Category Archives: Jewish Thought

Seeing Privilege As A Pain

Sometimes a first-person account is just so sad you could cry. And when the writer seems oblivious to the sadness, well, then it’s sadder still

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently offered a piece written by a Jewish woman explaining her and her husband’s decision to forgo having children.

“As a Conservative Jew raised in the Midwest,” she writes, “I always assumed I’d have kids… In my mind, being a grown-up meant having children.”

During her college days, she stopped in at the Brown University Hillel House and met a young man. Eventually they began to date.

When marriage came up, they discussed how “religiously” to raise their children, and found that they had different opinions. Her partner wanted to observe the Sabbath but she did not. And, if they each did his or her own thing she feared the “inevitable” questions their children would have about their mother’s level of observance.

Then, she writes, “It occurred to me that our potential problems would vanish if we just skipped parenthood.” Problem – at least if she could get her boyfriend on board – solved.

As it happened, after the young man became her husband, he began “losing his religion.” They were busy with their careers and, she writes, “reproducing was the farthest thing from my mind.” Then she found websites of people who had decided not to have children, and shared them with her husband. They laughed together “at jokes about sleep-deprived parents and children misbehaving in public.

So other people, too, they realized, “lacked the drive to make and raise babies, and were they ever happy,” the woman recounts. “They described enticing benefits, one of which particularly stood out for me: having their beloved to themselves and cultivating a devoted, satisfying relationship.”

And so she and her husband decided that “life would be better without kids.”

The couple’s mothers were not happy, as one might expect. His was the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and had told her son in his youth that “If you don’t raise Jewish children, you’re letting Hitler win.”

“There is no coming back from aiding Hitler,” observes the writer, and “so we all avoid the topic.”

But, she insists, she and her husband are happy. They have each other entirely to themselves, without any pesky little people intruding on their relationship. And they owe it all to Judaism, the writer explains, without which she and her husband would never have met at that Hillel House.

“Ironically,” she concludes, “If it weren’t for Judaism… it may never have occurred to me not to have children at all.”

The writer knows, of course, and acknowledges, that Judaism favors children; indeed, she may even know, there is a Torah commandment to be fruitful. But she and her partner have made a conscious decision to reject their religious heritage.

What’s more, the husband and wife are depriving themselves not only of an important mitzvah, and not only of the life beyond death that is a son or daughter, but of the sublime joy of being parents. Sleepless nights and misbehaved children? Some of the most difficult or embarrassing parental situations, any parent could tell the writer, morph with time into some of the most meaningful, even wonderful, memories imaginable.

Is it hard? Of course. What worthwhile endeavor isn’t?

Do parents experience trying times? Yes. Life is trying; that’s its point.

Will it all have been worth it, in fact many millions of times over? Yes again.

And if the writer and her husband really think that their relationship to each other would suffer, rather than be strengthened, by their sharing the privilege of forging a new generation, they are astoundingly naïve. The greatest boon for any relationship is not a shared taste in music, nor a shared desire for childlessness; it is a shared challenging but meaningful endeavor. And when the endeavor is something as momentous as creating and guiding new lives, the bond that can result is most powerful.

Time will tell whether the writer’s and her husband’s bond of mutual desire for childlessness will itself prove sufficiently strong to maintain their relationship. But one thing is certain. The couple’s assumption that the mutual nurturing of a new generation is a mere pain rather than an unparalleled privilege is a sad mistake.

Made all the more sad by the couple’s utter unawareness of the fact.

(For a decade-old essay about the Jewish choice to have children, please see here.

In Those Days, In This Time

The following essay was written for Haaretz and appeared on its website recently under a different title. I share it here with that paper’s permission.

There’s a striking irony in the fact that Chanukah is one of the most widely celebrated Jewish holidays among American Jews.

Cynics have contended that it’s Chanukah’s proximity to the Christian winter holiday, with all the latter’s ubiquitous glitz, baubles and musical offerings, that has elevated Chanukah – seen by some as a “minor” celebration, since it’s a post-Biblical commemoration – to the pantheon (if a Greek word is appropriate here) of popular Jewish observances.

In fact, though, Chanukah is not minor at all; a wealth of Jewish mystical literature enwraps it, and laws (albeit rabbinical in origin) govern the nightly lighting of the holiday’s candles and the recital of Al Hanisim (“For the miracles”) in our prayers over Chanukah’s eight days.

As to whether many American Jews are enamoured of Frosty the Snowman, well, it’s an open question. Me, I prefer my winter nights silent.

But onward to the irony, which is not only striking but significant.

I recall hearing a Reform rabbi on a public radio program a couple of years ago extolling Chanukah as a celebration of “pluralism” and “tolerance.” After all, the Greek-Syrian Seleucid enemy of the Jews at the time of the Chanukah miracle, he explained, were intolerant of Jewish religious practices. Well, yes, but the Jewish rebellion wasn’t aimed at establishing some sort of Middle-Eastern First Amendment but rather to fiercely defend the study and practice of the Torah. And to rid the Temple of idols. Judaism has no tolerance at all for some things, idolatry prime among them.

What is more, the Jewish uprising also – and here we close in on the irony – was to counter the influence on Jews of a foreign culture.

To the Jewish religious leaders who established the observance of Chanukah, a greater threat than the flesh-and-blood forces that had defiled the Holy Temple was the adoption by Jews of Hellenistic ideals

For the Seleucids not only forbade observance of the Sabbath, circumcision, Jewish modesty laws and Torah-study, they held out to Jews the sweet but poison fruit of Greek culture, and some Jews devoured it whole.

The enemy, in other words, didn’t just install a statue of Zeus in the Temple, but an assimilationist attitude in some Jewish hearts. And Chanukah stands for the fight against that attitude.

It’s easy to dismiss the ancient Greek soap-opera that passed for divine doings, the gods who were described as acting like the lowest of men. It isn’t likely that many Jews (or Greeks, for that matter) really believed the tales of celestial hijinks that passed for spirituality at the time.

But the ancient Greeks had something much more enticing to offer. Hellas celebrated the physical world; it developed geometry, calculated the earth’s circumference, proposed a heliocentric theory of the solar system and focused attention on the human being, at least as a physical specimen. It philosophized about life and love.

But much of Hellenist thought revolved around the idea that the enjoyment of life was the most worthwhile goal of man, yielding us the words “cynic,” “epicurean,” and “hedonist” all Greek in origin.

Western society today revolves around pleasure too. It adopts the language of “freedom” and “rights” to disguise the fact, but it’s a pretty transparent fig leaf.

To be sure, most Jews in the U.S. remain stubbornly, laudably, proud of their Jewishness. But, all the same, they have been culturally colonized by a sort of contemporary Hellenism, American style.

Which bring us – if you haven’t already guessed – to the irony.

Because Chanukah addresses neither pluralism nor tolerance (admirable though those concepts may be in their proper places), but rather Jewish identity and continuity, the challenges most urgently faced by contemporary American Jews.

And its message stands right in front of them, in the flickering flames.

The “miracle of the lights,” Jewish tradition teaches, was not arbitrary. Abundant meaning for the Jewish ages shone from the Temple candelabra’s supernatural eight-day burning of a one-day supply of oil. For light, our tradition further teaches, means Torah, its study and its observance – not “contemporized,” and not edited to conform to the Zeitgeist, but as it has been handed down over the centuries.

When American Jews light their Chanukah candles they may not consider that the holiday they are acknowledging speaks most poignantly to them.

But they should.

For older Chanukah-themed essays just click on “Chanukah” in “Categories.”

Musing: Professor Sarna’s Hammer

Jonathan Sarna, a professor of history (and someone whose company I have enjoyed on too-rare occasions) recently penned a piece (“Why is Orthodoxy Packing Up Big Tent”?) for the Forward in which he tries to minimize the import of a letter signed by scores of members of the Rabbinical Council of America saying, in effect, that the “Open Orthodoxy” movement is not only unorthodox but non-Orthodox. He compares the widespread rejection of the “OO” movement by rabbis across the Orthodox spectrum to earlier rejections of movements within Orthodoxy that came to be included in the Orthodox tent. The RCA itself, he points out, was once condemned by some respected Orthodox religious leaders.

It is to be expected that a professor of history with a conceptual hammer will see every happening as a parallel of some earlier one. But, with all due respect to Professor Sarna, the issue at present isn’t whether or not the RCA was once itself seen by some as beyond the pale.

The issue is whether the “big tent” has any walls, whether one can jettison essential elements of the theology of what has been called “Orthodoxy” over the past century and a half and still claim the mantle of that name.

Honored members of the “OO” movement have made theological statements and proposed “halachic” actions that are indistinguishable — indistinguishable — from those of the Conservative movement in the 1950s.

Back then, Conservative leaders had the honesty to distinguish their movement from Orthodoxy, by the very name they adopted. “Open Orthodoxy,” by striking contrast, is attempting to do just the opposite, claiming to be something it demonstrably is not.

“Time to Come Home” or “The Conservative Lie or Whatever

Back in 2001, I wrote a piece for Moment Magazine about the Conservative movement. It caused quite a stir, evoking angry and overheated reactions from Conservative leaders. Part of the anger, no doubt, was a result of Moment’s titling of the article “The Conservative Lie.” I had titled it “Time to Come Home.”

But much of the anger was about my message itself, that the movement was not, as it claimed, grounded in halacha, and therefore was losing, and would continue to lose, members who sought an authentic connection with the Judaism of the ages.

Of late, there has been much written about the Conservative movement, born of the recent Pew survey’s revelation that it has faltered greatly in terms of members over recent years.

I thought my article of 12 years ago might be of interest to some readers. So if it is to you, I have posted it here.

Seeding the Right Cloud

Following the time-honored if somewhat irritating tradition of speechmakers who begin by announcing that they are departing from the scheduled topic, I informed those present that instead of focusing on the media’s coverage of Orthodox Jews, I would make my presentation on cloud seeding.

The venue was Agudath Israel of America’s recent 91^st national convention, which took place this past weekend at the Woodcliff Lake Hilton in New Jersey, where thousands converged to hear words of inspiration and admonition from some of the Orthodox world’s guiding elders.

And, for some of the attendees, to hear words of lesser gravity from people like me, at various smaller sessions. Still, the Sunday morning one in which I participated, along with Agudath Israel executive director Rabbi Labish Becker, the session’s chairman; respected educator Rabbi Aaron Brafman; and accomplished attorney Avi Schick, drew nearly 500 souls.

A few voices in the back of the hall demanded that I repeat myself, for surely they had misheard. So I did, but, before puzzlement could turn to consternation, I launched into a pretty funny joke. No, I’m not going to repeat it here. If you’re really curious, you can get the CD from zalmanumlas@netzero.net .

But I will offer here the gist of my words that morning. (I’d love to do the same with those of my co-presenters, but don’t have their notes. So, again, please just order the CD.)

Orthodox Jews seem to be in the news a lot, usually in news stories focused on the wrongdoings of Orthodox individuals. That usually begins with the Jewish media, which make yeomen’s efforts to find anything scandalous – or even innocent but which can be presented in such a way as to imply something dark – in the Orthodox community. And larger media pick up the baleful ball and run with it.

Needless to say, there are truly egregious crimes that have been committed by members of the Orthodox community, as by those of any community. But the powerful lens aimed at the Orthodox world is sui generis. (I’m not a psychologist, but have my suspicions about why some Jewish media are so bent on ferreting out Orthodox misbehavior; it has something to do with Jewish guilt. But let’s not go there.)

And yet, there are times when it seems a stream of positive news about Orthodox Jews seems to burst forth from nowhere.

Recently, we were treated to Professor Noah Feldman’s Bloomberg News ode to the scholarship and democratic meritocracy that is Beth Medrash Govoah, the Lakewood Yeshiva; and reports about the political alliance and personal friendship between a Chassidic woman (elected to a town council) and a Palestinian one in Montreal, a man with a yarmulkeh riding a New York subway who allowed a young man in a hoodie to use his shoulder as a pillow, and a Connecticut rebbe who discovered nearly $100,000 stashed in a desk he had bought and unhesitatingly returned it to its owner. (She had forgotten where she had put the cash, which is a lesson to us all: Whenever we stash a hundred grand somewhere around the house, we should write where on a sticky note and put it on the fridge.)

What, though, precipitates the negative Ortho-news, and what the positive? A believer in chance wouldn’t have the question. But a believer in Judaism does.

And “precipitates” is the right word. My stab at an answer was where cloud seeding came in.

I picture a spiritual cloud of sorts, an amorphous mass of minor acts of chilul Hashem, or “desecration of G-d’s name.” Any time a visibly Jewish Jew blocks traffic by double parking, or is impatient with a clerk at a supermarket or cuts corners while doing his taxes, a bit of malign moisture is added to that Chilul Hashem cloud. And when it is sufficiently heavy, it rains down on our heads, and into the media, in the form of a large and public desecration of G-d’s name.

And conversely, when enough visibly Jewish Jews are considerate, polite, scrupulously honest and proactively friendly to others in their daily lives, their actions feed another cloud, the cloud of Kiddush Hashem – “Sanctification of G-d’s name.” And then the media are presented with un-ignorable examples of public actions of Kiddush Hashem, and are forced to report them.

So by our own actions, each of us helps seed one cloud or, G-d forbid, the other; whether acid rain or blessed rain results depends, in the end, on us all.

The most valuable thing I shared with those present, though, consisted of a sentence from the Rambam (Maimonides), what I believe is his definition of Kiddush Hashem.

“Anyone,” he writes, “who refrains from a sin or fulfills a commandment not for any earthly reason, not fear nor trepidation, nor to seek honor, but [entirely] because [it is the will] of the Creator… has sanctified G-d’s name.”

And so, even – perhaps especially – in our quietest, most private moments, we all have opportunities to seed the right cloud.

Musing: Alan Dershowitz to the Rescue

Celebrated attorney Alan Dershowitz has petitioned Israeli President Shimon Peres to intervene in what Haaretz characterizes as “the case of the apparent blacklisting of Rabbi Avi Weiss by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.” That is to say, the conclusion of the Rabbinate that Rabbi Weiss’s conversion standards are markedly beneath their own.

Mr. Dershowitz wrote Mr. Peres that the rabbi at issue is “one of the foremost Modern Open Orthodox rabbis in America” (no argument there, although “Open Orthodoxy,” as has been well revealed, is a misnomer) and – the lawyer’s apparent coup de grâce – “one of the strongest advocates anywhere for the State of Israel.”

The attorney goes on to bemoan the “chasm between the Jews of the United States and the religious institutions in Israel” which he characterizes as “baseless religious tyranny.”

As to Mr. Dershowitz’s authority to pronounce on matters religious, some earlier words of his:

“I am… certain that the miraculous stories that form the basis of most religious beliefs are myths. Yet I respect the Bible and enjoy reading and teaching it. Indeed, I find it even more fascinating as a human creation than as a divine revelation. I consider myself a committed Jew, but I do not believe that being a Jew requires belief in the supernatural… If there is a governing force, He (or She or It) is certainly not in touch with those who purport to be speaking on His behalf.”

What’s New

As someone with a well-honed sense of wonder, who delights at the sight of a blue jay (even though several of them regularly greet my wife and me outside the window during autumn breakfasts) and who, walking to Maariv each night, surveys the constellations and planets with awe (and feels a frisson at the occasional shooting star), I might be expected to marvel as well at modern communications technology.

And I do, at least to an extent. The rapid advance from dedicated word-processing machines (How futuristic was that StarWriter I bought in the 1980s! It had a five-line screen!) to computers, and then to more powerful computers – and the invention of e-mail and the Internet (thank you, Mr. Gore!) and smartphones – has been nothing short of astounding.

And yet, unlike blue jays and shooting stars, the state of personal tech today often leaves me grumpy. E-mail, for instance, for all its convenience and efficiency, seems to have only increased workloads. The Internet, for all the good that it may have to offer, presents so much that is the opposite of good – not just fraud and panderings to the lowest human instincts but avalanches of ill will and cynical slander purveyed online by disturbed, malevolent individuals. And smartphones are too smart for their own good.

As I discovered a few months ago. As if I weren’t already sufficiently wary of communications technology’s larger challenges, I was accosted by something more subtly irksome, in the form of the message I received when I turned on a new phone. The device introduced itself to me as my “Life Companion.”

Okay, now, I said to it, that’s quite enough. I appreciate (somewhat) the fast and efficient mail-on-the-go, the high voice quality of the phone calls, the reliable music player, the weather and travel apps. But even if this new model could cook supper, wash clothes and proofread articles, it would not be my “life companion.” I already have one of those. And she doesn’t even need a battery.

The device’s presumptuous self-introduction got me thinking about how, really, all of technology is presumptuous. The aforementioned StarWriter (like its great-grandfather before it, the IBM Selectric electric typewriter) was once “the future” of writing. “Super-8” film was supposed to be the ultimate in video recording, here to stay (until it went and left). And, to roll the film (remember film?) ahead to more recent years, does anyone even use a Segway anymore?

Just as the sartorial styles of the 1960s and 1970s look so embarrassingly silly in photographs from those ancient times (yes, we had photographs then – taken by actual cameras!), so will the computers and smartphones of today one day strike our descendants as primitive. “What? You used to have to actually touch a screen or speak into a device?” many a child will ask a wizened grandparent, with a condescending snicker. “Didn’t you have brainwaving?”

All of which points to one way of understanding Shlomo Hamelech’s eternally timely words in Koheles, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Of course there are new things, all the time. They just don’t stay new.

The Talmud teaches us that what isn’t “under the sun,” however, Torah, can yield newness, new insights, new ideas, new understandings. But perhaps the simplest understanding of the limitation “under the sun” is that, when it comes to what the Creator, who transcends the universe, has bequeathed to us in what we call “nature,” the shine, so to speak, never dulls.

Blue jays, comets and constellations may be old things, but somehow they remain fresh and awe-inspiring every morning and every night. They will never go out of style, and won’t ever be improved upon. Things in the natural world are, one might say, engineered to last. In the world of technology, though, no matter what its engineers may imagine, what’s present will one day be past, in fact passé.

And yes, after enough poking around, I finally figured out how to change the greeting my phone offers when activated. Now the screen declares: “This too shall pass.”

Musing: Times Are Strange

A lengthy op-ed in the New York Times by one Susan Katz Miller celebrates intermarriage and the raising of children of intermarrieds in both Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. Her family “celebrates Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Sukkot, Simhat Torah, Hanukkah, Passover and many Shabbats… We also celebrate All Saints’ Day and All Souls, Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.”

Ms. Katz and her Episcopalian husband want their children “to feel equally connected to both sides of their religious ancestry.”

“Perhaps,” she writes, “having been given a love for Judaism and basic Hebrew literacy in childhood, they will choose at some point in their lives to practice Judaism exclusively. That would be good for the Jews. Or perhaps they will choose to be Christians or Buddhists or secular humanists who happen to have an unusual knowledge of and affinity for Judaism. That would also be good for the Jews.”

Neither, however, would be good for the Jews. Ms. Katz, “the granddaughter of a New Orleans rabbi,” was “raised Reform Jewish” by her own “Episcopalian mother and… Jewish father.”

Times, indeed, are strange. Geraldo Rivera and Stella McCartney (Paul’s daughter) are halachically Jewish. But Susan Katz Miller is not.

Orthodoxy And Honesty

The essay below was written for, and published by, Haaretz.com. I share it with that paper’s permission.

The perils of religious self-definition became amusingly apparent in the recent Pew survey of American Jews. One category of “Jews” was “Jews by affinity” – Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish background who simply choose to call themselves Jews; more than one million people so identified themselves. Similarly suspicious are the survey’s self-described “Orthodox,” fully 15% of whom reported that they “regularly attend services” in a non-Jewish place of worship, 24% of whom handle money on the Sabbath and 4% of whom say they erect holiday trees in their homes in December.

In a recent op-ed, Rabbi Asher Lopatin insists that the “Open Orthodox” movement whose flagship institution, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, he now serves as president has every right and reason to call itself Orthodox – indeed that anyone can choose whatever Jewish religious label he wishes to wear, and that “no one has the authority” to “write someone out of Orthodoxy.”

The issue here, however, is not one of people but of concepts, not about writing anyone out of anything but rather of defining words, which, pace Humpty Dumpty, are expected to have meanings.

To be sure, words’ meanings can change. Once, not very long ago, a “mouse” was exclusively a furry creature, and “gay” meant only “joyful.” Perhaps “Orthodox Judaism” will, as Rabbi Lopatin wishes, undergo a metamorphosis too, and come to encompass even theologies that are indistinguishable from the one currently associated with the Conservative movement.

But at present, as over the past century or two, “Orthodoxy” has been synonymous with full acceptance of the mesorah, or Jewish religious tradition – including most prominently the historicity of the Jewish exodus from Egypt; the fact that the Torah, both Written and Oral, was bequeathed to our ancestors at Sinai; and that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob actually existed – concepts that prominent products or leaders of the “Open Orthodoxy” movement are on record as rejecting.

Orthodoxy is “pluralistic,” in the sense that it encompasses pieces at odds with one another on myriad issues. Parts of the Orthodox universe embrace formal secular learning, parts eschew it; parts recite the Israeli Rabbanut’s prayer for Israel, and parts don’t; parts are defined by the warmth and tumult of their shul services, parts have services that are formal and sedate.

But all those parts, for all their differences in orientation and practice, are unified by a belief system that embraces the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides (derived from the Talmud and other links in the chain of the Oral Tradition – our mesorah). An adherent of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, a Satmar chassid, a “Litvish” yeshiva graduate and a student of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchonon Theological Seminary are all unified by the essence of what the world has called Orthodoxy for generations. But “Open Orthodoxy,” despite its name, has adulterated that essence, and sought to change both Jewish belief and Jewish praxis (as in ordaining women or suggesting that problematic Jewish marriages can simply be retroactively annulled).

It would be unfortunate were a new movement to force Orthodoxy to find a new name for itself, just in order to communicate the idea of a community that affirms the entirety of the mesorah. It would be unfair, too, since there already exists an “open” movement that seeks to “conserve” what it likes of the mesorah but to respect the Zeitgeist and embrace different approaches and practices from those of the Jewish past.

Why, indeed, can’t the new Jewish movement just append itself to the already existing one that shares its ideals? A cynic’s answer would be: because it wouldn’t be newsworthy; a conservative wing of the Conservative movement is hardly a novelty; a “new” and “open” “Orthodoxy,” the violence done to the latter word in the process notwithstanding, is something special. A non-cynic would have no answer.

But both the cynic and the sober observer would rightly consider the use of “Orthodox” to be a violation of truth in advertising. We need, Rabbi Lopatin writes, to “respect each other’s understanding of what Orthodoxy is.” But – at least until the dictionary jettisons history here – “Orthodoxy” is not an all-encompassing umbrella. There may be different sub-species of aardvarks and of zebras, but an opossum cannot lay claim to either entry.

Seeking to revise the mesorah, although disturbing enough, is one thing; redefining a time-honored word while misrepresenting what one is doing, quite another.

It’s one thing, in other words, to be “open.” But, above all, one must be honest.

In Our Bones

We cannot see the tens of thousands of mazikin, or “harmers” (often translated as “demons”), that the Talmud teaches surround us always (Berachos 6a). Were they visible, says Abba Binyamin, they would utterly terrify us. The same, of course, is true about the tens of thousands of spores, bacteria and viruses that constantly seek to invade our bodies.

The latter are held off, if we are alive and healthy, by an unbelievably complex biological network we call the immune system.

Langerhans cells on our skin keep tiny potentially lethal invaders out.

The enzyme lysozyme in mucus breaks down the cell walls of malign bacteria, as do tears and saliva.

An astounding menagerie of protein molecules we call antibodies, moreover, is produced by the white blood cells born in the marrow of our bones, each product designed (yes designed; there’s a Designer here) to disable a specific bacteria, virus or toxin. Lymphocytes, one such product of our bone marrow, attack a broad array of the bacterial and viral agents that are capable of causing us great harm.

And the system contains a vital control subsystem governed by the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA), a molecule present on the surface of practically every cell in our bodies, that identifies those cells as our own, protecting them from attack by the myriad germ-fighting antibodies commanded (yes, commanded; there’s a Commander here) to seek and destroy foreign invaders.

We know these facts today because of the progression of science and its observations of the world beneath the threshold of unaided human vision – and the devastation that occurs when any part of immune system ceases to work and a body is invaded by biological mazikin.

The immune system is to be constantly marveled at. But a particularly apt place to ponder it is during the prayer recited on Shabbos (and at the Pesach seder) that we call “Nishmas Kol Chai” (“The Spirit of All Living Things”). During the Shabbos service, sadly, that prayer is often truncated or even omitted entirely by many people, likely because it comes at the end of a portion of the service (like Aleinu, another “orphan in shul”). And yet, halachic sources say that it should receive preference before much of what precedes it. And for good reason.

Some of “Nishmas” consists of verses borrowed from Tehillim and the prophet Yeshayahu, along with poetic renderings of concepts from the Talmud. Toward the prayer’s end, we find the words:

…From severe and enduring diseases You spared us… therefore, the organs that You set within us shall thank and bless… and declare the sovereignty of Your name… as it is written [Psalms 35:10]: “All my bones shall say, ‘Hashem, Who is like You? You save the poor man from the one stronger than he, the poor and destitute from the one who would rob him…’”

Our very bodies, in other words, our organs and their processes, figuratively “thank and bless” our Creator – by their very workings. What is the pertinence here, though, of King David’s praise of G-d’s saving a poor man from being oppressed by a stronger one?

From the perspective of what we know today, it is not hard to perceive the exquisiteness of that reference in its context. The “poor men” are our bodies, vulnerable to hordes of imperceptibly small but dangerously strong agents of harm. Is it not self-evident that we owe our Creator our wide-eyed gratitude for the easily ignored but incalculably vital miracle that is our immune systems’ ceaseless work to vanquish those baleful agents?

And is it not particularly exquisite that the parts of our bodies King David singles out as declaring “Hashem, who is like You?” for saving the poor from the strong… are our bones?

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life