Some politicians and pundits – including several writers in Haaretz – seem misguidedly intent on extending blame for Jewish terrorism across Orthodoxy, even to the charedi community and its Torah educational system. And several have pointed to a song played at Jewish weddings as Exhibit A.
I recently shared some thoughts on the matter with the readers of Haaretz. The piece is here and here.
The reporter’s question: “Should the chareidim serve in [Israel’s] military, or at least serve in some other capacity such as recognized public service commensurate with military service?”
The query was posed to me in my capacity as Agudath Israel of America’s media liaison. My response: In the view of chareidim, they are already doing so.
I explained that a religious Jew sincerely believes that his or her life, based as it is on religious observance, charity and Torah-study, helps ensure the security of Jews.
Raw power, after all, doesn’t win wars. Even strategy isn’t decisive. Often, what turn the historical tide this way or that are simple, unexpected happenings.
The Byzantine Empire fell when it did because a single gate to Constantinople was left open in 1453, allowing the Turks to invade and take the capital city.
World War I was famously set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Less known is that his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, had abandoned his plan. But the Archduke’s driver made a wrong turn that took their vehicle to the very spot where Princip was standing. The car stalled and Princip took advantage of the situation, firing the shots that would yield the death of 17 million people.
In October, 1907, an aspiring teenage artist took a two-day entrance exam for the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He thought he did well and was shocked to be informed that he hadn’t made the cut. Dejected, he pursued a different life-path, eventually becoming the Führer of the Third Reich.
German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel took a rare leave from his post in France in 1944 to celebrate his wife’s birthday on June 6, reassured by miserable weather that the Allies would not be invading France that week. With the weather’s sudden improvement, the Normandy invasion began in the early morning hours of Mrs. Rommel’s birthday. By the time her husband returned to France, it was too late to repel the decisive offensive.
Some regard such history-altering occurrences as mere happenstance. But a believing Jew knows that history is in Hashem’s hand. That isn’t always evident, but it’s always true.
It was both, though, during the 1967 Six-Day War. While some attribute Israel’s victory over three neighboring Arab countries, aided by others, to superior military prowess, then-IDF Director of Operations Major General (and later Israeli president) Ezer Weizmann, noting the fact that for 3 straight hours, IAF planes flew from one Egyptian airstrip to another destroying the enemy planes without the Egyptians ever radioing ahead to warn their own forces of Israeli attacks, credited “the finger of G-d.” Haaretz’s military correspondent at the time contended that “Even a non-religious person must admit this war was fought with help from Heaven.”
The futility of trying to predict geopolitical matters is no less evident today. Although Russia is committed to keeping Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in power and Turkey is backing the Sunni majority and pushing for Assad’s ouster, the two countries have maintained generally good relations. A year ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, celebrated an agreement for Russia to invest in a major gas pipeline, to pump Russian natural gas through Turkey to Europe. And Mr. Putin praised his Turkish counterpart as “a strong man” willing to stand up to the West.
More recently, though, after the downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai by ISIS, which Russia claims is aided by Turkey; and then Turkey’s downing of a Russian air force plane that Mr. Erdogan says violated Turkish airspace, Kremlin ideologue Dmitry Kiselyev described the Turkish leader as “an unrestrained and deceitful man hooked on cheap oil from the barbaric caliphate [ISIS].” A recent headline in a pro-government Turkish newspaper asserted that “Putin tries to deceive the world with his lies.”
What relations between the two nations will look like a year hence, whether the war of words will evolve into a missile-and-mortars conflict or blow over, is nothing anyone can know. But one takeaway, here as from so many happenings, is that the only thing one can reasonably expect from history is the unexpected.
I spared the reporter all those observations, offering only what he sought, a sound-bite with which (hopefully) he will balance the piece he’s writing. But it was more than a soundbite. It was a truth – in fact, a Chanukah truth: Divine providence is at work in the world; and spiritual merits, not superior munitions, are what matter in the end.
© 2015 Hamodia
An article of mine about the limits of empathy, the historical revisionism of The New York Times and the endangering of Jewish lives by activists intent on establishing a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount appears in Haaretz and can be accessed here .
I’m not among those who grow apoplectic at the New York Times’ reportage from Israel. There are, to be sure, occasions when, in misguided attempts to achieve what passes these days for “evenhandedness,” the Old Gray Lady misses the mark. But I have found most (I wrote “most”! – please hold off with the angry letters!) of the dispatches from Eretz Yisrael to be informative and objective.
What isn’t either of those things, though, is how the paper has repeatedly chosen to characterize the Har HaBayis. In fact, “misleading” and “deceptive” are the most descriptive words to come to mind.
After a recent clash between Israeli police and Palestinians at the site, for instance, a September 16 New York Times report referred to the holy place as the site where the Jewish temples were “believed to have once stood.” Another story, three days earlier, described it as a site “revered by Jews” but “one of the three holiest sites in Islam.” Why not “revered by Jews and Muslims,” or “Islam’s third holiest site and Judaism’s holiest one”? Something is rotten in the state of New York.
Similarly, two years ago, a Times video referred to the Har HaBayis as the place “that Jews call the Temple Mount…” and that “Jews widely believe was the site of the Temples.”
Call the Temple Mount? That’s what it is. Believe? Yes, like we believe the sun is hot.
No historian, at least in a state of sobriety, entertains the slightest doubt that the Bayis Sheini stood on the mount for centuries, having been built there nearly 1500 years before Islam’s founder’s grandmother was born. Both Jewish and, l’havdil, Roman sources recount that korbanos were offered on the mizbei’ach there. (The historicity of the Bayis Rishon is part of our mesorah, but the lack of contemporary non-Jewish writings from the time deprives historians the documentary “proof” they demand.)
That the Har HaBayis was conquered by Christian, and then Muslim, forces, and that churches and mosques were built upon the site, is undeniable. Equally undeniable, though, are the site’s true Jewish origins – brightly reflected in the life and prayers of Jews over the course of known history.
Every observant Jew recalls the Beis Hamikdash every single day of the year, in each of his or her tefillos – recited, of course, facing in the direction of what we “widely believe was the site of the Temples.”
Then there are our holidays, like the one just past, where our Mussaf tefillos include a lengthy bemoaning of those Temples’ destructions.
The words “Yerushalayim” and its synonym “Tzion,” the city whose holiness derives from the holiness of the Makom Hamikdash, pass our lips at least ten times every morning. Before breakfast.
There is “shabchi Yerushalayim” in Pesukei d’Zimrah, “ohr chodosh al Tzion to’ir” in birkas Krias Shma, Boneh Yerushalayim in Shemoneh Esrei, another reference in Tachanun, and others throughout Shacharis. And let’s not forget Korbanos.
And then, after breakfast, well, if one had a bowl of cereal, his Al Hamichyah would mention Yerushalayim two more times. And if bread was consumed, one of the brachos of Birkas Hamazon, of course, expresses our hope that Hashem will be “boneh b’rachamov Yerushalayim.”
What distorts the vision of the “paper of record” is, of course, a deep commitment to fairness and objectivity. There is, after all, a “Muslim narrative,” too, a claim to the Makom Hamikdash by another religion, indeed one that, at least in numbers of adherents, dwarfs the Jewish one.
But fairness, of course, doesn’t mean considering every claim to be the equal of every other one. When the New York Times refers to the events of September 11, 2001, it describes them as a concerted attack by Al Qaeda on the United States, not as “a series of plane crashes believed by Americans to have been Islamist attacks but considered by many in the Arab world to have been the work of the American government or a Jewish plot.” At least it hasn’t done so yet.
It’s an unfortunate reminder of our galus that the Bais Hamikdash isn’t standing where it once did. But we must accept that sad fact. It is wrong to seek (other than through our tefillos) to change that current reality, halachically wrong to walk onto the Har HaBayis, and doubly wrong to endanger Jews by offending those who occupy the site.
But what’s also wrong (attention: New York Times) is to pretend that its history isn’t established and clear.
© 2015 Hamodia
Have you ever wondered why, in light of the slew of “I survived Orthodoxy but saw the secular light!” essays and books, there no counter-flood of similar writing by some of the many who came from other Jewish places to Orthodoxy?
Why are there are no vivid descriptions of what impelled some Orthodox Jew toward traditional Jewish observance? Why no accounts of the emptiness of secular lives they experienced, or the inadequacy they perceived in less observant ones?
Are there no tales to tell of parents who deprived their children of even a rudimentary Jewish education? Who responded negatively to their progeny’s explorations of their Jewish roots? Or who lived lives that contradicted what they preached to their young?
My thoughts on the matter can be read here.
I’m greatly pained by much of the reaction in the Orthodox community to what has come to be called the Iran Deal. To be sure, there are elements of the agreement that are less than ideal. And there is nothing remotely wrong with pointing out those things, even without acknowledging the deal’s positive elements.
But there is something wrong, terribly wrong, tragically wrong, in assuming that anyone who dares to see the positive as outweighing the negative is ipso facto “anti-Israel” or, if Jewish, a “traitor” or “sellout.” That opinions other than one’s own are not just misguided but evil.
And there is something particularly ugly about ads – like those that an unnamed person or persons placed in several Orthodox newspapers – that stoop to the basest sort of character assassination (aided by Photoshopping a Congressman’s face to make him look like an ogre), and are reminiscent of how true enemies of Jews have portrayed us all in centuries past.
Similar ads demeaning elected officials who are opposed to the deal would be no less obnoxious. The issue isn’t what “side” one is on. It is how a Jew expresses himself, as a mensch, or as something else.
At this introspective time of the Jewish year, I hope that the person or people behind “American Parents and Grandparents Against the Iranian Deal” and the papers that hosted its offensive ads will give some thought about whether name-calling and insults are the Jewish way to express a political opinion, even about an important issue.
An essay I wrote about Faigy Mayer, o”h,’s death, the haste with which some blamed it on her chassidic community and the importance of addressing mental health in the Orthodox community ran today in Haaretz. It can be read here.
It can be read here.
It’s intriguing – to be truthful, depressing – that as we prepare to focus on our galus and its causes we in the Orthodox world are witnessing acrimony born of true chinom, nothingness.
The sort of sentiments and language that are regularly being employed by opponents of the Iran agreement against anyone who isn’t convinced that it is “evil” or “insane” or “dangerous” is deeply wrong. (Maybe there is corresponding rashness from the deal’s supporters. I just haven’t encountered any.)
What seems lost on some is the fact that the issue isn’t “Israel’s security” against (take your pick:) “America’s needs” or “Obama’s worldview” or “hopeless naiveté.” It is “Israel’s security” against “Israel’s security.”
That is to say, whether Israel’s security, along with that of the rest of the free world, is better served by an imperfect agreement (as all agreements must be) or by no agreement. Reasonable, sane, and not evil people can disagree with that. But they cannot – or, at least, should not – heatedly denounce those who see things differently from themselves just because… they see things differently from themselves. That is chinom.
The Gemara teaches that “just as people’s faces all differ, so do their attitudes.” The Kotzker is said to have commented on that truth with a question: “Can you imagine disdaining someone because his face doesn’t resemble yours?”
Think about that. It contains a worthy, and timely, truth.
Mere minutes after last Tuesday’s announcement of the nuclear deal struck with Iran – well before anyone could possibly have read its 159 dense pages of highly technical details – the usual suspects were busy weighing in.
Organizations, leaders and politicians with long-standing animus toward President Obama extended their hostility to the deal, which they characterized as a spineless capitulation to a rogue regime. And knee-jerk defenders of Mr. Obama (a group that some imagine includes me, but doesn’t) heralded the agreement as the best thing since bagels.
Over ensuing days, open-minded observers waited patiently until experts had had a chance to carefully absorb the agreement’s terms and render their judgments. Alas, unanimity there wasn’t.
Some found the inspections regimen less than ideal, the sanctions phase-out too lenient, the preservation of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure too frightening, the term of the agreement too short. They warned of how the economic impact of the sanctions’ lifting will allow Iran to finance its non-nuclear murderous mischief throughout the Middle East; and wondered how a nation whose leaders have never paid any homage to honesty can be trusted to not cheat on its pledges.
Others sang the praises of Iran’s agreement to convert its infamous and impervious Fordo uranium enrichment facility, buried deep underground, into a closely monitored research lab; the requirement that Iran dilute or convert its stockpile of near 20% uranium so that it cannot be enriched to the 90% level required for a nuclear weapon; its agreement to render inoperable over two-thirds of the 19,000 centrifuges it has installed; the requirement that the country’s stockpile of uranium gas be reduced from some 10,000 kilograms to 300; its commitment to not enrich any uranium above 3.67 percent; and the disabling of the Arak facility from producing plutonium.
Other elements of the agreement were less open to simple judgments of “good” or “bad.” Happily, inspectors will be tracking Iran’s uranium from the time it is mined to ensure that it is not enriched beyond the agreement’s terms; and fiber-optic seals, sensors and cameras will be keeping constant tabs on every known nuclear facility; all such sites and their inventories will be closely monitored by inspectors. The movements of scientists and nuclear workers, moreover, will be tracked. And the deal also gives inspectors the right to visit any other suspicious sites “anywhere in the country.” But it also gives Iran 24 days to comply with such special requests.
Iran, indeed, could cheat. But doing so would require the building of a covert enrichment plant, the secret procurement of uranium and centrifuges and, even more improbably, the transfer of scientists from known facilities to the covert one, despite the ongoing monitoring of the personnel’s movements.
To some, that is reassurance enough. Others, including Israeli leaders, are less sanguine, to put it mildly.
“You have a large country, with a significant military,” President Obama himself averred about Iran last Wednesday, “that has proclaimed that Israel shouldn’t exist, that has denied the Holocaust, that has financed Hezbollah. There are very good reasons why Israelis are nervous about Iran’s position in the world…”
But, the President contends – and it is a contention worth pondering – that the alternative, namely no deal, would be worse. Sanctions, after all, have not prevented Iran from increasing its 164 spinning centrifuges in 2006 to its current 19,000. It doesn’t take a nuclear rocket scientist to imagine what the mullahs would choose to do in the absence of an agreement.
It was always a wishful fancy that a “good deal” would mean the end of all Iranian nuclear activity. No country has ever been forced to forgo nuclear development for medical or energy purposes. The notion that the current hubristic leadership of Iran would, even under continued sanctions pressure, ever accept that humiliating “first” status made for a lovely dream, but a dream it was.
By definition, a deal means a compromise. The U.S and its allies would have loved to end Iran’s nuclear program altogether, entirely and forever. Iran would have loved to maintain its headlong rush to develop, and use, nuclear weapons. Those, though, were necessarily starting positions, not some goals in a zero-sum game. In the end, the evil player saved some face and won a pile of money. The good one got up to 10, 15 or 25 years (depending on the provision; and, for some provisions, even longer) of likely effective prevention of the malignant entity’s malevolent designs.
Bad deal? Maybe, maybe not. But, as the numerous tragedies associated with Tisha B’Av demonstrate, it’s certainly a bad world.
With our mitzvos, though, and our tefillos and our mourning of our galus, we can change that, and merit the Geulah Shleimah. May it arrive quickly.
© 2015 Hamodia