Category Archives: Journalism

The Importance of Ignoring Headlines – and of Being a Mensch

In February, 2001, I penned a piece for Moment Magazine that caused quite a ruckus

I had titled it “Time to Come Home,” and it was addressed to Jews who belonged to Conservative Jewish congregations.  I made the case that the Conservative movement’s claim of fealty to halacha was hollow and that the movement essentially took its cues from whatever non-Jewish society felt was acceptable or proper.

The issue of same-sex relationships, I contended, would prove my point.  At the time, the movement hadn’t yet rejected the Torah’s clear prohibitions in that area.  I predicted that, as the larger societal milieu was coming to embrace such relationships as morally acceptable, the Conservative movement would follow suit in due time.

(It did, of course, rather quickly.  In 2006, the movement’s “Committee on Jewish Law and Standards” endorsed a position permitting “commitment ceremonies” between people of the same gender and the ordination as Conservative rabbis of people living openly homosexual lives.  But the accuracy of my prediction is not my topic here.)

I pleaded that Conservative Jews who truly respected the concept of halacha  should join their Orthodox brothers and sisters, and “come home,” as per the piece’s title.

It was most upsetting to me to see the final proofs of the article.  The editing and pull-quotes were great, but the piece had been retitled (with the artwork reflecting the renaming) “The Conservative Lie” – in large, bold letters.   I protested mightily but the magazine was adamant about its right to title the piece as it wished.  A newcomer to its pages (and having worked for many weeks on the piece), I relented.

I had expected a torrent of righteous indignation from Conservative leaders for daring to call their dedication to halacha into question.  And it came; the truth hurt.  I also heard from many thoughtful Conservative and ex-Conservative Jews who affirmed my thesis.

But I lament to this day the fact that the harsh title likely prevented many readers from actually weighing what I wrote, that it biased them from the start to regard the writer of the piece as a rude name-caller and to read my words (if they even bothered to) through the lens of that bias.

The experience returned to my consciousness not long ago when I saw the title the Forward placed on a piece I had written, this one about haredi women in the Israeli workplace.

The point of my piece was a simple one.  In much of the multitudinous reportage about high haredi poverty and unemployment rates in Israel, one interesting factor seems to have gone missing: the upsurge in employment of haredi women, trained and placed in a variety of professions by various private groups.

I noted the irony of that ignoring, since women’s economic empowerment has traditionally been celebrated by liberal-minded folks.  And I noted further that while haredi society embraces distinct male and female roles, it seems to have no objection to couples who decide that the husband’s full-time Torah-study is worth the wife’s becoming the family breadwinner.

The title the Forward placed on the piece: “How Ultra-Orthodoxy Is Most Feminist Faith.”

Not only was that not my thesis, but the word “feminism” didn’t even appear among the nearly 800 I had employed

The bloggerai, predictably, went bonkers.  Various armchair commentators seemed to not realize that headlines and titles are the choice of the medium, not the writer.  Some knee-jerk pundits  seemed to have read little beyond the title itself; others read the piece and were outraged that it didn’t fulfill the promise of the title; others still ignored the point of the piece altogether and just took the opportunity to vent spleen over the fact that I had dared address an interesting aspect of the haredi economic situation rather than condemning haredim for their choices.  And some, it seemed, just saw the word haredi and, reflexively, saw red.

A friend of mine, a non-observant Jew, recently sent me some unsolicited comments.  While he is puzzled in some ways by haredim, he noted how, deep into middle age, he has discovered how important it is to “understand that the other person has a point of view, that one should not judge a specific situation without knowing the specifics.”  As he grows older, my friend continued, “I increasingly appreciate, on a deep emotional level, the virtues of genuine tolerance and a certain degree of humility” when looking at seemingly disturbing things.

My recent re-titling experience, and my friend’s words, hold some lessons for us all:

Don’t pay attention to headlines or titles.  Rather, read what a writer has actually written.

And don’t make an automatic target of people who have made choices different from your own.  Sure, criticize, if you think it’s warranted.  But do so thoughtfully.  In your zeal, don’t jettison menschlichkeit.

Zoned Out

Challenging “pre-owned” and “correctional institution” for first place in the delicate euphemism rankings is “sensitive urban zones.”

That phrase, having barged into the news cycle in recent weeks, is the translation of “Zones Urbaines Sensibles,” a designation long used in France to describe neighborhoods characterized by high unemployment, high rates of public housing and low educational attainment, many if not most of the areas populated for the most part by Muslim immigrants.

It was the characterization of such areas in Western Europe as “no-go zones,” first by Fox News and then by Louisiana governor and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal, that propelled “sensitive urban zones” into the news.

After terrorism analyst Steve Emerson contended on Fox News that “There are actual cities [in Britain] like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” British Prime Minister David Cameron waxed apoplectic, and the network apologized repeatedly.  Similar claims about “no-go” neighborhoods in France prodded Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to announce that the City of Light would be suing Fox. “The image of Paris,” she huffed, “has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced.”

A day after those apologies, Mr. Jindal told CNN that “In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home…” and added, “I think that the radical Left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem is not here. Pretending it’s not here won’t make it go away.”

There are indeed Sharia courts in some Western European countries, including England, where “Muslim Arbitration Tribunals” resolve civil and family issues through Islamic law.  There are also, l’havdil, batei din in our own communities that arbitrate disputes and rule on halachic questions.  Allowing religious communities to address legal issues among their willing members should not threaten anyone.  Multi-cultural democratic societies rightly respect religious communities’ right to practice their faiths, including to arbitrate religious matters and disputes among their members.  Thus, Mr. Jindal’s conflating of arbitration courts with incubators of terrorism is misguided and dangerous.

Equally misguided and dangerous, though, is the contention, much bellowed of late by the media, that “no-go” zones don’t exist in Western Europe.  The designation need not mean lawless, rebellious enclaves.  But it describes something real.

Neighborhoods that incubate the sort of evil that exploded in France mere weeks ago – and that has exploded so many times before – are indeed threats to civilized society.  Such areas breed and attract disaffected Muslims, often petty criminals seeking glory, like the brothers who massacred 17 people earlier this month.  Or the British soldier hacked to death by two Islamists in 2013.  Or the scores of other Islamist terrorist “incidents” in both countries over the years.  The “no-go” neighborhoods, whatever one chooses to call them, nurture such people’s malevolence, and send them on their wicked ways.

In Britain, one such enclave spawned a (now banned) group called “Muslims Against the Crusades,” which pledged to turn 12 British cities – including what it calls “Londonistan” – into autonomous Islamist enclaves operating entirely outside British jurisprudence.

Political commentator Daniel Pipes conceded that France’s “sensitive urban zones” are, “in normal times… unthreatening, routine places.”  He adds, though, that “they do unpredictably erupt, with car burnings, attacks on representatives of the state (including police), and riots.”

Such neighborhoods may not have seceded from their countries, as has been implied by some overreaching pundits and politicians.  But they are viewed by police, other emergency services and the public as dangerous places.  Because they are.  Dangerous not only to visit but to society at large, because of the hatred and violence regularly preached and promoted there.  Cancer cells can bide their time too.

After Fox News aired its reference to “no-go” zones, a French comedic program mocked the assertion in a video.  Two “correspondents” pretending to be American journalists ventured into a Muslim neighborhood and, in slapstick fashion, cowered when they spied a couscous restaurant and then fell to the ground in fright at the sound of a jackhammer.

The host of the program wouldn’t take credit for causing Fox’s apology.  But he said that “The important thing is that we really had fun.”

It’s nice that he had fun.  After the horrors of past weeks, Frenchmen deserve some comic relief.  But should the comedian happen to find himself for some reason in a Zone Urbaines Sensibles, and heard a loud, explosive noise, he will do well to, in all seriousness, drop quickly to the ground.

© 2015 Hamodia

 

Strong and Subtle Slanders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An edited version of the above appeared this week in Hamodia

 

Kidneys, Cash and Caring

Over recent years, “Israelis have played a disproportionate role” in organ trafficking, The New York Times reported recently in a lengthy front-page story.  Some Israeli entrepreneurs “have pocketed enormous sums for arranging overseas transplants for patients who are paired with foreign donors,” according to court filings and government documents.

The organs in question are kidneys.  Most of us are born with two, although only one is necessary for living a normal life. Numerous people in renal failure have received kidneys donated by friends or relatives – even altruistic strangers.

But the supply of transplantable organs is estimated by the World Health Organization to meet no more than a tenth of the need. And so a market for kidneys has emerged, and thousands of patients receive illicit transplants each year, often facilitated by brokers, like the accused Israelis, who match potential donors wishing to sell one of their kidneys to someone who desperately needs one.  The brokers maintain that they operate legally and are simply engaged in facilitating legitimate business transactions.

The unaddressed but poignant question here, though, is why the sale of kidneys is so widely perceived as immoral.  Opponents of such sales say that since poor people, likely from third-world countries, will be those most likely willing to exchange one of their kidneys for cash, embracing such activity would amount to exploitation of the poor.  Others counter that providing impoverished people a means of garnering the sort of funds that they would otherwise have no other option of amassing would allow them to use the income to escape the poverty cycle, by investing in businesses or other enterprises.  Encouraging kidney selling, these proponents say, will not only save countless lives but represents a humane way to narrow the global gap between the haves and have-nots.

In fact, while global health organizations stand steadfast against the sale of kidneys, legalizing commercial donation is no longer the fringe position it once was. The American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons have called for pilot projects to test incentives for donation, potentially including cash payments, even though such a change would require amending a 30-year-old federal law.

That larger issue aside, though, what accounts for “the tiny nation” of Israel’s “outsize role in the global organ trade?”  The story suggests it is the result of “religious objections… to recovering organs from brain-dead patients.”

That is likely true.  In other countries organs, overwhelmingly, are retrieved from the recently deceased, declared so because they lack electrical activity in their brains but who may still be breathing with the aid of a respirator.  In Israel, however, “religious objections” to equating lack of discernable brain function with death have resulted in a “severe” shortage of kidneys for transplantation.

The concept of accepting “brain death” as the equivalent of death has been embraced by modern medicine since the 1960s.  But not by some of the past decade’s most widely respected poskim in the world – including Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, Rabbi Yosef Sholom Elyashiv, Rabbi Aharon Soloveichik (who reported that his brother, Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveichik, held the same position) and Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, zecher tzaddikim liv’rocho.

The “brain death” standard, though, has been a boon for transplantation.  A person declared dead but still breathing and circulating blood, is an ideal “host” from whom to “harvest” organs.

Even among those who accept a “brain death” definition of death, though, some fear that, eager to procure organs, overzealous doctors may be tempted to prematurely declare deaths to have occurred.   As for those who respect the decisions of the above-mentioned poskim that brain-death does not mean life has ended, harvesting vital organs from a brain-dead patient is no less than murder.

Saving a life is a most weighty imperative, of course, but halacha does not permit one life to be taken to save the life of another – no matter how diminished the “quality” of the life of the former, no matter how great the potential of the life of the latter.  Halacha, moreover, forbids any action that might hasten death, including the death of a person in extremis.

Contrary to what Reform and secular activists like to insinuate, the great majority of Israelis, whether or not they lead strictly observant lives, in fact recognize the importance of halachic concepts, particularly in matters of life and death.  And so it is not outlandish to imagine that rejection of the “brain death” criterion may indeed have much to do with the chronic kidney shortage in Israel.

What is unremarked upon, though, in the long Times story is something that can be gleaned from an accompanying chart that lists 14 developed countries, ranked in order of their per capita kidney donations from donors who have been declared deceased.  The country with the fewest such donors is Israel.

But also, pardon the pun, harvestable with a bit of effort from the chart are the rankings of those same countries with regard to kidney donations by living donors, and they are telling.  There, high up, above places like Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Spain, is Israel.

© 2014 Hamodia

Republication or posting of the above only with permission from Hamodia

Ugly Times

It could well be, as some have charged, that the New York Times’ choice of photographs to accompany its reportage from Israel and Gaza has been skewed to emphasize Hamas’ grievances; or it could be that the imbalance of photos is merely a manifestation of the old journalistic adage “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Despite my general satisfaction with the paper’s actual reportage on the conflict, I lean to the former judgment.  And I have similar misgivings about headlines that are created for dispatches.  It’s not widely known that media have “headline writers” over whom reporters have no control.  There have been several examples of headlines that didn’t truly reflect the articles beneath them, and in ways that led readers (of the headlines alone, at least – and that’s a lot of readers) to regard Israel negatively.

A recent Times report began with the following sentences: “Militant rockets can be seen launching from crowded neighborhoods, near apartment buildings, schools and hotels. Hamas fighters have set traps for Israeli soldiers in civilian homes and stored weapons in mosques and schools. Tunnels have been dug beneath private property.”  Its headline?  “Israel Says That Hamas Uses Civilian Shields, Reviving Debate,” as if the technical issue of the legal definition of a human shield under international law (and what “Israel Says” about it) were more compelling than the undisputed facts that open it.  The technical definition debate is part of the piece, to be sure.  But the more essential facts that the headline might well have synopsized were what the piece’s first sentences describe.

Another head of the hydra that is the Old Grey Lady is its business department, which recently demonstrated an astoundingly deficient judgment. In an advertisement in its July 20 travel section touting a New York Times tour package to Israel and the West Bank, the paper touts how participants in its offering will experience “a fascinating journey through the geographical, cultural, historical and political landscapes of the region.”  And the “featured expert” for, presumably, the latter landscape is… Hanan Ashrawi.

Ms. Ashwari, of course is a well-known Palestinian activist, legislator and member of the PLO’s Executive Committee; and her portrayals of Israel are little short of rabid.  Citing her denial (in Arabic, in an Arab periodical) that there were ever any Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris remarked that “Hanan Ashrawi is to truth what smoking is to health.”

The articulate but malign Ms. Ashwari regularly uses terms like “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” and “the premeditated killing of civilians” with regard to Israel.  “Israel’s calculated crimes” is one of her particularly cherished phrases.

Back in 2000, when two Israeli reservists, having mistakenly entered Ramallah, were captured, killed and grossly mutilated to the cheers of crowds (remember the fellow elatedly displaying his bloody hands for all to see?), Ms. Ashwari asserted, defensively and falsely, that the pair of soldiers (who were wearing army fatigues and whose car bore Israeli plates) were “undercover Israeli agents that had infiltrated” the town and were recognized by her fellow Palestinians “as members of the Death Squads that had been responsible for assassinations and provocations” (Jordan Times, Oct. 29, 2000).

Two years earlier, Ms. Ashrawi founded MIFTAH – the “Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy,” which was caught a number of times offering alleged quotes of Israeli leaders that turned out to be invented.  Last year it was forced to remove an article from its website that, in the context of attacking President Obama for hosting Pesach sedarim in the White House, accused Jews of using “the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.”  (The group, graciously, later offered its “sincerest regret” for the error.)

More recently, the Palestinian propagandist said that “Israel’s military assault on Gaza constitutes an act of state terror and a deliberate war crime” and that Israel’s building in the West Bank and Jerusalem “constitute another aspect of Israel’s aggression and impunity.”

So, to put it most mildly, Ms. Ashwari is about the least objective observer one might choose to feature as the “expert” to enlighten tourists seeking an objective and factual lesson about the region’s political situation.  But she was the Times’ choice.

One has to wonder if the newspaper would ever have dared offer, say, a right-wing member of the Knesset (whose most extreme member would pale in radicalism next to the choice the paper made) for the edification of American visitors partaking of one of its tourism packages.

Alerted to the advertisement by an Agudath Israel constituent, I immediately wrote the paper’s “public editor” or ombudsman, to ask about the wisdom of the choice of “expert” for the tour.  On July 21, her assistant, Jonah Bromwich, replied that although ads are not part of the public editor’s bailiwick he would pass on my note to an executive in the paper’s advertising department.

Despite several follow-up inquiries, Mr. Bromwich informed me that my communications had all been forwarded to the advertising department, but that “unfortunately,” he “cannot compel them to respond.”

 © 2014 Hamodia

Fresh Air Amid the Reek

Even more remarkable than the article itself was where it appeared.

Written by Elissa Strauss, an essayist and a “co-artistic director” of a “non-religious Jewish house of study for culture-makers at the 14th Street Y” in New York, the piece – “What Did the Orthodox Do Now?!” – graced the pages of the Forward, where Ms. Strauss is a contributing editor.

The essay’s focus was the non-Orthodox Jewish media’s “fixation with Haredi Jews”; those organs’ “hunger for sensationalism” in their reportage on the Orthodox community; the “crude laziness” evidenced by such tunnel vision; and the reduction of “a whole community of Jews” to “a kind of caricature in stories that often traffic in stereotypes.”

Points well taken, and the Forward, of course, is a good example of such invidious ink-spilling.  It has some excellent reporters but also maintains a stable of writers and bloggers with chronically jaundiced views of the charedi world.  And so it deserves credit for publishing Ms. Strauss’ piece, which was essentially a rebuke of its own journalistic bent with regard to our community.

Ms. Strauss attributes the obsessive negativity displayed by some non-Orthodox writers for charedim to a desire to feel a “moral superiority” over their subjects, to “pat ourselves on the back for being so much better.”  But she also raises the specter of other “much more complicated emotions” involved, “possibly including envy…”

A second remarkable article appeared recently in a Jewish publication that doesn’t display any noticeable anti-charedi bent: the venerable politically conservative monthly, Commentary.  On the heels of Ms. Strauss’ piece, it published a lengthy scholarly historical and sociological overview of the charedi community, written by Jack Wertheimer, a respected professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.  Titled “What You Don’t Know About the Ultra-Orthodox” (although the latter term is eschewed in the text of the article, in favor of “Haredim”), it presents an impressively clear and unbiased picture of the American charedi world and its ideals, and demonstrates what the piece’s subtitle promises: “The least understood and most insular American Jews have much to teach us.”

Professor Wertheimer acknowledges various grievances and complaints some Jews voice about charedim; in each instance, though, he also explains the charedi viewpoint, and does so eloquently and well.

As in every community, there are, unfortunately, distasteful things and unsavory players in our own.  We do ourselves no favor pretending otherwise.  “The Haredim,” however, explains Professor Wertheimer, “are expected” by other Jews “to be free of vice because they are supposed to ‘tremble in fear of G-d’.”

How wonderful a testimony to the Torah’s truth such perfection would be.  Alas, free will is what it is, and living a superficial charedi  lifestyle cannot preclude bad behavior.  But generalizing from outliers to the community as a whole is wrong and indefensible.

As is the refusal Professor Wertheimer asserts “to acknowledge the good and not only the problematic or off-putting [to some outsiders] aspects of Haredi life.

Ms. Strauss puts it pithily: “We aren’t really interested in the Orthodox.  We aren’t willing to see a full picture, the good and the bad, the complexity of these many individuals living so differently than us.”

That’s a sort of unwillingness many of us charedim, too, are occasionally guilty of, whether the subjects of our opinionating are other groups of Jews, non-Jews or President Obama.  But it is particularly glaring, all said and done, in Jewish media reportage on charedim.

Not long ago we read in shul of how Bilam broke the news to his sponsor King Balak that Hashem has thwarted their plans to curse Klal Yisrael, the king responded: “Come with me to another place from where you will see them; however, you will see only a part of them, not all of them, and curse them for me from there” (Bamidbar 23:13).

At first thought that puzzles.  Why would Balak think that having Bilam look at the Jews from a different place and in a limited way might facilitate a successful curse?

Things, though, can look very different from different vantage points.  And a focus can be chosen.  One can aim one’s sights at the negative in a people – or a community or an individual; or one can pull back to see a larger, more comprehensive, and thus more accurate, picture.

Perspective, in the end, is everything, and a skewed one can be a very misleading and dangerous thing.  Balak clearly hoped that a view from a different “angle” might reveal something negative about Klal Yisroel, some vulnerability into which a curse might successfully settle.  Boruch Hashem, he had no success.

Unfortunately, some Jewish media have succeeded for years in portraying charedim from a malevolent perspective, sullying our community and beliefs with selective vision, animus and unjustified generalizations.

Ms. Strauss and Professor Wertheimer deserve kudos for pointing that out, and for suggesting that those media aim to be accurate and fair.  May those writers’ words be taken to heart by those who so need to hear them.

© 2014 Hamodia

Letter in the New York Times

To the Editor:

“A Damaging Distance” (news analysis, Sunday Review, July 13) may well be right that the reduced interaction between Arabs and Israelis is lamentable. But to attribute Israel’s erection of a barrier wall between Palestinian land and Israeli land to “the common wisdom that the two nations needed not greater intimacy but complete separation” ignores something rather important.

The wall was built for one reason: to prevent terrorism. In the three-year period after its erection, only a handful of murderous attacks were carried out in Israel. In the three-year period before it was built, 73 such attacks took place, and 293 Israelis were murdered as a result.

(Rabbi) AVI SHAFRAN
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
New York, July 13, 2014

Dangerous and Defective Products

It isn’t every year that news reports about Agudath Israel of America’s annual dinner make the pages of media like the Forward or The New York Times.  This, however, was one such year.

The reason for the attention was the heartfelt and stirring speech delivered by the Novominsker Rebbe, shlit”a, the Rosh Agudas Yisroel, at the gathering.  And the fact that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio chose not to contest the Rebbe’s words.

Rav Perlow spoke to the issue of organized deviations from the Jewish mesorah, a topic that is timely because of the insistence of the latest such movement on calling itself “Open Orthodoxy,” rather than summoning the courage to find an independent adjective for itself, as did the Conservative and Reform movements of the past.

Over the past century or two, the term “Orthodox” in the Jewish world has been synonymous with full affirmation of the mesorah – including most prominently the historicity of Yetzias Mitzrayim; the fact that the Torah, both Written and Oral, was bequeathed to our ancestors at Har Sinai; and that Avrohom, Yitzchok and Yaakov actually existed – concepts that prominent products or leaders of the “Open Orthodoxy” movement are on record as rejecting.

Yet, the “Orthodoxy” in the group’s name has misled various Orthodox congregations across the country to assume that there must be truth in that advertising, and to engage the services of graduates of the “Open” movement as rabbis.  And so, the Rebbe apparently and understandably felt it was important to, in effect, proclaim a strong and principled “caveat emptor,” so that any potential buyers of this particular bill of goods will beware of the fact that the product is dangerously defective.

And so he invoked the sad examples of the other heterodox movements, which, while they seemed once upon a time to offer the promise of Jewish fulfillment and a Jewish future to some undiscriminating Jews, have, the Rebbe lamented, “fallen into an abyss of intermarriage and assimilation” and are on the way to being “relegated to the dustbins of Jewish history.”

A rather unremarkable if unfortunate truism, that.  But, at least to the two newspapers, it seemed to be news (“Orthodox Rabbi Stuns Agudath Gala With ‘Heresy’ Attack on Open Orthodoxy,” gasped the Forward headline) – at least combined with the fact that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio spoke after Rav Perlow’s remarks and chose to not address them.  It couldn’t have been much of a dilemma for him, as an elected official (not to mention one presumably not expert in Jewish theology), to decide whether or not to mix into a religious issue.

The New York Times columnist who wrote about the rabbi and the mayor is Michael Powell.  If his name elicits a sour taste, it’s because it was he who, only last month, wrote an egregiously unfair column about the East Ramapo School District’s “Orthodox-dominated board” that “ensured that the community’s geometric expansion would be accompanied by copious tax dollars for textbooks and school buses.”  Those books and buses, of course, are mandated by law for all New York city schoolchildren – even Orthodox ones.  He has written a number of other columns that touch upon – and not in a positive way – charedi communities, including a long cynical magazine piece about Satmar back in 2006.

What further upset Mr. Powell was Mr. de Blasio’s praise for the Agudah as a movement, and for its executive vice president Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, with whom he has worked for years and who he said “is someone I deeply respect and listen carefully to.”  Bad enough, the writer seemed to be thinking, that the mayor didn’t stand up for the cause of kefira, but did he really have to express admiration for an Agudath Israel leader?

Mr. Powell clearly has an “Orthodox problem.”

That’s unfortunate.  Still, a columnist has the right to be biased, unfair and even offensive.  What even a columnist may not do, though, is offer his readers errors of fact.

Rav Perlow did not, as Mr. Powell reports, offer a “shower of condemnation for Reform and Conservative Jews.” The Rebbe simply reaffirmed Orthodox Judaism’s insistence that heterodox theologies – ideas and beliefs, not people – are incompatible with the Judaism of the ages. Anyone who knows the Rebbe, or any of the manhigei hador, knows that they have only love and concern for all Jews, no matter how misled they may be by their religious leaders.

The reporters missed the real story.  That a clarion call had been sounded to all Jews – charedi and otherwise – who recognize that the Torah is true and that our mesorah is real, to address the deceptive attempts to convince Jews that ersatz “Judaisms” and even “Orthodoxies” are something other than capitulations to the Zeitgeist.

The mayor may have understood that.  Or just, wisely, recognized that he had no expertise to engage the issue of the meaning of Judaism.

Would that Mr. Powell had followed his example.

© 2014 Hamodia