Category Archives: MUSINGS

Musing: Iron Dome Hakaras Hatov

The New York Times today notes that:

“The United States has been instrumental in helping to fund the development of Iron Dome and has proprietary access to the technology. Israel has said that the system has a success rate of nearly 90 percent in intercepting the missiles it is meant to thwart.”

Indeed, in 2013, US President Barack Obama pledged continued funding of the Iron Dome system, stressing that America’s commitment to the State of Israel is a “solid obligation” and “non-negotiable.”

In 2014, the US provided $235 million for Iron Dome research, development and production.  At the time, President Obama called it “a program that has been critical in terms of providing security and safety for Israeli families,” one, he continued, that “has been tested and has prevented missile strikes inside of Israel.”

Actions and words worth remembering, and worth expressing hakaras hatov for, in these trying times.

Musing: Sneak Preview

I’m supposed to give the sermon this Shabbos at the shul I usually attend on Shabbos mornings.  The rabbi is away for the summer and sometimes asks me to say a few words when he’s gone.

I have several thoughts that I think I’ll share with those in attendance; but one insight I hope to cite is from Rav Elchonon Wasserman, zt”l, Hy”d.

As recounted by Rav Moshe Shternbuch, shlit”a, Rav Wasserman visited England (where Rav Shternbuch grew up) before the war, collecting money for his yeshiva.  Famously unconcerned with anything but truth, he spoke in a London shul and said something that resulted in part of the congregation standing up and exiting the room in protest.  He was unruffled.

What Rav Wasserman focused on is one of the descriptions of the Jewish people reluctantly pronounced by Bil’am (Bamidbar 23:9):  Aam livadad yishkon uvagoyim lo yischashov – “a people (aam) that will dwell alone, and will not be reckoned among the nations (goyim).

An aam, Rav Wasserman explained, is a people united by a purpose and calling; a goy, the citizenry of a country.  The Jewish people is the former; and lo yischashov – it should not be reckoned among the latter.  A country in the Holy Land that aspires to be a nation like the countries of the rest of the world is not a Jewish ideal.  The Land of Israel (in contrast to a country, even the one today called Israel, which was still unborn when Rav Wasserman spoke) is the holy place Hashem entrusted to us, invaluable for the closeness it offers us to Him and the commandments that can only be performed there.  It cannot be our mere “country.”

We all owe gratitude to the state of Israel for myriad things, but it is in the end but a country, a fact we sometimes forget.  Despite the wording of one Israeli leader’s eulogy for the three boys murdered by Arabs, they were killed not because they were Israelis.  They were killed because they were Jews; that’s why they are kedoshim.  May Hashem grant their families, and us all, nechama.

I hope no one stands up and leaves the shul in protest when I speak this Shabbos.  But if anyone does, I will be in good historical company.

Musing: Stop and Wonder

Sometimes a statistic just makes you stop and wonder.

One such fact came near the start of an essay in Hillsdale College’s publication Imprimis.

Anthony Daniels, a British psychiatrist, writes: “By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home.  The child may be father of the man, but the television is father to the child.”

It’s unlikely that things are terribly different on this side of the pond.  The implications not only for the family but for society as a whole are… well, disquieting, to say the very least.

Musing: Skin in the Game

My new issue of Reform Judaism magazine just arrived.  Its cover story is “Jews and Tattoos.”  And it asserts that “Jewish tradition is surprisingly nuanced on the practice” of tattooing

That contention, and the arguments in the article to support it, well demonstrate the Reform movement’s attitude toward Torah (“Only one law,” after all, it explains, “in the Book of Leviticus, prohibits a tattoo.”  As if more than one law prohibits murder.)

The article, seemingly seriously, offers “positive examples of tattooing” in the Bible.  Things like Hashem’s placing a “mark” on Kayin (Beraishis 4:15) and His command (Yeshayahu 44:5) that “one shall call himself by the name of Yaakov; and another shall write with his hand to Hashem” (presumably understanding “with his hand” as “on his hand,” and by cutting the skin and applying ink).

It is sad, just so sad.

Musing — Inspector Clouseau, Phone Home

The New York Times today, reporting on a gunman ‘s murder of three people at the Jewish Museum in the center of Brussels, Belgium, notes that:

“…investigators still had to determine the motive for the shooting but added that the fact it took place at the city’s Jewish Museum indicated an ‘anti-Semitic attack’.”

Impressive detective work.

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.”

AS

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.

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.”

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.

Musing: A Premature Obit for Yiddish

A mailing from the Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based cultural nonprofit dedicated to translating and promoting Yiddish books, is sitting on my desk.  The oversized envelope contains  a fundraising letter and various enclosures.

Emblazoned across the front of the envelope is the large word “Yiddish,” followed by the legend, its second word highlighted:

“Our last chance to keep it alive forever!”

Someone really should buy these folks a bus ticket to Williamsburg.