Category Archives: News

Letter in the New York Times

A letter of mine was published in the New York Times on Shabbos:

To the Editor:

In his essay “Israel, This Is Not Who We Are” (Op-Ed, Aug. 14), Ronald S. Lauder sees the Israeli sky falling, as a result of Israel’s “destructive actions” like the maintenance of traditional Jewish religious decorum at the Western Wall, which Mr. Lauder criticizes as coming at the expense of a planned egalitarian prayer space, and a new Israeli law that establishes Israel as a state with a Jewish identity, which he says “damages the sense of equality and belonging of Israel’s Druze, Christian and Muslim citizens.”

But Israel, as a self-described Jewish state, needs a Jewish standard for public behavior at religious sites and to inform religious personal status issues. The standard that has served the state since its formation has been the Jewish standard of the ages — what the world calls Orthodoxy.

And, whether or not the nation-state law was necessary or wise, it does not impinge in any way on the equality before the law of any Israeli citizen.

Israel is not, as Mr. Lauder says some think, “losing its way.” It is the vast majority of the world’s Jews, those who do not regard their religious heritage as important, who are in danger of being lost — to the Jewish people. And it is those indifferent Jews who have the most to gain from the example of Israel preserving the traditional Jewish standards and values that have stood the test of history.

Avi Shafran

New York

The writer, a rabbi, is the director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

First Amendment and Ninth Commandment

Most of us born and raised in this great country, an outpost of galus that offered our immigrant forebears unprecedented freedoms and protections, deeply appreciate not only those gifts but the Constitutional principles on which these United States stand. Among them, the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.

The issue of that guarantee’s limits is currently a thing, thanks to one Alex Jones.

Mr. Jones is an extremely popular radio program host and the proprietor of a number of websites, most notably one called Infowars. He traffics in unfounded “reports” of conspiracies and nefarious actions by government and “globalist” agents.

He famously averred that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, an assertion that resulted in threats against bereaved parents of some of murdered children. He has also propagated the notion that Democratic lawmakers run a global child-trafficking ring, and that the U.S. government was involved in both the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11 attacks. He has also claimed that the moon landing footage was fake, and that NASA is hiding secret technology and the deaths of thousands of astronauts.

Mr. Jones is in the news these days because of pending lawsuits by Sandy Hook victims’ parents and others against him, complaints by former staffers of his alleged racist or anti-Semitic behavior and, most recently, because of the removal of his posts and videos from top technology companies’ media platforms.

Enter the First Amendment.

Characterizing the tech companies’ decision to not host his misinformation as “censorship,” he says the move “just vindicates everything we’ve been saying.”

“Now,” he proclaimed in a tweet, “who will stand against Tyranny [sic] and who will stand for free speech? We’re all Alex Jones now.”

No we’re not.

To be sure, distasteful opinions are legally protected in our country. In 1969, the Supreme Court held that even inflammatory rhetoric is protected unless it “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Revolting as some of Alex Jones’ rants have been, they likely fall on the mutar side of that legal psak. But the rabble-rouser’s lament that, with the curbing of his exposure, the citizenry has been deprived of their last defense against tyranny (upper-cased, no less) is as hollow as the heads of his fans who act on his wild speculations.

In the end, though, no one is preventing Mr. Jones from promoting his untruths (or his products – the diet supplements and survivalist gear he profitably hawks between diatribes) from other rooftops, literal or electronic. The First Amendment limits only the actions of government, not private companies.

Jones, though, is also using the right to free speech as a defense against the lawsuits he’s facing.

One concerns Brennan Gilmore, a former State Department official who attended last summer’s violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Mr. Gilmore was present when a man drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman.

After Mr. Gilmore posted a video of the episode and spoke about it, Mr. Jones accused him of being a C.IA. plant employed by the billionaire George Soros, and as having possibly been involved in the attack on the woman to bring about what he described as “the downfall of Trump.”

In March, Mr. Gilmore sued Mr. Jones for defamation, arguing that he had suffered threats and harassment as a result of the unfounded claim.

Do such public speculations and conspiracy theories merit First Amendment protection, even when they cause harm to others?

In a recent court filing, four law professors specializing in free-speech issues said no.

“False speech does not serve the public interest the way that true speech does,” the scholars wrote. “And indeed, there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.”

For what it’s worth, Donald Trump Jr. feels differently. He reacted to criticism of Mr. Jones by asserting that “Big Tech’s censorship campaign is really about purging all conservative media. How long before Big Tech and their Democrat friends move to censor and purge… other conservatives [sic] voices from their platforms?”

Judges will decide, at least with regard to American law. As believing Jews, though, we know that there really is no hallowed ideal of “free speech.” The unique ability with which the Creator endowed us, the ability to communicate ideas, is not an “inalienable right” but a formidable responsibility. “From a word of falsehood stay distant” (Shemos 23:7) and “Do not give false testimony against your neighbor” (ibid 20:13) comprise our duty.

Would that American jurisprudence, even as it protects unpopular opinion, recognize the import of that charge.

© 2018 Hamodia

Haley’s Comment

You likely haven’t heard of Bryan Sharpe. He’s a black activist who, in the grand tradition of Louis Farrakhan, has demonized Jews (whom he calls “Jutang Clan,” an unimaginative play on the name of a rap group). “Trump don’t run America,” he tweeted in March. “He’s just a figure head [sic]. Jutang run America.”

For good measure, Mr. Sharpe has explained that “Holocaust denier” is a term “created to hide the truth.” He uses the triple-parentheses favored by white supremacists as a way to denote Jewishness.

“People in power is always (((them))),” in another tweet, for example.

You may also not be familiar with Charlie Kirk. But the 24-year-old is a hero to 130,000 high school students, undergraduates and recent college graduates, who appreciate his quest “to save Western civilization.”

Six years ago, the then-teenaged Mr. Kirk founded a politically conservative group called Turning Point USA, and it has experienced phenomenal success attracting followers. The group holds conferences and operates a website “dedicated to documenting and exposing college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

Critics have charged that the site has misquoted and mischaracterized comments by academics and, in May, a leaked internal memo written by the more traditionally conservative Young America’s Foundation (YAF) accused Turning Point USA of “lack of integrity, honesty, experience, and judgment,” and bemoaned “the long-term damage TPUSA could inflict on… the conservative Movement.”

But Mr. Kirk has pressed on, and believes his group, whose revenues in 2012 were $78,890, will raise close to $15 million this year.

What do Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Kirk have to do with each other? They certainly make an odd pair. But a pair they have become, with Mr. Kirk’s embrace of Mr. Sharpe, including him in meetings and inviting him to a retreat for “black influencers.”

Although Turning Point USA has not exhibited anti-Semitic sentiments and is resolutely pro-Israel, those positions seem to take second and third places to the desire to attract what its leader imagines to be a potential conservative black membership for his group.

And Mr. Sharpe seems enamored of even the far fringes of the politically conservative world. “Alt right,” he remarked in a February, 2017 video, “isn’t afraid to call out the Jews and their implications in the destruction of the black community in America. It’s just the truth.”

The coddling of Mr. Sharpe by Mr. Kirk is a reminder that, although we tend these days to see animus for Jews mostly on the far left (often poorly disguised as objections to Israeli policies), neither end of the political spectrum is without its haters.

Turning Point USA didn’t respond to media requests for comment about its relationship with Mr. Sharpe, and the latter declined to comment, although he deleted many of his tweets about Jews shortly after being contacted by a news organization.

On July 23, hundreds of students gathered at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for the conservative group’s fourth annual High School Leadership Summit. The four-day event included workshops on campus activism and student leadership, and featured speeches by prominent conservatives, including Sebastian Gorka and Anthony Scaramucci. Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed members of the group.

As did U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and what she said to the students was characteristically incisive and impressive.

She asked attendees to raise their hands if they “ever posted anything online to ‘own the libs’ ” – to get the goat, that is, of Americans who don’t agree with them. Most of hands in the audience proudly shot up, and there was much laughter and applause.

But then she closed in to make her point. “I know that it’s fun and that it can feel good,” she says. “But step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this. Are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading?… But this kind of speech isn’t leadership – it’s the exact opposite.”

“Real leadership,” she continued, “is about persuasion. It’s about movement. It’s bringing people around to your point of view. Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do.”

Ms. Haley seems to never disappoint. It isn’t likely that she had any inkling of the group’s leader’s outreach to an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser. She is an open book, and its pages so far have all been inspiring. Her call to, in effect, eschew political machinations and tactics – which would include, presumably, trying to leverage the popularity of a hater in order to gain supporters – was a message one hopes was well heard by all present, including Charlie Kirk.

© 2018 Hamodia

Faisal, Mohammed and Hasnain

Arriving in Toronto for a family simchah last week, my wife and I found a city – at least the parts of it not involved in personal celebrations – still reeling from a gunman’s Motzoei Tisha B’Av shooting of random strangers, leaving a young woman and a 10-year-old girl dead, and 13 people injured.

The name of the culprit, Faisal Hussain, and his Pakistani parentage, along with the Islamic State’s claim that he was part of that murderous movement (“a soldier of the Islamic State,” the group crowed, “[who] carried out the attack in response to calls to target the citizens of the coalition countries”) obviously raised concerns that the terrorist, who killed himself after his rampage, had been motivated by Islamist sentiments.

Authorities in Toronto, a city of inordinate politeness, said that “at this stage,” there was no evidence connecting the shooter with radical Islam. What subsequent stages may reveal remains to be seen.

The murderer’s family expressed its “deepest condolences” to the victims and their families for what they called “our son’s horrific actions,” and said that the killer had been mentally ill. As if emotional ailments somehow lead non-evil people to kill and maim random innocents.

Wednesday night saw a vigil in the Toronto neighborhood where the rampage occurred. Thousands of Canadians held lit candles in memory of those killed. Thursday morning saw my wife and me bidding goodbye to my parents-in-law as we waited for an electronically summoned car service taxi to pick us up for the trip to the airport.

Our driver’s name, we were informed, was Hasnain.

The conversation between us and my sister-in-law, perhaps predictably, veered into terrorist territory, so to speak, as we considered whether car service drivers should be subject to suspicion based on their ethnicities or countries of origin. Not an unreasonable proposition, of course; most Islamic terrorists have Muslim names and roots in Muslim lands.

Then again, as my wife interjected, no less reasonable is the contention that the vast majority of Muslim-named immigrants from Muslim lands are neither terrorists nor their sympathizers.

I recalled a long cab ride I took a year or so ago with Mohammed (not the original one). As it turned out, he had worked for years in a kosher meat store in Brooklyn, spoke some Yiddish and had only the kindest words for his observant Orthodox erstwhile employer. (The driver had freely chosen his change of career, preferring steering wheels to meat slicers.)

The car was one minute away and so we bid our final goodbyes and went outside. Hasnain had a 4.9 (out of 5) rating as a driver but I had to wonder if he might have any rating in some unrelated field. I pushed the thought out of my head.

He was friendly, of course; a 4.9 rating isn’t earned by surliness. And most of the trip, he was silent.

After having to dodge some double-parked cars on both sides of Bathurst St. (Southern Brooklyn isn’t unique, I learned), Hasnain apologized for the swervings. His English was excellent, British-tinged.

I decided to ask him where he was from. Pakistan. How long he’d been here. Six years.

“You learned English so well in so short a time?”

“Oh, I had an excellent education in Pakistan, including in English. As a matter of fact, when we moved here, my children were well ahead of their Canadian classmates in their studies.”

I was intrigued. “What did you do for a living in Pakistan?” I asked.

“I owned a successful leatherworking factory, with high-end fashion companies across Europe as clients.” Here he dropped a list of names, one or two of which I had heard of.

“So why did you leave?”

“Well, I was kidnapped.”

“You were kidnapped?” my wife and I queried, in comic unison.

“Yes,” he replied. “By the Taliban.”

We asked for details but at that point we were at the airport. He just smiled and said, “I escaped.” He got out of the car and unloaded our suitcases. As we thanked him, I thought of the conversation at my in-laws’ home, not an hour earlier.

Yes, terrorists these days tend, like last week’s rampager, to have Muslim names and Muslim-majority country connections. And, yes, most Muslim-named immigrants from Muslim lands are not terrorists. Two uncontestable truths.

And, while caution is always in order, especially these days, our heads have to be sufficiently large to hold both those thoughts simultaneously.

© 2018 Hamodia

The Writing on the Wall

So many walls these days. The Israeli security one. The one President Trump wants to build along the Mexican border. The “Wall of Steel” erected around London’s Winfield House, where the president spent a night last week. And that older, conceptual wall, the one separating “church” and state – or, put more precisely, religion and government.

Interestingly, the U.S. Constitution nowhere refers to such a construct. It was erected, piecemeal, over the years, its popularization beginning with its use by Thomas Jefferson, in an 1802 letter.

When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced last month that he would be retiring from the Supreme Court, while Chicken Little was apparently unavailable, there was no lack of squawking in some circles over the imminent falling of the sky. The specter of a conservative-leaning High Court left some commentators and legislators aghast.

And they weren’t much mollified by the president’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Kennedy, even though the nominee was regarded by some conservatives as not sufficiently on board with their program.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted that Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation would prove “a destructive tool on a generation of progress for workers, women… communities of color & families.” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal attributed to the nominee, “a very extreme hostility to many of the precious rights and liberties that make our nation great.” And so it went.

But, despite the harsh interrogation Mr. Kavanaugh will face from the Senate Judiciary Committee, and barring a revelation that he tortures small animals in his spare time, the judge is likely to be confirmed as the newest member of the High Court,.

The nominee’s non-fans and fans alike seem focused on what his joining the Court will mean for the 1973 “right to privacy” Roe v. Wade decision, and on his past position regarding presidential privilege. But what might matter most, especially to those of us who hold conservative social and moral positions, will be a Justice Kavanaugh’s approach to the aforementioned wall. There is some evidence that he feels it might stretch too high.

The separation of religion and state was originally binding only on the federal government. After the Civil War, though, the 14th amendment made all states subject to rule by the federal Constitution, opening the way for courts to apply to the states the First Amendment’s prohibition of laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

That second phrase, the “free exercise” clause, is likely to play a major role in future Supreme Court decisions.

The current High Court has already moved a bit away from seeing that barrier as extending into the stratosphere. It ruled that a closely-held, for-profit religious company should not have to provide its employees with insurance covering services that go against the company owners’ faith. And that a church could access state funds to build a playground. And that members of a Colorado commission had shown “hostility” and “disrespect” for the religious views of a baker who declined to make a wedding cake for a ceremony that offended his religious beliefs.

The likelihood that respect for the beliefs of religious Americans will continue to be a prominent feature of the future High Court is important.

Because, in the contemporary libertine social climate, religious Americans are finding themselves facing litigation aimed at forcing them, in their businesses, and even their private lives, to defer to objectionable societal attitudes. They are discriminated against by ad hoc zoning ordinances wielded by prejudiced people. They are assailed for wanting to educate their children as they see fit, and are called bigots for their sincere beliefs about proper human conduct.

There will continue to be division among Americans over the proper relation of religious convictions to the body politic and the lives of individuals. But a socially conservative-majority Supreme Court, we can reasonably hope, will take religious Americans’ concerns fully into consideration as it deliberates on religious rights cases brought before it.

Thomas Jefferson may have made the concept of a “wall” between religion and government famous, but the metaphor’s earliest use was in 1644, when Roger Williams, the founder of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (which would become the state of Rhode Island) wrote that “[A] hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world” was necessary to ensure colonists’ freedom of religion.

I think his first mashal is the better one. “Hedge” conjures a less charged image than “wall.”

And hedges, as we all know, need occasional trimming.

© 2018 Hamodia

A Fish’s Smile

I was accosted recently on the Staten Island Ferry by a large fish.

Well, not exactly. It was actually a large photograph of a fish, on a poster carrying the legend: “I’m ME, not MEAT. See the individual. Go vegan.”

Yes, “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” or PETA, has taken its efforts to the high seas. And, although some of the other animals featured on similar posters in the “I’m ME” campaign elsewhere are not particularly charming – it’s hard to make a cow or chicken (much less a lobster) look friendly – the fish whose gaze met mine as I took a seat on the boat and looked to my right was decidedly endearing.

Because he (she?) was smiling.

Or appeared to be. That’s because the sea creatures Hashem created include not just astoundingly colorful and morphologically remarkable species but some that have what strike humans as expressive, almost human, faces. Some look angry, others perplexed – others, like the one on the poster, happy, friendly.

None of those faces, though, in fact reflects any of those human traits, any more than a smiley-face sticker means the sticker is happy. We might be able to tell when a dog is pleased, but when we imagine animals expressing truly human emotions, we are unconsciously anthropomorphizing them – attributing quintessentially human traits to creatures lacking them. There are photographs of “smiling” sharks too.

Of course, trying to convince people that, as PETA’s founder and president Ingrid Newkirk once famously put it, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” is the group’s raison d’être.

It even went so far, in 2003, to promote what it called its “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign, comparing the meat processing industry to Churban Europa. The traveling exhibit juxtaposed World War II death camp photographs with scenes in animal slaughter facilities.

Emaciated men were shown next to a gaggle of chickens; pigs behind bars, beside starving children behind barbed wire; mounds of human remains beside mounds of cow carcasses. In one panel, above the legend “Baby Butchers,” mothers and children in striped garb were shown staring through the barbed wire of a concentration camp; alongside them, a similar shot of caged… piglets.

Ms. Newkirk once commented that “Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.” Try wrapping a normal brain around that comparison.

A half-hearted “apology” eventually came, but only for the “pain” the exhibit may have caused. Ms. Newkirk expressed her surprise at the negative reaction. She had “truly believed,” she wrote, “that a large segment of the Jewish community would support” the exhibit, and was “bowled over by the negative reception.” Disturbingly, she laid responsibility for the ill-advised campaign on “PETA staff [who] were Jewish.” Ah, the Jews.

A longtime and still employed slogan of the group, in fact, is “Meat is Murder.” But it’s not. Meat is food. At least since the Mabul, the Torah not only permits meat-eating, it encourages it on Shabbos and Yamim Tovim as a means of enjoying and hence showing honor to holy times.

Few if any religious cultures are as concerned with animals as our mesorah. Not only were two of the three Avos, not to mention Moshe Rabbeinu, caring shepherds, but there is a halachic prohibition of tzaar baalei chaim.

And in actual practice, observant Jews are exquisitely sensitive to animal well-being. I recall as a young boy how my father scooped two injured birds from a street and brought them home to care for them. In my own home, even insects are captured and released rather than killed. (I won’t subject readers again to the menagerie of pets – the goat, iguana, tarantula and assortment of rodents – the Shafran family has hosted. Sorry, guess I just did.) I am careful, as per the Talmud’s exhortation regarding animals, to feed my own tropical fish before I sit down myself to dinner.

But the Torah is clear that animals are for human use. We can hold them captive, we can work them and we can eat them. We can, indeed must, when there is a Beis Hamikdash, bring them as korbanos.

The “PETA Principle,” paralleling animals with humans, subtly lies at the root of much that is wrong with our world. But humans alone make moral choices; animals do not. And conflating the two worlds shows disdain for the specialness of the human being.

A rat may be, in a way, a pig, and a pig a dog.

None of them, though, is a boy.

And fishes don’t smile.

© 2018 Hamodia

 

 

Kavanaugh and Religious Freedom

When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, many immediately predicted the worst. NPR’s Nina Totenberg, channeling R.E.M., proclaimed it “the end of the world as we know it.”

After President Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Kennedy, Ms. Totenberg admitted that the nominee was “incredibly charming” “enormously skilled” and “decent.”…

The rest of this article, which appears at Forward, can be read here.

The Monster on Muslims’ Backs

The third time proved the charm. President Trump’s travel ban received the hechsher of the highest court in the land.

As well it should have.

True, in the years since 9/11, no one in the United States has been killed in a terrorist attack by anyone from the seven countries subject to the president’s executive order (North Korea, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Venezuela). And true, too, that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, countries from which the 9/11 attackers hailed, are not on the list. Likewise true, the U.S. already has strong vetting procedures for all immigrants from a host of countries.

But there were three non-fatal attacks by people connected to Iran or Somalia. And the bottom line, as the Court held, is that an American president has the right to decide what countries he feels cannot prevent the export of terrorists.

The key to the legal muster-passing of the travel ban’s third iteration was its devolvement from a “Muslim ban,” which would have branded an entire religion and all its adherents dangerous, to a ban on citizens of specific countries. Adding to the non-Muslim nature of the ban is the fact that the presidential order affects a mere estimated 8.2 percent of the world’s Muslims.

The closeness of the Supreme Court vote was largely due to the question of whether to give weight to the president’s campaign rhetoric about Muslims, which was at times rather harsh.

I’m not inclined to ascribe to President Trump true animus for Islam and Muslims. I suspect that some of his past intemperate words were innocent if inelegant attempts to vilify radical Islamists, those who murder and maim in the name of Islam, who richly deserve opprobrium.

In any event, a majority of the Court felt that the rhetoric, some of which persisted even after the presidential election, was not pertinent to the order before them, which made no mention at all of any religion.

That wasn’t the feeling of four justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent, notably used President Trump’s inflammatory words about Muslims to underscore what she asserted were the “stark parallels” between the majority opinion and one of the high court’s most shameful moments: Korematsu v. United States, the decision that upheld the rounding up and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

That comparison, though, was, to put it politely, bewildering. The Korematsu decision concerned the uprooting of American citizens and their effective incarceration in detention camps. Halting the provision of visas to citizens of other countries isn’t just in a different category, it’s on a different planet.

My first reaction to the decision was satisfaction with the Court majority’s understanding of its role in a case like this: to judge only the order at issue.

My second one, though, was to engage in a bizarre thought experiment. What if the enemy-identifying rhetoric of a president – unimaginable as it would be for the current one – were aimed at Judaism and Jews? What if a (chalilah) President Farrakhan had declared in campaign speeches that “Judaism hates us!” and ordered a ban on Jews – but then, under legal constraints, narrowed it down to a ban on people from Israel, France and the U.K.? And the High Court, asked to rule on the ban, chose to focus exclusively on the new order’s mentioning of only countries, not a people or religion? How would we feel?

Crazy scenario? Surely. Still and all, such wild, discomfiting imaginings are part and parcel of objective critical thinking.

So, though, is recognizing the qualitative difference between that fever dream and the reality today – a difference that makes quite a difference: There are no Jews, much less a Jewish movement, bent on murder and mayhem. And Israel, France and the U.K. are not incubators of terrorism.

The vast majority of Muslims, both here in the U.S. and overseas, are not proponents of violence. But there can be no denying that much terrorism today emerges from the foul belief that Islam requires hatred and killing of “infidels”; no denying that the only religious credo routinely bellowed before attacks on innocents is an Islamic one.

And, unfortunately, the tiny percentage of the nearly 2 billion Muslims who subscribe to a violent theology cannot erase those facts. I feel sympathy, and think we all should, for innocent Muslims who have to live with that ugly monster on their backs, misrepresenting the faith they live daily and peacefully.

The monster, though, is real. And it birthed a travel ban.

© 2018 Hamodia

Us, Them and the Deep State

Hamodia opted to not publish my column submission for this week, so I post it here instead.

The two thirds of the American populace that objected to the policy of removing children from their illegal immigrant parents at the southern border emitted a collective sigh of relief last week. President Trump, in a stunning turnabout, signed an executive order intended to stop the practice.

Although there are logistical and legal issues still to be resolved and subsequent presidential tweets to try to reconcile with the executive order, the president demonstrated the courage to publicly jettison his repeated claim that he was powerless to act, that only a larger action by Democrats in Congress could end the separation policy. He deserves credit for that move.

Before his reversal, though, the administration’s policy was to treat people who entered the country illegally as felons rather than civil violation offenders (first-time illegal entry is a misdemeanor). Children, even very young ones, were taken from their parents against their will, and the policy was broadly decried. Among the decriers was Agudath Israel of America, which expressed its “deep concern and disappointment” over the resultant “profound suffering and pain to both parents and children.”

The Agudah statement acknowledged that the “problem of illegal immigration is a serious one, and we support reasonable efforts by the administration and legislature to effectively stem the flow of would-be immigrants who have not been accepted through the legal immigration system.” But it contended that “seeking to enforce our statutes does not relieve us of [our] moral obligation” to prevent “the extreme anguish, fear and trauma born of separating undocumented immigrant family members, which is particularly harmful to children.”

The reaction to Agudath Israel’s statement was broad and diverse. There were many expressions of gratitude for its issuance, from both members of our community and others. But there were a number of negative reactions too. I serve as the Agudah’s liaison with the media and public, and so those reactions landed in my inbox, some with quite a thud.

They confirmed something that (as regular readers of this space well know) has pained me for years: the prevalence of gross, fervent and unthinking partisanship.

A legitimate question asked by several people was why the Agudah felt the need to comment on the situation at all. The organization does not, of course, regularly comment on events that lack direct impact on the Jewish community.

The knowledge, though, that wailing children were being taken from their parents was wrenching not only to a broad swath of the larger American public but to a wide swath, too, of Klal Yisrael – rachmanim, after all, bnei rachmanim. So, it was not inappropriate for us to register our pain. And, with scores of religious groups registering their own protests of the policy, some of them quite harshly, it was felt that, should the Agudah say nothing, it would be assumed to approve of the policy.

Striking, though, was the lack of information that underlay some other (often vociferous) complaints. Several people, “informed” presumably by news sources that richly deserve the adjective “fake,” insisted that “the law” requires family breakups, and that the policy of considering unlawful entrants to be criminals had been in place under previous administrations.

When I explained that there was and is no such law, and that the policy of automatically considering illegal entrants to our country deserving of incarceration and the seizing of their children was mere weeks old, they seemed taken aback.

Others apprised us that a “deep state” plot, or Democratic Party conspiracy, was clearly at play; others were upset that we dared “attack” a sitting president, although we took care in our statement to not even mention the president or attorney general, and lamented only the upshot of an unfortunate policy. When, in past years, the Agudah issued statements critical of the Obama administration for joining the U.N. Human Rights Council or fostering the Iran Deal, no complaints, to the best of my memory, were registered.

Some correspondents, seemingly having read only part of the statement, interpreted the Agudah’s expression of humanitarian concern as advocacy for “open borders.” As if there are only two options: wrenching kids from their parents’ arms or having the country overrun by a horde of Aztec invaders.

The acutely politicized, black-and-white, “us-and-them” and often woefully misinformed mentality in parts of our world is lamentable. Intelligent, informed opinions on current events cannot be gleaned from talk radio hosts or blatantly partisan news organizations. Astuteness requires middos tovos, the consideration of different points of view and the application of that most important of skills: critical thinking.

And their lack poorly serves the mission of Klal Yisrael.

© 2018 Rabbi Avi Shafran