Mishpacha Magazine asked me to contribute, as part of a symposium, a short essay on the topic of a lesson I would want my children to internalize. The symposium was recently published, and my contribution is below.

(As it happens, although the below was written months before then end of my 31-year tenure as Agudath Israel’s director of public affairs, it turns out to be a most timely idea for me.)

A lesson that has become concretized in my life, and that I have sought to impart to my children (and to anyone else who will listen – the progeny are a captive audience) is what Rabi Akiva famously said when he found himself sleeping in the wild, with the candle he had lit blown out by the wind, his rooster alarm clock devoured by a cat and his donkey killed by a lion (Berachos 60b).

Namely, “All that the Merciful One does is for the good” – an attitude that reflected the motto of his teacher, Nachum Ish Gamzu,  “This, too, is for the good.” 

And when Rabi Akiva repeats that sentiment as well to the people of the nearby town as they, unlike him, were marched into captivity, he is reminding them of the same, even as they are experiencing great adversity. We may not see the good in what happens to us right away – or ever – but it is still for the good.

There’s nothing wrong with wishing for peace and calm and stability. But when adversity arrives, we can either kick and scream (to no avail) or seek to accept and come to terms with the challenge.

What began to teach me that lesson (though it took long to absorb it) was the knowledge that my father, a”h, as a teenager, was banished with other members of his Novardhok yeshiva by the Soviets to Siberia. Those boys could easily have felt hopeless. Yet they grew in unimaginable ways during their Siberian ordeal.  And survived the war to marry and raise families. Families that raised families of their own…

And in my own life, although I never faced anything like Siberian exile, I saw how “bad” things could be good things well-disguised. Our family moved to new cities twice and each exodus was from a wonderful place, leaving me devastated to be leaving. In each case, the new city loomed depressingly.

And yet, each move turned out to be a great brachah. As did an unexpected seeming professional downturn, which I deeply bemoaned at the time but that I have come to see as a true blessing well-camouflaged.

The life lesson of understanding how good can lie beneath what seems its opposite is even reflected in halacha:  “Just as one offers a blessing over good,” Chazal teach and the Shulchan Aruch codifies, “so does one offer a blessing over bad.”

I still need to fully internalize that truth; it’s one that needs constant chazarah. But I have experience born of having seen it realized. And I hope that my and my wife’s children will come to appreciate it as well.

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Midrash Rabbah (ibid) recounts how our forefather exclaimed “Deceiver, daughter of deceiver! Did I not call out ‘Rachel’ and you answered me?”

Leah well parried the thrust: “Is there a barber without apprentices? Did your father not call out ‘Esav’ and you answered?”

Touché.

But the Torah isn’t a drama presentation. And the Torah doesn’t criticize either subterfuge. What are we to glean about our lives from that comeback? On the most simple level, I think it conveys something about how we – whether we are teachers, parents or just people (because all of us are examples to those around us) – convey less (if anything) with words than we do with our actions. 

I learned that lesson well, if a bit embarrassingly, many years ago, when I was typing away on a keyboard and my four-year-old son sat down on the floor near my desk with a pegs-and-holes toy, which his imagination had apparently repurposed into a word processor (this was B.C. – Before Computers), and proceeded to imitate me.

It was very cute, and I smiled. Until, that is, his little sister crawled over and tugged at him. Showing annoyance, he turned to her and said, loudly and tersely,  “Will you please stop? Can’t you see I’m working?” Yes, he was, as they say in the theater, inhabiting his character.

One of the answers to the Chanukah question of why the cohanim needed to find a sealed flask of oil despite the fact that tum’a hutra b’tzibbur – ritually defiled entities are permitted in many cases for public use – is attributed to the Kotzker Rebbe. He explained that that principle does not apply when a crucial, new era is being initiated, which was the case when the Chashmonaim rededicated the Bais Hamikdash. At so important a time, purity cannot be compromised. 

The term for “initiation” is chinuch. And it is  also used to mean “education.” When we educate others, especially the young, we do well to ensure that our actions are pure.

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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I’ll get to the “whatever” a bit below. 

But first: You may not realize it but, if you’re part of the American Jewish community, especially if you’re part of the Orthodox world, you have benefitted from the work of Agudath Israel.

From protection of religious rights to promotion of Jewish values and Torah study, from fighting antisemitism to ensuring that Jewish citizens can live as Jews where they wish, from obtaining permitted funding for Jewish schools to advocating for the defense of Israel, Agudath Israel has been, and remains, at the forefront of shtadlanus – legislative, diplomatic and political activism – in Congressional halls and court chambers, as well as in ongoing interaction with elected officials.

It has been my deep privilege to have been a cog in the well-oiled and constantly humming Agudah machine for some 30 years now. The legendary Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z”l, recruited me and it was a great honor for me to have been able to work alongside him for four years until the end of his amazing life. And it has been a great honor, from that time on, to have worked with people like Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, Rabbi Abba Cohen and so many others who tirelessly advocate for the community.

Above all, it is humbling to continue working for a Jewish organization that takes its direction from a body like the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. Agudath Israel is truly unique.

And it is currently poised to launch a drive to ensure that it can continue its work into the future without hindrance or pause.

If you know enough about the Agudah to cherish it (and if you don’t, please spend some time at https://agudah.org/ ), or if you just want to show appreciation for the articles that I produce (whether for the Agudah or, independently, for various media, which the organization gives me rein to do), please visit:

https://charidy.com/agudahnational/AShafran

Now, to the “whatever.” Please offer whatever you can, no matter how little, to help further the cause. If you can sign on to a recurring donation, click on the relevant button after “donate.” Please do what you can, but know that no donation whatsoever is too small to say: “I appreciate the Agudah.” 

And I appreciate you for that.

Avi Shafran

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Kosher species require cud-chewing and split hooves, yet the camel, the text states, is forbidden “because it chews its cud, but does not have a [completely] split hoof”; and the pig, “because it has a cloven hoof that is completely split, but will not regurgitate its cud.” The “becauses” are seemingly misplaced, since the reason for the species’ forbiddance is for the lack of one kosher sign, not the presence of one.

Similar wording is used regarding the two other “one sign only” species mentioned, the hyrax and the hare.

The Kli Yakar perceives something poignant in the placement of the kosher signs after the “becauses.” He writes that “their pure sign adds extra impurity to their impurity, as we find that Chazal compared Esov to a pig that sticks out its hoofs when it lies down to make it appear as if it is kosher, but its inside is full of deceit. This represents anyone whose inside is not like his outside, in the manner of the hypocrites … Therefore, the pig’s split hoof is a sign of impurity because the split hoof can deceive people and make it appear as if it is kosher.”

The Chashmonai king Yannai, before he died, told his wife “Don’t be afraid of the Perushim [Torah-faithful Jews] or of those who are not Perushim, only of the hypocrites who present themselves as Perushim, for their actions are those of Zimri while they ask for reward like Pinchas received” (Sotah 22b).

Presenting oneself as a better version than that of one’s reality, Rav Yaakov Weinberg, zt”l, once told me, isn’t wrong – if one aspires to that better version. As the Chinuch put it, “what is on the outside can awaken the inside.” 

But pretension for the sake of pretension is being, well, piggish. 

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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At the end of the parsha, Yosef, still “undercover” as the Egyptian viceroy, plants a royal goblet in Binyamin’s knapsack. When the chalice, which Yosef indicates was used for telling the future, is “found” there, he says to his brothers, “Don’t you know that a person like me practices divination?”

Divination, or kishuf, is forbidden by the Torah. Yosef received his ability to interpret dreams directly from Heaven, not through any magical means. And that is clearly why he avoids lying outright, not claiming that he himself uses the goblet for divination purposes but, rather, that it is so used by “a person like me” – referring to Par’oh, not himself.

The halachos of what constitutes kishuf are complex. There are occasions when an omen may be taken seriously but, generally speaking, acting on the “revelation” of an omen, or relying on seemingly magical means to make one’s plans, constitutes a forbidden act. 

There are, unfortunately, practices that have found footholds in some otherwise observant Jewish circles that seem clearly to be straddling, if not crossing, the line between legitimate “omen recognizing” and outright, forbidden occultism. I won’t venture into citing particular practices. As the same wise rebbe quoted above would say about controversial things, “Go ask your local Orthodox rabbi.” But when faced with the option of utilizing a seemingly questionable segulah, one needs to weigh the possibility that doing so may be an issur d’Oraysa, a Torah prohibition.

Back in parshas Vayeitzei, we find Lavan telling Yaakov, that “I have learned by divination that Hashem has blessed me on your account” (Beraishis 30:27).

Once again, Lavan is in our ancestry. But we have free will, and are charged to do our best to squelch whatever inclinations we may have that are born of that ancestor’s influence.

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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And then there are my colleagues. It is gratifying to work alongside some of the most dedicated and effective protectors of religious rights, providers of social services, promoters of Torah study and observance, and standard bearers of Judaism.

Above all, it is humbling to work for a Jewish organization that takes its direction from a body like the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. Agudath Israel is truly a unique movement.

And it is poised to launch a drive to ensure that it can continue its great work into the future without hindrance .

If you know enough about the Agudah to cherish it (and if you don’t, please spend some time at https://agudah.org/ ), or if you just want to show appreciation for the articles that I produce (whether for the Agudah or for various media, which the organization gives me rein to do), please visit 

https://charidy.com/agudahnational/AShafran

and offer whatever you can to help further the cause.  Thank you!

AS

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The sorrow I felt at the news that Rav Aharon Schechter, zt”l, had been niftar from this world eventually gave way to the comforting image of his radiant smile and the memory of his personal warmth. And to a particular personal memory of a long-ago, unexpected phone call.

The Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin Rosh Yeshiva’s smile wasn’t born of any calculated forcing of will. It was simply his “default” expression, the physical manifestation of his simchas hachaim and ahavas Yisrael.  It receded only when he was deep in thought, saying a shiur, pondering a she’eilah or formulating a response to a question, then giving way to a look of concentration. As soon as the contemplation was complete, the smile quickly, naturally, reasserted itself, coming again to the fore.

Rav Schechter’s brilliance and scholarship were recognized by Rav Yitzchak Hutner, zt”l, who tapped him to take his place in the yeshiva when Rav Hutner moved to Eretz Yisrael to found Yeshivas Pachad Yitzchak in Yerushalayim. And they are evident in “Avodas Aharon,” the sefer Rav Schechter authored back in the 1950s. And his eloquence, whether speaking in Yiddish or English, was striking.

Until illness limited him, Rav Schechter was constantly in the beis medrash, and even learned “bichavrusa” with talmidim. Under his direction and love, the yeshiva became a renowned makom Torah. 

But it was his smile, his kindness, his ahavas Yisrael, his concern for everyone with whom he interacted, that first come to my mind when I think of him. 

The sensitivity that characterized Rav Schechter was evident in much of what was recounted at his levayah. Although in her later years, his rebbetzin had become progressively unaware of her surroundings, her husband refused to recite kiddush on Shabbos until she was seated at the table, such was his respect for his eishes chayil, diminished in awareness or not. Once, leaving home for the chasunah of one of the rebbetzin’s relatives, he told her he was going to a chasunah. Why, he was asked afterward, didn’t he say whose chasunah he was attending. “I didn’t want her to feel bad that she isn’t able to go,” was his response.

I cannot claim the honor of having been a talmid of Rav Schechter’s. I first met him, briefly, in the early 1980s, when I was a rebbe in a mesivta in Providence, Rhode Island and, by then having become a member of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, he visited the community. (That alone said much about him.)

He observed my shiur and even offered an observation about a perplexing Rashi to me afterward. 

I wouldn’t hear his voice again for two or three years, on that phone call.

Those of a certain age might recall a controversy I inadvertently stirred up with an article I wrote in the much-missed Jewish Observer in 1986. On the heels of an earlier JO piece I had written about the radical Reform proponent Abraham Geiger, the magazine’s editor, Rabbi Nissan Wolpin, a”h, asked me if I would undertake one about the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

I said I would happily do so, but, having done some reading about Mendelssohn, knew that, despite the sad fate of his children and disciples, he was no reformer. Rabbi Wolpin insisted that all he was asking for was an accurate portrayal of the man and whatever thoughts I might have to offer about him.

The resultant article, “The Enigma of Moses Mendelssohn,” described him accurately, as having lived an observant Jewish life, even as, professionally, he moved in decidedly unJewish circles. 

Although the JO’s respected editorial board, including Rav Joseph Elias, a”h, quite the expert on German Jewish history, had approved my article, it enraged some readers, who had coddled an image of the article’s subject as the “father of Reform.”  They felt that my suggestion that Mendelssohn’s inability to keep his students or progeny within the Jewish fold lay in something subtle, a lack of true respect for gedolim of his era, was a whitewashing.

The brouhaha grew so frenzied that the question of how the Jewish Observer should respond was discussed by the members of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. I was told that their ultimate decision – to have the JO express regret for having published the piece – was not favored by all the Moetzes’ members.

Far from the storm, in Providence, any bolts of lightning missed me, and I didn’t really feel its hailstones. But I was told that they were large and many. When I called the Agudah’s offices about something unrelated, the receptionist asked, under her breath, “How are you holding up?”

That’s when I realized that the storm had been upgraded to hurricane status. I was, understandably, not happy. I had, I thought, just reported facts and offered a theory. Some, though, felt I had attempted to rehabilitate a fiend.

When the JO’s apology for running my piece was published, Rabbi Wolpin called me and attempted to take the blame for the hubbub. But he had done nothing wrong. Neither he nor the members of the editorial board (nor I) had any reason to foresee the anger that had ensued. 

I was understandably disheartened, though, by the disowning of what I had worked on so long.

It was a Motzoei Shabbos when the phone rang. Caller ID wasn’t yet a thing and so I had no idea who was calling. I picked up and said “Gut voch.”

The voice on the other end said, “This is Schechter.”

“Moishy!” I exclaimed, delighted to hear from my old high school classmate in Baltimore’s Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim, or “T.A.”

“No. Aharon.”

It took me a few seconds to realize whom I was speaking with. But the realization eventually dawned.

“Rosh Yeshiva!” I corrected myself. “I’m so sorry. I thought it was someone else.”

“That’s okay,” he responded. And then he got to the crux of the call. “I just wanted to wish you a gut, gebenched voch. That’s all.”

To say that the call was a balm or chizuk at a difficult time would be an understatement. I don’t recall exactly what I stammered in response to the Rosh Yeshiva’s wish, but I imagine I expressed my hakaras hatov for the call. I certainly felt it.

The kerfuffle over the Mendelssohn piece, like all storms, subsided with time. And, ironically, Rabbi Moshe Sherer, a”h, later offered me a position at the Agudah (which I initially turned down – another story there – but eventually accepted).

I’ve been with the Agudah now for some 30 years. And one of the great perks of working for the organization has been the ability to greet and speak with members of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah when they have come to the office to meet.

Approximately two years ago, Rav Schechter attended one such meeting; it would turn out to be his last. He was already physically compromised, but his smile was unfaded, bright as ever. When I went over to greet him, he warmly shook my hand. 

And then he asked me if he could hold on to my arm as he made his way down the hall. I was sad that he needed support but couldn’t have been more honored. And that special memory of being able to be of some small assistance to the Rosh Yeshivah has joined the company of another special memory, of an unexpected phone call 35 years earlier.

© 2023 Ami Magazine

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I haven’t been to one for many years. No great loss – to either me or the party. But back in the George W. Bush years – Mr. Bush started the tradition – I was invited for some reason to two of the latkehfests.

I greatly appreciated being able to meet and mingle with Jews from other parts of the American Jewish community, an opportunity I don’t have as often as I wish. And it was a privilege for my wife and me to meet, if briefly, President and Mrs. Bush. I chose to use my moment in their company to offer them my birchas hedyot, thereby disappointing my then-13-year-old son, who had wanted me to request an executive order that the school week be reduced to three days.

True to its Jewish nature, the event was awash in food – all of it under strict hashgachah, produced in a kashered White House kitchen. It was hard to not contemplate the crazy swings of Jewish history.

The second year that I received an invitation, 2006, my wife opted to stay home. It was the third day of Chanukah. In my wife’s place, I took a dedicated supporter of the Agudah as my partner.

He asked if he could pose alone with the Bushes rather than have both of us in the photo. No problem, I said. I preferred the one with my wife from the previous year. When Mr. Bush motioned me to join in the photo, I explained my guest’s request and said I was fine being out of the frame. Ignoring protocol, he insisted on having two photos taken, one with my guest alone and another with both of us. I was impressed by his menschlichkeit.

The high point of my White House visit that year, though, had nothing to do with either the Presidential receiving line or the array of kosher victuals. Not even with the mingling with Jews outside my orbit.

No, the highlight of my trip to Washington that year took place before I even entered the White House. I was sitting on a bench outside the East Entrance, enjoying the unseasonably warm December day, watching the line of invitees form as they waited for security personnel to open the gates and begin the process of examining identifications and scanning bags.

Relaxing there in the descending darkness, I was overtaken with melancholy at being away from home for even that one night of Chanukah. I had made the necessary arrangements; the menorah in my home would be lit by my wife or one of our children. Still, I was troubled by being so far from them.

I’ve always been struck by the stark contrast between, on the one hand, the public pageantry and blinking lights with which most Americans celebrate their winter holiday and, on the other, the quiet, home-bound nature of Chanukah, with its tiny ethereal flames. And here I was, I lamented, about to join in a boisterous, bustling celebration – albeit of Chanukah – while the small points of fire created on my behalf would be flickering some 200 miles away, invisible to me.

My cellphone suddenly clamored for attention. Aroused from my gloomy reverie, I offered it my ear.

It was my wife. She and our children were about to light the menorah and thought I might want to be included, if at a distance, in hearing the brachos and post-lighting songs. A truer thought could not have been had.

And so unfolded the truly transcendent moment of my White House Chanukah, on a bench outside the grand Presidential residence. To any passerby, it would have looked like nothing more than a balding fellow with a graying beard, smiling broadly, eyes closed, animatedly singing into a phone.

The passerby would probably have dismissed me as a disturbed, if unusually well-dressed, individual. How could he have known that I had been, in both the word’s senses, transported?

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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I’ve always found people’s infatuation with money funny.

That’s not to say the stuff isn’t useful, or that a certain amount of it (increasingly more, of late) is required to live even a simple life. But I just can’t fathom why people with billions of dollars in assets spend their time – in many cases, all of their waking hours – trying to amass even more. What exactly can a fellow do with $10 billion that he can’t with a mere $5 billion? After all, one can only occupy one yacht or jet at a time, no?

My wife and I own some valuable assets, but if, chas v’shalom, a burglar rifled through our possessions, he wouldn’t likely find her diamond engagement ring (which she chooses not to wear – nothing personal, she assures me). It’s hidden in too clever a place (not telling). Or my gold chasunah watch (ditto).

And he’d surely overlook the really valuable things in our home. 

Like the piece of paper with the words “Rav Hecksher” written on it in Hebrew. That dates from my year – many years ago – in Yeshivas Kol Torah in Yerushalayim. Around Chanukah, we “chutzniks” were graduated from an “Ivrit Kal” shiur to one of two regular ones. I had come to know Rav Dovid Hecksher, zt”l, a true tzaddik, and desperately wanted to be in his shiur. The determinations were made by lottery, and, well, that paper is the lot I drew. 

The esrog box I use each year is another of my invaluable possessions. No, it isn’t silver. It’s cardboard, but with children’s colorful artwork adorning it. Those children are now grown with families of their own, b”H. But each Sukkos I’m reminded of when their hands were tiny. 

Then there’s the framed faded ticket hanging on our dining room wall. It was for admission to the Twin Towers, to the top of which my wife took three of our children on August 30, 2001. Some reminders are happy; others, grim. 

I also have a wonderful note from a boy who attended a California yeshiva where I was learning back in the late 1970s. He was quite an annoyance and we had a mutually antagonistic relationship. I owned a motorcycle back then – it was a convenient mode of transportation to the laundromat and such – and I spun out one day, fracturing my wrist and cutting my face a bit in the process.

The boy’s note, left on my dormitory desk, reads: “I’m so happy you’re okay.” It was sincere, and the boy and I got along swimmingly thereafter.

There are several personal notes from Rabbi Moshe Sherer, a”h, that I cherish. And, less cherished but valuable to me all the same, a napkin from a White House Chanukah party during Dubya’s presidency.

And scores of wonderful letters from talmidim and talmidos I taught in California and Rhode Island mosdos. And assorted kindergarten projects, now decades old, taped to walls in our home. 

My most recently acquired cherished possession has a “real” value of, at most, five cents.

It is a gift that was presented to me by a panhandler I often pass in lower Manhattan, where he sits on the sidewalk with a can. I have never offered him money – he knows that I know that he’s looking for tourists – but have always greeted him and wished him well. Usually, he spies me before I reach him and calls out loudly “Hi, rabbi!”

But a couple of months ago, he was standing by a table where knicknacks were for sale, and greeted me with a broad smile. “Hey, rabbi, I got a job!” he proudly informed me.

I congratulated him and shook his hand. Moving on, I heard him call out to me and turned around. There he was, having momentarily left his post, offering me a keychain depicting a yellow cab. 

It has a place of honor over my desk.

© 2022 Ami Magazine

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After disembarking from the SS Ernie Pyle, the transport ship that brought World War II refugees from Europe to the United States in the late 1940s, my father used the $75 dollars provided him by the social service Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to buy a pair of tefillin.

Those are the small black leather boxes containing verses from the Torah that observant Jewish men don on their arms and head daily. The pair he had with him, from his bar mitzvah in the shtetl, had not fared well over the war years.

Simcha Bunim Szafranowicz was in his early 20s when he arrived, and had spent the war years, first, as a young teen, fleeing the Nazis when they invaded his native Poland; and later, after being captured in Russian-controlled territory, banished along with a group of his fellow yeshiva friends and their teacher to a work camp in Siberia.

For many years, he didn’t speak about his wartime experiences to his three children, I being the middle one. When we became adults, we urged him to recount the experiences of his own young adulthood.

Once our father began to share his recollections, they came out in a torrent.

He told us about how, when the Nazis invaded Poland and his entire town fled the approaching troops, he, a 14-year-old, and his fellow shtetl-folk, were captured in a nearby town where they had sought refuge. The group of refugees was crowded and locked in a synagogue. Then, nearby houses were set aflame. The boy, like the others, expected to die there. 

But they were saved, at the last moment, incredibly, by a passing Nazi officer, who berated the soldiers who had acted without orders. My father and the others suspected the officer was Elijah the prophet in disguise. 

Shortly thereafter, he told us, the “stubborn boy,” as our father described his younger self, took leave of his parents – whom he would never see again – to board a train to a city with a yeshiva. He had always wanted to study in one.

But the yeshiva he managed to get to, in Vilna, Lithuania, was overtaken by the Russians, and its Polish students and faculty were given a choice: become Russian citizens or be banished, as foreign nationals, to a work camp in Siberia.

They chose the latter. After a weeks-long, packed cattle-car train journey to the far east of the continent, he and his fellow yeshiva boys and their teacher were put to work chopping down trees in temperatures that reached 40 degrees below zero. Once he became seriously ill there and almost died. 

After the war, he and the others made their way to the Soviet sector of Berlin, from which they were smuggled to the American section — during which dangerous trip my father was shot in the upper arm. He showed us the scar, which we had never noticed before.

The boys and their teacher re-established their yeshiva in an Austrian city called Salzburg, where they prayed and studied until they could find ways to leave the blood-soaked soil of Europe for faraway lands like Palestine or the U.S.

My father managed to contact a distant relative in America, who sponsored his immigration to the country he would come to cherish. He shortened his surname and met our mother, who had arrived from Poland herself but before the war. Their dates in New York consisted of riding the subway together, and his singing Hebrew and Yiddish songs – he had a keen sense of music and a sweet voice – for her. 

The couple moved to Baltimore and my father, with my mother’s tutoring him in English (which he mastered perfectly), eventually became the beloved rabbi of an Orthodox congregation that he ended up serving for more than a half century. To make ends meet, he attended the University of Baltimore and received a degree in accounting, which served him well as he juggled his synagogue duties, his family and his job as an auditor for the city.

There are stories galore I can tell about the impact he made as a rabbi on countless Jewish men and women, boys and girls. Not to mention about the veneration he came to receive from his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — and countless people who just happened to cross paths with him.

He was called to heaven six years ago, when he was 91.  As he breathed his last breaths in my brother’s home, where he had been living for a number of months, he mustered the energy to quietly ask the family members around him for something. It wasn’t clear what.

But my sister-in-law deciphered his request and told my brother, who took my father’s tefillin and placed them lovingly on our father’s arm and head.

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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That was because, after immigrating as a young child with her parents and maternal grandmother to Baltimore from a shtetl in Poland not long before World War II, within three years she lost her grandmother, her 20-year-old brother, who took suddenly ill and died while studying in a New York yeshiva, and then, shortly thereafter, her father, who perished, they said, of a broken heart. He was 48.

I never met my mother’s father, who served as a respected rabbi of a small Baltimore synagogue; I was born some 16 years after his death. But a photograph of him, dark-eyed, long-bearded and in rabbinic cap and garb, looks down at me from within a cherry-wood frame over the desk where I write.

After his death, his widow, a quiet, calm and determined woman, finding herself suddenly on her own, summoned the energy to open a small Jewish bookstore, and the strength to make it a small success.

My mother’s mother was successful, too, with the help of a Brooklyn rabbi, in finding a suitable husband for her daughter.

He was also a Polish immigrant, a yeshiva boy who had spent the war years in a Siberian work camp, courtesy of the Soviet Union. Essentially penniless, he courted my mother by quietly singing songs to her in his sweet voice as they rode the subways in New York where she had a secretarial job.

Like his bride’s father, he became the rabbi of a congregation, but in his case, happily, serving it for more than a half-century. My mother, though, was his partner in full, befriending and counselling the shul’s congregants, and running its youth program. My parents had three children, a girl and then two boys. I am the older boy, though I haven’t been a boy for more than 50 years.

My mother’s only other sibling, a brother, was studying in a Baltimore yeshiva when the U.S. entered World War II. He left the study hall to join the military and, after serving honorably in the South Pacific, returned to Baltimore and married. He and his wife, though, were childless.

And so it was my mother alone who was left to carry on her parents’ line.

I often marvel at how, throughout my youth, her young experience of repeated loss never registered on her face or in her demeanor.  It never occurred to me that she had had so wrenching a childhood; it was only long into my own adulthood that I heard her mention, en passant, her mistaken notion that shiva was just part of the Jewish year

It became obvious to me in adulthood that my mother didn’t want to burden her own children with the pain she had borne in her younger days. She was constantly upbeat, optimistic, nurturing and encouraging. Everything anyone could ask for in a mother. And it was real. She didn’t muffle the sadness of her youth; she overcame it.

Today, surveying a world so rife with anger at fate, so full of self-centered gripes about slights and harms, real or imagined, I regularly conjure the image of my mother. And the knowledge of what her youth was like, and how she transcended the personal tragedies she endured at a tender age, how she never allowed self-pity to embitter her, how her sights were only on joys of the present and hopes for the future, not on the hardships of the past.

And, as it happens, her hopes were realized. Although she died more than thirty years ago when she was only 65, she lived to see many grandchildren. And were she alive today, she could smile at triple-digit progeny, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of them living vibrant Jewish lives.

And I am quite sure that the very last thing she would be thinking about was her fourteenth year.

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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Letters emailed to Ami and me were strikingly strident. They included comments like “How can Ami write such a false liberal article?”; “I was horrified”; “First they came for the Truckers….”; “Omg. I just read this article. What a pack of lies!!!!!”; “I’m shocked Ami would post this without fact checking.  Shame on you!”; “Does Avi Shafran  work as Justin Trudeau’s press secretary?   Did he actually do any research or did he just copy paste from the msm news?”; “I have never experienced such straight out propaganda”; and “If the AMI [sic] cannot have the moral courage to remove Mr. Shafran from the pages then I will have no choice but to not bring it into my home.” (Talk about cancel culture.)

Accelerating Godwin’s Law, which only expects Nazi accusations to be the eventual yield of electronic discussions, one writer wasted no time in immediately raising the Third Reich: “Avi my friend, you are this generations [sic] Joseph Goebbels.”

Needless (I hope) to say, my article was entirely factual. Unlike a number of the letters, which made demonstrably false assertions (some of which will be debunked in a response to them planned for Ami’s next issue).

All that I had dared to reveal in my Ami piece was that there were people in the truckers protest movement (including the person who conceived it) with unsavory backgrounds; that a Nazi flag and Confederate flags had appeared over the weeks when truckers snarled downtown Ottawa; and that some protesters had engaged in rather ugly acts. I thought that such facts were worthy of readers’ consideration.

I conceded in the piece that “It isn’t hard, at least in theory, to summon some understanding of, if not quite sympathy for, the protesters, who don’t want to be made to vaccinate against their will.”

But, I continued, “it must be conceded, ‘freedom’ has morphed considerably from when it meant the desire of slaves to live normal lives or the goal of colonists to throw off the yoke of King George III to… the refusal to help stem the spread of a disease.”

That really riled up some people – vaccine skeptics, conspiracy theory adherents and one apparent racist, who took umbrage at my mention of slavery. 

I’ve written in public forums for many years, and have grown a thick skin. I am amused, not bothered, by verbal brickbats, especially when they are hurled by people who are clearly uninformed, filled with fury but short on facts.

But what does concern me, and deeply, is how part of the Orthodox world has not only become unhinged from reality, choosing to glom on to certain media and personalities to the exclusion of all others, but has also adopted the “outside world”’s enthusiastic embrace of outrage and acrimony over rational discussion. 

Anyone, of course, can disagree with me on anything, including my take on the protests. One can reasonably contend that the majority of the protesters were good people, that those who abused national monuments or called for violence against the government were outliers, that the right to protest a vaccine requirement for travel outweighs the effect of snarled traffic and noise.

But there is a civilized way, not to mention a Jewish way, to take issue with something.  And, distressingly, it seems that there are otherwise observant Jews who seem unable to digest that most important fact.

I offer no solutions to that unfortunate development. I just hope that more people, especially those infected with the vehemence virus, come to recognize it for the plague it is. That will be a vital first step to curing it.

© 2022 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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Pesach Sheni is a special day in my family, because in 1945, on that day of the Jewish calendar, my father-in-law, who passed away earlier this year, was liberated from Dachau by American soldiers.

You can read about his last days in the concentration camp, and about his family’s marking of that day each year, here.

(Photo is of my father-in-law and one of his orphan charges in France.)

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That, according to the Midrash Rabbah brought by Rashi (Beraishis 32:23). His reason for hiding Dinah, the Midrash notes, was because he feared that Esav would, upon seeing her, wish to marry her. And he didn’t want to take that chance.

But there’s a phrase in the Midrash, though, that is easily overlooked. Not only did he put his daughter in a box, he “locked her in.”

What that seems to indicate is that Yaakov knew that, as Chazal explain at the very beginning of the saga of Dinah’s abduction and rape by Shechem, she was a yatzanis, an “outgoing personality.” She was a naturally curious person. And so, prudently, her father locked her in, since he feared she might emerge during his meeting with Esav to witness the goings-on.

And, according to the Midrash, Yaakov is faulted for that, since, had Dinah in fact been seen by Esav and ended up marrying him, she might have been able to turn his life around and alter the enmity he held in his heart for Yaakov.

But wasn’t Yaakov right to do what he did?  

Apparently not. The question is why.

What occurs is that children have natural proclivities and tendencies.  There are times, to be sure, indeed many times, when a child has to receive “no” as an answer.

But squelching a child’s nature is not a good idea. It can easily backfire.  Ideal child rearing is channeling the child’s nature, not seeking to squelch it. (See Malbim on Chanoch lina’ar al pi darko (Mishlei 22:6).

My wife and I know a couple whose little boy seemed obsessed with airplanes, beyond the normal interest in such things of all little boys. The parents didn’t try to dissuade him from his desire, as he grew, to fly or work with planes, to force him, so to speak, into a box. They allowed him to express it, and the little boy is grown today, a yeshiva (and flight school) graduate who is a certified air traffic controller, and he’s raising a beautiful, Torah-centered family with his wife, our daughter.

© 2020 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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There are children, of course, who, because of home circumstances or other reasons, truly need a summer camp option, but here is a secret: Most kids don’t.

My intention is not, chalila, to dissuade any parents from sending their children to camp. Rather, it is to reassure those whose kids may not have camp options this summer that summer school-free weeks aren’t an obstacle but an opportunity.

It’s been a while – a very long one – since I was a child, and the world was very different in the 1960s from what it is today. But I never attended summer camp – by choice. I cherished my freedom and balked at regimentation, even of fun activities.

And yet, despite my spending childhood summers at home, they were wonderful times.

I studied Torah each day, both a little on my own and with an older chavrusa, a young talmid chochom who ended up becoming a stellar mesivta rebbe – a development I like to imagine was born of the considerable resources he was forced to summon to hold my attention.

But each day’s many hours also afforded me an abundance of other activities, unstructured and not always in a group setting, but no less enjoyable for their spontaneity or, at times, solitude.

One summer, on a lark, I taught myself (from a book) how to type, a skill that ended up coming in handy when I became a high school rebbe myself (and even more handy in my writing career). Yes, practice was tedious, but the daily progress was its own reward.

Another summer, I undertook origami, or Japanese paper-folding. Not so handy in the end – I don’t think I’ve ever been asked as an adult to fashion a paper swan or rabbit – but fun all the same. I collected and observed bees, and fired off model rockets I built from balsa-wood kits and painted. I took long bike rides and, in my teens, occasional part-time jobs. I mowed our lawn and hiked local trails. I played ball with other camp-shy or camp-deprived friends, read a lot, and then read some more. Some kids like science; some, history; some fiction. But all kids like something, and there are books on everything.

And unlike in my youth, today there is a wealth of reading material that meets every religious standard.

Did I learn as much Torah as I might have in a camp? Probably not. I didn’t visit any amusement parks or waterworks either, or attend any campfire kumsitzes. But somehow I survived those deprivations and emerged from each summer happy, refreshed, and, I think, grown a little as a person.

Although several of our children attended overnight summer camps one or two years here and there, my wife and I never considered the experience de rigeuer, or even necessarily in our kids’ best interest. That we generally couldn’t afford anything but, at most, neighborhood day camps made it easier to not feel a need to “keep up with the Katzenellenbogens.” We taught our children that expensive things are seldom important ones, and they accepted that truth – baruch Hashem, perpetuating it in their own families.

Not all parents can take the time in the summer to go on day trips with their children. But those who can should not discount how enjoyable and memorable even trips to local parks or scenic view spots can be. Nor do children lack for creative quarries to mine in their own figurative backyards (or literal ones). There are musical instruments to be mastered, artwork to be created, bugs to be unearthed, recipes to be tried (and created), clothing patterns to be cut and sewn, model cars and airplanes kits to be assembled and painted.

The complaint “I have nothing to do!” lovingly ignored, can yield all sorts of creative ideas, inventions mothered by necessity, on the part of the tragically bored. And, of course, chaburos, chavrusos and shiurim can, with a bit of effort, be arranged.

Yes, I know, today’s world is a very different one from the one I inhabited as a boy, even from the one in which our children, now adults with their own families, grew up. Children today confront unprecedented educational expectations, social norms, challenges, and dangers. I understand that the sort of long bike rides I took through unfamiliar neighborhoods in the 1960s would not be recommended for even a suburban ten-year-old today; and that a public library is no longer the generally healthy environment it once seemed to be.

And I know, too, that many ex-campers positively glow when reminiscing about their summer experiences. So the benefits of well-run camps can’t be overstated.

Still and all, and particularly if summer camp, for whatever reason, isn’t a viable option, we do ourselves and our young a favor by recognizing that camps are among the many once-luxuries that have somehow come to be seen as necessities.

For all their benefits, though, they aren’t. Summer, even without the “c” word following it, can be a time of wonder, fun and growth for a child.

© 2020 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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At least that’s how some mental health professionals might characterize it.

Among the boys in my neighborhood more than a half century ago was one who would today be called obsessive-compulsive, and another was firmly on the autism spectrum. Yet another seemed chronically depressed, and anxiety plagued another. Yet another would have been diagnosed as ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disordered, for anyone unfamiliar with the acronym) – had the diagnosis existed at the time.

I’m not exaggerating. The boys displayed classic symptoms of their respective “disorders.” But the rest of us kids somehow didn’t see the actions or moods or attitudes as emotional disorders, certainly not as mental illnesses, but only as quirks.

And the quirky kids were not medicated; they were integrated.

In fact, appreciated.

Yes, we were kids, occasionally mocking one another, and the quirky ones were occasional targets for joking. But so were the math prodigies, clumsy kids, sloppy kids or sports-obsessed ones. We all had our idiosyncrasies. But no one was treated meanly and everyone was accepted by everyone.

The memory of the “different” boys – all of whom, I suspect (and in some cases know), went on to live productive lives – came back to me when I read of the recent death of Dr. Bonnie Burstow, a Jewish psychotherapist and University of Toronto professor who was known as a major proponent of “anti-psychiatry.”

Conventional psychiatry holds that things like chemical imbalances, sometimes paired with social factors or traumas, are what lead to mental illnesses. Professor Burstow was famous for her claim that “There is not a single proof of a single chemical imbalance of a single so-called mental illness.”

“Do I believe people have anxiety?” she once challenged listeners. “Do I believe that people feel compulsions? Of course. But I believe these feelings are a normal human way of experiencing reality.”

Now, she targeted not only minor emotional or behavioral peculiarities but things like schizophrenia as well. That would seem to be an overreach. Anyone walking on a Manhattan sidewalk knows that there are people who are well beyond quirky, who are seriously mentally impaired and in need of treatment or, at least, supervision.

That said, though, Dr. Burstow’s view on the over-medicalization of emotional illness is a worthy spur to further thought.

Not every oddity of behavior is a sickness. Should our first reaction to a child with a facial tic be to create a “persistent minor spasm malady” and seek drug treatment? Should a kid who is disobedient and rebellious be labeled with a diagnosis of – oh, I don’t know – “oppositional defiant disorder”?

Oh, scratch that. The disorder actually exists, at least in the view of the ever-changing and usually expanding “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” or DSM.

That American Psychiatric Association publication is considered authoritative and is used by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, drug companies and lawyers. (And it’s not delusional to wonder whether those last two categories might have some less-than-humanistic stake in the over-medicalization of emotional challenges.)

Too often missing, as well, from our conception of mental or emotional illness, I think, is the fact that, when it comes to attitudes and behaviors, there are spectra.

There is, for instance, a paranoia spectrum, at one end of which sits a person who is convinced that the CIA has tapped his phones, bugged his home and implanted a computer chip in his brain. At the other, though, is a person with a nagging suspicion that a particular other person or people are ill-disposed toward him. The suspicion may be wrong and unreasonable, but that doesn’t render the uneasy fellow a mental invalid. What’s more, he may be right. As a character in a work of fiction once observed, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

And aren’t many, if not most, of us somewhat obsessive or compulsive, at least in certain areas? We may not wash our hands fifty times a day, but we might regularly, just as we’ve closed the door to our homes behind us, turn back and go in to make sure we hadn’t left the oven on. And even the regular hand-washer isn’t necessarily in need of treatment. (In fact, he likely doesn’t often catch colds.)

And between the poles on each spectrum are many gradations. As the Rambam at the beginning of Hilchos Dei’os explains, people are born with certain sets of “default” middos at or between two extremes: Constantly angry, or never moved to anger; excessively prideful or exceptionally humble; ruled by physical appetites or undesirous of even legitimate needs; very greedy or reluctant to pursue even what he lacks; miserly or very generous; jocular or depressed; cruel or softhearted, cowardly or rash… And there is an entire scale of notches between each set of extremes.

While the Rambam, famously, does employ a medical mashal to characterize “off-balance” middos, he considers them normative human states treatable by contemplation, consultation with wise people and willpower.

Again, to be sure, there are mental disorders that require intervention, perhaps even including the use of chemicals.

But we do no one a service by ignoring some realities: “Normal” encompasses much more than some may think; psychological states exist on spectra; and people’s natural middos can, sans drugs, be changed.

© 2020 Hamodia

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“Did you hear about Yankel the barber in Pinsk?”

“No,” Berel says haltingly, having picked up an ominous signal from the way the question had been asked.

“He’s not here anymore,” Shmerel says, using a Yiddish euphemism for someone recently deceased.

“Oy!” exclaims Berel, “You mean Yankel, with the huge round nose?”

Shmerel nods a sad yes.

“Yankel who has only one eye?” Again, a confirmation.

“Yankel with that big scar across his cheek and the pimples?!” Another sad nod.

“Ay, yai, yai,” moans Berel. “Azah sheineh Yid!” (“What a beautiful Jew!”)

The story came back to me at the Siyum HaShas. Let me explain.

When people, as so many did, came over to me in various places to congratulate me, a veteran Agudath Israel staff member for a quarter of a century, for the amazing event, I responded, entirely honestly, that my main role was standing out of the way of the many unbelievably dedicated and talented people who did the real work, like the Agudah’s executive staff, the young women who spent days and late nights taking orders and processing tickets, the devoted community askanim and technical facilitators.

(Actually, I do take credit for offering the idea, a year or so before the Siyum, of including chemical hand warmers in the swag bags. You’re welcome.)

I wasn’t even really at the Siyum, at least not as part of the crowd. My perch was in the press box, high above the gathering, a floor dedicated to members of the media, with whom I was charged to interact.

I answered many questions but mostly just steered representatives of the Fourth Estate to members of the tzibbur whom they could interview about Daf Yomi and the Siyum.

One of my few on-camera moments, as it happened, was responding to a German television crew’s question, born of recent events, about what the Siyum means in the context of all the recent anti-Semitic violence. I straightforwardly pointed out that Jews are long accustomed to hatred and adversaries, and are long trained in perseverance. I wonder how that played in Munich.

It was, though, when I watched several reporters intone into their microphones about how so many Jews “read a page of Talmud” daily that Shmerel and Berel appeared before my mind’s eye.

Because the joke about them, of course, is a pointed one. And its point is that we Jews see things differently from other people. To us, beauty is truly anything but skin deep.

And so, when we look at a true Daf Yomi talmid, we don’t see someone “reading a page” of a text. We see someone who, for 2711 days straight, has engaged not only with very complex material, but with holiness itself.

Where a reporter saw “reading,” we saw reverence.

Many journalists wanted to tie their stories about the Siyum into a narrative about the aforementioned violence against Jews we’ve endured of late. They saw “a flare up of anti-Semitism.”

Jewish eyes, though, saw the latest manifestation of “Esav sonei l’Yaakov,” the wages of galus and a message that we need to improve our avodas Hashem.

During a particularly poignant part of the Siyum program, tribute was paid to a man named Mendy Rosenberg, who, despite being severely limited by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), successfully undertook to complete a full Daf Yomi cycle despite a prognosis that didn’t allow him anywhere near the time needed, and, despite eventually having to communicate with his chavrusa through eye movements alone. Reporters saw a broken man doing the best he could. Jewish eyes saw an amazing hero, a gibor chayil and powerful role model for mesirus nefesh.

And when a group of Holocaust survivors were introduced to the approximately 90,000 people at MetLife Stadium and to countless others in myriad venues linked to the proceedings, the media saw the last human vestiges of a world that once was. Jewish eyes, though, saw superhuman connections to our mesorah, which they carried out with them to us from the furnace of Churban Europa.

When the camera was aimed at the Masmidei HaSiyum youngsters, who had participated in the Siyum by undertaking limudim of Gemara, Mishnayos or Chumash, the reporters saw lovable little boys. We saw nothing less than the Jewish future, a, be”H, bright one.

And, finally, when the observers from the outside saw, and dutifully reported on, the “record crowd” in the stadium – not only were the stands fairly full, but the playing field held many more people, including the Rabbanim on the dais, Daf Yomi Maggidei Shiur and many others – Jewish eyes saw, well, Klal Yisrael.

No, not all of it, but enough of it to perceive something else invisible to many observers: the vibrancy, dedication and passion of the collective Jewish neshamah.

Berel would understand.

© 2020 Hamodia

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Like those who don’t know how to disagree agreeably, and consider every holder of a different opinion to be a mortal enemy.

And drivers who don’t bother to signal before turning or changing lanes. Likewise, those who don’t know how to properly double-park. (You have to leave a car’s width plus a half-inch for others to pass.)

And, of course, phone marketers, “survey” takers and politicians who interrupt the dinnertime calm with chain-call messages. Ditto for worthy causes that do the same, and somehow think that shouting in Yiddish will make the recipients more receptive to their cause.

I also have a bimah-ful of gripes revolving around shul.

Talking during davening is wrong. Not just disturbing to others and not just impolite. Wrong. Ditto for literally throwing tzedakah literature in front of people trying to daven. Double-ditto for those who don’t bother to turn off their phones before entering a mikdash me’at, treating it more like a shuk me’at.

The Sdei Chemed (Maareches Beis Haknesses, 21) cites the Magen Avraham and Chasam Sofer to the effect that any behavior considered disrespectful in a society’s non-Jewish houses of worship becomes, as a result, forbidden in Jewish shuls.

Maybe there are churches or mosques where congregants “warm up” for services by discussing business or sports or the stock market.Or who take the opportunity of a pause to schmooze or share jokes. But I wonder.

I have never had aspirations to being a shul Rav. My esteemed and much-missed father, a”h, was one, and watching him over the half-century of his exemplary service to his kehillah disabused me of any desire to undertake the myriad responsibilities that he shouldered so well. Even were I qualified for such a role, I don’t think I would be able to live up to his example.

And it’s probably a brachah for the world that I chose a different path, first, as a mechanech; then, as an organizational representative and writer. Because were I responsible for a shul, I would be a terror.

Not only would davening be stopped at the slightest hint of a conversation, but I would disallow chazzanus at the amud. Spirited, heartfelt singing would be fine, even invited. But “performances” would be canceled mid-concert. The tefillos, sir, just the tefillos.

If a cellphone rang – or beeped or pinged or chirped or played a merry tune – in shul, its owner would be presented with a pre-printed notice advising him that a first offense had been noted and that a second one would result in the gabbai’s confiscation of the offending device and its smashing with the special hammer kept under the bimah for that purpose.

Oh, yes, I would be a fearsome clergyman.

What is more, I would lock the doors once davening began.

Yes, lock them, so that no one could enter.

Some people approach tefillah as something they are supposed to do, which, of course, they are. But without much thought to concentrating on the meaning of what they are saying. There’s a reason for the expression “to daven uhp” something – i.e. to just read it quickly and perfunctorily.

Others are determined to maintain kavanah for every word of tefillah. They are usually the ones who are still davening Shemoneh Esrei when chazaras hashatz is almost completed.

Then there are the rest of us, who are still working on trying to keep our minds focused on what we are saying. Unlike the accomplished group, we are all too easily disturbed in our efforts by latecomers who open and close doors, and plod around noisily.

And so, the doors would be locked. And mispallelim would learn that arriving on time is important.

And, finally, to offend anyone I haven’t yet alienated, I would abolish all candymen. I might be persuaded to permit them to quietly place a (preferably low-sugar) treat in front of a child who’s davening nicely. But to just play Pied Piper, attracting a crowd of kids with a bag of tooth-rotting, empty calorie-laden goodies… not on my watch!

I realize that my dream of a shul is someone else’s nightmare, that the world is probably best off for the fact that I didn’t try to become a shul Rav.

Probably…

Yes, I know the causes of my gripes aren’t likely to disappear.

But could people at least start signaling before changing lanes?

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That’s what my father, a”h, would say with a laugh if I complained over the phone about the frigid weather in Providence, where my family lived in the 1980s. And indeed it never was that cold. In the work camp east of Irkutsk where he and a small group of Novardok talmidim and their rebbe, Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, had been exiled by the Soviets, winter temperatures could reach minus-40 Celsius.

When I was transcribing the memoir I convinced my father to write, some ten years ago, I asked my wife to check what that would be in Fahrenheit, the system we in the U.S. use. I imagined it was somewhere around zero, when, after a few minutes, my ears, and even gloved fingers, lose all feeling.

After some research, she reported back: “That’s where both scales converge. Minus forty Celsius is minus forty Fahrenheit.”

I write as the edges of the polar vortex have chilled the air outside to single digits (as I set out for Shacharis this morning, the thermometer read zero), and 27 below was what my friends and nieces and nephews in Chicago were enduring.

As you read this, the weather will have warmed. But unless you live in Australia (where it was recently 99 degrees Fahrenheit), you will recall last week’s deep freeze with a shiver.

Arctic blasts always recall to me not only my father’s droll comment but the experience that qualified him to make it.

The ten young men – boys would better have described them; my father was all of 16 – and Rav Nekritz, his wife and their two daughters reached the work camp at the end of July, 1941. They thought the Siberian summer was insufferable, with its hordes of stinging gnats and mosquitoes (though my father, always seeing the good, remembered beautiful butterflies too). And, as the exiles felled trees and harvested potatoes and onions, the brown bears in the forest were also on their minds.

But when the first winter arrived, well before Rosh Hashanah, the new arrivals discovered what “Siberia” conjures in most minds.

When I picture the Jews whom the Soviets forced to work outdoors in horrific cold, I can never avoid thinking about what I was doing at 16 years of age, when my biggest challenges were things like being unprepared, through every fault of my own, for a bechinah or math test. The contrast is always, pun intended, chilling.

In keeping with the Novardok derech, the yeshiva bachurim would try to find a few minutes to spend isolated in a far corner of a field, or among the trees of the forest, to think about who they were, who they should be, and how best to journey from the one to the other.

My esteemed friend Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, who has written about Novardok and the Siberian chaburah, has recounted how a non-Jewish resident of the work camp once asked Rav Nekritz why he thought that a respected rabbi and teacher of Torah like him had been reduced to the life of manual labor in the Siberian wastelands.

His response was: “So you and your friends would see that there is a G-d in the world.”

Novardoker that he was, he then added, perhaps to himself as well: “And so that we, too, would see that there is a G-d in the world.” And indeed, Hashem protected the group; all its members survived the war to rebuild their lives and establish families.

Rav Nekritz also once shared a thought with the young exiles.

“The Amora Rav Yitzchak Nafcha,” he pointed out, “was a blacksmith, a lowly job.”

“When we picture a blacksmith,” he continued, “we imagine someone with grossly muscular arms and an unrefined soul. Yet Rav Yitzchak Nafcha was an illustrious chacham, possessed of no less holiness and refinement than any sage whose good fortune was to spend his days in the beis medrash…

“Yes, our situation here is very different from what it was in yeshivah. But we can strengthen ourselves so that our surroundings and labors do not negatively affect us. One can be a woodchopper and simultaneously develop an exalted, refined soul, as exalted and refined as that of anyone who spends his entire days in deep introspection. Hatchets and saws need not leave their marks on our neshamos.”

It’s a message not bound to any time and place. For those of us today who are no longer ensconced in yeshivah or seminary, it’s as important to hear as it was for the Novardokers in Siberia.

© 2019 Hamodia

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Cape Verde is a group of islands off the west coast of Africa that were uninhabited until discovered by Portuguese explorers in the 15^th century. Among the immigrants to the islands from Europe, historians contend, were Spanish and Portuguese Jews fleeing the Catholic Inquisitions in those lands. One of the islands’ towns is called Sinagoga, Portuguese for “synagogue,” and surnames of Jewish origin can still be found in the area.

In the early 19^th century, many Cape Verdeans found their way to the New World, and Providence is home to one of the oldest and largest Cape Verdean communities in the U.S.

I was reminded of my former neighbors’ purported practice when reading of a recent study published in the scientific journal Nature, examining the DNA of thousands of members of another population with roots in the Iberian Peninsula: Latin Americans.

The researchers sampled the DNA of 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardi Jews.

That degree of Jewish ancestry is more pronounced than that of people in Spain and Portugal today, indicating that a significant segment of the immigrants who settled the New World were descended from Jews.

It is no great surprise that so large a portion of a population that emigrated from Spain centuries ago have Jewish ancestry. It is estimated that when the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478, approximately one-fifth of the Spanish population, between 300,000-800,000 people, were Jews. By 1492, when the Alhambra Decree gave the choice between expulsion and conversion, the number had dwindled to 80,000. Most of the “missing” Jews had undergone superficial conversions and retained their Jewish identity and practices in secret. They are called “crypto-Jews,” conversos or anusim. Many of them, though, along with many other Spanish and Portuguese Jews who refused conversion, sailed away from the Iberian Peninsula to seek refuge on new shores.

There is no way, of course, to prove that those emigrants were the source of the apparent Jewish ancestry of so many Latin Americans today, but the genetic test results dovetail neatly with the historical record, indicating that a new population began to appear in Latin America around the time of the Inquisitions.

Bolstering the genetic connection is a 2011 study that found that several rare genetic diseases (including a cancer associated with the BRCA1 gene and a form of dwarfism) that appear in Jews also show up among Latin Americans. Albert Einstein College of Medicine geneticist Harry Ostrer, one of the study’s researchers, said, “It’s not just one disease… this isn’t a coincidence.”

The newer study’s results indicate that there may currently be over 150 million Latin Americans with a degree of Jewish ancestry.

Some Latinos who believe they have Jewish roots seek to reclaim a Jewish identity, even undergoing conversion ceremonies; some have even undergone halachic geirus. Others just take note, and pride, in their ostensible Jewish genealogical heritage. New Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose family comes from Puerto Rico, recently revealed that her family tradition includes some Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

Genetic studies, of course, have no halachic import. And not only because Jewishness depends on the maternal line. Even in analyses of mitochondrial DNA – which passes down only through females – genetic findings do not meet the halachic requirements for establishing Jewish identity.

Yet it’s intriguing to read stories of people across Latin America whose family tradition is to shun pork and light candles on Fridays and cover mirrors when mourning the deaths of relatives. And stories like the one I heard about some of Providence’s Cape Verdeans.

And depressing to think of all the Jewish families that were lost to Klal Yisrael over history to persecution and the resultant intermarriage and assimilation.

But the resurgence of interest – and pride – in even tenuous Jewish connections is heartening too.

For it recalls what the navi Zecharyah (8:23) predicts for the time of Moshiach: that “ten men from all the languages of the nations will take hold… of the tallis of a Jew, saying: ‘We will go with you, for we have heard that Hashem is with you’.”

© 2019 Hamodia

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But when we moved to New York 24 years ago, we visited the statue with our children. The visit yielded one of those “kids say the funniest things” quotes, one we invoke to this day.

We marched up the 150 or so steps of the double spiral staircase from the statue’s base to its crown. It was an increasingly claustrophobic experience, as the passage grew narrower with our ascent, but with each step I marveled at the fact that I was actually walking inside the gift from France and symbol of freedom across the globe, seeing it from an entirely new perspective.

Impressively, even the youngest member of our family, a bright and energetic then-three-year-old, managed to scamper up the steps with his little feet.

His memorable comment, delivered with puzzlement, when we reached the top: “Where’s the slide?”

If he was distressed by our laughter and explanation that, unlike the culmination of other climbs he had made, there was no slide here, he didn’t show it. And while he may have wondered about the point of it all, good soldier that he was (and is – today as a member of Rav Shimon Alster’s kollel in Cliffwood, New Jersey), he dutifully marched with us back down.

So “Where’s the slide?” has become the Shafran family’s version of the saying, attributed to cartoonist Allen Saunders, “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” Fixation on some end can obscure what one is experiencing now.

Yiddishkeit certainly focuses us on both the past and the future. As Jews we are enjoined to remember and try to emulate the Avos and Imahos, to recall Mattan Torah, the Beis Hamikdash and more. And we are ultimately enjoined to defer the impermanent indulgences of Olam Hazeh for the only meaningful and ultimate fulfillment of the future, Olam Haba. But none of that contradicts our need, at the same time, to recognize the import of the moment, the opportunity that the present alone provides.

We often find ourselves so focused on the slide that we don’t notice where we actually are, so absorbed in the later that we are oblivious to the now.

My wife and I try to get away for a day or two each summer in search of a waterfall we haven’t yet seen. Several years ago we hiked up a steep trail to experience Kaaterskill Falls, in upstate New York.

About 100 miles north of New York City, the falls have two tiers, with a combined height of 230 feet, higher than Niagara Falls. We didn’t know it at the time, but the falls have been the site of several fatalities, at least eight since 1992.

According to Rob Dawson, a state forest ranger, the last four people who died at Kaaterskill Falls were either taking or posing for pictures. They were focused, quite literally, on creating mementos of their having reached the falls – or, more likely of late, on transmitting images of themselves there to their friends and relatives on social media.

It’s understandable, of course, for a person to want a photograph of an achievement or event, and usually, baruch Hashem, the endeavor isn’t fatal. But reading of the tragedies reminded me of Saunders’ adage, and made me wonder if our obsession with documenting things hasn’t overly encroached on the wonder of actually experiencing them.

Think of all the time, effort and trouble that go into creating chasunah photos and videos. Leave aside how often most people really look at them after the first time. Just think of how much the recording of a simchah can deprive the principals and celebrants of enjoying the moment. (Please, professionals, no angry letters! I don’t mean to, chalilah, devalue your skill and work, only to spur thought.) And with the ubiquity of cellphone cameras, how much time people spend staring at little screens depicting joyous occasions rather than being parts of them.

There were no cellphone cameras when we navigated the Statue of Liberty’s innards; we hadn’t bothered bringing my Minolta. But even though we have no photos of the experience, and our little boy may have been disappointed by it, the trip to the crown, even sans slide, remains most memorable and vivid in my mind.

© 2018 Hamodia

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I wasn’t anything of the sort, of course, and my assumptions that none of the non-observant shul members would ever one day begin to keep Shabbos or undertake kashrus or study Torah were happily proven wrong. I underestimated the power of my father’s warmth and his standing on principle, and the respect that those things engendered in his congregants. And the ability of people to change.

But before I saw the power of an unabashed but warm presentation of Jewish right and wrong, I looked down at the shul members who expressed their Jewishness only on the “High Holidays” – “three day Jews,” some called them – and yahrtzeits, and I considered them to have missed the point of the Jewish mission. Judaism, after all, can’t be “compartmentalized” and “practiced” only in shul. It’s an all-encompassing, non-stop way of life.

Around the same time I stopped looking down my young nose, I started looking into my young heart, and realized that I, too, compartmentalized Yiddishkeit, living it fully at times and places but… less fully at other ones.

The truth is that it’s a problem many of us, young or old or in-between, regularly need to confront. We may live observant Orthodox lives, doing all the things expected of a frum Jew – eating only foods graced with the best hechsherim and wearing whatever de rigeuer head-covering our communities expect of us, avoid things that must be avoided – but may still, at least to some degree, in other environments or areas of our lives… compartmentalize. It’s a challenge to keep foremost in our consciousnesses that the Creator is as manifest on a July Tuesday in a traffic jam as He is in shul on Yom Hadin.

Compartmentalization explains how it is that an otherwise committed Orthodox Jew can, in his workplace, engage in questionable business practices, or mistreat a child or a spouse. Or, more mundanely but no less significantly, how he can cut others off on the road, speak rudely to another person, or blog irresponsibly.

It’s not, chas v’shalom, that such people don’t acknowledge Hashem’s presence or their responsibilities. It’s just that, while going through the daily grind, they don’t always include Him in their activities.

Even many of us who think of our Jewish mindfulness as healthy are also prone at times to compartmentalize our avodas Hashem. It’s painful to ponder, but do we all maintain the Hashem-awareness we (hopefully) attain in shul on a Shabbos at all times, wherever we may be? Do we always, wherever we may be, think of what it is we’re saying when we make a brachah (or even take care to pronounce every word clearly)? Do we stop to weigh our every daily action and interaction on the scales of Jewish propriety? Do our observances sometimes fade into mindless rote?

When it comes to compartmentalization, I suspect, there really isn’t any “us” and “them.” All of us occupy a point on a continuum here, some more keenly and constantly aware of the ever-present reality of the Divine, some less so.

Rosh Hashanah and the rest of Aseres Yemei Teshuvah are suffused with the concept of Malchiyus, or Kingship. The shofar, we are taught, is a coronation call, and we say Hamelech Hakadosh in our tefillos. We might well wonder: What has Kingship to do with teshuvah?

Consider: a king rules over his entire kingdom; little if anything escapes even a mortal monarch’s reach, and no subject dares take any action without royal approval. All the more so, infinite times over, in the case not of a king but a King.

And so, we might consider that kingship (or, at least, Kingship) is diametrical to compartmentalization, to the notion that the Monarch rules only here, not there; only then, not now. There are, ideally, no places and no times when Hakadosh Baruch Hu can be absent from our minds.

Rosh Hashanah is a yearly opportunity to internalize that thought, and to try to bring our lives more in line with it.

And, no less than some of those once-“three day Jews” did, to change our lives.

Ksivah vachasimah tovah.

© 2018 Hamodia

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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

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A Haredi Rabbi’s Rumination on Racism

Mr. Paskow*, now long gone, was a transplant to these shores, an Eastern-European-born Holocaust survivor, and, over the 1970s, he attended services at the small shul where my late father served as rabbi.  And, like many of his generation, Mr. Paskow harbored some deep, overt racial prejudices.

“Shvartzes,” Yiddish for “blacks,” is a term that – not unlike “Jews” in English – can be used as a simple descriptive identifier or as a pejorative, depending on context and how the word is spoken.  Likewise with the synonym tunkel, meaning “dark-skinned.” In my parents’ home, the terms were used only the way one might use any other noun or adjective to describe someone.

Someone like Lucille, our once-a-week African-American maid. I was taught to be respectful and appreciative of her; her blackness was a simple matter of fact.

I wish I had been old and savvy enough to ask Lucille about her own childhood and life. What did she know about her ancestry? Did she resent being a domestic? What were her aspirations for her children?

I’ll never know the answers, but what I do know is that she seemed content with her life, and became, at least on Sundays, part of our family. The most vivid memories I have of Lucille are of her greeting me warmly when I came home from yeshiva and of her sitting at the kitchen table being served lunch by my mother, who would then sit down across from her and schmooze (about what, unfortunately, memory fails).

When Lucille grew older and infirm, my parents “employed” her all the same for several years to do very light work. Mama would, as always, serve her lunch and pay her wages, as compensation, not charity. That lesson in kavod habriot, “honoring all people,” remains with me to this day.

Mr. Paskow, though, was of a different mind about blacks. He employed “shvartzes” often, and not as a term of endearment. It was 1969, and race riots in a number of cities the previous year provided the elderly shulgoer with ample fodder for his racial railings.

Waiting each day for Mincha services to begin, Mr. Paskow, often as not, would pontificate about political and social issues.

I was just a teenager, and held my peace.  I had experienced black anti-Semitism.  Like the boy who liked to yell “Heil Hitler!” at my father and me when we walked to the synagogue on the Sabbath, or the public school students who, having been invited by a group of us Jewboys to play a game of softball, lost interest in the ball when they were up to bat, and wielded the wood against us.

But I had also grown fond of my yeshiva’s black gym teacher, a consummate mensch and sportsmanship role model.  And I had also experienced the close friendship of a black neighbor a bit older than I.  I tried to see people as just people.  So I ignored Mr. Paskow’s ravings.

Until, one day, entirely en passant, he mentioned Lenny, a boy he had employed years earlier in his haberdashery, and whom the elderly man had effectively adopted, even paying, he said, for the kid’s college education. One of the other congregants asked Mr. Paskow whether Lenny was Jewish.  “No,” said the elderly man.  “He was a shvartze.”

Old bigoted Mr. Paskow’s protégé was black?  And he had given him a job for the asking?  And paid his college tuition? Who could have guessed?

I filed that oddity away in my head.

When my wife and I married and had children, we raised them to respect all people of whatever ethnicity. When we lived in Providence, Rhode Island, our daughters befriended a black neighborhood girl, Desiree, who was often a guest at our home.

Our children were also particularly fond of Dhanna, the caring black librarian, who was so nice and helpful to them.  Their artwork graced her desk.

And, in the early 1990s, I was privileged to write a biography of a local man of African and Native American ancestry whose determination to become a Jew inspired me.

None of that erased the hatred for Jews I had experienced from blacks. But I knew there’s no dearth of white haters either.

And there’s racism, moreover, among Jews as well. But Farrakhan and followers aside, I think that blacks and Jews have grown less wary of each other, and learned that “the other” isn’t really quite so “other.”  Blacks and haredim have increasingly interacted in politics, businesses and many professions.

In late April, the leading haredi newspaper Hamodia editorialized about the new “lynching museum” in Montgomery, Alabama, and asserted “the need for all Americans, even those of us whose forebears were far from American shores when African-Americans were killed and seen as subhuman, to ensure that the tragic history of American racial violence, too, is not forgotten.”

My thoughts cycle back to Mr. Paskow.  The co-existence of his apparent racism and real-life colorblindness, I suspect, meant that, although his attitude toward blacks was influenced by radicals and rioters, deep in his Jewish soul, he could see, beyond a nebulous group, an individual.

Racism, I fear, may be a fact of life, and its eradication an unattainable goal.

“Curing” racism would be a perfect thing, but, as so often, the perfect is the enemy of the good.  The good here to pursue is, rather than trying to disabuse people of the biases they may coddle, charging them to focus on individuals.

Let people joke and grouse as they wish about whites, blacks, Jews, Muslims or Mexicans, specious though some of the stereotypes may be.  It shouldn’t matter what people think about any group.

It doesn’t matter to me, a visibly Jewish Jew, if someone assumes I possess traits that anti-Semites attribute to my tribe.  I am, indeed, rather cliquish, preferring the company of my own people.  No apologies there.  But I’m neither wealthy, nor do I have business acumen.  And I can’t control my weight, much less the world.  All I ask is that others see me, whatever their beliefs about Jews, as an individual. Judge me as me.

It might seem radical to abandon the traditional assumption that fighting racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism requires hitting some reset button.  But what if there is no button, if looking for it is a fool’s errand?

Most Americans are not true bigots; they don’t hate anyone.  But we all have prejudices. Maybe the best we can, and should, do is accept that fact, but remind ourselves constantly that whatever we may think about a group of people, each of its members, in the end, is an individual.

Even Mr. Paskow was able to do that.

*Not his real name

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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

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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

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“You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” he said, about certain illegal immigrants. “These aren’t people, these are animals.”

The president was immediately assailed for what critics assumed was a crass dehumanization of foreigners. Stress on “immediately” and “assumed.”

Because had the critics taken the time to examine Mr. Trump’s comment in its context, they could have based what comments they had on facts, not assumptions.

But, no doubt recollecting some of presidential candidate Trump’s harsher campaign declarations about Mexicans, Muslims and others, some of those who see him as a danger to democracy didn’t look at what he actually said but, rather, chose to suppose.

“We are all G-d’s children,” scolded House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum declared that “Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot all called their opponents ‘parasites’ or ‘vermin’ or ‘animals’.  Dehumanization is what you do to unwanted social groups before killing them.”

The Trump-Hitler comparison became a meme of the moment in certain parts of the social media planet.

The president took delight in exposing the overreaction, since his “animals” comment was clearly made with reference to violent criminal elements, some of whom have committed unspeakable acts of murderous, cruel violence. Earlier at the event, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims had referred to the violent criminal gang MS-13. While the gang started in Los Angeles and includes many American citizens, its members are ethnic Central Americans, and the need to prevent suspected members from coming across our border illegally is a no-brainer.

But I still have an objection to the president’s characterization of violent criminals.

It’s unfair to animals.

My family has played host at various times to a goat, an iguana, assorted rodents and a tarantula.  (Witnessing the large spider’s shedding of its skin to emerge with a new, radiant one is an unforgettable experience.) I exult at watching the inhabitants of my aquarium (we recently welcomed new brood of baby guppies and mollies – mazel tov!), and the birds, squirrels and deer that pass our way are always appreciated.

I recently watched a carpenter bee excavate a perfect circle on the underside of the wooden maakeh on our deck, knowing that she will abruptly turn at a right angle to continue her tunnel horizontally, and create a tunneled-out bedroom for her progeny.

The wonders of the world Hashem created are ceaseless, and the amazing behaviors of the countless creatures He placed on earth, if viewed with honest eyes, must astound.

And each of those behaviors is ingrained in the species. To be sure, some are violent; Tennyson’s observation of nature’s being “red in tooth and claw” holds true. But animals who kill do so for food or survival, and act out of instinct, not as a result of choice.

Unlike humans, who can never be deemed innocent of horrific crimes on the claim that they were compelled by their nature. The specialness of the human lies in his ability to resist base inclinations, to use the astonishing gift we have been given: free will.

Calling a human who has made a choice to act cruelly or to wantonly maim or kill others an animal does an immense disservice to the animal kingdom, whose members do what they do because it is their immutable nature. And, worse, it subtly muddles the meaning of the outrage we should feel at human acts of violence or cruelty.

We live in times when some contend that there is no qualitative difference between an animal and a human being, that we are as hard-wired and predictable in our behavior as any lion, tarantula or carpenter bee. The upshot of that view is a world where there is no more meaning to right and wrong than there is to right and left.

That amoral philosophy stands in the starkest contrast to what the Torah teaches us: We are not animals but choosers, owners of our actions.

President Trump was riffing, of course, not philosophizing, at the recent public roundtable. And his point, no matter how one may feel about immigration policy, wasn’t to sow hatred for foreigners, much less to dehumanize any “unwanted social groups before killing them.”

He was just trying to express the depth of his contempt for people who have made the choice to profit from the torture and murder of others. The truest description of such people, though, isn’t “animals” but “choosers of evil,” something more heinous by far.

© 2018 Hamodia

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The first gig was dearer to me, since the members of my audience were people not set in their ways and thus open to my message, which was about what makes kids kids and grownups grownups. (The boys shared various ideas and I, mine: Awareness of Consequences – hey, it’s never too early to learn a new word.) But the class has a wonderful Rebbi and really didn’t need my own input.

By contrast, the audience at the second presentation, which was sponsored by the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies, included many middle-aged and older members, less open to changing their attitudes, which are largely and unfortunately detached from the Jewish mesorah. They were proud Jews, to be sure, but with an assortment of misguided notions of just what living Jewish really means.

And yet, from the sentiments conveyed by attendees who approached me after my participation in a panel discussion of whether there is a divide between American Jews and Israel, the presence of an unabashedly Orthodox participant in the day-long program was appreciated. And I am grateful to Professor Paul L. Scham, the institute’s executive director, for inviting my participation. Especially since other parts of the day included a strident speech by the president of the New Israel Fund and what struck me as an attempt to upholster the deck chairs on a theological Titanic by the head of the American Reform movement.

On the panel, I attempted some humor to convince the audience that underneath my black suit (and sefirah-overgrown beard) was a normal human being. Then I made a serious case, that a connection to authentic Judaism empowers dedication to the Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael – and that the demographics of the American Jewish community, which indicate a clear waning of non-Orthodox movements and a waxing of Orthodoxy, heralds a stronger pro-Israel future American Jewry.

And I took the opportunity to assert that the true preserver of the Jewish people, and the true ensurer of its integrity and unity is our mutual religious heritage.

In that context, I highlighted groups like Partners in Torah, and the way they non-judgmentally bond Jews through the study of traditional Jewish texts. I cited the example of my wife, who has for years studied weekly by phone with an intermarried Jewish woman in Arizona whom she has not yet met.

I knew I wouldn’t likely convince those present who were long invested in Reform or secular Jewish culture. But planting seeds, I learned from my years in chinuch, is always a worthy thing. Sometimes seedlings sprout down the line.

The best part of such conferences, though, is the opportunity they present to speak with Jews whom I would otherwise not likely ever meet. I cherish those chances to engage fellow Jews very different from me in friendly conversation. (And there’s always the amusement afforded by the reaction of the inevitable question about my college alma mater; when informed that I just managed to graduate high school and thereafter studied only in yeshivah, the questioner seems shocked that I speak English competently.)

The most memorable conversation I had at this particular conference was with a lady somewhat older than I and with a very serious demeanor who recounted an experience she had had over Pesach, on the street of a Florida city where she had spent the holiday.

She described how she went for a walk on the first day of Pesach, in clothing suited to the climate, and saw a man, whom she described as “a Satmar Chassid in a big fur hat,” coming toward her from the opposite direction.

“And I said to him,” she told me, “‘Gut yontiff.’”

My “justification mode” kicked right in and I prepared to explain to her how there are different norms in different communities, and that some Jewish men, out of tzenius concerns, don’t address women directly, and how, in other circumstances, surely, the gentleman would have acted differently…

But as my head was churning out the hasbarah, she continued her story, describing how the man stopped, smiled at her and – here she imitated the man’s motions – bowed to her three times, and heartily said “Gut Yom Tov! Gut Yom Tov! Gut Yom Tov!”

It was worth all the time and shlep and speeches just to hear that account.

© 2018 Hamodia

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We thereby became the proud caretakers, at various points, of a goat, an iguana and a tarantula. In addition to the tropical fish we’ve always kept, and the occasional hamster or mouse one or another of our children cared for.

I honestly appreciated each of the creatures; they evoked in me amazement over the variety and abilities of Hashem’s creations. Likewise, the birds and squirrels outside our dining room window during breakfast are an endless source of beauty (and, even sweeter, needn’t be fed). My wife is particularly partial to the graceful deer that sometimes venture from nearby woods to visit.

But animals are animals. Not, as some increasingly assert, beings less sentient than us but no less worthy of being treated as human.

The more than two thirds of American households that own pets spend more than $60 billion on their care each year, up sharply in recent years. People give dogs birthday presents and have their portraits taken by professional photographers. According to at least one study, many Americans grow more concerned when they see a dog in pain than when they see an adult human suffering.

That’s bad enough, but the law, too, is being enlisted to obscure the bright line between the animal and the human spheres.

Last year, the Illinois legislature passed a law that would force courts to give “parents” joint custody of pets in divorce cases. “It sort of starts treating your animal more like children,” says an unembarrassed Illinois State Senator Linda Holmes, the bill’s sponsor.

The nonprofit Nonhuman Rights Project promotes the idea that animals should be entitled to the right to not be unlawfully detained without a judge’s order. Habeas corpus for horses.

New York University law professor Richard Epstein sees the implications, and skeptically observes that “We kill millions of animals a day for food. If they have the right to bodily liberty, it’s basically a holocaust.”

Shades of the 2002 book that made precisely that case. It bears a truly obscene title: “Eternal Treblinka.”

And then there is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals founder and president Ingrid Newkirk’s declaration a few years back that “Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses,” and her infamous aphorism “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

We are required by halachah to protect animals from needless harm or unnecessary suffering when they are put to our service or killed for food. But that is a far bark from assigning them “rights.”

We who have been gifted with the Torah, as well as all people who are the product of societies influenced by Torah truths, have no problem distinguishing between animals and human beings.

But some secularists reason that, since animals have mental abilities, if limited ones, they should be treated like human infants.

If such people’s minds are open even a crack, though, they should be able to realize that considering animals qualitatively different from humans isn’t “speciesism” but a truth born of observable facts.

Yes, animals think and communicate. But conceiving or conveying abstract but important concepts like “right” and “wrong” and “responsibility” and “wantonness” – is something quintessentially, and pointedly, human.

Humans, moreover, have what philosophy calls moral agency, the ability to choose to act even against instinct.

And something else.

In a recent conversation with an eldercare professional, I pointed out something she had never considered.

Seen through a secular lens, biological species are “interested” only in preserving their own lives and those of their progeny; their behavior (consciously or not) serves the biological goal of the species’ perseverance. The previous generation has no value; it has served its purpose. Animals care only for their young, not for their parents.

Humans, though, at least in normal circumstances, feel an obligation to care for those to whom they owe their lives.

It will have to be seen whether or not such compelling distinctions will put brakes on the misguided idea of a smooth animal-human continuum. And, if it doesn’t, whether those who see animals as human (and vice versa, the inevitable other side of that counterfeit coin) will be able to enlist lawmakers in their goals.

More than we might imagine will hang on it.

© 2018 Hamodia

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I was part of a yeshivah in Northern California in the 1970s, and my wife and I spent our first five years of marriage there, in the lovely Tanteh Clara Valley (yes, it’s officially “Santa” but we renamed it). Temperate clime, brilliant blue skies, enchanting mountains off in the distance.

And earthquakes.

It’s hard to convey the helplessness one feels when the very ground beneath slowly shifts this way and that. During that first temblor, we were in our second-story apartment. Strange, I thought, looking out a window, how the framed vista seemed to move up and down repeatedly as the building gently swayed. In a few minutes it was all over, but the feeling of powerlessness remained, and its memory has stayed with me over the decades. There’s nowhere to escape to, after all, when the very earth under one’s feet is expressing discomfort.

We later moved into a rented house, and its back yard abutted a dry gully. Dry, at least, in the summer. In the winter, when the Bay Area weather turns rainy, it morphed into a raging river. I loved listening to its roar, audible even in the house.

Our private river at times seemed poised to overflow its banks and come rushing into our living room but, baruch Hashem, it never did.

I was reminded of it recently, when heavy rains in the south of the state followed terrible wildfires that destroyed ground-stabilizing vegetation. The resulting mudslides – even more horrific to contemplate than earthquakes – devastated the Santa Barbara County community of Montecito, killing at least 20 people. Aged 3 to 89, the victims were buried alive in their homes or carried away by the mud.

Then there were the recent disasters that seemed imminent, but blessedly weren’t.

Like the public alert in Hawaii warning that a ballistic missile was headed toward the islands. The alert, understandably, terrified the state’s residents, especially in the wake of the past months’ chest-thumping and nuclear button braggadocio in Washington and Pyongyang.

“This is not a drill,” the official message misinformed Hawaiians, sending people into closets and basements and prompting countless citizens to write heartfelt goodbye notes to their loved ones. No one died as a result, but one man suffered a heart attack, and a woman became violently ill from shock. Many others feared the worst for the 38 minutes it took for state authorities to retract the public notification.

And then, mere days later, Japan’s public broadcaster accidentally sent its own alert that North Korea had launched a missile its way and that citizens should take shelter.

That panic lasted only five minutes, at which point the station apologized for the false alarm.

But, of course, in August, 1945, even though two initial alerts were followed by “all clear” signals in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all was not clear, and 129,000 people were killed, and countless others poisoned by radiation. Nuclear attacks are not unthinkable today either, and contemporary nuclear weapons are vastly more destructive than those of 1945.

Confronted with disasters, actual or averted, should make us think. We readily recognize the dangers of everyday life, the “kol minei puraniyos” we reference in Tefillas Haderech, the she’im yipaseiach echad meihem of Asher Yatzar.

But a truly sensitive person doesn’t just acknowledge the dangers of travel or the menace of maladies. He takes nothing for granted. Nothing. Not the stability of the earth under his feet, nor the absence of mass destruction raining from the sky.

Jews worry. It’s a stereotype exploited by comedians, impolite pundits, and anti-Semites, but it contains a grain of truth. And it derives from a fundamental Jewish middah, hakaras hatov – in the phrase’s most literal, most fundamental, sense, “recognition of the good” – the good that Hashem bestows on us daily, indeed every hour, every minute, every second the earth stays still and the only clouds on the horizon are made of water droplets.

To be exquisitely makir tov to Hashem for all the brachos from which we constantly benefit requires us, on some level, to realize all that could go wrong. There are people, after all, who are jarred from their sleep by earthquakes or fires or mudslides, or who don’t wake up at all. Only a keen recognition of dire possibilities can lead us to fully appreciate what so many mindlessly take for granted.

Nothing, in truth, can be taken for granted.

And that realization should imbue us with hakaras hatov.

© 2018 Hamodia

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A scion of the Zhviller Chassidic dynasty, Rabbi Baruch Korff lay on his deathbed.

It was back in the 1970s that the erudite, eloquent Rabbi Korff worked without fanfare for Senator Hatch. To this day, the Mormon lawmaker, whose affinity for the Jewish people and Israel is legend, wears a “mezuzah” necklace given him, I believe, by Rabbi Korff.

Rabbi Korff was best known to the American public as “Nixon’s rabbi” – a title given him by President Richard Nixon himself, with whom Rabbi Korff developed a deep personal relationship. It is widely believed that the rabbi had an influence on Nixon’s strong support for Israel and on efforts to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.

When the Watergate scandal broke in 1973, Rabbi Korff staunchly defended Mr. Nixon, founding the National Citizens Committee for Fairness for the Presidency. He admitted that Nixon had “misused his power” and that Watergate was “wrong,” but felt that the president hadn’t committed any crime and deserved to remain in office.

But Rabbi Korff’s early years were even more remarkable, bordering on incredible.

In 1919, a pogrom was launched by Christian residents of his birthplace, the Ukrainian city of Novograd Volynsk. Jewish homes were ransacked and Jews killed where they were found. Five-year-old Baruch’s mother Gittel fled with him and three of his siblings.

The little boy watched in horror as a rioter ripped his mother’s earrings from her ears and then murdered her. Writing 75 years later, Rabbi Korff averred that he had branded himself a coward for being too frightened to protect his mother. “My life ever since,” he wrote, “has been a quest for redemption from that charge.”

The activist life he lived reflected that quest.

In 1926, the surviving family members immigrated to the United States but, after becoming bar mitzvah, Baruch journeyed to Poland, where he studied in yeshivos in Korets and then Warsaw. Upon his return to the U.S., he attended Yeshiva Rav Yitzchak Elchanan, where he received semichah.

During World War II, Rabbi Korff, who had become an adviser to the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada, and to the U.S. War Refugee Board, petitioned European dignitaries, U.S. congressmen and Supreme Court justices on behalf of Jews in Europe. He even held clandestine negotiations with representatives of Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler, ym”s, about the purchase of Jews from Germany.

One of his wilder exploits took place in 1947, when, working with the militant Lehi group (derisively called the Stern Gang), he plotted to set off bombs in London (placed and timed to prevent human casualties) in protest of British policy in Palestine, and to drop leaflets over the city from a plane.

The leaflets began: “TO THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND! To the people whose government proclaimed ‘Peace in our time’: This is a warning! Your government had dipped His Majesty’s Crown in Jewish blood and polished it with Arab oil…” The pilot he engaged in Paris, however, tipped off authorities and Rabbi Korff was arrested. After a 17-day hunger strike, he was released, and charges against him were dropped.

After the war ended, Rabbi Korff continued his work on behalf of fellow Jews, presenting a petition with more than 500,000 signatures to the U.S. government, urging that Hungarian Jews be permitted to enter Palestine.

Eventually, he served as a congregational rabbi in several New England cities, and as a chaplain for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. I met him in his retirement, when he employed me to edit one of several books he had written about his experiences.

During that final Providence visit, he lay in bed holding a morphine pump, but was still engaged with the few of us who had gathered to pay our respects. I remember him asking us to sing Adon Olam, and we obliged.

And I remember, too, a phone call he took from Eretz Yisrael, from someone clearly distraught at the rabbi’s dire situation. When the choleh hung up, he explained that the caller was a kollel man whom he had been helping support for a number of years.

So Senator Hatch’s announcement brought me to the brink of a thought that I often think, about how astounding were the lives of some who preceded us.

© 2018 Hamodia

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When I wished my brother and his wife “veiter simchos!” – “further happy occasions! – I wondered if I had inadvertently uttered a double entendre. It turns out I did. My wife and I just returned from Milwaukee, where another bris took place, as our daughter and son-in-law welcomed their new little boy to their family; he, too, is a Simcha Bunim.

I’ve been thinking, as you might imagine, about the name.

Firstly, what exactly is “Bunim”? My father always assumed that it derived from Binyamin, and there are sources that indeed assert that. But another possibility was suggested to me by a brother-in-law’s brother, Tzvi West, who thinks (very plausibly, to me) that, like many double names (e.g. Zev Wolf, Dov Ber, Aryeh Leib…), “Simcha Bunim” may be a vernacular translation added to a Hebrew one. Because, in French, bonhomme means “a good-natured man” or “a man of good cheer.”

If that theory is right, though, both names are uncannily descriptive of my father.

He was renowned for his ready, radiant smile, and over the more than sixty years he served as a shul Rav, countless congregants and strangers alike were greeted with his sever panim yafos. He was a reservoir of friendly, encouraging words for all who sought his counsel.

But simchah isn’t only an interpersonal ideal. We exist for avodas Hashem. And Dovid Hamelech reveals that our lifelong service be done with simchah – ivdu es Hashem bisimchah. Jewish joy occupies a very high plane indeed.

I don’t know if my father was able to embrace simchah as he fled as a young teen with his family from their Polish town before the invading Nazis in 1939, or when he saw his uncle shot dead before him, or when he and other Jews were locked in a shul that was set aflame (though I imagine he must have smiled when a German army officer – Eliyahu Hanavi, the Jews suspected – passed by and ordered the Jews released). Or if he attained moments of joy during the years he and his Novardok chaverim spent as the guests of the Soviets in a Siberian work camp. But knowing Norvardok’s stress on making the most of every moment of life, it’s entirely plausible.

What I know for fact, though, is how Simchas Torah was his Yom Tov. He rejoiced then with vigor that left anyone who witnessed it astonished. And how delighted he was during his long career to be able to provide a spiritual home for a congregation of Yidden of widely diverse backgrounds and levels of observance.

When my siblings and I were young, it didn’t occur to us that a Rav davening all the Yamim Noraim tefillos (and blowing the shofar) himself was unusual. When, eventually, he trained others to daven for the amud, he took great joy in that, too, and always happily encouraged the new baalei tefillah.

He also undertook the most menial tasks of maintaining a shul with joy. The shul had no shamash, only a rabbi who saw honor in every shul chore.

A congregant recounted seeing him in the shul perched on a 20-foot ladder, changing a light bulb.

“What are you doing?” the man asked him. My father looked down and, wondering at the question, said, “changing a bulb.”

“I know. But why are you doing it?”

“Because the old one burned out,” he explained patiently, with his characteristic smile.

Leaving a neighbor’s shivah house five or six years ago, I was stopped by a gentleman who said he recognized me from a recent chasunah we had both attended, of a relative of mine (the man had a connection to the other family). I confirmed I had indeed been there. He then he took out his phone and said “I have to show you a short video from that chasunah. This zaken was dancing so gracefully, like a young bachur!”

My suspicion of what might be coming was borne out. The video was of my father, well into his 80s at the time, being mesame’ach the chassan and kallah with vigor and joy.

At present, he has five little boy descendants who carry his name (and one little girl who was named Simcha). May they, and, be”H, veiter simchos, herald a new infusion of joy into our world.

© 2017 Hamodia

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An article I wrote about poverty and plenty in the Orthodox Jewish world appears in the Forward, and can be read here.

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As an 18-year-old studying in the   Yeshivah in 1972, I watched him at first from afar, then learned from him up-close. The depth of his knowledge, his eloquent, brilliant analyses of Shas sugyos, and of history and science, made a deep impression on me.

His intellect and erudition, though, were mere tools with which he was gifted. His essence was his dedication to Torah, to emes, and to his talmidim – indeed, to all Klal Yisrael.

When I think back on the many times I telephoned Rav Weinberg from wherever I was living at the time to ask him a question about halachah or machshavah, or for an eitzah, I am struck by something I gave little thought to at those times: He was always available. And, I came to discover, not only to me. So many others – among them accomplished talmidei chachamim, rabbanim, and askanim – had also enjoyed a talmid–Rebbi relationship with Rav Weinberg. In my youthful self-centeredness, I had imagined him as my Rebbi alone.

Nor did his ongoing interactions with his talmidim prevent him from travelling wherever his services were needed. A sought-after speaker and arbitrator for individuals and communities alike, he somehow found time and energy for it all.

In the early 1980s, Rav Weinberg was asked to temporarily take the helm of a small   Yeshivah in Northern California that had fallen on hard times. He agreed to leave his home and position in Baltimore and become interim Rosh Yeshivah.

My wife and I and our three daughters lived in the community; I taught in the   Yeshivah and served as principal of the local Jewish girls’ high school. And so I was fortunate to have ample opportunity to be meshamesh Rav Weinberg, and to witness much I will always remember.

Like the time the yeshivah placed Rav Weinberg in a rented house, along with the yeshivah’s cooks – a middle-aged couple, recently immigrated from the Soviet Union.

Though Northern California has a wonderful climate, its winters can be cool, and the house’s heating system wasn’t working. The yeshivah administrator made sure that extra blankets were in the house, and an electric heater was procured for Rav Weinberg. (The cooks, it was figured, had been toughened by a colder clime).

After a week or two of chilly, rainy weather, it was evident that the Rosh Yeshivah had caught a bad cold. Someone went to his room to check the heater. It wasn’t there.

It was in the cooks’ room. Confronted with the discovery, Rav Weinberg sheepishly admitted to having relocated the heater. He “thought they might be cold” he explained.

We bought another heater. And learned a lesson.

But the particular memory that was recently jogged in my mind was of the yeshivah’s janitor. A young black man, his surname was Barnett. And that’s how we referred to him. “Hey, Barnett, how’s it going?” “Yo, Barnett, can you take care of this mess?” “Barnett, you working tomorrow?”

Once, Rav Weinberg heard one of us call out to the worker. Fixing his eyes on us, the Rosh   Yeshivah said, quietly but firmly, “Mr. Barnett,” pointedly articulating the “Mr.”

What reminded me of that incident was a report about a commencement speech Supreme Court Justice John Roberts made at his son’s ninth-grade graduation from a prestigious New Hampshire school. He had much of worth to share with the boys, warning them, for instance, that their privileged lives will not insulate them from adversity, and suggesting that they take ten minutes a week to update and thank one of their former teachers with a written note (“Talk to an adult, let them tell you what a stamp is. You can put the stamp on the envelope”).

He also told them that, when they get to their new school, each of them should “walk up and introduce yourself to the person who is raking the leaves, shoveling the snow or emptying the trash. Learn their name and call them by their name during your time at the school.”

And so I was naturally reminded by that advice of Rav Weinberg’s “Barnett lesson” – that kvod haadam extends to every rung of the social ladder (and all the more so within Klal Yisrael’s social order!).

Then, suddenly, I realized that Rav Weinberg’ yahrtzeit, Shivah Asar B’Tammuz, was mere days away.

Yehi zichro baruch.

© Hamodia 2017

The post “Mr.” to Us appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

For a relatively young out-of-town high school rebbe /would-be writer having just made his first submission to the Jewish Observer, the flagship printed medium for the dissemination of Torah thought and perspectives, simply receiving an acceptance letter from the magazine was a wonderful surprise.

More wonderful still, though, was the warmth of the words in Rabbi Wolpin’s personal note, in which he expressed his appreciation for my offering and which was full of encouragement to keep writing. And over ensuing years, both before and after I joined the staff of Agudath Israel of America, each of the essays I wrote for the JO was acknowledged with new words of appreciation and encouragement from its editor. That was Rabbi Wolpin. He was rightly renowned as a top-notch writer and a top-notch editor. But he was a top-notch mensch, too, a top-notch nurturer, empathizer, partner and coach. And, although he was much my senior in both age and ability, he was a top-notch friend, too.

It was 1970 when Rabbi Wolpin assumed the editorship of the JO. Back then, as a high schooler myself in Baltimore’s “T.A.”, or Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim, I had a keen interest in hashkafah, and a literary bent. And so I read the Jewish Observer avidly and considered Rabbi Wolpin, whose keen insights and wonderful prose animated the magazine, an intellectual hero. So it’s no wonder that first acceptance note, years later, was, and remains, cherished to me.

As does the memory of the first time I met Rabbi Wolpin in person. It was in the mid-1980s and my wife and I decided to take a long-distance shopping trip from Providence to Brooklyn one Sunday with our two youngest children. I called Rabbi Wolpin to see if we might stop by his home to meet him, and he and his rebbetzin, tibadel l’chaim tovim, didn’t hesitate to answer in the affirmative.

I vividly recall how welcoming the Wolpins were to us when we arrived at their home. And I remember, too, how our two-year-old son, our first boy, ran around the room and repeatedly tossed off the yarmulke we had recently begun putting on his head. I was embarrassed by that behavior, even a little worried that it might herald more rebellious actions in the future. Rabbi Wolpin laughed and assured me that it was perfectly normal and that I had no reason to be concerned. I was greatly reassured. (The little boy is a respected talmid chacham and rosh chaburah in a large kollel today, with a family of his own – and he keeps his head properly covered.)

A decade after that visit, at the invitation of Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z”l, we moved to New York and I was privileged to joined the staff of Agudath Israel. A large part of that privilege was being able to work with Rabbi Sherer, of course, and with Rabbi Wolpin.

Whenever I had the opportunity to interact with him, the experience was rewarding. Whether it was on a professional level, regarding articles in the JO or interaction with various media, or on a personal level, like when one of us happened to pass by the office of the other and stopped in to ask a question or offer an observation, I was impressed anew each time by his incredible knowledge, savvy and insight.

And then, as I came to realize what Rabbi Wolpin’s position as the JO’s editor actually entailed, I was much more than impressed.

Soliciting manuscripts, fielding submissions (including the surely difficult task of sending rejection letters that were nevertheless kind and encouraging), analyzing and editing copy, interacting with writers and editorial board members – not to mention penning his own perspectives and well-wrought commentaries – were all part of his portfolio. And I don’t remember ever seeing his face show any of the pressures under which he labored. Always a smile, always a happy greeting, almost always a good pun or humorous observation. Just thinking of him now makes me smile as I write.

Above all, perhaps, his respect for talmidei chachamim was a life-lesson in itself. He was, it seemed to me, in almost constant contact with not only the respected Rabbanim on his editorial board but with members of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. He would consult them on “judgment call” issues and they would call him with concerns and guidance. And he was always appreciative, seeing himself as fortunate for the very fact of those interactions. He was a modest man, and, despite his important position in Klal Yisrael, kept as low a profile as he could manage. While he was a true and illustrious oseh, a “doer,” he saw himself more as a me’aseh, a facilitator of the work of others.

There can be little question that the world of intelligent, well-written and compelling Torah thoughts in English today derived directly from the toil of a Seattle-born, public school-attending melamed’s son, who was born in 1932 and, at 15, traveled to New York to study at Mesivta Torah Vodaath. There, the boy, who would become the Rabbi Nisson Wolpin the world of Torah would come to know and revere, absorbed the teachings and devotion to Klal Yisrael of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, zt”l, and became close to Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, zt”l and Rav Gedalia Schorr, zt”l. Several years later, he joined the yeshivah founded by Rav Simchah Wasserman, zt”l and then studies in Bais Medrash Elyon in Monsey.

After his, and the JO’s, retirement in 2008, Rabbi Wolpin effortlessly slipped back into the life of the beis medrash, which he had really never left. Two years later, he and, tbl”ct, Mrs. Wolpin moved to Eretz Yisrael.

Rabbi Wolpin’s nurturing (and skillful editing) of younger writers like my dear friend Yonasan Rosenblum and me, and his featuring of seasoned scribes like Rabbi Nosson Scherman, shlita, and Rabbi Moshe Eisemann, shlita, made the JO what it was – and in the case of the former group, helped us develop our critical thinking and writing skills.

Recently, I had the opportunity to leaf through scores of Jewish Observers. It was a bittersweet experience. I was enthralled anew at the quality of the writing, so much of it not only perceptive but prescient, and so much of it still timely even after the passage of many years. But I was anguished anew at the fact that the JO has long ceased publication. And, of course, well beyond that, anguished at the fact that Rav Wolpin, z”l, is no longer with us, at least not in person, here in this world.

Yehi zichro baruch.

© 2017 Hamodia

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In case you’re unfamiliar with the Colorado contretemps that birthed the above: A celebration of the Mexican cultural holiday of Cinco de Mayo at Roosevelt High School, in the Rocky Mountain state town of Johnstown, included an assault on the aforementioned POTUS, or President of The United States.

Well, the assault, while physical, wasn’t on Mr. Trump’s person but rather on his countenance, which graced a piñata, a papier-mâché figure traditionally filled with sweets, released by celebrants’ banging at the container with sticks until it breaks. Which it did here, leaving the president’s smiling, if deflated, image lying on the ground as the candies were liberated.

Whether the teacher who oversaw the celebration, who was quickly suspended, was guilty of any crime isn’t clear. The contention of some present that the other side of the piñata featured Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto certainly complicates any judgment.

The candy kerfuffle raises the issue of teachers’ conveying their personal political or social attitudes to their charges. That educators should not engage in overt politicking is entirely reasonable, of course; but entirely inevitable is that more subtle, and thereby more insidious, conveyances of their outlooks will take place.

I am reminded of my English class in 1970. Our teacher – I’ll call him Mr. Levin – was an unabashed liberal, an implacable foe of then-POTUS Richard Nixon, and a vociferous opponent of the Vietnam War, societal moral norms and all that stood in the way of what Mr. Levin considered progress. Teenage me, by contrast, was vocally contrarian whenever political or cultural matters came up in class readings, assignments and discussions; the teacher and I thus had many opportunities for what might politely be called dialectic. My grades in Mr. Levin’s class were not what I felt they deserved to be, but I attributed that to a persistent recurrence of the laziness with which I had been accurately diagnosed. I wondered, though, if there may have been more to my B’s and C’s than met the eyes.

And so, one day, when the members of the class were assigned to write a poem about any topic we chose, a devious idea dawned: I would write an entirely disingenuous anti-war sonnet, making no more of an effort than I ever did, just to see if it might affect my grade. I held my nose and did the deed. Sure enough, I received an A+, my first (and, I think, only) one. Mr. Levin even hailed my accomplishment in a glowing comment beneath the grade.

And people wonder why I can sometimes be cynical.

What I gleaned from that experience was the realization that grades sometimes reflect a grader’s biases rather than a gradee’s mastery of material or skill. And that teachers, being human, bring their personal attitudes and outlooks to their classrooms.

That truism escapes some public school parents, who delude themselves into thinking that their children’s minds are being filled with only facts and skills, not with the values of those into whose care they place their progeny. All classroom education, no matter the subject, involves a relationship between teacher and student. And so, the character and life-philosophy of a teacher is always – or always should be – an important consideration.

Including for those of us who entrust our children to Torah institutions. You won’t find anyone more dedicated than I to the view of secular education expressed by Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch. He rejected the valuation of secular studies as limited to their “practical utility,” an attitude, he maintained, that deprives young Jews from “the pure joy of acquiring knowledge for its own sake.” He asserted that secular learning can be “a road leading to the ultimate, more widespread dissemination of the truths of Judaism.”

But for that to be so, it must be transmitted by Jews who comprehend that purpose. If we dismiss “English,” the catch-all term for secular studies, as unimportant, and thus entrustable to teachers who have knowledge of facts but not the perspective for presenting them in a Torah context, we fail our children.

Creating a capable cadre of bnei Torah who can expertly teach writing, literature, science and history from an authentic Torah perspective requires the guidance of Gedolim. It is guidance, though, we do well to seek.

An edited version of this essay appears in Hamodia

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I don’t own stocks, but am familiar with that disclaimer, required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for ads peddling investment opportunities.

It’s cited here because I’m about to share some choices, borne out as wise ones, that my wife and I made over the past decade and a half of involvement in the shidduchim of our children, as of recently, b”H, all married.

Of course, we know that the bottom line wasn’t our wisdom, hence the SEC-style disclaimer. That we so delight in our children-in-law, all of whom we see as our own children, if shared with our wonderful mechutanim, is, in the end, the result of siyatta diShmaya. And part of our brachah  is who our children themselves are – which I attribute to the one of us who did most of the heavy lifting (literally and figuratively) in raising them. And both she and I have, as well, great zechus avos v’imahos.

So I can’t guarantee that doing what we did will yield the same results with which we’ve been blessed. I’m convinced, though, that those still “in the parashah” of shidduchim might find some of our choices to be worthy of consideration.

There are, of course, communities within Klal Yisrael that have formulated particular approaches to the various aspects of shidduchim. I don’t mean to speak to members of those communities, as they presumably follow the hadracha they have received. What follows here are simply the lessons gleaned by one pair of average parents, not authoritative pronouncements born of scientific analysis or nevuah.

We don’t run the show.

Although parents must make their proper hishtadlus in shidduchim, as in all things, we tried to avoid the trap of imagining that we can somehow know everything there is to know about a person or a family; or that we could, no matter the strength of our resolve and imagined wisdom, determine, or even imagine, the future. There are always myriad “unknown unknowns,” not only in the future but in the present. All one can, and must, do is try to do what is right. The ultimate success of any venture is always in Higher hands.

Corollary: Questions about any serious health issues are not improper. Questions about non-serious ones are. Ditto about the health histories of a prospective shidduch’s parents or grandparents.

Corollary: When it comes to researching a family’s reputation, dig, but don’t excavate. It’s a hishtadlus, not an FBI investigation.

Fretting is forbidden.

During “dry spells,” we didn’t engage in, or allow, handwringing. It serves no constructive purpose, and is in fact destructive in many ways. “Bishaah tovah” isn’t just a throwaway phrase, or even simply a brachah. It is a truth. There are auspicious times for things to happen, and we aren’t privy to knowing those times. And, as the chassidishe vort has it, all yiush (despair) is shelo midaas (without thought).

Look for the best match.

That is to say, not necessarily the most meyuchas young man or woman, the most high-community-status family, the wealthiest, or the one who is most like oneself… What is being sought is the best match for the person being matched. It’s a life-partner being looked for, after all, not a badge of honor, stock portfolio or carbon copy. When my wife and I had the luxury of choosing among several proposed possible shidduchim for one of our children, we always kept paramount in our minds that we were seeking the best complement for the particular son or daughter.

And never, after the fact of a successful shidduch, did we ever allow ourselves to think that “We could have done better.” There is no “better”; there is only what is right. And what’s right is better than better; it’s best.

Corollary: While a young person is wise to confide concerns to his or her parents, and the parents are wise to offer their feelings, the final judgment about continuing, discontinuing or becoming engaged must be the young person’s. And no pressure to make a particular decision should ever be brought to bear on him or her.

Corollary: Making a particular educational background or yeshiva gedolah (or type of one) a requirement for a young man is unwise. As is making cooking skills, appearance, or a particular vocation or income-potential a requirement for a young woman. Adjustments to “dream futures” can be – and usually are – made by married couples. All that really matter are the shared goals and the suitability of the individuals to each other.

Hint: Shidduchim suggested by siblings or friends of the single are particularly worth pursuing.

…And for the biggest mentch.

There are many maalos that may inhere in a young man or young woman being proposed as a shidduch. For men, it might be excellence in Torah-study or accomplishments in other realms; for women, it might be scholastic achievement or exemplary homemaker skills. The most important qualifying credential, in our experience, is mentchlichkeit. The personal character of a person, we believed and believe, stands well above and beyond all others on the roster of maalos. When “doing research” on a prospect, while we were certainly interested in accomplishments, reputations and skills, what really mattered to us were accounts of how the prospect interacted with others, and accounts of their personal good will and consideration of others. That might seem obvious, but it can’t be sufficiently stressed.

Parents of a young person seeking a spouse, and the young person, are not yeshivah administrators seeking a Rosh Yeshivah or a hotelier looking to hire a caterer. We’re talking marriage here – building a happy home and raising a Torah-centered family. Eyes must always be kept on the prize, and it’s not a sefer or a cooking award.

Hint: Ask someone who would know about how the prospective shidduch davens.

Corollary: Baalei teshuvah should be given the same consideration as anyone, if not greater.

Corollary: If asked for a photo, the ideal answer is a simple “no.”

Don’t promise what can’t be delivered.

While there are stories of parents who pledged financial assistance they simply didn’t have and who miraculously became beneficiaries of unforeseen windfalls, “ein somchin al hanes” is the operative principle in life. We considered it wrong to pretend or imply in any way that we had resources we did not. In fact, throughout our shidduch-making years, we were never in a position to pledge support – any support – to a potential marriage partner for our daughters (nor did we ever request support for our sons). Did that shrink the pool of prospects? Surely it did (at least in the case of daughters), but that wasn’t a bad thing. It narrowed down the “contenders,” making decisions less fraught.

As a result, our daughters married young men who either did not, to their credit, expect support, or who didn’t need it. Some of those chassanim, now all wonderful fathers, intended to learn for years, and did so. They and their wives were willing to live simply – in some cases very simply. Others pursued parnassah, either part-time or full-time. All, though, are bnei Torah who are koveia itim laTorah and dedicated to raising their own children to cherish Torah and Yiddishkeit. Does anything else really matter?

No “no”s after one meeting.

Unless a prospective partner is judged to be utterly, outlandishly, painfully “wrong” after a first meeting, a second one is always proper. Few people are zocheh to be able to perceive all that needs perceiving – or to project all that needs projecting – when meeting a stranger for the first time.

Chasunos are not marriages.

Chasunos last a few hours. Marriages, with determination and siyata diShmaya, last lifetimes. And there is zero correlation between, on the one hand, the number of hot dishes (or lack of them) at a reception, the number of courses at a seudah, the reputation of the photographer or the lavishness of a wedding hall and, on the other, the success of a marriage or the happiness of the couple. Even at the chasunah itself, the joy of the friends of the chassan and kallah and the others present, and the joining of two sets of parents in a shidduch are what beget the true simchah of the event. Nothing else makes any difference

The rule should be that when there is a choice, be it ring, gifts, hall, caterer, band, photographer, or any other element of an engagement and chasunah, the less expensive, more simple option should win out. It can’t be sufficiently stressed that Thoreau’s advice “simplify, simplify” could not be better placed than in the context of a chasunah.

I realize that bands, photographers and “high end” establishments all need to make their parnassos. But they’re not endangered; there will always be people who will dismiss the advice my wife and I offer here. If you’re smart, though, you won’t.

And may you have hatzlacha in all.

© 2017 Binah Magazine

The post What Worked for Us: Some Shidduch Advice appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

There are certainly reasons to question the order, which restricts immigration from seven countries, suspends refugee-admission for 120 days and bars all Syrian refugees indefinitely—and is, at this writing, halted by a federal court.

There are the humanitarian concerns that have been highlighted by much of the public and many media; and the fact that immigrants from problematic lands are already subject to very strict, multi-layered vetting procedures. And then there is the fact that no Americans have died as a result of terrorist acts in the U.S. by immigrants from any of the seven targeted nations.

What’s more, the blacklist doesn’t include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon – the countries that yielded the 9/11 attackers.

But the most disquieting concern about the executive order was raised by, among others, former CIA Director and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

“We’ve fed ISIS a major argument,” he contended, “that I think will help them in recruiting, and that increases the chances of a potential attack in this country.”

He went on to explain that Islamic State operatives and recruiters will seize upon the president’s targeting of some Muslim-majority countries to make the case that the West is at war with the religion of Islam rather than with the scourge of terrorism, a contention that was strongly rejected by President George W. Bush and President Obama.

That fear of the executive order playing into terrorist hands resonates strongly with many, as it did with me in the days after the order was signed. Ensuing events, though, led me to a very different place.

One doesn’t have to harbor particularly positive feelings about the mass protests that came in the wake of the executive order to recognize their impressive magnitude: Almost immediately after the order’s signing, 10,000 protesters gathered in Manhattan’s Battery Park, another 10,000 in Boston’s Copley Square, thousands more in front of the White House, and many hundreds in major airports and city spaces across the nation.  And protests persist to this writing.

I don’t like large noisy demonstrations, even in support of ideals like human rights. Mobs remind me of, well, other mobs, like those of the past and the present that were or are informed by things other than humanitarianism – things like animus for the West, for Israel, for Jews. They are ugly organisms, amalgams of evil individuals bound together by hatred. Even the innocuous roar of citizens protesting some insult to the environment or new regulation, a sound that occasionally rises 13 floors to my office in lower Manhattan, makes me shiver.

Maybe it’s in my genes, or the residue of some vicarious memory of what my father, hareni kapparas mishkavo, recounted to me about how the Jews in his Polish town in the 1930s had to stay inside and lock their doors as Pesach approached, when groups of marauding churchgoers, spurred by angry sermons they had heard, would move down the streets looking for Jews to attack.

Still and all, aside from the inevitable anarchists and rabble-rousers dedicated to nothing more than anarchy and rabble-rousing, many – I suspect most – of the protesters of the president’s order were people of sincere good will expressing sincere concern for other people, of other religions and nationalities, and for refugees fleeing persecution or war-torn lands.

What I came to realize was that the sight of such mass protests can’t have been entirely lost on the Muslim “street.” There might, in other words, be a silver lining to the immigration order kerfuffle in the vocal opposition (justified or not) it elicited from a broad swath of American citizens.

I imagine an Islamic State recruiter trying to convince a confused Arab or African teenager seeking some “higher” calling to join a terrorist cell targeting Americans. “Trump, that kufr!” Malevolent Mohammed rails at his charge. “He hates ‘the prophet,’ hates Islam!” But the boy has seen images (these days, even dusty desert villages are “on the grid”) of American citizens – the very people he is being urged to murder – standing up for Muslims. It’s got to at least confuse the kid.

Some readers (probably many) will see an overactive imagination here. But there have indeed been Muslim extremists who, exposed to unexpected Western good will, have turned their lives around. Is it irrational to hope that the reaction to the recent presidential order might serve to help others do the same?

Maybe only a few will be impressed, and there will always be bad people. But every ex-terrorist-wannabe counts.

© 2017 Hamodia

The post Fortunate Fallout? appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

The details of what prompted my banishment, while amusing, aren’t important. All you need to know is that someone had called out something while the rebbi’s eyes were in his sefer, and that it hadn’t been I. (Admittedly, on a number of occasions during my schooling I would have rightfully been accused of various violations of rules or decorum. That particular time, however, I happened to be innocent.).

Irate at the unfairness of it all, I marched to the office of the principal, Rabbi Joel Feldman, shlita, announced with righteous indignation that my punishment had been unjust, and declared that I had no intention of ever returning to that shiur. I was convinced, I declared, that the rebbi, while a fine man, had it in for me.

I was surprised by the principal’s reaction. He didn’t ask me to identify the criminal (and, honoring the high school omertà code, I would never have told him anyway), but simply said, “Well, I can’t send you to the lower shiur; you’d be bored. So I guess I’ll send you to Rabbi Rottenberg’s shiur.”

Rav Yosef Rottenberg, shlita (may he have a refuah shleimah), was Baltimore’s Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim’s “high shiur” rebbi at the time and its eventual Rosh Yeshivah. I was taken aback but readily accepted the offer.

That marked a turning point in my life. Although the shiur was somewhat over my head, I made some effort (for a change), and actually did some learning. Rabbi Rottenberg, a brilliant Torah-scholar and talmid of Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, truly became my rebbi. His broad knowledge of both Torah and worldly matters, not to mention his well-honed sense of humor, were inspiring. When I graduated, he recommended me to Yeshivas Kol Torah in Bayit Vegan, where I learned before returning to Baltimore and continuing my studies in Yeshivas Ner Yisrael.

I owe any hatzlachah I had thereafter to Rabbi Feldman, Rabbi Rottenberg… and Rebbi X (not his real initial), the one who ordered me out of shiur.

I don’t write those words facetiously. Hakaras hatov is due for any tov, intended as such or not. Why else, the baalei mussar ask, could Moshe Rabbeinu be “indebted” to the water or to the earth to the point where Aharon had to strike them to bring about the makkos of dam, tzefardeia and kinim? Inanimate objects can’t be objects of what we call “gratitude.” They can, though, be objects of hakaras hatov, “recognition of the good” – which is for our own benefit, not that of the objects.

And that requirement to recognize good exists even when the good is sourced in something negative. In last week’s parashah, Moshe is described by the daughters of Yisro as an “ish mitzri,” an “Egyptian man.” Midrash Tanchuma has it that the reference is to the “ish mitzri” Moshe had killed in Mitzrayim, whose death was the cause of his flight to Midyan. Moshe, in other words, in a sense, owed much to that Mitzri.

Many years after being kicked out of shiur, I myself, ironically, served as a rebbi and principal of a yeshivah, in an ‘out-of-town’ community. And one day, I found myself forced to leave – not just the classroom but the institution. A new overseer, working with a board of directors with a very different vision than I had of what the yeshivah should be, told me that he couldn’t guarantee my position for the following school year.

I was heartbroken to leave my beloved yeshivah and community. And more, to be forced to entertain something I had often said I would never do: move to New York. But Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z”l, had asked me to join Agudath Israel’s staff. Tearfully, my wife and I and our young family left our home of 11 years.

Fast-forward a few more years, after we had acclimated to our new location, and I to my new job, which I grew to deeply appreciate. One Shabbos in shul, I saw Rabbi Y. (not his real initial either), the overseer who was the cause of our exile. He was related to someone in the community and had come to visit.

First reaction: Oh, no! Not him!

But then, a deeper, more profound thought dawned: I owe this guy my new life. And I said to myself, as all feelings of hakaras hatov should ultimately impel us to say, “Baruch Hashem.”

© 2017 Hamodia

The post Perceiving the Good appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

I’m much older than that, and knew and loved him my entire life. But I only really knew him – his full life story – for three decades.

How, for instance, at the age of 14, Simcha Bunim Szafranowicz had insisted that his parents let him go to study in yeshivah – even though what would come to be known as World War II had begun mere weeks earlier, and the family was fleeing the Nazis.

How SS men who had caught up with his family and other refugees from their Polish town, Ruzhan, had killed his uncle in front of him and packed my father and hundreds of Jews into a shul, and set fire to neighboring homes. Preparing to die, the Jews were rescued by a regular German Army official who had passed by and ordered the Jews out. Eliyahu Hanavi, they suspected, in unprecedented disguise.

How the boy’s parents reluctantly gave him their brachah, and said goodbye to him for, it turned out, the last time.

That was the beginning of a journey that would take “Simcha Ruzhaner” to Siberia, and then America, where, as Rabbi Simcha Shafran, he would become a revered, beloved Rav.

He and his remarkable, beloved eishes chayil Puah had three children, my sister Rochel (Zoberman), brother Noach and me. Our dear father was niftar on 20 Kislev.

In the fall of 1939, the boy who would become our father, holding his tefillin and some apples his mother had given him, set out for the Novardoker yeshivah in Bialystok.

En route, he discovered that the Polish yeshivos had relocated to Vilna. In Bialystok, he heeded a voice in his head crying “Simcha! Get on the train!” to Vilna, and managed to pull himself onto the platform between two cars.

Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky, zt”l, famously organized the relocation of yeshivos in Vilna; Novardok settled in the “Gesher Hayarok” shul, and, at the end of 1939, relocated to Birzh, where the yeshivah functioned until the Soviets took over in 1941, and demanded that all refugees become Soviet citizens.

Refusing the offer, which the talmidim did, made them foreign nationals. Those without visas to other countries were put on cattle trains and, weeks later, arrived at a Siberian work camp, where they were ordered to fell trees, chop wood, and harvest and grind grain.

My father was the youngest of the chaburah that spent the rest of the war in the frozen taiga, along with their rebbi, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Nekritz.

When working, the bachurim would review Gemara or recite Tehillim. When not, they studied the few sefarim they had with them – with a chessboard, mid-game, in front of them, in case their anti-religious overseer should stop by.

The exiles used an assortment of tricks to avoid working on Shabbos, and tried to observe Yamim Tovim, clandestinely baking matzos and using a kosher sukkah in the middle of the night.

In 1944, the group was transferred westward, and eventually smuggled into Berlin’s American zone. My father had a bullet wound scar on his arm from when a bribed guard betrayed them.

The refugees organized a yeshivah in Salzheim, near Frankfurt, and resumed their Torah studies. In June, 1947, after establishing contact with a relative in the U.S. willing to sponsor him, my father arrived at Ellis Island and joined other refugees in the reestablished Novardoker yeshivah, Beis Yosef, in Brooklyn.

With the $75 given him by a Jewish social service organization he bought a new pair of tefillin, his old ones having been weathered by Siberia. (He later discovered that his new parshios had been written by his second cousin and namesake, Simcha Bunim Szafranowicz, the Gerrer Rebbe’s personal sofer.)

Another immigrant, Rabbi Yaakov Krett, suggested a shidduch for my father, the daughter of Rav Noach Kahn, a respected Rav in Baltimore, a musmach of Rav Boruch Ber Leibovitz. The young couple had Yiddish in common, and my father, impoverished but resolute, courted my mother by taking walks with her and singing Novardoker niggunim; soon they married.

The couple moved to Baltimore and my father taught at Yeshivahs Chofetz Chaim (“Talmudical Academy”) before becoming the rov of a small shul, Adath Yeshurun – Shadover Shul.

He delivered drashos in Yiddish until more non-Yiddish-speakers joined the shul, and my mother helped him translate his speeches into English. She was a full partner in both his life and the shul, cooking for kiddushim, conducting groups for children on Shabbos afternoons, and much more.

‘Kiruv’ wasn’t a catchword back then, but that was what my parents were doing, and they raised the commitment to Yiddishkeit of untold numbers of people then and for the rest of their lives.

The shul paid little and somehow, even with the counseling, chasunos and hospital visits, my father found the time to attend night school to study accounting. In addition to his rabbinic responsibilities, he became an auditor for the city of Baltimore. He took his obligations seriously and his co-workers were impressed by his integrity. They said they could set their watches by when he left for lunch break (when he would take walks to keep in good health) and when he returned to his desk.

In the 1970s, a minyan near his office in downtown Baltimore wouldn’t hew to my father’s polite request of a mechitza to accommodate a woman who attended davening, so he started a second minyan. Someone who was there at the time recounts that my father was “the rav, the gabbai, the posek, and often the shliach tzibur” as well as “a role model for how a frum person should conduct himself… [and] interact with all of one’s diverse co-workers, creating a true kiddush HaShem. [He] foster[ed] respect towards Jewish people from everyone he encountered.” Days after his petirah, the minyan, which continues to this day, was formally named “The Rabbi Simcha Shafran Downtown Mincha Minyan.”

Throughout his more than 60 years as a Rav, my father made deep impressions on young and old, seekers and scoffers, intellectual and spiritual sorts alike. There wasn’t any trick. With his radiant smile, he just presented himself, and Torah, honestly, without pretensions. Someone once remarked that he had always assumed that, to be a successful Rav in America, a man had to be tall and sophisticated, speak the Queen’s English and hold himself aloof – until he met my father.

When, after more than 40 years of marriage, my mother was nifteres, in 1989, my father was devastated. But the inner strength that saw him through so much emerged with time and he resumed his life with vigor, even marrying again. His second wife, the former Ethel Bagry (Mendlowitz), was beloved to my wife and me, and everything a Bubby could be to our children. My father and “Bobby Ethel” exulted in each other’s families’ simchos for 20 years, and my father cared for her, as he did for my mother, during her final illness.

The neighborhood where my father’s shul existed for many years changed and so, in his 80s, he moved to the Greenspring area of Baltimore County. He built a beis medrash in his new home’s basement, and established a Shabbos minyan. A dedicated group of mispallelim considered it their shul; and my father, their life guide.

He learned and taught Torah, and served as the mazkir of the Baltimore Bais Din. His “vacations” were trips to celebrate the simchos of his children, grandchildren and step-progeny.

He would also yearly address a Ner Yisroel high school Holocaust Studies class (taught by my brother, a rebbi), sharing his wartime experiences with that, and other, rapt audiences.

He walked three miles daily, well into his upper 80s. Only a brain tumor slowed him down. When it became necessary for him to have 24-hour care, he moved in with my brother and his eishes chayil Shalvah, both of whom were deeply dedicated to him. Two days before his petirah, my father was able, with Baltimore Hatzalah’s help, to attend the chasunah of one of their daughters. He gave and received brachos from many of the hundreds in attendance, gave the kallah a special brachah before the chuppah, and one to the new couple afterward.

The morning of his petirah, he made a final request. It wasn’t clear what he sought but his daughter-in-law thought she heard him say “tefillin.” When she asked him if that was what he wanted, he nodded yes, and my brother put tefillin on him. Shortly thereafter, Hakodosh Baruch Hu welcomed my father to his eternal reward.

The final day of shivah, a baby boy was born to my and my wife’s son Mordechai and his eishes chayil Leah Gittel. At the bris, a new Simcha Bunim Shafran was introduced to the world.

Zeh hakatan gadol yihyeh. May he prove a worthy bearer of his name.

(Rabbi Simcha Shafran’s memoir, “Fire, Ice, Air: A Polish Jew’s Memoir of Yeshivah, Siberia, America,” is available from Amazon.)

 © Hamodia 2017

The post Rabbi Simcha Shafran, zt”l: A Sheloshim Reflection on His Life appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was 14, he found himself, along with his family and others from the small Polish shtetl of Ruzhan, fleeing the Nazi invaders with only what they could carry on their backs. Soon enough, the refugees were apprehended and locked in a shul, with a neighboring home set ablaze and the flames growing closer. The din, he recalled, was deafening. People were shouting out the Shema with all their might, crying bitterly, saying Viduy. Then they were suddenly, miraculously saved before the flames reached the shul, by, they suspected, Eliyahu Hanavi, in the guise of a high-ranking German officer.

Then, in a miracle of will, the boy decided to leave his parents to journey to Bialystok, to join the Novardoker yeshivah, a dream he had been promised, before the war, he would be able to fulfill.

The yeshivah, though, wasn’t there anymore, and so the boy jumped onto a train to Vilna, where many Polish yeshivos had relocated. Lithuania was still independent.

It wasn’t long, though, before the Soviets took over, and he and his chaverim and rebbe were sent to Siberia, where they spent the war years, enduring long 40 degrees below zero winters.

He once came close to death there. One of the other young men even trudged for kilometers through the snow on a mission, the trudger thought, to bury the boy, who was rumored to have succumbed.

At war’s end, the group made its way to Germany, were smuggled into Berlin’s American sector and set up a yeshivah in a town called Salzheim. Eventually, the boy, now a young man, was able to sail to America, where he married a respected Baltimore Rav’s daughter, who taught him English and helped him pursue his career, first as a rebbe in Baltimore’sYeshivas Chofetz Chaim and then as a shul Rav, a position he held for some 60 years. They had three children.

He was my father, hareni kapporas mishkavo. And his actual kevurah did not happen until more than 70 years had passed since that day his friend expected to inter him. It took place just before the start of Chanukah.

For all who knew and loved my father – and it is a very large group – his petirah was a wrenching personal loss. But it represented a tragedy for Klal Yisrael, too, and not just in the sense that an oved Hashem and marbitz Torah left this world.

It was a national tragedy for another reason, too, because, among all the many men and women whose lives my father touched and who came to the shivah house or called or emailed their nechamos – a group that included an astonishingly diverse spectrum of Yidden, from talmidei chachamim to the not-yet-frum – not a single one was from my father’s European chevrah.

That dearth, of course, was not unexpected. But it was an unhappy reminder, all the same, that the generation that witnessed the Jewish Europe that once was, and the horror and hashgacha of the Holocaust years, the generation that was our living link to that place and those days, is ebbing.

The only member, in fact, of my father’s Novardok chaburah in Siberia still alive is Reb Herschel Nudel, may he have a refuah shleimah, the man who endured that long, frigid walk to “bury” my father so many decades ago. Considering his astounding chessed, his arichas yamim, isn’t surprising.

And yet, the scene at my father’s levayah that most vividly remains with me was when the announcement was made that grandsons and great-grandsons of the niftar should come forward to carry the aron to begin its journey to the beis olam, where my mother, grandmother, uncles and aunts, my Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Yaakov Yitzchak Ruderman, and my rebbe, Rav Yaakov Weinberg, zecher kulam livrachah, all lie, awaiting techiyas hameisim.

Those summoned came forth, but it took a while before the aron could be lifted. Not that it was heavy. My father wasn’t a physically large man. But it was a challenge for the many young men, all yirei Shamayim, who had heeded the call to find an empty spot to put their hands.

It was an aron, not a shulchan. But the words “Banecha kish’silei zeisim saviv lishulchanecha,” “Your sons, like olive shoots, all around your table” (Tehillim 128:3), even at that agonizing moment, rang like a melodic bell in my mind.

© Hamodia 2017

The post Loss and Legacy appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

I don’t doubt that some of the scrawled swastikas are just what they seem to be. All it takes, after all, to create one is a hateful mind and a broad-tipped marker, neither of which is usually in terribly short supply.

But no one can really even know whether a graffito in fact reflects the writer’s sentiments or was cynically intended to incite others. And, as to the accounts of intimidation by alleged pro-Trump hoodlums, many lack any corroboration or evidence.

Like the claim of an unnamed black girl on a city bus in Queens, that, the day after the election, several white girls from St. Francis Prep, a local Catholic high school, told her that, now that “Trump is president,” she belonged “in the back of the bus.”

A local newspaper called it a “shocking echo of the Jim Crow South.”

When asked for details that might help apprehend the harassers, though, the alleged victim declined to cooperate.

Then there was the University of Louisiana student who, that same week, told of how two white men, one wearing a Trump hat, stole her wallet and hijab. Confronted with contrary evidence, however, she admitted fabricating her tale.

Many of the recently reported episodes of hate crimes are vague, involve unidentified culprits and are unsupported by witnesses. Often the police aren’t even called, and often when they are, the stories don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Sometimes the alleged victim is even the perpetrator. Kean University student Kayla McKelvey pleaded guilty this past summer for having fabricated threats against black students like herself, sowing panic over the campus.

What has Rabbi Sherer to do with all this?

Well, my first encounter with the man who later hired and mentored me as Agudath Israel’s spokesperson, was an unexpected phone call.

It was the mid-1980s, and I was a high school rebbe in Providence, Rhode Island. Occasionally, though, I wrote opinion pieces, for the Providence Journal and various Jewish weeklies.

One piece I penned was about bus stop burnings that had been taking place in religious neighborhoods in Yerushalayim. Advertisements on the shelters in religious neighborhoods displayed images that offended the sensibilities of the local residents. Scores of the offensive-ad shelters were vandalized or torched; and, on the other side of the societal divide, a group formed that pledged to burn a shul for every burned bus stop shelter. It was not a pretty time.

My article was an attempt to convey the motivation of the bus-stop burners, wrong though their actions were. Imagine, I suggested, a society where hard, addictive drugs were legal, freely marketed and advertised. And a billboard touting the drugs’ wonderful qualities was erected just outside a school. Most people might never think of defacing or destroying the ad, but would probably understand the feelings of someone who did take things into his own hands. For a chareidi Jew, I wrote, gross immodesty in advertising in his neighborhood is no less dangerous, in a spiritual sense, and no less deplorable.

Rabbi Sherer had somehow seen the article and he called to tell me how cogent and well-written he had found it. But, he added – and the “but,” I realized, was the main point of his call – “my dear Avi, you should never assume that the culprits were religious Jews. Never concede an unproven assertion.”

I was taken aback, since hotheads exist everywhere. But I thanked my esteemed caller greatly for both his kind words and his critical ones. I wasn’t convinced, though, that my assumption had really been unreasonable.

To my surprise, though, several weeks later, a group of non-religious youths were arrested for setting a bus stop aflame, in an effort to increase ill will against the religious community. How many of the burnings the members of the group, or others like them, may have perpetrated was and remains unknown. But Rabbi Sherer had proven himself (and not for the first or last time) a wise man.

To be sure, there may be, and probably are, haters out there who are harassing citizens they don’t like, or putting their lack of artistic talent and good will on public display. Their actions rightly evoke our outrage.

But it’s important to remember, even amid outrage, that accusations are easily made, but assumptions shouldn’t be.

© Hamodia 2016

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“No,” he insisted. “A mensch shtarbt.  A ferd paigert.”  He was right, of course.  The Yiddish verb for “died” is different for a human and for an animal.

New York, I remember thinking, is an interesting place.

I never found out how my interlocutor knew Yiddish so well, but, over the ensuing years, I have met many, if less interesting, seekers of alms.

When I first began working in “the city,” as an out-of-towner unaccustomed to street beggars, I made a point of giving a coin or two to each of the bedraggled people on my route who shook a cup of coins or asked passers-by for a donation.  Chazal, after all, teach us to provide charity to all (Gittin 61a).

Rightly or wrongly, though, I eventually came to stop that practice.  There were the times when, after my small donation to an indigent person, I was besieged by theretofore hidden others who, having witnessed my largess, suddenly and magically appeared to stake their own claims. I would have had to carry a bag of quarters each day.

And I came to realize, too, that there are an abundance of agencies and charities that provide food and shelter for the homeless.  I wondered what “extras” the coins and bills in the cups would end up purchasing.  Candy bars?  Cigarettes?  Drugs?

And so, for better or worse, I joined the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers, who go about their business without acknowledging the sound of shaken change or the repeated mantras of “got any spare change?”  But I felt (and feel) bad.  I was still ignoring human beings.  That’s not something a descendant of Avraham Avinu should be able to do nonchalantly.  True, the solicitors don’t seem to mind being ignored by so many, and are seemingly happy with the “business” of the ever-present tourists.  But still.

One day not long ago, though, an elderly man sitting on the sidewalk and asking passersby for change focused on me as I approached where he sat.  “Rabbi!” he called out.  “Got anything for me?”

Having been so (somewhat) personally addressed, I had to interrupt my brisk walking.  In Manhattan, that can be dangerous; those behind you are often inhabiting alternate worlds, talking on phones or pecking out emails as they walk.  By stopping short, one can cause the pedestrian version of a vehicular pile-up.  Luckily, though, the foot traffic behind me must have naturally noted my braking, since it just flowed smoothly around me.

I wasn’t, though, about to change my callous custom.  So I just bent down to smile at the fellow and tell him that I don’t generally carry cash (which by then was true) but that I wished him a wonderful day.

I can tell a sincere smile from a contrived one, and the one he returned was the real thing. And along with it came, without a hint of cynicism, a “thank you.”

Whenever I see the fellow in his spot, I make a point of addressing him, just to smile and wish him a good day.  And each time I do, he seems genuinely pleased.  Sometimes, he even beats me to the greeting.  He doesn’t ever ask me for money.

The Gemara in Berachos (6b) quotes Rav Chalbo in the name of Rav Huna as saying: “Anyone who is greeted and does not return the greeting is called a thief.”  His source is a passuk in Yeshayahu (3:14): “The theft of the poor man is in your house.”  Rashi explains that a poor person has no possessions to steal, and so the thievery referred to must be a greeting owed him, of which he was deprived.

Presumably, if an unreturned greeting is a theft, an offered one is a gift.  My indigent friend certainly appreciates that fact.

Greeting every person we pass throughout the day isn’t very practical, and would seem eccentric.  In some cases, personal interactions might even be inappropriate. But in so many others, the opposite is true.  The hurried nature of modern life shouldn’t obscure the testimony of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai (Brachos 17a), that no one ever beat him to a greeting, as he was always first to offer one, “even [to] a non-Jew in the marketplace.”

© 2016 Hamodia

The post Greetings! appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

Homeless people regularly spend time in the ferry terminal, as they do in other transportation hubs in New York and elsewhere.  They’re often sleeping, and taking up seats with their bodies and their belongings. It’s easy to feel resentful toward them, especially if there are no other seats available.  Until, that is, one thinks about the fact that the large bags of sundry items they lug around and park nearby represent all that they own in the world.  And that their only options for getting rest or staying warm in the winter – other than to subject themselves to crime-ridden public shelters – is to bed down in train, bus or ferry terminals.

Although he wasn’t one of the “regulars,” the fellow who had just entered the room clearly belonged to the fraternity of people with no place to call home.  He was laughing and moving somewhat animatedly as the ferry terminal personnel, who seemed to know him, gently escorted him out of the room.  “C’mon, Jerry,” one large uniformed fellow cajoled him, “Let’s go.”

“No, no,” the homeless man replied, and looked around the room.  “I just want to talk to… the rabbi!”

That would be me, of course.  Oy.

“No, you don’t, Jerry,” Mr. Burly said with a loud laugh.  “You leave the rabbi alone!”

“Just for a minute,” Jerry pleaded, and, releasing himself from his captor’s grip, he ambled over and introduced himself.  “Sholom aleichem, rabbi!  I’m Yosef Shmuel ben Aharon!”

I would never have guessed the fellow was a relative.  “Pleased to meet you,” I replied, smiling, and hoping my discomfort didn’t show.

“Would you happen to have a spare yarmulke on you, by any chance?” he asked.

I was taken aback by the unexpected request.  “I’m so sorry,” I replied.  “I don’t.”  Which was true, but, after he thanked me all the same and was led out of the room, I felt ashamed.  I was wearing a yarmulke under my hat, after all.  Couldn’t I have given it to him and worn my hat at work?  It might have looked a little strange as I moved my morning coffee from the kitchen to my desk, but it would not have eternally stigmatized me.

That entire day, my response to the homeless man bothered me.  Actually, at night, too.

The next day, I put a spare yarmulke in my pocket, just in case Jerry might be at the terminal again.  I had never seen him before, so I wasn’t optimistic. But when I arrived, there he was, sitting quietly in one of the waiting-area seats.  He didn’t see me and I just watched him from afar. When the call came for passengers to board the ferry, though, I went over to him and offered him the yarmulke.

His eyes opened wider than I imagined possible.  He took the yarmulke, leaped to his feet and practically shouted “Thank you so much!”

“My pleasure,” I said, and rushed to make it to the boat before the doors closed.

So many bein adam lachaveiro mistakes in life are not easily correctable, so I was grateful for the opportunity to undo one of my bad judgments.  And yet I worried, too, that I may have made a friend who would come to occupy more of my time than I might wish.  I try to use my commute for learning and reading.  I turn down ride offers from neighbors, so cherished is my “quiet time.”

So, even though I sincerely wished Jerry only well, and hoped that his new (well, to him) yarmulke would somehow benefit him, if only to identify himself as a Jew, I feared that I might have paved the way for a daily conversation with someone who might not even be mentally balanced.  But I didn’t regret my small gift; I knew I had done the right thing.  And that’s all any of us can do, no matter what consequences might ensue.

It’s been many weeks since my two encounters with Jerry.  I haven’t seen him since.

I know it might strike some as silly, but I can’t help wondering if he might have been placed there those two days just for me.

© 2016 Hamodia

The post Ferry Tale appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

Her parents had a good laugh over that “memorable kids’ pronouncements” moment, and it returns to us this time each year, when parashas Metzora comes around.

Because of the miraculous malady called nigei batim that existed when our ancestors entered Eretz Yisrael and afflicted the walls of houses.  Such discolorations, we are taught by Chazal, result from tzarus ayin, literally, “narrowness of the eye” – the Gemara’s term for stinginess.

That cause is evident in the requirement (Vayikra 14:36) that the homeowner remove all of his possessions from the house before it is pronounced menuga.  The reason for that, the Torah explicitly states, is to prevent the possessions from being rendered tamei (as tumah only affects the house and its contents when the kohen renders his judgment).  So the Torah is pointedly demonstrating concern for protecting the homeowner’s things, a concern that is the antithesis of tzarus ayin.

What is more, Chazal point out, the rescued vessels sitting on the homeowner’s lawn reveal to neighbors who may have sought to borrow such items but were told by the tzar ayin that he hadn’t any, that the reality was otherwise.

And, finally, the hint the Gemara (Arachin [Erechin] 16a) sees as identifying tzarus ayin as the cause of the negaim is the phrase “and the one to whom the house belongs should come…” (Vayikra, 14:35).  The Torah is conveying that the homeowner’s perception of his house and other possessions – the idea that they are actually his – is what the nega is meant to explode.  In the Kli Yakar’s elaboration:

“The reason Hashem gave him an inheritance, a home full of good things, was to test him, to see if he would use his possessions to do good for others as well… for all that a person gives to others is not of his own, but rather from what the ‘Heavenly table’ has provided him…”

There are few, if any, communities as committed to tzedakah as ours.  The amount of charity that Orthodox Jews donate to help others is truly astounding.  Might there, though, still be room for improvement in our recognition of “whose house” it is?

Chazal created a specific vehicle for us to reflect on the reality that we aren’t the owners of what we tend to think is “ours”: birchos hanehenin – the blessings we recite before eating, drinking, or smelling fragrant spices, bark or flowers.

Such brachos state that what we are about to enjoy is a gift, not a birthright.  As the Gemara notes (Brachos 35a), the passuk that says that “To Hashem is the earth and all it contains” (Tehillim, 24:1) does not contradict the one that says “And the earth He gave to human beings” (Tehillim 115:16): “One [verse] is [referring to] before the brachah [is recited]; the other, after the brachah.”  Once we acknowledge the gift, recognizing that it wasn’t truly “ours”, we are permitted to enjoy it as if it were ours.

The impact of that truth only happens, though, when we think of what we’re saying. If we, for instance, pronounce the nine simple words meant to thank Hashem for the beauty, tastiness and nourishment of an apple as a string of slurred semi-words (the first three as “buchatanoi”), taking two seconds rather than the five or six needed to actually say all the words clearly and focus on their meaning, we’re missing the point.

It’s an occupational hazard of observance, of course, to become so accustomed to a tefillah or brachah that we don’t give it the attention it requires.  It’s what the Navi Yeshayahu describes as mitzvas anoshim melumadah (29:13), rote observance of mitzvos.   But occupational hazards are hazards all the same; and just as the construction worker needs to secure his helmet, we need to secure our mindfulness when saying the words that permit us to partake of blessings.

There’s irony in the fact that as materially blessed a generation as ours may need a renewed focus on brachos.  But we would do well to emulate true talmidei chachamim and nashim tzidkaniyos (and baalei teshuvah), who manage to rout rote.

The little “MY kitchen!” girl has a family of her own today.  She is not only a paragon of politeness but an inspiring, delightful parent.  She and her wonderful husband teach their children – as, with her innocent bluntness decades ago, she taught her parents – just Whose kitchen it really is.

© 2016 Hamodia

The post Routing Rote appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

But did you know that 10 million Americans suffer noise-induced hearing loss?  Or that exposure to some common sounds, even for limited periods of time, can cause permanent hearing damage?

Loud sounds damage microscopic hair cells, known as stereocilia, that line the ear, leading, in time, to the need to use hearing aids.

Uninterested?  Stay with me, please.  This is going somewhere important.

According to the World Health Organization, 15 minutes of 100 decibel noise is considered unsafe.

The music of an average chasunah band registers at approximately 110 decibels – with many bands considerably, even greatly, exceeding that.

In fact, professional musicians are almost four times more likely to suffer noise-induced hearing loss than other people, according to researchers who analyzed health insurance records of 7 million people from 2004 to 2008.

The professionals were also about 57 percent more likely to suffer tinnitus – constant ringing in the ears.

Musicians have learned the hard way about the damage they cause to themselves, and that is why one sees many musicians wearing earplugs when they perform.

Baruch Hashem, multiple chasunos take place every night when halachah permits.  The community has grown, and so has the number of simchos it celebrates.  But there is a hidden cost to those celebrations: future hearing loss to the celebrants.  Especially children who are present, as a child’s ears are more sensitive than those of adults to sound.

Published research yields the fact that about 12.5 percent of American children between the ages of 6 and 19 have measurable noise-induced hearing loss in one or both ears.  And the average American child is probably not as often exposed to loud music as are siblings of chassanim and kallos.

There’s no escaping the fact: When we attend simchos that feature loud bands, we are injuring ourselves; and, if they are with us, our children.

Many people innately sense that fact, even if they are unaware of the science or statistics. They just feel discomfort or pain in their ears at celebrations.   One increasingly sees chasunah attendees who had the prudence to bring earplugs, and who quickly put them in place as soon as the band strikes up.  And others who, in pain, run out into the lobby to escape their audio-rodef.

Can anything be done about this hidden danger?  Of course.  We just need the will and foresight to do it.

My wife and I, baruch Hashem, have had the good fortune to walk most of our children to the chuppah.  At every chasunah but one (where the mechutanim’s good friend, a band leader, supplied the music), there was a one-man band, in which circumstance the volume of the music is more easily controlled – and control it the band-man did, as per the instructions he received.

I have attended many chasunos with any number of band members, and can attest to the fact that the simchah felt and expressed by the guests at our chasunos was in no way less enthusiastic than at any multi-instrumented affair.  Or any louder one.

Band leaders will tell you that their parnassah is dependent, indirectly, on the loud volume of their musical offerings.  Friends of the chasson and kallah, they claim, insist on louder music, “to get them going.”  And those friends will, b’ezras Hashem, be celebrating their own marriages one day, and will surely hire only the loudest bands.

If that is true, then the chasson and kallah in those cases are, sadly, bereft of true friends, who would not need their eardrums overstimulated to celebrate their friends’ marriages.  Music should aid the simchah; it is not what creates it.

So, when you are next planning to walk your child to the chuppah, consider doing one of two things:

Distributing earplugs to all guests as they sit down to the seudah.

Or stipulating to the band person or leader, when he is hired, that he will only be compensated for his great and appreciated efforts and talent if the music is kept to whatever decibel level you decide is safe for your guests. (Someone with the ability to download a decibel-measuring app to a phone can aid you here.)

You’ll be doing your part not only to make the simchah more enjoyable to the majority of the guests, but to help ensure that when the chosson, kallah and their friends are walking their own children to the chuppah, they won’t be wearing hearing aids.

© 2016 Hamodia

The post Hear Me Out appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

One thing is certain.  Kedoshim u’tehorim on Purim, unleashed from the constraints of full daas,  are more often seen singing and dancing spiritedly, even wildly, sharing divrei Torah and divrei sod that one might not ever hear from them the rest of the year.

Needless to say, and unfortunately, some who are less kadosh or tahor can overindulge on Purim and come to act very differently.  They may imbibe stronger things than wine (the preferred mitzvah) in excess, even to the degree of actually endangering themselves.  That is nothing short of a horrific Purim mask, an aveirah in the guise of a mitzvah.

But when the mitzvah is done right, though, even if the results are something more… well, dynamic than a placid visit to a backyard swing, something important about Klal Yisrael can be revealed.  After all, Rabi Iloi (Eruvin 65b) tells us that one way a person’s essence can be discerned is “in his cup,” in his behavior when inebriated.

Something so important, in fact, that I once witnessed a Purim celebration causing an Italian cook at a yeshivah where I once taught to investigate geirus.  By her admission, she told me that, over the years, she “had seen many people very drunk, but never so many people so drunk – without any fighting.”  All she saw was celebration, friendship, good humor and happiness, and that, she said, had impressed her beyond words.  (She was nevertheless dissuaded from her geirus plan.)

Chazal teach us (Shabbos, 88a) that something was lacking at Mattan Torah, and the lack only remedied centuries later in the Persian Empire.

Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chassa tells us there that “Hashem held the mountain over the Jews’ heads like a gigis [a barrel]” to force them to accept the Torah.  One approach to that statement is that it refers to the experience of being directly addressed by the Borei Olam.  Receiving direct communication from Hashem was so overwhelming, so traumatic, so crushing – after all, it caused our ancestors’ souls to leave them, and brought them to beg Moshe to be the only one to directly receive the final eight dibros – that it simply left no other choice but to accept His mission.

Experiencing the Divine fully does not leave one with truly free will to say “no.”

Rabbah comments that the “coercion” remained a remonstration against Klal Yisrael, that it colored our acceptance of the Torah as less than willful – until the “days of Achashverosh.”

For it was then that the Jews chose, entirely of their own volition, to perceive Hashem’s presence where there was no “mountain” held over their heads, where it was not only not overwhelming but not even obvious.  Our ancestors chose to see Divine Providence in seemingly mundane, if alarming, political happenings, took the events to heart as a message from Above, and responded with tefillah, taanis and teshuvah.  Thus, kiymu mah shekiblu kvar, they “completed” Mattan Torah, supplied what had been missing. The nation truly perceived Hashem, not only in thunder and lightning but in words inscribed on parchment and in a signet ring removed from a royal hand.

Moving back to what is revealed when Yidden have a proper simchas Purim, I’ve often wondered about Rav Avdimi’s strange choice of imagery. “Holding the mountain over their heads like a barrel.”  Wouldn’t a mountain looming above be galvanizing enough?  What’s with the barrel?

A gigis, however, throughout the Gemara, is a container for an intoxicating beverage.  Chazal’s description of the implement of coercion at Har Sinai, in other words, is a beer-barrel.

Rabi Meir in Pirkei Avos (4:20) admonishes us not “to look at the container, but at what it holds.” It wouldn’t seem outlandish to perceive some pertinence of that admonition to the gigis to which Har Sinai is compared. Or, in turn, to Purim, when wine allows the essence of Klal Yisrael, our truest nature, to be revealed.

Don’t dwell, Rabi Meir may be saying, on our compromised acceptance of Hashem at Har Sinai in a state of coercion, but rather at our wholehearted, free-willed embrace of Him in our states of mindless purity.

The post The Evidence in the Barrel appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

This is a true story and took place mere weeks ago in an “out-of-town” community.  The teacher, who called just after school had adjourned, recounted how “Leah,” six years old, had seemed ill at ease the entire afternoon.  In the morning all had seemed well.  But later in the day, although Leah seemed attentive, she was uncharacteristically quiet.  So quiet, indeed, the teacher said, that her little student wouldn’t even respond to questions or as much as open her mouth in class.  That was very unusual.

Leah’s mother, herself a long-time teacher and someone who, along with her kollelman husband, had wonderfully guided their older children through early childhood, had never before received such a phone call.  She was worried, but knew she couldn’t substantively respond to the report before seeing and speaking to Leah herself, and so, with her little one expected home any minute, she thanked the teacher for the “heads up,” and waited for Leah’s arrival.

The teacher, it turned out, had not been imagining things.  Leah walked into the house silently, and just retired to the couch, looking uncomfortable.  She wouldn’t respond to her mother’s “How was school?” or her subsequent “Is everything alright?”

“If you don’t want to tell me what’s wrong” her wise and gentle mother whispered to her daughter, a precocious child who, even at her tender age, can write full sentences, “Can you write down what’s bothering you?”  Leah nodded yes.

Pencil and paper in hand, the girl scribbled away.  At lunchtime, she wrote out, she had washed her hands and made the brachah for netilas yadayim.  But, then, when she went to her lunchbox, the sandwich she had expected to be there wasn’t!  So, she explained, she wasn’t able to speak.

The first feeling that washed over her mother, as one might expect, was relief.  Then, after giving Leah a piece of bread on which to make her Hamotzi, she felt pride.

Had Leah been a bit less bashful, she could have hinted to her quandary, or written a note about it, to someone at school and been given some bread.  Had she realized that speaking after washing for something pertinent to eating is permitted, she could have solved her problem by just telling her teacher about it.

But, being self-conscious and not knowing that halachic fact, she just chose to do what she felt she had to do to be a good Jew.  When the teacher was informed of what had happened, she was deeply impressed.  Ditto for me when I heard the story.

We adults often face difficult situations where halachic concerns come up against personal “needs.”  We seek, and often find, ways of satisfying both.  And then, of course, there are times when there is no seeming reconciliation of the two.  What do we do then?  Hopefully, the right thing.  Leah thought she faced an at least temporarily irreconcilable pair of challenges – wanting to talk but assuming it would be halachically wrong – and, to the best of her understanding, did the right thing.  She thereby became a teacher herself.

Dovid Hamelech sang to Hashem that “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings You have established strength…” (Tehillim, 8:3).

The straightforward p’shat of that passuk is, as per Metzudos Dovid, that the miracle of a human baby and his latent power of speech demonstrates Hashem’s “strength,” or power.

The Gemara (Sotah, 30b) applies the words to how, when our ancestors emerged from the Yam Suf and Hashem’s presence was manifest, even babies and sucklings declared “This is my G-d and I will glorify Him!”

Also implied by Dovid Hamelech’s words is that, as Resh Lakish in the name of Rav Yehudah Nesiah teaches us (Shabbos 119b), the world only perseveres because of the hevel shel tinokos shel beis rabban, “the mouth-breath of the youngsters in their places of study.”

That is usually understood to mean that Torah studied by the purest of souls, children, keeps the universe going.  And that is certainly true.

But I’ve often wondered at the word hevel, “mouth-breath.”  “Hevel,” in other contexts, means “nothingness.”

The story of Leah’s silence, though, makes me wonder if, perhaps, there are times when even a child’s silence, when it’s an example of how a Jew should see his obligations, can itself be a foundation of Creation.

© 2016 Hamodia

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Mr. Sanders – now the first Jew to win a U.S. presidential primary – lived for several months in Sha’ar Ha’amakim, near Haifa, a kibbutz affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair, the secular, Zionist-socialist movement.  (It was quite an active one during part of last century; this one, not so much.)

Right-wing media seized on the socialist element, with the American Thinker featuring an op-ed with the headline, “Bernie Sanders Spent Months at Marxist-Stalinist Kibbutz.”

On the other side of the partisan divide, various blogs attacked Mr. Sanders for having been part of a kibbutz that was founded, in the words of radical leftie Philip Weiss, on “ethnic cleansing.”

Intelligent discourse proceeds apace.

For my part, the disclosure of Sanders’ sanctuary evoked memories of my own time on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz – beautiful Ein Hashofet, a mere ten miles from where Bernie bedded down less than ten years before I arrived in the area.

I spent only two days at Ein Hashofet, having traveled there before the start of Elul zman in Yeshivas Kol Torah to visit one of the kibbutz’s founders, my uncle Nachman.

Back in pre-war Poland, when my father, shlit”a, was a little boy, two of his older brothers became involved in a Zionist youth enterprise and surreptitiously made their way to Eretz Yisrael.  My father was determined to study Torah and, after he became bar mitzvah, just as the war broke out, he left his parents and other siblings to learn in a Novardok yeshivah that had been relocated to Vilna.  Eventually, the Soviets sent him and his chaverim , along with their Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, to Siberia.  Eventually, my father emigrated to America; of his large family, only he and his two brothers in Palestine survived the war.

The kibbutzniks were very welcoming of the young yeshivah bochur who had come from America (no, he told them all, he didn’t know their cousins there) to study in Yerushalayim.  I must have seemed, and definitely felt, out of place there.  But I was “Nachman’s nephew,” so I got the royal treatment.

During my stay at the kibbutz, I lived on Tnuva products and some packaged foods I had brought with me.  When it was time to leave, some of the kibbutzniks gave me small gifts – a Hebrew booklet about Van Gogh, a plastic Egged tik, some doodads – that (despite the place’s strict socialist ethos) they possessed.  I was very touched, and remember the residents’ kind sentiments fondly to this day.

My greatest takeaway, though, was from my uncle, in the words he spoke a year later, when he visited me in Bayit Vegan as I prepared to return to the U.S.  Tears welling in his eyes, he wished me well and said, wistfully, that he wondered if, had he retained his Jewish observance, his children might have remained in Eretz HaKodesh.  Most of them, despite their father’s dedication to the Land, had left Eretz Yisrael to find their fortunes in other places.  I didn’t know what to say, and just hugged him goodbye.

Fast-forward fifteen years.  My Israeli uncle and aunt, visiting the U.S., were driven by my father, shlita, from Baltimore all the way to Providence, Rhode Island, where I and my family were living at the time.  It was wonderful to see them again, and, at some point, my uncle mentioned – and there was pride in his voice – that the kibbutz had recently put mezuzos on its doors.

I noticed, too, that he had brought with him a pair of tefillin.

My uncle is now long gone from this world, but I’m reminded of the Gemara about a man who betroths a woman on the condition that he is a righteous person (Kiddushin 49b).   Even if the man was not known to be righteous, the Gemara says, if the woman accepts his kiddushin, they are married.  Because “perhaps he mused about repentance in his heart.”

A hirhur teshuvah – a “mere musing of repentance” – can change a person.  And what matters more than where we are is the direction in which we are headed.

I don’t know if Bernie Sanders’ few months on a kibbutz had any impact on him.  But, as I recall my uncle’s words about his children, and those tefillin, it seems to me that his more than half-century on his kibbutz, ironically, may have yielded him a keener perspective.

© 2016 Hamodia

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She clearly felt comfortable at our Shabbos table, a tribute to the calm of Shabbos, my wife’s affability and the presence of another, even younger, guest, our 14-year-old grandson, whose home is Milwaukee but who is a talmid at the Yeshiva of Staten Island.

Our older guest wasn’t aiming to challenge our mesorah, only to convey something that bothered her about authentic Jewish life, to which she is otherwise attracted.  She knew, she told us, that a special tisch was planned for later that night for locals and guests at a nearby shul.  She knew, too, that the women would be up in the balcony ezras nashim, while the men would be seated below, eating, drinking and singing. “I will be a spectator,” she said, “not a participant.”

For some reason, I resisted the reflexive urge to offer my shiur.  I paused for a moment – always a good thing to do – and responded instead from the heart.  “You know, I totally understand how you feel,” I said.  “That’s the way things are done, and the way they need to be done.  But I can really relate to your feeling as you do.”

Pretty lame response, I chided myself.  Surprisingly, though, our guest’s reaction was otherwise.  She seemed taken aback.  Now it was she who paused before speaking.  “Nobody has ever said that to me before,” she finally said. “Being validated in my feelings means more than you can imagine to me.”

I expected I might impart some lesson that night.  Instead, I learned one.  Sometimes it’s not about “answering” or even “addressing,” but simply about empathizing.  And, giving it more thought, I realized that that’s the case not only in kiruv but in life.  Chazal teach us as much when they tell us not to “judge one’s fellow until you have reached his place” (Avos, 2:4). The message there isn’t simply to not judge others; it’s that we need to put ourselves in the place of others, to see things through eyes that aren’t ours.

The same thought subtly inheres in the passuk that Rabbi Akiva (Yerushalmi Nedarim 9:4) called a klal gadol baTorah: “V’ahavta l’reyacha kamocha.”  There, too, the Torah isn’t exhorting us just to love our fellow, but to love our fellow like ourselves.  We see things through our own eyes; we are admonished to try to see through the eyes of others.

On the way to shul that Shabbos morning, I wondered if my grandson had been able to relate to our other guest’s angst over, as she saw it, being “left out of things.”  So I posed a thought experiment to him.  Imagine, I said, if only boys with black hair could have bar mitzvah celebrations.  Aharon’s bar mitzvah, a year earlier, had brought two sets of grandparents and an assortment of aunts, uncles and cousins to Milwaukee, where he, his parents and siblings and the extended family all had a truly uplifting and wonderful Shabbos.  And Aharon has reddish-blond hair.

He didn’t say anything, but he’s bright.  I think he got the point.  Our Shabbos guest, unfortunately, had no understanding of tzniyus.   To her, separating men and women was no more comprehensible than my imaginary “black hair rule.”

Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes isn’t easy.  Sometimes it seems almost impossible.  “How could he ever do such a thing?”  “What was she thinking?”  “What’s the matter with them?”

And empathy isn’t likely the way to go when we’re faced with a psychopath or someone wont to commit premeditated crimes.  But most veerings from the straight and narrow are neither calculated nor psychopathic.  Whether what stunned us were the actions of a parent or a child, a friend or a stranger, a “kid at risk” or an adult long “off the derech,” it’s easy to admonish or condemn.  It’s harder, though, and more important, to put ourselves in the shoes of the offender, imagining the effects of his upbringing, personal experiences, his particular yetzer hara, his distinctive compulsions.

All of us, after all, have personal histories and individual challenges of our own.  It pays, in myriad ways, to try to imagine those of others.

© 2015 Hamodia

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Most American Jews, rightly or not, don’t think they are capable of living observant Jewish lives.  With the passage of time, the Holocaust has lost the binding power it once had for many Jews; and Israel, unfortunately, has become a source of contention rather than unity for many American Jews, particularly younger ones.  It’s unfortunate, but unfortunately true.

Someone in the group raised the fact that the coming Shabbos – the Shabbos past, as you read this – was to serve as a Jewish unifier, through the “Shabbos Project,” the brainchild of South Africa’s chief rabbi, Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein that has brought together thousands of Jews in observance and celebration of Shabbos over the past two years. More than 550 cities in 70 countries were set to participate in this year’s event.

What other means, though, could bring Jews together?  Many aspects of Torah-centered life involve things that, sadly, do not resonate with – or, worse, sadly, even offend – some American Jews, infected as they are with misguided notions like “egalitarianism.”  And even Shabbos, in the end, observed properly, involves trials that might challenge many a Jew who was not raised observant – a fact to which anyone who has been stuck in an erev Shabbos traffic jam near shkiah can readily attest.

I suggested the study of Torah, which, after all, is the very genesis of Jewish unity, that which was bequeathed us all at the foot of Sinai, when we stood “as one person, with one heart.”  And the proposition that Torah-study remains a potent unifier of Jews is well borne out by the experience of programs like Partners in Torah and TorahMates.  (The brachah we make each morning, it’s worth noting, is “Nosein haTorah” – pointedly in the present, not the past, tense.  The Torah is still being given to Klal Yisrael.)  The idea was well received.

Afterward, though, I thought of another mitzvah that should present no problem to any Jew, and that can serve as a unifying observance.

The two d’Oraysa brachos – birkas haTorah and birkas hamazon – and the many other brachos we make regularly on foods or mitzvos, or as birchos hoda’ah – comprise a paramount element of Yiddishkeit.  They focus our attention on the Source of our blessings, and can serve as a potent unifying force for all Jews.

By undertaking to recite brachos, an otherwise distant Jew can be reminded that he or she is connected to the rest of Klal Yisrael multiple times a day, every morning, every time a flower is sniffed, thunder is heard or one is sitting down to a plate of spaghetti.

What a powerful campaign a broad-based “Brachos Project” could be.  No non-Orthodox Jew could have a problem with it – brachos, after all, are egalitarian.  There are many excellent guides to brachos in English, and reciting them entails no expense or inconvenience.

Truth be told, such a project could also do us some good, too.  As we are reminded by the baalei mussar, reverence can all too easily devolve into rote, and that is particularly true when it comes to brachos.  Many of us find ourselves reciting them by habit, without pronouncing their words distinctly, much less focusing on their meaning. Anyone who’s watched a baal teshuvah recite a brachah has been graced with a good example to follow.

Rav Chaim Vital testifies that the Arizal called birchos hanehenin “the essential way for a human being to attain the spirit of holiness… removing the [unholy] shells and [sublimating] his physicality,” adding that the Arizal “admonished me greatly about this…” (Etz Hachaim, Shaar Ruach Hakodesh).

The mystical perspective alluded to by those words is that the human being straddles the realms of the physical and the spiritual. Food mediates between the two, nourishing the bodies that house our souls.  So it should not be surprising that the act of consuming food would provide opportunity for bringing the holy into the mundane, for removing the “shells” and rarifying physicality.

What better empowerment of Jewish unity could there be than a rededication of Jews from all types of communities and walks of life to sharing in an observance that reflects the quintessential Jewish ideal of acknowledging Hashem’s blessings?  And, at the same time, strengthening our own dedication to brachos?

Who knows what other shells might thereby be removed?

© 2015 Hamodia

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My father, shlita, his family and all Ruzhan’s townsfolk fled ahead of the advancing Germans.  That erev Shabbos, they found themselves in a town called Govrov, just before the Germans arrived there.  Motzoei Shabbos was the first night of Selichos.

Several years ago, I helped my father publish his memoirs, about his flight from the Nazis, his yeshivah days, his sojourn in Siberia (as a guest of the Soviet Union), and his subsequent emigration to America and service as a congregational rav in Baltimore for more than 50 years.  He is currently the mazkir of the Baltimore Beis Din and the rav of a Shabbos minyan.

In his book (“Fire, Ice, Air,” available from Amazon), he movingly describes how he insisted on taking leave of his parents to go to yeshivah, his banishment, along with Rav Leib Nekritz, zt”l and a handful of other Novardhoker bachurim to Siberia; and his being shot while being smuggled, after the war, into Berlin’s American sector.

About that Motzoei Shabbos Selichos in Govrov, he writes:

… My family and I were lying on the floor of a local Jew’s house when we heard angry banging on the door and the gruff, loud words “Raus Jude!  Raus Jude!” – “Jew, out!”…

The SS men chased us from the houses, prodding us with bayonets to raise our hands and join the town’s other Jews – several hundred people – in the middle of the town’s market area…

Some of the Germans approached the men among us who had beards and cut them off, either entirely or purposely leaving an odd angle of beard, just to humiliate the victims.  One man had a beautiful, long beard.  When he saw what the Germans were doing, he took a towel he had with him and tied it around his beard, in the hope that our tormentors might not see so enticing a target.  But of course, they went right over to him, removed the towel and shaved off what to him and us was a physical symbol of experience, wisdom and holiness.  He wept uncontrollably.

We stood there and the smell of smoke registered in our nostrils, becoming more intense with each minute.  It didn’t take long to realize that the town’s homes had been set aflame.  Later we heard that a German soldier had been discovered killed nearby and that the SS men had assumed that the culprits were Jews… We Jews were ordered into the synagogue… the doors were locked and SS men stood outside to ensure that no one managed to escape …  The town had been set afire, and the Nazis clearly intended to let the flames reach the synagogue.   Houses nearby were already wildly burning…

The scene was a blizzard of shouting and wailing and, above all, praying.   Psalms and lamentations and entreaties blended together, a cacophony of wrenched hearts.  Everyone realized what was in store and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that any of us could possibly do. 

The smell of smoke grew even stronger…  And then, a miracle occurred.

How else to explain what happened?  Those in the synagogue who were standing near the doorway and windows saw a German motorcycle come to a halt in front of the building.  A German officer – apparently of high rank – dismounted from the machine and began to speak with the SS men guarding our intended crematorium.   The officer grew agitated and barked orders at the other Nazis.  After a few minutes, the doors to the synagogue were suddenly opened and, disbelieving our good fortune, we staggered out…

What made the officer order them to release us we did not know and never will.  Some of us suspected he was not a German at all, but Elijah the prophet, who, in Jewish tradition, often appears in disguise.

We were ordered across a nearby brook…  And so there we sat, all through the Sabbath, watching as the synagogue in which we had been imprisoned mere hours earlier was claimed by the flames and, along with all the Torah-scrolls and holy books of both Ruzhan and Govrov, burned to the ground…

That night was the first night of Selichos…

I have often contrasted in my mind my father’s teenage years and my own, during which my biggest worries were lack of air conditioning in my classroom and tests for which I had neglected to study.

And each year at Selichos, I try to visualize that Selichos night in Govrov.

© 2015 Hamodia

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Millions have found the 1960 book inspiring, and it is indeed a rare work.  It wonderfully captures Southern American life in the 1940s, and deals thoughtfully with themes like racism and friendship.  What’s more, it is suffused with subtle humor.

And it has provided American culture with a hero, in the form of “Atticus,” as the father of the narrator, a little girl at the time the novel takes place, is called.  Atticus, a lawyer, is a paragon of honor, rectitude and compassion, and, although a mere fictional character, has been an inspiration to many a living lawyer and judge.  The Alabama State Bar even erected a monument to him.

Were I a literature teacher and had assigned the book to students, a question I would ask them would be to identify Atticus’ most heroic act.  Some might point to his acceptance of the legal case at the heart of the book, defending a black man against a white accuser.  Others to his standing up to a crowd intent on a lynching of the suspect.  Some might even respond with his facing down of a mad dog, which he kills with a single rifle shot.

My own answer to my question, though, would be something very different.  At one point in the book, it is recounted how a character, Bob Ewell, a wretch intent on seeing the defendant found guilty and executed, approaches Atticus on the street and spits in his face.

Atticus, who has every reason and ability to lay the scoundrel low, instead, in the words of the woman recounting the incident, “didn’t bat an eye, just took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and stood there and let Mr. Ewell call him names wild horses could not bring her to repeat.”

In Hebrew, the closest word to “hero” is gibor, often translated as “a strong man.”  And its definition is provided us in the fourth chapter of Pirkei Avos:  “Who is a gibor? He who conquers his evil inclination, as it is said: ‘Better is one slow to anger than a strong man, and one who rules over his spirit than a conqueror of a city’ (Mishlei 16:32).”

Heroism and strength in Judaism are evident not in action but in restraint, not in outrage but in calm.  Something to think about as the Days of Judgment grow closer.

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But awaken I did, and so I decided to go out on the deck to scan the sky for evidence of what is called the Perseid meteor shower.  My wife had never seen a meteor, and so I woke her up, thinking she’d want to join me.  (Thankfully, I was right.)  And baruch Hashem, we spied a couple of the ephemeral streaks of light in the relatively dark Staten Island sky, and recited the brachah of oseh maaseh bereishis.

Not everyone finds such things exciting; many people find amusement parks, performances or miniature golf more to their liking.

That’s unfortunate, I think.  Firstly, because nature is really so much more of a thrill.  Watching a caterpillar weave a cocoon or the butterfly it turns into leave the structure; witnessing a spider spinning its web; planting a seed and observing it as it grows into a plant; staring at even a comet-less night sky and contemplating the unimaginable distances of the suns one is viewing – all such astounding realities are more viscerally compelling than anything man-made.

Secondly, though, and more ultimately important, the thrills that nature offers us pave a path from mindlessness toward a most important mitzvah: ahavas Hashem.

At least, that’s what the Rambam states in Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah (2:2):

“And what is the way toward love of Hashem and fear of Him?  When a person contemplates [Hashem’s] great and wondrous acts and creations, and perceives in them His indescribable and infinite wisdom, he immediately loves and praises and extols and experiences a great desire to know Hashem…”

Yet, in the Sefer Hamitzvos (Mitzvas Aseh 3), the Rambam seems to take a different tack:

“…we should think about and contemplate His mitzvos and statements and actions, until we attain [an understanding of] Him, and experience an ultimate pleasure in that attainment…”

So, is “the way toward love of Hashem” to contemplate His universe, or His mitzvos?

The two seemingly different approaches to the mitzvah of  ahavas Hashem may not be what they seem.  As Rav Mordechai Gifter, zt”l, explained it, one might be describing the lens; the other, the view.  Rav Mordechai Pogramansky, zt”l, invoked a mashal:

A visitor to a city is shown a series of beautiful works of art in a museum but reacts to each with disdain, claiming to see only messy canvases.  Finally, a member of his entourage hits upon the idea of cleaning the fellow’s eyeglasses.  The visitor is subsequently deeply impressed by the art.

Before one can perceive Hakadosh Baruch Hu’s grandeur in the astounding magnificence of His creation – which path leads to love of its Source – one must first approach Creation as something other than an accident, as something containing meaning.  And the way to attain that foundational, vital recognition is to understand the concept of… mitzvos.

Because doing so impresses on us the idea of right and wrong, forces us to confront a choice: to view our lives as meaningless or as a mandate.  And if they are a mandate, there must be a Mandator.

Then, through that clear lens, one can truly see, and appreciate, to the extent a mortal can, the unfathomable wisdom inherent in the wondrous world around us.

It’s unfortunate that “science,” as the word has come to be used, has become the perceived enemy of emunah.  In truth, though, it is Scientism – the conviction that nature is all that there is, and that the wonder it engenders has no further point – that stands in opposition to the truism that Creation has a Creator.

Genuine science, though, the Divine implication-sensitive observation of the world around us, and of the worlds light-years (both literally and figuratively) beyond our ken, is a key to the deepest, most genuine feeling a human being can attain.

When, thrice daily, we declare that Hashem satisfies “all living things” with their needs, there is no comparison between just comprehending the simple meaning of the words and pronouncing them with keen awareness of the number of distinct species on earth (10 million on land, and another estimated 20 million marine microbial organisms) and the astounding intricacy of the way they all are provided their species-specific nourishment.

Reciting Ashrei can lead one to“…immediately love and praise and extol and experience a great desire to know Hashem…”

© 2015 Hamodia

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That very week, though, shuls around the world were sounding an early morning alarm of their own, as they will be doing soon enough this year.  No complaints were reported in Jewish communities then, or are expected to be registered this year, about Elul’s daily tekias shofar.

The Rambam famously described the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah as a wake-up call – bearing the unspoken but urgent message “Uru yisheinim mishinaschem”— “Awaken, sleepers, from your slumber.”   The slumber, he went on to explain, is our floundering in the “meaningless distractions of the temporal world” we occupy.

No doubt, the shofar sounds we hear throughout Elul carry that message no less, calling on us to refocus on what alone is meaningful in life: serving the Boreh Olam.

Elul.  As old Eastern European Yiddish sayings go, the observation that, in Elul, “even the fish in the river tremble” is particularly evocative.

The image of piscine panic is meant to evoke the atmosphere of our hurtling toward the Yemei Hadin.  And, in fact, the weeks before Rosh Hashanah are infused with a certain seriousness, even nervousness, born of a sharpened cognizance of the fact that the world will soon be judged; and of the guilt that those of us who are not perfectly righteous – that would be all of us – rightly feel.

Sleeping through a physical alarm clock is always a temptation, and a danger. And even if the sound registers, we are all too easily drawn to hit the snooze button on the spiritual timepiece, busy as we are with all the “important” issues and diversions that take over our lives.

Sometimes, though, some of us wake up even before our alarm clocks go off.  It’s nice to get a sort of head start on full consciousness, so that we’re not terribly shocked when the beeping intrudes upon our sleep, insisting against all reason that the night is already over.

It may still be Av when you read these words, but there’s nothing wrong – and perhaps, in these particularly unsettled and challenging days, everything right – with getting a head start on Elul, with beginning to wake ourselves up even before Rosh Chodesh.  Just as Elul’s tekios are there to remind us of Tishrei, it’s ideal to discern the ethereal clock’s ticking during the month prior.

Hamodia’s Rabbi Hershel Steinberg recently related to me something the Pnei Menachem, zt”l, told him in the name of his father, the Imrei Emes, zt”l.  The Gemara in Brachos (61a) quotes Rabbi Yochanan as stating that it is better for a man to walk “behind a lion than behind a woman.”  The Imrei Emes perceived a deeper meaning beyond the straightforward one. “It is better to begin doing teshuvah during the month of Av, whose mazal is a lion (Leo),” he said, “than to wait until Elul, whose mazal is a woman (Virgo).”

At a family simchah last week in a shul hall, some of the celebrants held a minyan for Maariv.  While I was in the middle of Shemoneh Esrei, I felt a tug on my pants leg. I lifted one of my closed eyelids slightly to see that it wasn’t a snake or scorpion but rather one of my (utterly adorable, needless to say) grandchildren, a little blue-eyed girl of three.  She wasn’t in any danger or distress; she just wanted my attention.  I tried to keep it, though, on my tefillah.   There would be ample time to reassure her of my love for her after davening.

Before she gave up her quest, though, and decided her cousins were more fun than I was being, she gave it one last try and I heard her little voice implore: “Zaidy!  Wake up, Zaidy!”

I had to pause a moment at so delightful an “einekel moment.”

Now, however, thinking about Elul, even with Rosh Chodesh still a few days off, I wonder if there might not have been a more serious, if unintended, message for me in her words.

© 2015 Hamodia

The post Be Alarmed appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

Turning a corner, I found myself facing a middle-aged woman, clearly from the Indian subcontinent, wrapped in a traditional Pakistani shawl, accompanied by a little boy of perhaps 8, walking toward me.

It is my practice to offer all people I meet, even in passing, a smile and greeting.  “Good morning,” I said, and both mother and son responded in kind.  As I walked on, though, I heard the boy call something from behind.

I turned around, smiled at the boy, now across the street, and called out, “I’m sorry. What?”

“Are you guys,” he responded, grinning broadly with the innocent curiosity characteristic of little boys, “really magicians?”

I was alone, and so “us guys” could only mean us guys in the neighborhood with beards and hats. He was clearly enthralled by the prospect of our wizardry.  I laughed and said, “I wish!”  The mother just kept walking.

Of course, I don’t really wish to be a magician, but I wanted to assure the boy that, no, we Jewish guys don’t possess magical powers.  What aptitude we have lies in our tefillos, not the hocus-pocus little Musa was eagerly imagining.

I don’t know if it had been his mother who informed the boy then that we Jews are sorcerers (she had walked ahead), or whether it was something he had been taught earlier.  But it’s unlikely that the characterization was intended to endear us to him.  Whether my friendly demeanor and denial of the charge will in any way prevent him from absorbing his “chinuch” is something I’ll not likely ever know.  But one can hope.

The view of Jews as sorcerers is an ancient one.  When half of Europe’s population perished in the 14^th century’s Black Death, Jews were less affected than their neighbors (something commonly attributed to our regular hand-washing, an activity shunned by non-Jews at the time).  Jewish communities were massacred on the assumption that their members had poisoned wells or cast magical spells on their neighbors

Apparently the imagining of our sorcery, like so many anti-Semitic tropes, persists today.  Last year, Tehran University professor Valiollah Naghipourfar was asked by an interviewer for Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting whether jinns, or demons, can “be put to use in intelligence gathering.”

His response was: “The Jew is very practiced in sorcery. Indeed most sorcerers are Jews.”

And in 2013, Hamas religious leader Sheikh Ahmed Namir charged that evil Jewish (and Christian – the fellow’s an equal opportunity paranoiac) demons had possessed Palestinians, and were behind a Gazan mother’s attempt to murder her child.  She was, Mr. Namir explained, possessed by “sixty-seven Jewish jinn.”  Palestinian exorcist Sheikh Abu Khaled reported that “most of my patients are possessed with Jewish jinns.”

And so it goes.

It’s easy today to become oblivious to how some ignorant people among our neighbors see us. After all, we regularly come into contact with unbigoted, friendly non-Jews.  The morning of the day I’m writing this, a bus driver who could have ignored the bearded, black-hatted man walking up a hill instead signaled happily that I didn’t have to rush, that he’d wait for me. From my desk at Agudath Israel’s headquarters, I regularly see respectful public officials who have come to visit.

Sure, we all realize that there are third-world inhabitants with benighted attitudes toward Jews, who cling to dark fantasies about the Yahuds.  But we don’t often imagine that our neighbors might be sullied by such psychological slime. My post-Shacharis interaction was a little reminder, I suppose, a reality check.

And yet, it’s not hard to understand the assumption of our wizardry.

To be sure, divination and witchcraft are foreign to Jews and forbidden.  As Bilam will remind us this Shabbos, as he does each year, “There is no sorcerer in Yisrael.”

But isn’t the fact that, through millennia of persecution and attempts at our annihilation we Jews persist as a nation… if not magical, miraculous?  And aren’t the achievements of Jews, not only in the most meaningful realms like Torah and chessed, but even in fields more readily appreciated by “the world”… astonishing?

There is indeed magic here, though, of course, it’s not the right word.  We’re not sorcerers, chas v’shalom.  But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something supernatural – in the word’s most basic meaning, “beyond physical nature” – behind our survival, in our successes, and lying in our future.  As we prepare to enter Bein Hametzarim, our mourning should be tempered by that thought.

© 2015 Hamodia

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That’s what Modeh Ani is for, of course.  That short statement of gratitude uttered by every observant Jew upon waking up is meant to focus our thoughts on the fact that, just as some earthquake victims are not rescued, so do some sleepers never awake.  And on Chazal’s description of sleep as a taste of death.  In a way, no matter how many times we may have arisen, we greet every morning as beneficiaries of techiyas hameisim.

And there are other resurrections, too, that we experience but don’t always fully appreciate.  For several weeks this winter, I was homebound and in considerable discomfort with a, baruch Hashem, non-life-threatening but debilitating illness.  As I recovered, I came to understand something I had never given much thought to before.  I gained a sudden comprehension of why the phrase “rofeh cholim” is included in the bracha of “mechayeh hameisim” – why Hashem’s healing of the sick falls under the category of His resurrection of the dead.

When one is ailing, in distress and depleted of energy, appetite and even the ability to concentrate or do much more than hurt, it really does feel as if he isn’t really living, just sort of present in the painful moment – and that the moments are endless.  And when the illness passes, it’s like re-entering the world, like being born anew.

The capacity to fully function again provides an appreciation of normalcy.  When asked by people who knew that I was laid up how I’m feeling now, I respond with two words: “Wonderful” and “normal.”  Because normal, I now keenly know, is wonderful.

That’s a lesson that living an observant Jewish life drives home daily.  From Modeh Ani, those first words out of our mouths when we arise – to brachos like Asher Yatzar and those of Birchos Hashachar and Shemoneh Esrei and Hamapil (among others), we are guided to recognize the blessing of life and health and being, “Your miracles that are with us every day…,” in the words of Modim.

And it’s not just life and health and the normal functioning of our bodies and minds that we are enjoined by our mesorah to pause and be thankful for each day.  What happens to us each day, what we experience, is no less worthy of our grateful focus.

A young woman of whom my wife and I think very highly – we’d think the same even if she weren’t our first-born daughter – has a wonderful custom.  Every night, before sending each of her children off to bed, she asks him or her to identify “the best thing that happened to you today.”

Each of us (and, presumably, those children) have days that we tend to think of as “bad ones,” as having afforded us nothing really to feel positive about.  But we’re wrong.  There’s always a “best thing.”  It might not rate anywhere near the top of the list of our personal “best things that ever happened to us” list.  But everything’s relative; there’s always something we can identify as the high point of even the most dismal day.  It might be a small thing, even something that happens often.  But identifying it nightly and giving it some thought focuses one’s mind to appreciate it when we otherwise might not.

Not a bad idea even for those of us who aren’t sent to bed by our mothers, who retire for the night of our own accord.  Before Hamapil we might look back over our day not only, as many are accustomed, to make a cheshbon hanefesh, to identify things we did that we might have done better or might have better not done, but also to identify the best thing that happened to us over the hours since we last said Modeh Ani.

As a result, we might find it easier not only to fall asleep peacefully but to focus and feel appreciative when, the following morning, we say that next Modeh Ani.

© 2015 Hamodia

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Ostensibly, the recent rioting was a reaction to the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, whose spinal cord was nearly severed when in custody. Peaceful marches to protest that death were understandable, and in fact took place.  (The death was eventually ruled a homicide by Baltimore State’s Attorney.)  But then legions of young black men, many of them apparently high schoolers, began taunting and attacking police, setting fires and looting stores.  Most telling were the delighted smiles on many looters’ faces, indelibly captured on film. If Mr. Gray was at all in the minds behind the faces, he had been grossly obscured by something else, an ugly anarchistic glee.

The rioters’ small minds weren’t likely capable of appreciating the irony of their actions.  Not only the self-evident irony that they were destroying their own neighborhood (including a senior citizens residence under construction).  But also the irony of the fact that the image they projected to the world is precisely what feeds negative preconceptions about black men, of whom Mr. Gray was only the most recent to die as a seeming result of police actions.

That’s what Elizabeth M. Nix, assistant professor at the University of Baltimore and co-editor of the book “Baltimore ‘68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City,” told an interviewer, she is “nervous about”: “more violent images, more reasons for people to stereotype us.”

Baltimore’s mayor and Mr. Gray’s mother strongly decried the rioting.  A lawyer speaking for the dead man’s family said baldly that the rioters “dishonored Freddie’s legacy.”  And President Obama succinctly characterized the rioters “who tore up” Baltimore as “criminals and thugs.”

Only the ethically unbalanced could (and did) try to justify the Baltimore violence.  Could there, though, be something for those of us who would never think of committing burglary or arson to glean from the visceral disgust we felt at the rioters’ actions?

That question brings me to the second thing I was reminded of by the wanton destruction in Baltimore: the Sefer Hachinuch’s words on bal tashchis, offered in connection to the prohibition against cutting down a fruit tree during a siege (mitzvah 529).  The Baal HaChinuch (in loose translation) writes:

“Included in the prohibition is the destruction of anything for no reason… The way of meticulously religious Jews is to love peace and to rejoice in the welfare of others… they will not destroy even a grain of mustard… and any destruction that they see causes them pain … Not so evil people, cohorts of demons, who rejoice in the destruction of the world…”

“Rejoice in destruction” well characterizes the Baltimore rioters.  But we might ponder the positive example the Baal HaChinuch provides. For the Torah bar here is a high one.

Ours is a world of wastage.  Not only grains of mustard but unimaginable amounts of perfectly serviceable food are daily relegated to the garbage dump.  And it’s not only storekeepers and caterers (both of which are often required by law to dump past-prime produce) but all too many of us who see the value of things only in dollars, cents and convenience.  Why bother “recycling” that leftover challah into a kugel for next week when kugels will be on sale at the store?  Why freeze those leftover broken hamburgers when they don’t look appetizing and, anyway, the Nine Days are coming?  Why make the effort to ascertain whether those items are really chametz when it’s so much easier to just toss them as part of our “spring cleaning”?

And who among us thinks – as my mother, a”h, who was more keenly attuned to the import of bal tashchis than most of us, did – of using a plastic or foam cup more than once?  And when do we toss items of clothing – when they are in fact worn out, or when we simply fancy a change.

Admittedly, it’s odd to be stirred to such thoughts by the Baltimore rioting. Intentional, wanton destruction, after all, is a far cry from simple thoughtless wastage.  But lessons for our own lives can lie in unexpected places, and we do well to try to find them

© 2015 Hamodia

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There are, they like to say, two types of people: Those who categorize people into two groups and those who don’t.  I generally don’t.  But I have found that the “two groups” model does seem to encompass most folks when it comes to facing change.

Some individuals relish changes, are excited at the prospect of new circumstances, thrilled by interruptions of the norm.

And then there are the rest of us, we who are happiest when thing just blessedly stay the same, who are content with predictability, enamored of the status quo.

Changes, though, are part and parcel of life.  And so even those of us who are naturally averse to disruptions of our routines cannot escape them.  And among us, too, are two groups: Those who kick and scream (to no avail), and those who learn to come to terms with change.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with wishing for peace and calm and stability.  No less a personage than our forefather Yaakov, Chazal inform us, “wished to dwell in tranquility.”

But as in Yaakov’s life, challenges to tranquility appear in every life.  Some take place, with Hashem’s help, as a matter of inevitable course, like adulthood and aging.  Others come as special blessings, like (hopefully) marriage, parenthood, grandparenthood, and – with Divine assistance – beyond.

Other changes, though, disrupt not only our status quos but our emotional equilibrium.  Things like illness, family problems, loss of employment, loss of loved ones…

Such uninvited and unwanted guests in our lives are vexing, of course.  They elicit the “Why me?” or “Why now?” or just the “Why?” laments, and can easily lead to feelings of resentment, anger and frustration.

Even Yaakov was not immune to seeing his many trials, even in retrospect, in a bitter light.  “Few and bad have been my days,” he tells Par’oh when the Egyptian  ruler, apparently noting our forefather’s wizened appearance, asks how old he is.

The Midrash considers Yaakov to have erred in that attitude, and even to have lost years from his life as a result.  Yaakov, to be sure, did indeed have a travail-filled life, and the travails were far from minor.  But he is held to account nonetheless for regarding them as negative.

Well, what then?  As positive?

Apparently yes.  It’s not easy, to be sure, but it’s right.

And it’s reflected even in halacha:  “Just as one offers a blessing over good,” Chazal teach and the Shulchan Aruch codifies, “so does one offer a blessing over bad.”

Our first, visceral, understandable, predictable reaction to unwanted change is usually negative.  But it’s misguided.  We need to realize that we need to have a second, more thoughtful, reaction, born of the admonition that even “bad” deserves a blessing – to internalize, and even express, the recognition that what seems unfortunate is, one way or another, for our benefit.

On Purim we celebrated Haman’s downfall.  Imagine, though, how things must have looked when Mordechai refused to bow to the Amalekite.  What a terrible, dangerous move that was.  It was born of Mordechai’s choice, to be sure, not an “act of Hashem,” but it was in accord with His will.  And it was something that certainly seemed to bode ill.  It ended up, to put it mildly, boding well.

Commemoration of Purim’s ge’ulah, the Gemara tells us, must take place in the month closest to the ge’ula of Yetzias Mitzrayim.  Think back about the beginnings of that redemption.  A decree to kill all newborn baby boys.  A baby being abandoned by his parents, left to his fate in the bulrushes.  Which led to his being taken by Par’oh’s daughter Bisya into the royal palace.  All, in the end, for the good.

It’s not only in the Torah, though, or the Megilla, that the inscrutability of seemingly “bad” happenings is evident.  In 1941, my dear father, may he be well, barely a teenager, joined the Bialystok Novardhok Yeshiva, which had relocated, first, like many yeshivos at the time, to Vilna; and then, in the case of his yeshiva, to the Lithuanian town of Birzh.  The Soviets, who had taken over Lithuania, gave the talmidim a stark choice: Become citizens of the USSR or retain your Polish citizenship and be considered foreign nationals.  The former status would mean being drafted and sent to the front, cannon fodder for the German army; the latter, being banished to Siberia.

My father and his colleagues and their Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, made the second choice, and were put on a freight train headed east to the frigid, forbidding place that would be their home for close to three years.  He remembers how, as the train prepared to depart, the Jewish townsfolk wailed and bemoaned the lot of the Siberia-bound boys.  How must those boys have felt?  Yet they grew in unimaginable ways during their Siberian ordeal.  And they survived the war to marry and have children.  And those children had children.  And those latter children are now raising their own families – two of them, as it happens, my father’s granddaughters, and their husbands,  in Oak Park.

But how dark the future must have looked as that train pulled slowly away and gained steam.

Talk to anyone thoughtful over 60 – or anyone younger, if he or she is a perceptive person – and you can hear personal stories of how changes feared and then bemoaned turned out to be blessings.  Perhaps you can testify to your own.  If not, with Hashem’s help, you one day will.

“Reuvain” was once part of a small Jewish community centered around a yeshiva where he taught.  Over seven years, the yeshiva thrived, the community grew and remained close-knit, and Reuvain was sure that he and his family would live out their lives in that wonderful place.  Then, quite suddenly, circumstances entirely beyond Reuvain’s control dismantled the community and the yeshiva.  He found himself having to move thousands of miles away to become part of another institution and community.  He was devastated.

Eleven years later, Reuvain was still in that new place, and it had become a wonderful home for him and his growing family.  He wanted to stay there until Moshiach’s arrival.  But, once again, circumstances beyond his control, a school administration bent on a certain path, conspired to evict him.  He and his family picked up again, in tears, and moved to a place Reuvain had said he’d never want to do more than visit: New York

It’s been 20 years since that latter move, and Reuvain has grown to recognize the bracha in that move as well.  In fact, when his employment status changed radically and unexpectedly several years ago, a seemingly grave setback to his parnassah, it, too, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, allowing him more creative freedom and opening new doors for income.

“Reuvain,” something of a slow learner, will likely still react with pain at any future seeming setbacks. I know, because his real name is Avi and he is me.  But he won’t have any excuse; just looking back at his own life so far should reassure him that things that seem bad can be very misleading

The idea is enshrined in Rabbi Akiva’s motto of “All that the Merciful One does is for the good,” and in the account related about in the Gemara (Brachos, 60b) his being refused lodging in a certain town.  Rather than express anger or frustration, he simply pronounced his motto to the people of the town, and went off to sleep in a nearby field.  More problems awaited him there, as the candle he lit was blown out by the wind; the rooster that was to serve as his alarm clock was devoured by a cat; and his donkey killed by a lion.

Still and all, he simply reminded himself that all that Hashem does is for the good.  That night a regiment of soldiers invaded the nearby town, taking all its residents captive.  Rabbi Akiva was spared that fate, the loss of his flame and animal having rendered him undetectable in the night.

The Gemara continues, though.  When the townsfolk, marched out in chains, passed Rabbi Akiva, he said to them, “Didn’t I tell you that all that the Merciful One does is for the good?”

It’s a bit disturbing to read that final sentence.  What was Rabbi Akiva doing?  Mocking the unfortunate captives with his own happy escape from their destiny?

I don’t think he was doing anything of the sort.  Quite the contrary.  He was offering them encouragement, strength to face their own futures.  “I experienced adversity yesterday and last night,” he was saying to them, “and in the end it was clearly for my good.  You are experiencing adversity now.  Realize that, even if the change in your lives seems irredeemably evil, it is not.  It is, in some way or other, whether you can imagine it or not, for the good.”

We’re not always able, even in the long run, to recognize the good in what seems bad in our lives.  There are times, moreover, when adversity serves a purpose in itself, in ways we simply cannot see in this world.

But there’s a bottom line here, Rabbi Akiva’s parting message to the captives.  When we feel captive ourselves to changes we didn’t anticipate or want, we’re wise to hear in our heads his admonishing, encouraging words: “Didn’t I tell you that all that the Merciful One does is for the good?”

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While I have no desire to interfere with the livelihoods of those who offers handwriting analysis services, I do feel a responsibility to offer accurate information to the public.

To that end, I feel it is worthwhile to share an article on the topic of “graphoanalysis” that I wrote for Ami Magazine back in 2011.  You can read it here.  Feel free to share the link with anyone you feel might find it thought-provoking.

The post Handwriting Analysis Analyzed appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

At least one of my night-seder chavrusos, as it happened, followed me into the field of Jewish education, becoming, as I learned years later, the principal of a middle school in New England and then of a Bais Yaakov in Rockland County, the position he currently occupies.

I had only seen him once since our youths, when I was a rebbi and principal in Providence, Rhode Island, where he had brought a group of students from his school there for a Shabbos. That, though, was more than twenty-five years ago, and so it was a special pleasure to find myself at a meeting not long ago that, as it happened, took place in his home.  It was an even greater pleasure to hear what he told me when he took me aside before the meeting began.

“You should know,” he told me, “that something you said when I brought those kids changed the life of at least one of them.”  He went on to recount that a young woman among the group had discovered that, although she was raised as a Jew, she did not meet the halachic standard of Jewishness. At the time of the visit, she was deeply conflicted about whether she wanted to become a giyores or just accept her non-Jewish status and forge a life apart from the Orthodox Jewish world.

According to my former chavrusa, the young women he had brought from his school joined the Providence Bais Yaakov for Shabbos seudos, one of which my wife and I and our daughters were invited to attend.  He told me that I spoke to the group about the parasha and, although I had been oblivious to the presence of a potential giyores, had made some reference to illustrious geirim and descendants of geirim in Klal Yisrael.

“It made a tremendous impact on her,” my former chavrusa told me, and recounted how the girl underwent giyur shortly afterward and went on to get married and move to Eretz Yisrael, where she is the mother of a large and wonderful family.

The story, as might be imagined, warmed my heart.  The only problem was that I had no recollection of ever having spoken to the group, or of speaking about geirim to any group of visitors.  I strongly suspect that the orator at issue had been one of my wonderful colleagues in Providence at the time. Whatever.

But the story, whomever it concerned, was one worth pondering, and still is.

One can never know the effect of an offhand encouraging word or positive comment.  If we think about our own lives, most of us can readily remember something said by a teacher, parent, friend or even a stranger, that subtly (or not so subtly) put us on this road rather than that one.  Sometimes it may even, as the famous Robert Frost poem goes, have made all the difference.

Unfortunately, the same, it must be thought as well, is true about discouraging or negative comments; the difference they can make can be devastating.  Anyone who is thinking of entering the field of chinuch needs to realize that, while being a Jewish educator relieves one of many of the ethical challenges of other professions – doctors, lawyers and businessmen face all sorts of dilemmas – there are dangers in the seemingly idyllic vocation of teaching Torah too.  Like the possibility of inadvertently saying or doing something that might negatively affect a young person.

I might not remember saying many of the things that erstwhile students of mine have told me made a positive difference in their lives.  But I remember more than a thing or two I said in frustration or under pressure that certainly could have, chalilah, had the opposite effect.  And those students won’t likely call to let me know.

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” Shlomo Hamelech informs us (Mishlei 18:21).  And while that organ may be physically soft and feeble, it can have the effect of a protective fortress or a sharpened dagger.

An important realization for every mechanech.  Actually, no less important for us all.

© 2015 Hamodia

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It took place in a Muslim country that I won’t identify; the authorities there do not look favorably on Jews or on citizens who communicate with Jews, like the groom and his mother, who long ago decided that the Jewish mesorah is true.  Long ago, she abandoned the Christianity into which she was born, and has tried mightily, and with some success, to convince her husband, a Hindu, to forsake the idols and rites of his own upbringing and join her in her acceptance of Torah. Talk about a complicated family dynamic.

“Tehilla,” as I’ll call her, has not converted to Judaism.  She and her two adult sons are “Bnei Noach,” non-Jews who have accepted the Torah’s truth and who cherish Klal Yisrael.

There are similar non-Jews in Australia, Asia, Europe and here in the United States (a good number of them, for some reason, in the south).  Many confront formidable societal obstacles, although Tehilla, considering where she lives, likely faces more than most.

“Tehilla” is an appropriate alias for someone so filled with praise for the Jewish people.  Her studies of Judaism over years and her electronic interaction with various rabbis around the world have endeared the Jewish people and the Jewish religion to her – and her to her mentors.  Jews, to be sure, are enjoined from proselytizing to non-Jews, but Tehilla is self-motivated (an understatement); those, like me, who have corresponded with her are simply answering her queries – and are often inspired by her observations.

Tehilla’s empathy for Klal Yisrael, especially in Eretz Yisrael, is deep.  And it is accompanied by a clarity of vision that eludes so many, and so much of the media.  “With all the sufferings [the world has] inflicted on you all,” she once wrote, “I still cannot fathom how magnanimous you all are in being a light to all nations.”

“After meeting your people [by e-mail],” she once wrote, “I cannot understand how such a warm, compassionate and humane people can be so persecuted and so misunderstood.”

And, from other communications:

“G-d will never allow you to fall, in the merit of your patriarchs and prophets… soon G-d is going to say ‘enough’ to your tears…

“All I can pray is when Hashem decides it’s time for all your sufferings to be over, He will show us Gentiles the compassion we failed to show you all.

And she looks forward to Moshiach’s arrival with eagerness: “The greatest blessing for believing Gentiles like us is to be able to live where we can study … without fear and acknowledge Hashem as the supreme G-d and you all as His chosen.

Tehilla has always worried about how her sons, who share her dedication to truth, will find wives who will likewise eschew their religious upbringings and accept emes.  She was overjoyed when her older son found precisely such a young woman.  Their marriage is the one that recently took place.

Tehilla was pained by the possibility that the bride’s family, Hindus, would insist on a ceremony that might include idolatrous rituals.  In the end, the young couple’s insistence on only a civil ceremony and one presided over by an Orthodox rabbi in another country, carried the day – with the full support of Tehilla’s husband, and reluctant acceptance by the bride’s parents.  (And you thought your chasunos had challenges!

Tehilla is overwhelmed with gratitude toward her distant Jewish friends, whose tefillos on her behalf she credits with her good fortune.  Of course, those Jewish friends credit her fortitude and perseverance in a religiously hostile environment

It’s an image worth conjuring, and pondering.  A family without any natural connection to Jews or Judaism that has embraced both.  A wedding of two non-Jews who believe that Moshe emes v’Torahso emes, and who will raise their family accordingly.  A Bas Noach mother and traditional Hindu father looking on proudly.

I don’t know how many others there are in the wide world who have thought deeply about life and history and come to the same conclusion as Tehilla and her sons have.  But it’s intriguing to imagine that there may be many who are entirely “off the radar.”  And heartening to imagine that one day, their lives will come more publicly into view.  And then go, as they say, viral.

Our hope for precisely that, after all, is what we express three times a day in the second paragraph of Aleinu.

The post A Hint of What We Pray for Daily appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.

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.

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Correlation, it is famously and accurately said, does not necessarily imply causation.  It has been noted, for instance, that per capita consumption of cheese in the U.S. correlates closely with the number of people who died by becoming entangled in their bedsheets.  And mathematical proficiency generally correlates with shoe size (children’s feet, after all, being smaller than those of adults).

So it’s wise not to put too much emphasis on the recent research, which was based on a survey of nearly 3,400 people who answered 40 questions, much less to extrapolate from it to the observant Jewish community.

But still.

The researchers’ conclusion – “We find that marriage duration is either not associated or inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony” – does seem sensible, and correlates well, I’d venture to say, with many people’s experience.

Baruch Hashem, the divorce rate in the Orthodox community is nothing like what it is in the larger society.  But, sadly, it seems to be higher than it’s ever been; and there is widespread perception, if not clear evidence, that, Rachmana litzlan, it is growing.

And so, whether or not the recent Emory study holds any real-world meaning for us, it might certainly serve as a spur to thinking about chasunah and gift-related excesses, which we cannot deny exist within our community as well.

Most of us have attended a wide range of chasunos, some modest, others less so, and others even more less so.

This is only a personal observation, of course, but my enjoyment of a simchah has never had any relationship whatsoever to the presence or absence of a wet bar, number (or dearth) of cooked dishes at the reception/chassan’s tish, variety of courses at the meal or number of musicians in the band.

In fact, when things were “fancy,” I often enjoyed the chasunah less, pained in my heart by what struck me as a wanton waste of money; and in my ears, by the decibel overkill.

Now, there may, of course, be perfectly valid reasons to host a lavish simcha rather than a simpler one.  Like the need to impress business contacts, to satisfy the mechutanim, or to create jealousy in others (okay, okay, scratch that one).  But one thing is certain, at least to me: Excess spending does not somehow create an enjoyable simchah.  Or, it’s safe to say, if only from reason alone, healthier marriages.

As to rings, baruch Hashem, neither our daughters or daughters-in-law had any insecurities about diamond size or flawlessness or clarity (or any of the other creative “chiddushim” invented by the diamond industry – itself based on the fiction that diamonds are somehow inherently important to a shidduch).  I think that any of them would have happily accepted a cubic zirconia ring, a lovely replacement that, were I king of the world, I would insist upon for all my subjects’ engagement gifts.

I might well be accused of holding such opinions because my wife and I, having been privileged to marry off eight children so far, boruch Hashem, always opted (as a matter of necessity – but with no embarrassment or regrets) for the most simple gifts and affairs available.  We went for one-man bands (except in one case, where mechutanim were close to a bandleader and wanted to honor him with the job), no wet bar, limited reception food and simple seudah fare.  When a “takanos hall” – a wedding hall that subscribed to the call of Gedolim to keep simchos simple, and insisted that its patrons hew to a list of clear limitations – was available, that was what we chose.

But the simchos were beautiful, as have been, baruch Hashem, the marriages that began at each.  If any guest was disappointed at not having enjoyed a fine scotch before the chuppah or by not being regaled by a horn section or offered a choice of main course, well, I imagine he’s gotten over it by now.

The chasunos all shone.  But the shine came from faces, not silverware.

© 2015 Hamodia

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To those of us who don’t live in southern Brooklyn, efforts that will add to the population density and vehicular traffic there (an area some of us call Borough Double-Park) seem to border on irrationality.  But of course, to residents who wish to see their married children settle in the neighborhoods where they were raised (and to those children who wish to live near their parents), new housing is an urgent priority.

No one lacking the requisite rebbishe credentials should arrogate to suggest to others how they should make decisions as important as where to live.  But, having just spent a warm, memorable and inspiring Shabbos in Cincinnati, Ohio, I’d like to at least share a few impressions of that small but vibrant kehillah; and some others about some others.

Neither my wife nor I had ever been to Cincinnati before, and the fact that the occasion was an Agudath Israel “Shabbos of Chizuk” and featured a special and celebrated guest from overseas, Dayan Aharon Dunner, surely made it an unusual few days for the community.  But it doesn’t take great effort to extrapolate an impression of a community’s essence from even an uncommon Shabbos.

Much of Cincinnati’s kehillah is concentrated in one area, and offers a broad variety of housing options that can cater to Jews all along the economic spectrum.  The local day school is an impressive center of Torah chinuch.  The mechanchim and mechanchos who teach there, as well as the rabbanim of shuls in the area, are remarkable people.  As are the friendly, learned and dedicated members of the community kollel and their wives.

But this is not a column about Cincinnati.  Cincinnati was just its inspiration.  I could write many thousands of words in praise not only of Cincinnati’s kehilla but of Providence’s, (where we lived for 11 years), or of Detroit’s (where two of our daughters and their husbands are raising beautiful mishpachos), or of Milwaukee’s (where another of our daughters and her husband are doing the same, baruch Hashem).  Or any of a number of other communities we’ve visited or know about.

The point is that there is a broad Jewish world –a vibrant and wonderful one – out there.  Yes, even beyond the exotic realms of Staten Island, Passaic or Stamford.

Admittedly, there are challenges to “out-of town” living.  If a choice of chalav Yisrael pizzerias or fast food joints (or nice restaurants) is a must, not every city out there will be able to oblige.  But for those for whom the benefits of a diverse but cohesive and dedicated community outweigh gastronomic concerns (and, of course, other more significant ones), the thought of living “out of town” should not be treated as unthinkable.

I like to imagine a well-funded organization that could amass sociological data about observant Jewish families in the New York area willing to consider moving elsewhere. and that would maintain a comprehensive database of housing and employment opportunities in other communities.

The data, in my fantasy, would then be crunched, and a group of New York-born participant families with similar backgrounds would receive invitations to move together to a new locale.

Just think… Satmarers in Seattle… Klausenbergers in Kansas City… Lakewooders in Las Vegas… Bobovers in Boston… Briskers in Boca…  The possibilities are endless.

More seriously, though, one meets former New Yorkers in frum communities nationwide, and they seem entirely happy to live where they do. Yes, there are downsides, not least of which is being at a distance from family members back in the “old country.”  But the upsides are powerful: warm, caring communities, slower pace of life, inexpensive housing, the sense of being appreciated.  In fact, being appreciated.

Nor are Torah resources – batei medrash, shiurim or chavrusos – lacking.  “Minyan factories” might be rare, but not Minyanim.

And the confluence of housing crunches and the growing number of cities across America that are already home to yeshivos and kollelim should spur more of us to seriously consider whether, if we choose to live in chutz laAretz, where we live or think we need to live is necessarily the best place for us to be.

© 2015 Hamodia

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Today we put what we’ve raked into very large double-reinforced paper “lawn bags” and leave them for the recycling pickup.  (I don’t imagine they put the leaves back on trees, but surely something worthwhile is done with them.)

A few weeks ago, while I was doing the final leaf-raking of the year, the lawn bag I was filling provided me some timely spiritual direction.

I needed the chizuk, and for a reason not unrelated to how distant a memory the scent of burning leaves is, to how many years have elapsed since it would regularly waft through the autumn air.

Having several months ago passed the 60-year life-mark (the “new 40,” as I prefer to imagine it), I find myself among the population I casually regarded for so much of my life as “old.”  I still like to think of myself as a young adult, and am always happy when, at a simchah, I’m seated with people much younger than I.  I prefer to converse about the sort of things un-old people talk about, not my contemporaries’ various aches, pains and medical conditions. (Though, of course, if anyone demonstrates the slightest interest, I am happy to share details of my own.)

One danger of passing the half-century mark and then some is the enticing thought that it’s time to “settle down” and rest on one’s laurels – or, if one doesn’t really have any laurels, to rest at least on one’s easy chair.  That is to say, to imagine that the season of personal growth and development is in one’s past, and that the present and the future are limited to “maintenance,” not only of our physical health but our spiritual states as well.  The baalei mussar, however, famously warn us that there’s no spiritual standing still in life, no neutral gear as we climb the hill of our personal histories.  Take your figurative foot off the accelerator, they caution, and be prepared to drift downward.

A Midrash (Koheles Rabbah 1:3) speaks of the various stages of life, comparing a baby to a king and an aged person to a monkey. Every parent understands the royalty comparison – we wait on our newborns, happily but often exhaustedly, hand and foot; high chairs are thrones and the will of the little one (in most cases) must be done.

What’s with the monkey, though?  Explains the Kotzker, zt”l:  An ape… apes.  That is to say, he imitates what he sees.  Visit a zoo and engage one of the simian prisoners.  Slowly raise your hand; as likely as not, he’ll do the same.  Lift your leg; he’ll follow suit.

When people grow old, explains the Kotzker, they all too often come to just imitate… themselves, or, better, their younger versions. They just keep on keeping on, with their lives mere mirror reflections of their earlier days.  They daven the same, they study Torah the same, they observe Shabbos and Yomtov the same, they interact with others the same way.

Whereas once, in youth, striving for higher levels of sensitivity to tefillah, Torah, Shabbos, Yomtov and interpersonal relations was a given.  As we grow older, unfortunately, it is all too often a forgotten.  Yet, we do well to recognize that “ohd yenuvun biseivah” isn’t just a brachah; it’s a mandate.

It’s not easy to maintain growth after a few decades of adult life.  Like objects moving closer to the speed of light, where the faster they go, the more energy they need to increase speed, it takes greater effort as we age to avoid complacency, to not become lazy about life.

Such thoughts were bouncing around in the back of my head as I raked the leaves.  And then I noticed the apparent motto of the “home-improvement center” where I had purchased my lawn bags, inscribed in large letters on the side of the bag.  It seemed to be speaking to me; halevai I should take it to heart.

It read: “Never Stop Improving.”

© 2014 Hamodia

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I know, because during the George W. Bush administration, on behalf of Agudath Israel, I attended several of the yearly gatherings, which brought together assorted Jewish personalities, politicians and organizational representatives. One of the times when my wife didn’t accompany me, a major supporter of Agudath Israel was my guest.

I discovered then (aside from the fact that nothing compares to home-made potato latkes) that Mr. Bush is a mentch.

As we stood in the long line for the ritual photo-op with the president and first lady, my guest asked me if I minded if he alone stood next to the first couple for the photo.  Having already garnered the souvenir before (along with a presidential seal paper hand-towel from the White House restroom, now hanging on our own bathroom wall), I didn’t.  And so, when it was our turn, I stepped back to allow my guest to pose unaccompanied with the First Couple.  Mr. Bush motioned to me with a broad smile to join the photo.  I explained that I wanted my guest alone to be in the picture.

The president allowed the photographer to snap the photo but then, breaking assembly line photo op etiquette, insisted that a second photo be taken with me in it.  “Why shouldn’t you get a turn?” Mr. Bush asked.  I was a little embarrassed but, of course, heeded the Commander in Chief’s order.

Mr. Bush’s mentchlichkeit has been on more public display many times, most recently, during a Fox News interview.  The interviewer reminded Mr. Bush of his 2007 warning that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq could be disastrous, and asked if he had criticism of President Obama for doing precisely that two years later.

“I’m not going to second-guess our president,” Mr. Bush said. “I understand how tough the job is. And to have a former president, you know, bloviating and second-guessing is, I don’t think, good for the presidency or the country.”

Mr. Bush wasn’t just being perfunctorily polite.  Having “been there,” he knows that there are factors that go into a presidential decision to which the citizenry is blissfully oblivious – and that, in the end good outcomes can only be hoped for, not prophesied.

A decision Mr. Bush made during his tenure was to authorize the secret creation of the Stuxnet computer virus, designed to infect and wreak havoc on Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities. When Mr. Bush left office, President Obama accelerated the clandestine program, ordering increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems at the Natanz plant.

In 2010, the plant was hit by a new version of the worm, widely regarded as having been designed by American and Israel cyber experts working together, and then another one after that. Nearly 1,000 Iranian uranium-purifying centrifuges were disabled. The virus continued to hamper other Iranian facilities through the end of 2012

During that same period, many media were brimming with indignation over Mr. Obama’s not having yet visited Israel as president; trumpeting charges that cooperation between Israel and the U.S. was at its lowest point in decades; bubbling with outrage over Mr. Obama’s opposition to Israeli construction in the West Bank; and castigating the president for mentioning Israel’s 1967 borders as a starting point (“with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established…”) for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

And yet, behind the scenes, unknown and unsuspected by all the righteously irate, Mr. Obama was pursuing a joint program with Israel to undermine the Iranian threat to her security.

Ex-President Bush is both wise enough and modest enough to know that even those who once sat in the Oval Office are not privy to all that’s happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Kal v’chomer, the rest of us.

Predictably, though, in anticipation of news about a nuclear development deal with Iran, or of an extension of negotiations (this is being written before the deal-deadline), the usual suspects are cleaning their BB guns, ready to take their potshots at the president.  But the wiser among us do well to remind ourselves that we don’t know all there is to know, to not “bloviate and second-guess” the current president.  We could learn a little wisdom and humility from the forty-third.

© 2014 Hamodia

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http://forward.com/articles/209618/when-i-drifted-off-the-path/

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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.

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But it was, I must admit, one of the first things I noticed on a recent, wonderful visit to Eretz Yisroel.

I suppose I have a bit of the neat freak in me.  I try, with varying levels of success, to keep things in my life organized.  My desk may not always show it, but I do try.  So maybe I was too sensitive to the litter I saw along the streets and walkways of Sanhedria HaMurchevet, where we stayed.  But the trash was ubiquitous and plentiful, and I’d be lying to say that it didn’t bother me.  At least at first.

My wife and I were privileged to spend a week and a bit in Yerushalayim for the bris of a new einekel and for Shavuos.  It was the first time in 14 years I had been in Eretz Yisroel (previous hiatus: 28 years) and we had never been there together.

It was an exalting, memorable week.  There is much I could rhapsodize about, and much to recount – like meeting Eliyahu Hanavi on Har Hamenuchos (it’s a long story).  But that will have to remain for, perhaps, some other day.

The neighborhood was deeply endearing.  It wasn’t one of Yerushalayim’s posher places; the residents seemed mostly simple people, our kind of people.  Our son and daughter-in-law, the parents of the new little Shafran who received the name Moshe (well, the bris was on erev Shavuos) live in a small apartment, eleven flights up (no elevator).  The climbs were not easy, but it took no effort at all for this long-time suburbanite to feel totally at home in the surroundings.

The shuls were wonders, their tefillos unhurried and heartfelt.  Birds glided gracefully through the open windows, making me feel that I was davening in the sky, the bright blue Yerushalayim sky.  People were warm and helpful, and, throughout both the bustle of the weekdays and the ethereal calm of Shabbos and Yomtov, holiness hovered in the air.  And the children, ah, the children.  There were many, bli ayin hara.  They streamed to their chadorim during the week and filled the streets on the holy days, playing joyfully, gaggles of little girls here, posses of little boys there, hiding and seeking, throwing and catching, walking bicycles and scooters up the hill, riding them down.  And each little face seemed to shine.

It amazed me that, over the course of many hours of seeing them at play, I didn’t witness a single argument, or child crying.  All I heard was laughing and singing.  I was in awe of the youngsters, even knowing that in a few years they would no longer be children, that the challenges of adulthood would confront them soon enough.  For now, though, they were radiant packages of potential, and their incandescence dazzled.

We hadn’t made the trip to tour, only to help our children a bit. (Well, that would be my wife; my assistance consisted of staying out of the way, and holding and dancing with Moshe here and there).  And to absorb some of Yerushalayim’s kedusha.  We left our host neighborhood only to go to the Kosel, visit some friends in the Old City, walk through Meah Shearim and seek a kever in Har Hamenuchos (in which quest the aforementioned Eliyahu Hanavi played a pivotal role).

Some things, I noticed, had changed since I first experienced the city as a yeshiva bochur in the 1970s.  The traffic is much worse. (In fact, had I ever been to Calcutta, it probably would have reminded me of there.)  Construction was ubiquitous and striking.  Everywhere, it seemed, were cranes and building crews.  Neighborhoods that had barely existed back when I was a teen (including the one where we were staying) were populous and thriving.

Meah Shearim, though, for all the decades’ passage, looked and felt much the same.  The homes and shops seemed unchanged;Yerushalmi men and women still glided along its streets in the same traditional clothing, although the cellphones many of them held to their ears as they walked were clearly something new.

But back to the trash.  No one seemed to pay it much attention.  I saw a street-sweeping vehicle clear much of it from the main streets one day, but elsewhere it lay in peace.  After trying unsuccessfully to not see it, I decided to confront it.  No, not by trying to pick it up; that would have been a Sisyphean task.  Rather, by analyzing it.

What I discovered was that the garbage was very different from what one might find in, say the Bronx, or even lower Manhattan, no liquor bottles, cigarette packages or pages from magazines.  The Sanhedria detritus was comprised, almost exclusively, of candy wrappers, snack packaging and similar evidence of sweet teeth.

It wasn’t, in other words, the product of callous citizens unconcerned with the cleanliness that neighbors G-dliness, but, rather, the inevitable byproduct of a society whose most cherished possession is the mass of beatific little people whose play and demeanor had ­­so impressed me, its beautiful, holy children.

It was, I realized, holy garbage.

© 2014 Hamodia

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When I hear German or a Slavic language spoken, I can’t help but recall the wry words of the late New York City mayor Ed Koch as he led the Ukrainian Day parade one year. He told the parade’s grand marshal: “You know, if this were the old country this wouldn’t be a parade, it would be a pogrom. I wouldn’t be walking down Fifth Avenue; I would be running… and you would be running after me.”

And I’m reminded, too, of the sentiment of my dear father, may he be well, who spent the war years first fleeing the Nazis and then in a Soviet Siberian labor camp. When I asked him many years ago how he feels when he meets a German non-Jew, he told me that any German “has to prove himself” to be free of the Jew-hatred that came to define his people. My father’s “default” view of a German (or, for that matter, Pole or Ukrainian or Romanian…) is “guilty,” or at least “suspect.”

And yet, he continued, if a German clearly disavows his elder countrymen’s embrace of evil, then he deserves to be seen and treated as just another human being. I imagine others might not be so willing to accept even the apparent good will of someone from the land and stock of those who unleashed the murder of millions of Jews (including my father’s parents and many of his siblings and other relatives). But that is how my father approaches things. And how I do, too.

All of which I shared with two German filmmakers a year or two ago. They had requested an interview, to be used in a documentary for broadcast in Germany that would focus on how Jews regard Germans today. I consented, if only because I had no reason to say no.

When the visitors, young people who clearly disavowed anti-Semitism, arrived at Agudath Israel of America’s offices and turned on their camera, I explained that there were Jews, of both my father’s generation and mine, who would always see Germans as evil; but others who would choose to judge an individual, in the end, no matter his genealogical or national baggage, as an individual.

What became of my comments, or the program, I can’t say. I don’t know anyone in Germany who saw the broadcast.

The interview comes to mind because of a recent Agence France-Presse report about Rainer Hoess, the grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, yimach shemo, who estimated that he was responsible for the deaths of two and a half million people, including at least a million Jews. He was found guilty of war crimes by Polish authorities and hanged near Auschwitz’s crematorium in 1947.

As a 12-year-old growing up in post-war Germany, Rainer was puzzled by negative feelings toward him that he sensed in his school gardener, a Holocaust survivor. A teacher revealed the truth about his infamous forebear.

Now 48, Rainer Hoess seeks to deal with that awful discovery by devoting his life to fighting the rise of neo-Nazi movements across Europe. At first sought out by such hate groups to join them as a “high profile” member, he turned the tables and condemned them unequivocally.

“Every time I have the chance to work against them,” he says, “I will do that.” And he has devoted the past four years to educating schoolchildren about the dangers of right-wing extremism, sadly on the rise in Europe. Last year alone, he addressed students in more than 70 schools in Germany, and has visited Israel.

There’s food for thought here, because it seems inevitable that people will generalize about groups, be they ethnic, national or even professional, whether the justification is conceived as based on genetics, environment or culture.

But our generalizations, however justified they may seem to us, should not figure in our judgments of the individual who has just introduced himself. That fellow might end up adding fodder to our assumption. But he might do just the opposite, and should be given the chance.

After all, there are generalizations, too, that others make about us Jews qua Jews, sadly; and about us Orthodox Jews as Orthodox Jews, sadder still. And, whether those generalizations are based on isolated, unrepresentative facts or pure fantasy, we want others to regard us not in their shadow, but in the revealing light of who we are. And we should give others the same courtesy.

© Hamodia 2014

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In a recent episode, Nahoul encourages a boy from Jenin to attack his Jewish neighbors.  “Punch them,” he advises.  “Turn their faces into tomatoes.”

“If his neighbors are Jewish or Zionist,” Rawan, the little girl host of the show adds helpfully, “that goes without saying.”  Nahoul then advises throwing stones at “the Jews.”

A bit later in the program, another little girl shares her hope to become a policewoman, so that she can “shoot the Jews.”

“All of them?” the host asks with a smile.

“Yes,” the other girl replies.

“Good.”

Nahoul is likely to meet the fate of other cuddly animals – like Farfour the Mouse, a rabbit and a bear – that were previously featured on the program only to suddenly disappear, the show’s little viewers being informed that each character had been “martyred” by Israelis.

The airwaves in Gaza are tightly controlled by Hamas, the de facto government, and “Pioneers of Tomorrow” is part of that violent and hateful group’s effort to educate the region’s children about what Hamas considers their civic and religious duties.

They educate and we educate.

It might seem a novel thought, but it’s really an obvious one: The surest way to understand a society lies in the entertainment it offers its young.

American culture qua culture is largely aimless.  If it has ideals, they are high-sounding ones like “freedom” and “individuality” but which generally translate as “do what you will” and “I’m okay, you’re okay.”  Reportedly, much of the programming aimed at American children pays homage to the same.

Children’s fare in the Orthodox Jewish world is also telling.  And although it does not use television as a medium, it’s voluminous.  Whether in the form of books, compact discs, MP3s or cassette tapes, there is an astounding array of memorable musical offerings, characters, stories and performances that convey the ideas and ideals that inform the community, and that reflect its essence.  Jewish children are taught about Jewish history, about love for other Jews and for Eretz Yisroel, about the beauty of Shabbos and the meanings of yomim tovim, and about the performance of mitzvos; about the evils of jealousy and loshon hora and about the importance of Torah-study.

And then we have Hamas.

Shavuos approaches.  My wife and I will miss having our children with us.   (They’re all either married or in yeshiva –yes, the marrieds invited us to join them, but their father is a hopeless homebody.)  But when I go to the beis medrash on Shavuos night, I’ll remember all the Shavuos nights spent learning Torah with the little boys, later young men, whom we were privileged to raise, and all the subtle teaching of both them and their sisters that went on around the Shabbos table, and throughout the weeks and years.

And I will remember one Shavuos in particular, quite a few years back, when I was learning in a nearby shul – packed with others, many of them fathers and sons too – with one of our sons, then a 12-year-old.

We spent most of the night engrossed in Gemara.  We began with the sugya of tzaar ba’alei chayim in Bava Metzia, which he was studying in yeshiva, and then continued with the sugya of Yerushalayim nischalka l’shvotim in Yoma, which he and I were learning regularly together.

Dovie seemed entirely awake throughout it all, and asked the perceptive questions I had come to expect from him.

The experience was enthralling, as it always was, and while it was a challenge to concentrate (at times even to keep my eyes from closing) during Shacharis, Dovie and I both “made it” and then, hand in hand, walked home, where we promptly crashed.  But before my head touched my pillow (a millisecond or two before I entered REM sleep), I summoned the energy to thank HaKodosh Boruch Hu for sharing His Torah with us.

That silent prayer came back to me like a thunderclap a few days later, when I caught up on some reading I had missed (in the word’s most simple sense) over Yomtov.  Apparently, while Dovie and I were learning Torah, the presses at The Washington Times were printing a story datelined Gaza City.

It began with a description of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Abu Ali, being “lovingly dress[ed] by his mother in a costume of a suicide bomber, complete with small kaffiyeh, a belt of electrical tape and fake explosives made of plywood.”

“I encourage him, and he should do this,” said his mother; and Abu Ali himself apparently agreed. “I hope to be a martyr,” he said.  “I hope when I get to 14 or 15 to explode myself.”

My thoughts flashed back to Shavuos and to my own son, and I thanked Hashem again.

© Hamodia 2014

POSTSCRIPT:  It turns out that we will indeed be away from home for Shavuos, in Israel, for the bris of Dovie’s and his wife Devorah Rivkah’s  firstborn .  May we all know only happy occasions!

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The middle-aged woman in the elevator didn’t even have anything in or clipped to her ear; she was holding an actual, physical cellphone near the side of her face.  And so, when she said, once, and then again, “Which is the way out?” I wondered to whom she was speaking and what topic was being discussed.

It was the end of a workday in downtown Manhattan, and only the woman, whom I hadn’t ever encountered before, was in the elevator when it stopped at my floor.  I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but had little choice.  So I started to imagine what might have yielded her repeated, somewhat urgent-sounding question.  A tax problem? (April was imminent.)  A troubled relationship?  Some existential crisis?

Following elevator etiquette, I faced the door.  But, for some reason (in retrospect, probably siyata DiShmaya), I turned briefly in the woman’s direction. It was a good thing I did.  Phone or not, she had been talking, I realized, to me.  Her expression, telegraphing annoyance bordering on irritation, made that very clear.

After a moment’s speechlessness born of surprise, I managed a smile and said “I’m sorry.  What were you asking?”  And she explained that she wanted to know which floor was the way out of the building.  I told her that floor number “1” was the lobby, and apologized for not having realized that she had been speaking to me and for ignoring her question.  Her earlier chagrin seemed to evaporate.  When the elevator landed at the lobby and we left our temporary prison, I wished her a good night and she wished me the same.

During the trek home, I pondered several things.  First, self-defensively, how is it that one might assume, especially when one is holding a phone, that others realize that you are addressing them?  A simple, loud “excuse me” to get their attention would, to my lights, be in order.

Then, though, turning inward, I pondered how getting lost in one’s thoughts isn’t an indulgence one should choose when others are around, even other strangers.  I was reminded of the fact that Hillel Hazaken’s version of what society calls the “Golden Rule” differs from that of other cultures.  He framed it in the negative: “What is hateful to you do not do to others.”  That might seem a weaker version than “Do unto others…”  But just the opposite is true: It is both more challenging and more meaningful to be on constant alert to not, consciously or otherwise, do something objectionable to another person.

A third thought, however, quickly edged out the others: What had happened almost hadn’t.

Had I not for some reason turned around briefly, I pondered, I would never have realized that it was me my co-prisoner had been addressing.  She would likely have just judged me a boor for ignoring her, left the elevator when I did, and gone on her way, all the while angry at the rude man who wouldn’t answer her simple question. The rude Jewish man.

Many people tend to generalize when they feel they have been offended by a member of an identifiable group, be it racial, ethnic or religious.  But while a black or Mexican or Asian or Muslim may not particularly care whether others see his actions as confirming a negative group stereotype, a visibly Jewish Jew must care indeed.

So thought #3 was about how very careful we Orthodox Jews need to be to avoid offending others – even when we don’t mean to do anything of the sort.  Part of that carefulness involves being aware of those around us in public places.  That’s not so simple a matter for observant Jews, as our convictions usually point us in the direction of inward focus, and keeping the outside at bay.  But on the other side of the scales is, chas vesholom, the possibility of causing, even inadvertently, others to think of our people and our faith negatively.

It’s a delicate balance, but a most important one, all the same, to strike.

© 2014 Hamodia

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When one reporter asked the priest in one of the churches if he knew why, the answer he received, offered with a smile, was: “Israeli counterintelligence.”

He went on to explain that Israeli-made cell phone jammers the size of paperback books had been tucked unobtrusively among paintings that were hanging in the chapel. The jammers emit low-level radio frequencies that thwart cell phone signals within a 100-foot radius. Thus, technology developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and phone-triggered bombings had been purchased for a more mundane (the priest would probably say holy) purpose.

Although cell phone jammers are employed in India’s parliament, Italian universities (to prevent cheating on exams), Mexican banks (to keep robbers from calling their accomplices) and Tokyo theaters and commuter trains, federal law prohibits their use in the U.S., and so shuls, alas, cannot legally utilize them to prevent davening from being punctuated by jazz, Beethoven or Hatikva (all of which have been heard by this writer during the silent Shemoneh Esrei).

Once, not too many years ago, the worst electronic interruption of tefillos in shul was the very occasional beeper; and the fact that it was usually summoning a doctor, presumably because of a medical crisis, mitigated the rudeness of the disturbance.

Today, though, as we all know, cell phones are ubiquitous, and so the satan has been able to add classical and pop riffs, and an assortment of utterly annoying chimes, tones and melodies, to his arsenal of davening disruptions, which once consisted only of mindless conversations among those who find silence a painful vacuum in need of filling.

What would the Tosfos Yomtov — who lamented talking in shul as courting tragedy, and composed the well-known, if too-often-ignored, Mi Sheberach for those who maintain shul decorum — say? Had cellphones existed in the 17th century, would he have showered special blessings on those who took three seconds to turn theirs off every time they entered a mikdash me’at?  I have little doubt that he would have.

It is often said, generously, that the laxity of decorum in some shuls results from the comfort that Jews feel in their place of prayer. We feel at home in shul, the diyun l’chaf zechus goes, and so we converse.  Indeed we do, but we shouldn’t.

Because it’s still a shul. Those are siddurim, not newspapers, and the people holding them and moving their lips quietly are talking to the Creator, not the bartender. And they want you to please hold your tongue, and your calls.

It is, to be honest, easy to forget to turn off our phones when we enter a shul. I once neglected to, although thankfully it didn’t ring (or ping or sing) during davening. But it could have, and I have been more careful ever since.

And I was witness, not long ago, to another man’s neglect to power down his phone before a tefillah, and his phone did ring. What happened afterward, though, was truly remarkable.

During the week I daven Minchah at the national headquarters of Agudath Israel of America, where I am privileged to work. Many men who work in lower Manhattan attend Minchah at our offices during their lunchtime. During the silent Shemoneh Esrei at Minchah one day, the man’s cellphone went off. (I don’t recall what the selection was; something Jewish, I think.) No, that wasn’t what was remarkable (unfortunately). What happened after Minchah was.

The man whose phone had serenaded us during davening looked embarrassed and I noticed that he left the beis medrash quickly after Aleinu. (Please don’t even get me started about Aleinu, which cannot be recited by a normal human being in less than 45 seconds but seems to benefit from some odd sort of kefitzas haderech in all too many shuls.)

As I left the room myself, I saw the gentleman whose phone had asserted itself standing near the elevator bank, where all the mispallelim would have to pass, both those headed down to the lobby and those of us who work in the Agudah offices.

The man stood there and politely accosted each and every one of us individually — to apologize for not having turned off his phone when Minchah began.

What mentchlichkeit, I told myself.  And what a poignant lesson about how we should feel if we have disturbed someone else’s davening.

And, of course, about how careful we should be to not do so.

© 2014 Hamodia

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The article below appeared last week, on March 11, in Haaretz.  It is republished here with that paper’s permission.

Pondering the Prayer Gathering

Ruminations of a participant in the Manhattan Atzeret Tefilla

The weather in Manhattan on Sunday – a few degrees above freezing – wasn’t as pleasant as Jerusalem’s a week earlier.  But that didn’t stop an estimated 60,000 Orthodox Jews from turning out to participate in an American counterpart to the mammoth prayer gathering that had filled the Holy City’s streets the week before.

Many American haredim live in communities far removed from New York, and thus couldn’t participate.  Still and all, an ocean of black hats stretched about a mile along, fittingly, Water Street, a major thoroughfare at Manhattan’s tip.  Traffic reporters were beside themselves, direly warning drivers to abandon all hope of entering lower Manhattan, and reporters in truck buckets high above the crowd shouted down to us earthlings that they couldn’t spy an end to the mass of humanity.

And, as was the case at the Israeli happening, a broad spectrum of haredim was represented.

There were Jewish businessmen and professionals from throughout New York and New Jersey, yeshiva and kollel students from places like Lakewood and Baltimore, chassidim of varied stripes, even including Satmar, a group that isn’t often comfortable with, and is seldom seen among, such broad efforts.

A large portion of the gathering site was set aside for women, of whom there were many, too, schoolgirls, seminarians and homemakers.

(Also represented, although in protest of the gathering, was the anti-Israel Neturei Karta.  A small contingent of its teenage boys, held back by police near the Staten Island Ferry, seemed to be enjoying themselves, waving placards, denouncing Israel and condemning those who walked by for not sharing their point of view.  The walkers-by just rolled their eyes and moved along to join the prayers.)

What united the supplicants was what united the participants in the Jerusalem gathering: the conviction that a dangerous line was about to be crossed.

That line, of course, is the modus vivendi in Israel since the state’s inception, which permits full-time Torah-students to defer the military service required of (most) other Israelis.  And the looming line-crosser is the Knesset legislation all but finally approved that would extend mandatory military or civil service to the haredi community and that allows, if mandated quotas are not met, for criminal prosecution of haredi conscientious objectors.

The law is generously sugar-coated, extolling Torah-study, phasing in its quotas over several years, insulating 1800 particularly promising haredi students annually from the draft and permitting others to defer service for several years.  But, to the haredi world, the sugar cannot mask what they see as its bottom line bitter taste: effectively making a student’s determination to study Torah full time a criminal offense, potentially punishable with imprisonment.

That fact is “deeply dismaying and profoundly shocking,” according to a statement issued by the American gathering’s organizers.  (Full disclosure: the organization I work for, Agudath Israel of America, was asked to provide its expertise in arranging the necessary permits, police presence and other logistical assistance.  But it was only part of the broader-based effort.)

And the purpose of the prayer gathering, the statement continued, was to let Israeli haredim know “that the Torah community in America stands with you…”  All that transpired, as in the Jerusalem gathering, was prayer and recitation of Tehillim.

Between the two events, though, something less rarified transpired, something in fact ugly.  Some enterprising fellow decided to produce his personal “official” video of the Jerusalem happening.  It was set to a pop-tune that hijacked the lyrics of the traditional “siyum,” or tractate-completion, prayer, contrasting the life of scholarly Jews with aimless souls who “sit around at street corners.”

“We arise and they arise,” the grateful prayer goes.  In the video, at the phrase “we arise to study words of Torah,” the image of a haredi studying appeared.  And at “they arise to pointless ventures,” politicians… and soldiers were depicted.  The insinuation (at least about soldiers) was deeply offensive to all feeling Jews, haredi ones included.  Normative haredim, even those who wish to be scholars and not soldiers, and even with their sincere belief that Torah-study protects soldiers and citizenry alike, don’t disparage soldiers.

And, as might have been expected, a “counter-video” subsequently appeared, using the same pop-tune and words, but with opposite depictions.

How often and how tragically are important issues hijacked by the small-minded, whether Neturei Karta or haredi-haters, would-be impresarios of this extreme or of that.  Having strong convictions doesn’t have to result in insensitivity, and certainly not insanity.

In a perfect world, every secular Israeli (even politicians) would respect those who sincerely embrace full-time Torah-study as a high ideal; and every haredi would not only respect the soldiers who put their lives on the line for the Jewish people but declare the fact at every opportunity. And Jews would seek, at most, to persuade, not ignore one another, and not try to legislate their lives.

But alas, our world is imperfect.

We can pray, though.

© 2014  Haaretz

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I came across some very compelling literature that called traditional Jewish beliefs into question, and was disturbed by what I had read, and so I read more, and did a good amount of serious thinking and research.

As to Orthodox Jews themselves, yes, most seem to be fine people, but there have also always been “characters” – people with strange fixations or behavior patterns.  And then there are Jews proven or rumored to be… not so nice.

The thought that the “outside” world might provide a more rarified and thoughtful community was an enticing one.  And so I began to entertain doubts about Jewish beliefs, my religious identity and my community.

I was 14.

To my relief now, many decades later, there was no Internet then to intensify my confusion, and no examples of people who had abandoned Jewish beliefs and observance and written best-sellers about the fact.  I had no opportunity at the time to capitalize on my doubts and gripes with a memoir that would garner me the media spotlight, interviews and royalties.  Though I had what to tell, like how my second grade rebbe would rap my fingers hard with a ruler when I misbehaved.  I would have had to have been truthful and admit that he didn’t do it in anger, and that I felt he loved me dearly throughout.  But I could have racked that up to Stockholm Syndrome.

Lacking the commercial incentives, though, allowed me to take my time, do some critical thinking and research, and give Judaism a chance.  I engaged my doubts with information, and was blessed to have parents who gave me space, who didn’t try to overly control my reading, dress or activities; and with rabbaim who didn’t consider any question off-limits.

And so I found answers to all the questions I had.  As a result, even though I was raised in an Orthodox home, I consider myself “Orthodox-by-choice,” someone who made a conscious decision to accept the Torah, and the mission it bequeaths all Jews.

What reminds me of my intellectually tumultuous days is the spate of “I Escaped Orthodoxy and Lived!” memoirs that have appeared in recent years, practically a cottage industry.  The autobiographies are celebrated and hyped for their anger and outrage, and an “enlightened” world considers their authors to be heroes.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I don’t mean to disparage the true experiences of others, or to discount the special challenges some may have faced, especially in very insular and rigid communities.  But there is much that is deeply suspect in some of the literary accounts.  In one case, a writer was revealed to have entirely fabricated a terrible crime, a murder-mutilation of which there is no police record.  Needless to say, that employment of creativity calls the rest of the writer’s impossible-to-confirm personal experiences into some doubt.

More recently, another writer has been making the rounds and has not only contradicted herself about a formative period in her life but admitted to having been mentally unstable and self-destructive since childhood.  Her intelligence and eloquence at present is obvious.  But her description of her far-from-New York, non-chassidic community is at wild odds with reality.  Whether her personal memories are real or delusional thus remains unclear.  Her publisher and the media, of course, don’t seem to care much either way.

Although I can rightly wax suspicious about some of the assertions in some of these ostensibly true stories, I have no right to deem their writers intentional fabulists.  Perhaps their once-Orthodox environments, or some other life-experience, so damaged them that they became confused as a result.  Or perhaps they suffer from some congenital emotional problem beyond their control.

But what I can do is reflect on the fact that adolescence brings all sorts of psychological and intellectual challenges, including to Orthodox adolescents.  And recognize that a particularly powerful challenge is presented to young people these days by the Internet and social media, which provide easy misinformation, precarious camaraderie and false solace; and by publishers anxious to sell books – the more outlandish and prurient, the better.

Of little interest to blogs or editors, tellingly, are the vast numbers of intelligent, sensitive Orthodox youth, including many in the most insular communities, who stand up to the special, myriad challenges of our time as  they forge their personal paths through life.

Those young Orthodox Jews are the true, if unpublished, heroes, for ignoring the contemporary, technology-empowered sirens of cynicism.  They are heroes for having the courage to pursue resolutions for any doubts or confusion they may harbor, for realizing that there is balm for the wounds they may have suffered, and fulfillment in the religious heritage bequeathed them by their parents, and their parents before them.

© 2014 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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Unlike some in the traditional Orthodox community, I empathize with the young women in two modern Orthodox high schools in New York who asked for and received permission to don tefillin during their school prayer services.  They have, after all, seen their mothers wearing the religious objects and simply wish to emulate their parents’ Jewish religious practice.  Carrying on the traditions of parents is the essence of mesorah, the “handed-down” legacy of the Jewish past.

None of us has the right to assume that these girls aren’t motivated by a deeply Jewish desire to worship as they have seen their mothers worship.  Even as to the mothers’ motivations, I can’t know whether their intention is pure or homage to the contemporary and un-Jewish idea that “men and women have interchangeable roles.”  Most of our acts, wrote the powerful thinker Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, are mixtures of motivations.  And so I don’t arrogate to judge either the mothers or their daughters.

The question, though, of whether halacha considers it proper for women to wear tefillin, despite the much smoke and many mirrors conjured in myriad quarters over recent weeks, is pretty clear, at least looked at objectively, without a predetermined “result” in mind.  It does not.

The essence of halacha is that discussions and disagreements among different authorities distill over time into codified and universally accepted decisions.  The urtext of halacha in the modern era (using the term loosely) is Rabbi Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Aruch, along with its appendage “the Mapa,” in which Rabbi Moshe Isserles added glosses, sometimes but not always to reflect normative Ashkenazic law.

Rabbi Isserles states clearly that women should not wear tefillin.  The Vilna Gaon prohibits it categorically.  The “bottom line” commentaries on that part of the Shulchan Aruch, the Mishneh Berurah (written by the “Chofetz Chaim”) and the Aruch HaShulchan, both concur.  And that is why Jewish women have forgone wearing tefillin until (for some) recent years.

That the daughter of King Saul famously wore tefillin is indeed a fact, but the exception only proves the rule: other women in her time and thereafter (and there were great and righteous ones in every generation) did not wear tefillin.  The same applies to the practice of the “Maiden of Ludmir,” an exceptional figure in the Chassidic world.  There is no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that Rashi’s daughters wore tefillin; it is a legend that appears only in modern times.  And, despite all the conceptual contortions of late, no Orthodox halachic authority of repute has ever permitted women to wear tefillin.  “Retrofitting” halacha, going back to “earlier sources” to change established practices, was the hallmark of the early Conservative movement; it has no place in the Orthodox sphere.

More important, though, there is a Torah prohibition (lo titgodedu) against a part of a Jewish congregation adopting even a permitted Jewish practice if it is not the normative practice of the congregation.  And a rabbinic prohibition (mechzi ki’yuhara) against adopting even acceptable practices if doing so will make the practitioners seem to be holding themselves “higher” than others.

That latter idea, it seems to me, speaks particularlyloudly here, even aside from the technical halachic concern.  What message does the public tefillin-laying of some young women in the school send to the others?  That they are somehow deficient or less holy, or less concerned with connecting with the Divine?  What a terrible thing to imagine, what misguided pedagogy.

I once served as the principal of a high school where some students hailed from “modern Orthodox” or non-Orthodox backgrounds.  I never interfered in the practices of those students and their families in their homes and synagogues, even when they may have diverged from normative halacha.  But when it came to in-school affairs, normative halacha was the standard.

Were I the principal of a school for young women and some of them wished to don tefillin, I would not deride them for their desire, nor judge them in any way.  But I would insist on normative halachic standards in school, and ask the girls to don their tefillin at home.  I am told that such was indeed the policy of the schools at issue until now.  Why it was changed is not clear to me.

What I would wish for my students, and indeed wish now for the young women at the two schools at issue, is that they intensify their commitment to mesorah, and maintain their determination to be closer to G-d.  And thereby come to gain sufficient knowledge and objectivity to examine many things, including their tefillin-donning.

And come to wonder why, even if their mothers adopted the practice, their grandmothers, and their grandmothers and their grandmothers – heartfelt, intelligent and deeply religious women – did not.

© Haaretz

(This article is available for purchase for publication only from Haaretz.)

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Yes, annually.

Usually for about an hour or two.

In a different city each year.

The text we studied was rather complex and challenging – the exquisitely concise (and often exquisitely confounding) glosses of the 18^th-century Torah luminary known as the Vilna Gaon to the Shulchan Aruch’s section on the laws of mikva’os, or ritual baths.  That complex material was a major focus of my study-partner’s analysis for many years.  I was just “tagging along.”  Once a year.

The reason for the infrequency of that study partnership was that my partner, Rabbi Hillel Goldberg – a formidable Torah scholar, writer and the editor of the Intermountain Jewish News – lives in Denver, and I reside in New York. We would meet, though, each year at a gathering of Jewish journalists sponsored by an organization that held its annual get-together in one of various cities across the country.

When Reb Hillel would arrive at the convention hotel, one of the first things he would do was to contact me to arrange a good time to sit and study a bit.  I well recall our study sessions in places like Washington, Philadelphia, Denver and Los Angeles (where we discussed one of the Vilna Gaon’s glosses amid actors’ trailers at the Universal Studios lot, surely a place that had not witnessed such holiness in the past).  Our chavrusah-sessions were highlights of the junkets for me.

I haven’t attended the gatherings for a number of years now (due to budget constraints and a general feeling that there wasn’t much for me to either gain or give by my attendance), and not long ago, Reb Hillel published a comprehensive and scholarly tome on the course of his Vilna Gaon glosses study over those years.

Reb Hillel is also the author of several more works, considerably more layman-accessible.  And he has just published a new one, entitled “The Unexpected Road: Storied Jewish Lives Around the World.”

Anyone who knows me knows well that I’m not a fan of what pass for “inspirational stories” – that is to say, undocumented (if widely believed and shared) accounts of various great people’s performance of wonders or astounding mental feats.  It’s not that I don’t value miracles (though I have found few than can top a starry sky, or a baby), or that I’m not impressed by eidetic memories (though, ultimately, human value lies in righteousness, not talent, mental or otherwise).  It’s just that, well, there isn’t, shall we say, rigorous corroboration of most of the popular tales that make the rounds; and I’m a hopelessly critical thinker (read: cynic).

And so I tend to favor overtly fictional parables – stories that make no pretentions whatsoever to having ever actually happened, but nevertheless yield food for thought.  And first-person accounts from people I actually know.

Rabbi Goldberg is one such person, and his new book is chock full of such accounts.  He describes people he knows, or has known, and lets us share in some of the inspiration and realizations he has gleaned from their lives and doings.

In the book, one meets a man who reunited two brothers separated at Auschwitz, an American congregational rabbi who cast himself to “chance” in order to personally witness Divine providence, great leaders of Jews and simple Jews, even a neo-Nazi who came to give a Jew a thankful hug.  The places along Rabbi Goldberg’s “unexpected road” include Basel, Santa Fe, Boston, Minsk, Jerusalem (of course), Brooklyn (ditto, lihavdil), Frankfurt and Atlanta.

This collection of stories will indeed, as Rabbi Berel Wein predicts in a blurb on the book’ jacket, help readers realize that “there is more to life and life’s events than ‘me’ and one’s plans and decisions.”  Each of us, Rabbi Goldberg assures the reader, can become, like many of the people whose stories are included in his book, angels of the Divine.

© 2014 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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