“Obama, May [G-d] Curse You… We Will Trample On Your Head With Our Feet, You Infidel, You Tyrant!”
Syrian “child preacher” Abu Ja’far, in a recorded “street sermon” widely circulated on the Internet.
Kid’s got a bright future in talk radio.
Category Archives: Personalities
Stubborn Spirit
The birthday cake was ablaze with 105 candles, and many among the scores of people present at the Czech embassy in London this past spring for the party would not have been there – or anywhere – had it not been for the man in whose honor they had gathered.
Nicholas Winton, who remains in full possession of his faculties, including his sense of humor, saved the lives of 669 children, mostly Jewish, during the months before the Second World War broke out in 1939. There are an estimated 6000 people, many of those children, now grown, along with their own descendants, who are alive today because of his efforts, which went unrecognized for decades.
Born in 1909 in West Hampstead, England, Mr. Winton was baptized as a member of the Anglican Church and became a successful stockbroker. He lived a carefree life until December 1938, when a friend, Martin Blake, asked him to forgo a ski vacation and visit him in Czechoslovakia, where Mr. Blake had traveled in his capacity as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, a group that was providing assistance to refugees created by the German annexation of the Sudetenland regions of the country. Together, the two men visited refugee camps filled to capacity with Jews and political opponents of the Nazis.
Mr. Winton was moved by the refugees’ plight. Knowing, too, about the violence that had been unleashed against the Jewish community in Germany and Austria during the Kristallnacht riots a mere month earlier, he resolved to do for children from Sudetenland what British Jewish agencies were doing to rescue German and Austrian Jewish children.
Audaciously (and illegally) “borrowing” the name of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, he began taking applications from parents, first at a hotel room and then from an office in central Prague. Thousands lined up to try to save their children’s lives.
(When an interviewer recently remarked to Mr. Winton that his actions “required quite a bit of ingenuity,” the interviewee responded, “No, it just required a printing press to get the notepaper printed.” And asked about travel documents he had forged and the “bit of blackmail” that he had employed to save children, Winton, seemingly amused, just replied, “It worked. That’s the main thing.”)
Returning to London, Mr. Winton raised money to fund the children transports, including funds demanded by the British government to bankroll the children’s eventual departure from Britain; and he found foster homes for the refugee children.
The first transport organized by Mr. Winton left Prague by plane for London on March 14, 1939, the day before the Germans occupied the Czech lands. After the Germans established a Protectorate in the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, Winton organized seven further transports that departed by rail out of Prague and across Germany to the Atlantic Coast, then traveled by ship across the English Channel to Britain. At the train station in London, British foster parents waited to collect the children. The last trainload of children left Prague on August 2, 1939, and the rescue activities ceased when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of September 1939
During the war, Mr. Winton volunteered for an ambulance unit for the Red Cross, then trained pilots for the Royal Air Force. He married, raised a family and earned a comfortable living. For 50 years, his rescue efforts remained virtually unknown until 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook from 1939 with all the children’s photos and names. (Asked why he kept his secret so long, he explained, “I didn’t really keep it secret, I just didn’t talk about it.”)
Once his story got out, Mr. Winton received a letter of thanks from the late former Israeli president Ezer Weizman, was made an honorary citizen of Prague and, in 2002, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his service to humanity. His recent projects include providing help to the mentally handicapped people and building homes for the elderly.
It would be easy to place Nicholas Winton’s story securely in the “Righteous Gentiles” file, along with the accounts of other non-Jews who proved themselves exemplars of humanity. But his life, as it happens, is not that simple. It may speak less to the greatness of chassidei umos ha’olam and more to the pinteleh Yid.
For the bittersweet fact is that Nicholas Winton was born Nicholas Wertheimer, and was baptized and raised Christian on the decision of his parents, assimilated German Jews.
© 2014 Hamodia
From The Mouths Of Secularists
“…To this very day, if you ask for my religion, I say ‘Orthodox Hebrew’ – in the sense that the church [sic] I’m not attending is that one. If I were to go to a church, that’s the one I would go to. That’s the one I failed. It doesn’t mean I’m something else…”
Those are the words of the famous physicist and Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi (1898-1988), quoted in the book “Rabi, Scientist and Citizen.” He was born into an observant family in Galicia, and was still a baby when his parents immigrated to the United States.
Although he eventually lost his connection to Jewish observance, he confided toward the end of his life that “Sometimes I feel I shouldn’t have dropped it so completely”; and, as his earlier words above testify, he rejected the idea that Judaism could ever be anything other than what it always has been, or that he – or any Jew – could ever be anything other than an Orthodox Jew – whether or not he chose to live like one.
A similar sentiment was voiced several years ago by then-Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin, the man elected last week to be Israel’s 10th president.
In a 2006 Knesset speech, Mr. Rivlin, who has been described as secular, said that he “has no doubt… that the status of Judaism according to Halacha is what has kept us going for 3,800 years” and that “besides it there is nothing.” During that same address, he explained that if non-halachic conversion standards were to be adopted by Israel, the state would be abandoning a “religious definition” of Jewishness for a mere “civic” one with no inherent meaning.
And back in 1989, after visiting two Reform temples, he was blunter still, calling the liberal Jewish movement “a completely new religion without any connection to Judaism.”
Mr. Rivlin was assailed by adherents of non-Orthodox Jewish movements on both those occasions, and his present ascendancy to the Israeli presidency has understandably caused them renewed heartburn.
“He may be open-minded on a variety of issues,” Uri Regev, a Reform rabbi who now heads the “religious pluralism” organization Hiddush, sniffed about the president-elect, “but his mind was made up” about Judaism’s definition. He is “the same old anti-liberal, close-minded traditionalist Israeli.”
Former Reform leader Eric Yoffie echoed that judgment before Mr. Rivlin’s election, pointedly warning that he expects “candidates for president to act in an appropriate and respectful manner to all elements of the Jewish world.”
And the current head of the Reform movement, Rick Jacobs, recently penned an open letter in Haaretz to Mr. Rivlin, in which he reminded the Israeli president-elect of the “stunning insensitivity” he had displayed toward the “dominant religiosity of North American Jewry” (a risible description if ever there were one) and expressed his hope that “you’re ready to update your harsh and rather unenlightened views of our dynamic, serious and inspiring expression of Judaism” (ditto).
Whether Mr. Rivlin, who by all accounts is a pleasant fellow, will see a need to assuage the umbrage-takers remains to be seen. He may succumb to the pressures, although one hopes that he will not sacrifice principle for pacification.
The fact that the new president’s old statements have been dredged up and placed in the spotlight, however, is a healthy development. For it informs the “dominant religiosity of North American Jewry” – in other words, the vast population of the Jewishly ignorant – that disinterested, objective observers readily perceive that there is only one Judaism, the original one.
The conniptions over Mr. Rivlin’s comments also call attention to the fact that, while various Jewish groups were “evolving” new theologies and practices, and abandoning the mesorah, the community of Jews who remained faithful to the Jewish religious tradition didn’t peter out, as so many had expected (and so many had hoped), but rather thrived, and continues to thrive, b”H, mightily.
By contrast, American Jewry outside the Orthodox world is in deep demographic crisis. The intermarriage and assimilation that concerned us greatly decades ago have only intensified and accelerated. Long gone are the days when a person presenting himself as a Jew can be presumed to be halachically Jewish.
And yet, there are still countless actual Jews out there, Jews who lack the benefit of an observant upbringing or a Jewish education, and are under the delusion that Judaism is a smorgasbord of offerings. They are, moreover, relentlessly bombarded with articles in the “mainstream” “Jewish” media that, in effect, warn them not to dare sample the Orthodox tray, that it will make them sick.
What can we do to help those cherished if distant fellow Jews? Ultimately, be who we are supposed to be. Many who have gotten their impressions of Orthodox Jews from actually seeing true Orthodox life and behavior (rather than from the media malshinim) have in fact returned to their spiritual roots.
But a first step is the promotion of a truism, one that was voiced by a nuclear physicist and an Israeli president.
© Hamodia 2014
Storied Lives
I used to have a chavrusah, or study partner, with whom I learned Torah annually.
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 18th-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
Open “Orthodoxy”?
A rejoinder to my recent essay, “True and Tragic Colors,” about Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and “Open Orthodoxy,” was published by The Times of Israel. Below is my response to that posting, written in my capacity as Agudath Israel of America’s spokesperson.
I am grateful to Dr. Ben Elton, a student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, for his rejoinder to my recent posting about that institution and “Open Orthodoxy,” in which I asserted that neither can lay claim to the adjective “Orthodox,” at least not if words are to have meanings.
My gratitude derives from the fact that Dr. Elton’s words help clarify the issue. Although he writes that he is “bemused” by my critique of his invocation of the Wurzburger Rav as an example of Chovevei Torah’s approach, his explanation of his bemusement can allow us to better understand whether that revered Torah personality would indeed approve of the inclusion of non-Orthodox Jewish clergy in training rabbis, which YTC proudly embraced at its recent presidential installation.
Dr. Elton is correct that there was indeed a difference of opinion between the Wurzburger Rav (Rav Yitzchok Dov Halevi Bamberger) and Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch regarding whether the rabbis of the Orthodox community of Frankfurt could remain part of that city’s official “Jewish community” council along with non-Orthodox clergy.
And he is correct, too, to note that Rav Hirsch’s objection to such membership was based on his conviction that it would “thereby give[s] formal recognition to the legitimacy of Reform.”
But he is mistaken to interpret Rav Bamberger’s dissent as permitting membership despite that contention. The Wurzberger Rav simply felt that membership in a communal body did not, in fact, confer legitimacy of any sort to Reform. As I noted in my response to Dr. Elton’s original posting, Rav Bamberger expressly forbade membership in other cities’ communal councils, where he apparently felt the terms of membership did in fact confer such legitimacy to Reform.
That a communal Orthodox rabbi, Marcus Horowitz, sat on the body overseeing the construction of a Reform Temple “and used his influence to prevent building taking place on Shabbat” – Dr. Elton’s evidence for his thesis – does not negate Rav Bamberger’s forbiddance to confer Jewish legitimacy on non-Orthodox systems of thought.
Nor does Rav Bamberger’s letter to Rav Hirsch in which he wrote that their common “reject[ion” and “detest[ation] of Reform with all our hearts” should nevertheless “not break the ties of personal friendship which bind us.”
Personal friendships, of course, are not the issue here. Orthodox rabbis, even among those who affiliate with Agudath Israel, maintain friendships with non-Orthodox representatives. The issue, though, is not personal friendship but something entirely different: whether non-Orthodox rabbis should be given a public platform to share their views on the quintessentially religious question of how to train rabbis.
As Dr. Elton himself concedes, Rabbi Bamberger would not likely “have advocated theological dialogue” with Reform representatives. Does he imagine that the Wurzberger Rav would have invited them, as YCT did, to a public forum to train rabbis? How, then, can Dr. Elton claim that “YCT is simply enduring the same critique today” as Rav Bamberger did in his day, and that YCT “can take pride in [Rav Bamberger’s] company?
Most glaring is Dr. Elton’s response (or lack of one) to the main point of my earlier posting: that neither YCT nor “Open Orthodoxy” can legitimately lay claim to the title “Orthodox.”
He blithely dismisses my summoning of quotations from YCT leaders and honored graduates that negate the very essence of what history has come to call Orthodoxy, with the observation that the quotes “do not contain much new material” and that they have been well explained “in the past.” He does not, however, offer even a synopsis of any such explanations. He cannot, for none can exist. One either accepts that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob existed or one does not; one either subscribes to the belief that the Torah, Written and Oral, was given to our ancestors at Sinai, or one does not. Esteemed leaders in the “Open Orthodoxy” movement do not. Orthodoxy does.
History is the best guide here. The Conservative movement began precisely as “Open Orthodoxy” has begun – the former was so named because it wished to “conserve” what it judged it could of halacha in a new environment that it felt deserved a more liberal approach to traditional Jewish thought and social norms. It shunned the word “Orthodox” only because it saw that adjective, at the time, as an albatross around its neck, since Orthodoxy was expected to expire quickly in America. YCT, by contrast, embraces the word as a badge of honor. Not because it fits but because embracing the word “Orthodox” – the institution hopes – might distinguish it from the Conservative movement despite its essential duplication of its essence.
The problem is that, to imagine an example in another realm, a person who is anti-immigration, anti-abortion, against higher corporate taxes and pro-gun and cannot legitimately claim the label “liberal.” As much as he may call himself that, he is like a leopard claiming to be an eagle.
And leopards cannot even change their spots, much less fly.
Whatever it may call itself, a neo- Conservative movement is simply not part of what history has come to call Orthodoxy.
© 2013 Agudath Israel of America
Missing the Joke — And the Message
The lack of a sense of humor may not totally disqualify one from being a good teacher, but in, as they say, my humble opinion, it comes close.
I had recent occasion to watch the recorded presentation of an Israeli professor who seemed, regrettably, humor-impaired. That he exhibited no sense of cleverness wasn’t so terrible. That he failed, though, to even recognize humor – in this case a poignant pun – was.
The lecturer was soberly providing his audience what it had come to hear, namely a scholarly assault on the contemporary “Ultra-Orthodox” world and its leaders. And, as has become de rigueur, in his effort to portray the charedi world as hopelessly close-minded, he invoked the famous dictum of the Chasam Sofer (Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, 1762-1839) that “chadash assur min haTorah” – “what is new is forbidden by the Torah.” But he presented it as some sort of absurdly pilpulistic application, not seeming to realize – or, certainly, not communicating – that it was, in fact, ingenious wordplay.
The Chasam Sofer, venerated by Orthodox Jews to this day, was a strong opponent of the nascent Reform movement of his day, which had begun to attract adherents in his native Austria-Hungary and beyond. It was his influence and determination that kept the Reform movement out of Pressburg, the city he served as rabbi for more than three decades. And it was his determination to preserve what we today call Jewish “Orthodoxy”– namely, commitment to the entirety of classical Judaism – that impelled him to humorously hijack the “what is new is forbidden” phrase.
The phrase’s original context is the Biblical prohibition of consuming the “new grain” of each Jewish year until the second day of Passover, when the Omer sacrifice was brought. Rabbi Schreiber employed the phrase as a pun (oh, what injury we do to a joke by explaining it!), to express his entirely unrelated-to-agriculture feeling that even a seemingly innocuous innovation to Jewish life – “what is new” – must be regarded with skepticism, and scrutinized to ensure that it will not prove an inadvertent step in a bad direction.
Some innovation-minded Jews, including some who are fully committed to halacha, find the Chasam Sofer’s approach discomfiting. What they don’t seem to appreciate is that he was not, in fact, offering a blanket rejection of all that is “new” for all time, as people like the humor-compromised professor profess. To begin with, the revered Torah leader of his generation was confronting an immediate and formidable challenge to the mesorah, or Jewish religious tradition, a movement that rejected its very theological foundation. And so, even minor changes in liturgy or synagogue practices represented – at least to a deeply perceptive mind –a potential Trojan Horse. Or, perhaps a better metaphor, a slippery slope.
And secondly, he was not saying that every change in Jewish life or practice is dangerous. The fact that sermons are delivered from Orthodox synagogue pulpits in English, that there are schools and seminaries for Orthodox girls and women, that organized efforts exist to encourage Orthodox Jews to reach out to their non-Orthodox fellow Jews all reflect that fact that what is “new” is sometimes not only permitted but necessary.
What allows the novel to be embraced by Orthodoxy, though, is the considered judgment of the most experienced and learned religious leaders of the Orthodox world. That Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch sermonized in German, that the Chofetz Chaim endorsed the Bais Yaakov movement, that “outreach” was characterized as a Jewish obligation by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, all demonstrate that the Chasam Sofer’s pun was not intended to promote some sort of spiritual Luddism.
What it was intended to do was to sensitize his generation to the existence, and danger, of slippery slopes, a recognition our own times require of us no less.
In truth, at least with regard to secular beliefs, most American Jews readily understand that small departures from a path can eventually lead to larger, more disturbing, deviations. Any “new” idea, for instance, that that would ever-so-slightly modify First Amendment rights in the United States, like freedom of speech or religion, is rightfully seen as a threat to those high ideals. Not to mention that every teacher – and parent – knows that there are times when making a small allowance can be an invitation to anarchy, when giving an inch begets the loss of a yard, or a mile.
Yes, of course, there are limits to what sort of Jewish “newnesses” should be regarded as wrong. There are many great jokes – speaking of humor – that we charedim tell among ourselves about taking stringencies or “the way it has always been done” too far.
But as a wise man (or wise guy; I think it was me) once said: Just because elephants don’t fly doesn’t mean birds don’t exist. Excessive insistence on fealty to the way things have always been is unwise. But so is pursuing, without the blessings of true Jewish leaders, shiny, happy innovations whose trajectories we cannot know. That was what the Chasam Sofer meant, and expressed in an amusingly creative way.
It’s unfortunate that the Israeli professor wasn’t able to recognize a joke – or the possibility that a venerated Jewish sage might be more prescient than he.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Crime and Prejudice
My first encounter with the legendary Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z”l, the late president of Agudath Israel of America and the man who hired and mentored me as the organization’s spokesperson, was an unexpected phone call offering praise and criticism.
It was the mid-1980s, and I was a rebbe, or Jewish studies teacher, in Providence, Rhode Island at the time. Occasionally, though, I indulged my desire to write op-eds, some of which were published by the Providence Journal and various Jewish weeklies.
One article I penned in those days was about the bus-stop burnings that had then been taking place in religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel. Advertisements on the shelters in religious neighborhoods began to display images that were, to put it genteelly, not in synch with the religious sensibilities of the local residents, for whom modesty was a high ideal and women were respected for who they were, not regarded as means of gaining attention for commercial products.
Scores of the offensive-ad shelters were either spray-painted or torched; and, on the other side of the societal divide, a group formed that pledged to burn a synagogue for every burned bus-stop shelter. It was not a pretty time.
My article was aimed at trying to convey the motivation of the bus-stop burners, wrong though their actions were. Imagine, I suggested, a society where heroin was legal, freely marketed and advertised. And a billboard touting the drug’s wonderful qualities was erected just outside a school. Most of us would never think of defacing or destroying the ad but most of us would probably well relate to the feelings of someone who took things into his own hands. For a charedi Jew, 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 he had found it. But, he added – and the “but,” I realized, was the main point of the 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 certainly exist among religious Jews. But I thanked my esteemed caller greatly for both his kind words and his critical ones. I wasn’t convinced that my assumption had really been unreasonable, but, I supposed, he had a valid point.
To my surprise, 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.
What recalled that era and interaction to me this week were the reports from Israel that arrests had been made in the 2009 case of a gunman who entered a Tel Aviv youth center for homosexuals and opened fire on those inside, killing two people and wounding 15 before escaping.
Both Israeli and western media freely speculated at the time that the murderer was likely a charedi, bent on visiting his idea of justice upon people who live in violation of the Torah’s precepts.
What has apparently turned out to be the case, though, is that the rampage at the club had nothing to do with either charedim or religious beliefs. It was reportedly a revenge attack in the wake of a minor’s claim that he had been abused by a senior figure of the club. A family member of the minor allegedly went to the club to kill the suspected abuser but, unable to find him, opened fire indiscriminately. (Unsurprisingly, but worthy of note all the same, none of the media pundits or bloggerei who laid the shooting at the feet of charedim have offered apologies.)
There are, to be sure, unsavory people in charedi communities, as there are in every community. Religious dress and lifestyle are no guarantees of what kind of person lies behind the façade. The Talmud includes a difference of opinion about how “Esav’s personification,” the angel with whom Yaakov wrestled, appeared to our forefather. One opinion holds that the malevolent being looked like “a mugger”; the other, “like a religious scholar.”
But for anyone to assume that any particular crime must have been the work of someone in the charedi community – or in any community – bespeaks a subtle bias born of animus, whether recognized by its bearer or not.
And such assumptions are criminal in their own right.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Target (Mal)Practice
Some unwarranted criticism that was lobbed last week at several Orthodox writers greatly disturbed this one.
The target of one volley – though the shots widely missed their mark – was Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblum, one of the preeminent representatives of the charedi world. He was harshly criticized in a magazine editorial for a column he penned in a different magazine wherein he sought a silver lining in the current political disenfranchisement of charedi parties in the Israeli government coalition.
Rabbi Rosenblum suggested that the current situation “affords new opportunities to meet our fellow Jews on the individual level” and that now that they know that “we no longer threaten them” in the political realm, “they may be more open… to getting behind the stereotypes that fuel the animus” against charedim in Israel. “On a one-to-one basis,” he suggested, “we can show them what Torah means to us, what we are prepared to sacrifice for it, and what it might mean for them as well.”
Astonishingly, the writer of those words was pilloried for that sentiment, and misrepresented, too, as having asserted that “the hatred secular Israelis have toward charedim is the fault of the hated rather than the haters” (which, of course, he never contended). The censure of Rabbi Rosenblum continued in much the same vein, with the censurer lumping all non-charedi Israelis into one undifferentiated “secular” mass brimming with ideological hatred for religious Jews, and concluding that the only possible way to truly alleviate anti-charedi sentiment would be for charedim to abandon their beliefs and “adopt… the culture of the majority.”
To be sure, there are secular ideologues in Israel, and elsewhere, for whom Judaism itself is anathema. Rabbi Rosenblum knows that well, every bit as well as his attacker. But the vast majority of non-charedi Jews are not ideologues. Most Jews who may bear bias against their charedi fellow citizens do so because of anti-charedi propaganda – and the fact that they themselves have few if any positive personal interactions with charedim. It is precisely that latter unfortunate reality that Rabbi Rosenblum suggests charedim try to address.
Rabbi Rosenblum is a friend of mine, but I have not always agreed with him (nor he with me) on every issue; I would never hesitate to take issue with him if I felt it were warranted. But his straightforward, heartfelt and wise contention that religious Jews in Israel (and I’d extend it to those of us in America no less) would do well to seek opportunities for demolishing negative stereotypes about charedim is simply beyond any reasonable argument.
Two other Orthodox writers, members of what is often called the “Centrist” Orthodox world, were also strongly taken to task last week in a charedi newspaper. These targets, criticized by a respected columnist, were Rabbi Gil Student and Rabbi Harry Maryles, each of whom presides over a popular blog.
The columnist’s complaint was that the rabbinical bloggers did not see fit to condemn a third Centrist rabbi, a celebrated scholar whose reputation was, sadly, recently upended by the revelation that he had engaged in internet “sock puppetry” – the assumption of an alternate identity on the Internet. It was hardly the most scandalous of scandals but was still (as the culprit eventually admitted and apologized for) an act of subterfuge below someone of his scholarly stature.
Since the pretender had often posted, been quoted or been lauded on Rabbi Student’s and Rabbi Maryles’ blogs – the columnist contended – each of them needed to vociferously denounce him. That, because their blogs regularly link to stories in the general media that portray charedi Jews’ real or imagined crimes and misdemeanors, and because many comments appearing on each blog evidence clear animus for charedim. Why, the columnist asked, the double standard, the seeming readiness to extend mercy and the benefit of the doubt to a Centrist rabbi’s misdeeds but not to fallen charedim? The columnist, moreover, insinuated that Rabbis Maryles and Student themselves harbor ill will for charedim.
I cannot claim to be aware of everything (or even most things) that Rabbi Student or Rabbi Maryles have written. But what I have seen of the writings of each has never given me the impression that either man bears any such animus. They are not charedi themselves, to be sure, and I have disagreed with some of their stances. This is not fatal; indeed it is healthy, like all “arguments for the sake of Heaven.” But I don’t think it is reasonable to demand that they denounce someone whom each of them has looked to as a rabbinic authority. IMHO, as bloggers are wont to write – “in my humble opinion” – there was simply no need to pour salt into the wound here.
An important point, though, was registered by the columnist, and it is one that I hope Rabbi Maryles, Rabbi Student and, for that matter, the “charedi websites” alike all ponder well: Comments sections attract ill will, slander and cynicism like some physical materials do flies. While there are certainly responsible commenters out there, there are also many people with clearly too much time and too few compunctions. And it doesn’t strike me as outlandish to wonder if permitting the posting of cynical or vile comments is complicity in what such comments “accomplish.”
It’s a propitious time for talmidim, which we all are of our respective rabbaim, to do our best to ratchet up our “kovod zeh lazeh” – our proper honor for one another, even when we may be in disagreement. That can be done agreeably.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Savage Ignorance
It’s difficult to know whether shock-jock Michael Savage is in fact the actual person whose Bronx-accented ranting emanates daily from radios across the country, or whether that voice belongs to an adopted persona, a cantankerous, rude and hilariously self-aggrandizing misfit who seeks to capitalize on an assortment of angers lurking in the dark corners of listeners’ souls.
Certainly the fact that the former Michael Weiner adopted the name “Savage,” of all things, and that the portly 70-ish fellow introduces his program with abrasive headbanger music more suitable to a pierced punk rocker than a political pontificator would seem to argue for the alter ego case. So would optimism about the human condition: It would be disturbing to know that such an abrasive person was in fact real.
Already disturbing is the fact that the fellow (or his affected persona) has Jewish admirers. Those fans apparently figure that someone who voices fury for terrorists, bashes Israel-bashers and claims to stand up for traditional morals not only can’t be all bad but must be all good. No logic there, of course, but no one ever claimed that fandom is fettered by reason.
And so some Orthodox Jewish admirers of Mr. Savage (or DR. Savage, as he prefers to be called – he earned a Berkeley Ph.D. in “nutritional ethnomedicine”) were pained to hear the talk show host spend most of two programs last week spitting outrage at a Jewish ritual and its “bearded guys” practitioners.
The ritual, metzitza bipeh, or oral suctioning of a circumcision cut – a practice widely observed in Chassidic and yeshiva-centric communities – is hardly a good poster child for religious freedom. That it appears strange and even dangerous to uninformed people unfamiliar with the rite is entirely understandable.
But ignorance – something Mr. Savage champions himself as helping lesser people overcome – remains ignorance; and its promotion, heavily larded with ill will, is offensive. It might not be surprising in a radio personality who famously once asserted that in “ninety-nine percent” of autism cases the child is just “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out” and on another occasion told a listener who dared take issue with him to “Go eat a sausage, and choke on it.” But the offensiveness remains.
Yes, New York Mayor (a.k.a. “Nanny-in-Chief”) Michael Bloomberg, with the assistance of the New York Board of Health, has waged war on metzitza bipeh, claiming that it has been the cause of infections of Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 (the cold sore virus, carried by most of the population but which can be dangerous in babies). That fact was the extent of Mr. Savage’s research of the issue. But it has been compellingly asserted by objective scientists that the mayor and health board’s claims are without basis in fact.
New York Westchester Hospital Chief of Infectious Diseases Dr. Daniel S. Berman, Beth Israel Hospital director of epidemiologic research Dr. Brenda Breuer and Columbia University Professor Awi Federgruen, an expert in quantitative methodology, have all publicly called into serious question the claim that metzitza bipeh represents any quantifiable danger to babies.
(There is, of course, a slightly increased danger of any infection at the site of any open wound – including a circumcision, even when metzitza bipeh was not performed. But such increased risk of harm doesn’t approach that of the increased risk to life and limb attendant to, say skiing, bicycling or crossing a Manhattan street – even when the “walk” sign is on.)
Affidavits by each of those intrepid professionals (none of whom carries any brief for metzitza bipeh; their only goal is to defend the integrity of science and its objective application to life and law) can be read at http://protectmilah.org/ (on the click-through to the second page of the site).
Had Mr. Savage taken the time and care to actually research the issue of the Jewish ritual’s alleged dangerousness before launching his crude tirade, he might have been less inclined to render a judgment so quickly, absolutely and rudely. But that would have required fairness and objectivity, not to mention good will toward people with whom he has little in common.
And such things, admirable though they are, don’t do much for ratings.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Musing: Full Circle for a Firebrand Feminist
A long article in The New Yorker chronicles the life and death of radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, who angrily rejected her Jewish heritage and whose name in the 1960s became synonymous with the jettisoning of traditional mores.
Ms. Firestone died last August at 67, after increasingly exhibiting signs of schizophrenia over the final decades of her life, during which she survived on public assistance and the kindness of others. She eventually became a recluse, living in a East Village tenement and refusing visitors.
The article, by the Jewish feminist journalist and author Susan Faludi, includes a deeply moving image, recounting how a spurned visitor to the shut-in recalled hearing “a torrent of Hebrew coming from inside” the tenement. “Firestone,” the article explains, “was reciting Jewish prayers.”