Letter to the Editor of the NY Jewish Week

Below is the text of a self-explanatory letter to the editor of the New York Jewish Week; it is published in this week’s issue of that paper.

December 21, 2013

Editor:

Rori Picker Neiss (op-ed, December 15) is “shocked” at my response to your reporter, who asked me for the rationale of esteemed rabbinical authorities’ opposition to pre-nuptial agreements focused on a future divorce. I explained that “there is a concern that introducing and focusing on the possible dissolution of a marriage when it is just beginning is not conducive to the health of the marriage.”

Ms. Picker Neiss contends that such focus is already introduced, in the traditional ketubah. I don’t know what version of the ketubah she is citing but the time-honored, halachically mandated one contains no mention whatsoever of divorce.

The pledge of support that the ketubah references remains in place in a case of divorce, or of the husband’s death. But that is simply a peripheral implication of the ketubah, which simply lists the husband’s obligations to his wife.

And so to compare the ketubah to the “prenup” used by some today is comparing apples to aufrufs.

Ms. Picker Neiss is entitled to embrace the prenuptual approach if she chooses. But I would only ask her to recognize that there are others who, for entirely defensible reasons, choose otherwise.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Director of Public Affairs

Agudath Israel of America

Musing: What Were They Thinking?

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, whose dispatches are widely reproduced both here in the United States and abroad, reported today on British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis having become the first sitting British chief rabbi to address the annual Limmud conference, a gathering of multi-denominational and non-denominational Jewish leaders and laymen. By attending and being featured as a speaker, the JTA informs us, he was “defying the opposition of prominent haredi Orthodox rabbis in England.”

Fair enough. Those charedi leaders have a longstanding and principled opposition to Orthodox rabbis participating in “multi-denominational” panels, rosters and such, since doing so perforce promotes the notion that all “rabbis are rabbis,” equals in belief and scholarship, and that all self-defined “Judaisms” are part of the Judaism of our ancestors.

But the JTA report puts it thus:

“The critics had said the conference, which draws thousands of participants from all walks of Jewish life, represented a danger to British Jewry by suggesting it was acceptable for observant Jews to associate with less or non-observant Jews.”

How a Jewish news agency can think for even a moment that charedi Jews – with their innumerable and rabbinically-endorsed outreach organizations and efforts, personal friendships and study-partnerships with “less or non-observant Jews” – consider it unacceptable to associate with such Jews is beyond comprehension.

The “T” in “JTA,” here at least, would seem to stand for “tripe.”

UPDATE:

To its credit, JTA has changed the wording of its piece and notified its clients of the correction. The paragraph quoted above now reads:

The critics had said the conference, which draws thousands of participants from all walks of Jewish life, represented a danger to British Jewry because of its inclusion of non-Orthodox religious perspectives.

It’s not a perfect correction, as that would require a more lengthy explanation of the objection to Orthodox rabbis’ participation in Limmud, along the lines of my posting above. But it is a great improvement. And has moved the “T” much closer to “truthful.”

The Fact of the Matter

Several weeks ago, my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting Detroit (well, Oak Park, a suburb, and a solvent one), where two of our daughters and their husbands and their children live.

Oak Park, and Southfield, which abuts it, are home to a wonderful, vibrant and multifaceted Orthodox Jewish community. The two neighboring cities, within walking distance of each other, boast (figuratively speaking; the residents are a modest bunch) an abundance of shuls and shteiblach, a large and flourishing yeshiva and Bais Yaakov, a yeshiva gedola, a Kollel – and all the requisite kosher shopping and dining amenities to boot. And housing, to put nice icing on a scrumptious cake, is extremely affordable.

One of the cake’s delectable ingredients is a “Partners in Torah” night of study that takes place each Tuesday night at Beth Yehudah, the local yeshiva, where Jews of all stripes learn Torah for an hour with study-partners from the Orthodox community. Hundreds of pairs of men, on one side of a large room, and women on the other, delve into Jewish texts together. It’s an inspiring sight (and sound).

Our recent trip, though, didn’t include a Tuesday, so we missed that weekly event. But we were there over a Motzoei Shabbos, a Saturday night, when that same Beth Yehudah space hosts a “father-son” (and grandfather-grandson) study hour. For 45 minutes I got to study with one of my grandsons (smart as a whip, of course), while my son-in-law studied with another of his sons. Then all the boys – there were hundreds present – moved to one side of the room, where there were tables, and were treated to pizza and a raffle. This takes place, as in dozens of other cities with Orthodox populations, every Saturday night when Shabbos ends fairly early. But so large a turnout in the Detroit suburbs impressed me deeply.

On our return home, though, I was saddened. Not only because I missed our kids and their kids, but also because of an article that had appeared in the interim in the Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal.

It was titled “Open Day Schools To Non-Jewish Students,” and advocated, well, just that. Written by a Reform Rabbi, Jeffrey K. Salkin, it bemoaned the fact that non-Orthodox “Jewish day schools are… going out of business.”

The Conservative movement’s Solomon Schechter schools nationwide, the writer noted, have “lost 25 percent of their students during the last five years,” and “since 2008-2009, four Reform day schools have closed.”

The rabbi’s solution? “Let’s open Jewish day schools to non-Jewish students.” Not only products of intermarriage, he explains, but “full-blown, not-in-the-least-bit-Jewish kids.”

After all, he argues, “Jewish kids have been attending (nominally and not so nominally) Christian day schools… Perhaps it’s time for us to learn how to be hosts as well.”

“We might,” he acknowledges, “lose the automatic, unspoken expectation that our kids will meet and perhaps mate with other Jewish kids.” But it will be worth it, as Jewish schools will achieve solvency and “we get to be a light to the nations – a teaching instrument to the world.”

And then, a bit later, came the report that the Union for Reform Judaism had sold off half of its headquarters in New York, to use $1 million of the proceeds, according to the movement’s president, Reform Rabbi Rick Jacobs, to supplement major foundation grants to reshape the movement’s “youth engagement strategies.”

An admirable goal, yes; youth engagement is vital to Judaism. We are but links in a chain, and our youth are the next link.

But the chain starts at Sinai. And the links will only be as strong as their connection to that original one.

That isn’t just theory, of course, or claim; it’s a fact, blazingly evident before open eyes, here and now in the third millennium of the Common Era, more than three thousand years since the Jewish chain’s first link was forged.

It is a fact evident in the sweet cacophony of children’s voices that rang out from that large packed room I was privileged to sit in for a short time on Motzoei Shabbos, and in all the similar ones across the country.

It is evident in Southfield, Michigan’s weekly Partners in Torah study-partner session, and in countless similar one-on-one telephone partnerships.

It is evident in the explosive growth of Orthodox day schools, high schools, yeshivos and kollelim, and in the many building campaigns to add to their number.

It’s just not yet a fact that’s evident, tragically, to Rabbis Salkin and Jacobs. May they, and their followers, come soon to face it, and to ponder it well.

Too Little Information

At the Sheva Brachos festivities this past summer for the marriage of our youngest daughter, my wife and I heard many wonderful things about our newest son-in-law. Friends and relatives spoke about his impressive Torah scholarship, his modesty, his sterling character. We had already known all that, although it was good to hear all the same. One testimonial, though, particularly impressed me; it was offered by one of the new husband’s brothers-in-law, who, in a short speech, recounted a long-ago lively Shabbos table discussion at his in-laws’ home.

Each member of the family, it seems, had vociferously put forth his or her perspective on some now-forgotten topic. Except, the speaker recounted, for our new son-in-law. When asked by one of the others for his opinion on the matter, the reticent family member’s simple response was: “I don’t have enough information to have one.”

I smiled broadly inside (probably outside too). If only, I mused, more of us were so thoughtful. Instead, our times seem to foster a diametric approach, that all of us must have opinions, with or without the assistance of facts. Call it a Contemporary Commandment: Thou shalt leave no issue uncommented upon.

And so, opine we merrily do, with or without the requisite information, the clay of which cogent opinions are molded – or objectivity, the furnace that forges them.

Whether the topic is gun control, the Affordable Care Act, immigration reform, Afghanistan or the agreement with Iran, we must speak up; full knowledge, let alone comprehension, of all the pertinent details is no requirement. (Mindless animus for the current occupant of the White House is much preferred – but that’s a different essay.)

Opinions have become something like fashion accessories (“Oh, what a nice opinion you have! Where can I get one like it?”), and too often are just purloined from pundits who make us feel righteous – or fearful or angry, the strange preferences of some.

Worse still is opting for “selective information.” Few if any important political or social topics lack two sides. Listening to only one of them because it’s where one has decided beforehand he’d like to land may be enticing, but it’s irresponsible. Shutting oneself in the echo chamber of (take your pick) “conservative” or “liberal” or Democratic or Republican (or Jewish or non-Jewish) commentary is a recipe for intoxication, not enlightenment.

Please don’t misunderstand. We are entitled to have and voice opinions, to take sides. (Some of us do it professionally.) But thoughtful judgment begins with seriously considering all sides of an issue. And yet, while it’s not exactly hard these days to find very different perspectives on any topic, too many of us purposefully avoid the marketplace of ideas (or limit ourselves to one stall). “Oh, I don’t read that,” we glibly say, or “I never pay attention to him” – simply because the “that” and the “him” represent points of view at odds with the speaker’s gut feelings. What somehow gets lost is the recognition that there’s great gain in confronting a different point of view – and none at all in just having one’s uninformed feelings seconded.

A little experiment: Write down the names of the media or pundits you make a point of reading. Now, examine your list to see if they are homogeneous or represent a broad variety of attitudes or perspectives. If the former’s the case, you’re cheating yourself.

Needless to say, there are ideas from which we observant Jews rightly insulate ourselves. But political and social issues don’t usually entail heresy or licentiousness. What they do entail, and require, is complete information, true objectivity and long, hard thought.

Consider, for example, the death penalty. On the one hand, why should taxpayers be burdened with housing and feeding bad people? Executions, moreover, deter other would-be criminals, and can provide victims’ families a measure of solace.

And yet, there’s another hand. Killing a human being is a grave deed, not to be undertaken lightly. And people, at least some of them, can change. And mistaken convictions have sent innocent people to their deaths.

It’s easy to just dismiss the first set of points as callous, or the second as weak-willed. What’s hard is weighing the two sides against each other. But that’s what’s necessary, in the end, to reach an informed, intelligent opinion.

And if the weighing is inconclusive – which happens more than seldom – and leaves an informed, intelligent person ambivalent, well, then, maybe he should just acknowledge the fact.

What? And remain opinionless? Heavens!

Sometimes, though, that’s necessary. And, as our son-in-law understood – and all of us should – there’s no shame in that.

The Peril of Pluralism

The following essay was published earlier this week, under a different title, by Haaretz. It is posted here with that paper’s permission.

Those of us who believe that the Torah, both its written text and accompanying Oral Law, were bequeathed by G-d to our Jewish ancestors at Sinai, and that its commandments and prohibitions remain incumbent on Jews to this day, obviously hope that Jewish movements lacking those beliefs remain marginal forces in Israel.

But that’s a hope born of the perspective of a particular belief-system (albeit the conviction of all Jews’ ancestors until two centuries ago). Leaving such blatant subjectivity aside, though, would the growth of non-Orthodox Jewish theologies be a boon or a bane to Israeli society qua society?

The answer may lie in the example of the United States, where the Reform and Conservative movements, as well as less popular groups like Reconstructionism and Humanistic Judaism, had and have free rein to lay claim to Jewish authenticity. And here in the American diaspora, the results of the Jewish Pluralism experiment? Decidedly binal.

On the one hand, Jews who, for whatever reason, choose not to embrace the demands of a traditional (in this context, Orthodox) Jewish life have less demanding options for maintaining a Jewish identity. They have access to clergy who are not only sensitive and caring (as all clergy should be) but who don’t regard traditional Jewish observance as necessary for meaningful Jewish life, and who can guide them through times of personal challenges, happy occasions and, G-d forbid, sad ones.

The downside of the American “let a hundred Jewish flowers bloom” approach, though, is that there is no longer a single American Jewish community.

That is because the non-Orthodox Jewish movements, whether they are unconcerned with halacha (e.g. Reform, et al.) or view it as pliable (i.e. Conservative), have happily converted countless non-Jews and (less happily, to be sure, but readily all the same) issued countless divorces. (The Reform movement’s acceptance as Jews of children born to non-Jewish mothers but Jewish fathers has complicated matters even more.)

The problem is that Orthodox Jews, out of conviction, cannot recognize the validity of such status-changes that don’t meet the halachic bar. And so, there are thousands of American non-Jews who believe they are Jews, and unknown numbers of children born to women in second marriages whose first marriages have not, in the eyes of halacha, been dissolved, children who are severely limited in whom they may halachically marry.

As a result, whereas once upon a time (and it wasn’t long ago), an Orthodox young man or woman could see a similar-minded but different-backgrounded member of the opposite sex as a potential life-partner on the exclusive evidence of a claim of Jewish identity, that is no longer the case. A child or grandchild of non-Orthodox Jews may have the halachic status of a non-Jew or be the product of an illicit remarriage.

(I was personally involved, more than 30 years ago, in the case of a young observant Orthodox woman who discovered that her maternal grandmother had been a Reform convert, rendering the young woman halachically non-Jewish. She was able to undergo a halachic conversion. But countless others are not aware of their status and, even if they were, would not necessarily be willing to meet the necessary conversion requirements.)

And so, in America, not only must non-Orthodox Jews be regarded by Orthodox Jews as possibly (and, increasingly, likely) non-Jewish, but Reform converts (whose conversions do not meet Conservative standards) are similarly not Jewish in the Conservative casting of “halacha.” And as to the human repercussions of non-halachic divorces… well, imagine a young newly Orthodox man suddenly discovering that his beloved is halachically forbidden to him in marriage

At present, the Israeli Jewish community suffers no such balkanization. There is, to be sure, much disagreement within the Israeli Jewish family; but the fights are all family fights. Anyone presenting as a Jew is regarded as a relative, no matter his or her perspective.

That is the result of what is often derided as the “Orthodox monopoly” over “personal status” issues like conversion and divorce. A less charged description, though, might be “single standard.”

No less a non-traditional Jew than David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, understood the need for such a standard. He wrote in 1947 that multiple definitions of “Jew” would court “G-d forbid, the splitting of the House of Israel into two.” The number may have changed, but not the validity of his concern. And the fact has now been borne out by the American experiment: multiple Jewish standards yield multiple “Jewish peoples.”

Standards may chafe, but they are part of every country’s life. Even here in the pluralistic West, we have “monopolies” like a Food and Drug Administration and a Federal Reserve Board. A Jewish state requires a Jewish standard for issues of defining Jewishness.

Until fairly recently, the “highest common denominator” standard has always been halacha – “Orthodoxy.” At present in Israel, it still is. But should the pluralism push there make inroads, what would result – even from a disinterested, strictly sociological perspective –would be nothing short of Jewish societal disaster.

Deathless

Odd that the Torah-portion about the death of Yaakov Avinu is called “Vayechi.” After all, the word means “And he lived.” And, differently voweled, the word can mean “And he will live.” And especially odd, because Yaakov didn’t die.

At least that’s what Rabbi Yochanan (Taanis, 5b) asserts, although his listeners asked sarcastically, “Was it then for naught that the eulogizers eulogized him, the embalmers embalmed him and the gravediggers buried him?”

Unperturbed, Rabbi Yochanan responded with the prophet Yirmiyahu’s assurance, “And you, fear not, my servant Yaakov, says Hashem, and tremble not, Yisrael. For behold I am your savior from afar and [that of] your descendants from their land of captivity.” That verse, explained Rabbi Yochanan, juxtaposes Yaakov with his descendants. And so, the sage concluded, “just as those descendants are alive, so, too, must he be.”

As abstruse Talmudic passages go, this one would seem a good example. Rabbi Yochanan’s proof is as unconvincing as his contention was bewildering. And yet, the traditional word for dying (vayomos) is strangely absent from the account of Yaakov’s… whatever. Instead, an unusual and somewhat vague word (vayigva) is employed. And there are Midrashic narratives, too, that imply Yaakov’s life after life.

What is more, the concept that Jewish tradition associates with the third of our forefathers is emes, or “truth.” The Rambam (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 1:3-4), albeit in a different context, explains emes as meaning, essentially, “permanence”. Another indication that Yaakov, in some way, has transcended demise.

And, even with his embalming and burial, he has. For while his parents and their parents – Yitzchak and Rivka, and Avrohom and Sarah – bore children who proved unworthy of being progenitors of the Jewish people, only Yaakov and his wives merited seeing all of their offspring become forbears of the nation.

And so, in a very real way, Yaakov didn’t die; he metamorphosed into Yisrael, into the Jewish people. Which, when one thinks about it, may be precisely what Rabbi Yochanan was saying. His proof of Yaakov’s eternalness, after all, lies in a comparison between the man and his progeny. Perhaps it is more than a comparison. Yaakov becomes the Jewish people; he is Klal Yisrael, and that is why he is deathless.

That Yaakov would sire the first exclusively Jewish family was heralded in his famous dream, of which we read several weeks ago. There too, as in Yirmiyahu, Yaakov is juxtaposed with his descendants. “To you shall I give [the Holy Land], and to your children.” And: “All the families of the earth will be blessed through you, and through your children.”

Sometimes a thought can only be thought, or an observation observed, after a certain point in history. A possible example has to do with the realization of the import of Yaakov becoming Yisrael – and the dream he dreamt after he left Be’er Sheva and set out on his journey to Charan.

Because the dream-image that accompanied that Divine message about his future was a connection between heaven and earth in the form of a sulam, or “ladder.”

“Sulam” occurs only this once in the Torah, and its etymology is unclear. But an Arabic cognate of the word refers to steps ascending a mountain. The easiest way to ascend a mountain is a spiral path. That fact, and the possibly related Aramaic word “mesalsel” – to twist into curls – might lead one to imagine Yaakov’s “ladder” as something more akin to a spiral staircase.

It is a poignant image.

For, beginning with Yaakov, Jewishness is finally bestowed by genealogy.

And a spiral ladder is what one might more technically call a double helix, a fitting vision to presage the destiny of the man who dreamed it.

Seeing Privilege As A Pain

Sometimes a first-person account is just so sad you could cry. And when the writer seems oblivious to the sadness, well, then it’s sadder still

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently offered a piece written by a Jewish woman explaining her and her husband’s decision to forgo having children.

“As a Conservative Jew raised in the Midwest,” she writes, “I always assumed I’d have kids… In my mind, being a grown-up meant having children.”

During her college days, she stopped in at the Brown University Hillel House and met a young man. Eventually they began to date.

When marriage came up, they discussed how “religiously” to raise their children, and found that they had different opinions. Her partner wanted to observe the Sabbath but she did not. And, if they each did his or her own thing she feared the “inevitable” questions their children would have about their mother’s level of observance.

Then, she writes, “It occurred to me that our potential problems would vanish if we just skipped parenthood.” Problem – at least if she could get her boyfriend on board – solved.

As it happened, after the young man became her husband, he began “losing his religion.” They were busy with their careers and, she writes, “reproducing was the farthest thing from my mind.” Then she found websites of people who had decided not to have children, and shared them with her husband. They laughed together “at jokes about sleep-deprived parents and children misbehaving in public.

So other people, too, they realized, “lacked the drive to make and raise babies, and were they ever happy,” the woman recounts. “They described enticing benefits, one of which particularly stood out for me: having their beloved to themselves and cultivating a devoted, satisfying relationship.”

And so she and her husband decided that “life would be better without kids.”

The couple’s mothers were not happy, as one might expect. His was the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and had told her son in his youth that “If you don’t raise Jewish children, you’re letting Hitler win.”

“There is no coming back from aiding Hitler,” observes the writer, and “so we all avoid the topic.”

But, she insists, she and her husband are happy. They have each other entirely to themselves, without any pesky little people intruding on their relationship. And they owe it all to Judaism, the writer explains, without which she and her husband would never have met at that Hillel House.

“Ironically,” she concludes, “If it weren’t for Judaism… it may never have occurred to me not to have children at all.”

The writer knows, of course, and acknowledges, that Judaism favors children; indeed, she may even know, there is a Torah commandment to be fruitful. But she and her partner have made a conscious decision to reject their religious heritage.

What’s more, the husband and wife are depriving themselves not only of an important mitzvah, and not only of the life beyond death that is a son or daughter, but of the sublime joy of being parents. Sleepless nights and misbehaved children? Some of the most difficult or embarrassing parental situations, any parent could tell the writer, morph with time into some of the most meaningful, even wonderful, memories imaginable.

Is it hard? Of course. What worthwhile endeavor isn’t?

Do parents experience trying times? Yes. Life is trying; that’s its point.

Will it all have been worth it, in fact many millions of times over? Yes again.

And if the writer and her husband really think that their relationship to each other would suffer, rather than be strengthened, by their sharing the privilege of forging a new generation, they are astoundingly naïve. The greatest boon for any relationship is not a shared taste in music, nor a shared desire for childlessness; it is a shared challenging but meaningful endeavor. And when the endeavor is something as momentous as creating and guiding new lives, the bond that can result is most powerful.

Time will tell whether the writer’s and her husband’s bond of mutual desire for childlessness will itself prove sufficiently strong to maintain their relationship. But one thing is certain. The couple’s assumption that the mutual nurturing of a new generation is a mere pain rather than an unparalleled privilege is a sad mistake.

Made all the more sad by the couple’s utter unawareness of the fact.

(For a decade-old essay about the Jewish choice to have children, please see here.

In Those Days, In This Time

The following essay was written for Haaretz and appeared on its website recently under a different title. I share it here with that paper’s permission.

There’s a striking irony in the fact that Chanukah is one of the most widely celebrated Jewish holidays among American Jews.

Cynics have contended that it’s Chanukah’s proximity to the Christian winter holiday, with all the latter’s ubiquitous glitz, baubles and musical offerings, that has elevated Chanukah – seen by some as a “minor” celebration, since it’s a post-Biblical commemoration – to the pantheon (if a Greek word is appropriate here) of popular Jewish observances.

In fact, though, Chanukah is not minor at all; a wealth of Jewish mystical literature enwraps it, and laws (albeit rabbinical in origin) govern the nightly lighting of the holiday’s candles and the recital of Al Hanisim (“For the miracles”) in our prayers over Chanukah’s eight days.

As to whether many American Jews are enamoured of Frosty the Snowman, well, it’s an open question. Me, I prefer my winter nights silent.

But onward to the irony, which is not only striking but significant.

I recall hearing a Reform rabbi on a public radio program a couple of years ago extolling Chanukah as a celebration of “pluralism” and “tolerance.” After all, the Greek-Syrian Seleucid enemy of the Jews at the time of the Chanukah miracle, he explained, were intolerant of Jewish religious practices. Well, yes, but the Jewish rebellion wasn’t aimed at establishing some sort of Middle-Eastern First Amendment but rather to fiercely defend the study and practice of the Torah. And to rid the Temple of idols. Judaism has no tolerance at all for some things, idolatry prime among them.

What is more, the Jewish uprising also – and here we close in on the irony – was to counter the influence on Jews of a foreign culture.

To the Jewish religious leaders who established the observance of Chanukah, a greater threat than the flesh-and-blood forces that had defiled the Holy Temple was the adoption by Jews of Hellenistic ideals

For the Seleucids not only forbade observance of the Sabbath, circumcision, Jewish modesty laws and Torah-study, they held out to Jews the sweet but poison fruit of Greek culture, and some Jews devoured it whole.

The enemy, in other words, didn’t just install a statue of Zeus in the Temple, but an assimilationist attitude in some Jewish hearts. And Chanukah stands for the fight against that attitude.

It’s easy to dismiss the ancient Greek soap-opera that passed for divine doings, the gods who were described as acting like the lowest of men. It isn’t likely that many Jews (or Greeks, for that matter) really believed the tales of celestial hijinks that passed for spirituality at the time.

But the ancient Greeks had something much more enticing to offer. Hellas celebrated the physical world; it developed geometry, calculated the earth’s circumference, proposed a heliocentric theory of the solar system and focused attention on the human being, at least as a physical specimen. It philosophized about life and love.

But much of Hellenist thought revolved around the idea that the enjoyment of life was the most worthwhile goal of man, yielding us the words “cynic,” “epicurean,” and “hedonist” all Greek in origin.

Western society today revolves around pleasure too. It adopts the language of “freedom” and “rights” to disguise the fact, but it’s a pretty transparent fig leaf.

To be sure, most Jews in the U.S. remain stubbornly, laudably, proud of their Jewishness. But, all the same, they have been culturally colonized by a sort of contemporary Hellenism, American style.

Which bring us – if you haven’t already guessed – to the irony.

Because Chanukah addresses neither pluralism nor tolerance (admirable though those concepts may be in their proper places), but rather Jewish identity and continuity, the challenges most urgently faced by contemporary American Jews.

And its message stands right in front of them, in the flickering flames.

The “miracle of the lights,” Jewish tradition teaches, was not arbitrary. Abundant meaning for the Jewish ages shone from the Temple candelabra’s supernatural eight-day burning of a one-day supply of oil. For light, our tradition further teaches, means Torah, its study and its observance – not “contemporized,” and not edited to conform to the Zeitgeist, but as it has been handed down over the centuries.

When American Jews light their Chanukah candles they may not consider that the holiday they are acknowledging speaks most poignantly to them.

But they should.

For older Chanukah-themed essays just click on “Chanukah” in “Categories.”

Musing: Professor Sarna’s Hammer

Jonathan Sarna, a professor of history (and someone whose company I have enjoyed on too-rare occasions) recently penned a piece (“Why is Orthodoxy Packing Up Big Tent”?) for the Forward in which he tries to minimize the import of a letter signed by scores of members of the Rabbinical Council of America saying, in effect, that the “Open Orthodoxy” movement is not only unorthodox but non-Orthodox. He compares the widespread rejection of the “OO” movement by rabbis across the Orthodox spectrum to earlier rejections of movements within Orthodoxy that came to be included in the Orthodox tent. The RCA itself, he points out, was once condemned by some respected Orthodox religious leaders.

It is to be expected that a professor of history with a conceptual hammer will see every happening as a parallel of some earlier one. But, with all due respect to Professor Sarna, the issue at present isn’t whether or not the RCA was once itself seen by some as beyond the pale.

The issue is whether the “big tent” has any walls, whether one can jettison essential elements of the theology of what has been called “Orthodoxy” over the past century and a half and still claim the mantle of that name.

Honored members of the “OO” movement have made theological statements and proposed “halachic” actions that are indistinguishable — indistinguishable — from those of the Conservative movement in the 1950s.

Back then, Conservative leaders had the honesty to distinguish their movement from Orthodoxy, by the very name they adopted. “Open Orthodoxy,” by striking contrast, is attempting to do just the opposite, claiming to be something it demonstrably is not.

“Time to Come Home” or “The Conservative Lie or Whatever

Back in 2001, I wrote a piece for Moment Magazine about the Conservative movement. It caused quite a stir, evoking angry and overheated reactions from Conservative leaders. Part of the anger, no doubt, was a result of Moment’s titling of the article “The Conservative Lie.” I had titled it “Time to Come Home.”

But much of the anger was about my message itself, that the movement was not, as it claimed, grounded in halacha, and therefore was losing, and would continue to lose, members who sought an authentic connection with the Judaism of the ages.

Of late, there has been much written about the Conservative movement, born of the recent Pew survey’s revelation that it has faltered greatly in terms of members over recent years.

I thought my article of 12 years ago might be of interest to some readers. So if it is to you, I have posted it here.