The Import of Empathy

The other day, waiting to board a bus, I was moved to think about empathy.

Unfortunately, the prod came in the form of the opposite, crass selfishness.  A young woman approached the group of us waiting to step up into the vehicle and insinuated herself at the front of the long line.  She had no visible physical impairment, made no request for anyone’s permission, offered not even a perfunctory “excuse me.”  She seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that other people occupied the universe at the time, some even in her immediate vicinity.

I could read the minds of my fellow future passengers. Their faces telegraphed my own mental reaction: Who does she think she is?  How would she like it if someone cut before her in a line?  Yes, she would probably reply in puzzlement.  “But that’s not what’s happening.  I am the one cutting in here, not someone else cutting in before me.”  The lady, in other words, was empathy-impaired.

“My sins I recount today,” as the waiter, just released from prison, told Pharaoh.  I recall myself as a small boy armed with a magnifying glass on a sunny day, incinerating individual ants out of sheer curiosity.  I even remember watching without pain or protest as my buddy devised creative ways of dispatching grasshoppers, ever-present victims of little boys in early-60s Baltimore summers.  Some claim that killing insects as a child presages the eventual emergence of a serial killer.  So far, though, thank G-d, I haven’t much felt the urge to commit murder; and when I have, I have managed to overcome it.

Today, in fact, when an insect finds its way into my home, I always try to capture the invader and escort him or her safely to the great outdoors.  (All right, mosquitos are an exception, but they are the aggressors.)

After all, I wonder, how would I like it if I were a stinkbug and someone chose to squash me or spray me with poison or flush me down the toilet?  Empathy, again.

Being concerned with the wellbeing of an insect, or for that matter a dog or cat or cow, is but one rung on the empathy ladder.  The Torah teaches us that animals, in the end, although they may not be needlessly hurt, exist for human servitude and food, things we would surely not wish for ourselves.  Our ultimate and most powerful concern for “the other” is meant to be for other human beings.

What occurred to me at the bus stop was that, while some may gauge human spiritual growth by religious meticulousness or proficiency in texts or the ability to deeply meditate, the most essential marker of spiritual progress may well be how far one has progressed from the selfishness that defines us at birth toward true, encompassing empathy. (I have far to go; caring about bugs is easier than truly caring about people, especially some people.  But most of us have, over our years of living, grown, to various degrees, to appreciate empathy.)  The severely empathy-impaired, like the girl on the bus line, are essentially children, perhaps infants.

It is the import of empathy, of course, that imbues Rabbi Akiva’s statement (in the Midrash, quoted by Rashi) that the verse, “Love your fellow as yourself” (Vayikra, 19:18) is a “great principle of the Torah.” And Hillel’s famous response to the potential convert who insisted on learning the entire Torah on one foot: “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and study it” (Shabbos, 31a).

Jews the world over are reading and studying these days about Avrohom, the subject of the weekly Torah readings.  It is not insignificant that the first of our forefathers is characterized by our tradition not only as the champion of monotheism – the quintessential Jewish idea – but as the paragon of chesed, or “kindness to others.”  His rejection of idolatry, even to the point of risking his life, is of a part with his pining for strangers to welcome and feed even when in great pain from his adult circumcision.

Which points to a deeper truth, one that might be germane to the akeida, Avrohom’s “binding” of Yitzchok his son: Although some choose to see human empathy as a simple evolutionary adaptation that helps protect the species, a believing Jew’s dedication to the other is ultimately expressed in the context of his dedication to the Other, that is to say to G-d.  We are born utterly selfish; we are meant to strive toward utter selflessness, to care about and for our fellows, and to be, in the end, selflessly dedicated servants of the Divine.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Musing: Whistling Past the Maternity Ward

One of the many post-mortem dissections of the recently released Pew study of American Jews appeared in the Forward last week.  It contended that the Orthodox community “isn’t growing nearly as fast as some of its boosters claim.”  The 10% of the American Jewish population that identify as Orthodox Jews, the piece explains, is “up only 2% from 10 years ago.”

What’s more, the article notes, “only 48% of people who were brought up Orthodox remain Orthodox.”

As it happens, though, the Orthodox “retention rate” has risen considerably in recent decades. Whereas, indeed, only 22% of people now 65 and older raised Orthodox still call themselves that, fully 57% of people aged 30-49 raised Orthodox do.  And for those under 30, the percentage of raised-Orthodox Jews who are still Orthodox is 83%.

As to the “up only 2%” observation, it would seem that some journalists could use a math refresher.  Growth from 8% to 10% represents a rise of fully 25% – a rather impressive figure indeed.

True and Tragic Colors

Agudath Israel of America’s recent statement regarding the ostensibly Orthodox “Yeshivat Chovevei Torah” took that institution to task for crossing a particularly bright red line by inviting non-Orthodox Jewish clergy to make presentations at a “roundtable” entitled “Training New Rabbis for a New Generation” at its installation of a new president.

The most eloquent and straightforward defense of YCT came in the form of a posting at “The Times of Israel” by a student of the institution, Dr. Ben Elton.

While graciously “respect[ing]” the “right of the Agudah to object to cross-denominational activity” (even citing Lord Jonathan Sacks in concurrence, as Rabbi Sacks has written that “pluralism and Orthodoxy are mutually exclusive”), Dr. Elton asserts that the Wurzberger Rov (Rav Yitzchok Dov Halevi Bamberger), by taking a different position from that of Rav Shamson Raphael Hirsch on the secession of Orthodox Jews from the larger, government-sanctioned pan-Jewish community in Frankfort, is a model for a more inclusive attitude.

The Wurzberger Rov’s permitting of Frankfort’s Orthodox Jews to remain part of the official Jewish community of the city, Dr. Elton contends, “inevitably meant recognizing the status of [the city’s] non-Orthodox rabbis and institutions, perhaps even paying for their upkeep…”

Unfortunately for Dr. Elton’s thesis, it is utterly undermined by documented facts.  Whatever the Wurzberger Rov’s reasoning may have been for his decision regarding the Orthodox Jews of Frankfort (as it happens, he supported the secession of other Orthodox communities from their local Jewish pan-community entities), he most certainly did not consider remaining part of the official community to constitute “recognizing the status” of clergy or groups that rejected the Jewish mesorah.

In fact, he clearly stipulated that fees paid by Orthodox members could not be used to support Reform activities in any way.  He felt no differently from Rav Hirsch about the fact that Reform represented a heretical movement and could be provided no respect nor support from any believing Jew.  And there is no evidence whatsoever that he in any way condoned the “co-operation and dialogue” with non-mesorah-accepting movements that Dr. Elton contends his example suggests.

In truth, the entire comparison is baseless.  Rabbi Bamberger was pronouncing only on the permissibility of being part of a Jewish communal entity presenting itself as such in official dealings with the local government regarding limited communal matters.  He was not permitting any sort of combined Orthodox-non-Orthodox rabbinical collaboration in rabbinical training like what YCT pointedly and tellingly included in its presidential installation.

Dr. Elton poignantly concludes by asking Agudath Israel to recognize that YCT and others who subscribe to its “vision” in fact “care very much about Torah and mesorah.”

We truly wish that were so.  Unfortunately, however, and tragically, there is ample evidence that that YCT and the other components of Rabbi Avi Weiss’ “Open Orthodoxy” movement (its women’s institution, Yeshivat Maharat, and its rabbinical organization, the International Rabbinic Fellowship – “IRF”) care not much at all about either Torah or mesorah.  There is abundant reason why even the resolutely “centrist” Rabbinical Council of America does not accept YCT’s rabbinic degrees as qualification for membership.

The evidence of “Open Orthodoxy”’s true essence has been publicly presented by others, most prominently Yated Neeman columnist Rabbi Avrohom Birnbaum and Cross-Currents.com contributor Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer. It is abundant.

One of YCT’s most illustrious graduates, Zev Farber, who received the institution’s most prestigious rabbinic ordination (Yadin Yadin), is a founding board member of  the IRF, the coordinator for their Va’ad Giyyur and an advisory board member of Yeshivat Maharat, has publicly contended things like: “The Deuteronomic prophet (i.e. the author of Deuteronomy) was still a human being, his scope remains limited by education and social context.”

And: “Given the data to which modern historians have access, it is impossible to regard the accounts of mass Exodus from Egypt, the wilderness experience or the coordinated, swift and complete conquest of the entire land of Canaan under Joshua as historical.”

And: “The idea that the twelve tribes of Israel were formed by the twelve sons of Jacob has all the appearances of a schematic attempt of Israelites to explain themselves to themselves… These Torah stories are not history, the recording of past events, they are mnemohistory, the construction of shared cultural-memory through narratives about the past.”

And: “Abraham and Sarah are folkloristic characters; factually speaking, they are not my ancestors or anyone else’s.”

He also has called it “impossible” and “unrealistic” to ask Jews plagued by same-sex attraction to “give up on the emotionally fulfilling and vital experience of intimate partnership that heterosexual men and women take for granted” and has encouraged only “exclusivity and the forming of a loving and lasting relationship-bond as the optimal lifestyle” for Jews facing such challenges.

YCT’s Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Dov Linzer, was once reported in the New York Jewish Week as having asserted that the Sages of the Talmud were unconcerned with a person’s religious beliefs; that, in the article’s words, “it was Maimonides who introduced the concept that Jews must adhere to basic dogmas, and even he was not consistent in his demands for such adherence.”

He has also asked, as a “reasonable question” whether we “should we be bending the halakhah to conform to our modern notions of egalitarianism.” It is, he decides, “a reasonable question to ask and a hard one to answer.”

YCT’s newsletter has featured a profile of an alumnus whose “most proud accomplishment” was having “created a meaningful Haggadah” for people living lives in violation of a sin the Torah characterizes as “an abomination.” The “Haggadah” was lauded because it “spoke to their understanding of what it means to be liberated.”

Such positions espoused by YCT leaders (and those are but a few of many such examples) are run-of-the-mill notions in the non-Orthodox rabbinic world.  They wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in non-Orthodox circles.  But how do they comport with “car[ing] very much about Torah and mesorah”?  There can be only one answer: they don’t.

Which is why “Open Orthodoxy” and its institutions have felt free to ignore the Jewish religious tradition in the realms of synagogue worship and gender roles.  If the mesorah is just an historical artifact of a primitive, unenlightened period, why not just “update” it?

A half-century ago, a combination of optimism and ignorance led well-intentioned Jews to believe that the Conservative movement truly respected our mesorah and was just a more “open” and “accepting” form of Orthodoxy. Today, some Jews, sadly, are making a similarly hopeful error about YCT.

Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik once wrote that “Too much harmony and peace can cause confusion of the minds and will erase outwardly the boundaries between [the] Orthodox and other movements.” He knew of what he spoke.

Despite the enticing phrase “Open Orthodoxy” and the protestations of YCT, Yeshivat Maharat and the International Rabbinic Fellowship that they are Orthodox institutions, their true, tragic colors are blindingly evident.

 

A Contrarian Approach to Kiruv

I unintentionally shocked a Jewish journalist several months ago. I had invited the non-Orthodox reporter to Agudath Israel of America’s offices to introduce her to the organization’s various divisions and projects, and to some of my colleagues.  But later, conversing with her about various issues, something I said – although to me it was entirely unremarkable – seemed to take my guest aback.

She had brought up the topic of abortion rights.  I noted that Orthodox Jews don’t regard the issue as one of “rights” but rather of right – that is to say, our obligations to our Creator.  Odd as it still seems to me now, my guest reacted as if a new lens on the world had suddenly opened before her.  She wasn’t about to suddenly adopt the Orthodox paradigm, I’m quite sure.  But she admitted that she hadn’t ever considered its contrarian conceptual source – the idea that we are here on earth not to reach our own conclusions and assert our rights but rather to accept G-d’s will and serve Him.  Suddenly, she seemed to understand why the Orthodox approach to a number of contemporary issues was so different from her own and that of her own professional and personal circles.  She had actually thought a new thought.

I was reminded of the reporter’s minor epiphany by the recently released and much-reported-upon Pew Research Survey of American Jews.

There are all manner of puzzlements in the survey results, likely a result of the very broad definitions employed by the researchers.  One category of “Jews” is “Jews by affinity,” which is to say Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish education who simply opt to call themselves Jews.  There are apparently more than one million of them (which might go a long way toward explaining the survey’s finding that fully one third of all “American Jews” erect a holiday tree in their homes each December).

Similarly suspicious is the survey’s definition of “Orthodox.”  How else to explain the bizarre finding that fully 15% of Orthodox Jews regularly attend services in a non-Jewish place of worship? (Or that 4% of them, too, have holiday trees!)

Times, to be sure, are strange.  But still.

All that aside, though, the clear and less-contestable takeaway of the survey is that there is a very large and increasing number of halachically Jewish American Jews who have opted out of Jewishness as a religious identification altogether, on whose radar Judaism is a fading blip, if that.

The larger community’s approach to such “unaffiliated” Jews has long been to offer an elaborate smorgasbord of “Jewish” choices: Funky Federation programmatic food, somewhat moldy “denominational” fare (whose expiration dates have come and gone), “tikkun olam” appetizers, various affinity-group pastries “koshered” by adding the word “Jewish” to them (like “Jewish” vegetarianism, or “Jewish” yoga and even “Jewish” activities condemned by the Torah).

Even some of the various Orthodox kiruv, or outreach, groups, all of whom do wonderful work in the American spiritual field (or desert) occasionally lapse into entertainment-mode, enticing  unconnected Jews with nosh whose ingredients, while they include healthful Jewish additives, remain essentially nosh.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with trying to reach Jews “where they are,” with connecting to them through their personal interests or culture. And certainly nothing wrong with using the beauty of a Shabbos (or the aroma of a cholent) to help a Jew begin to “bond” with his or her heritage.  But might there be room, even a need, for a… different approach?

What if, instead of special offers and glitzy offerings, we simply proclaimed loud and clear – in billboards and web ads and social media – that being a Jew, like it or not, precious fellow Jew, means being Divinely charged, that it means shouldering, whether it is always comfortable or not, responsibility ?  And that ignoring that mandate is a reckless wasting of an opportunity to live a meaningful life by doing G-d’s will?  That each of us has a stark and urgent choice: either to regard our lives as the brief opportunities to access eternity they are, or to waste one’s days in the pursuit of stuff and fun and “rights”?

Would such an ‘in your face” challenge just be a total turn-off?  Or might its message actually reach Jews, at least those who prefer being challenged to being wooed?

And might, just might, there be more such Jews than we dare imagine?

The common wisdom is that most Jews simply can never “become Orthodox” – that is to say can never come to accept and respect true Jewish belief and halacha.  And so there’s no point trying to offer them the entirety of their religious heritage.  But maybe the less common but more Jewish wisdom lies in Jewish tradition: that there flickers in every Jew’s heart a spark of desire to serve G-d, that every Jewish soul was present at Mt. Sinai.

Yes, free will exists, and each person in the end makes his or her own choices.

But could the best way to fan some Jewish sparks into flame be to simply, starkly state the Jewish facts – that the Torah is our Divine inheritance, and that striving for a fully observant Jewish life is the mandate of every Jew?

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Defining History Down

Under siege by some of his countrymen for seeming to have acknowledged the Holocaust, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tried to walk that Chihuahua back at a forum this week sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society. Asked to clearly state his stand on the issue, he chose to condemn “crimes by the Nazis during World War II [including the killing of] a group of Jewish people.”

Another “defining down” of historical fact also recently appeared, this one emanating from a more respectable source, the New York Times, in a video on its website.  The background clip accompanied a print report about Jews who ascend the Har Habayis, or Temple Mount, thereby passively challenging the Muslim authorities to whom Israel has ceded oversight of the ancient Jewish holy site.  Those overseers forbid Jews from praying openly there; some of the Jewish visitors, apparently, dare to do so silently.

The second of the two holy Jewish national temples that stood on the mount for centuries, of course, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.  It was more than 600 years later, after the Islamic empire spread to the Holy Land, that a small mosque was erected there.  An earthquake destroyed the mosque, and a second one was subsequently built on the spot, although it met the same fate shortly thereafter.  In 1035, the grandiose mosque currently occupying the Temple site was built, and thus far survives.

The Times article itself, as it happens, hinted at something that deserved more prominence in the piece, namely that the most respected Jewish rabbinic authorities have forbidden all Jews, in no uncertain terms, from ascending the Mount, both for halachic reasons and to not give the mosque’s overseers and other Muslims any excuse to engage in violence. Charedi Jews are often the focus of news reports from Israel. In an article presented to millions that speaks of religious Jews doing something that some regard as politically provocative, it would have been proper to point out that the Jews at issue are decidedly not charedim, and that the latter disapprove of their actions.

But what was truly disconcerting was the narration of the Times’ video expanding on the article.  It referred to the Har Habayis as the place “that Jews call the Temple Mount…” and that “Jews widely believe was the site of the Temples.”  Italics, of course, mine.

Such subtle casting of long-accepted historical fact as mere popular Jewish belief is of a sort with the subtle devaluation of “Judaism’s holiest site” the Old Gray Lady has perpetrated in the past – like when it bestowed that honor to the Western Wall rather than to the Temple Mount that lies behind it.

Fact: Objective students of history – of all ethnicities – see no reason to not accept the Bible’s account that, approximately nine centuries before the beginning of the Common Era and nearly 1500 years before Mohammed’s grandmother was born, King Solomon built the first of the two Holy Jewish Temples on that Jerusalem site.  And that sacrificial offerings, as the Talmud and Roman sources alike recount, were brought on the altar there on behalf of both Jews and non-Jewish visitors.

That that history derives mostly from Jewish texts and Jewish tradition is no deficiency.  The meticulous preservation of history is the nuclear strong force of Judaism, and is what has preserved the Jewish nation for millennia. Jews the world over just celebrated, on Sukkos, the collective memory of their ancestors’ Divine protection after the exodus from Egypt; that exodus itself is mentioned hundreds of times each year by every observant Jew in prayers and rites.

He or she recalls the ancient Jewish Temple too, every single day of the year, in each of the silent prayers – recited facing the Temple Mount – that are the backbone of Jewish religious life.

On holidays, moreover, the special Mussaf prayer includes a lengthy bemoaning of the Temples’ destructions.

The words “Jerusalem” and its synonym “Zion,” the city whose holiness derives from that of the Temple Mount, passed my lips at least ten times this morning.  Before breakfast.

And that repast was followed by the grace after meals, which includes an entreaty of G-d to rebuild Jerusalem – meaning the Temple.

That rebuilding, to be sure, isn’t a call to human physical force. The Third Holy Temple will be built by the hand not of man but of G-d, the object of our entreaty.  That is likewise evident in the passive form of our prayer elsewhere: “May it be Your will that the Temple be [re]built.”  But that collective Jewish prayer will be prayed – our spiritual contribution – until its fulfillment.

In the meanwhile, however much mullahs or media may seek to distort inconvenient historical facts, people devoted to truth will continue to know better.  They will know that, just over 60 years ago, millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their friends. And that, over 2000 years ago, a Holy Jewish Temple stood on the hill that still carries its name.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

History’s First Complaint

“It was all her fault,” the first man, referring to the first woman, told their Creator, establishing the principle of cherchez la femme in the very first week of history.

In a more precise translation of the Hebrew verse in Beraishis, which Jews the world over will be focused on soon as we begin the public reading of the Written Torah anew, what Adam said was: “The woman whom You provided to be with me, it was she who gave me of the tree and I ate.”

No wonder that the rabbis of the Talmud branded Adam, for those words, an ingrate, a “denier [literally, ‘turner-over’] of a favor.”

What is intriguing and may be significant is the word Adam used for “whom,” asher.  It is a common word, and can mean either “that” or “who” or “whom.”  But it is often contracted to a single letter, shin, appended to the word that follows.

In at least one place where it isn’t so shortened is in the Creator’s words to Moshe Rabbeinu, announcing the production of a second pair of Ten Commandment Tablets, to replace the ones “asher shibarta,” “that you shattered.”

While that phrase may seem to telegraph disapproval, the Talmudic amora Resh Lakish conveyed a tradition that the word asher should be read there as implying quite the opposite, a pun on the phrase y’yasher kochacha, a congratulatory blessing (that might literally if awkwardly be translated: “may your strength proceed straight!”).  So that the phrase “that you shattered” becomes “congratulations for having shattered.” (Yevamos, 62a)

Could the same word in Adam’s mouth imply something similar?

It certainly wouldn’t seem to, at least not on the surface.  But surfaces are, well, just surfaces.

No, Adam does not seem to be expressing gratitude to G-d, but rather to be complaining to Him, blaming his own sin on the partner his Creator had seen fit to give him.

Nevertheless, the Torah’s inclusion of the elsewhere congratulatory asher in the first human’s complaint may hint at a deep truth: Sometimes griping masks something very different.  Something not readily obvious – even, perhaps, at least consciously, to the griper.  Complaining can cover up something deeper and more positive.

It’s a truth that many a spouse, parent and teacher has gleaned from experience.  Grousing can be a strange psychological expression of disappointment in the grouser himself, not the groused-about. “It’s all your fault!” sometimes can mean the very opposite.

Adam may have been, in the Talmud’s phrase, a “turner-over of a favor,” someone who inverted a gift into a burden.  But that phrase itself is telling.  To invert something usually requires recognizing it first as right-side-up. Might part of Adam have fully recognized that his wife was not only a Divine gift but a divine one too, and his complaint have been a misguided projection of his own guilt?

It isn’t that the first woman was free of blame. When G-d pronounces the punishments, she is included.  But it was Adam who had been commanded to not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; her sin was essentially complicity in his doing so.  The buck, though, stopped with Adam. And he surely, at least subconsciously realized that. Might the word asher subtly hint to Adam’s essential recognition of the wonderful gift that his wife was, even as he sought to mitigate his sin on her account?

The speculation might be overreaching  But it is intriguing that immediately after G-d’s pronouncements comes the verse “The man called his wife’s name Chava, because she was the mother of all life [chai].” Not exactly a show of resentment.

To be sure, an ingrate is sometimes, well, just an ingrate.  But more often than we might realize, what may seem to be simple unthankfulness may also contain a measure of appreciation.

So the next time someone acts as if he or she doesn’t recognize what you’ve done for him or her, stop a minute and, rather than react with umbrage, consider the possibility that just under the ingratitude something very different might lie.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Who By Tongue

I had always thought that I knew the story of Rabbi Amnon of Mainz (or Mayence), whose poignant prayer-poem “U’nsaneh Tokef” is solemnly recited on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.  Several years ago, though, I discovered something about the account that I had overlooked, and was struck by the irony it holds.

The liturgical poem, of course, pictures the scene of the new year’s Divine judgment of all mortals, with the Ultimate Judge opening the book of their deeds, in which “the signature of every man” is inscribed and which “will read itself.”  The judgment is pronounced: “who will live and who will die,” and how; who will “live undisturbed, and who in turmoil”; “who will be laid low, and who raised high.” It is a chilling passage to recite – and the haunting melody to which it is traditionally sung only adds to its poignancy, sending chills down any spine connected to a functioning head. And the prayer’s final words, “But repentance, prayer and charity remove the evil of the decree,” chanted loudly by the entire congregation, are a font of inspiration to be better in the coming days of the year just arrived.

The story behind the composition, as I had known it from the old machzor I had used as a teenager, was that a certain Rabbi Amnon, who lived in the 11th century, was pressured by the Archbishop of Mainz to convert to Christianity.  The rabbi refused repeatedly but on one occasion asked for three days’ time to consider the offer, a stalling tactic he immediately regretted, as he realized he had given the clergyman hope that he might abandon his ancestral faith.

When Rabbi Amnon didn’t visit the clergyman at the end of the three days, he was forcibly taken to him.  When it was clear that he would not waiver from his faith, the archbishop, deeply disappointed, had Rabbi Amnon’s fingers and toes amputated one by one, pausing before each drop of the sword to allow the rabbi to change his mind.  He didn’t, and was returned to his home, along with his twenty amputated limbs.

On Rosh Hashana, Rabbi Amnon asked to be carried, along with his body parts, into the synagogue, and at an important point in the service, before Kedusha, asked the cantor to pause.  The silent lull was broken by the tortured man’s intonation of U’nsaneh Tokef, after which he died. Several days later, another rabbi, Kalonymus ben Meshulam, had a dream in which Rabbi Amnon taught him the words of the prayer.

The account comes to us from the famous 13th century halachic work Ohr Zarua, written by Rabbi Yitzchok ben Moshe of Vienna. Several years ago I took the trouble to read the Ohr Zarua’s actual words recounting the event.

What I hadn’t known was that when Rabbi Amnon was brought before the archbishop, the rabbi told the clergyman that he wanted to be punished – not for refusing the Christian’s urging to convert but rather for giving the impression that he had even considered such a thing.  “Cut out my tongue,” he told the archbishop.  The clergyman, however, saw Rabbi Amnon’s sin as his refusal to come as he had promised, hence he chose his own punishment for the rabbi, the one that was meted out.

And so the priest, while he tortured the Jew grievously, left his victim’s tongue in place.

The Talmud teaches us that the Jew’s power lies not in his hands – that is Esav’s domain – but rather in his words, his prayer.

And, indeed, Rabbi Amnon, denied the excision of his tongue he had requested, went on to utilize it well – the result being U’nsaneh Tokef.  The irony is striking.  The part of his body he regretted having misused became the holy instrument of his contribution to Jewish liturgy, to Jewish life, to the inspiration of millions of Jews over the generations since.

And so all of us who, as we read the words Rabbi Amnon composed, are moved by them to make even some small change for the better in our lives in the new Jewish year are thereby contributing, across the centuries, to Rabbi Amnon’s personal repentance.  And are joining, in small but real ways, in his sanctification of the name of G-d.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Ksiva Vachasima Tova

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all visitors to this site a ksiva vachasima tova : May you be inscribed and sealed in the book of life for the coming year.

Thank you for visiting and reading the thoughts offered here.

Articles about Rosh Hashana can be accessed by clicking on “Rosh Hashana” in the “categories” list to the right, below.

May 5774 be a year of only blessings for you and yours.

AS

Compartment Syndrome

It’s easy for many of us Orthodox Jews to look down our noses on our fellow members of the tribe who express their Jewishness only on the “High Holidays” and yahrtzeits, to consider them to have missed the point of the Jewish mission. Judaism can’t, after all, be “compartmentalized.”  It’s an all-encompassing way of life.

There are, though, even Orthodox Jews, living what seem to be observant Orthodox lives, doing, at least superficially, all the things expected of a religious Jew – eating only foods graced with the best hechsherim and wearing the de rigeuer  head-covering of his or her community – who also seem to religiously compartmentalize, who seem to leave G-d behind in shul (if they even think of Him), who seem to not realize that the Creator is as manifest on a Tuesday in July as He is on Yom Kippur.

Which explains how it is that an Orthodox Jew can engage in unethical business practices or abuse a child or a spouse.  Or, more mundanely but no less significantly, how one can cut others off in traffic, act rudely, or blog maliciously.  Or, for that matter, how he can address his Maker in prayer with words so garbled and hurried that, were he speaking to another mortal, the soliloquy would elicit no end of mirth.

It’s not necessarily the case that such Jews don’t acknowledge Hashem.  It’s just that they don’t give Him much thought – even, ironically, while going through the myriad motions of daily Jewish lives. In the most extreme cases, the trappings of observance are essentially all that there is, without any consciousness of why religious rituals are important.  What’s left then is mere mimicry, paraphernalia in place of principle.

What’s wrenching to ponder is that even those of us who think of our Jewish consciousnesses as healthy and vibrant are also prone to compartmentalize our Judaism. Do all of us, after all, maintain the G-d-consciousness we (hopefully) attain in shul at all times, wherever we may be? Do we always think of what it is we’re saying when we make a bracha (or even take care to pronounce every word distinctly)?  Do we stop to weigh our every daily action and interaction on the scales of Jewish propriety?  Or do our observances sometimes fade into rote?

Most of us must sadly concede that when it comes to compartmentalizing our lives there really isn’t any “us” and “them.”  All of us live on a continuum here, some more keenly and constantly aware of the ever-present reality of the Divine, some less so.  Obviously, those who do think of Hashem and His will when engaged in business or navigating a traffic jam are more religiously progressed than those who don’t. But still.

Rosh Hashana presents all of us a special opportunity to hone our Creator-awareness.  The Jewish new year, the start of the Ten Days of Repentance, is suffused with the concept of Kingship (malchiyus).  The shofar, we are taught, is a coronation call, and malchiyus is prominent in the days’ prayers.  We might well wonder: What has Kingship to do with repentance?

The answer is clear.  A king rules over his entire kingdom; there is little escaping 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) and compartmentalization are diametric, incompatible ideas.  If Hashem  rules over all, then there are no places and no times when He can be absent from our minds.

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

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Al Jazeera And The Jews

Even as Al Jazeera America – the new offshoot of the Qatar-based news organization – was making its broadcast debut recently on cable carriers in the United States, its parent organization back on the Arabian peninsula featured a commentary by former Muslim Brotherhood official Gamal Nassar, in which he claimed that the Egyptian military (and currently political) leader Abdel Fattah Al Sisi is a Jew.  He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Mr. Nassar cited an Algerian newspaper (“All the slander that’s fit to sling”?) to the effect that Mr. Al Sisi’s uncle was “a member of the Jewish Haganah organization” and that the nephew “is implementing a Zionist plan to divide Egypt.”

The Al Jazeera commentator helpfully added that “Whoever reads The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the writings of [the Jews], including those who were writing in the U.S., realizes that this plot was premeditated.”

Maybe it’s not fair to visit the sins of the father – Al Jazeera in Arabia – so to speak, onto the son – Al Jazeera America.  The latter organization claims to be “a completely different channel from… all of the other channels in the Al Jazeera Media Network” and has its “own board and advisory board.”  And the American operation asserts that it will be delivering “unbiased, fact-based and in-depth journalism,” which, if true, will become apparent in time. But, with the baggage of its family name’s reputation, “AJAM”’s battle will be uphill.

As it happens, not long ago, in my capacity as Agudath Israel’s public affairs director, I was contacted by a reporter for Al Jazeera – the original, Qatar operation.  He worked for its English-language version, which is no longer accessible in the US, and was helping produce a television segment for the network, about the religious-secular divide in Israel.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to become involved, even as a mere resource, with an Arab-centered, less-than-sympathetic-to-Israel operation.  A good friend of mine who also deals with media advised me to demur.  But I decided to interact with the reporter (who turned out to be very friendly, and Jewish, to boot) all the same, and offered him some background information about the topic he wouldn’t likely glean from most Jewish media, and some suggestions for whom he might wish to feature as guests on the segment.

A few weeks later, he sent me a link to a recording of the program, which I watched carefully.  The guests included a religious Israeli politician and an American proponent of dismantling the rabbinate and creating a more “democratic” state that didn’t favor Orthodox Judaism.

The segment, I had to admit, was excellent.  Both sides made their cases, of course, but the moderator was outstanding, asking informed, probing questions not only of the politician but of the activist too, and letting her guests know when they didn’t address what had been asked.  Another journalist on the program was monitoring personal media in real time, and the tweets and postings she shared with the audience were balanced, representing both sides of each issue.

Afterward, I sat back and pondered the contrast between mainstream Jewish media’s reportage of Jewish religious issues and what I had witnessed on Al Jazeera’s program.  When it comes to things like the segment’s subject, many media, including some major Jewish media, are transparently biased against Jewish Orthodoxy.  That’s not surprising, as most journalists, as a Pew poll several years back revealed, are less than sympathetic to religion.  And most Jewish journalists are non-Orthodox Jews with, by their profession, an interest in the Jewish community; hence they bring some personal baggage to their keyboards.  Al Jazeera, however, lacks any dog in the race, and so it addressed the subject in a refreshingly objective way.

That it did so recalled to me something I had said before an audience of my own, at the 92nd St. Y a few months ago.  In an offhand comment that drew some gasps (and, surprisingly, some applause), I asserted that the reporters most qualified to write for Jewish newspapers are non-Jews.  They, I explained, are less likely to be burdened by preconceptions or guided, even subconsciously, by agendas.

I know Al Jazeera – the parent, that is – well enough to not expect it to report objectively on Israel.  It doesn’t expend the effort to see beyond the Jewish state’s real or imagined warts, to its human face.  Nor would I expect it to feature – although it should – opinion pieces defending Israel against the libels regularly hurled at her by much of the Arab world.

But, optimist that I am, I wonder whether Al Jazeera America, which aims to focus mainly on American news, might prove itself, at least in the realm of reportage on Jewish religious issues, to be a breath of unpolluted air. Time will tell.

How disturbing, though, to have to be looking to an Arab news network for balance in Jewish issues.