The Secular Sky Is Falling!

(This essay appeared in Haaretz this week, under a different title.)

Well, it won’t be long now before Israel institutes penalties for watching television on the Sabbath and declares a religious war against the Palestinians. At least that’s what a cursory – or, actually, even a careful – reading of a recent New York Times op-ed might lead one to conclude.

In the piece, Abbas Milani, the head of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University, and Israel Waismel-Manor, a University of Haifa senior lecturer, argue that Iran and Israel might be “trading places,” the former easing into a more secular mode, the latter slouching toward theocracy.

Whether the writers’ take on Iran has any merit isn’t known to me. But their take on Israel is risible, and the evidence they summon shows how clueless even academics can be.

The opinionators contend that the “nonreligious Zionism” advanced by David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s is “under threat” today by “Orthodox parties” that “aspire to transform Israel into a theocracy.”

The irony is intriguing. It was none other than Ben-Gurion who pledged, in a 1947 agreement with the Agudath Israel World Organization, representing Haredi Jews, to do “everything possible” to promote a single standard, that of halacha, or Jewish religious law, with regard to “personal status” issues like marriage, divorce and conversion; to designate the Jewish Sabbath as the new state’s official day of rest; to provide only kosher food in government kitchens; and to endorse a religious educational system as an alternative to Israeli state public schools. Those concessions, which pretty much sum up Israel’s accommodation of religion, were seen as inherent to its claim to be a “Jewish State.”

The impression Messrs. Milani and Waismel-Manor seek to promote is that there has been some sort of sea change of late in the Haredi community’s influence and designs. The writers, like other “the secular sky is falling” oracles, point to demographics (the Haredi community considers children to be great blessings) and the rise of Haredi political parties (although they are not currently part of the government coalition and always at the mercy of the larger parties) as evidence.

But a closer look at recent religious controversies in Israel, whether the drafting of Haredi men, traditional prayer standards at the Western Wall, conversion standards or subsidies for religious students, reveals that Haredi activism, such as it is, is aimed entirely at preserving the “religious status quo” of the past six decades, not at intensifying the state’s restrained connection to Judaism – much less at creating a “theocracy.” Some outside the Haredi community feel that the religious status quo is outdated and needs to be changed. But Haredi political activism is limited to pushback against that cause; it does not aim to impose Jewish observance on any Israeli.

And on the infrequent occasions when individuals have sought to expand real or imagined religious values in the public sphere – like imposing separate seating for men and women on selected bus lines servicing religious neighborhoods – Israel’s courts have stepped in and conclusively quashed the attempts. (Separate seating on those limited lines remains voluntary, and anyone seeking to force it is subject to prosecution.) And when religious vigilantes have been reported to have done ugly things (see: Beit Shemesh), the reported actions have been broadly condemned, and have ceased. Messrs. Milani and Waismel-Manor presumably know that there have been no moves in Israel to compel synagogue attendance or to cut off criminals’ body parts, sharia-style.

They get totally wrong, too, what they describe as “the vast majority of Orthodox Jews” who they contend are “against any agreement with the Palestinians,” further contributing to the writers’ feverish imagination of (excuse the expression) Armageddon.

There are many, to be sure, in the “national religious” camp who agitate for annexation of the West Bank and shun the idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. (The New York Times op-ed authors quite erroneously conflated this community, represented in Israel’s government by Habayit Hayehudi, with the Haredim, despite their distinctly different religious, political and cultural positions.

But the vast majority of Haredim are famously deferent to their religious leaders, many of whom have maintained for decades that that land may, indeed should, be ceded in exchange for a meaningful peace with trustworthy adversaries of good will. The current Haredi (and much non-Haredi) opposition to the here-again, gone-again current peace process is due to the apparent lack of such an adversary. While Haredim await the Messiah’s arrival and restoration of all of Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people and the re-establishment of the Davidic kingdom, they do not consider it acceptable to try to push history forward.

Yes, Israel’s Haredi population has grown, and its growth has had impact on aspects of Israeli life – in Haredi communities. There has never been any attempt to insinuate religious practices into non-Haredi ones, and no one has ever put forth any plans to do so. The overwhelming majority of Israeli Haredim just want to be left alone and allowed to live their lives as their – and most Jews’ – ancestors did. That shouldn’t discomfit, much less threaten, anyone. And it certainly shouldn’t be portrayed as some looming catastrophe by sky-watchers in ivory towers.

Jungle Jurisprudence

Tommy, a resident of Gloversville, New York, filed a lawsuit in a New York state court last year against Patrick and Diane Lavery for what he claims was his unlawful detention in a “small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed.” Actually, to be more precise, the lawsuit was filed on Tommy’s behalf, by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), as he is a chimpanzee.

Legal action was initiated at the same time on behalf of Kiko, a chimp in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, primates in a research facility at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

The NhRP asked the court to declare Tommy, then 26, “a cognitively complex autonomous legal person with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned.”

In October 2011, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit on behalf of five orcas, accusing the theme parks owning them of violating the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. The suit was dismissed by a judge in the U.S. District Court for Southern California who wrote in his ruling that “the only reasonable interpretation of the 13th Amendment’s plain language is that it applies to persons, and not to nonpersons such as orcas.”

NhRP’s president, Steven Wise, an attorney who teaches “animal rights law” at Harvard Law School, lost a similar case on behalf of a dolphin in 1991. But he is hoping, and not without reason, that over more recent years attitudes like that of Princeton University “ethicist” Peter Singer, who has decried “speciesism,” have taken hold in society and among the judiciary, at least with regard to animals like chimps, who, he says, “possess complex cognitive abilities that are so strictly protected when they’re found in human beings.”

Indeed, Mr. Wise has argued that, like severely compromised babies with no discernable cognitive abilities, animals like chimps should be considered persons in the eyes of the law. Professor Singer, for his part, has gone a step further, stating bluntly that “The life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee.” He takes his logic to its inevitable conclusion and advocates the killing of the severely disabled and unconscious elderly as well.

Such attitudes are of a part with books like the astoundingly offensive “Eternal Treblinka,” which compares “the exploitation and slaughter of animals” for food with Nazi concentration camps.

Some of the most fundamental philosophical and moral issues of our time – indeed of any time – touch upon the special distinction of humanness. Calling an unborn child something other than that, for instance, and characterizing its destruction as a mere “choice,” is, in the word’s most stark sense, dehumanizing. As is the removal of other moral curbs on human behavior on the grounds that people are, as Professor Singer asserts, mere animals.

The prospect that the decision in the chimpanzees’ case might further fuzz the line between humans and animals should deeply discomfit those of us who believe that humans, with their ability to exercise free will and their obligations to the Divine, are special parts of Creation.

According to our mesorah, until the time of Noach, although animals were allowed to be used as beasts of burden, they could not be consumed as food. After the Mabul, however, the eating of meat became permissible to mankind. One reason that has been suggested for that change is based on another rabbinic tradition, that the dor haMabul, the “Generation of the Flood,” had lost its essential moral bearings, going so far as to act as if there were no difference between humans and animals.

The divine sanction of meat-eating, that approach contends, was a means of impressing humankind with the too-easily-lost truth that human beings are special, possessive of a spark of holiness that does not inhere in animals.

Mr. Wise has warned his students to not hope for “a principles judge,” one who might say “You lose. I don’t agree with your principles. I agree with the principle that [G-d] created humans, and we all have souls, and we’re special, and nonhuman animals do not and so aren’t.” In that case, he tells his charges, “you’ve just shot yourself in the head.” One hopes that no violence is involved, but that if any of the young men and women he teaches are inspired to follow in his footsteps, they will encounter many such a judge.

And yet, we would be wrong to blithely dismiss concerns for animal welfare. We mustn’t forget that the Torah, although it permits us to “enslave” animals and even eat some of them, proscribes us from causing needless pain to non-human creatures. Tzaar ba’alei chaim is a serious issur.

But the animal-personhood crowd has it all wrong. The issue isn’t animal rights; there is no such thing. The issue is human responsibility – ironically, itself a product of humanity’s specialness.

Black Like Us

The confluence of this past Shabbos and reports about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s alleged ugly racist remarks inspire me to share the piece below, which was written three years ago.

The Chasam Sofer probably never saw a black person. There weren’t likely very many in 19^th century central Europe. But he certainly knew they existed. After all, they are mentioned in a posuk, the one that opens the haftarah of parshas Kedoshim, which was this past Shabbos. There, Kushites—Kush is generally identified as a kingdom in central Africa—are a simile for Klal Yisrael.

“Behold, you are like the children of Kush to Me,” the navi Amos (9:7) quotes the Creator addressing the Jewish People.

“Just as a Kushite differs [from others] in [the color of] his skin,” comments the Gemara (Moed Katan, 16b), “so are the Jewish people different in their actions.”

One might assume that the intention of that explanation is simply that, while most people often act thoughtlessly or selfishly, Jews, if they live as they should, do otherwise, planning their every action, concerned about their obligations to the Creator, and to others.

But the Chasam Sofer’s interpretation of the Talmudic comment (he apparently had “the righteous” in place of “the Jewish people”) goes in a different direction, and makes a point as fundamental as it is timely.

His words:

“It is well known that every Jew is required to observe all the mitzvos. But there is no single path for them all. One Jew may excel in Torah-study, another in avodah (service, or prayer), another in kindnesses to others; this one in one particular mitzvah, that one in another. Nevertheless, while they all differ from each other in their actions, they all have the same intention, to serve Hashem with their entire hearts.

“Behold the Kushite. Inside, his organs, his blood and his appearance are all the same as other people’s. Only in the superficiality of his skin is he different from others. This is the meaning of ‘[different] in his skin,’ [meaning] only in his skin. Likewise, the righteous are different [from one another] only ‘in their actions’; their inner conviction and intention, though, are [the same,] aimed at serving Hashem in a good way.”

There are two messages to glean here. One—which wasn’t intended by the Chasam Sofer as a message at all, but as a truism—is that people of different colors are only superficially different from one another. What lies beneath our shells are the same veins, sinews and organs, no matter our shades.

The Chasam Sofer’s novel message, though, is that there are different ways, no one of them any less essentially worthy than any other, of serving Hashem.

All too often we fall into the trap of thinking that we, or our children, must follow a particular trajectory and land in a particular place in life. But when Chazal teach that “just as people’s faces all differ one from the other, so do their minds,” they are informing us otherwise, that there are different, equally meritorious, trajectories, different, equally praiseworthy, landing places for different people. It’s not just that people are dissimilar and will choose a variety of vocations, excel in a variety of fields, and establish individual priorities. It’s that in all our diversity of vocations, fields and priorities, we can be entirely equal servants of Hashem.

Consider Rav Broka, who, the Talmud recounts (Ta’anis 22a), was often accompanied by Eliyahu Hanavi, and once asked the prophet whether in a certain marketplace there were any people who merited the World-to-Come. The individuals Eliyahu pointed to turned out to be a prison guard who made special efforts to preserve prisoners’ moral integrity and who interceded with the government on behalf of his fellow Jews; and a pair of comedians, who used their humor to cheer up the depressed and defuse disputes.

One wonders if the parents of those meritorious men felt disappointed at their sons’ choices of professions. Or whether they realized that there are, in the end, many paths that can lead to the World-to-Come.

The (Almost) Rude Jewish Man

Time was when you saw a person talking to himself you assumed he was deranged or at least a little off. These days, of course, prattling people wired up or Bluetoothed are commonplace. The unhinged are well camouflaged among the masses.

The middle-aged woman in the elevator didn’t even have anything in or clipped to her ear; she was holding an actual, physical cellphone near the side of her face. And so, when she said, once, and then again, “Which is the way out?” I wondered to whom she was speaking and what topic was being discussed.

It was the end of a workday in downtown Manhattan, and only the woman, whom I hadn’t ever encountered before, was in the elevator when it stopped at my floor. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but had little choice. So I started to imagine what might have yielded her repeated, somewhat urgent-sounding question. A tax problem? (April was imminent.) A troubled relationship? Some existential crisis?

Following elevator etiquette, I faced the door. But, for some reason (in retrospect, probably siyata DiShmaya), I turned briefly in the woman’s direction. It was a good thing I did. Phone or not, she had been talking, I realized, to me. Her expression, telegraphing annoyance bordering on irritation, made that very clear.

After a moment’s speechlessness born of surprise, I managed a smile and said “I’m sorry. What were you asking?” And she explained that she wanted to know which floor was the way out of the building. I told her that floor number “1” was the lobby, and apologized for not having realized that she had been speaking to me and for ignoring her question. Her earlier chagrin seemed to evaporate. When the elevator landed at the lobby and we left our temporary prison, I wished her a good night and she wished me the same.

During the trek home, I pondered several things. First, self-defensively, how is it that one might assume, especially when one is holding a phone, that others realize that you are addressing them? A simple, loud “excuse me” to get their attention would, to my lights, be in order.

Then, though, turning inward, I pondered how getting lost in one’s thoughts isn’t an indulgence one should choose when others are around, even other strangers. I was reminded of the fact that Hillel Hazaken’s version of what society calls the “Golden Rule” differs from that of other cultures. He framed it in the negative: “What is hateful to you do not do to others.” That might seem a weaker version than “Do unto others…” But just the opposite is true: It is both more challenging and more meaningful to be on constant alert to not, consciously or otherwise, do something objectionable to another person.

A third thought, however, quickly edged out the others: What had happened almost hadn’t.

Had I not for some reason turned around briefly, I pondered, I would never have realized that it was me my co-prisoner had been addressing. She would likely have just judged me a boor for ignoring her, left the elevator when I did, and gone on her way, all the while angry at the rude man who wouldn’t answer her simple question. The rude Jewish man.

Many people tend to generalize when they feel they have been offended by a member of an identifiable group, be it racial, ethnic or religious. But while a black or Mexican or Asian or Muslim may not particularly care whether others see his actions as confirming a negative group stereotype, a visibly Jewish Jew must care indeed.

So thought #3 was about how very careful we Orthodox Jews need to be to avoid offending others – even when we don’t mean to do anything of the sort. Part of that carefulness involves being aware of those around us in public places. That’s not so simple a matter for observant Jews, as our convictions usually point us in the direction of inward focus, and keeping the outside at bay. But on the other side of the scales is, chas vesholom, the possibility of causing, even inadvertently, others to think of our people and our faith negatively.

It’s a delicate balance, but a most important one, all the same, to strike.

Social Injustice

It was Albert Camus’ insight that bad things often result from ignorance, and that “good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

He could have been writing of the good souls whose desire for social justice has impelled them to smear members of the East Ramapo School District board for increased public school class size and cuts in school programs and extracurricular activities like sports and music.

A Jewish group, Uri L’Tzedek, is among the critics of the board, and contends that the majority “fervently Orthodox” members of the school board have been unfair to the primarily African-American, Haitian and Hispanic public school student population. In these pages, a founder of the group, Rabbi Ari Hart, amplified its objections in passionate terms (“East Ramapo’s Children Are Suffering”). Unfortunately, passion is no replacement for understanding

Rabbi Hart claims to have conducted a “careful review of the facts” and to have spoken to “leaders from the Jewish and non-Jewish community.” But he apparently didn’t speak to any of the members of the school board. Had he done so, he would have encountered the critical fact that undermines the slander he has accepted and promoted

State funding to all school districts, including East Ramapo, is based on a statutory formula involving property values, income levels and public school student numbers. Education funds are provided accordingly; wealthier districts, fairly, receive less government funding than poorer ones.

For most school districts, where the large majority of students attend public schools, the state aid formula accurately identifies districts that are poor and require more aid, and those that are wealthy and require less aid.

East Ramapo, however, has an odd demographic: approximately 20,000 students in nonpublic schools, only about half that number in public schools – and relatively high property values, resulting in a totally skewed picture of the public school population’s wealth. The district is thus funded, pursuant to the statutory formula, as if it were one of the wealthiest school districts in the state – when it is in fact one of the poorest.

The bottom line result is that the state provides the district with insufficient funds for meeting anything beyond the bare-bone requirements of the law.

Some of those requirements, like per-student book allocations and bus transportation, apply not only to public school children but to their nonpublic school counterparts (who also need textbooks and a way to get to school). The district would be in stark violation of the law were it to direct resources to the public schools that would entail neglecting its legal obligations to the nonpublic schools.

No evidence has been produced that the East Ramapo School Board’s members have disbursed the state and other funds entrusted to them in anything but a responsible manner, meeting the state’s mandated requirements before budgeting other programs.

East Ramapo Superintendent Joel M. Klein (who is not an Orthodox Jew) has noted that program cuts were due to $10 million worth of cuts in state funding and $960,000 worth of cuts to federal funding.

“You can blame it on Jews, you can blame it on yeshivas,” said Mr. Klein, but the flawed state aid formula and funding cutbacks are the real culprit.

“When you lose $10 million on a $200 million budget,” he explained, “you have to make cuts. One year it’s arts and music, the next year it’s full-day kindergarten. We had to cut over 400 staff positions. No matter who was on the board, they would have made the same decisions.”

To insinuate, as Rabbi Hart and other crusaders against imagined charedi villains have done here, that East Ramapo school board members have somehow favored yeshivos over public schools is unjustified, irresponsible and dangerous, as it fosters anti-Semitism, which in fact is reported to have increased in recent weeks.

A malodorous red herring thrown into the mix by Rabbi Hart involves a sale of an unused public school building to a yeshiva. An appraiser was accused of having assigned a value to the structure less than its market value.

Superintendent Klein, however, notes that the school board was not aware of the undervaluation. And, in any event, it was not part of any pattern, and has no pertinence to the board’s allocations of the funds entrusted to it, which have treated public and nonpublic school students equitably and responsibly.

In his quest to portray East Ramapo school board members as Shylocks, Rabbi Hart invokes the celebrated halachic decisor Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who unequivocally forbade yeshivos from taking government funds for which they do not qualify.

Rabbi Feinstein’s responsum is indeed important and binding – and irrelevant to the problems in the East Ramapo school district. Be that as it may, using it to tar good people who are endeavoring to do exactly what it instructs is uncouth, indeed odious. A more basic text that Uri L’tzedek would do better to ponder is Leviticus, specifically the verse “You shall not go around as a gossipmonger among your people.”

And all the vocal critics of the East Ramapo school board would do better to focus their passions on advocating for an intelligent state funding formula for the district – the lack of which is the real problem here.

The Second Son

A Pesach-themed essay I penned for the Forward appears here

Chag kasher visame’ach!

Chopin and Shema Koleinu

A few years ago, reporters who were covering weddings of the rich and famous in four Monterrey, Mexico, churches were chagrined to find that they weren’t able to call or send messages to their editors. They routinely got a “no service” or “signal not available” message on their cell phones.

When one reporter asked the priest in one of the churches if he knew why, the answer he received, offered with a smile, was: “Israeli counterintelligence.”

He went on to explain that Israeli-made cell phone jammers the size of paperback books had been tucked unobtrusively among paintings that were hanging in the chapel. The jammers emit low-level radio frequencies that thwart cell phone signals within a 100-foot radius. Thus, technology developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and phone-triggered bombings had been purchased for a more mundane (the priest would probably say holy) purpose.

Although cell phone jammers are employed in India’s parliament, Italian universities (to prevent cheating on exams), Mexican banks (to keep robbers from calling their accomplices) and Tokyo theaters and commuter trains, federal law prohibits their use in the U.S., and so shuls, alas, cannot legally utilize them to prevent davening from being punctuated by jazz, Beethoven or Hatikva (all of which have been heard by this writer during the silent Shemoneh Esrei).

Once, not too many years ago, the worst electronic interruption of tefillos in shul was the very occasional beeper; and the fact that it was usually summoning a doctor, presumably because of a medical crisis, mitigated the rudeness of the disturbance.

Today, though, as we all know, cell phones are ubiquitous, and so the satan has been able to add classical and pop riffs, and an assortment of utterly annoying chimes, tones and melodies, to his arsenal of davening disruptions, which once consisted only of mindless conversations among those who find silence a painful vacuum in need of filling.

What would the Tosfos Yomtov — who lamented talking in shul as courting tragedy, and composed the well-known, if too-often-ignored, Mi Sheberach for those who maintain shul decorum — say? Had cellphones existed in the 17th century, would he have showered special blessings on those who took three seconds to turn theirs off every time they entered a mikdash me’at? I have little doubt that he would have.

It is often said, generously, that the laxity of decorum in some shuls results from the comfort that Jews feel in their place of prayer. We feel at home in shul, the diyun l’chaf zechus goes, and so we converse. Indeed we do, but we shouldn’t.

Because it’s still a shul. Those are siddurim, not newspapers, and the people holding them and moving their lips quietly are talking to the Creator, not the bartender. And they want you to please hold your tongue, and your calls.

It is, to be honest, easy to forget to turn off our phones when we enter a shul. I once neglected to, although thankfully it didn’t ring (or ping or sing) during davening. But it could have, and I have been more careful ever since.

And I was witness, not long ago, to another man’s neglect to power down his phone before a tefillah, and his phone did ring. What happened afterward, though, was truly remarkable.

During the week I daven Minchah at the national headquarters of Agudath Israel of America, where I am privileged to work. Many men who work in lower Manhattan attend Minchah at our offices during their lunchtime. During the silent Shemoneh Esrei at Minchah one day, the man’s cellphone went off. (I don’t recall what the selection was; something Jewish, I think.) No, that wasn’t what was remarkable (unfortunately). What happened after Minchah was.

The man whose phone had serenaded us during davening looked embarrassed and I noticed that he left the beis medrash quickly after Aleinu. (Please don’t even get me started about Aleinu, which cannot be recited by a normal human being in less than 45 seconds but seems to benefit from some odd sort of kefitzas haderech in all too many shuls.)

As I left the room myself, I saw the gentleman whose phone had asserted itself standing near the elevator bank, where all the mispallelim would have to pass, both those headed down to the lobby and those of us who work in the Agudah offices.

The man stood there and politely accosted each and every one of us individually — to apologize for not having turned off his phone when Minchah began.

What mentchlichkeit, I told myself. And what a poignant lesson about how we should feel if we have disturbed someone else’s davening.

And, of course, about how careful we should be to not do so.

Defining Orthodoxy Down

Had someone back, say, in the 1960s had both the foresight to trademark the word “Orthodox” and no compunctions about licensing it, he’d be a wealthy man today.

Once upon a time, when Torah-observant Jewish life in America was expected to expire in short shrift, the “O” word was something of an albatross (though I don’t know if they’re kosher). Anyone wanting to establish a new-and-improved Jewish movement would coin a new-and-improved adjective – “Reform,” “Conservative,” “Reconstructionist,” something novel and shiny. But “Orthodox”? It bespoke a tired, dusty past, one without a future.

Times have changed. Today, Orthodoxy, boruch Hashem, is thriving, and “Orthodox” seems to be the adjective of the era. So much so that when the latest carbon copy (remember carbon copies?) of the Conservative movement is conceived, the last thing its proponents wants to do is to associate it with its languishing, moribund theological predecessor. It wants an “Orthodox” label, the better to lay claim to Jewish legitimacy.

And so we have seen “Orthodox Feminism,” which flouts established halacha and rejects “patriarchal” elements of Judaism. And “Open Orthodoxy,” which not only derides by its very name those committed to the mesorah (we “closed” folks) but proudly advocates for things demonstrably antithetical to the Judaism of the ages.

And now, in the April issue of the monthly periodical Commentary, we have the latest addition to the “Orthodox” bestiary.

The new animal, “Social Orthodoxy,” is introduced by Jay P. Lefkowitz, a former adviser in the George W. Bush administration. To be fair, he claims to not really be inventing anything new, only channeling what he considers to be the religion of many “Modern Orthodox” Jews (although he thereby insults all the upstanding, halacha-respecting Jews who choose to call themselves “modern”).

Mr. Lefkowitz’s creation is, in a sense, the polar opposite of what was once called “cardiac Judaism” – the once-popular “I’m a believing Jew in my heart, even if I’m not observant of any of the Torah’s commandments” approach. “Social Orthodoxy” means doing Jewish without believing Jewish.

To wit, Mr. Lefkowitz explains that he dons tefillin daily and attends a synagogue weekly. He eats kosher and, when eating in non-kosher restaurants, orders vegetarian dishes. He “pick[s] and choose[s] from the menu of Jewish rituals,” but “without fear of divine retribution,” indeed without belief in a Creator. (To Whom he prays in synagogue isn’t clarified.)

He claims, ludicrously, that “Modern Orthodoxy” of the sort he extolls has its roots in the teachings of Rav Shamson Raphael Hirsch; and, not ludicrously at all, sees its exemplification in the approaches of Rabbi Avi Weiss, the father of the aforementioned “Open Orthodoxy” and Mordecai Kaplan, Reconstructionism’s parent.

Indeed, that latter movement, although it hasn’t gained many adherents, is pretty much precisely what the Commentary commentator is championing, albeit with an attempt at some “Orthodox” redecoration. Kaplan’s first and most recognized work was entitled “Judaism As A Civilization,” and its title says it all. The Jewish faith, to him, is not a world-view, not a religion, not a revealed mission from the Creator to His chosen people, but a culture, and nothing more.

Mr. Lefkowitz recounts the astonishment of a Catholic friend who asked him, “How can you do everything you do… if you don’t even believe in G-d?”

The writer, he tells us, responded by citing to his friend his ancestors’ response at Sinai – “We will do and understand afterwards,” which he reads as “engaging first in religious practices” and only later, if then, dealing with “matters of faith.”

Of course, that is an utter misunderstanding of what Naaseh Vinishma really means, that it was Klal Yisroel’s acceptance of a Commander, regardless of whether or not we comprehend His commands. It does not bespeak, chalilah, any postponement of emunah but, quite the opposite, is predicated on it. Mr. Lefkowitz might do better to ponder Shema instead.

One wishes that he would have been more honest and straightforward and just declared himself a Reconstructionist. But rather than add a new member to that smallest of the mesorah-spurning Jewish groups, he insists on appropriating the “O”-word, with yet a new antithetical adjective in front of it.

Mr. Lefkowitz reports that his children attend a Modern Orthodox day school. Here’s hoping they receive a good education in basic Jewish texts and beliefs there, including what Naaseh Vinishma really means and the significance of Shema. May his choice of schooling for his progeny merit him the nachas of true Yiddisheh kinder and einiklach.

Pesach is Coming!

The two essays immediately below are several years old but I thought I’d post them here all the same, in honor of Pesach’s imminent arrival, and in the hope that readers might find them worthy of thought, or even of sharing at the Seder table.

Other Pesach pieces that might be of interest can be accessed by clicking on “PESACH” in the category list below to the right.

Deconstructing Dayeinu

Much of our Seder-night message to our children, mediated by the Haggadah, is forthright and clear. Some of it, though, is subtle and stealthy.

Like Dayeinu.

On the surface, it is a simple song – a recitation of events of Divine kindness over the course of Jewish history, from the Egyptian exodus until the Jewish arrival in the Holy Land – with the refrain “Dayeinu”: “It would have been enough for us.” It is a puzzling chorus, and everyone who has ever thought about Dayeinu has asked the obvious question.

Would it really have “been enough for us” had G-d not, say, split the Red Sea, trapping our ancestors between the water and the Egyptian army? Some take the approach that another miracle could have taken place to save the Jews, but that seems to weaken the import of the refrain. And then there are the other lines: “Had G-d not sustained us in the desert” – enough for us? “Had He not given us the Torah.” Enough? What are we saying?

Contending that we don’t really mean “Dayeinu” when we say it, that we only intend to declare how undeserving of all G-d’s kindnesses we are, is the sort of answer children view with immediate suspicion and make faces at.

One path, though, toward understanding Dayeinu might lie in remembering that a proven method of engaging the attention of a child – or even an ex-child – is to hide one’s message, leaving hints for its discovery. Could Dayeinu be hiding something significant –in fact, in plain sight?

Think of those images of objects or words that require time for the mind to comprehend, simply because the gestalt is not immediately absorbed; one aspect alone is perceived at first, although another element may be the key to the image’s meaning, and emerge only later.

Dayeinu may be precisely such a puzzle. And its solution might lie in the realization that one of the song’s recountings is in fact not followed by the refrain at all. Few people can immediately locate it, but it’s true: One of the events listed is pointedly not followed by the word “dayeinu.”

Can you find it? Or have the years of singing Dayeinu after a cup of wine obscured the obvious? You might want to ask a child, more able for the lack of experience. I’ll wait…

…Welcome back. You found it, of course: the very first phrase in the poem.

Dayeinu begins: “Had He taken us out of Egypt…” That phrase – and it alone – is never qualified with a “dayeinu.” It never says, “Had You not taken us out of Egypt it would have been enough for us. For, simply put, there then wouldn’t have been an “us.”

The exodus is, so to speak, a “non-negotiable.” It was the singular, crucial, transformative point in Jewish history, when we Jews became a people, with all the special interrelationship that peoplehood brings. Had Jewish history ended with starvation in the desert, or even at battle at an undisturbed Red Sea, it would have been, without doubt, a terrible tragedy, the cutting down of a people just born – but still, the cutting down of a people, born. The Jewish nation, the very purpose of creation (“For the sake of Israel,” as the Midrash comments on the first word of the Torah, “did G-d create the heavens and the earth”), would still have existed, albeit briefly.

And our nationhood, of course, is precisely what we celebrate on Passover. When the Torah recounts the wicked son’s question (Exodus12:26) it records that the Jews responded by bowing down in thanksgiving. What were they thankful for? The news that they would sire wicked descendants?

The Hassidic sage Rabbi Shmuel Bornstein (1856-1926), known as the “Shem MiShmuel,” explains that the very fact that the Torah considers the wicked son to be part of the Jewish People, someone who needs and merits a response, was the reason for the Jews’ joy. When we were merely a family of individuals, each member stood or fell on his own merits. Yishmael was Avraham’s son, and Esav was Yitzchak’s. But neither they nor their descendents merited to become parts of the Jewish People. That people was forged from Yaakov’s family, at the exodus from Egypt.

That now, after the exodus, even a “wicked son” would be considered a full member of the Jewish People indicated to our ancestors that something had radically changed since pre-Egyptian days. The people had become a nation. And that well merited an expression of thanksgiving.

And so the subtle message of Dayeinu may be precisely that: The sheer indispensability of the Exodus – its importance beyond even the magnitude of all the miracles that came to follow.

If so, then for centuries upon centuries, that sublime thought might have subtly accompanied the strains of spirited “Da-Da-yeinu’s,” ever so delicately yet ever so ably entering new generations of Jewish minds and hearts, without their owners necessarily even realizing the message they absorbed.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life