A Modest Jewish Proposal

A reporter recently asked me whether I thought Jewish women could be experts in Jewish law.  “Of course,” I responded without hesitation.

The journalist was one of the horde of heralds who practically fell over one another a few weeks ago to celebrate – I’m sorry, report upon – the recent graduation of three women from a school whose aim is to place them in synagogues as rabbis, if not quite to call them that.

I elaborated on my response by citing the examples of my own wife and daughter.  (We have several, all of them knowledgeable Jews, but I had in mind our youngest, about to be married but for now still at home.)  “When I have a question, for instance, about what bracha, or blessing, to make on a food,” I explained, “they are the ones I ask.”

The reporter seemed surprised to hear that there could be questions about blessings. So I elaborated on the fact that much of an entire tractate of the Talmud deals with blessings on food and other things, and that there is a wealth of complex halachic material relating to the proper blessings a Jew is to make on different foods and special occasions.  Since brachos entail invoking G-d’s name, I pointed out, it is important that they be made only when required, and that, when required, the proper blessing be made.

There wasn’t time to go into the underlying meaning of brachos, our need to recognize how blessed we are to be able to eat this food or that one, to have reached a milestone in the Jewish year, to have experienced thunder, lightning or an earthquake, or even to have digested one’s food (yes, there’s a blessing to be recited after leaving the bathroom).

The majority of brachos, however, and the volumes of halachic material thereon concern the proper blessings to be made before consuming a food and, if a certain amount is eaten, afterward.

There’s a movement in the larger world these days that promotes “mindful eating,” the conscious focusing on one’s food before consuming it and the retaining of that focus while doing so, slowly and deliberately.  That approach dovetails well with the Jewish perspective on eating.  We are indeed to stop and appreciate every morsel we consume; and brachos are the key to focusing us on that goal.

Unfortunately, many of us observant Jews are not sufficiently careful with our brachos, reciting them hurriedly and pro forma, without summoning the requisite attention to the meaning of their words, and often while doing something else: working, reading, conversing, even driving.  What’s more, as above, the laws governing brachos can be very intricate; not having studied them is a recipe (I’m sorry) for error.

In the non-Orthodox Jewish world, to the best of my knowledge, there is little observance of brachos altogether.

Which leads me to a thought.  With all the contemporary Jewish world’s disagreements and disagreeableness, all the polarized points of view and highly charged issues, might a small measure of pan-Jewish People unity be attainable by a collective embrace of brachos?

Brachos, after all, don’t touch upon issues like feminism (they are – well, almost all – gender-neutral) or insularity (they are recited on both cholent and crêpes Suzette).  And brachos are not even within firing range of topics like drafting charedim in Israel or forcing changes in their educational system.  In other words, they may well comprise a perfect potential Jewish unifier.

For those of us who identify unapologetically with the Jewish past and consider halacha sacrosanct, a renewed focus on brachos would mean strengthening our knowledge about the laws of brachos and undertaking to recite them properly.  Instead of mumbling them, let us resolve to pronounce each word clearly and carefully.  Instead of a mindless “shkolniyedvoro,” let us try harder to articulate our words and think about what we’re saying.

For the part of the Jewish world that does not consider itself governed by halacha at all, simply focusing on the Divine blessings inherent in our food, and acknowledging them with brachos, should present a wonderful opportunity to embrace a non-hot-button Jewish observance.  There are many excellent English-language guides to the recitation of brachos available today.

And for Jews who embrace halacha in principle but feel a need to champion elements of contemporary societal mores, mindful eating and Jewish observance would seem a perfect pairing.

Imagine the importance and laws of brachos being spoken about from the pulpits of Orthodox shuls, Reform temples, feminist yeshivot and Jewish Federation meetings.

No, it won’t bring all Jews to agree on other things. But you know what they say about the journey of a thousand miles…

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

There’s A Will

A new book, “The Anatomy of Violence,” suggests that “the seeds of sin are brain-based,” at least in a sense.  Its author, psychologist Adrian Raine, isn’t speaking of sins like gossip or tax evasion but rather violent crime.  And he makes the case that such criminalities may have biological roots, and that “neurocriminology” may provide society with ways of curbing crime.

Both genetic makeup and prenatal environment, Dr. Raine asserts, are factors that can presage a criminal mind.  On the most basic level, it has long been clear that there is a correlation between certain “accidents of birth” (or of life) and proclivity to crime.  Being born male rather than female, for instance, makes it much more likely that one will become a mugger or murderer.  And certain types of damage to the brain have long been observed to yield changes in behavior, sometimes including a proclivity to violence.

Likewise, more mundane things, like an expectant mother’s smoking or consumption of alcohol (not to mention even more severe chemical insults to the brain of a fetus, like exposure to lead or use of other drugs), can contribute to the likelihood of eventual bad behavior on the part of the child later born.  That a low resting heart rate, however, correlates with antisocial behavior – a finding relayed by Professor Raine – comes as something of a surprise, as does evidence that fish consumption may have the opposite effect.

Many other factors, of course, biological, environmental and situational, may also contribute to the statistical likelihood that a person will be prone to violence.

Correlation, however, does not mean causation.  Shoe size, after all, broadly correlates with math proficiency – most small children are not as good with numbers as are we larger people.

More important still, even causation needn’t be absolute.  Professor Raine cites the case of a man who possessed many of the risk factors for becoming a killer.  The fellow suffered from a vitamin deficiency as a young child, as a youth had a low resting heart rate; and abnormal structures in his brain, revealed by a scan, were reminiscent of abnormalities in the brains of serial killers. And in his pre-teens, the subject joined a gang, smoked cigarettes and engaged in vandalism.  With time, however, he veered from that course, and in fact even wrote a book about the biological roots of violence.  Yes, Professor Raine speaks of himself.

“Why didn’t I stay on that pathway?” he wonders.

The answer is simple: human beings have free will. Bad behavior, whether of the sort universally recognized as such or, for a Jew, behavior forbidden by the Torah, is ultimately a choice.

To be sure, as the great Jewish thinker Rabbi E. E. Dessler (1892-1953) famously pointed out, different people occupy different points of a free will continuum.  One man’s free-will challenge (because of his nature and nurture) may be to refrain from murdering someone he hates; another’s, whether to opt for a kosher product over a tastier non-kosher one; yet another’s, whether to utter a sentence that straddles the line of derogatory speech.

But Francis Crick (quoted by the professor) was wrong to assert that “free will is nothing more than a large assembly of neurons located in the anterior cingulate cortex.”  The choices we make may be processed by our brains, but they are sourced in our souls.

Reviews of the book and its thesis reminded me of the Talmudic statement (Shabbos, 156b) of Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak.  There are two opinions in the Talmud about whether astrological factors, presumed to influence the world and most of its inhabitants, have any effect on Jews.  Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak was of the school of thought holding that they do.  In fact, he declared that someone born under, so to speak, an unlucky star, the planet Mars, will be a “shedder of blood.”

But, he goes on to say, what that means is that he will be either a surgeon, a mugger, a ritual slaughterer of animals or a circumciser.  An orientation, in other words, is one thing; its expression, quite another.  Because that is a matter of will.

So whether one seeks the sources of personal psychologies in a scan of a brain or a scan of the sky, in a double helix or a double star, whether one peers through a microscope or through a telescope, ultimately we all choose our actions, and thus our fates.

© 2013  Rabbi Avi Shafran

Addendum

A correspondent  had some complaints about my essay below “Meet Cindy,” and since the points he raised are important ones, I am sharing my slightly edited responses to him here.

He quoted the following paragraph from my essay:

“And a country that calls itself the Jewish one, it can well be argued, has a special responsibility to underwrite the portion of its populace that is willfully destitute because of its dedication to perpetuating classical Judaism.”

And then commented:

The charedi community is not willfully destitute because of its dedication to perpetuating classical Judaism. In classical Judaism – both in sources in the Gemara and Rishonim, and in actual Jewish history – people worked to support their families. Following the directives of Chazal, people raised their children with the skills, the desire and the motivation to work for a living. There was no system of mass kollel.

The charedi community is not willfully destitute because of its dedication to perpetuating classical Judaism. It is willfully destitute because of its dedication to perverting classical Judaism.

My response:

Classical Judaism is, above all, hewing to the interpretation/application of the Torah’s timeless principles to each generation and place’s situation and needs.  The dorshov of each dor vi’dor [spiritual leaders of each generation] are the arbiters of what is required of us in each era of our history.

I may personally be (and am, in fact) a Hirschian in outlook, and be as puzzled as you at the seeming shunning of what seems to me to be healthy development for Klal Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael.  But even Rav Hirsch, in his day, recognized that his school model in Germany could not be “exported” to Eretz Yisrael.  To ascertain when we are correct and when we are not is what we have Gedolim [recognized spiritual leaders] for.

In the end, whatever my natural personal view, my emunas chachamim [trust in the judgment of the wise] trumps it.  When there is a consensus of the greatest and most recognized Gedolim that a certain departure from the historic norm (and the historical uniquenesses of our times are many), I don’t second-guess them, because I believe that Hashem’s will is that I follow the decisions of the judges “in my day.”

My correspondent then asserted that my analogy between charedim and my fictional creation Cindy was flawed.  He wrote:

1. Cindi is raising her children to be productive citizens, not to also require welfare.

2. Motherhood is something valued by everyone. Being charedi is not. (It’s not being a religious Jew that we’re discussing – plenty of people who work are also religious Jews.)

3. Cindi is presumably appreciative for the aid. She’s not part of a movement that disparages the government, refuses to serve in the army even in times of great national danger, and refuses to display any gratitude to those who defend her and those who financially support her.

4. Cindi’s situation is unplanned, unwanted, and she hopes to get out of it one day.

My response:

1)  Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t.  But if she isn’t, should we feel differently about her?  And if so, should we see ourselves as responsible public policy makers or as social engineers?  You may well disagree with my feeling that how Cindy raises her children should not matter, and I respect your point of view on that, but I reject it.

2) My essay wasn’t an attempt to convince a reader that the charedi way is right or wrong.  It was intended only to, through a thought experiment, help him/her to better relate to how charedim feel.

3)  Most charedim do not disparage the government (at least not any more than non-charedim or secular Israelis).  Their avoidance of military service is for principled religious reasons, not as some sort of eye-poking (and they contribute – at least to those of us who consider Torah-study to be protective of Klal Yisrael – much to the security of the state). 

And I explicitly wrote that charedim need to be makir tov [have and express gratitude to the state for what it provides them].

4) That is a valid difference.  Whether it makes a difference is another matter.  I don’t think it does.   

Meet Cindy

Meet Cindy.

A single mother living in the Midwest with her three young children, she’s deeply unhappy because of the news she received the other day.

Although Cindy does some sales work from her computer at home, her income is insufficient to cover the monthly mortgage payments for her small home and food and clothing for her family. Until now, though, she has managed to make ends meet, with the help of various social safety-net needs-based programs like WIC and food stamps.

Earlier this week, though, Cindy, and hundreds of thousands of others like her, received word that the government is ending those programs.  Budgetary concerns were one reason given but the letter Cindy received also noted that she could still qualify for some of the benefits she was receiving if she found and accepted a full-time job.  “When citizens like you, Cindy,” the personalized form letter explained, “are a regular part of the workforce, it benefits not only you and your family, but the economy as a whole.  And that is something that every loyal citizen should appreciate!”

Well, says Cindy to herself somewhat bitterly, I don’t.  The state of the economy is important, but improving it isn’t my main personal goal.  Raising my children myself is what I consider my immediate mandate. Spending my days in an office or behind a counter and entrusting my children to some sitter is not what I consider good parenting. Being a full-time mother, she tells herself, may not make me a model citizen, but it makes me, at least in my mind, a model human being.  My children are my most important asset.

The new bad news, moreover, came on the heels of some earlier unhappy tidings, the repeal of the federal mortgage interest tax deduction, which increased Cindy’s tax bill by a good chunk of her income.

Making Cindy even more outraged and despondent was the popular move to require that every American child join a “junior civil service program” where values she (as a conservative Christian) doesn’t endorse are taught.  And then, to top things off, there were the relentless media and public assaults on “welfare” single parents like her, the newspaper editorials and talk-show hosts labeling of them as “freeloaders,” “unpatriotic” and even “parasites.”  It made her angry enough to cry.

Cindy, of course, and her troubles, are hypothetical.  Our country still extends a generous safety net to its neediest citizens, and the mortgage interest deduction is alive and well. Children are not forced into any educational program and can even be home-schooled.  But can you relate to how hypothetical Cindy would feel if the nightmare scenario were in fact real?  If so, then you might better appreciate how charedim in Israel are feeling these days.

Over the past decade or so, their social services – primarily in the form of child allowances – have been drastically cut, several times.  Now what is left of the allowances is under the knife again. And charedim are being pressured to forgo full-time Torah-study, their “most important asset” and first priority.  They are told that they must enter the army, even though there is no need for them in the military (as its leaders have repeatedly stated) and they fear the impact Israel’s “military melting pot” will have on their lives.  They are vilified without pause, and cajoled to act not in what they consider their best interest (and the best interest, ultimately, of the entire country) but rather just to do what they are told.  All, of course, for “the economy” and the “greater good.”

No one, to be sure, can claim a “right” to social service entitlements.  And one can, if he chooses, take the stance that no citizen of any country should expect, for any reason, that the government needs to take care of him in any way. That’s a perfectly defensible position, at least from a perspective of cold logic.

But every compassionate country recognizes the rightness of assisting the poor.  And a country that calls itself the Jewish one, it can well be argued, has a special responsibility to underwrite the portion of its populace that is willfully destitute because of its dedication to perpetuating classical Judaism (which, as it happens, is what kept the connection between Jews in the Diaspora and their ancestral land alive for millennia, and allowed for a state of Israel in the first place).

Gratitude for what one has received is a deeply Jewish ideal.  And Israeli charedim should indeed feel and express gratitude for all that the state provides them.  But absent are calls for non-charedi Israelis – or the rest of us –  to consider feeling and expressing gratitude for the charedi willingness to live financially constricted lives in order to remain immersed in Jewish practice and learning.  Instead, just the opposite is seen: Israeli charedim are used as political pawns, regarded and portrayed and treated as Israel’s misfortune.

Cindy would relate.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Crime and Prejudice

My first encounter with the legendary Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z”l, the late president of Agudath Israel of America and the man who hired and mentored me as the organization’s spokesperson, was an unexpected phone call offering praise and criticism.

It was the mid-1980s, and I was a rebbe, or Jewish studies teacher, in Providence, Rhode Island at the time.  Occasionally, though, I indulged my desire to write op-eds, some of which were published by the Providence Journal and various Jewish weeklies.

One article I penned in those days was about the bus-stop burnings that had then been taking place in religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel. Advertisements on the shelters in religious neighborhoods began to display images that were, to put it genteelly, not in synch with the religious sensibilities of the local residents, for whom modesty was a high ideal and women were respected for who they were, not regarded as means of gaining attention for commercial products.

Scores of the offensive-ad shelters were either spray-painted or torched; and, on the other side of the societal divide, a group formed that pledged to burn a synagogue for every burned bus-stop shelter.  It was not a pretty time.

My article was aimed at trying to convey the motivation of the bus-stop burners, wrong though their actions were.  Imagine, I suggested, a society where heroin was legal, freely marketed and advertised.  And a billboard touting the drug’s wonderful qualities was erected just outside a school.  Most of us would never think of defacing or destroying the ad but most of us would probably well relate to the feelings of someone who took things into his own hands.  For a charedi Jew, gross immodesty in advertising in his neighborhood is no less dangerous, in a spiritual sense, and no less deplorable.

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

I was taken aback, since hotheads certainly exist among religious Jews.  But I thanked my esteemed caller greatly for both his kind words and his critical ones.  I wasn’t convinced that my assumption had really been unreasonable, but, I supposed, he had a valid point.

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

What recalled that era and interaction to me this week were the reports from Israel that arrests had been made in the 2009 case of a gunman who entered a Tel Aviv youth center for homosexuals and opened fire on those inside, killing two people and wounding 15 before escaping.

Both Israeli and western media freely speculated at the time that the murderer was likely a charedi, bent on visiting his idea of justice upon people who live in violation of the Torah’s precepts.

What has apparently turned out to be the case, though, is that the rampage at the club had nothing to do with either charedim or religious beliefs.  It was reportedly a revenge attack in the wake of a minor’s claim that he had been abused by a senior figure of the club. A family member of the minor allegedly went to the club to kill the suspected abuser but, unable to find him, opened fire indiscriminately.  (Unsurprisingly, but worthy of note all the same, none of the media pundits or bloggerei who laid the shooting at the feet of charedim have offered apologies.)

There are, to be sure, unsavory people in charedi communities, as there are in every community.  Religious dress and lifestyle are no guarantees of what kind of person lies behind the façade. The Talmud includes a difference of opinion about how “Esav’s personification,” the angel with whom Yaakov wrestled, appeared to our forefather.  One opinion holds that the malevolent being looked like “a mugger”; the other, “like a religious scholar.”

But for anyone to assume that any particular crime must have been the work of someone in the charedi community – or in any community – bespeaks a subtle bias born of animus, whether recognized by its bearer or not.

And such assumptions are criminal in their own right.

© 2013  Rabbi Avi Shafran

 

Unreal

I was recently privileged to spend the good part of a week on the tree-studded rural campus of my alma mater, Yeshivas Ner Yisroel (the Ner Israel Rabbinical College, according to the sign at its entrance).  As always, visiting the place where I studied some forty years ago was an enthralling experience.

There have been changes, to be sure, at Yeshiva Lane, the winding private road that is the yeshiva buildings’ address.  What was the main study hall in my day now serves the yeshiva’s high school division; and a magnificent newer beis medrash stands where, in the 1970s, an old house occupied by a faculty member’s family sat on a hill.  New housing has risen up for faculty and married kollel students – there is a long waiting list of kollel-fellow families living “in town” (that is to say, Baltimore and its suburb Pikesville) who are anxious to move onto the yeshiva campus.  (Kollel fellows who can no longer afford to be engaged in full-time Torah study understand that their campus apartment or townhouse should be offered to a a full-time kollel fellow’s family.)

Torah life and study, and children, permeate Yeshiva Lane.  Students and staff members walk to or from the study hall, often in studious conversation with one another; and parents driving cars and vans shuttle their children to schools “in town.”  After school hours, the bevies of bicycles lying near the entrance of each of the apartment buildings welcome their owners back.  A small playground suddenly comes to life, echoing with the sweetest sound in the world, happy kids at play.

On the Sabbath, the scene is idyllic.  With no traffic, carpools, appointments or any reason to rush, a special calm settles over the campus.  The songbirds that must have been there the entire week suddenly stand out, adding avian Shabbos songs to the ambiance.  In the afternoon, after services and the festive Shabbos meal, parents sit on the balconies of their homes, watching their children at play, or study or just relax.  A special lecture is offered for women, and husbands take a break from their studies to allow their wives to attend.  Everyone looks after everyone else and everyone else’s children.  The community is a model of caring.  Every neighbor is neighborly.

Life on Yeshiva Lane unmistakably revolves around the study halls, where a total of close to 900 boys and men delve into the Talmud and other Jewish sources, usually studying in pairs. And the dynamos that are the batei medrash operate on Shabbos no less energetically than during the week, and are filled with young and not-so-young men from early morning until late at night.

I took the opportunity to spend a couple hours in one of those study halls; it was hard to find a seat. I applied myself to my own studies for most of the time, and then listened in to several of the pairs of students studying in my vicinity.  It was as if I had been transported four decades into the past; the material and method of learning were more than familiar.  And four decades hence, I realized, the room’s walls would hear the same sort of academic conversations, about the same texts.  The Torah has been the focus of Jewish minds over millennia; and always will be.

Like all good things, though, my visit came to an end and I returned to a very different “ultra-Orthodox” world, at least a very different depiction of it than the one I had just experienced.

My job immerses me in the media.  And awaiting me were the usual reports and blog postings about Orthodox Jews’ real or imagined crimes and misdemeanors, and the regular opinion pieces equating Orthodox belief and standards with backwardness, sexism, “phobias” and intolerance.

A special welcome-back “present” was a long frothing-at-the-mouth diatribe in a respected Jewish periodical, written by a self-described “polymath” angrily decrying the growth of the charedi community and its “Jewish fundamentalism,” which, he contends, “threatens the fabric of American Jewish life.”  The would-be dragon-slayer railed against “the coercion and ignorance prevalent in American ultra-Orthodox communities”; asserted that charedi lives are “a distortion of Judaism” and fuel an “apparatus of fear, manipulation and power mongering”; sees something sinister if not criminal in the acceptance of Pell grants by yeshiva students who qualify for them; and sounds a dire warning that, because of charedi Jews’ generally large families, “New York Jewry, within a generation, will be fundamentalist, poor, uneducated and reactionary.”

Two depictions of the same subject, one a Rembrandt, the other a Picasso.  What comes to mind is the famous musing of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu.  “Last night I dreamt that I was a butterfly,” he told his students.  “Now I do not know if I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamt himself a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Tzu.”

No, reality wasn’t what I returned to last week, but rather what I left behind.  The portrait painted by a jaundiced media and the precious polymath is the dream, a fever dream. What I saw in Baltimore – which is duplicated in every charedi community I’ve lived in or visited – is the reality.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Musing: Message for a Maniac

New York’s tabloids and international news services alike took note of a New Jersey court appearance by Nazi admirer Heath Campbell, who named his first-born ‘Adolf Hitler’ (yemach shemo – although Mr. Campbell neglected to add that phrase to the name) and has had all four of his children removed from his home in the wake of violent incidents there.

The proudly fascist dad, who is seeking to have his children returned to him, appeared in court in an authentic World War II Nazi uniform, complete with medals, knee-high boots and an armband sporting a swastika.

“I want my children back,” Campbell told the Daily News.

And I want my grandparents back.  My uncles, aunts and cousins too.

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