Musing: The Spelling Champ Who Wasn’t

As most everyone knows by now, the ethnic Indian 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali, won the final bee by correctly spelling the word knaidel, the Yiddish word for a dumpling.

What only a privileged few – now including you – know is that, back in 1989, a 10-year-old Jewish girl, whose last name at the time was Shafran (she has moved on in both locale and life, and is today a mother several times over and a beloved teacher in Milwaukee), came close to winning the spelling championship of Rhode Island and moving on to the national contest. But she erred.

The word she misspelled was “mistletoe.”

Marriage Isn’t What It Used To Be

A number of years ago I shared the essential thought in the essay below with subscribers to my mailing list at the time. But I believe it’s a thought worth repeating, for the benefit of new readers, and worth re-pondering for the rest of us.

My wife and I recently accompanied our second son to the chuppah. It was an elating experience, understandably, and the sight of the new couple recalled to me the unsettling, if simple, observation of the Netziv.

The Netziv – an acronym meaning “pillar,” by which Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin (1817-1893), the famed dean of the Volozhin Yeshiva, is known – noted that the first marriage in history differed in an essential way from all the matrimonial unions that came to follow. Because, according to a widely cited Jewish tradition, Adam and Eve were created as a single entity, a man-woman coupled back to back, with the “forming” of woman described by the Torah more accurately envisioned as a separation. The word often translated “rib” is in fact used elsewhere in the Torah to mean “side,” and so should be understood in the light of that tradition as referring to the woman-side who was part of Adam-Eve before Divine surgery provided her an independent personhood.

So, notes the Netziv, Adam’s subsequent union with his wife was in fact a “re-union” – of two entities that had originally been one. That idea, says Rabbi Berlin, lies in Adam’s declaration when Eve is presented to him: “This time it is a bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Comments Rabbi Berlin: “Only ‘this time’ is it so, since she is a ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’; [here, Adam’s love for Eve] is like a person who loves his own hand.”

Not so, though, every marriage to follow, where the two people creating a relationship will have been conceived, born and raised as independent individuals before becoming a marital unit.

Yet the Talmud directs that, among the blessings recited at a Jewish marriage ceremony and at the festive “Sheva Brachot” (“Seven Blessings”) meals attended by the bride and groom for the week thereafter, are several references to the First Couple (Eden’s, not the Obamas). Not only is the creation of Adam and Eve explicitly invoked, but the bride and groom are reminded of how “your Creator made you joyous in the Garden of Eden.” How, though, can the comparison be made? The essence of post-Edenic marriages, their emotional and spiritual components, would seem to be of a qualitatively different nature from that of the original one. As per the Netziv’s observation, they are mergers, not homecomings.

Or, to carry the Netziv’s own simile a bit further, they are not like reattaching a severed limb but like transplanting a newly donated one.

Interestingly, the medical metaphor itself may hold the answer to why we hold up the example of Adam and Eve to those marrying. Maybe it isn’t a comparison that is intended but a spur to thought – the thought that a successful marriage entails striving for a relationship like that of Adam and Eve, who began their lives as a single being.

Consider why transplantation is no simple matter: It commonly entails a risk of rejection.

The natural reaction of a normal body to the introduction of an “other” with its own distinct genetic identity is to seek to show it the door, so to speak. There is good reason for that immune response, of course; it helps protect against the introduction of foreign elements that could be harmful.

Likewise, the natural response of a normal human psyche to the intimate introduction of an “other,” with its own discrete emotional and spiritual identity, is to similarly seek to protect the threatened self.

Doctors help ensure successful transplants by administering immunosuppressant drugs, chemicals that prevent rejection. They operate by lowering the threshold of the immune system’s integrity. Or, put more simply, they weaken the body’s sense of self.

Might it be that we focus a contemporary bride and groom on the original ones in order to teach them that marriage needs its own form of “immunosuppressant” to succeed – that, in other words, no less than in an organ transplant, marriage requires a weakening of self?

Here, of course, no drug will do; what alone can work is a conscious, determined reorientation of attitude, a force of will born of love. In the Netziv’s words about post-Edenic brides and grooms, only “deep connection [“d’veika”] will bring them together, to become one.”

Like everything truly important, of course, that is more easily said than done. But knowing one’s objective is the first step of any journey.

And the second, here, is acting – whether or not one’s actions reflect purity of intent – as if it is not one’s self that is calling the shots. Jewish tradition stresses that simple deeds can beget essential changes. As a Jewish aphorism sourced in the 13^th century work Sefer HaChinuch puts it: “A person is acted upon by his [own] actions.” What we do, with determination to become someone who naturally does what we are doing, brings us closer to becoming that person.

And so newlyweds might disagree over whether the window should be open or closed. But the chilled spouse should be the one insisting that it remain open, for the comfort of the overheated one; and the latter should be running to shut it, to keep the other warm. Even if the result is a compromise, like leaving the window open a crack, the acts of selflessness themselves are priceless. And they are not limited to windows.

And the marriage-message borne by the Netziv’s observation is, of course, not only for newlyweds.

Transplant recipients, after all, generally need to take their immunosuppressants for life.

Seize The Avocado

It might not be quite up there with the first day of spring or grandchildren, but one of the undeniably wonderful gifts the Creator has bestowed on mankind is the ripe avocado.

The buttery consistency, the unique pastel coloration, and the divinely subtle taste all combine to make it truly a fruit to be thankful for. I have a few slices each morning, joined by lettuce and tomato on toast; a wondrous, nutritious and flavorful start to the day.

And most every time I open one of the fruits and gently rock the point of a sharp knife into its pit before easing it out, I think back at how clueless I was as a teenage yeshiva boy in Israel forty-odd years ago.

I had never eaten – or even seen – an avocado at that point. If supermarkets in my childhood’s Baltimore even stocked the fruit, my mother had never bought one. We did fine on Jewish food, the Eastern European kind, and had our share of American fare too. But exotic fruits weren’t part of my family’s culinary offerings.

Then, suddenly, in a new and very different clime, avocados were everywhere. I didn’t find much beyond tomatoes and falafel in the Israeli diet to sate me, and, skinny as I was to begin with (ah, the thin old days!), I lost weight during that first post-high-school year of study. Although the more cosmopolitan Americans in the Israeli yeshiva I attended, like the natives, devoured the avocados that were provided us each day, I took one look at the mushy, slimy, greenish stuff they spread on bread and my only reaction was pass the leben please.

Why am I sharing this? Stay with me, please.

I came to realize, only many years later, married and living in northern California, how wondrous avocados are (and, in the 1980s, they were four for a dollar at any roadside stand!). What a fool I had been, the smarter, older me realized, to have once shunned the wondrous food (not to mention to have gone so hungry for being so finicky).

Similarly, when later that decade my family and I moved to New England, I was chagrined to discover that homes in our Providence neighborhood had steam heat, with each room sporting a heavy iron radiator that I half-expected to one day explode. I had always associated such metal monstrosities with lower-class living, and modern life as a forced-air world.

It took only a short while (as I aged, apparently, my stubbornness waned) to appreciate the wonderful warmth – second only to a fireplace – that a steam heat radiator provided. The occasional spurts of steam humidifying the air, the place for the children to place their snow-drenched mittens (and all of us, assorted clothing, to become comfortably warm) to dry. A strange Shafran kids custom was placing Corn Chex on the radiator cover to “toast” them. Even the cacophonous clinging and clanging of the steam pipes became, to my ears, magnificent music, the notes signaling that the house would soon be cozily warm.

And so I arrive, at last, at my point, which is a simple one. What was true for me about avocados and radiators is likely true about many other things in all of our lives. Not just things, but people and places too. Instead of wasting precious moments – and sometimes years – grumbling to ourselves about what seems unpleasant, we do ourselves a great favor to wonder if the generators of the grumbles may in fact be blessings well-disguised. Considering that might just lead us to complain a little less and to, rightly, appreciate our here-and-now worlds a little more.

A Piece of the Wall

I really must avoid spicy foods – even my wife’s scrumptious jalapeno pepper-laced cornbread – before retiring at night. The recipe’s great, but for someone approaching 60, it’s a recipe, too, for indigestion-fueled nightmares.

The scene: the Kotel Maaravi, or “Western Wall” in Jerusalem. The time: some future point, may it never arrive, when Anat Hoffman’s vision of the holy place has been realized.

Ms. Hoffman, of course, is the famously melodramatic chairwoman of the feminist group “Women of the Wall,” who has orchestrated countless demonstrations (with adoring media and bevy of cameras in tow) in the form of untraditional prayer services at the holy site; who has reveled in being arrested for her provocations by Israeli police; and who is celebrated by temple clubs and coffee klatches across the United States as the Jewish reincarnation of Rosa Parks. She recently told a Jewish newspaper in California that the Wall should become, in effect, a timeshare. “For six hours a day,” she explained, “the Wall will be a national monument, open to others but not to Orthodox men.”

Those “others,” in Chairman Hoffman’s hope, will presumably include not only the group she leads (and which she characterizes as praying in a halachic manner, although she is personally a Reform Jew) but any group seeking solace under the sheltering umbrella of “pluralism.”

Ms. Hoffman also serves as the executive director of the Reform group the Israel Religious Action Center, which laments the fact that “Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Humanistic, and secular Jews have no representation on the council overseeing the operations of the holy site” and declares that the current single standard there “must be changed.”

That’s what apparently fueled my nightmare. In it, the timeshare model had apparently been found too cumbersome. Each of the various groups laying claim to a “piece of the wall” wanted to express themselves without any time limit; and so a geographical solution to the pluralism problem had been instituted. The Kotel had been Balkanized.

One crowded sliver of the plaza continued to be a place of traditional Orthodox worship, men on one side of a partition, women on the other, everyone welcome. But the area had been severely truncated, to make room for the others.

Nearby, the Reform service, comprised mostly of women in colorful talleitot and kippot, featured a folk guitarist and her choir. (The Orthodox men next-door had resorted to earplugs.)

The Conservative service turnout was sparse, and most of those in attendance were on the far side of middle-age.

The Reconstructionist area was empty, but a sign designated its identity.

The Renewal spot was populated by various small groups of people, some quietly meditating in the lotus position, others dancing in a circle and others still seemingly lost in a daze of unknown provenance.

The Humanistic Kotel-space harbored a small band of people chanting “Hear O Israel, Humanity is holy, Humanity is One.”

There were other successful applicants for Kotel space too. Over toward the end of what had once been the common plaza, was a Jewish animal rights group holding a “blessing of the pets” ceremony, which was followed by a noisy “bark mitzvah” celebration for a pug wearing a kippah. And at the very end of the site were the Jewish Vegetarians of America, waving ceremonial stalks of celery.

At the other end of the pluralized plaza was the Jewish Global Warmist Alliance. Its members were sitting on the ground, wrapped in sackcloth and singing dirges from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

At the back of the plaza, protesting the fact that they hadn’t yet been awarded a space of their own, were members of a “Hebrew-Christian” group, in Jewish religious garb of their own.

I woke up then, thankfully. But not before I sensed a deeper, ethereal moaning, inaudible to human ears but causing the very universe to shudder, emanating from the other side of the Wall.

Infestation Inspiration

The thought, a staple in the writings of the celebrated Jewish thinker Rabbi E. E. Dessler (1892-1953), is best known to people unfamiliar with his thought and writings from a famous and evocative paragraph written by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,” Emerson mused, “how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of G-d which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

Rav Dessler, who wrote poetry too but was above all a keenly incisive philosophical thinker, explains that there really is no inherent difference between nature and what we call the miraculous. We simply use the word “nature” for the miracles to which we are accustomed, and “miracles” for those we haven’t previously experienced. All there is, in the end, is G-d’s will.

That we are inured to the magnificence of the stars in the sky is unfortunate. We city dwellers can still capture some of the grandeur of Emerson’s “city of G-d” if we journey to less light-polluted places. I recall the shock I felt as a young man driving with some friends through West Virginia on a cross-country trek and suddenly seeing, for the first time in my life, the Milky Way. It was a moonless night and the river of white across the sky so struck us we stopped the car and got out to gape at the splendor.

It’s important, though, to try to capture some of the miraculous in the mundane wherever we are and whatever we are surveying. The short Jewish prayer on awakening – “I am thankful before You, living, everlasting King, that You have mercifully returned my soul to me…” – sets the day’s stage for acknowledging the Divine gifts we are daily given. That our sleep was not permanent, yes, but also that our hearts have been beating all the while, and our lungs filling and emptying; that arms and legs do our bidding, that the food we eat nourishes us and allows us to live, to think, to do…

But human nature makes it hard to be filled with gratitude at the sight of the rising sun, much as we should be.

And so it’s a special occasion when we are able to see something in nature that reminds us of Rav Dessler’s nature-equals-miracle equation. And one such occasion is near, at least for those of us in the northeast of the United States.

The more perceptive among us might notice in coming days small holes appearing in the ground. And the least perceptive will find it impossible to not notice what will quickly follow: billions of large dark blue insects with strikingly red eyes and beautiful lacy, orange-veined, nearly transparent wings. People who are not blessed with the miracle of vision will know of the sudden visitors through the miracle of hearing. The noise that large numbers of Magicicada septendecim generate en masse can be overwhelming.

As another poet, born Robert Zimmerman, put it, “And the locusts sang, yeah, it gave me a chill.”
What will allow us, if we’re sufficiently sensitive, to see the upcoming “natural” happening not as an infestation but an inspiration will be the knowledge that the members of “Brood II,” the cicada group soon to emerge, emerge only every 17 years.

Although they are commonly called “locusts,” cicadas are not biologically related to locusts (which we Westerners call “grasshoppers”). But they are impressive creatures, ferocious-looking but entirely harmless to humans and animals (who readily feast on them).

After the insects mate and the females among them lay their eggs, they quickly die. The nymphs that will emerge from the eggs several weeks later will then burrow into the ground, to make their own grand entrance, G-d willing (meant most pointedly) in 2030.

No one really knows why the cicadas spend so much time waiting to emerge, and how they “know” when 17 years have elapsed. John Cooley, a research scientist at the University of Connecticut who has been studying Magicicada septendecim since the early 1990s, was asked about the 17-year wait.

“Man,” he responded, “I wish I knew.”

No doubt science will eventually provide a good hypothesis or two for the marvel. But anyone who wants to experience the frisson born of recognizing the miraculous in the natural, who wants to see the phenomenal in the phenomenon, can just open his ears and eyes to these unlikely envoys of beauty.

And consider, as Mr. Zimmerman did, that “Yeah, the locusts sang, and they were singing for me.”

Celebrating Submission

[This essay was written and published several years ago.]

All Biblical Jewish holidays but one are distinguished by specific mitzvos, or commandments, that attend their celebration: Rosh Hashana’s shofar, Yom Kippur’s fasting, Sukkot’s booths and “four species,” Passover’s seder and matzah.

The one conspicuous exception is Shavuos, which falls this year on May 15 and 16. Although the standard prohibitions of labor that apply to the other holidays apply no less to Shavuot, and while special sacrifices were brought in Temple times on every Jewish holiday, there is no specific ritual or “objet d’mitzvah” associated with Shavuos.

There are, of course, foods traditionally eaten on the day – specifically dairy delectables like blintzes and cheesecake. And there is a widely-observed custom of spending the entire first night of Shavuot immersed in Torah readings and study. But still, there is no Shavuot equivalent to the shofar or the esrog or the seder.

The early 19th century Chassidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev suggested that perhaps the mitzvahlessness of Shavuos was why it is called throughout the Talmud “Atzeres” – which means “holding back” and refers to the prohibition on labor. The fact that Shavuos is essentially characterized by “not doing” rather than by some particular mitzvah-act, though, may imply something deeper.

Shavuos, although characterized by the Torah only as an agricultural celebration, is identified by the Jewish religious tradition with the day on which the Torah was given to our ancestors at Mount Sinai.

That experience involved no particular action; it was, in a sense, the very essence of passivity, the acceptance of G-d’s Torah and His will. That revelation was initiated by G-d; all that our ancestors had to do – though it was a monumental choice indeed – was to receive, to submit to the Creator and embrace what He was bestowing on them.

Indeed, the Midrash compares the revelation at Sinai to a wedding, with G-d the groom and His people the bride. (Many Jewish wedding customs even have their source in that metaphor: the canopy, according to sources, recalls the tradition that has the mountain held over the Jews’ heads; the candles, the lightning; the breaking of the glass, the breaking of the tablets of the Law.)

And just as a marriage is legally effected in the Jewish tradition by the bride’s simple choice to accept the wedding ring or other gift the groom offers, so did the Jewish people at Mount Sinai create its eternal bond with the Creator by accepting His gift of gifts to them.

That acceptance may well be Shavuos’s essential aspect. A positive, active mitzvah for the day – an action or observance – would by definition be in dissonance with the day’s central theme of receptivity.

And so the order of the day is to reenact our ancestors’ acceptance of the Torah – pointedly not through any specific ritual but rather by re-receiving and absorbing it. Which is precisely what we do on Shavuos: we open ourselves to the laws, lore and concepts of G-d’s Torah, our Torah – and accept them anew, throughout the night, even as our bodies demand that we stop and sleep.

The association of Shavuos with our collective identity as a symbolic bride accepting a divine “marriage gift,” moreover, may well have something to do with the fact that the holiday’s hero is… a heroine: Rus, or Ruth (whose book is read in the synagogue on Shavuos); and with the fact that her story not only concerns her own wholehearted acceptance of the Torah but culminates in her own marriage.

It is unfashionable these days – indeed it violates the prevailing conception of cultural correctness – to celebrate passivity or submission, even in those words’ most basic and positive senses.

But it might well be precisely what we Jews are doing on Shavuos.

Happy, and meaningful, anniversary.

© Rabbi Avi Shafran

Understanding the “Other”

It’s a story I tell a lot, since, well, its point comes up a lot. Blessedly, my audience, at least judging from its response, hadn’t heard it before.

The psychiatrist asks the new patient what the problem is. “I’m dead,” he confides earnestly, “but my family won’t believe me.”

The doctor raises an eyebrow, thinks a moment, and asks the patient what he knows about dead people. After listing a few things – they don’t breathe, their hearts don’t beat – the patient adds, “and they don’t bleed very much.” At which point the psychiatrist pulls out a blade and runs it against patient’s arm, which begins to bleed, profusely.

The patient is aghast and puzzled. He looks up from his wound at the slyly smiling doctor and concedes, “I guess I was wrong.”

“Dead people,” he continues, “do bleed.”

I interrupted the laughter with the sobering suggestion that it’s not only the emotionally compromised victims of delusions, however, who see the world through their own particular lenses. Most of us do, at least if we have strong convictions. And the yields of those sometimes very different lenses are the stuff of conflict.

My brief presentation took place on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, as part of an April 23 panel discussion hosted by the 92^nd St. Y and Gesher (in partnership with “Israel Talks,” a JCRC-NY initiative). It featured former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner, Gesher CEO Ilan Geal-Dor and me; the discussion was moderated by Professor Ari Goldman of Columbia University. The topic: “Resolving Conflict with Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Community.”

The point I sought to make with my little story and postscript was that a secular Jew and a religious Jew live in different universes, each providing its own perspective on reality. The first step toward lessening the interpersonal tensions born of those alternate perspectives, I suggested, is simply recognizing that fact. And the second is seeking – if you’re standing, you might want to sit down here – to occupy, if only for a few moments, the mind of the “other.”

That suggestion won’t sit well with those who imagine that all less-observant or non-observant Israelis are hateful, evil people, or with those who look down at the charedi community as a hopelessly backward and useless bunch.

But it’s a vital one for them, and everyone in both communities, to consider. We charedim need to understand that many other Jews have never experienced a truly Jewish life and as a result have come to regard Jewish observance as a mere cultural heritage, and Torah-study as an unproductive vocation. No, not to accept those contentions, G-d forbid, but to understand them, to perceive the roots of the secular disdain for Torah and for those who live and study it – giving us the tools to, at least where it can be done, change misperceptions.

Conversely, though, I continued, non-charedim, like most of the people I was addressing (though I greatly appreciated the presence of a handful of attendees who resembled my wife and me), do themselves a disservice if they don’t “try on” the perspective yielded by charedi convictions. Again, not to succumb to the charedi mindset, just to better understand it.

And so, I touched on several issues. We charedim really believe, I confided, that Torah – its observance and its study – protects the Jewish people. Really.

We really believe, I continued, that what some call an “Orthodox monopoly” in religious matters in Israel is nothing other than an authentically Jewish standard – the only one that can preserve the oneness of Jewish people in the Jewish state. Really.

We really believe that the peaceful spirit of Jewish unity that the Western Wall has evidenced for more than 40 years is threatened by those who want to change the mode of public worship there. Really.

We really believe that traditional Jewish modesty is not misogynistic or prudish but as deeply Jewish an ideal as providing for the poor or caring for the sick. Really.

Do any or all of those beliefs, I asked my listeners, strike you as bizarre? “Of course they do!” I answered on the audience’s behalf. (I read minds.)

“But you know what?” I went on. “The non-charedi takes on security, pluralism, the Kotel and standards of dress are no less bizarre to us.”

The discussion that followed, primed by questions from the moderator and the audience, was an exercise in civility and intellectual give-and-take, particularly noteworthy considering the attempts of late by various parties in the media to bring a host of simmering issues to a boil.

At one point I mused how odd how it is that political conservatives tend to listen almost exclusively to Rush Limbaugh, and liberals, just as religiously, to NPR. It really, I suggested, should be just the opposite. After all, if you’re not listening to your adversary, you’re just listening to yourself.

Musing: They’ve Uncovered Our Secret Weapon

Mehdi Taeb, who is close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently revealed that the Jews are the most powerful sorcerers in the world today, and that they have used their powers to attack Iran. While Iran has so far prevailed, he explained, the full force of Jewish sorcery has not yet been brought to bear.

“The [Jewish] people,” he confided, “believe that it is possible to… even… control G-d’s decisions, by using sorcery methods… ”

Don’t know about sorcery, but prayer and repentance have indeed long demonstrated the potential to merit Divine assistance.

Outside/Inside

A discomfiting feeling crept over me as I watched the fellow remove his head.

Well, not his head – though that would have been discomfiting too, even more so. This was just a costume head, that of the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster. The scene: a small island of concrete in the middle of lower Broadway in Manhattan, where a moment before, Mr. Monster had been happily (at least his expression seemed to say so) posing with a pair of happy children (their expressions left no doubt), the latter’s parents pointing their phones at the photogenic performer and progeny.

My discomfiture arose from discordance, the jarring contrast between the friendly furry face, now dangling from a hand, and the entertainer’s actual own face, heavily stubbled and sneering. Grumbling and angry, he was clearly not enjoying his job.

It might be a professional hazard. A year or so later, an Elmo in Times Square began shouting anti-Semitic rants (with his head on, so to speak) and blocking traffic before being arrested. Another Cookie Monster in the same area stands accused of shoving a 2-year-old when he deemed his mother’s tip insufficient for his services. (“He was using words that were really bad,” she related.)

It’s not easy being cooped up in a hot full-body costume. I know that from personal experience as a Purim gorilla several decades ago. But I’m pretty sure I emerged smiling if sweaty, and while I may have frightened some small children, I didn’t mistreat any.

The disconnect between appearances and what lies beneath can sometimes come crashing down on heads, as it did on mine in lower Manhattan and on that of the mother in Times Square. Similarly, a blast of puzzlement and pain hit many of late when a respected academic and rabbi was accused of assuming internet and e-mail aliases for purposes both perplexing (to tout his intellect and accomplishments) and unethical (allegedly providing anecdotal misinformation about a halachic matter).

The electronic masquerading, though, like the fur and plastic sort, might lead the thoughtful to think about how most of us wear masks too. No, we aren’t (hopefully) rude malcontents trying to make a quick buck off of toddlers’ parents. And we also (again hopefully) don’t utilize aliases to self-aggrandize or mislead others (though some sympathy is due an accomplished scholar who must have faced forces we cannot fathom to have so risked – and now lost – respect and credibility amassed over years).

But still, are we always in fact the “we” we project to others? Are we, even the observant Orthodox Jews among us, not – at least on occasion – somewhat inconsistent with our appearances? I once heard a well-known rabbi pose the funny (yet serious) question: “How is it that people sometimes forget to recite a bracha achrona (the blessing after eating) but somehow never forget to eat?” His point was that if all halacha-committed Jews were truly as observant as they appear, they could no more forget to discharge a religious obligation than they could to attend to the demands of their stomachs.

Do those of us whose dress and demeanor bespeak “fervent” Jewish observance not sometimes lapse into questionable speech or thought, or halachic “corner-cutting”? Does that not make some black hats and beards the Jewish equivalent of Elmo costumes?

Not necessarily.

My rebbe, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, once (it may even have been in response to the question above) helped me see something I had missed in a familiar Talmudic statement. “Any talmid chochom [religious scholar] whose inside does not reflect his outside,” Rava states, “is no talmid chochom.”

Rabbi Weinberg called attention to the fact that Rava doesn’t simply say that a scholar (or any religious Jew) needs to be the same inside and out, but rather implies that there is a process here: first the outside has to be established; then, to become truly accomplished, the inside must be brought into line with the outward appearance.

In other words, there is nothing wrong with presenting an image of ourselves as we wish to be, even if we haven’t yet merited to fulfill that wish. If we have no such wish, our appearance is a meaningless costume, or worse. But if one’s dress and demeanor are adopted along with a concomitant determination to work toward reflecting inwardly what one projects to the world, well, that’s what yeshiva circles call “working on oneself,” and it’s, in fact, what living a Jewish life is all about.

Target (Mal)Practice

Some unwarranted criticism that was lobbed last week at several Orthodox writers greatly disturbed this one.

The target of one volley – though the shots widely missed their mark – was Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblum, one of the preeminent representatives of the charedi world. He was harshly criticized in a magazine editorial for a column he penned in a different magazine wherein he sought a silver lining in the current political disenfranchisement of charedi parties in the Israeli government coalition.

Rabbi Rosenblum suggested that the current situation “affords new opportunities to meet our fellow Jews on the individual level” and that now that they know that “we no longer threaten them” in the political realm, “they may be more open… to getting behind the stereotypes that fuel the animus” against charedim in Israel. “On a one-to-one basis,” he suggested, “we can show them what Torah means to us, what we are prepared to sacrifice for it, and what it might mean for them as well.”

Astonishingly, the writer of those words was pilloried for that sentiment, and misrepresented, too, as having asserted that “the hatred secular Israelis have toward charedim is the fault of the hated rather than the haters” (which, of course, he never contended). The censure of Rabbi Rosenblum continued in much the same vein, with the censurer lumping all non-charedi Israelis into one undifferentiated “secular” mass brimming with ideological hatred for religious Jews, and concluding that the only possible way to truly alleviate anti-charedi sentiment would be for charedim to abandon their beliefs and “adopt… the culture of the majority.”

To be sure, there are secular ideologues in Israel, and elsewhere, for whom Judaism itself is anathema. Rabbi Rosenblum knows that well, every bit as well as his attacker. But the vast majority of non-charedi Jews are not ideologues. Most Jews who may bear bias against their charedi fellow citizens do so because of anti-charedi propaganda – and the fact that they themselves have few if any positive personal interactions with charedim. It is precisely that latter unfortunate reality that Rabbi Rosenblum suggests charedim try to address.

Rabbi Rosenblum is a friend of mine, but I have not always agreed with him (nor he with me) on every issue; I would never hesitate to take issue with him if I felt it were warranted. But his straightforward, heartfelt and wise contention that religious Jews in Israel (and I’d extend it to those of us in America no less) would do well to seek opportunities for demolishing negative stereotypes about charedim is simply beyond any reasonable argument.

Two other Orthodox writers, members of what is often called the “Centrist” Orthodox world, were also strongly taken to task last week in a charedi newspaper. These targets, criticized by a respected columnist, were Rabbi Gil Student and Rabbi Harry Maryles, each of whom presides over a popular blog.

The columnist’s complaint was that the rabbinical bloggers did not see fit to condemn a third Centrist rabbi, a celebrated scholar whose reputation was, sadly, recently upended by the revelation that he had engaged in internet “sock puppetry” – the assumption of an alternate identity on the Internet. It was hardly the most scandalous of scandals but was still (as the culprit eventually admitted and apologized for) an act of subterfuge below someone of his scholarly stature.

Since the pretender had often posted, been quoted or been lauded on Rabbi Student’s and Rabbi Maryles’ blogs – the columnist contended – each of them needed to vociferously denounce him. That, because their blogs regularly link to stories in the general media that portray charedi Jews’ real or imagined crimes and misdemeanors, and because many comments appearing on each blog evidence clear animus for charedim. Why, the columnist asked, the double standard, the seeming readiness to extend mercy and the benefit of the doubt to a Centrist rabbi’s misdeeds but not to fallen charedim? The columnist, moreover, insinuated that Rabbis Maryles and Student themselves harbor ill will for charedim.

I cannot claim to be aware of everything (or even most things) that Rabbi Student or Rabbi Maryles have written. But what I have seen of the writings of each has never given me the impression that either man bears any such animus. They are not charedi themselves, to be sure, and I have disagreed with some of their stances. This is not fatal; indeed it is healthy, like all “arguments for the sake of Heaven.” But I don’t think it is reasonable to demand that they denounce someone whom each of them has looked to as a rabbinic authority. IMHO, as bloggers are wont to write – “in my humble opinion” – there was simply no need to pour salt into the wound here.

An important point, though, was registered by the columnist, and it is one that I hope Rabbi Maryles, Rabbi Student and, for that matter, the “charedi websites” alike all ponder well: Comments sections attract ill will, slander and cynicism like some physical materials do flies. While there are certainly responsible commenters out there, there are also many people with clearly too much time and too few compunctions. And it doesn’t strike me as outlandish to wonder if permitting the posting of cynical or vile comments is complicity in what such comments “accomplish.”

It’s a propitious time for talmidim, which we all are of our respective rabbaim, to do our best to ratchet up our “kovod zeh lazeh” – our proper honor for one another, even when we may be in disagreement. That can be done agreeably.