I have added a new category to those listed to the right: “Oldies (Hopefully Goodies)”. Older, often lengthy pieces will be posted under that category.
The first article to be posted there is titled “Graphoanalysis: Science or Snow Job?”, and concerns the popular pursuit of divining people’s character from their handwriting. It appeared in Ami Magazine in 2011.
AS
The essay below was written for, and published by, Haaretz.com. I share it with that paper’s permission.
The perils of religious self-definition became amusingly apparent in the recent Pew survey of American Jews. One category of “Jews” was “Jews by affinity” – Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish background who simply choose to call themselves Jews; more than one million people so identified themselves. Similarly suspicious are the survey’s self-described “Orthodox,” fully 15% of whom reported that they “regularly attend services” in a non-Jewish place of worship, 24% of whom handle money on the Sabbath and 4% of whom say they erect holiday trees in their homes in December.
In a recent op-ed, Rabbi Asher Lopatin insists that the “Open Orthodox” movement whose flagship institution, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, he now serves as president has every right and reason to call itself Orthodox – indeed that anyone can choose whatever Jewish religious label he wishes to wear, and that “no one has the authority” to “write someone out of Orthodoxy.”
The issue here, however, is not one of people but of concepts, not about writing anyone out of anything but rather of defining words, which, pace Humpty Dumpty, are expected to have meanings.
To be sure, words’ meanings can change. Once, not very long ago, a “mouse” was exclusively a furry creature, and “gay” meant only “joyful.” Perhaps “Orthodox Judaism” will, as Rabbi Lopatin wishes, undergo a metamorphosis too, and come to encompass even theologies that are indistinguishable from the one currently associated with the Conservative movement.
But at present, as over the past century or two, “Orthodoxy” has been synonymous with full acceptance of the mesorah, or Jewish religious tradition – including most prominently the historicity of the Jewish exodus from Egypt; the fact that the Torah, both Written and Oral, was bequeathed to our ancestors at Sinai; and that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob actually existed – concepts that prominent products or leaders of the “Open Orthodoxy” movement are on record as rejecting.
Orthodoxy is “pluralistic,” in the sense that it encompasses pieces at odds with one another on myriad issues. Parts of the Orthodox universe embrace formal secular learning, parts eschew it; parts recite the Israeli Rabbanut’s prayer for Israel, and parts don’t; parts are defined by the warmth and tumult of their shul services, parts have services that are formal and sedate.
But all those parts, for all their differences in orientation and practice, are unified by a belief system that embraces the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides (derived from the Talmud and other links in the chain of the Oral Tradition – our mesorah). An adherent of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, a Satmar chassid, a “Litvish” yeshiva graduate and a student of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchonon Theological Seminary are all unified by the essence of what the world has called Orthodoxy for generations. But “Open Orthodoxy,” despite its name, has adulterated that essence, and sought to change both Jewish belief and Jewish praxis (as in ordaining women or suggesting that problematic Jewish marriages can simply be retroactively annulled).
It would be unfortunate were a new movement to force Orthodoxy to find a new name for itself, just in order to communicate the idea of a community that affirms the entirety of the mesorah. It would be unfair, too, since there already exists an “open” movement that seeks to “conserve” what it likes of the mesorah but to respect the Zeitgeist and embrace different approaches and practices from those of the Jewish past.
Why, indeed, can’t the new Jewish movement just append itself to the already existing one that shares its ideals? A cynic’s answer would be: because it wouldn’t be newsworthy; a conservative wing of the Conservative movement is hardly a novelty; a “new” and “open” “Orthodoxy,” the violence done to the latter word in the process notwithstanding, is something special. A non-cynic would have no answer.
But both the cynic and the sober observer would rightly consider the use of “Orthodox” to be a violation of truth in advertising. We need, Rabbi Lopatin writes, to “respect each other’s understanding of what Orthodoxy is.” But – at least until the dictionary jettisons history here – “Orthodoxy” is not an all-encompassing umbrella. There may be different sub-species of aardvarks and of zebras, but an opossum cannot lay claim to either entry.
Seeking to revise the mesorah, although disturbing enough, is one thing; redefining a time-honored word while misrepresenting what one is doing, quite another.
It’s one thing, in other words, to be “open.” But, above all, one must be honest.
© 2013 Haaretz
A mailing from the Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based cultural nonprofit dedicated to translating and promoting Yiddish books, is sitting on my desk. The oversized envelope contains a fundraising letter and various enclosures.
Emblazoned across the front of the envelope is the large word “Yiddish,” followed by the legend, its second word highlighted:
“Our last chance to keep it alive forever!”
Someone really should buy these folks a bus ticket to Williamsburg.
We cannot see the tens of thousands of mazikin, or “harmers” (often translated as “demons”), that the Talmud teaches surround us always (Berachos 6a). Were they visible, says Abba Binyamin, they would utterly terrify us. The same, of course, is true about the tens of thousands of spores, bacteria and viruses that constantly seek to invade our bodies.
The latter are held off, if we are alive and healthy, by an unbelievably complex biological network we call the immune system.
Langerhans cells on our skin keep tiny potentially lethal invaders out.
The enzyme lysozyme in mucus breaks down the cell walls of malign bacteria, as do tears and saliva.
An astounding menagerie of protein molecules we call antibodies, moreover, is produced by the white blood cells born in the marrow of our bones, each product designed (yes designed; there’s a Designer here) to disable a specific bacteria, virus or toxin. Lymphocytes, one such product of our bone marrow, attack a broad array of the bacterial and viral agents that are capable of causing us great harm.
And the system contains a vital control subsystem governed by the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA), a molecule present on the surface of practically every cell in our bodies, that identifies those cells as our own, protecting them from attack by the myriad germ-fighting antibodies commanded (yes, commanded; there’s a Commander here) to seek and destroy foreign invaders.
We know these facts today because of the progression of science and its observations of the world beneath the threshold of unaided human vision – and the devastation that occurs when any part of immune system ceases to work and a body is invaded by biological mazikin.
The immune system is to be constantly marveled at. But a particularly apt place to ponder it is during the prayer recited on Shabbos (and at the Pesach seder) that we call “Nishmas Kol Chai” (“The Spirit of All Living Things”). During the Shabbos service, sadly, that prayer is often truncated or even omitted entirely by many people, likely because it comes at the end of a portion of the service (like Aleinu, another “orphan in shul”). And yet, halachic sources say that it should receive preference before much of what precedes it. And for good reason.
Some of “Nishmas” consists of verses borrowed from Tehillim and the prophet Yeshayahu, along with poetic renderings of concepts from the Talmud. Toward the prayer’s end, we find the words:
…From severe and enduring diseases You spared us… therefore, the organs that You set within us shall thank and bless… and declare the sovereignty of Your name… as it is written [Psalms 35:10]: “All my bones shall say, ‘Hashem, Who is like You? You save the poor man from the one stronger than he, the poor and destitute from the one who would rob him…’”
Our very bodies, in other words, our organs and their processes, figuratively “thank and bless” our Creator – by their very workings. What is the pertinence here, though, of King David’s praise of G-d’s saving a poor man from being oppressed by a stronger one?
From the perspective of what we know today, it is not hard to perceive the exquisiteness of that reference in its context. The “poor men” are our bodies, vulnerable to hordes of imperceptibly small but dangerously strong agents of harm. Is it not self-evident that we owe our Creator our wide-eyed gratitude for the easily ignored but incalculably vital miracle that is our immune systems’ ceaseless work to vanquish those baleful agents?
And is it not particularly exquisite that the parts of our bodies King David singles out as declaring “Hashem, who is like You?” for saving the poor from the strong… are our bones?
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
A rejoinder to my recent essay, “True and Tragic Colors,” about Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and “Open Orthodoxy,” was published by The Times of Israel. Below is my response to that posting, written in my capacity as Agudath Israel of America’s spokesperson.
I am grateful to Dr. Ben Elton, a student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, for his rejoinder to my recent posting about that institution and “Open Orthodoxy,” in which I asserted that neither can lay claim to the adjective “Orthodox,” at least not if words are to have meanings.
My gratitude derives from the fact that Dr. Elton’s words help clarify the issue. Although he writes that he is “bemused” by my critique of his invocation of the Wurzburger Rav as an example of Chovevei Torah’s approach, his explanation of his bemusement can allow us to better understand whether that revered Torah personality would indeed approve of the inclusion of non-Orthodox Jewish clergy in training rabbis, which YTC proudly embraced at its recent presidential installation.
Dr. Elton is correct that there was indeed a difference of opinion between the Wurzburger Rav (Rav Yitzchok Dov Halevi Bamberger) and Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch regarding whether the rabbis of the Orthodox community of Frankfurt could remain part of that city’s official “Jewish community” council along with non-Orthodox clergy.
And he is correct, too, to note that Rav Hirsch’s objection to such membership was based on his conviction that it would “thereby give[s] formal recognition to the legitimacy of Reform.”
But he is mistaken to interpret Rav Bamberger’s dissent as permitting membership despite that contention. The Wurzberger Rav simply felt that membership in a communal body did not, in fact, confer legitimacy of any sort to Reform. As I noted in my response to Dr. Elton’s original posting, Rav Bamberger expressly forbade membership in other cities’ communal councils, where he apparently felt the terms of membership did in fact confer such legitimacy to Reform.
That a communal Orthodox rabbi, Marcus Horowitz, sat on the body overseeing the construction of a Reform Temple “and used his influence to prevent building taking place on Shabbat” – Dr. Elton’s evidence for his thesis – does not negate Rav Bamberger’s forbiddance to confer Jewish legitimacy on non-Orthodox systems of thought.
Nor does Rav Bamberger’s letter to Rav Hirsch in which he wrote that their common “reject[ion” and “detest[ation] of Reform with all our hearts” should nevertheless “not break the ties of personal friendship which bind us.”
Personal friendships, of course, are not the issue here. Orthodox rabbis, even among those who affiliate with Agudath Israel, maintain friendships with non-Orthodox representatives. The issue, though, is not personal friendship but something entirely different: whether non-Orthodox rabbis should be given a public platform to share their views on the quintessentially religious question of how to train rabbis.
As Dr. Elton himself concedes, Rabbi Bamberger would not likely “have advocated theological dialogue” with Reform representatives. Does he imagine that the Wurzberger Rav would have invited them, as YCT did, to a public forum to train rabbis? How, then, can Dr. Elton claim that “YCT is simply enduring the same critique today” as Rav Bamberger did in his day, and that YCT “can take pride in [Rav Bamberger’s] company?
Most glaring is Dr. Elton’s response (or lack of one) to the main point of my earlier posting: that neither YCT nor “Open Orthodoxy” can legitimately lay claim to the title “Orthodox.”
He blithely dismisses my summoning of quotations from YCT leaders and honored graduates that negate the very essence of what history has come to call Orthodoxy, with the observation that the quotes “do not contain much new material” and that they have been well explained “in the past.” He does not, however, offer even a synopsis of any such explanations. He cannot, for none can exist. One either accepts that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob existed or one does not; one either subscribes to the belief that the Torah, Written and Oral, was given to our ancestors at Sinai, or one does not. Esteemed leaders in the “Open Orthodoxy” movement do not. Orthodoxy does.
History is the best guide here. The Conservative movement began precisely as “Open Orthodoxy” has begun – the former was so named because it wished to “conserve” what it judged it could of halacha in a new environment that it felt deserved a more liberal approach to traditional Jewish thought and social norms. It shunned the word “Orthodox” only because it saw that adjective, at the time, as an albatross around its neck, since Orthodoxy was expected to expire quickly in America. YCT, by contrast, embraces the word as a badge of honor. Not because it fits but because embracing the word “Orthodox” – the institution hopes – might distinguish it from the Conservative movement despite its essential duplication of its essence.
The problem is that, to imagine an example in another realm, a person who is anti-immigration, anti-abortion, against higher corporate taxes and pro-gun and cannot legitimately claim the label “liberal.” As much as he may call himself that, he is like a leopard claiming to be an eagle.
And leopards cannot even change their spots, much less fly.
Whatever it may call itself, a neo- Conservative movement is simply not part of what history has come to call Orthodoxy.
© 2013 Agudath Israel of America
The other day, waiting to board a bus, I was moved to think about empathy.
Unfortunately, the prod came in the form of the opposite, crass selfishness. A young woman approached the group of us waiting to step up into the vehicle and insinuated herself at the front of the long line. She had no visible physical impairment, made no request for anyone’s permission, offered not even a perfunctory “excuse me.” She seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that other people occupied the universe at the time, some even in her immediate vicinity.
I could read the minds of my fellow future passengers. Their faces telegraphed my own mental reaction: Who does she think she is? How would she like it if someone cut before her in a line? Yes, she would probably reply in puzzlement. “But that’s not what’s happening. I am the one cutting in here, not someone else cutting in before me.” The lady, in other words, was empathy-impaired.
“My sins I recount today,” as the waiter, just released from prison, told Pharaoh. I recall myself as a small boy armed with a magnifying glass on a sunny day, incinerating individual ants out of sheer curiosity. I even remember watching without pain or protest as my buddy devised creative ways of dispatching grasshoppers, ever-present victims of little boys in early-60s Baltimore summers. Some claim that killing insects as a child presages the eventual emergence of a serial killer. So far, though, thank G-d, I haven’t much felt the urge to commit murder; and when I have, I have managed to overcome it.
Today, in fact, when an insect finds its way into my home, I always try to capture the invader and escort him or her safely to the great outdoors. (All right, mosquitos are an exception, but they are the aggressors.)
After all, I wonder, how would I like it if I were a stinkbug and someone chose to squash me or spray me with poison or flush me down the toilet? Empathy, again.
Being concerned with the wellbeing of an insect, or for that matter a dog or cat or cow, is but one rung on the empathy ladder. The Torah teaches us that animals, in the end, although they may not be needlessly hurt, exist for human servitude and food, things we would surely not wish for ourselves. Our ultimate and most powerful concern for “the other” is meant to be for other human beings.
What occurred to me at the bus stop was that, while some may gauge human spiritual growth by religious meticulousness or proficiency in texts or the ability to deeply meditate, the most essential marker of spiritual progress may well be how far one has progressed from the selfishness that defines us at birth toward true, encompassing empathy. (I have far to go; caring about bugs is easier than truly caring about people, especially some people. But most of us have, over our years of living, grown, to various degrees, to appreciate empathy.) The severely empathy-impaired, like the girl on the bus line, are essentially children, perhaps infants.
It is the import of empathy, of course, that imbues Rabbi Akiva’s statement (in the Midrash, quoted by Rashi) that the verse, “Love your fellow as yourself” (Vayikra, 19:18) is a “great principle of the Torah.” And Hillel’s famous response to the potential convert who insisted on learning the entire Torah on one foot: “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and study it” (Shabbos, 31a).
Jews the world over are reading and studying these days about Avrohom, the subject of the weekly Torah readings. It is not insignificant that the first of our forefathers is characterized by our tradition not only as the champion of monotheism – the quintessential Jewish idea – but as the paragon of chesed, or “kindness to others.” His rejection of idolatry, even to the point of risking his life, is of a part with his pining for strangers to welcome and feed even when in great pain from his adult circumcision.
Which points to a deeper truth, one that might be germane to the akeida, Avrohom’s “binding” of Yitzchok his son: Although some choose to see human empathy as a simple evolutionary adaptation that helps protect the species, a believing Jew’s dedication to the other is ultimately expressed in the context of his dedication to the Other, that is to say to G-d. We are born utterly selfish; we are meant to strive toward utter selflessness, to care about and for our fellows, and to be, in the end, selflessly dedicated servants of the Divine.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
One of the many post-mortem dissections of the recently released Pew study of American Jews appeared in the Forward last week. It contended that the Orthodox community “isn’t growing nearly as fast as some of its boosters claim.” The 10% of the American Jewish population that identify as Orthodox Jews, the piece explains, is “up only 2% from 10 years ago.”
What’s more, the article notes, “only 48% of people who were brought up Orthodox remain Orthodox.”
As it happens, though, the Orthodox “retention rate” has risen considerably in recent decades. Whereas, indeed, only 22% of people now 65 and older raised Orthodox still call themselves that, fully 57% of people aged 30-49 raised Orthodox do. And for those under 30, the percentage of raised-Orthodox Jews who are still Orthodox is 83%.
As to the “up only 2%” observation, it would seem that some journalists could use a math refresher. Growth from 8% to 10% represents a rise of fully 25% – a rather impressive figure indeed.
Agudath Israel of America’s recent statement regarding the ostensibly Orthodox “Yeshivat Chovevei Torah” took that institution to task for crossing a particularly bright red line by inviting non-Orthodox Jewish clergy to make presentations at a “roundtable” entitled “Training New Rabbis for a New Generation” at its installation of a new president.
The most eloquent and straightforward defense of YCT came in the form of a posting at “The Times of Israel” by a student of the institution, Dr. Ben Elton.
While graciously “respect[ing]” the “right of the Agudah to object to cross-denominational activity” (even citing Lord Jonathan Sacks in concurrence, as Rabbi Sacks has written that “pluralism and Orthodoxy are mutually exclusive”), Dr. Elton asserts that the Wurzberger Rov (Rav Yitzchok Dov Halevi Bamberger), by taking a different position from that of Rav Shamson Raphael Hirsch on the secession of Orthodox Jews from the larger, government-sanctioned pan-Jewish community in Frankfort, is a model for a more inclusive attitude.
The Wurzberger Rov’s permitting of Frankfort’s Orthodox Jews to remain part of the official Jewish community of the city, Dr. Elton contends, “inevitably meant recognizing the status of [the city’s] non-Orthodox rabbis and institutions, perhaps even paying for their upkeep…”
Unfortunately for Dr. Elton’s thesis, it is utterly undermined by documented facts. Whatever the Wurzberger Rov’s reasoning may have been for his decision regarding the Orthodox Jews of Frankfort (as it happens, he supported the secession of other Orthodox communities from their local Jewish pan-community entities), he most certainly did not consider remaining part of the official community to constitute “recognizing the status” of clergy or groups that rejected the Jewish mesorah.
In fact, he clearly stipulated that fees paid by Orthodox members could not be used to support Reform activities in any way. He felt no differently from Rav Hirsch about the fact that Reform represented a heretical movement and could be provided no respect nor support from any believing Jew. And there is no evidence whatsoever that he in any way condoned the “co-operation and dialogue” with non-mesorah-accepting movements that Dr. Elton contends his example suggests.
In truth, the entire comparison is baseless. Rabbi Bamberger was pronouncing only on the permissibility of being part of a Jewish communal entity presenting itself as such in official dealings with the local government regarding limited communal matters. He was not permitting any sort of combined Orthodox-non-Orthodox rabbinical collaboration in rabbinical training like what YCT pointedly and tellingly included in its presidential installation.
Dr. Elton poignantly concludes by asking Agudath Israel to recognize that YCT and others who subscribe to its “vision” in fact “care very much about Torah and mesorah.”
We truly wish that were so. Unfortunately, however, and tragically, there is ample evidence that that YCT and the other components of Rabbi Avi Weiss’ “Open Orthodoxy” movement (its women’s institution, Yeshivat Maharat, and its rabbinical organization, the International Rabbinic Fellowship – “IRF”) care not much at all about either Torah or mesorah. There is abundant reason why even the resolutely “centrist” Rabbinical Council of America does not accept YCT’s rabbinic degrees as qualification for membership.
The evidence of “Open Orthodoxy”’s true essence has been publicly presented by others, most prominently Yated Neeman columnist Rabbi Avrohom Birnbaum and Cross-Currents.com contributor Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer. It is abundant.
One of YCT’s most illustrious graduates, Zev Farber, who received the institution’s most prestigious rabbinic ordination (Yadin Yadin), is a founding board member of the IRF, the coordinator for their Va’ad Giyyur and an advisory board member of Yeshivat Maharat, has publicly contended things like: “The Deuteronomic prophet (i.e. the author of Deuteronomy) was still a human being, his scope remains limited by education and social context.”
And: “Given the data to which modern historians have access, it is impossible to regard the accounts of mass Exodus from Egypt, the wilderness experience or the coordinated, swift and complete conquest of the entire land of Canaan under Joshua as historical.”
And: “The idea that the twelve tribes of Israel were formed by the twelve sons of Jacob has all the appearances of a schematic attempt of Israelites to explain themselves to themselves… These Torah stories are not history, the recording of past events, they are mnemohistory, the construction of shared cultural-memory through narratives about the past.”
And: “Abraham and Sarah are folkloristic characters; factually speaking, they are not my ancestors or anyone else’s.”
He also has called it “impossible” and “unrealistic” to ask Jews plagued by same-sex attraction to “give up on the emotionally fulfilling and vital experience of intimate partnership that heterosexual men and women take for granted” and has encouraged only “exclusivity and the forming of a loving and lasting relationship-bond as the optimal lifestyle” for Jews facing such challenges.
YCT’s Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Dov Linzer, was once reported in the New York Jewish Week as having asserted that the Sages of the Talmud were unconcerned with a person’s religious beliefs; that, in the article’s words, “it was Maimonides who introduced the concept that Jews must adhere to basic dogmas, and even he was not consistent in his demands for such adherence.”
He has also asked, as a “reasonable question” whether we “should we be bending the halakhah to conform to our modern notions of egalitarianism.” It is, he decides, “a reasonable question to ask and a hard one to answer.”
YCT’s newsletter has featured a profile of an alumnus whose “most proud accomplishment” was having “created a meaningful Haggadah” for people living lives in violation of a sin the Torah characterizes as “an abomination.” The “Haggadah” was lauded because it “spoke to their understanding of what it means to be liberated.”
Such positions espoused by YCT leaders (and those are but a few of many such examples) are run-of-the-mill notions in the non-Orthodox rabbinic world. They wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in non-Orthodox circles. But how do they comport with “car[ing] very much about Torah and mesorah”? There can be only one answer: they don’t.
Which is why “Open Orthodoxy” and its institutions have felt free to ignore the Jewish religious tradition in the realms of synagogue worship and gender roles. If the mesorah is just an historical artifact of a primitive, unenlightened period, why not just “update” it?
A half-century ago, a combination of optimism and ignorance led well-intentioned Jews to believe that the Conservative movement truly respected our mesorah and was just a more “open” and “accepting” form of Orthodoxy. Today, some Jews, sadly, are making a similarly hopeful error about YCT.
Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik once wrote that “Too much harmony and peace can cause confusion of the minds and will erase outwardly the boundaries between [the] Orthodox and other movements.” He knew of what he spoke.
Despite the enticing phrase “Open Orthodoxy” and the protestations of YCT, Yeshivat Maharat and the International Rabbinic Fellowship that they are Orthodox institutions, their true, tragic colors are blindingly evident.
I unintentionally shocked a Jewish journalist several months ago. I had invited the non-Orthodox reporter to Agudath Israel of America’s offices to introduce her to the organization’s various divisions and projects, and to some of my colleagues. But later, conversing with her about various issues, something I said – although to me it was entirely unremarkable – seemed to take my guest aback.
She had brought up the topic of abortion rights. I noted that Orthodox Jews don’t regard the issue as one of “rights” but rather of right – that is to say, our obligations to our Creator. Odd as it still seems to me now, my guest reacted as if a new lens on the world had suddenly opened before her. She wasn’t about to suddenly adopt the Orthodox paradigm, I’m quite sure. But she admitted that she hadn’t ever considered its contrarian conceptual source – the idea that we are here on earth not to reach our own conclusions and assert our rights but rather to accept G-d’s will and serve Him. Suddenly, she seemed to understand why the Orthodox approach to a number of contemporary issues was so different from her own and that of her own professional and personal circles. She had actually thought a new thought.
I was reminded of the reporter’s minor epiphany by the recently released and much-reported-upon Pew Research Survey of American Jews.
There are all manner of puzzlements in the survey results, likely a result of the very broad definitions employed by the researchers. One category of “Jews” is “Jews by affinity,” which is to say Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish education who simply opt to call themselves Jews. There are apparently more than one million of them (which might go a long way toward explaining the survey’s finding that fully one third of all “American Jews” erect a holiday tree in their homes each December).
Similarly suspicious is the survey’s definition of “Orthodox.” How else to explain the bizarre finding that fully 15% of Orthodox Jews regularly attend services in a non-Jewish place of worship? (Or that 4% of them, too, have holiday trees!)
Times, to be sure, are strange. But still.
All that aside, though, the clear and less-contestable takeaway of the survey is that there is a very large and increasing number of halachically Jewish American Jews who have opted out of Jewishness as a religious identification altogether, on whose radar Judaism is a fading blip, if that.
The larger community’s approach to such “unaffiliated” Jews has long been to offer an elaborate smorgasbord of “Jewish” choices: Funky Federation programmatic food, somewhat moldy “denominational” fare (whose expiration dates have come and gone), “tikkun olam” appetizers, various affinity-group pastries “koshered” by adding the word “Jewish” to them (like “Jewish” vegetarianism, or “Jewish” yoga and even “Jewish” activities condemned by the Torah).
Even some of the various Orthodox kiruv, or outreach, groups, all of whom do wonderful work in the American spiritual field (or desert) occasionally lapse into entertainment-mode, enticing unconnected Jews with nosh whose ingredients, while they include healthful Jewish additives, remain essentially nosh.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with trying to reach Jews “where they are,” with connecting to them through their personal interests or culture. And certainly nothing wrong with using the beauty of a Shabbos (or the aroma of a cholent) to help a Jew begin to “bond” with his or her heritage. But might there be room, even a need, for a… different approach?
What if, instead of special offers and glitzy offerings, we simply proclaimed loud and clear – in billboards and web ads and social media – that being a Jew, like it or not, precious fellow Jew, means being Divinely charged, that it means shouldering, whether it is always comfortable or not, responsibility ? And that ignoring that mandate is a reckless wasting of an opportunity to live a meaningful life by doing G-d’s will? That each of us has a stark and urgent choice: either to regard our lives as the brief opportunities to access eternity they are, or to waste one’s days in the pursuit of stuff and fun and “rights”?
Would such an ‘in your face” challenge just be a total turn-off? Or might its message actually reach Jews, at least those who prefer being challenged to being wooed?
And might, just might, there be more such Jews than we dare imagine?
The common wisdom is that most Jews simply can never “become Orthodox” – that is to say can never come to accept and respect true Jewish belief and halacha. And so there’s no point trying to offer them the entirety of their religious heritage. But maybe the less common but more Jewish wisdom lies in Jewish tradition: that there flickers in every Jew’s heart a spark of desire to serve G-d, that every Jewish soul was present at Mt. Sinai.
Yes, free will exists, and each person in the end makes his or her own choices.
But could the best way to fan some Jewish sparks into flame be to simply, starkly state the Jewish facts – that the Torah is our Divine inheritance, and that striving for a fully observant Jewish life is the mandate of every Jew?
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Under siege by some of his countrymen for seeming to have acknowledged the Holocaust, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tried to walk that Chihuahua back at a forum this week sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society. Asked to clearly state his stand on the issue, he chose to condemn “crimes by the Nazis during World War II [including the killing of] a group of Jewish people.”
Another “defining down” of historical fact also recently appeared, this one emanating from a more respectable source, the New York Times, in a video on its website. The background clip accompanied a print report about Jews who ascend the Har Habayis, or Temple Mount, thereby passively challenging the Muslim authorities to whom Israel has ceded oversight of the ancient Jewish holy site. Those overseers forbid Jews from praying openly there; some of the Jewish visitors, apparently, dare to do so silently.
The second of the two holy Jewish national temples that stood on the mount for centuries, of course, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. It was more than 600 years later, after the Islamic empire spread to the Holy Land, that a small mosque was erected there. An earthquake destroyed the mosque, and a second one was subsequently built on the spot, although it met the same fate shortly thereafter. In 1035, the grandiose mosque currently occupying the Temple site was built, and thus far survives.
The Times article itself, as it happens, hinted at something that deserved more prominence in the piece, namely that the most respected Jewish rabbinic authorities have forbidden all Jews, in no uncertain terms, from ascending the Mount, both for halachic reasons and to not give the mosque’s overseers and other Muslims any excuse to engage in violence. Charedi Jews are often the focus of news reports from Israel. In an article presented to millions that speaks of religious Jews doing something that some regard as politically provocative, it would have been proper to point out that the Jews at issue are decidedly not charedim, and that the latter disapprove of their actions.
But what was truly disconcerting was the narration of the Times’ video expanding on the article. It referred to the Har Habayis as the place “that Jews call the Temple Mount…” and that “Jews widely believe was the site of the Temples.” Italics, of course, mine.
Such subtle casting of long-accepted historical fact as mere popular Jewish belief is of a sort with the subtle devaluation of “Judaism’s holiest site” the Old Gray Lady has perpetrated in the past – like when it bestowed that honor to the Western Wall rather than to the Temple Mount that lies behind it.
Fact: Objective students of history – of all ethnicities – see no reason to not accept the Bible’s account that, approximately nine centuries before the beginning of the Common Era and nearly 1500 years before Mohammed’s grandmother was born, King Solomon built the first of the two Holy Jewish Temples on that Jerusalem site. And that sacrificial offerings, as the Talmud and Roman sources alike recount, were brought on the altar there on behalf of both Jews and non-Jewish visitors.
That that history derives mostly from Jewish texts and Jewish tradition is no deficiency. The meticulous preservation of history is the nuclear strong force of Judaism, and is what has preserved the Jewish nation for millennia. Jews the world over just celebrated, on Sukkos, the collective memory of their ancestors’ Divine protection after the exodus from Egypt; that exodus itself is mentioned hundreds of times each year by every observant Jew in prayers and rites.
He or she recalls the ancient Jewish Temple too, every single day of the year, in each of the silent prayers – recited facing the Temple Mount – that are the backbone of Jewish religious life.
On holidays, moreover, the special Mussaf prayer includes a lengthy bemoaning of the Temples’ destructions.
The words “Jerusalem” and its synonym “Zion,” the city whose holiness derives from that of the Temple Mount, passed my lips at least ten times this morning. Before breakfast.
And that repast was followed by the grace after meals, which includes an entreaty of G-d to rebuild Jerusalem – meaning the Temple.
That rebuilding, to be sure, isn’t a call to human physical force. The Third Holy Temple will be built by the hand not of man but of G-d, the object of our entreaty. That is likewise evident in the passive form of our prayer elsewhere: “May it be Your will that the Temple be [re]built.” But that collective Jewish prayer will be prayed – our spiritual contribution – until its fulfillment.
In the meanwhile, however much mullahs or media may seek to distort inconvenient historical facts, people devoted to truth will continue to know better. They will know that, just over 60 years ago, millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their friends. And that, over 2000 years ago, a Holy Jewish Temple stood on the hill that still carries its name.
© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran