Modern times, intriguingly, provide examples of would-be destroyers of Jews who met their fates in serendipitous, Purim-like ways. An essay of mine about that fact is in Haaretz today, here.
A freilechen Purim!
The Evidence in the Barrel
Back in a previous lifetime, when I was a mesivta rebbe, I once heard a menahel exhort our talmidim to not get carried away on Purim. As an illustration, he described how a certain Gadol on Purim simply went into his backyard and swung back and forth on a children’s swing. The implication was that the Gadol hadn’t imbibed much. I wasn’t so sure, myself. Ad d’lo yoda can express itself in different ways.
One thing is certain. Kedoshim u’tehorim on Purim, unleashed from the constraints of full daas, are more often seen singing and dancing spiritedly, even wildly, sharing divrei Torah and divrei sod that one might not ever hear from them the rest of the year.
Needless to say, and unfortunately, some who are less kadosh or tahor can overindulge on Purim and come to act very differently. They may imbibe stronger things than wine (the preferred mitzvah) in excess, even to the degree of actually endangering themselves. That is nothing short of a horrific Purim mask, an aveirah in the guise of a mitzvah.
But when the mitzvah is done right, though, even if the results are something more… well, dynamic than a placid visit to a backyard swing, something important about Klal Yisrael can be revealed. After all, Rabi Iloi (Eruvin 65b) tells us that one way a person’s essence can be discerned is “in his cup,” in his behavior when inebriated.
Something so important, in fact, that I once witnessed a Purim celebration causing an Italian cook at a yeshivah where I once taught to investigate geirus. By her admission, she told me that, over the years, she “had seen many people very drunk, but never so many people so drunk – without any fighting.” All she saw was celebration, friendship, good humor and happiness, and that, she said, had impressed her beyond words. (She was nevertheless dissuaded from her geirus plan.)
Chazal teach us (Shabbos, 88a) that something was lacking at Mattan Torah, and the lack only remedied centuries later in the Persian Empire.
Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chassa tells us there that “Hashem held the mountain over the Jews’ heads like a gigis [a barrel]” to force them to accept the Torah. One approach to that statement is that it refers to the experience of being directly addressed by the Borei Olam. Receiving direct communication from Hashem was so overwhelming, so traumatic, so crushing – after all, it caused our ancestors’ souls to leave them, and brought them to beg Moshe to be the only one to directly receive the final eight dibros – that it simply left no other choice but to accept His mission.
Experiencing the Divine fully does not leave one with truly free will to say “no.”
Rabbah comments that the “coercion” remained a remonstration against Klal Yisrael, that it colored our acceptance of the Torah as less than willful – until the “days of Achashverosh.”
For it was then that the Jews chose, entirely of their own volition, to perceive Hashem’s presence where there was no “mountain” held over their heads, where it was not only not overwhelming but not even obvious. Our ancestors chose to see Divine Providence in seemingly mundane, if alarming, political happenings, took the events to heart as a message from Above, and responded with tefillah, taanis and teshuvah. Thus, kiymu mah shekiblu kvar, they “completed” Mattan Torah, supplied what had been missing. The nation truly perceived Hashem, not only in thunder and lightning but in words inscribed on parchment and in a signet ring removed from a royal hand.
Moving back to what is revealed when Yidden have a proper simchas Purim, I’ve often wondered about Rav Avdimi’s strange choice of imagery. “Holding the mountain over their heads like a barrel.” Wouldn’t a mountain looming above be galvanizing enough? What’s with the barrel?
A gigis, however, throughout the Gemara, is a container for an intoxicating beverage. Chazal’s description of the implement of coercion at Har Sinai, in other words, is a beer-barrel.
Rabi Meir in Pirkei Avos (4:20) admonishes us not “to look at the container, but at what it holds.” It wouldn’t seem outlandish to perceive some pertinence of that admonition to the gigis to which Har Sinai is compared. Or, in turn, to Purim, when wine allows the essence of Klal Yisrael, our truest nature, to be revealed.
Don’t dwell, Rabi Meir may be saying, on our compromised acceptance of Hashem at Har Sinai in a state of coercion, but rather at our wholehearted, free-willed embrace of Him in our states of mindless purity.
Golden Silence
The mother was understandably concerned. Her first-grader was a sociable, talkative little girl, and so her teacher’s phone call was certainly disturbing.
This is a true story and took place mere weeks ago in an “out-of-town” community. The teacher, who called just after school had adjourned, recounted how “Leah,” six years old, had seemed ill at ease the entire afternoon. In the morning all had seemed well. But later in the day, although Leah seemed attentive, she was uncharacteristically quiet. So quiet, indeed, the teacher said, that her little student wouldn’t even respond to questions or as much as open her mouth in class. That was very unusual.
Leah’s mother, herself a long-time teacher and someone who, along with her kollelman husband, had wonderfully guided their older children through early childhood, had never before received such a phone call. She was worried, but knew she couldn’t substantively respond to the report before seeing and speaking to Leah herself, and so, with her little one expected home any minute, she thanked the teacher for the “heads up,” and waited for Leah’s arrival.
The teacher, it turned out, had not been imagining things. Leah walked into the house silently, and just retired to the couch, looking uncomfortable. She wouldn’t respond to her mother’s “How was school?” or her subsequent “Is everything alright?”
“If you don’t want to tell me what’s wrong” her wise and gentle mother whispered to her daughter, a precocious child who, even at her tender age, can write full sentences, “Can you write down what’s bothering you?” Leah nodded yes.
Pencil and paper in hand, the girl scribbled away. At lunchtime, she wrote out, she had washed her hands and made the brachah for netilas yadayim. But, then, when she went to her lunchbox, the sandwich she had expected to be there wasn’t! So, she explained, she wasn’t able to speak.
The first feeling that washed over her mother, as one might expect, was relief. Then, after giving Leah a piece of bread on which to make her Hamotzi, she felt pride.
Had Leah been a bit less bashful, she could have hinted to her quandary, or written a note about it, to someone at school and been given some bread. Had she realized that speaking after washing for something pertinent to eating is permitted, she could have solved her problem by just telling her teacher about it.
But, being self-conscious and not knowing that halachic fact, she just chose to do what she felt she had to do to be a good Jew. When the teacher was informed of what had happened, she was deeply impressed. Ditto for me when I heard the story.
We adults often face difficult situations where halachic concerns come up against personal “needs.” We seek, and often find, ways of satisfying both. And then, of course, there are times when there is no seeming reconciliation of the two. What do we do then? Hopefully, the right thing. Leah thought she faced an at least temporarily irreconcilable pair of challenges – wanting to talk but assuming it would be halachically wrong – and, to the best of her understanding, did the right thing. She thereby became a teacher herself.
Dovid Hamelech sang to Hashem that “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings You have established strength…” (Tehillim, 8:3).
The straightforward p’shat of that passuk is, as per Metzudos Dovid, that the miracle of a human baby and his latent power of speech demonstrates Hashem’s “strength,” or power.
The Gemara (Sotah, 30b) applies the words to how, when our ancestors emerged from the Yam Suf and Hashem’s presence was manifest, even babies and sucklings declared “This is my G-d and I will glorify Him!”
Also implied by Dovid Hamelech’s words is that, as Resh Lakish in the name of Rav Yehudah Nesiah teaches us (Shabbos 119b), the world only perseveres because of the hevel shel tinokos shel beis rabban, “the mouth-breath of the youngsters in their places of study.”
That is usually understood to mean that Torah studied by the purest of souls, children, keeps the universe going. And that is certainly true.
But I’ve often wondered at the word hevel, “mouth-breath.” “Hevel,” in other contexts, means “nothingness.”
The story of Leah’s silence, though, makes me wonder if, perhaps, there are times when even a child’s silence, when it’s an example of how a Jew should see his obligations, can itself be a foundation of Creation.
© 2016 Hamodia
Handling Success With Care
Back in 1941 (no, I don’t remember it personally, but it’s documented), there was an American Jewish establishment group called the “Joint Boycott Council.” It objected vehemently to Agudath Israel of America’s policy of sending packages of food and religious items to beleaguered and endangered Jews behind enemy lines in Eastern Europe. The JBC considered that effort an affront to its own judgment that the risk that the Nazis, ym”s, might intercept the goods outweighed what Gedolim of the time considered to be the Jewish obligation.
The group picketed Agudath Israel’s offices that year and its chairman described the Agudah as “a sickly weed transplanted from foreign soil to the liberal American environment,” lamenting how it, and presumably the Orthodox Jewish community it served, will only “continue to poison the atmosphere.”
The Council is now long forgotten, but my, how the “sickly weed” has grown. The Torah-true community in America proved itself not only hardy but a towering tree that bore, and continues to bear, most wondrous fruit.
Those of us born well after 1941 often take the thriving of Torah life and study for granted. We hear about the challenges our parents and grandparents faced in the previous century, celebrate their accomplishments and feel secure in the world they forged for us. That’s not a problem, of course… at least not until it is.
Case in point: Several suburban frum communities are expanding greatly these days, attracting Torah Jews from near and far. The law of supply and demand won’t be violated, and what ensues are increased property values and willingness, on the part of some long-time homeowners, to “trade up” to larger homes in other areas.
That’s fine and good; and so is the effort by real estate agents to make the case to residents of such communities that they can benefit financially from the new desirability of their dwellings by putting their houses on the market.
What isn’t fine and good, though, is pressuring residents by visiting them, unbidden, to make that case. And what’s even less fine and good is doing so on non-Jewish holidays, when residents are be more likely to be home but are undoubtedly more likely to resent uninvited guests.
Such solicitations have caused some towns, including Toms River, New Jersey, to update their “no-knock” rules and related laws, adding real estate inquiries to measures that already limit other types of solicitations.
An Associated Press story about that particular New Jersey town was recently widely published by media here and overseas. It may be a local story, but when an item involves Jews, money and irate neighbors, it somehow tends to… hold… special interest.
The news article quoted one Toms River resident who claimed to have been badgered by an aggressive real estate agent to sell his home. In local media, several others complained about feeling pressured by Orthodox Jews’ overtures. The fact that a “no-knock” ordinance was unanimously endorsed by the local Township Council itself indicates that others had, or feared, similar experiences – and should be a wake-up call to us all.
Yes, to be sure, some of the pushback against the pushiness might be tainted with pre-existing resentment of Jews. But that’s really beside the point. In fact, it intensifies the point. Because acting in ways that give people who don’t like Jews in the first place reason to resent us, aside from being wrong, well, gives some people who don’t like Jews in the first place reason to resent us.
There is no doubt that the great majority of frum real estate professionals in Lakewood and elsewhere hew to high standards and promote their services in proper manners, using advertisements and mailings. But the small number (it may in fact be only one, but that’s one too many) who feel that it’s “just business” to be aggressive and intimidating toward potential clients are causing ill will against the entire community. What’s more, they are ketanei emunah.
Because if they believed, as Jews should, that their parnassah comes from Above, and that our efforts to make our livings are entirely in the realm of hishtadlus, “simple, normal effort,” they would never imagine that acting more aggressively than others in their field could yield them some advantage or anything more than what was decreed for them in Shamayim on Rosh Hashanah.
And they should know, too, that the truest measure of Jewish success is acting “with pleasantness toward others,” in ways that make others say “Fortunate is his father who taught him Torah” (Yoma 86a).
© 2016 Hamodia
A Troubling America for Jews…
American Jews might be excused for finding the circus more formally known as the current presidential campaign unthreatening, even amusing. Unthreatening, because the leading Republican candidate has a Jewish daughter; the leading Democratic candidate, a Jewish son-in-law; and her rival is a bona fide member of the tribe himself. All the candidates, moreover, have expressed support for Israel.
And amusing? Well, no need to go into detail on that one. We need a dictionary with more expressive words than “grandstanding” and “mudslinging.”
Some Jews, though, are worried by the Republican front-runner, despite his Jewish connection. After all, Mr. Trump at one point indicated that, if elected, he would approach the Israel-Palestinian impasse as “a sort of neutral guy.” But he later explained that he simply meant that he didn’t see how he could promote negotiations if he openly took sides. “With that being said,” the candidate added unequivocally, “I am totally pro-Israel.”
More troubling to many Jews, and understandably so, is Mr. Trump’s dog whistling (actually, often, out-loud shouting “Fido!!!”) to American bigots and general lowlifes.
To read the rest of this piece, which appears in Haaretz, please click here.
Voting Advice
Few things outrage people as greatly as the suggestion that their vote doesn’t really make a difference. “Your vote counts!” is, after all, the essence of Civics 101.
And yet it is the most straightforward of truisms that – other than, say, a vote for gabbai in a very small shul – no election is ever decided on one vote. Or, in national politics, many thousands.
“But if everyone thought that way, no one would vote!” comes the immediate, irritated reply.
True. But an observation isn’t an argument. The bottom line remains that… well, you know.
Please don’t misunderstand. It is important to vote, and each of us should make every effort to do so, for several reasons. Firstly, it’s a privilege of citizenship, and seizing it is a sign of respect for the wonderful country in which we live. Secondly, as observant Jews, with particular needs and interests, it is vital that we be perceived as voters, not as complacent, unengaged citizens. What’s more, if we live, as many of us do, in fairly homogenous voting districts, elected officials take note of our voting turnouts, and that can influence decisions they make about things that matter to us.
But all of that is in the realm of hishtadlus – appropriate efforts to effect proper goals. The bottom line remains: our individual votes don’t really count. (Sorry.)
Is there any point to revealing how we are being brash to imagine our individual votes as crucial, any tachlis to bringing up the shocking reality that they are not? I believe there is, and that it’s important and timely.
Because too many of us tend to get very – how shall we put it? – agitated over politics. Should someone dare support what we feel is the “wrong” candidate, or take a “misguided” position on an issue, he isn’t just mistaken; he has become the enemy!
Politics has become, even, lamentably within parts of our community, something akin to what soccer is in some European and Middle Eastern countries: an utterly overheated choosing of teams, followed by zealous, uncompromising rooting, and vilification of those who dare support other teams. People have been injured and even killed as a result of “football hooliganism,” and fans of opposing teams are routinely segregated in stadium stands, to minimize the likelihood of carnage.
We may not express our political sureties and affiliations with the sort of violence that accompanies some soccer matches. But, from a Jewish perspective, words can be instruments of violence, too. And, in a way, worse ones than bats and rocks.
Is getting angry over politics in keeping with Torah values? With mentchlichkeit? With reason?
“Just as people’s faces all differ,” we are taught by Chazal, “so do their opinions” (Bamidbar Rabbah, 21:2).
The Imrei Emes, zy”a, commented on that truth with a question: “Can you imagine disdaining someone because his face doesn’t look like yours?” The question’s implied lesson is obvious: Neither does a person deserve contempt for having a different view of things from yours. His eyes are a different color from yours; his mind isn’t the same as yours either.
Maybe stopping and thinking about the fact that a vote is only a vote, and that an election’s outcome will not hinge on our ballot, can help us turn down the volume a bit, not to mention lower our blood pressure.
There’s nothing wrong with having political points of view, with discussing national and international issues. But there is something very wrong about allowing opinions to ferment into anger or resentment. Choose positions and candidates. Just don’t overinvest your choices with an importance they simply don’t have.
One of my brothers-in-law once told me, with a sly smile, that, in his house, he makes “the big decisions” and leaves the “small ones” to his wife. He then explained that he decides what should be done about world affairs, the economy, immigration and crime; his wife takes care of raising the children, chinuch matters, the atmosphere in the home…
In fact, if we want to do something to influence world affairs, we do well to remind ourselves that lev melech bi’yad Hashem (Mishlei 21:1) that, in the end, it’s the Bashefer, not the ballot box. Our power lies in choosing how to live, not how to vote. Deciding to daven more mindfully, to learn more seriously, to engage in chessed more frequently – those are the choices that count.
© 2016 Hamodia
Error Message
Is it permissible to drink water on Shabbos?
Yes, the question is facetious. But not pointless. Because the parshiyos of this time of year, which deal with the construction of the mishkan and its vessels, are the source of what constitutes a melachah, or act forbidden on Shabbos. (That connection is based on the juxtaposition of the Torah account of the building of the mishkan and the law of Shabbos.)
Still wondering about the opening sentence? Well, if every act done during the mishkan’s building constitutes a melachah, isn’t it reasonable to imagine that those engaged in the construction occasionally drank some water?
That’s ridiculous, you protest, rightly. Drinking isn’t essential for building the mishkan!
You’re right. Neither, though – at least at first thought – is making a mistake.
And Chazal assume as a matter of course that mistakes were made during the mishkan’s construction. That is why the mishnah in Masseches Shabbos (73a) includes mocheik, or “erasing,” the sister-melachah of “writing.”
Writing was used in the hakamas hamishkan, the Gemara explains, (ibid, 103b) to ensure that the kerashim, the gilded wooden beams used for the structure – which was dismantled and rebuilt repeatedly – were inscribed with letters to indicate which beams were to be placed where.
And Rashi, on the mishnah preceding that Gemara, explains that the melachah of erasing derives from the need to correct errors when the wrong letters were mistakenly inscribed on beams.
Now, if drinking water isn’t a melachah because it was not intrinsic to the construction project, why should the correcting of a mistake, namely, erasing, be a melacha? Making mistakes isn’t intrinsic to the project… or is it?
But when one thinks deeply about errors, one comes to realize that they are in fact essential parts of success. Even when it comes to Torah-study, about which the Gemara says (Gittin, 43a), “[When it comes to words of Torah] one does not stand on [i.e. understand] them unless one [first] stumbles over them.” Every talmid of Talmud knows that well; there is no understanding like that which dawns after having made a wrong assumption.
In fact, mistakes are indispensable parts of even mundane projects, educational or otherwise. No child walks until he first takes an uneasy step and falls. The eventual ability to walk doesn’t come despite the first unsuccessful attempts; it comes as a result of them.
Even when it comes to more complex things like engineering, the path to success leads through a maze of mistakes. Duke University civil engineering professor Henry Petroski captured that truth in the title of one of his books: “To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design.” Initial failures, he asserts in that book, are what drive any task to perfection.
“An expert,” the famous Jewish physicist Neils Bohr once remarked, “is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”
The importance of erring informs many areas of life. When I was privileged to serve as a rebbe teaching Gemara, when a talmid would ask what some call a “klutz kasha” – a question based on a misunderstanding, my reaction (at least when I had my wits about me) was, “Wow! You made a great mistake!” And then I would proceed to show how that mistaken assumption clearly led to the question asked, but that it was mistaken, and thus a vital part of the process of truly understanding the subject at hand.
I didn’t call the talmid’s mistake “great” to coddle him or boost his self-esteem (though that’s sometimes not a bad idea). It was an honest assessment.
The world in which we live often seems to embrace an opposite philosophy, where mistakes are often not only unappreciated but not tolerated. Errors are seen as, at best, embarrassments, not worthy experiences. Just – for a timely example – note how presidential candidates handle questions about questionable past decisions, dredged up by media intent on uncovering clay feet.
The pols hem and haw, they justify and deny, they “explain” and, if at all possible, just change the subject. How refreshing it would be were one or two of them to discard the political script and say something radical, shocking and outrageous, like “It was a mistake. I erred and, hopefully, came away from my error wiser.” A perceptive fellow once said that “Admitting a mistake only means you’re smarter than you were yesterday.”
Let’s not raise politicians. Our children, grandchildren and talmidim need to know that to err is not just human, it’s vital.
© 2016 Hamodia
Bernie’s Kibbutz and Mine
The disclosure of which kibbutz Senator Bernie Sanders spent time at in1963 was red meat for the voracious purveyors of what, regrettably, passes for political commentary these days.
Mr. Sanders – now the first Jew to win a U.S. presidential primary – lived for several months in Sha’ar Ha’amakim, near Haifa, a kibbutz affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair, the secular, Zionist-socialist movement. (It was quite an active one during part of last century; this one, not so much.)
Right-wing media seized on the socialist element, with the American Thinker featuring an op-ed with the headline, “Bernie Sanders Spent Months at Marxist-Stalinist Kibbutz.”
On the other side of the partisan divide, various blogs attacked Mr. Sanders for having been part of a kibbutz that was founded, in the words of radical leftie Philip Weiss, on “ethnic cleansing.”
Intelligent discourse proceeds apace.
For my part, the disclosure of Sanders’ sanctuary evoked memories of my own time on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz – beautiful Ein Hashofet, a mere ten miles from where Bernie bedded down less than ten years before I arrived in the area.
I spent only two days at Ein Hashofet, having traveled there before the start of Elul zman in Yeshivas Kol Torah to visit one of the kibbutz’s founders, my uncle Nachman.
Back in pre-war Poland, when my father, shlit”a, was a little boy, two of his older brothers became involved in a Zionist youth enterprise and surreptitiously made their way to Eretz Yisrael. My father was determined to study Torah and, after he became bar mitzvah, just as the war broke out, he left his parents and other siblings to learn in a Novardok yeshivah that had been relocated to Vilna. Eventually, the Soviets sent him and his chaverim , along with their Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, to Siberia. Eventually, my father emigrated to America; of his large family, only he and his two brothers in Palestine survived the war.
The kibbutzniks were very welcoming of the young yeshivah bochur who had come from America (no, he told them all, he didn’t know their cousins there) to study in Yerushalayim. I must have seemed, and definitely felt, out of place there. But I was “Nachman’s nephew,” so I got the royal treatment.
During my stay at the kibbutz, I lived on Tnuva products and some packaged foods I had brought with me. When it was time to leave, some of the kibbutzniks gave me small gifts – a Hebrew booklet about Van Gogh, a plastic Egged tik, some doodads – that (despite the place’s strict socialist ethos) they possessed. I was very touched, and remember the residents’ kind sentiments fondly to this day.
My greatest takeaway, though, was from my uncle, in the words he spoke a year later, when he visited me in Bayit Vegan as I prepared to return to the U.S. Tears welling in his eyes, he wished me well and said, wistfully, that he wondered if, had he retained his Jewish observance, his children might have remained in Eretz HaKodesh. Most of them, despite their father’s dedication to the Land, had left Eretz Yisrael to find their fortunes in other places. I didn’t know what to say, and just hugged him goodbye.
Fast-forward fifteen years. My Israeli uncle and aunt, visiting the U.S., were driven by my father, shlita, from Baltimore all the way to Providence, Rhode Island, where I and my family were living at the time. It was wonderful to see them again, and, at some point, my uncle mentioned – and there was pride in his voice – that the kibbutz had recently put mezuzos on its doors.
I noticed, too, that he had brought with him a pair of tefillin.
My uncle is now long gone from this world, but I’m reminded of the Gemara about a man who betroths a woman on the condition that he is a righteous person (Kiddushin 49b). Even if the man was not known to be righteous, the Gemara says, if the woman accepts his kiddushin, they are married. Because “perhaps he mused about repentance in his heart.”
A hirhur teshuvah – a “mere musing of repentance” – can change a person. And what matters more than where we are is the direction in which we are headed.
I don’t know if Bernie Sanders’ few months on a kibbutz had any impact on him. But, as I recall my uncle’s words about his children, and those tefillin, it seems to me that his more than half-century on his kibbutz, ironically, may have yielded him a keener perspective.
© 2016 Hamodia
The American Jewish Buffet
“Secular Orthodox.”
That’s how Avinoam Bar-Yosef, president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, recently characterized many Israelis. What he meant was that, while an Israeli may not be observant of halachah, or even affirm belief in Torah miSinai, he is likely to still recognize that there is only one mesorah, one Judaism, the one that has carried Klal Yisrael from that mountain to Eretz Yisrael, through galus Bavel and countless galuyos since, and that carries it still to this day.
If only American Jews were so perceptive. Many criticisms can be cogently aimed at the movements to which so many American Jews claim fealty (or, at least, to whose congregations they send dues). Were there only an Orthodox option, that of Torah-faithful belief and practice, there would likely be a greater degree of Jewish observance throughout the broader Jewish community; intermarriage would probably be more rare than it sadly is; Jewish unity would certainly be more evident, and more real.
But the most damaging legacy of the heterodox movements (and I write here of those movements qua movements – their theologies, not their members, most of whom don’t understand the basics of Yahadus) is their propagation of the notion that there are different “Judaisms,” that Jews stand before some spiritual smorgasbord from which they are free to choose whatever doctrinal hors d’oeuvres they find appetizing.
I had a neighbor in the out-of-town community where I once lived, a middle-aged man who had observed some mitzvos as a youth, but who had long since lapsed and become a member of a non-Orthodox congregation.
One Shabbos, on my way to shul, I heard a disembodied “Good Shabbos” come from beneath my neighbor’s parked car. His head then appeared from under the vehicle, followed by his hands, one of them holding a wrench. I returned the greeting along with a forced smile, and then, with some sheepishness, my neighbor added: “I gotta say, my Shabbos is sure different now that I’m a Conservative Jew!”
In my neighbor’s mind, he had undergone a metamorphosis; he’d become a “different kind of Jew” – a perfectly observant, rabbinically-endorsed, card-carrying “Conservative Jew.” Changing the meaning of a Jewish life had become the equivalent of what he was doing, changing his oil.
Contrast my erstwhile neighbor’s attitude (that of most American Jews, unfortunately) with the insight of Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi (1898-1988), a groundbreaking physicist. He told a biographer that “To this very day, if you ask for my religion, I say ‘Orthodox Hebrew’ – in the sense that the church [sic] I’m not attending is that one. If I were to go to a church, that’s the one I would go to. That’s the one I failed. It doesn’t mean I’m something else…”
He was, and knew he was, a Jew. Far to one side of the observance spectrum, to be sure. But observance is a continuum on which we all live, with perfection far from most of us. Professor Rabi was perceptive and honest enough to recognize his failure instead of choosing to just invent a new entity, a “Judaism” where he could consider himself a success.
It is a tribute to the Israeli no-nonsense mentality that so many of the country’s less- or non-observant Jews haven’t bought into the American Jewish buffet model, and recognize what Professor Rabi did. Israelis tend to think and talk dugri – straightforwardly, even bluntly. Hence, Mr. Bar-Yosef’s seemingly, but not really, oxymoronic phrase, “secular Orthodox.”
What evoked that characterization, as it happens, was his interview by the New York Times about the recent Israeli government decision to expand an area to the south of the current Kosel Maaravi plaza, for feminist and non-Orthodox services. The Israeli was trying to explain why the American Jewish model of Jewish identity has not taken root in his country. American Jews, he continued, have “a desire to bring into the tent everyone who feels Jewish,” whereas Israeli Jews, even secular ones, “live in a [Jewish] state and want a unified system.”
That “unified system” – halachah – is, unfortunately, under attack by some American Jews, not only with regard to conduct at the Kosel but in even more important areas, like marriage and geirus. We have to hope, against all the evidence, that our less observant brothers and sisters recognize the danger – to themselves above all – of promoting a “multi-winged” model of “Judaisms,” instead of recognizing the most trenchant truth: that ke’ish echad was possible only because our ancestors were neged hahar.
© 2016 Hamodia
The Professor Stumbles
You just can’t, as they say, make this stuff up.
A performer recently made news by implying that 1) Holocaust denier David Irving deserves reconsideration, and 2) that the earth is flat.
The entertainer didn’t offer those two wise thoughts as part of a comedy routine, but in a serious, assertive manner, using the medium of “rap” – a genre that some people consider music (count me among the deniers there).
“Stalin was way worse than Hitler,” the fellow also declared. “That’s why the POTUS gotta wear a kippah.” POTUS, of course, in secret service-speak, means “president of the United States” and kippah means… well, you know. If you’re looking for logic, even of the paranoid variety, you might wish to look elsewhere.
Someone else also recently made news about his own Holocaust views. That would be Professor Yair Auron, an Israeli historian several million light years removed, culturally, from the flat-earth rapper. In a way, though, Mr. Auron is the more hazardous of the two.
The professor is upset at the Israeli educational system for teaching that the Nazis’ determination to destroy every vestige of the Jewish people is something uniquely Jewish.
He accuses Holocaust educators of repressing or minimizing the suffering of others targeted by the Nazis, and is upset that other mass murders are not placed on a plane with the Nazis’ attempted destruction of Klal Yisrael.
“It must be asked,” he said recently, “if, in Israel in 2016, instead of also shaping Holocaust commemoration through humanist and democratic values… [is] fostering racism and xenophobia… Ignoring the non-Jewish victims is perhaps the most concrete manifestation of this trend.”
No one, of course, denies that the Nazis killed thousands of Communists, mentally disabled, Gypsies, criminals and others. Nor that mass slaughters of human beings were committed by Stalin in the Soviet Union, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, by the Turks against the Armenians and by the Hutu tribe against the Tutsi and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. And those outrages all deserve to be remembered.
But to contend that it’s somehow wrong to stress the singular hatred Hitler, ym”s, had for Jews, and his determination to destroy our people in toto is to reveal the deepest of delusions. And fostering that delusion is a Holocaust revision of its own.
Determination to create a world that would be Judenrein – free of Jews – was the Nazis’ first and foremost goal. They may have had no compunctions about killing others they felt were detrimental to the Third Reich – political opponents, the non-productive, those they deemed “asocial.” But they didn’t seek a Gypsyrein world or a disabledrein one. The Nazi quest was to clear the world, not just Germany, of Jews; and it was a deep and abiding obsession, a psychopathy clothed in philosophical/theological garb.
Hitler revealed as much in Mein Kampf, where he wrote: “If… the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men…”
Even as he and his companion were about to commit suicide, on April 29, 1945, at 4 a.m. the fading führer issued a statement declaring “Above all, I charge the leadership of the nation and their followers with… merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples, international Jewry.”
Scholar Steven I. Katz put it succinctly: “The Holocaust is phenomenologically unique by virtue of the fact that never before has a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific group.”
Or, as the philosopher Emil Fackenheim wrote, “The extermination of the Jews had no political or economic justification. It was not a means to any end; it was an end in itself.”
And there’s something more, too, a context that makes the Nazis’ Jew-hatred singularly significant. Here, perhaps, a non-historian may have said it best, and only last week.
Awarding a posthumous honor to Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds, an American serviceman who protected Jewish captives in a German POW camp, the aforementioned POTUS recalled Mr. Edmonds’ words to the camp’s commander, who had ordered Jewish prisoners to come forward: “We are all Jews.”
“We are all Jews,” explained Mr. Obama, “because anti-Semitism is a distillation, an expression of an evil that runs through so much of human history, and if we do not answer that, we do not answer any other form of evil.”
Gut gezokt. Hear it well, Professor Auron.
© 2016 Hamodia