Misguided Mounters

“As if the situation here was not sensitive enough,” groused an incredulous MK Yoel Hasson (Hamachaneh HaTzioni).

He was referring to Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely’s comment that her “dream is to see the Israeli flag flying over the Temple Mount” and her conviction that Jews should able to pray on Har HaBayis.

Mr. Hasson had harsher words, too, for the minister, ascribing to her “the stubbornness of a donkey” and calling for her dismissal.

Nor was Prime Minister Netanyahu pleased by Ms. Hotovely’s sentiment.  He had her cancel a press conference and impressed upon her the need to clarify that she had not been speaking for the government.  He also “requested” that Ms. Hotovely inform his office before any public appearance, so that her messages can be “coordinated” with Mr. Netanyahu’s policies.

The Prime Minister’s move was as wise as Ms. Hotolevy’s was foolhardy.  Past weeks have shown that bluster about Har HaBayis provides violent Palestinians with a handy pretext to violently vent the hatred they feel for Jews.

In the wake of Yerushalayim’s liberation from Jordan in 1967, Israel instituted a policy giving the Islamic trust known as the Waqf religious control over Har HaBayis, with Israel responsible for the area’s security.  That modus vivendi has generally kept the peace at the site.

That policy dovetailed with the halachic psak din at the time of rabbanim from across the spectrum, including Rav Avrohom Yitzchak Kook, zt”l, that ascending the Mount is forbidden.

Former chief rabbis Rabbi Shlomo Amar and Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi Doron, and current Israeli chief rabbis Rabbi David Lau and Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, as well as senior “national religious” leaders like Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, have also forbidden Jews from ascending Har HaBayis.

In 2009 Rav Elyashiv, zt”l, called on Israel’s president to actively prevent Jews from visiting the site, both because of the halachic concerns and because doing so can lead to bloodshed.  Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch recently declared that those who ascend the Har “will be held accountable” for resultant Muslim attacks on Jews.

In defiance of that wide consensus, in recent years, increasing numbers of nationalist Jews have made a point of ascending the Mount, and have, as a result, raised the ire of Muslims. According to the Associated Press, approximately 10,000 Jews visited the site last year, compared to 200 or 300 annually a decade ago.  And a nationalist group is currently offering to pay $516 to any Jew arrested for praying there.

While any excuse suffices for some Palestinians to try to kill Jews, the “reason” professed by recent murderers and would-be murderers has been their perception that Israel is poised to abrogate the 1967 policy regarding the Har HaBayis.  It is a perception unarguably fueled by the actions and words of the “Temple Mount activists.”

Those nationalistic Jews, however, value the rush born of physically asserting that the Har HaBayis is Judaism’s holiest site, over whatever hatred or bloodshed it may evoke from violence-prone Arabs.  That respected Torah leaders reject that calculus as corrupt is of no concern to them.  They are the “young guard,” and know better.

And they bring to mind the Gemara in Nedarim (40a) about the decision made by the melech Rechavam to shun the advice of the elders of his father Shlomo’s court and heed instead the advice of younger advisors (Melachim Alef, 12): “[What might seem] constructive on the part of the young [can in fact be] destructive; and [what might seem] destructive on the part of elders [can in fact be] constructive.”  Rechavam’s wrong choice brought terrible schism to Klal Yisrael, fanning the flames of rebellion.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the “activists”, only their wisdom – and their bitachon.  Yes, as Ms. Hotovely remarked, Har HaBayis is “the holiest place for the Jewish people.”  Thus, agitating for a Jewish presence there now might seem a high-minded thing.  In truth, though, it betrays a discomfort with our mesorah, which assures us that the Third Beis HaMikdash will appear only when Hashem sees fit.

Jews who are truly secure in their faith feel no compulsion to engage in political acts (much less actions that endanger other Jews) in order to proclaim that Eretz Yisrael is the Jewish land, and  Har HaBayis its spiritual center.  Those are indisputable facts.

And they are facts impervious to whatever borders temporal states may choose to draw, and whatever structures mortal men may build.  Yishmael is just a custodian, stewarding the Har HaBayis for the day – may it come soon – when the Beis HaMikdash will return to it.

That will happen, though, through merits, not machinations.

© 2015 Hamodia

Spaghetti and Jewish Unity

Last week afforded me an opportunity to sit with a group of Jews spanning the gamut of American Jewry – resolute secularists, members of non-Orthodox congregations and Orthodox Jews – to discuss Jewish unity and how it can be strengthened.

Most American Jews, rightly or not, don’t think they are capable of living observant Jewish lives.  With the passage of time, the Holocaust has lost the binding power it once had for many Jews; and Israel, unfortunately, has become a source of contention rather than unity for many American Jews, particularly younger ones.  It’s unfortunate, but unfortunately true.

Someone in the group raised the fact that the coming Shabbos – the Shabbos past, as you read this – was to serve as a Jewish unifier, through the “Shabbos Project,” the brainchild of South Africa’s chief rabbi, Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein that has brought together thousands of Jews in observance and celebration of Shabbos over the past two years. More than 550 cities in 70 countries were set to participate in this year’s event.

What other means, though, could bring Jews together?  Many aspects of Torah-centered life involve things that, sadly, do not resonate with – or, worse, sadly, even offend – some American Jews, infected as they are with misguided notions like “egalitarianism.”  And even Shabbos, in the end, observed properly, involves trials that might challenge many a Jew who was not raised observant – a fact to which anyone who has been stuck in an erev Shabbos traffic jam near shkiah can readily attest.

I suggested the study of Torah, which, after all, is the very genesis of Jewish unity, that which was bequeathed us all at the foot of Sinai, when we stood “as one person, with one heart.”  And the proposition that Torah-study remains a potent unifier of Jews is well borne out by the experience of programs like Partners in Torah and TorahMates.  (The brachah we make each morning, it’s worth noting, is “Nosein haTorah” – pointedly in the present, not the past, tense.  The Torah is still being given to Klal Yisrael.)  The idea was well received.

Afterward, though, I thought of another mitzvah that should present no problem to any Jew, and that can serve as a unifying observance.

The two d’Oraysa brachos – birkas haTorah and birkas hamazon – and the many other brachos we make regularly on foods or mitzvos, or as birchos hoda’ah – comprise a paramount element of Yiddishkeit.  They focus our attention on the Source of our blessings, and can serve as a potent unifying force for all Jews.

By undertaking to recite brachos, an otherwise distant Jew can be reminded that he or she is connected to the rest of Klal Yisrael multiple times a day, every morning, every time a flower is sniffed, thunder is heard or one is sitting down to a plate of spaghetti.

What a powerful campaign a broad-based “Brachos Project” could be.  No non-Orthodox Jew could have a problem with it – brachos, after all, are egalitarian.  There are many excellent guides to brachos in English, and reciting them entails no expense or inconvenience.

Truth be told, such a project could also do us some good, too.  As we are reminded by the baalei mussar, reverence can all too easily devolve into rote, and that is particularly true when it comes to brachos.  Many of us find ourselves reciting them by habit, without pronouncing their words distinctly, much less focusing on their meaning. Anyone who’s watched a baal teshuvah recite a brachah has been graced with a good example to follow.

Rav Chaim Vital testifies that the Arizal called birchos hanehenin “the essential way for a human being to attain the spirit of holiness… removing the [unholy] shells and [sublimating] his physicality,” adding that the Arizal “admonished me greatly about this…” (Etz Hachaim, Shaar Ruach Hakodesh).

The mystical perspective alluded to by those words is that the human being straddles the realms of the physical and the spiritual. Food mediates between the two, nourishing the bodies that house our souls.  So it should not be surprising that the act of consuming food would provide opportunity for bringing the holy into the mundane, for removing the “shells” and rarifying physicality.

What better empowerment of Jewish unity could there be than a rededication of Jews from all types of communities and walks of life to sharing in an observance that reflects the quintessential Jewish ideal of acknowledging Hashem’s blessings?  And, at the same time, strengthening our own dedication to brachos?

Who knows what other shells might thereby be removed?

© 2015 Hamodia

Barack is Leaving the Building

Although Barack Obama’s last day in office won’t come until January 20, 2017, the spectacle of the various presidential debates reminds us all that we won’t have him to kick around too much longer.

It’s no secret that the current Commander-in-Chief is unpopular in some circles, including, I suspect, a good part of of Hamodia’s readership.  His support for a “two state solution” in Israel seems, to many, outdated and unrealistic; his long-time discord with the current prime minister of Israel (amply fueled by both men) is legend; and, most recently, his Iran deal left many upset.

Some read those entrails as indicating an animus for Israel.  I don’t.  Either way, though, we’re not absolved from the elemental Jewish ideal of hakaras hatov, “recognition of the good” – which, Chazal inform us, is due even to inanimate things, and presumably, too, to people we may not like.  Whatever one’s views on Mr. Obama, some things he has said and – more importantly – done over his terms in office merit our recognition.

What things?  Here are some:

In his 2009 Cairo speech to the Arab world, he stated that America’s “strong bond” with Israel is “unbreakable,” and that the Jewish “aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” He firmly denounced anti-Semitic stereotyping and Holocaust denial, staples of the Arab square, and condemned anyone who would threaten Israel’s destruction.

That same year, he rejected the critical-of-Israel’s Gaza operation “Goldstone report.”

The next year he refused U.S. participation in joint military exercises with Turkey unless Israel was included.  And he told the U.N. General Assembly that year that “Israel is a sovereign state and the historic homeland of the Jewish people” (something denied, of course, by the Arab world).  Then, in 2011, he withdrew the U.S. from the Israel-bashing Durban II Conference.  That year, he also threatened Egypt with severe consequences if it didn’t protect Israeli embassy guards besieged by a mob, which it did, and Israel evacuated the hostages.

In 2014, he sought funding from Congress (to the tune of $225 million) for Israel’s “Iron Dome” system, and signed the law providing the funds.

He relentlessly pursued Islamic terrorists, like Anwar al-Awlaki and Osama bin Laden (and was vilified by some on the left for his decisive actions).  And the Obama administration has provided more security assistance to Israel than any American administration;

And then there are words Mr. Obama wrote or spoke that may not have received the attention they deserved.  Like:

“I’ve seen what security means to those who live near the Blue Line, to children in Sderot who just want to grow up without fear, to families who’ve lost their homes and everything they have to Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s rockets. And as a father myself, I cannot imagine the pain endured by the parents of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, who were tragically kidnapped and murdered…”

[Holocaust denial] is “baseless, ignorant, and hateful, [as is] the “threatening [of] Israel with destruction” [and the] “repeating [of] vile stereotypes about Jews.”

“Palestinians must abandon violence.  [It is] a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus.”

“More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here [in Israel], tended the land here, prayed to G-d here.  [That Jews live in Israel today] is a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history.”

“Those who long to see an independent Palestine rise must stop trying to tear Israel down. . . . After 60 years in the community of nations, Israel’s existence must not be a subject for debate… It should be clear to all that efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the U.S.”

His Secretary of State lectured Al-Jazeera that “when the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon they got Hezbollah and 40,000 rockets and when they pulled out of Gaza they got Hamas and 20,000 rockets”; and his State Department condemned the Palestinian Authority’s denial of the Western Wall’s connection to the Jewish people.

I don’t think that Mr. Obama’s appointment of Jews to important posts (Jack Lew and Janet Yellin are the best known, but it’s a long list) or his yearly “Pesach Seders” are of great significance, but they do say something about Mr. Obama’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism.

And so, even those who see bad in Mr. Obama must, if they wish to be true to a Jewish ideal, recognize good too.

© 2015 Hamodia

Buried Treasure in Tokyo

At a news conference last week, Satoshi Omura, a Japanese researcher and one of three scientists who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, made a comment that was not only modest but, properly considered, profound.

I’ll get to the comment in time.  First, though, some background:

The scientists used modern laboratory techniques to discover anti-parasitic drugs that, in the Nobel Committee’s words, “have revolutionized the treatment of some of the most devastating parasitic diseases” in the world.

Dr. Omura’s work was on the development of a medicine that has nearly eradicated the dreaded disease “river blindness” and radically reduced the incidence of the disfiguring disease known as elephantiasis. Dr. Omura’s work has already helped hundreds of millions of sufferers of these diseases, and has the potential of eradicating the ailments entirely.

Parasitic diseases are a threat to an estimated one-third of the world’s population, particularly among the poor in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

The work of Dr. Omura and the other scientists consisted of identifying and isolating a compound, which they called Avermectin, that occurs in nature – in this case soil collected by Dr. Omura from a golf course near Tokyo.

Anti-parasitic agents are not the only blessings concealed in plants and soil.  Many anti-bacterial and anti-viral compounds have also been found hidden in plain (if microscopic) sight, and successfully treat dangerous infections common in the Western world.

The most famous one is penicillin, which was discovered in 1928 when an airborne mold infected a petri dish in the lab of Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming.  But there are scores of substances in nature that have become effective treatments for myriad maladies.

The bacterium that causes clostridium difficile colitis, or “C-diff,” for instance, a serious intestinal ailment, is prevalent in hospitals and, in 2011 resulted in about half a million infections and 29,000 deaths in the United States alone.

One of the most effective treatments for C-diff is a drug called Vancomycin (which also is the treatment of choice for complicated skin and bloodstream infections and some forms of meningitis).  The drug was first isolated in 1953 from a soil sample collected from the interior jungles of Borneo.

Many scientists, upon isolating such compounds and identifying their properties and uses, proudly accept credit for their accomplishments.  How many, though, I wonder, stop to think about just what it is they did and didn’t do?

To be sure, much credit is due for the painstaking work of cultivating biological agents, experimenting with them, compiling data, and then collating and interpreting them.  But such cures for diseases, in the end, are merely discovered by the men of science, not created by them.

Do the researchers give thought to the Creator of the cures, Who secured them in unexplored places, until the arrival of the right time for their discoveries?  Have they considered how odd it is that there even are cures for dreaded diseases in soil and plants?

So much of what is heralded as astounding scientific achievement is simply accessing the miracle of nature, of Hashem’s gifts.  When a sheep was first successfully cloned a number of years ago, what was essentially accomplished was the coaxing of genetic material to do precisely what it does naturally all the time: code for traits, replicate and direct protein synthesis. Those things, not the clonings, were, and are, the miracles.

And when they were first performed, heart transplants were amazing. But, at least to thoughtful people, never remotely as amazing as hearts.

Dr. Omura seems to have the requisite sensitivity to recognize, despite the great impact of his accomplishment, the limitation of the role he played.

We don’t understand why diseases are necessary (although they point, like nothing else could, to the fragility of our bodies, and the many miracles we are beneficiaries of when we are healthy).  But it should astound us that Hashem has planted cures for ailments in the world He created for us.

Dr. Omura’s comment?  After expressing his surprise at having won the Nobel Prize (“I never imagined I would win.  If I had, I’d have worn a nicer necktie.”), he offered an assessment of what he had done.

“I merely borrowed,” he said, “the power of microbes.”

He didn’t cite the Creator of microbes (and everything else), and I have no idea of his religious beliefs.  But his words, all the same, should serve to remind every maamin of the manifold miracles we routinely, if obliviously, experience, and of the fathomless debt we owe Hakadosh Baruch Hu.

© 2015 Hamodia

 

Where “Objective” is Defective

I’m not among those who grow apoplectic at the New York Times’ reportage from Israel.  There are, to be sure, occasions when, in misguided attempts to achieve what passes these days for “evenhandedness,” the Old Gray Lady misses the mark.  But I have found most (I wrote “most”! – please hold off with the angry letters!) of the dispatches from Eretz Yisrael to be informative and objective.

What isn’t either of those things, though, is how the paper has repeatedly chosen to characterize the Har HaBayis. In fact, “misleading” and “deceptive” are the most descriptive words to come to mind.

After a recent clash between Israeli police and Palestinians at the site, for instance, a September 16 New York Times report referred to the holy place as the site where the Jewish temples were “believed to have once stood.”  Another story, three days earlier, described it as a site “revered by Jews” but “one of the three holiest sites in Islam.”  Why not “revered by Jews and Muslims,” or “Islam’s third holiest site and Judaism’s holiest one”?  Something is rotten in the state of New York.

Similarly, two years ago, a Times video 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.”

Call the Temple Mount?  That’s what it is.  Believe?  Yes, like we believe the sun is hot.

No historian, at least in a state of sobriety, entertains the slightest doubt that the Bayis Sheini stood on the mount for centuries, having been built there nearly 1500 years before Islam’s founder’s grandmother was born.  Both Jewish and, l’havdil, Roman sources recount that korbanos were offered on the mizbei’ach there.  (The historicity of the Bayis Rishon is part of our mesorah, but the lack of contemporary non-Jewish writings from the time deprives historians the documentary “proof” they demand.)

That the Har HaBayis was conquered by Christian, and then Muslim, forces, and that churches and mosques were built upon the site, is undeniable.  Equally undeniable, though, are the site’s true Jewish origins – brightly reflected in the life and prayers of Jews over the course of known history.

Every observant Jew recalls the Beis Hamikdash every single day of the year, in each of his or her tefillos – recited, of course, facing in the direction of what we “widely believe was the site of the Temples.”

Then there are our holidays, like the one just past, where our Mussaf tefillos include a lengthy bemoaning of those Temples’ destructions.

The words “Yerushalayim” and its synonym “Tzion,” the city whose holiness derives from the holiness of the Makom Hamikdash, pass our lips at least ten times every morning.  Before breakfast.

There is “shabchi Yerushalayim” in Pesukei d’Zimrah, “ohr chodosh al Tzion to’ir” in birkas Krias Shma, Boneh Yerushalayim in Shemoneh Esrei, another reference in Tachanun, and others throughout Shacharis.  And let’s not forget Korbanos.

And then, after breakfast, well, if one had a bowl of cereal, his Al Hamichyah would mention Yerushalayim two more times.  And if bread was consumed, one of the brachos of Birkas Hamazon, of course, expresses our hope that Hashem will be “boneh b’rachamov Yerushalayim.”

What distorts the vision of the “paper of record” is, of course, a deep commitment to fairness and objectivity.  There is, after all, a “Muslim narrative,” too, a claim to the Makom Hamikdash by another religion, indeed one that, at least in numbers of adherents, dwarfs the Jewish one.

But fairness, of course, doesn’t mean considering every claim to be the equal of every other one.  When the New York Times refers to the events of September 11, 2001, it describes them as a concerted attack by Al Qaeda on the United States, not as “a series of plane crashes believed by Americans to have been Islamist attacks but considered by many in the Arab world to have been the work of the American government or a Jewish plot.”  At least it hasn’t done so yet.

It’s an unfortunate reminder of our galus that the Bais Hamikdash isn’t standing where it once did.  But we must accept that sad fact.  It is wrong to seek (other than through our tefillos) to change that current reality, halachically wrong to walk onto the Har HaBayis, and doubly wrong to endanger Jews by offending those who occupy the site.

But what’s also wrong (attention: New York Times) is to pretend that its history isn’t established and clear.

© 2015 Hamodia

Two-Way Traffic on the Haredi Highway

Have you ever wondered why, in light of the slew of “I survived Orthodoxy but saw the secular light!” essays and books, there no counter-flood of similar writing by some of the many who came from other Jewish places to Orthodoxy?

Why are there are no vivid descriptions of what impelled some Orthodox Jew toward traditional Jewish observance?  Why no accounts of the emptiness of secular lives they experienced, or the inadequacy they perceived in less observant ones?

Are there no tales to tell of parents who deprived their children of even a rudimentary Jewish education?  Who responded negatively to their progeny’s explorations of their Jewish roots?  Or who lived lives that contradicted what they preached to their young?

My thoughts on the matter can be read here.

Enjoy!

Each year, sitting in the sukkah on the first night of Sukkos, with my wife and whoever among our children and grandchildren we are fortunate to have with us for Yom Tov, I feel a particularly intense elation.  Part of it, no doubt, is the result of having managed to erect the sukkah on time.  But most of it is born, simply but powerfully, of having so many family members around the table.  For many years, though, ironically, my joy also bothered me.

After all, I reasoned, simchas Yom Tov, the happiness we are commanded to feel on a holiday – particularly on Sukkos, “the time of our happiness,” is meant to be, well, simchas Yom Tov, not delight in one’s family.

But then, one year, I reached a more refined understanding of simchas Yom Tov.  And I’ve never thought about it quite the same since.

The first hint that there was something here to discover lay in Chazal’s description of how we are to fulfill simchas Yom Tov.  The Rambam (Hilchos Shvisas Yom Tov, 6:18), basing his words on the Gemara (Pesachim 109a), instructs a man to buy his wife new clothing and jewelry, to give his young children nosherai and to himself enjoy meat and wine.  (Before splurging on that special Cabernet, though, bear in mind the Kaf Hachaim’s admonition that precedence here should be given to one’s wife’s pleasure.)  So it’s clear that simchas Yom Tov is defined as taking joy in plainly physical pleasures.  What gives?

The Sefer Hachinuch on the mitzvah of celebrating Sukkos echoes the oddity. “The days of the holiday,” he writes in Mitzvah 324, “are days of great happiness to Jews, since it is a time of gathering into the house the grain and fruit, and people are naturally happy.”

But then he subtly addresses the issue of how physical pleasures can constitute simchas Yom Tov: “And so Hashem has commanded His people to celebrate at that time, to allow them the merit of turning the essence of the happiness to Him.”

A striking Midrash (cited by Rashi) on a chapter of Tehillim we recite twice daily this time of year, elucidates the passuk “For my father and mother have abandoned me, and Hashem has gathered me in” (27:10).   Dovid Hamelech, says the Midrash, was stating that his parents’ focus was on their personal relationship; it was about themselves, not him.  In that sense, explains the Midrash, they “abandoned” him.

But stop and think a moment.  Dovid’s father was Yishai – one of the three personages who Chazal tell us (Shabbos 55b) “died by the counsel of the nachash,” the serpent in Gan Eden.  In other words, he was personally without sin.  And yet he is being described as, in some way, selfish?

What occurs is that there is an inescapable aspect of self-awareness (the result, likely, of the nachash’s “success” in Gan Eden) and self-concern that is part and parcel of being human.  To lack it is to be an angel.  Or, perhaps better, a mere angel.  Angels, after all, Chazal tell us, are static; humans, dynamic.

Even the most sublime of human beings have selves.  Even the ideal talmid chacham, represented by the Aron in the Mishkan, who is “gold” within and “gold” without, still has a core of wood – a symbol, it may well be, of the Eitz Hadaas, which bequeathed self-awareness in the first place.

And if a sense of self is an inherent part of being a human being, experiencing physical or emotional pleasure at times is normal and inevitable.  What the Chinuch may be telling us is that simchas Yom Tov means acknowledging that reality, embracing the pleasure of the harvest – and the joy born of the new clothing and the wine and the meat – but “grafting” it onto the spiritual, conscripting it toward the service of Hashem.  By doing that, we elevate the self.  We turn the things that make our “selves” happy toward the holy.

What happier moment could be imagined than when Yaakov Avinu was reunited with Yosef after 22 years of not knowing what had become of his beloved son.  The Midrash, brought by Rashi, has Yaakov reciting Shema at that moment.  Was he not overjoyed at the reunion?  Of course he was.  But he saw fit to graft his joy onto kabbalas ol malchus Shamayim.

So we should enjoy our meat and our wine, our wives and daughters their new clothes and jewelry, our young’uns their nosh.  And we should all consciously try to channel our enjoyment toward its Source.

© 2015 Hamodia

Eliyahu’s Double Plea

The Rambam’s logic, as always, is unassailable.  Miracles, he informs us (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah, 8:1), simply cannot be bases of belief.  What appears to us as miraculous, he explains, could always be trickery or magic.  Or, we might add, as per the late science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, a “sufficiently advanced technology,” that will always be “indistinguishable from magic.”

To be sure, a miracle can be temporarily impressive, as the Rambam goes on to clarify; and, more important, if sourced in the Divine, can be (like Krias Yam Suf, the be’er and the mann) vivid demonstrations of Hashem’s love and concern for His people.  But what lies at the root of Jewish belief, he states, is no miracle, but rather the revelation at Har Sinai, when Klal Yisrael experienced direct communication with the Creator.

The assertion that what appears miraculous cannot in itself prove anything about its source, though, seems frontally challenged by the narrative of the confrontation between the nevi’ei habaal and Eliyahu Hanavi at Har Hacarmel, recounted in Melachim I 18:1-39 (the haftarah of parashas Ki Sisa).

There, we read of how Eliyahu, in order to convince the Jews of the time to stop vacillating between Hashem and a false god, challenged the idolatrous priests to offer, as he would himself, a sacrifice.  A heavenly fire that would descend on one of the sacrifices would serve as Divine testimony.  Despite efforts of the idolaters to artificially create a “heavenly fire,” as a Midrash describes, and despite Eliyahu’s soaking of his own sacrifice with water, a fire descends from heaven and consumes the Navi’s offering.  The people are overwhelmed, and cry out “Hashem, He is G-d!  Hashem, He is G-d!”

How, though, to square that account with the Rambam’s words about the limitation of miracles? The answer may lie in a Gemara in Berachos (6a).  Eliyahu’s tefillah before the miracle includes the plea Aneini Aneini!– “Answer me!  Answer me!”  The double entreaty, explains the Gemara, refers to two separate requests, to “cause a fire to come down from heaven” and to “let not the people say that it was the result of magic!”

Far from a challenge to the Rambam’s contention, then, the Gemara’s elucidation greatly supports it.  It required a special request of Hashem that the people not dismiss the miracle as meaningless – which they, logically, had every right to do.  In other words, that the people regarded the miracle as meaningful was, in a sense, itself something of a miracle.

And, in fact, the conviction to which the people gave voice when the fire descended did not prove lasting.  Soon thereafter, Eliyahu despairs at the nation’s slipping back into its wrong ways.  Their inspiration at Har HaCarmel was powerful but, in the end, ephemeral.  It was based, after all, on a mere miracle.

The declaration “Hashem, He is G-d!”, of course, is what we call out seven times at Ne’ilah, at the very close of Yom Kippur.  How odd that a declaration that turned out to be short-lived should conclude our holiest day.

Could it be a subtle warning? A reminder that “spiritual highs” cannot in themselves ensure their own perseverance, that even a state of deep emotion requires “follow-up” determination if it is to be maintained?

The first opportunity to follow up, so to speak, after Ne’ilah is the Maariv that ensues after the thunderous “Hashem Hu HaElokim!”s. A kehillah that davens that first post-Yom Kippur tefillah meticulously and with kavanah is one that has had a successful day.

You may know the story told of the Baal Shem Tov’s horses.  The two animals were hitched up to the Besht’s wagon for a trip, but were unaware of the kefitzas haderech, or miraculous “shortening of the way,” that would take place on their journey.  When only a few minutes had elapsed as they passed a point that should have taken them a full day to reach, one horse said to the other, “Hmmm. I’m not even hungry.  We must not be horses but men!”

Then, when a second landmark unexpectedly went by, the other horse commented, “No, we’re even more than men.  We must be angels!”  And so the horses proudly trotted on, until they reached their destination ten hours – but many days’ journey – away.  By this point, they were famished and, led to a feeding trough, enthusiastically dug in to sate their hunger.

And so, the story ends, it was then that the horses knew, without any doubt, that they were horses.

On Yom Kippur, we withdraw from human activities and stand like angels.  When the day ends, though, tired and hungry, we know we are mere humans.

But, if we manage to carry our Ne’ilah recognition into Maariv and beyond, better ones.

© 2015 Hamodia

The King and Us

One of the findings of a recent Pew Research Center report about Orthodox Jews was that for the vast majority of them – are you sitting down? – “religion is very important in their lives.”

Well, yes.

The study contrasts that with the situation in the non-Orthodox community, where only 20% of its members make a similar claim about themselves.

It’s all too easy for many of us to look down our noses at fellow Jews who express their Jewishness only on occasion, to consider them to have missed the point of the Jewish mission. Judaism can’t, after all, be “compartmentalized.”  It is an all-encompassing way of life and needs to inform all the choices we make.

And yet, as always, there’s more to be gained by not looking at others but rather inward.  Our Orthodox world, after all, “knows from” compartmentalization too.

There are, unfortunately, Jews who, while they wouldn’t ever dream of eating food lacking a good hechsher or of davening without a proper head-covering, seem in some ways to be less conscious of Hashem at other times.

How else to explain an otherwise observant Jew who acts in his business dealings, or home life, or behind the wheel, or the way he speaks to others, in ways not in consonance with what he knows is proper?

When we experience such dissonance, it’s not, chalilah, that we don’t acknowledge Hashem.  It’s just that we tend to compartmentalize; we feel HaKodosh Baruch Hu’s presence in our religious lives, but less so in our mundane ones.

Some of us struggle to maintain a keen awareness of Hashem not only out of shul but even in it. We don’t always pause and think of what it is we’re saying when we make a brachah (or even take care to pronounce every word clearly and distinctly).  We allow our observances, even our davening, to sometimes fade into rote.  I’m writing here to myself, but some readers may be able to relate.

Many of us – certainly I – must sadly concede that when it comes to compartmentalizing in our lives, there really isn’t really any clear “us” and “them,” the Pew report notwithstanding.  There is a continuum here, with some of us some more keenly and constantly aware of the ever-presence of the Divine, and some less so.

Obviously, Jews who are entirely nonchalant about religious observance are at one extreme of the scale.  And those who are not only observant but think of Hashem and His will even when engaged in business or navigating a traffic jam are at the other end. But many even in that latter category can still fall short of the ideal of Hashem-consciousness, can compartmentalize their lives.

This is a thought that leads directly to Rosh Hashanah.  The first day of a new Jewish year, the start of the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah, is suffused with the concept of Malchus, “Kingship.”  The shofar, we are taught, is a coronation call, and the concept of malchiyus is prominent in the days’ Mussaf tefillah.  We might well wonder: What has kingship to do with repentance?  The answer is: much.

By definition, a king has a kingdom, over which he exerts his rules.  There is little escaping even a mortal monarch’s reach, and none of his subjects dares take any action without royal approval. All the more so, infinite times over, in the case not of a king but a King.

And so, we might consider that kingship (or, at least, Kingship) and compartmentalization are diametric, incompatible ideas.  If Hashem is to be our Ruler, then there are no places and no times when He can be absent from our minds.

Rosh Hashanah is our yearly opportunity to ponder that thought and internalize it, to try to bring our lives more in line with it.  To better comprehend, in other words, that Hashem is as manifest when we are sitting behind a desk, cooking or sending kids off to school as he is when we are reciting Shemoneh Esrei, as present on a December morning as He is during the Yamim Nora’im.

On Rosh Hashanah, we will all be collectively focused on “de-compartmentalizing” our lives, on coronating Hashem over all Creation.  May the zechus of that effort bear fruit not only in our personal lives, but in history – may it lead, in other words, and soon, to the day when v’hayah Hashem l’melech al kol ha’aretz.

© 2015 Hamodia