Monthly Archives: May 2011

I recently attended an Orthodox wedding where the reception consisted of a buffet of baked ziti and eggplant parmigiana, along with some salads and bakery cakes. The entire wedding was kept simple- no floral arrangements, no alcohol, no elaborate decorations.The wedding was simpler than the average bris. And even simpler than the Israeli weddings of 20 years ago. It was a joyous celebration. The groom was connected to Uri L’Tzedek so I assumed that this wedding was only an exception. But as I waited outside for my ride, I asked the singles:What was their reaction to the wedding. I received a unanimous answer that they wanted their wedding to be the same way: Simple, Modest, Inexpensive and Thoughtful. They said that this way the love and the simcha shine though. We may be watching the start of a new trend. This wedding may serve as the exemplar. Wedding trends travel quickly and this one will be supported both by idealism and by the financial downturn. This wedding was based on high ideals, and the guests were all idealists but some might embrace the simplicity out of need.
The follow place card was set up on each table- I removed names.

Our Ethical Food Decisions for this Wedding

1. Why did we choose to have a modest buffet meal?

We wanted to embrace the core Jewish value of Histapkut ba’muat (being content with less) and Ben Zoma’s teaching that a wealthy individual is one who is content with one’s lot (Pirkei Avot 4:1). Rav Bachya Ibn Pakuda, an 11th century Spanish philosopher, shared this view and taught that a lifestyle of materialism and overindulgence leads one away from G-d. In fact, throughout various time periods, the Jewish community embraced sumptuary laws (laws limiting personal expenses on religious grounds) as a way of showing “deference to the poor” (Moed Kattan 27). Every simcha (religious celebration) affects the communal standard, and we would like to strive for the virtues of modesty and moderation. We are striving to have a creative and holy celebration that fosters inclusiveness and community building. A wedding, birth, bar/bat mitzvah, funeral, and the like are all great spiritual and ethical opportunities and are a time for families to engage in cheshbon ha’kis (financial introspection). We worry about the effect of consumerism on our celebrations. We struggled with whether or not to use dishes (more environmentally friendly) or disposables (lower in cost), and decided upon the latter.

2. Why did we choose to make the meal dairy?

[The birde] has been a vegetarian for about 14 years and [the groom ] has been for about eight years. One of [groom’s ] rabbis in Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, once wrote that “the dietary laws are intended to teach us compassion and lead us gently to vegetarianism.” We believe that in an age where it has become apparent that the new age of mass production done in factory farms immensely violates tza’ar ba’alei chaim (the Torah prohibition against inflicting pain upon animals), we must reconsider our consumer habits. In addition to the cruelty of how these animals are caged, fed, and slaughtered, many studies have shown the detrimental effect that meat consumption has upon human health. In a recession where our charity is needed more than ever, and as meat prices increase, the purchase of meat seems even more problematic. However, this is not an ascetic ideal. Alternative meat options are now more accessible, affordable, and similar in taste to meat than ever. In an age where vegetarianism must be viewed as a Jewish ethical ideal, we hope that more will consider this path in the pursuit of striving for truth, justice, peace, and holiness.
After the wedding, we intend to embrace a fully vegan diet as we have learned that many parts of the dairy industry have serious moral and health concerns as well.

3. Why did we choose food certified by the Tav HaYosher?

Launched by Uri L’Tzedek, the Tav HaYosher is a local, grassroots initiative to bring workers, restaurant owners and community members together to create just workplaces in kosher restaurants. Rav Yosef Breuer, one of the leading figures of 20th century Orthodoxy, famously stated that “Kosher” is intimately related to “Yoshor.” “G-d’s Torah not only demands the observance of kashrut and the sanctification of our physical enjoyment; it also insists on the sanctification of our social relationships. This requires the strict application of the tenets of justice and righteousness, which avoid even the slightest trace of dishonesty in our business dealings and personal life.” Recent studies have revealed widespread abuse and exploitation of workers in the New York food industry. Thousands of workers are paid below minimum wage. Even more are denied their legal rights to overtime pay and time off. Workers are often subjected to unsafe and abusive working conditions. Given recent events in the kashrut industry, we believe it is imperative that we implement a system that will prevent abuse and exploitation and that we must ensure these abuses are not taking place in kosher restaurants. The Tav HaYosher is an opportunity to harness some of the power and influence we have as an observant community to strengthen tzedek in our world and create a true kiddush Hashem (sanctification of G-d’s name).

I was going to talk about several graves in order to deal with some of the issues of graves in a single post but this one became long enough for its own post.

I set out to visit the grave of the Izbitzer rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica (pronounced in Yiddish as Izbitz). Izbitz Hasidus is currently fashionable for his vision that we have personal illuminations of God’s will.

Izbica is 30 minutes south-east of Lublin in one of the poorer parts of Poland located on the road to the Ukraine. On the side of the road are endless mustard yellow fields of rape–seed for canola oil. Everything is now modern agriculture with tractors, but many homes still have the older horse plows still rusting the yard. Cows and chickens in the front yards were common sites. One is entering into a realm scarcely populated with little business or industry. I remembered the signs at the Warsaw airport encouraging foreign investment to develop the country.

The town of Izbica goes back to the medieval era and it was briefly conquered by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the eighteenth century, but upon return to Poland it became an all Jewish city.

An ordinary Polish town of a noble from the 17-18th century originally had two parts, a Catholic part with a Baroque church and the Jewish side of the town; market was in the middle. (See Moshe Rosman The Lord’s Jews. Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 18th Century, Cambridge, MA, 1990 Gershon Hundert The Jews in a Polish Private Town. The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, 1992.)

In Izbica, as in many of the other towns in this region, there was no Christian side nor any Church. Izbica was 95% Jewish. The return of the town to Poland created an all Jewish town. Whereas the end of the arenda system led to poverty in Russia, in the Lublin province of Lublin it lead to financial security as the Jews built factories and help industrialize the country. Izbica was known for having furniture, wood, and comb factories. These new Jewish factory towns suffered a dearth of leadership in the nineteenth century and organized their religious lives around Hasidism- specifically the individualistic and mercantile qualities of Polish Hasidism. We know that the Kotzker had a vinegar and then an apparel factory. The older nobility towns were market towns now we have Orthodox factory owners and proletariat. And whereas the older towns had yeshivot and rationalism, these new towns had Hasidism.(see Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment)

Rabbi Mordecahi Yosef was born in Tomaszow located 50km further south and he eventually becoming a student of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (Koch). Tomaszow was the place of all the wild stories of the court of the Kotzker. In 1830, the Kotzker supported the Polish uprising against Russian so he needed to change his last name and his city to save his life. He moved to Koch and Mordechai Yosef followed. In 1839, there was the famous break between the two and Mordecahi Yosef moved to the all Jewish town needing leadership. He died in 1851.

We arrived into a nineteenth century brick town looking like many an American small town of only four blocks length. Izbica has a depressed rust belt town feel and one website claims that most of the inhabitants were unemployed.

The Jewish cemetery is located behind a yellow house. Everyone in town knew, when asked, where it was.One enters the private driveway and then goes up a narrow and steep hill with dirt steps. One comes to a tangle of bushes and bramble with a dirt path which the locals are walking on to reach the other side of the hill. The grave was located immediately to our left behind a forest of hedges, trees, and vines. We missed it and entered the trail which ran the length of the former Jewish cemetery. We noticed a few recent Post WWII memorial stones to relatives killed in war. One of these was by two siblings to their killed parents, but one of the siblings was Catholic and one Jewish so the tombstone had a Jewish memorial on one side and a Catholic one on the other. Realizing we must have missed the tomb, we went back and saw what looked like a garage set back behind the thicket which must be the ohel. There was no sign to the grave, no Jewish community signs, or clearing of the bushes to get through, nor was there any fence or enclosure.

There was a new black memorial tombstone plaque to all those killed in Holocaust and then a little clearing in which sat a wall made of broken Jewish tombstones and a homemade garage structure made of tombstone fragments held together by cement. The Nazis had destroyed the cemetery at the very start of the war to build a headquarters and prison/ghetto. These were the remnants of the broken stones returns to the cemetery now embedded in two structures. In the garage looking ohel was the grave of Rabbi Mordechai Leiner with a simple new stone and a simple plaque above it. The grave seems to have been built by the members of the Leiner family who live in Brooklyn & Israel in order to pray to their ancestor.

On the way out of town, we were pointed to a brick building and told that it was originally a bakery the only remnants of the former main street. Some of the homes looked similar in age.

The students of Rabbi Mordechai Leiner, Rabbi Zadok Hakohen and Rabbi Leibele Eiger share a common ohel in the new cemetery in Lublin proper but they get little attention and are not mentioned in the guides. If one wanted to show the past of Lublin, they should get greater attention.

But why was the grave of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef give special attention in contemporary Poland? He was not a wonder worker and the Polish Hasidic tradition is not part of the world of Galician wonder working Zaddikim. Those coming from Boro Park to visit the Hozeh, Reb Elimelech, Sanz and Belz do not include the Izbitzer. It seems that there was some Shlomo Carlebach influence on the Polish committee seeking to restore the graves as well as surprise money from German TV because they were doing a documentary of the Nazi responsible for destroying the town.

I am still trying to understand the bigger picture of these isolated acts of reclamation by the small Polish Jewish community, The Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) explained their work in Izbica as follows.

IZBICA JEWISH CEMETERY COMMEMORATION PROJECT
The goal of the project is to restore the neglected Jewish cemetery in Izbica and to bring back its proper look. The project is coordinated by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and supported by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and by Tvschoenfilm, a German documentary producing company.

Until the end of 2006 the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage had finished the first stage of the project, during which the following results were achieved:

– the matzevot, stolen during World War II and used to build a Gestapo prison in Izbica, were moved to the cemetery and secured;
– a monument commemorating the Jewish community of Izbica was erected at the cemetery;
– a pamphlet presenting the history of Izbica was published;
– a workshop on Jewish history and culture was organized for the students of the Izbica School Complex.

In autumn 2006 the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany had joined forces with the Foundation to realize the IZBICA JEWISH CEMETERY COMMEMORATION PROJECT. The financial support of the Embassy allowed the Foundation to erect a monument commemorating the Jewish community of Izbica, publish pamphlets presenting the history of the town (in Polish and in English), organize educational activities for the students of the Izbica School Complex and, finally, to trace the geodesic boundaries of the cemetery and design a new fence.

On November 16th, 2006, a ceremony of unveiling of the monument commemorating the Jewish community of Izbica took place.

The teachers and students of the School Complex in Izbica have been taking care of the Jewish cemetery in Izbica for many years, trying to discover the past of their town. In September 2005 the School Complex in Izbica joined the educational program “To Bring Memory Back”, launched by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage.

Within the framework of the „To Bring Memory Back” program the students take care of the Jewish cemetery, discover Jewish history and culture, and explore the history of the Jewish community of Izbica. They also undertake public activities leading to bring to the inhabitants of Izbica the memory of their past.

On December 19, 2006, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage organized for the students of the Izbica School Complex a workshop on Jewish culture and history, dedicated also to the educational program’s method and the realization of public activities.We certainly hope that thanks to the workshop, led by experienced animators, young people of Izbica will manage to invite many other inhabitants of their town to join them in taking care of the cemetery and exploring the past of Izbica.

The final stage of the IZBICA JEWISH CEMETERY COMMEMORATION PROJECT will be fencing the cemetery. The cost of this undertaking is estimated for 50 000 €. The Foundation is now seeking partners who will help us to complete this task. A pamphlet presenting the history of Izbica: “Izbica. A Story of a Place”»

They had a programs in the local school in 2005-6, but there does not seem to be any programming since 2006. The cemetery has several year’s of growth of bushes so the cleanup has not been maintained. They produced a very nice pamphlet on the town “Izbica. A Story of a Place” which is worth downloading. I have not uploaded my pictures yet. In the meantime page eight of the pamphlet has pictures of the wall of gravestones, and the ohel.

Towns such as Izbica had fewer survivors since there were no Christians in the town to serve as vehicles for escape and protection. In addition, in these towns, everyone spoke Yiddish – no one spoke Polish- so it was hard to blend in outside the town. The most famous survivor of Izbica is the still living Thomas Blatt who survived an escape from Sobibor. The pamphlet quotes Blatt that his father was called Leibele Goy since he was a freethinker who ate ham and spoke with Polish Christans, the latter a trait useful for survival.

Those who know the Torah of the Izbitzer come for pilgrimage and affirmation of his influence. Those Polish Jews who have reclaimed their Judaism come for an sense that just as they recovered their faith – they have an illumination that there is Jewish core to Poland. Some Jews from the US come for an Ozymandias sense of the immense loss and imagined vision of what the town was like when all Jewish. Others like Jonathan Foer Safran came to Eastern Europe and saw nothing but stones so he used his imagination to create his own personal illumination.

Now the goal is the raise money to fence it in. The question is: for whom? Is the goal to place a memorial and a fence around in all surviving cemeteries? But as the decades and centuries pass, who will take care of these places and who will travel to these places? Even with a fence it will soon be impassable due to overgrowth.

This morning a New York paper complained about the neglect and overgrowth of colonial Protestant cemeteries in NY. Thee are no funds to maintain every cemetary even in the United States. Do the well meaning restorers in POland understand the immense commitment for upkeep?

There are hundreds of Jewish graveyards of famous rabbis in Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco and Russia? Do we preserve them all? Here in Izbica, there are no surviving tombstones. No history to see. No graves left to protect. There is no Jewish community returning to educate and there is not enough cemetery left to create a focal point for Polish education. There are over 350 known cemeteries of shtetlach with destroyed graveyard with no tombstones left, should there be 100’s of projects to fence them in?

To be continued—Visit to Poland Part III: On to Zamosc

Rabbi Riskin has reached the culmination of several years of interfaith dialogue by declaring in a new statement that “Judaism must respect Christian faithfulness to their revelation, value their role in divine history, and acknowledge that Christians have entered a relationship with the God of Israel. In our pre-eschaton days, God has more than enough blessings to bestow upon all of His children.” He does this, in his own proclamation, “as a catalyst for other orthodox Jews and Jewry worldwide…”

In this statement, the general sharing of the universal creator of heaven has become a sharing of the the particular God of Israel, that Christians have a special positive relationship with the God of Israel, that Christianity has to figure positively in a Jewish theory of history, and that we should respect their revelation, implicitly indicating the New Testament. At the same time, Riskin reserves the right to prayer for their escatological conversion of Christians to Judaism but thinks both sides should avoid proselytizing for conversion.

This statement is way beyond Dabru Emet. Will anyone comment or will they ignore it? And if they ignore the statement-will it be because of loyalty to the Riskin of the 1970’s or because they do not take it seriously?
Riskin’s theological dialogue partner was the Hebraic Heritage Christian Center, a small non-accredited Bible college that seeks to return Christianity to its Jewish roots. Here is their concerns and here is their vision. Here is a DVD on their approach to dialogue.

Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Riskin said, “This statement only represents the view of our center but should also be used as a catalyst for other orthodox Jews and Jewry worldwide to consider fostering relationships with Christian communities. Leaders within the mainline Christian denominational world as well as the non-denominational movements of Evangelical Christianity have sincerely become friends of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. It is vital that we strengthen our relationship with them. We are certain that through these relational dialogues we will find far more which unites us than divides us.”

A Jewish Understanding of Christians and Christianity

Many leaders of Christianity today no longer seek to displace Judaism. They recognize the Jewish people’s continuing role in God’s plan for history, and through their own understanding of the Christian Testament, they understand themselves as grafted into the living Abrahamic covenant.

Christians see themselves not merely as members of the Noahide covenant, but as spiritual partners within the Jewish covenant. At the same time, they believe that God does not repent of his covenantal gifts and that the Jewish people continues to enjoy a unique covenantal relationship with God in accordance with its historical 2000 year traditions.

Jewish and Christian theologies are no longer engaged in a theological duel to the death and therefore Jews should not fear a sympathetic understanding of Christianity that is true to the Torah, Jewish thought and values. In today’s unprecedented reality of Christian support for the Jewish people, Jews should strive to work together with Christians toward the same spiritual goals of sacred history¬, universal morality, peace, and redemption under God¬ but under different and separate systems of commandments for each faith community and distinct theological beliefs.

Nearly all medieval and modern Jewish biblical commentators understood Abraham’s primary mission as teaching the world about God and bearing witness to His moral law. Maimonides insisted in his halakhic and philosophical writings that spreading the knowledge of the One God of Heaven and Earth throughout the world was the main vocation of Abraham. Significantly, this understanding of Abraham’s religious mission is exactly the role and historical impact of Christianity as understood by great rabbis such as Rabbis Moses Rivkis, Yaakov Emden and Samson Raphael Hirsch. [1]

[1] R. Moses Rivkis (17th century Lithuania):
The gentiles in whose shadow Jews live and among whom Jews are disbursed are not idolators. Rather they believe in creatio ex nihilo and the Exodus from Egypt and the main principles of faith. Their intention is to the Creator of Heaven and Earth and we are obligated to pray for their welfare (Gloss on Shulhan Arukh, Hoshen Mishpat, Section 425:5).

And Rabbi Jacob Emden (18th century Germany):
The Nazarene brought a double goodness to the world… The Christian eradicated avodah zarah, removed idols (from the nations) and obligated them in the seven mitsvot of Noah…a congregation that works for the sake of heaven¬(people) who are destined to endure, whose intent is for the sake of heaven and whose reward will not denied. (Seder Olam Rabbah 35-37; Sefer ha-Shimush 15-17.

And Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th century Germany):
Although disparaged because of its alleged particularism, the Jewish religion actually teaches that the upright of all peoples are headed toward the highest goal. In particular, rabbis have been at pains to stress that, while in other respects Christian views and ways of life may differ from those of Judaism, the peoples in whose midst the Jews are now living [i.e. Christians] have accepted the Jewish Bible of the Old Testament as a book of Divine revelation. They profess their belief in the God of heaven and earth as proclaimed in the Bible and they acknowledge the sovereignty of Divine Providence in both this life and the next. Their acceptance of the practical duties incumbent upon all men by the will of God distinguishes these nations from the heathen and idolatrous nations of the talmudic era (Principles of Education, “Talmudic Judaism and Society,” 225-227).

Israel…produced an offshoot [Christianity] that had to become estranged from it in great measure, in order to bring to the world¬sunk in idol worship, violence, immorality and the degradation of man¬at least the tidings of the One Alone, of the brotherhood of all men, and of man’s superiority over the beast. (Nineteen Letters on Judaism (Jerusalem, 1995).

When we combine this rabbinic appreciation of Christianity with today’s non-replacement Christian theologies toward Judaism, we find fresh possibilities for rethinking a Jewish relationship with Christianity and for fashioning new Jewish-Christian cooperation in pursuit of common values. If so, Jews can view Christians as partners in spreading monotheism, peace, and morality throughout the world.

This new understanding must encompass a mutual respect of each other’s theological beliefs and eschatological convictions. Some Christians maintain that Christianity is the most perfect revelation of God and that all will join the church when truth is revealed at the end of time. Jews, too, are free to continue to believe, as Maimonides believed, that “all will return to the true religion” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, 12:1) and, as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik declared, “In the ultimate truthfulness of our views, [we] pray fervently for and expect confidently the fulfillment of our eschatological vision when our faith will rise from particularity to universality and will convince our peers of the other faith community”(“Confrontation” from Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, 1964, 6:2).

The new relationship requires that Christians respect the right of all Jewish peoples to exist as Jews with complete self-determination ¬free from any attempts of conversion to Christianity.

At the same time, Judaism must respect Christian faithfulness to their revelation, value their role in divine history, and acknowledge that Christians have entered a relationship with the God of Israel. In our pre-eschaton days, God has more than enough blessings to bestow upon all of His children.

The prophet Micah offers a stunning description of the messianic culmination of human history:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and the God of Jacob, that He teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths.…Let the peoples beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore. Let every man sit under his vine and under his fig tree; and no one shall make him afraid….Let all the people walk, each in the name of his God; and we shall walk in the name of our Lord our God forever and ever.” (4:2-5)

Jews and Christians must bear witness together to the presence of God and to His moral laws. If Jews and Christians can become partners after nearly 2,000 years of theological delegitimization and physical conflict, then peace is possible between any two peoples anywhere. That peace would be our most powerful witness to God’s presence in human history and to our covenantal responsibility to carry God’s blessing to the world. It is the very essence of which the messianic dream is made of.

I sit here amidst announcement of ever new studies on the Holocaust that go beyond the death camp iconography. Books that deal with the Holocaust in different countries and forgotten aspects of the inhumanity. There is much to still grapple with now that the original shock has culturally been digested. However, much of the American presentation is so trivial as to be offensive to the victims. So, I was glad to see the recent article in the NYT decrying the connection of the Holocaust with bullying or thinking that holding hands and singing tolerance songs would defeat a foreign nation or stop slavery. I come late to this article written almost a month ago since I was out of the country. I assume it was already discussed on many websites. Nevertheless, it is a great piece to give out to classrooms.

In addition, the very people who are busy trivializing the message of the Holocaust by associating it with everything are the same ones complaining “the Holocaust is unique” when other groups mention their loss. They also dont see that their trivialization has led to the infotainment news stations to call almost everything a Holocaust.

April 29, 2011 NYT
Making the Holocaust the Lesson on All Evils By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

As proof, below a streaming news ticker (“Gay Basher Gets 12 Years”) are panels about “Confronting Hate in America”: Two Latinos are beaten on Long Island; a white supremacist shoots Jews in Los Angeles; a Sikh is murdered in a post-9/11 “hate crime”; a homosexual student is brutally murdered in Wyoming. On one panel is a description of the Oklahoma City bombing; on another, the attacks of 9/11.

A case of cyber-bullying also solicits our careful assessments. “Think,” we are urged by the signs: “Assume responsibility,” “Ask questions,” “Speak up.”

The museum’s central exhibition about the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews is preceded by this “Tolerancenter,” as it is called, which strains to tie together slavery, genocides, prejudice, discrimination and hate crimes, while showing even elementary school students (as the museum literature says) “the connection between these large-scale events and the epidemic of bullying in today’s schools.”

In the recently opened Holocaust museum in Skokie, Ill., bullying also plays a cautionary role.

Though Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have remained relatively immune to such sweeping moralizing, in most institutions and curriculums, the Holocaust’s lessons are clear: We should all get along, become politically active and be very considerate of our neighbors. If not, well, the differences between hate crimes and the Holocaust — between bullying and Buchenwald — are just a matter of degree.

Perhaps, though, we should take the lesson even further. What if this were the approach of every historical museum? The Imperial War Museum in London might look at World War I as a result of intolerance and hold out the promise of ending all wars if only its lessons were properly learned; after all, didn’t the French and Germans enjoy a sociable Christmas holiday cease-fire in the trenches of the Western Front?

The history of American slavery might explore the many ways people have enslaved others or forced them to do things against their will. An examination of the Soviet Gulag might emphasize the need to permit greater diversity of opinion in society, or more adventurously, it might attack the notion of imprisonment itself for being so Gulag-like.

As history, this is laughable. Yet we seem willing to accept that in the case of the Holocaust, an exhibition must allude to all forms of genocide, and must offer broad lessons about tolerance.

The impulse to tell the Holocaust story only in the context of elaborate generalizations has also helped justify its inclusion in school curriculums and helped obtain public financing for museums: The goal was not particular but general, not Judeocentric but humanitarian.

And the deeper one looks at the Holocaust itself, the more unusual its historical circumstances become. The cause of these mass killings was not “intolerance,” but something else, still scarcely understood.

Intolerance is almost too easy an explanation, implying a comforting moral message. Instead, why not look at how Hitler’s powers might have been undercut before he began to wage the war in Europe and the war against the Jews? Wouldn’t an examination of those possibilities offer a more profound lesson about how to prevent genocide?

And how central is intolerance to genocide anyway? Many intolerant societies don’t set up bureaucratic offices to supervise efficient mass murder.

There are even intolerant people who would still find genocide unthinkable
Read the Full Version Here

Interesting piece on the quest for macho reckless behavior among the Shuvu Banim followers. Nice quotes from Zvi Mark on their quest for adventure and spontaneous activities. Undertaking a risk places one at a higher level of emunah.

‘Religious macho’
Just three days ago, the Hasidim of the Shuvu Banim Yeshiva, situated in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, were informed that their rabbi, Eliezer Berland, would be returning today from the United States… Berland is an extreme mystic who aspires to be a tzaddik, a righteous person, in the image of Rabbi Nachman. His Shuvu Banim community of Bratslavers numbers more than 700 families. At Pesach one of the students, Ben-Yosef Livnat, was shot to death by Palestinian policemen

But no one denies that Berland has for years urged the Hasidim to visit Joseph’s Tomb and other dangerous places in the West Bank.

According to Dr. Zvi Mark, a scholar of Judaism and an expert on the Bratslav doctrine at both Bar-Ilan University and the Shalom Hartman Institute, Berland wants his followers to visit Joseph’s Tomb precisely because it is dangerous, and not in spite of the danger. “Even people who view highly dangerous backpacking trips by their children to all corners of the globe as a healthy outlet of youthful energies, accuse the Bratslav community of being adventurers,” Mark notes. “This is based on the concept of a separation between the vibrant secular way of life and religiously observant life, which must be spiritual and mystical, without earthly passions. Let them pray quietly in the synagogue and not disturb us during the siesta. But that dichotomy is remote from the Bratslav religiosity.”

The Shuvu Banim community describes Berland reverently as the spearhead of the visits to the tomb of Rabbi Nachman in Uman, Ukraine, that began in the 1980s – with the aid of forged passports and the ability to give the KGB the slip. The Soviet authorities offered a reward of thousands of dollars to anyone with information that would lead to Berland’s arrest. A similar mythology sprang up about his trips with followers to the graves of the patriarchs in the territories during the second intifada, under fire, and was bolstered by the more recent high-speed night rides across highways in northern Israel.

Some of the Hasidim said that Berland had instructed them to elude “dinnim,” negative forces that try to stop their motion, such as traffic lights, road signs and policemen. According to N., Berland taught him that “the moment you undertake a practical endeavor that entails a certain risk, it connects you with the tzaddik at a higher level.” And in the case of Nablus, with the biblical figure Joseph.

Another Hasid, Benny Mahleb, one of the organizers of the visits to Nablus, said: “When I go to Joseph’s Tomb, I know that something is liable to happen to me, but I believe in the rabbi [Berland] and I have a sense of security. I call this the adrenaline of holiness. You enter a city where there are terrorists – and we have already encountered gunfire – but you enter with faith, pray at the tomb and understand that by means of faith and prayer it is possible to change even nature.”
How many Hasidim have been hurt on the way to Joseph’s Tomb?

“One was injured and he has been in a vegetative state since 2003, and one, Ben-Yosef [Livnat], was killed. With all the grief – both were my friends – you have to view it in relation to the level of risk and you understand that it’s nothing, it’s beyond nature.”
Drawn to the Haredi world

The Haifa-born Berland is a product of the state-religious education system and the Bnei Akiva youth movement. He met his wife, Tehila, the daughter of the late Rabbi Shalom-Avraham Shaki – a Knesset member from the National Religious Party in the first half of the 1960s – when they were both members of a settlement group in the Nahal paramilitary brigade, bound for a religious kibbutz. Berland was already drawn to the Haredi world then, and no one was surprised when he entered an ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian yeshiva instead of the IDF.

Dr. Mark, who met Rabbi Berland a few years ago, says: “He has great knowledge. He interweaves material from different aspects of culture. In the course of a conversation he opens an encyclopedia and explains how storms happen and then switches to expert talk about a kabbalah manuscript. That is quite impressive.” Mark adds that, in contrast to other Bratslav rabbis who saw themselves, at least implicitly, as reincarnations of Rabbi Nachman, “I did not find any such claim in Rabbi Berland. On the other hand, I have never seen another Bratslaver rabbi whose demeanor is so close to that of Rabbi Nachman. If you ask yourself how the Hasidic movement started, what it was that people looked for in the tzaddikim, why people went to them, suddenly you have a powerful living example of just that.”

Mark points out that “some Bratslav Hasidim see Rabbi Nachman as being a saintly figure removed from them. Rabbi Berland sees him as a role model. He suddenly goes to Tiberias, suddenly goes to the United States – that is a very familiar pattern to those who know the behavior of Rabbi Nachman. Part of Rabbi Nachman’s ethos was always to renew himself and to change. If you are drawn to something, take action, go with what you feel. ‘Flow.’ Rabbi Berland is exactly that kind of character. If he feels the need to do something in the middle of the night, he will not put it off until morning but will go and do it immediately.”

“As a boy, Rabbi Nachman prayed he would die as a martyr to God,” Mark says. “He lived in Bratslav, but toward the end of his life said he wanted to die in Uman, because thousands of Jews who were martyred in pogroms were buried there. The whole ethos of Joseph and his devotion is interwoven in Rabbi Nachman’s life from beginning to end, and is also interwoven in the life of Rabbi Berland – from his trips to Uman when it was under Soviet rule, to his forays to Joseph’s Tomb.”

Do the Bratslav Hasidim consider the Palestinians, or the IDF soldiers stationed around Nablus, as “dinnim,” who need to be evaded or perhaps confronted?

“They don’t throw stones and don’t hurt anyone,” Mark says, about the Bratslavers. “It is an ethos of confidence in God or in the tzaddik. They take a chance and rely on Rabbi Berland, but they have no intention of hurting a living soul. It’s religious macho, not military macho. They say, ‘We go about without weapons, defenseless, and place our lives in God’s providence.'”
Read the full article here.

The Baby -Boomer changed the world less than they expected and they never expected a backlash by gen-x or by conservative religious and political forces. They also never imagined their current health and financial horizons that allowed a second life. Many of the 60 year old’s I know feel that relgion, politics, and the social climate did not turn out the way they planed. If this article turns out true then expect a major influx of money, time, and dedication as baby-boomers try to use their golden years of 60-85 to re-make the Jewish world. At this point, they will have an alliance with many of the gen-y and gen-z. The article claims that baby-boomer may not continue to support the institutions that took care of them or which they were affiliated during their work and family years. If they don’t like the community they will go elsewhere rather than hand the reigns to someone younger.

If the article is correct, then many baby-boomer Jews will seek their encore careers in the universalism of social action or arts. They may also shift their denomination affiliation. (I am predicting unless this issue is addressed this will be a major drain of money and resources out of Orthodoxy). Any thoughts on its effect on Judaism? These are people who became religious because they assumed the heroes of the 1960’s and 1970’s was the way of the future. What is the effect on the community if they want to re-capture their dreams? Alternately, what will happen if they opt out with their money and expertise? Or what of devote themselves to the community after 65 but show a strong lack of willingness to work with gen-x when they disagree?
Is this prospect scary or hopeful?

Update- There is the additional question of the media and tech abilities of the Baby -Boomers. Those born before 1957 do not generally have the web savvy or the needed ability to led and communicate via the web and new media. Will they be able to organize with their web limits?

As the Generational Winds Blow by Dr. David Elcott and Stuart Himmelfarb

When we look at that chart in the 21st Century, we see a radical shift as the sides have become more even. Our generational pyramid now looks increasingly like a square with large populations in their fifties and sixties near the top, and many more on top of them living beyond their eighties.
In fact, as analysts at Standard & Poor’s have observed, “No other force is likely to shape the future of national economic health, public finances and policy making as the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”

If Boomers stay engaged in the work of society rather than pursuing traditional retirement plans, if they enter Encore careers in public service or if they offer their talent, experience and financial resources as serious volunteers, we will then be forced to find a way to model something dynamically different and powerful: four active generations working side-by-side both in the work force and in Jewish communal life. The potential benefits of this achievement in the private and non-profit sectors are huge in an age of declining governmental supports, a besieged middle class and the increased demands of an aging population. Conversely, if we fail to address these issues, the result could be generational collisions and a potential collapse at the core of our community.

Given these winds of change, where can we look for solutions and support? Many of the foundations and communal organizations that fund innovation, especially in the Jewish community, are firmly fixated on youth and believe their focus on 20- and 30-somethings alone
In a recent study of over 250 philanthropic funders regarding their programmatic goals, responses clustered around childhood education and a wide range of entitlements for young adults. The only mention of any other age group related to geriatric needs.

And we have comforted ourselves by assuming that when people get older, their young leadership experiences will ensure their continued deep commitment, and that they will invest their financial resources, experience and talent in Jewish communal life.

Yet in a recent study of highly affiliated Jewish Baby Boomers, two-thirds said that if they do not find what they want in the Jewish community, they have every intention of going elsewhere. Rather than reaping the benefits of generations of fidelity and Jewish passion, we may well find ourselves with four generations of highly entitled Jews whose allegiance to the Jewish community will only be as deep as the next meaningful experience offered to them, and whose loyalties might not extend beyond their own, more narrow interests. And instead of intergenerational collaboration, we will have fostered a competitive environment where generational cohorts demand a larger share of ever decreasing entitlements.

The Jewish population is among the oldest of any ethnic or religious group. The evidence we gathered in the national survey of the Jewish community cited above indicates that continued Boomer fidelity to the Jewish people cannot be assumed. Competitive alternative options for Jews in their fifties, sixties and seventies are emerging throughout the country, from the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps to Senior Corps and Executive Service Corps. (For instance, 10% of all AmeriCorps positions are reserved for those over 55.)

We ignore at our peril the implications of Boomers leaving the Jewish scene and the influence of that exit on the generations that follow.
The first Baby Boomers have reached sixty-five years old. The youngest are approaching 50. They are at a pivotal moment as they consider their next steps. What they do and how the Jewish community connects with them has implications across the generational landscape. In fact, the next decades of Boomer behavior may well determine what kind of Jewish community we share and whether it grows stronger or is buffeted by forces beyond our control.

The authors, Dr. David Elcott and Stuart Himmelfarb, are co-founders of B3/The Jewish Boomer Platform, a new initiative dedicated to engaging – or re-engaging – Jewish Baby Boomers in Jewish life and to advancing inter-generational connections. Read the Full Version Here.

Usually Teaneck Shuls, the official list serve of all the shuls here in the shtetl posts lots of notices for magic, segulahs, and visiting wonder workers. Here is a first. And the person looking for friends even has a sense of humor in his title. I wonder if anyone will comment on the list serve or will anyone complain? It kinda feels like Russian haskole cut off from actual academic trends in Germany. The person also does not seem to realize that we have several major Biblical scholars that teach at JTS or secular universities that live in the neighborhood. For some current discussion, see my interview with Joshua Berman.

From:
Date: Thu, May 19, 2011 at 4:15 PM
Subject: [TeaneckShuls] Are J, E, P & D your favorite letters?

Are you intrigued by Biblical Criticism but have no one to talk to or learn with? Just your luck–a few of us are looking to start a *chabura. *Topic/book TBD. You must be able to read and understand Biblical Hebrew. Just respond to this email.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the 19 year old Jiri Langer scandalized his liberal parents by becoming a baal teshuvah to Belz Chassidus. Langer eventually left the Hasidc world to become observant and halakhic but modern Jew. He was a poet, psychologist, Zionist, and Hebraist- as well as a close friend of Kafka. He wrote a superb account of the life of the Hasidic court called Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries; it remains one of the most successful narratives of authentic Chassidic experience. Go read it.

In the new issue of JQR, there is an article called Coming Out of the Hasidic Closet: Jirˇı´Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the Fashioning of Homosexual-Jewish Identity written by Shaun Jacob Halper in JQR, Vol. 101, No. 2 (Spring 2011) 189–231. The author who is a Berkeley PHD and graduate of Yeshiva of Flatbush and Yeshivat Har Etzion is attempting to queer Jiri Langer and Hasidism, but the questions asked in the article make the article a queering of Modern Orthodoxy and modern Yeshiva life. The article has extensive notes on many topics. I am not sure of my thoughts on the article yet. It just came out.

Halper notes the break between Jiri and his parents was part of a pattern for that age. But Jiri chose not just poetry and Zionism rejecting their liberal and middle class lives, he also chose Orthodoxy. Langer found immense happiness in the Yeshiva. Later he becomes a Zionist leader and author. Later in his life, he wrote Die Erotik der Kabbala, a work ignored by scholars even though he dealt with the current erotic trends of the kabblah many decades before the current authors.

Langer defends halakhah as based on the need for Jews to bind their overwhelming passions. He offer reasons for the commandments , delineated in the full article, that treat as obvious that women are excluded from the homoerotics of time bound mizvot. Orthodox family life serves to bind passions, however tragic the results.
[Halper is in italics, Jiri Langer himself is in bold]

Jirˇı´ Langer’s generation of German-speaking Jews came of age experiencing acute cultural and political disinheritance. During this cultural upheaval they experienced the triple marginalization of their parents (as
German speakers, as Jews, and as liberals), leaving them caught between a declining German liberal culture and the ascendant presence of German vo¨lkisch ideology and Czech nationalism.

Jirˇı´ had come out to his family: he was now a Hasid who, among other things, kept strictly kosher and refused to speak with or look directly at women. Brod described how Jirˇı´’s conversion brushed up against the limits of Prague- Jewish sensibilities; Take his depiction of Hasidic yeshivah students from Die Erotik der Kabbala:

As soon as he arrives and it is determined that he is serious, he is greeted with open arms by the ‘‘Chevre’’ [social group]. Soon he finds himself in the middle of a circle of friends, who ‘‘draw near’’ to him through various tenderness and it doesn’t take long to find an older student who has ‘‘the same soul’’ to study with, which he accepts with great joy. How blessed he feels.

In this description of homoerotic attachment to the Rebbe, Langer evokes his own autobiographical account of leaving Prague for Belz in the first chapter of his Nine Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries. There he tells that while he later found his years among the Hasidim to be the happiest in his life.

At the time, Langer thought to remain at home for good, frustrated with his unbearable loneliness among the Hasidim, but he was visited one night in the family kitchen by the Belze Rebbe, Yisashar Dov Rokeah, through a prophetic vision, which inspired his return. These autobiographical links explain why Langer spends such a substantial portion of Die Erotik der Kabbala explicating the homoeroticism of the Hasidic world (he devotes an entire chapter to the subject). The following is even more explicit:

To understand what kind of love dwelled between the ‘‘yoshvim’’ [talmudic scholars; literally: ‘‘those who sit’’], one only has to step into the beis ha-midrash (house of study), where they are enveloped with their studies. Here sit two young men, with beards just beginning to cover their chins, ‘‘studying’’ assiduously over thick Talmud-folios. The one holds the other byhis beard, looks deep into his eyes, and in this manner explains a complicated Talmud passage. And there, two friends (yedidim) pace around the hall deep in conversation, while embracing one another . (During meals one can see that they always dine out of the same bowl). In the dark corner stand a pair. The younger of the two rests his back against the wall, the elder has the entire frontal part of his body literally pressed against him; they look lovingly in each other’s eyes, but keep still. What could be playing out within their pure souls? They themselves don’t even know.

That he experienced (or reimagined his experience) in the Hasidic world as homoerotic is undeniable. Hasidism, as he pictured it, was an incubator of homosexual desire.

Langer’s next metamorphosis into a Zionist activist. Langer became a co-organizer of the first hakhshara (preparation) training program for Zionist emigrants at Mukacheve

How did Langer, a homosexual man affiliated with halakhic Judaism until his death, address the issue of corporeal consummation (i.e., sex) in his work?

In Die Erotik der Kabbala, Langer engages with dominant cultural, psychoanalytic, and sexological discourses on homosexuality, but most directly with the work of Hans Bluher, the major theoretician of the German Wandervogelbewegung … Langer’s intellectual debt to Bluher is profound.

Bluher’s assertion that Jews were historically incapable of homosexuality; legal/religious commitments stunted homosexual expression by channeling Jewish drives exclusively around the interests of the family.

Langer’s commitment to Jewish law undoubtedly ran deep. During one digression (the text is loaded with these), Langer vigorously defends Halakhah against, what was by the 1920s, an oft-repeated attack repeated by Zionists, Haskalah writers, and Jews of many other stripes for decades that Jewish law was oppressive, ascetic, and caused spiritual decay:

When the modern Hebrew poet Saul Tschernichovski mocks his people for ‘‘tying up the divine in tefillin’’ he in a way touched on the deep secrets of the commandments. But his jeers are misplaced . The power of tefillin to ‘‘tie up’’ the divine is worthy of the highest admiration. Wrongly, one believes that an unrestrained life, driven extremely in one direction, is a sign of inner strength. On the contrary, every extreme, passionate way of life or ideology is, tragically actually a symptom of spiritual uncertainty or else inner weakness. Finding a happy compromise, as long as one’s energies are not lost, is actually the hardest thing to accomplish. It is always a work of especial spiritual depth and unflinching will to live. Therefore, only the noblest men and races can accomplish it.

In defending the law, Langer asserts the capacity of Halakhah to balance extreme passions with a healthy dose of restraint: Halakhah forms a ‘‘happy compromise’’ between compulsive drives and civilizing responsibilities.
But what about the expression of homosexual desire? Is the homosexual offered a ‘‘happy compromise’’ as well in the denial of his emotional and physical satisfaction through sex? Indeed, the problem of homosexuality and Jewish law stretches Langer’s faith to its limits:

The official position that emerges works coercively on individuals, in that it requires each individual who seeks to comply with the law to suppress his sexual tendencies and bring himself into harmony with ideas about the preservation of society. The tragedy that this inflicts upon each individual is proportional to his sexual drive.

In the nineteen forties and fifties were a great age of interfaith, specifically the creation of the idea of tri-faith America and the idea of a Judeo-Christian synthesis. These ideas let Jews and Catholics enter white America and Protestant America. It also allowed a united stand against bigotry and created an anti-evangelical mission by preaching tolerance door to door. Interfaith dialogue was not about theology but about tolerance.

Tri-Faith America by Kevin Schultz shows how postwar Catholics and Jews used the new image to force the country to confront the challenges of pluralism. Should Protestant bibles be allowed on public school grounds? Should Catholic and Jewish fraternities be allowed to exclude Protestants? Should the government be allowed to count Americans by religion? Challenging the image of the conformist 1950s, Schultz describes how Americans were vigorously debating the merits of recognizing pluralism, paving the way for the civil rights movement and leaving an enduring mark on American culture. This book is important for all those trying to understand the interfaith issues of the 1960’s. (There is much nonsense on the topic on the web and gross misunderstandings).

President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it bluntly, if privately, in 1942-the United States was “a Protestant country,” he said, “and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.”
In Tri-Faith America, Kevin Schultz explains how the United States left behind this idea that it was “a Protestant nation” and replaced it with a new national image, one premised on the notion that the country was composed of three separate, equally American faiths-Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Tracing the origins of the tri-faith idea to the early twentieth century, when Catholic and Jewish immigration forced Protestant Social Gospelers to combine forces with Catholic and Jewish relief agencies, Tri-Faith America shows how the tri-faith idea gathered momentum after World War I, promoted by public relations campaigns, interfaith organizations, and the government, to the point where, by the end of World War II and into the early years of the Cold War, the idea was becoming widely accepted, particularly in the armed forces, fraternities, neighborhoods, social organizations, and schools.

This book should makes us think about the current interfaith alliances. When Orthodox Rabbis are friendly with Evangelicals, Mormons, Catholic clergy, and Anglicans, then what does that alliance say about contemporary social needs? It is not theology at stake but a united social front. What is the social front trying to accomplish? Who is it allowing to enter the mainstream? What do they talk about? Not the issues of the 1950’s rather the issues of our decade such as maintaining faith in a projected secular world, and the need for religious values in the public sphere. What is gained by saying Orthodox Jew, Mormon, and Catholic clergy in one tri-faith breath?

And what is lost? Below is a book review of Kevin Schultz’s book by Northwestern Professor Chris Beneke who points out the loss of ideas such as distinction and prophecy. When the OU sees itself as one with Mormons and Evangelicals, what is lost from Judaism?

Judeo-Catholic-Protestant America—-Chris Beneke

Kevin Schultz’s Tri-Faith America begins with the story of a priest, a rabbi and two Protestant ministers. It might be the first line of a joke, but it’s deadly serious. The four chaplains were aboard the U.S.S. Dorchester when it was sunk by a German torpedo in February 1943. They all went down with the ship, prayerfully, arm-in-arm after having given their life jackets to sailors who lacked them.

The sacrifice of the Four Chaplains represented something of a landmark in the history of American religious comity. These men were “celebrated … as emblems of the new tri-faith nation.” Yet, as Schultz shows, Americans were already prepared to appreciate the larger significance of their heroism because of the ecumenical groundwork that had been laid over the previous decade by the anti-prejudice proselytizing of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), which confronted a revitalized Ku Klux Klan and a swelling, virulent strain of Western antisemitism in the 1920s and 30s.

Schultz’s assiduous research demonstrates that the NCCJ wasn’tmerely engaged in a half-ass exercise of holier-than-thou idealism. During WWII alone, the organization sponsored traveling “tolerance trios”–consisting of a rotating roster of priests, rabbis, and Protestant ministers–who visited nearly 800 military installations and addressed 9 million Americans. This was missionary work on a par with the massive evangelizing and Bible distribution efforts undertaken by American Protestants during the Civil War.

In the early postwar period, such everyday features of American culture as films, manners, and educational programming were shaped by the tri-faith model that the NCCJ had so carefully cultivated. Postwar liberalism was in turn infused with the mostly tolerant and religiously derived moral imperative that went by the name of the “Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Upon this somewhat narrow foundation, postwar Americans would adopt broader conceptions of tolerance that included a larger range of religious groups. Religious bigotry and discrimination certainly didn’t disappear, but they were largely driven from public life by the early 1960s. Though groups such as the NCCJ proved slow to promote civil rights for African Americans, the trope of inclusion that they popularized resonated throughout the 1960s. Meanwhile, before the Judeo-Christian tradition was appropriated by the Religious Right in the 1970s, it was employed by Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders to discredit racist institutions and policies in the 1950s and 60s.

There were deep, intangible costs accompanying the triumph of the tri-faith ideal, which Schultz details. Among them was the loss of communal identity by Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Also endangered were some of the vibrant, distinctive traditions within each of these larger faith categories. Prophecy withered as ecumenism bloomed.

Still, Schultz provides us with an unapologetically progressive account. He makes clear how profoundly important religious differences were to early twentieth-century Americans and how tirelessly some worked to transcend, or at least mediate, them. Tri-Faith America gives religious tolerance its due as a crucial component of postwar liberalism. In this, it represents a sharp rebuke to the fashionable idea that American religious freedom and religious tolerance have been little more than subtle exercises in coercion

Three weeks ago I posted an interview with Mark Paredes at Mormons and Orthodox Judaism Part II. In turn, Mark posted selections from my post at his blog, which elicited comments. I am now posted a short interchange from his comments because of an analysis of what the Book of Mormon says about Jews and how contemporary Mormons explains their texts.

Mr. Paredes, you really are to be commended for promoting positive dialogue between Jews and our Latter Day Saint neighbors.

But Latter Day Saint scripture leaves no room for ambiguity on this topic, making the relationship between Mormonism and the Jewish People unique indeed:
Second Book of Nephi, Chapter 10, Verse 3: “Wherefore, as I said unto you, it must needs be expedient that Christ—for in the last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name—should come among the Jews, among those who are the more wicked part of the world; and they shall crucify him—for thus it behooveth our God, and there is none other nation on earth that would crucify their God.”

Here we read in plain (Latter Day Saint) scripture that the Jews were the “more wicked part of the world” and that they had the unmitigated chutzpah to “crucify their God”! [exclamation point added] The scary thing is that I seriously doubt the general level of morality of Jews in Jesus’ time was any different than that of Jews today—we’re remarkably consistent—thus potentially keeping us among the more wicked part of the world. The only consolation I find is that (thank G-d) the Christian world has not incorporated Latter Day Saint scripture into its official canon. Otherwise, there would have been absolute carte blanche to do to the Jews what they will. You can’t kill G-d, and hope to get away with it.
Comment by Gavriel Abrams on 5/02/11 at 6:23 pm

Gavriel:
Thanks so much for your comment and for your readership. I believe that the following passage of scripture from the Book of Mormon is both better known and more representative of LDS feelings towards Jews, whom they have always respected and honored. Remember that Nephi lived around the time of Jeremiah, who had plenty to say about the Jews’ immorality and wickedness in his time. I have never heard the passage you cited used in any way to defame Jews.
2 Nephi 29:3-14: And because my words shall hiss forth—many of the Gentiles shall say: A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible.
4But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles?
5O ye Gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them. But behold, I will return all these things upon your own heads; for I the Lord have not forgotten my people.
6Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible. Have ye obtained a Bible save it were by the Jews? [7-11 edited out for posting]

12For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it.
13And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.
14And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the lands of their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in one. And I will show unto them that fight against my word and against my people, who are of the house of Israel, that I am God, and that I covenanted with Abraham that I would remember his seed forever.
Comment by Mark Paredes on 5/03/11 at 4:07 pm

Mark:
It was nice to read your thoughtful response to my comment. I can affirm that I have never heard a Latter Day Saint use any scriptural source – be it LDS-derived, or otherwise, to disparage Jews. The Latter Day Saints that I have encountered in my lifetime are among the most Philo-semitic people I’ve ever known. I completed my undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and my experience there as a Jew in the midst of a predominantly LDS population was 99.9% positive.

I find the way that Latter Day Saints live their religion to be a marvel, especially when one considers that LDS scripture contains such unique precepts as G-d meting out dark skin color as a form of punishment (for native peoples of the Western Hemisphere), or His withholding of earthly spiritual opportunities as punishment for errors committed prior to being born (in the case of black Africans). In the hands of a people less inclined toward genuine kindness and hospitality, these precepts could become the seeds of terrible hatred.

What actually prompted me to comment on this blog entry, and the response to Question No. 6 in particular, was the statement made regarding the Talmud. I found what was said to be unfairly dismissive (though I don’t believe you intended to come across as disrespectful of something so fundamental to Judaism). My initial comment didn’t address the Talmud statement because I was reaching back further, searching for some underlying motive for making a statement such as this. Perhaps a people considered to be so wicked as to have killed G-d Himself, would also be considered more inclined to quarrel pointlessly about scriptural interpretation?

I’m about as unqualified as they come when it comes to Talmud scholarship, so here’s my take as a regular Yid: without the combination of the written Torah, and the Oral Torah (with its exhaustive exploration, or “quarreling” as you call it) recorded in the Talmud, I doubt we’d be having this exchange – the Jewish People would have vanished a thousand years ago, through conversion and complete assimilation.
Personally, I think a Rabbi from the Orthodox community would be better prepared to go into the Talmud with you in greater depth.
Comment by Gavriel Abrams on 5/03/11 at 7:47 pm

Gavriel – In a few instances in the Book of Mormon, when people collectively sinned against God, He cursed them with estrangement from Him. In order to prevent righteous people living at that time from mingling with them, He caused them to have dark skins. Does this mean that Mormons believe that people with dark skin are cursed? No, it does not. It means that for those peoples in those specific time periods living in a specific place, there needed to be a separation between people who were cursed and people who were not. However, once again, the curse was not dark skin, but estrangement from God.

Blacks were not denied the priesthood because of some residual issues from the pre-earth life. This is not an official teaching of the LDS Church. We don’t know why this happened, but I suspect that it was the same reason that the priesthood was denied anciently to everyone but Aaron’s direct male descendants. The reason? Because that’s the way God wanted it to be for reasons known to Him. Mormons believe that everyone living on earth is a child of God, and that we all sided with Him and chose to come to earth and live together.

My comment on the Talmud had nothing to do with killing God, and everything to do with authority. I would welcome the opportunity to continue this dialogue offline.
Comment by Mark Paredes on 5/04/11 at 8:48 am

Rabbi Arthur Green, Ph.D., Irving Brudnick Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion and Rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College, presented the Graduation address at HUC-JIR/New York’s Graduation Ceremonies.

Some interesting points from his talk. First, Green gives his sense of nationalism.

First, we see ourselves as leaders of the Jewish people. We believe in ‘am yisra’el, a historic community that proudly bears an ancient national identity, one expressed in culture, language, memory, and attachment to an ancient and now-renewed homeland. Claims current in some post-Zionist circles that Jewish national identity is a nineteenth-century invention are as inaccurate as they are pernicious. Anyone who has ever opened a Jewish prayerbook (and indeed that may exclude some who assert these claims) will realize that we have seen ourselves as yisra’el ‘amekha, “Your people Israel,” for a great many centuries. Reform Judaism did well to rescind its demurral from that consensus many decades ago. We bear a deep connection to Jews around the world, including the State of Israel, as we do to Jews of past and future generations.

This means that we want to survive as a distinct ethnic as well as religious community. That will be an uphill struggle in this country, where non-racially defined minorities are unrecognized, where the price of white skin (that most of us still bear, though that is happily changing) has been an expectation of assimilation. We are an open religious and ethnic community, gladly embracing converts, welcoming them and their children to share fully in our collective national identity. This means language, text, culture, history, and all the rest, along with religion, the sacred calendar, and the Jewish life-cycle. To this end I believe that every synagogue needs to become an active bet midrash, house of study, where basic Hebrew, Jewish texts in translation, and great Jewish books, films, and works of art are actively taught, shared, and discussed. As a Jew deeply committed to prayer, I will nevertheless rejoice when the American synagogue comes to be known first as an active, bustling center of learning, where prayer services are also held on Shabbat, rather than as a temple for prayers on Shabbat, mostly closed on weekdays. Think about this when you lie down and when you rise up, when you design buildings and when you hire staff.

Second after discussing the role of rabbi as pastor, teacher, and halakhic rav, Green discusses the need to be a rebbe and inflame the community with spirituality of what he calls “the essence of a universalized Hasidic teaching.” It is quite a relevant list (1) mindfulness of God’s presence (2) Serve God in all your ways (3) Joy and wholeness-not guilt and bondage (4) The need for an inner life (5) The need to work on oneself.

I am a neo-Hasidic Jew. It is the teachings of Hasidism that have kept me at home, choosing to cultivate our Jewish spiritual garden rather than turning elsewhere for sustenance, like so many others of my generation. Hasidism is a revival movement within Judaism, as distinct from a movement for religious reform. Revivalists generally are not interested in changing the forms of religion. It’s just that the spark has gone out of them and needs to be re-lit. Jews are like knishes, Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav is quoted as saying. The ingredients are all the same, but I prefer the hot ones. Since you are New Yorkers, even the non-Jews among you know what a cold knish might taste like. Reform movements dabbled with changing the forms – let’s start with organ music and sermons in proper German or English, for example. Let’s all turn to page 23 and rise together. But somewhere the fire began to go out. Now we reformers and post-reformers are struggling toward revival. Fortunately we have the legacy of Hasidism to help us. I want to summarize the essence of a universalized Hasidic teaching as I would adapt it for today, using a few phrases taken directly from the sources, with just brief comment.

1) Galut ve-ge’ulat ha-da’at. The true exile is that of the mind. Mindfulness, making ourselves aware of God’s presence within us and around us is the beginning of redemption.

2) ‘Avodat ha-shem be-khol ha-ofanim. God needs to be served in every way. Everything we do, see, encounter in life is an opportunity for serving God. Do not restrict your Judaism to the synagogue or times of prayer and study. Live in intimacy with nature, with family, with others you love. Seek out work in which you find fulfillment; a life, not just a livelihood. Help others to do the same. In all of these, see the divine presence flowing through and uniting them. Raise up sparks through all you do.

3) ‘Ivdu et ha-shem be-simhah. Serve God in joy. The spiritual life requires wholeness, self-acceptance, freedom. It must not become a burden or a source of oppression. Avoid religion based on guilt. Use spiritual awareness to help people become more free, to be liberated from their own inner forms of bondage. Y-H-W-H brought you forth from Egypt to become your God. That process of becoming never ends, so you have to keep coming out of Egypt. Make sure your faith is helping you do that, not holding you back from it.

4) Dirshu et ha-nekudah ha-penimit. Seek out the innermost point. Religion’s message is that every person can have an inner life. This requires cultivation, toward which we use the tradition. Shabbat, prayer, meditation, mitsvot, spiritual friendship and direction, are all tools toward this end. There is more to life than our profane and over-commercialized surroundings tell us. The addiction to “success,” the most prevalent drug within our community, can leave you as empty as any other addiction. Get a life. The mishkan or dwelling-place of God is there within your heart. Just take the time and have the courage to open that door. Always look deeper, beyond the surface – in yourself, in others, in the world, and in the Torah.

5) Arbetn oif zikh. To be a hasid is to work on yourself. We are imperfect beings. That is the way we were made. God was not happy just being praised by a chorus of angels. Real flesh-and-blood humans, struggling with temptation, doubt, with the daily struggle to survive, with mortality and all the pain and loss along the way – if these creatures could sing to God, that would really be something! It’s a beautiful goal, but not an easy one. It requires work, including honest struggle, every day. It demands tikkun ha-middot, improving all those qualities that make us human, the same ones that make us potentially God’s image on earth. Each day we work on doing it a little better – or least not worse.

These are the teachings. I say to you as I say to myself: Don’t be so afraid of being a rebbe that you avoid sharing them with those around you. They need to hear them, and they need you to be their bearer. Read Full Version Here

This is a much clearer document than his Radical Judaism and conveys a broader picture of his thought than the book. Any thoughts? Where would someone Centrist Orthodox go for Arbetn oif zikh? Could one have the hectic upper-middle class professional life required by Centrist Orthodoxy and still seek mindfulness of God’s presence (without resorting to emotionalism and aestheticism)?

I am back from Poland. Next week I hope to get around to posting some observations about the trip and maybe some pictures. I always mistakenly think that I will be able to continue blogging overseas. I still have to return and finish the discussion of Richard Miller. I am home and working at my computer the upcoming weeks, so expect a larger than usual number of blog posts.

Someone who spent Passover in Crete with the many other people who were there, went during Chol HaMoad to visit the cave that is ascribed as the mythic birthplace of Zeus.

When the person returned to the hotel, one of the Brooklyn Jews asked: “Who is Zeus?

What is the cultural literacy of the community. Old time Orthodoxy knew in a nerdy factoid way lots and lots of cultural knowledge and could compete in any college bowl type competition. Has Orthodox cultural literacy changed? Has it changed the nature of the community? People frame the study of secular studies in terms of value for an adult life and for thought, but what about basic elementary school cultural literacy? E.D. Hirsch, in his 1987 bestseller Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know claimed that cultural literacy is the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions, and informal content that creates and constitutes a dominant culture. Is Orthodoxy outside of dominant culture and unable to answer basic questions? Does it put them in the same rubric as Snooki of Jersey Shore who cannot answer these basics?
What should be the role of cultural literacy?

Have any of my readers visited Izbica, the home of Rav Mordechi Yosef Leiner of Izbitz? If you have or know anyone who has, could you please contact me by email within the next 3-4 days?

In the winter, we were discussing Rawls and the need for rational universals. Here is the major post on the topic. Back on January 31, I posted:

To continue the discussion of Rawls and the creation of a fair Judaism that does not deny the humanity of others, I will do some posts on Richard B. Miller, Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (Columbia UP 2010). So AS and EJ you can have a chance to read it before I post.

Now, I am finally getting to it. I hope they had a chance to read it. For advanced warning, I will be discussing later this summer Oliver Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways

Miller’s agenda is how not to get caught up in multicultural relativism even as we argue for respect for relgions. How can we give room for religious beliefs and not justify killing, lying or stealing as condoned by a certain interpretation of religious law.

This topic is also important for all the events making the newspapers in our community. How should we tell someone in our community that theft from gentiles or cheating to make a living is inappropriate when there are minority voices allowing it. Or how to reject statements about not selling apartments to gentiles in Israel . Doesn’t multiculturalism mean that I cannot critique their religious view?

I am not interested in the gossip and scandal elements of the crimes and inappropriate statements. I am not looking for the hock or to necessarily criticize anyone.

I am interested in how to set up the ethical equation. My question is: How do we express an ethical position without having to give into the rampant religious relativism by those most religious? If someone says that a position that involves stealing or killing is the true halakhah, then how can we answer their claim that there is no outside vantage point to judge? Can we formulate halakhic responses to positions that have a moral force?

Miller’s basic answer is that there must always be a fundamental intuitionism as the core of any religious position. One must have a fundamental acceptance of “Do not kill” and “do not steal” as an intuition or natural starting point. What Saadiah called the rational laws (mizvot sikhliot). If one accepts do not steal as an axiom then no amount of casuistry can overturn it. What Rav Kook called natural morality. Or as Rav Aharon has said repeatedly: “Gezel hagoy (stealing from gentles) should not come down to two opinions in tosfot.” There needs to be a fundamental universal of “Do not steal” as a norm within the system. It takes Miller until chapter three to get to this point. So hold off questions. I am only presenting here the first chapter and parts of the second.

The seven chapters of the book deal with why that fundamental intuition is necessary and sufficient. And in the last four chapters he explains why we do not need all the big guns and many premises and expectations of Rawls, Rorty, Macintyre, Habermas, Taylor and Waltzer.
This will take about three posts to finish, so be patient.

Chapter One – Indignation
The first chapter expresses the problem of multicultural relativism as a culture of excuse and apology. This approach to culture will not defeat the evil or offer moral standards . (Michael Waltzer) There is a need for feeling of indignation when injustice occurs.

If we value human dignity and respect, if we want a society of justice and equality then how do we affirm it against multicultural pluralism?

Miller’s first point is that we have to take extreme statements seriously. They become part of our culture and poison the atmosphere. If Bin Laden and his followers are in favor of murder then we have to take it seriously. What we should not do is say that Bin Laden is not really Islamic, so we don’t have to take it seriously. We should not create false liberal images of Islam or Judaism and then tell people to disregard the extremes, the unethical, and immoral. People follow these extreme positions even if they are not the best textual reading.

On the other hand, we should also not create a firewall between faith and ethics. We should not say whatever religion says is good and that universal ethics like stealing and killing have no place in the discussion. We cannot tell someone to listen faithfully to the shaariah or halakhah and ignore the moral imperatives.

We should not say that stealing and embezzlement is OK because a specific posak said it was OK.

We can acknowledge that Islam and Judaism have civil, economic, and political aspects and we should follow the arbitration and judgment of those systems but when is a position just plain aggressive or immoral?
Miller feels that we are stuck between the rock and hard place of offering a favorable judgment on demand to every religious group based on multicultural tolerance and the liberal ethnocentrism of not allowing religion into the discussion.

Miller ends the chapter by asking: What does it mean to respect others and to offer a universal baseline ethic? We need both the acceptance of religious systems and offering them the benefit of the doubt as well as a baseline ethic.

Chapter 2 – Contextualization
In the second chapter Miller is bothered by how contextualizion is used to justify any moral wrong found in a system. If one goes back to any religious text, one can offer legal, historical, economic, and social explanations for what that immoral sentence was written but it is still on the books. You can justify killing heretics or stealing from gentiles based on a variety of contextualizations but if you then bring up the immoral law with a justification for it in conversation it is relativist or if you justify it for other people it is relativist.

(1) The first form of contextualization that Miller finds fault with is the use of historical arguments based on legal and doctrinal precedents to reject the immoral opinion.
For example, a historical approach to the law can claim that Bin laden is not Islamic based on prior sources. He made up new fatwa and makes assumptions not found in earlier sources. So he is not Islamic. Or you can declare the immoral approaches to halakhah as not really Jewish and not really halakhic.

But Miller cries out in his exasperation that telling me that Bin laden is a misuse of Muslim tradition does not deal with moral indignation and resentment of those who suffered an injustice.

Yes we now know from this act of contextualization that extremists have a narrow view of the tradition and ignore the richness of the tradition. But it makes the extremists guilty of reductionism of tradition rather than a moral crime.
Miller puts his finger directly on the problem. When Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein’s Responded to the Letter Banning Sale of Homes to Gentiles, he writes

This pain stems from the shortcomings that the document manifests in precisely those areas that should have been its strong point. The document speaks in the name Halakha, and its signatories see themselves as its envoys and propagators.

But therein lies the problem; the prohibition of selling homes to gentiles is presented as the exclusive halakhic position in the manner at hand, and the voice that bursts forth from the throats of the signatories is made to sound like the single unequivocal word of God, that is, halakha. Here one asks, is that indeed so? Without a doubt, the position expressed in the letter is based on rabbinic sources and a long halakhic tradition. Yet taken as a whole, the document leaves one with the impression that its conclusions are based on presumptions that characterize a particular—but not exclusive—halakhic approach.

Miller thinks that Rav Aharon should not turn this into a problem of reductionism of tradition but he should directly invoke the ethical principles. There needs to indignation not just regret. Rav Aharon ended his letter “I conclude with what should be self-evident. At stake are key questions that involve meta-halakhic considerations.” Miller thinks the self-evident should be front and center. (Dont take as a critique of Rav Aharon in any way, rather take this as an example of Miller knowing how these protests sound and wanting the rhetoric to be more direct.)

Why does Miller think this?
First, because laments of reductionism of tradition are not indignation.
Second, it does not place the rejected opinion as off limits. It is not strict and does not offer sufficient limits.
Third, it is much too vague about the moral judgment at core.

2] The second form of misplaced contextualization are economic arguments in which the offending opinion is considered as due to economics and material concerns. They are only doing it out of desperation or need, or social hopelessness, or it was the way they acted in the old country, or they don’t recognize America is a different country.

Miller does not like placing economics over faith especially when they themselves are claiming that their decisions are direct due to religion. Miller also finds that many amoral religious do not have any social or economic desperation. Many of the criminal Jews are already wealthy. Economic accounts do not take them at their word.

To be continued in at least two more parts. Help me think this one through. Is he setting up the problem correctly? I will edit this first part as I gain clarity. Could Rav Aharon have directly and head-on dealt with the ethical and meta-halakhic issues? How is this multicultural relativism moving to occupy a default position within Orthodoxy?

After the three parts, we can go back to the classic essays like “Is there an Ethic Outside of Halakha? to see if we have gained any clarity against 21st century multiculturalism.