American Jews
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Census and Non-Census: Undercounting the Orthodox [published in Cross-Currents 03-06-11]
[Excerpt from full Commentary] The Jewish Federation census, then, grossly undercounted Torah-observant Jews, demonstratively so. During the two decades since I arrived on the West Coast, I have seen what every Orthodox Jew and every other observer has seen here with her own two eyes. The Orthodox shuls are bursting, and they all have had major expansions, with growth further leading to break-off shuls. There are so many elegant high-class kosher restaurants in a city that once counted only two or three such choices that many locals are perplexed by the Baskin-Robbins-like choice of flavors. There are more yeshiva day schools, more yeshiva high schools, more Kollel programs, more and more shuls. To say that our Orthodox numbers actually had decreased from 5.2% to 4.3% — a 17% drop in the proportion of the total Jewish population in a region otherwise ravaged outside our ranks by rampant assimilation and intermarriage – was beyond false. It was delusional. [¶] The same problems, in one form or another, continue to mar census efforts undertaken by other Federation counters in other cities. The problems are endemic in the systems. Yet these miscounts continue, flawed though they be, to serve as foundational decisors in allocating critical communal Jewish funds in their millions. If yeshivas are decreasing and Orthodox Jews are disappearing, they presumably deserve reduced communal funding. Until the Torah-observant community evolves the sophistication to recognize that the numbers consistently are skewed, from city to city and from state to state, that the methodologies inherently are faulty, that the skewing is part of a subtle process that, deliberately or otherwise, steers away Federation funding from services and programs that serve the Torah-observant community, and that the solution for Orthodoxy is not rhetoric but statistical analysis and input not from trained statisticians sensitive to our inclusion, the non-census will continue skewing not only numbers but communal agendas and priorities for another millennium.
To Be Alone: The Loneliness of the Adult Jewish Single Amid the Oblivious [ Parsha Commentary: Ki Teitzei] [published in Jewish World Review [08-20-10]
[Excerpt from full Commentary] I often challenge my rabbinic colleagues -- not all -- for failing adequately to sensitize our communities to the needs and social status of the unmarried. Some feel that Singles are not worth the time because, at best, they pay only half a family membership, and they probably will leave the temple anyway if they do marry. Besides, they have JDate and Frumster, and there are "matchmakers." It almost sounds like a bad parody of Ebenezer Scrooge waving off those soliciting alms for the needy: Are there no poor houses? [¶] Are there no "matchmakers"? Are there no websites? Are there no Singles Mixers? [¶] If you know someone unmarried, bring that person into your Sabbath home. Invite him or her regularly to Sabbath meals. Arrange with others in your temple to assure that Singles get to meet others, that the widowed and the divorced enjoy the warmth of the Shabbat home. For this -- and only this -- one issue, become a busybody and ask friends whether they know someone who could be a good match. Not a "matchmakers"? You are hereby deputized.
Olive Tree Initiative - UCI: The Trilogy - Oy (1); Oy (2); Oy (3)
On the Obsolescence of “Orthodoxy” and the Timeliness of “Observance”
[Excerpt from full Commentary] We in the Observant community – my preferred term – historically have reflected, to our shame, a reduced sensitivity to the use of English language for transmitting values, ideas, and goals. “Colored People” started insisting on “Negro” as a transition to acknowledging a Peoplehood and abandoning an absurd term; they are not green, blue, or orange. Later, preferring to abandon the Spanish sobriquet for an American English term that paralleled the majority “White” culture, they moved to “Black.” And, for those among them who further sought to move away from defining-by-color and to define the group as an ethnic player alongside Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, and others, the term moved to “African American.” They stuck to their new term, and they have won, despite Americans’ preferences for reduced-syllabic terms. [¶] When married and single women alike moved to “Ms.” from “Miss” and “Mrs.,” they used and revolutionized language effectively to impact on wider goals, forcing a new debate and discussion. The very term “Ms.” downgrades the importance of marriage as a defining ethic for women and has contributed, albeit in a small measure, to the societal chaos. They stuck to their guns, and they won. Similarly, homosexuals somehow persuaded society to adopt the term “gay” as both their adjective and their noun. They won, and that small change in denomination has had a profound impact on the wider discourse. [¶] The term “Orthodox” – like “Colored People” and “Missus”-- comes from another era and defines us to our detriment in a way that withdraws the power and tool of language from our discourse. In reality, we are not “Orthodox.” If we were “Orthodox” – a word that conveys strict monolithic unilateralism – there would not be so many diverse variegations of our essence: Ashkenazic Lithuanian, Ashkenazic Hassidic (with all its multi-dimensional subgroupings), Sephardic Edot Mizrach, Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese, “Modern Orthodox,” “Black Hat,” etc. No, we are no more “Orthodox” than we are . . . .
Always the Jews -- Not: Give the Maniac Some Credit
[published in Jewish World Review 01-11-11][Excerpt from full Commentary] In the aftermath of the tragic and evil shooting of United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, American Jewish news sources have entered the conversation by noting that Rep. Giffords is Jewish and that her attacker, Jared Lee Loughner, has associated with extremist hate groups. The suggestion: her tragedy is an act of anti-Semitism. I respectfully beg to differ. [¶] Jared Lee Loughner is a nut. He has earned by dint of his own merit the privilege of being deemed a 100% crackpot. Yes, he may have had an interface with a hate group whose name I choose not to publicize further, possibly because that group hates Latinos or African Americans or perhaps even people from a distant planet where Loughner perhaps thinks he once lived. (For that matter, perhaps his anger stems from a perception that he has friends living on Pluto, which has been stripped of its planet identity without its input.) Regardless, the search for truth and understanding is not helped by searching endlessly for a Jewish angle in every cockamamie and outlier news event.
Bernie Who Madoff with Fifty Billion
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
It was said of Lev Bronstein, a revolutionary in post-Czarist Russia who changed his name to Leon Trotsky: “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins who pay the bill.” [¶] We Jews are such a profoundly ethical and honest community. How many prisoners in the federal prisons really ask for kosher meals? Five? Eight? Nine? [¶] Yet, there comes a point where it no longer seems or feels like only three out of 500,000 -- because this is the area of stereotype. It plays and feeds into stereotype. And therein lies the profound sensitivity.[¶] [W]e need to do something as a community akin to what Jews in America did 100 years ago to separate ourselves in the popular imagination from the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Bugsy Siegel and Legs Diamond and Meyer Lansky. And we did.[¶] Whether it means refusing to count these characters in minyans, to give them aliyas, to permit them to attend banquet dinners, taking their names off synagogue walls and out of siddur/chumash inside-covers, or the like, it seems necessary to do something to separate our community from them. . . .Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, Billy Mays: Counting the Stars and Numbering the Days
Michael Jackson’s death set off a veritable panic. It took one of my family members, who works near UCLA, three extra hours to get home because the crowds outside UCLA Medical Center, where Jackson died, were so massive. On the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame, throngs placed wreaths and wept at Michael Jackson’s star on the cement – not realizing that they were mourning at the star of the
wrong Michael Jackson, a radio talk show host. [¶] And so, as each element of our media-driven society – the cable news and celebrity-gossip programs in particular – endeavor to keep the stories running, it is worthwhile pausing to ask whether there is anything for us to learn from it all. [¶] There is. [¶] Life is short. So terribly short. “The days of our lives are seventy years and, [if blessed with extra] strength, eighty years . . . so much of it hard work and emptiness cut off suddenly and we fly away. . . . So teach us [O G-d] to count our days.” (Tehillim 90:10,12 ) We know we will not live forever, but how we do let the days go by! And why not? For “tomorrow is another day.” And then, suddenly, the little boy for whom we bought his first ice cream cone at his first state fair, and the little girl we pushed on a swing, each has a packed suitcase at the front door, bidding us good-bye as each leaves the nest, closing a chapter in our biographies. And soon our parents’ friends – people with whom we grew up – are dying. And then parents. [¶] Tomorrow is not another day. Tomorrow is a noun that means that today is lost forever. Yesterday, too. There is no tomorrow for even the greatest of celebrities whose time comes. Nor is there a today for those of us who would consume it watching and reading all about them. Our moments to realize our own dreams and hopes are today. . . .Time to Pardon Jonathan Pollard
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
1. Pollard did a terrible, terrible thing.
2. A terrible thing. Just terrible.
3. Horrible. And he messed up the position and status of Jews in
American government. He fed into anti-Semites’ worst diatribes about
Jews being of diverted loyalty to foreign powers. He had no right to
imperil the Jewish position in this country and, thereby, to lend
credence to haters elsewhere in the world who wonder about Jews and our
loyalties in those countries. . . .
[¶] 19. A final word: I cannot emphasize
enough that Pollard did terrible, terrible stuff. I am not impressed
with some people's arguments that he needed to do what he did, that he
gave Israel documents that America was obligated to share with Israel
anyway, that he had to do it to save lives. But, for G-d’s sake, after
23 years in prison, his continued incarceration no longer is about him.
It is about us -- it is about Jews. It is a statement to American Jews
that says to us every day: “We in Washington regard you differently from
Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, German-Americans,
Polish-Americans, Latino-Americans. You may need a reminder that other
people don’t need. You need to remember what we do to people who are not
loyal to this country, who have loyalties diverted elsewhere.” Thus,
Pollard's continued incarceration is personally offensive to the Jewish
community. . . .
Separating the Holy from the Despicable (Also published in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal)
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
In Judaism, “holiness” is epitomized by separation -- "separateness." “Behold [they comprise] a Nation that shall dwell alone.” (Bamidbar 23:9). We are holy because we are separate. [¶] Yes, be really careful to observe all the detailed rituals governing animal sacrifice, and carefully observe all kinds of esoteric laws: Refrain from donning garments made from a combination of both linen and wool. Don’t shave with a razor blade or obliterate your sideburns or get caught up in a societal tattooing craze. Tatt too will pass. Don’t go to fortune-tellers, and don’t erect statues. [¶] But also remember that, as part of being holy – of being different – your Creator will hold you accountable for cursing deaf people and for tripping up the blind, even if they are oblivious to your deeds. He will demand you account for conducting business dealings deceitfully, for failing to leave a corner of your field’s produce as open-pickings for the poor. Don’t you dare steal or deal falsely. If you invoke His name in a false oath, if you perjure yourself in a court filing, you will have to account. Don’t you dare cheat your neighbor, and don’t you rob, and don’t you withhold your employee’s wages past payday. Don’t you dare. [¶] So it’s not just about meticulously observing 39 rules that define Jewish Sabbath observance – although that, too, is central to the very concept of a Jewish People. Nor is it only about eating kosher and avoiding forbidden mixtures. Rather, it also is about being honest, ethical, trustworthy, and thus noble. Your scales must be honest when you weigh a pound of meat or a hill of beans. Your every transaction must be honest; even your resumés must be truthful: where you went to school, the degrees you truly earned. A holy nation is not led by crooks, nor does it honor them. [¶] Greatness is not measured by the size of your bat mitzvah smorgasbord or the layout of your backyard pool, but by how you acquired them. Your fancy car and your home landscaping and the jewelry in your safe do not define you. Your deeds define you. As Rabbi Emanuel Rackman taught: It is not enough to do well; you must do good. [¶] Whom do we honor? At our every organizational banquet, our every special event, do we make room on the dais to honor at least one person of modest means whose presence is grounded exclusively in her kindness, her goodness, her nobility of character?Spending Ourselves into Oblivion
A father, Frasier, blesses his son at a Bar Mitzvah:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZV6fsotYo
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Bar Mitzvahs typically are foolishly extravagant to a degree that is Jewishly unjustifiable. Nothing about being a boy becoming 13 or a girl becoming 12 justifies the insanity of turning it into a wedding, replete with a 20-minute film retrospective on the kid's life, as though it were the Biography Channel reviewing the life of Abraham Lincoln. [¶] In this time of massive economic crisis, it must be quite a spectacle for many to behold Jewish profligacy in spending $15,000-$50,000 on a kid's 13th birthday. . . .[Excerpt from full Commentary]
The thing is, Jewish Day Schools provide more than text study; they teach kids to interface with other Observant kids, and they bring kids into contact with a wide range of rabbonim. If middot are taught properly, that is a great thing. Public schools today are not what they were in the days of Blackboard Jungle. [¶]It’s quite a world out there. Many public schools nowadays really are out of control. Even the so-called “Jewish Community Day School” out here in Irvine. I have spoken there several times, and I am shocked by how much utter hefker exists. Utter and udder. [¶] So that goes into the equation on the cost of day school. They used to rationalize that, even if your professors at Columbia are no better than those at some “lesser college,” you nevertheless are paying for the Ivy League degree. There is hidden monetary value in having a degree from the Ivy League. In the same way, even for those who can home-school the text without yeshiva, maybe the parents of yeshiva kids really are paying for the atmosphere. [¶] To meet a rav who might change a life, and to meet rabbonim of all sorts. To have a wide range of classmates who wear kipot or otherwise are frum girls in modest attire. To have the right kind of social pressure – “What? You’re not going to the Regional Shabbaton?” To have Chumash or Gemara homework and to know that a bad grade can affect college admission. There is no substitute for Observant Day School. . . .A Mindset that Drinking Is Not Cool, Vodka Vomiting Is Not Cool, Crookery Is Not Cool
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
It was not cool to shoot spitballs at Columbia University. You did not get popularity points for interrupting professors with wise cracks, as you did in high school. So there is great value in changing a milieu, changing the mindset of what is cool. [¶] The goal needs to be to create a nationwide mindset in the Torah-observant community that it is cool to be honest, and it is not cool to cheat. It is not cool to avoid paying state sales tax by paying in cash -- and, for the one who does so, he keeps it to himself out of a proper sense of shame, rather than telling people in shul how he does it and where he goes. [¶] In some places, there are Kiddush Clubs. In other places, such things are inconceivable. Many Torah authorities have made an effort to send the word that Kiddush Clubs are not cool. That it is not cool to brag about what whiskey or malt scotch or whatever one drinks. One Young Israel rav here in Los Angeles took a powerful, powerful stand against Kiddush Clubs in his shul. Some people left his shul. His shul emerged better, stronger, and holier for his heroic leadership on that issue. His strength on this issue made him a role model for many other rabbonim. [¶] These are hard things. Kiddush Clubs. Teen and Adult inebriation on Purim and Simchat Torah. Loshon Horo. Business dishonesty. In each case, it is about creating a new mindset -- putting circulars regularly on shul seats, having not just one or two strong rabbonim talking about the issue but having a national campaign that urges all rabbonim to speak about an issue. Creating an environment where it is not cool to cheat or to tell others. . . .On Obama, Democrats, Republicans, and the Futility of Knowing Who Are Friends
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
I did not vote for Obama, instead choosing to vote as the exit polls told us that most Jews in Orthodox circles did. Still, I view Obama's election with fascination and a touch of wonder.[¶] . By the natural course of events, Obama should never have been elected or, frankly, even nominated. Historians will not understand it. Nevertheless, he now is the President-elect, and we will recite the same blessing in Shul for his welfare and that of his Government as we have recited for his predecessors. [¶] I am long past predicting who among the princes of flesh-and-blood is good for Israel and who bad. I vote based on commonsense natural analyses, but I know I can be wrong because good politicians can fool you, and so can bad ones. I know that all we can do is vote based on what we reasonably expect. But, in the end, it is all in Hashem's hands. Politicians often surprise.[¶] Our parents' generation bullet-voted for FDR, whom they regarded as the best American friend that Jews ever had in the White House. Turns out he and his State Department were not our best friends. Rather, they hated us and in some real measure were accessories to the mass murder of six million of us.[¶] Democrats-Republicans. We don't know. Nixon rushed weapons to Israel in an full-blast urgent airlift. Bill Clinton gave us Oslo and Arafat.[¶] Shalom Chaver.Courage Under Fire: How to Respond Amid Lashon Hara' (Slander and Gossip) "Friends"
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Slander -- Loshon horo -- is an infection, very contagious, so much so that it needs to be quarantined. It sneaks into a conversation, often introduced cleverly and surreptitiously by someone whose agenda – whose personal axe-to-grind – manipulates the discussion into that direction. And, as happened that night at that Shabbat table, Ellen and I suddenly and unexpectedly found ourselves embedded in a loshon horo environment. This prominent Rav was being derided and smeared by a person who absolutely did not know what he was talking about. We were caught off-guard. [¶] But what to do? What indeed to do? To make a scene? To break the ambiance? To ruin dessert? What to do? Because, alas, silence is often tantamount to agreement.[¶] In the “Harry Potter” series of children’s books, author J.K. Rowling puts a profound thought into the mouth of one of her characters: “It takes courage to stand up to your enemies. It takes even greater courage to stand up to your friends.” And that is indeed the only prescriptive that exists in the face of finding oneself in that bind.[Excerpt from full Commentary]
In October 1999, I went through the personal tragedy of a divorce. I felt personally lost, very much alone. A lady in my congregational community, Lilly Kahn-Rose, approached me one Shabbat soon after, offering to help me in some way. I responded: "Please invite me and my children for some Shabbat meals, and please help me get some Shabbat meal invitations from others in the community. I can buy cold cuts, side dishes, and challah, can recite kiddush and lead z'mirot melodies, but it is going to be so lonely and feel so minimalist in our apartment. Please help me get me some Shabbat invitations." [¶] A week later, Lilly called me and asked me for my fax number. The fax arrived soon after -- with a list of confirmed Shabbat invitations for my children and me for every Friday night dinner and Shabbat lunch for the next seven months.[¶] Throughout those next seven months, I met a community of wonderful, warm, loving people who are rearing their own families, burdened by their own struggles and concerns, yet who rushed to open their homes to my children and me. During those seven months, I never once felt like a beggar from Jerusalem. Instead, we talked throughout the meals, about mitzvot and ideas, about Israel, about the movies, about the busway, about broccoli in Guatemala, about the stuff that goes on in families. [¶] It made a potentially devastating period in my life not only bearable but extraordinary. I learned much Torah, even though I have some learning. I continued evolving as a person. In fact, Linda Charlin, the hostess in one family that hosted us most frequently, along with the Kahn-Roses, asked me after one Shabbat lunch whether I would be interested in meeting a friend of hers.[Excerpt from full Commentary]
The Christmas season dilemma arises for so many Jews in our city that it sadly deserves attention and comment. When I was a boy, growing up in a parochial Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, I certainly harbored no yearning for a Christmas tree at home. I was thrilled with my little homemade menorah and our family's nifty electric menorah, which we placed in the living room window. [¶] All of East 57th Street between Farragut and Foster Avenues had menorahs, all except for the block's one Christian family, the one with the tree. I barely knew their daughter, Kathy, but she once confided to me how much she wished that she, too, could have a menorah like everyone else on the block, instead of a tree. Over the years I have thought back to Kathy, as my life's travels took me out of Brooklyn's shtetl to a stint as rabbi in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. (Don't laugh - it comes right before "yarmulke" in some dictionaries.) I served a year in Louisville, Ky., not only clerking for a brilliant United States Court of Appeals judge but also serving as a volunteer rabbi for a small congregation there. And that experience brought me to Cincinnati. And, of course, I was rav of a synagogue in the San Fernando Valley. [¶] Through all those experiences I, too, have encountered the Christmas season's presence. At the yeshiva day school I founded in Woodland Hills, we had to contend with parents' desires that we schedule vacation time between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1. Taking my daughters to Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm and Magic Mountain my first winter here, I was visited with Christmas everywhere - not much different from Yarmouth, Louisville, or Cincinnati.[¶] Santa Clauses and tannenbaums and songs of a virgin mother and her infant. The songs are ubiquitous and cannot be escaped, whether at the malls or in the movie theaters or at the supermarket. The television programs all have special Christmas episodes. It really is quite everywhere. And every channel seems to have rights to telecast "It's a Wonderful Life," which really is a wonderful movie. [¶] Christmas is not our day. It is a day that commemorates the birth of a Jewish child who hundreds of millions believe was the Messiah. But we humbly do not share that belief. Indeed, our respectful understanding that he was not the Messiah constitutes the linchpin that ironically differentiates most culturally assimilated Jews in Los Angeles from their Christian neighbors. [¶] For those among us who do not observe the Torah traditions, who do not make Shabbat their special day of enjoyment and delight, who do not behold the cultural beauty of kosher restaurants and kosher foods, who do not study the Tanach or Talmud, who think Jeremiah was a bullfrog and that mikveh refers to a federal judge who used to be an Illinois congressman - ironically, the only point of departure that individuates the assimilated Angeleno Jew from her Christian counterpart is that Jews respectfully demur as to Jesus as Messiah. [¶] But how sad it would be if our community were left with no component of meaningful self-identification other than that negative salient: the common belief that Jesus was not Messiah. And that is why the "Christmas Dilemma" offers an extraordinary challenge or opportunity for us to contemplate not merely what Judaism is not, but what Judaism is. In an era in which a president memorably asked what "is" is, it is fair for Jews to ask what "Judaism" is. It is not about a tree of another religion, marking another faith's holy day. It is something else. [¶] But what is it?A father, Frasier, blesses his son at a Bar Mitzvah:
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
"If I had the power, I would annul the bar mitzvah ceremony as it is observed in our country because it is known that this ceremony has not brought anyone closer to the Torah and the commandments - not even the boy himself, not even for one hour. On the contrary, in many places, it actually brings [participants] to desecrate the Sabbath and to commit other transgressions. . . ." [¶] With these words, HaRav HaGaon HaRav Moshe Feinstein, who along with HaRav HaGaon HaRav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik was one of the two preeminent Torah sages of the past half century, gave expression to the deep frustration felt by so many American Jewish spiritual leaders who have watched the institution of the "Bar Mitzvah" spiral away from its historic religious moorings. Where it once existed to introduce a Jewish boy into the obligations of religious manhood, it now serves all-too-often as the youngster's exit door from further Jewish study. . . . [¶] Instead, too many parents are satisfied merely with handing the child a tape recording of an Haftorah portion and telling the poor child to memorize chanting it with a transliterated text.[¶] The Haftorah ultimately becomes a passing comet in the Jewish child's life that, like Haley's and other such, may reasonably be expected to pass through the Western horizon for four minutes once every several years. If one looks at the right place at the right moment, one may briefly detect it: "Uh, I think that was my bar mitzvah haftorah that just passed by. Did you see it?" But if he or she steps out for a moment, or turns the wrong way, it will have passed for another year. The Haftorah Comet.[¶] In nearly ten years as a congregational rabbi and a yeshiva faculty member, I never met a single child who spoke fondly of the bar mitzvah party as a spiritually meaningful event. At best, it is remembered with a smile. More often, it is recalled with profound disdain, even contempt. . . .Rosh Hashanah-- the Next Thing on My List
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
With Rosh Hashanah on the horizon, we pause to take stock: What is a year? We do not get many of them in a lifetime. According to Moshe Rabbeinu, in Psalm 90, we typically may look to seventy – if with strength, to eighty – of them, and most of our years are about toil and pain, struggle and “what-not.” That is a year. For us, we use the calendrical marker to look ahead, partly by looking back. What did I do with last year? With one fewer left ahead of me, what will I do with next year? . . . [¶] WWhat goes on a list? One of the most beautiful answers, from a secular perspective, comes in a country song written by one of my favorite artists, Toby Keith. Playing on the expression that all busy people reiterate several times daily – “OK, it’s time for me to do the next thing on my list” – he offers this alternative to the list of priorities for the day he has set under a paperwight: Go for a walk/ say a little prayer/ Take a deep breath of mountain air/ Put on my glove and play some catch/ It's time that I make time for that. [¶] For a Jew, I would add a few more things: Put my kid in a Jewish school/ Join with my spouse and walk to shul / Buy Torah books to put on my shelf / Open them up – I owe that to myself. / Start keeping kosher and opening my home / Never let a shul visitor sit alone / Look up a friend and invite her for Shabbat / It’s time that I make time for that / Turn my hopes to G-d and pray each day / Then listen to the things my children say / Ask my child if anything hurts / Think about the text printed on his shirts / Grab him and the tefillin and pray with my son / Learn Torah with my daughter so she associates Torah with fun / Study Talmud each day for all the years I’ve missed /Start livin’ – that’s the next thing on my list. . . .
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong. . . .[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Unexpectedly, I found myself traveling on the freeways most of last Wednesday, when the Michael Jackson story erupted into a media feeding frenzy. No matter the talk station, the conversation was salacious, incendiary, and vicious. . . [¶] So I do not know whether Michael Jackson dunnit. And, on a much deeper level, I do not care. I do not associate with Michael Jackson; odds are I will never meet him. The chances that he would invite my pre-adolescent son to spend a night at his ranch are less-than-nil. And — most important here — the chances that, if invited, my son actually would spend a night at Neverland were, are, and always will be, never. And that's the discussion the media should be having about the Michael Jackson issue. What parents would allow their child, in the aftermath of prior scandalous allegations and a mega-million-dollar out-of-court settlement, to spend private time with Michael Jackson? . . .I am My Kid's Dad, My Mom's Kid,My Torah's Defender: Radioing for Help from Dr. Laura
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
The Laura Schlessinger stuff has been circulating enough that a brief comment is warranted. And because she is a public figure whose actions and comments touch on our values, it is halakhically proper for me to make these comments that, in a different context, would be forbidden as lashon hara. [¶] There is much about her I respect. She took her stand on homosexuality, and that cost her mightily. She probably lost her television program because of that. She stood strongly for other morality issues and did not back down. I felt the maximum sympathy for her when that creep distributed nude photographs that she had allowed him to take decades earlier, when she was so-much younger and less focused on values she later adopted. I felt so bad for her. All her critics were calling her a hypocrite, ridiculing and mocking her. I felt so bad -- cannot a person make real mistakes when young and later revise her path? For that matter, can't a person make mistakes when in his 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s -- and later reverse course to a more Torah-defined path? And maybe the life of mistakes allows someone a heightened insight into why the Torah path is better. She was a victim, blackmailed from her past to silence her now. And she weathered the outrage with grace and dignity. [¶] Still, in the end, one should not be Jewish because Dr. Laura has a passing moment of interest or, as happened during a craze during my college years in the 1970s, because Bob Dylan suddenly was taking an interest in his roots. One day Bob Dylan is meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and a few years later he is meeting with Christian theologians and recording a Grammy-winning Christian Gospel album. One day Madonna is studying Kabbalah, and the next day she is publishing a book of pornographic photographs. One day Dr. Laura is the featured speaker at an Orthodox Jewish group, and one day she is getting love-bombed by Christians hoping to get their hands on a new Jewish convert . . and she is loving it, loving the attention, loving the acceptance. . . .[Excerpt from full Commentary]
We did not give up Torah and Jewish practice in[Excerpt from full Commentary] It is just plain awful when people decide that it is OK to cheat and steal in the name of Torah. [¶] To facilitate pidyon shvuyim (redeeming captive Jews from secular prisons) we are commanded to go so far as to sell a community's Torah scroll. Yet it is hard to rejoice that Bill Clinton pardoned four chassidim from the village of New Square, N.Y., along with an alleged tax evader who donated megabucks to Israel. In contrast to the complex moral and ethical questions that grated pro-and-con during discussions over the possible pardons of Michael Milken and Jonathan Jay Pollard, there is something unequivocally outrageous in Clinton's decisions to pardon the four Squarer chassidim and the international oil merchant whose dealings prompted the Justice Department to allege, among other things, tax evasion and trading illegally with Iran. [¶] I come from humble roots. My Dad sold toys and stationery goods as a wholesaler in New York City's Lower East Side, working six days a week for his brother. My parents did not go to college. We were not well-connected. We were not connected. When I wanted to go to Columbia for college, I had to figure out how to get accepted on my own, and I had to figure out how to pay my way through the Ivy League. No one helped. [¶] There should be a problem with the calculus that if I steal $10 million dollars and keep $9 million of the loot for myself but disperse the remaining $1 million to charitable causes, then I deserve to be guest of honor at an institution's annual dinner dance. There seems something far more noble in the person who never gets honored but who awakes at 5:30 in the morning, lays tefillin, prays to G-d, goes to work, works hard and accounts for every penny, davens again, feeds a family honestly though humbly, comes home late at night, perhaps after finishing a second job because it takes two jobs to break even, then davens a third time and drops into bed from exhaustion after spending a few moments with the children to teach them values like love, honor, respect, honesty, loyalty, trust, devotion. [¶] It really is horrible, just plain awful, when people who proudly boast that they do not read newspapers and who think that all non-Jews are reincarnated Chmielnitzki Cossacks and Russian pogromists, decide that it is OK to cheat and steal in the name of our Torah. The United States is a warm, kind, and generous country. There is no anti-Jewish head-tax here. And the only ghettoes in which Jews reside in America are those that Jews voluntarily create for themselves, while the only walls within which Jews are enclosed are those at the exclusive "gated communities" for which residents pay a premium.
[Excerpt from full Commentary] The Jewish Federation's census of Los Angeles Jewry remains controversial. Even as the United States continues striving to count historically less visible demographic communities, the kinds of people whom Ralph Ellison might have called "Invisible People," our local Jewish census-takers fail to acknowledge that Torah-observant Jews were dramatically undercounted. The census alleges that Observant households have dwindled in the past two decades from 5.2 to 4.3 percent of Los Angeles Jewry. I refuse to be an Invisible Man in the Age of Lieberman. The "census" numbers are false. They are stuff and non-census.[¶] The census grossly undercounted Torah-observant Jews, demonstratively so, but its camouflaged flaws nevertheless offered an intellectually interesting opportunity to pinpoint. Sort of a "Where's Waldo" for the statistically curious. The same problems, in one form or another, have marred census efforts undertaken by other Federation counters in other cities. Until the Torah-observant community evolves the sophistication to recognize that the numbers consistently are skewed, that the methodologies inherently are faulty, that the skewing is part of a subtle agenda to steer away Federation funding from services and programs that serve the Torah-observant community, and that the solution for Orthodoxy is not rhetoric but statistical analysis and input not from Orthodox political scientists and medical doctors but from trained statisticians, the non-census will continue for another millennium.
Orthonomics:Losing Our Best and Brightest
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How do Orthodox Jews do it? How can we expect others to live this lifestyle? With Americans on unemployment and in foreclosure in record amounts, how in the world do average people pay $10-20,000 per child for private Day School schooling? If we promote nice-sized families, how can we afford it? And summer camp . . . and bar mitzvahs. And kosher meat and cheese. Moreover, virtually every “Orthodox community” is more expensive to live in than are the exurban communities in the sticks. Because of supply and demand, there is inordinate demand for real estate within walking distance of the epicenter shuls, jacking prices further. And families with 3 and 4 children, not to mention 5 and 6, cannot fit comfortably into 2- or even 3-bedroom homes. So the food is high, and the home property is high, and the schooling is high. [¶] But not everyone sells diamonds or practices private medicine. Some people are employees in middle management, or lower. How do they do it? They get scholarships, and that helps. They get reduced shul dues. But the mortgage is not reduced for shomrei mitzvot, nor the meat or cheese. [¶] Orthonomics is a legitimate concern. By failing to address it, we also bring upon ourselves a second shame, less closely analyzed. Given the economic demands, many of our best and brightest opt out of rabbonus. That leaves the yeshivot in the control of faculty from a different oilam, an oilam where people do not get graduate degrees in medicine, law, or the arts. Those with graduate degrees avoid chinuch, so chinuch becomes populated by those who have less appreciation for our hashkafah – and that leads to concerns of other kinds.Hank Greenberg as Mixed Metaphor
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When a Torah-observant rabbinic figure participates in a Church service honoring a newly elected American President, the episode creates an interesting problem for other Rabbonim in the future, who choose not to do so. [¶] The image that most immediately comes to mind is that of Hank Greenberg not playing on Yom Kippur in 1934. He was not at all a religious Jew – that is, he was very forthright that religion and he were not, shall we say, both ends of a doubleheader. He was not a guy who atoned once a year with deep charatah. But he very demonstratively took Yom Kippur day off to make a statement. He won so much respect for his position . . . . [¶] But what if he had played on Yom Kippur? If Hank Greenberg had played on Yom Kippur, he would have made it a zillion times harder for Koufax, Green, and the others later. That, too, is part of the analysis. [¶] It’s nice when someone else already has run interference for you. Hank Greenberg ran interference -- even though the metaphor mixes a football term with a baseball legend. And it is deeply disquieting when you have to take a stand complicated by someone else who has placed an iceberg in the way. . . .[Excerpt from full Commentary]
That's a basic rule of civilized society, and it defines the parameters of the Free Marketplace of Ideas that highlights American civil discourse. It is a rule that applies equally to plumbers, to auto mechanics, to locksmiths - and, as should go without saying, to members of the academic community, including college professors. At least, that is what they taught me during my undergraduate days at Columbia University. . . . [¶]