On Jews and Christmas

This --> That
On the other hand, this; and I would agree with this if I still lived here.

EJF answers question: Why did the Rambam include the laws of giyur within the laws of forbidden relations?

A few readers have asked if I would address the issue of Leib Tropper's (I think we can dispense with the honorifics, no?) resignation from the EJF amid serious scandal. In truth, I don't have anything to add. I'm not one of the scandal blogs, and there is not much to analyze here. Dude's apparently a lowlife. Nuff said.
There are a few related points:
1) As a critic of EJF since pretty much its inception, and as one of the first to note the danger that the EJF posed to the Modern Orthodox rabbinate in America, I think this is a happy day. I'm not happy about the scandal itself since, as Gil writes, one should not rejoice at his enemy's downfall (and one may speculate that he is referring to this issue). I am happy that an organization that has been a thorn in the side of many has been crippled, if not killed. I have no doubt that people like R. Nachum Eisenstein will go on screaming about the evil Modern Orthodox rabbis, but he will slide right back to the margin that he occupied before the EJF gave him a bully pulpit.
2) There is very little doubt in my mind that Guma Aguilar is behind the scandal breaking. He and Tropper have been feuding openly (and suing each other) for the past year plus, and Aguiar is big on recording conversations; this is not the first conversation pertaining to Laib Tropper that he has recorded.
3) As a friend pointed out, and to answer the question posed in the title of this post, it is now clear that the Rambam's placement of the laws of giyur was done be-ru'ach ha-kodesh.

A line I'd add to Adam Sandler's Chanukah Song

Scarlet Johanssen is one great Jewish catch; Utah - we'll trade you Roseanne Barr for Orrin Hatch

What Minister Neeman Did and Did Not Say

Background: Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman is being roundly criticized for suggesting that Jewish law form the basis of law in Israel. [Links: Ynet, Ynet English, Jpost, Forward, and, for contrast, YWN and DB - who misses the point]

My first thought was that the reactions were generally coming from opposition MKs and Labor rebels, and it's their job to oppose the sitting government, which includes Ne'eman. Statements from folks lke Amnon Rubenstein are also to be expected, as anything that can be construed to threaten the authority of the judicial establishment would naturally get his britches in a twist.

However, the more I read that Ne'eman is calling for "talibanization" of Israel and undermining democracy and the principles of Zionism, the more I realized that there's a real danger here. Part of it is simply that I do not wish to see Neeman construed as something that he most clearly is not. Ya'akov Ne'eman is an ehrliche yid and a ben Torah. When he quoted from the daf yomi in his speech, it is because he learned it (several years ago, he regularly attended my brother-in-law's daf yomi shiur at Chovevei Tzion in Jerusalem). He's a regular attendee of Rav Usher Weiss's Thursday night shiur in Ramot. He's also a founding partner of Israel's largest and by many counts leading law firm, Herzog, Fox & Neeman. He was appointed justice minister because of his impeccable credentials and character. He does not affiliate with any political party. (To spell it out more clearly, I consider Ya'akov Neeman to be a great man, a role model, and a symbol of everything that is right with religious Zionism).

The context of the speech was a congress honoring Rav Dr. Ratzon Arussi. Rav Arussi, in addition to being the torch-bearer of Rav Yosef Qafih's halakhic approach, has set up an alternative to the court system where disputes can be adjudicated in accordance with Jewish law. From the perspective of the courts, this is no different than any of the other forms of arbitration available (numerous well known lawyers and retired judges serve as arbitrators in civil suits, even very high profile ones). To a large degree, the overburdened court system welcomes the relief that these forms of arbitration provide. From a halakhic perspective, as Rav Ovadya pointed out at the congress, it is preferable to adjudicate before a beit din than before a secular court.

One dimension of what Neeman was saying is that he wants to see this phenomenon increase. He likes the idea of this form of arbitration. It should be noted that this form of arbitration is for civil cases and only applies when both litigants agree to this form of arbitration. It is not "theocratic" or anti-democratic because nobody is coercing anyone else to do anything, and, in the case of arbitration, there need not be any Jewish laws on the books in order for such arbitration to work. Furthermore, civil law is not the same as ritual law. We're dealing with cases or torts - property damages, negligence, personal injury, inheritance, contracts, and the like. This law is no more "religious" than British, Ottoman, or Roman law in terms of its superficial content; like any other legal system, however, the laws reflect the values of the culture that produced it.

Even if one were to consider that Neeman was talking about actual legislation of Jewish law, and I do not think he was, this is still a far cry from calling for a halakhic state. The role of Jewish law in Israel has been debated since before the founding of the state, and, ironically, until Menachem Elon (whose 5-volume work on Jewish law was not perceived as being contradictory in any way to his serving as a justice on and ultimately president of the Israeli Supreme Court), generally promoted by secular jurists who wished to "deritualize" halakha. There is an entire department at Hebrew U dedicated to this study, which is a bona fide part of Israeli law. Neeman emphasized that Jewish law has much to contribute to contemporary legal discourse and that it is capable of serving as a basis for a complete civil law.

The "bit by bit" part of Neeman's speech was saying either that:
a) slowly, more people would begin to use batei din like R. Arussi's for arbitration.
b) slowly, new Israeli legislation would incorporate elements of Jewish law as part of the democratic process of legislation by elected officials.
The fact that he insisted that it happen slowly makes it clear that he is not interested in revolution or overthrow of the existing law,only that Israeli society/ law keep itself open to Jewish law and move in that direction through established processes.

Bottom line, though, he was talking about CIVIL LAW. Not about banning pork from Israeli supermarkets or enforcing Shabbat blue laws. He was talking about Choshen Mishpat, not Orach Chayim or Yoreh De'ah, or even Even ha-Ezer.

My article on Jack Tytell

This article was born in the following way:

After reading numerous articles and opinion pieces (for a particularly egregious example, see Gershom Gorenberg's piece here) that seek to blame the settler/ national-religious/ American Orthodox olim community for creating a monster, and after having heard several anecdotes about Tytell's early years that seemed to run counter to that presumption, I pitched an investigative piece to several well-known media outlets. The Jewish Week expressed interest (others also expressed interest, but either didn't have a mechanism for dealing with freelancers or simply wanted me to give them my sources), and we were on our way.
Clearly, as an American Orthodox oleh, I have an interest in deflecting blame away from my community, even as I readily acknowledge that this community tends to have more loose cannons than others. Nevertheless, the article is the product of dozens of hours of research, interviews, and cross-checking that gives the article a degree of veracity that goes well beyond anything you will see in any other article out there to date (starting with the fact that I spell his name correctly).

Readers are invited to leave comment here, since the JW does not yet have such a forum.

A Quote that Makes me Want to Learn More about this Guy

Universal justice is the essence of Judaism and all of the various types of liberalism, which are rooted in love and sensitivity, their blessed source is in classical Judaism, making it easy for us to be true to the fundamentals of Judaism while being the most extreme liberals...

R. Shmuel Alexandrov, Mikhtavei Mechkar U-bikoret, 1907, p. 23, letter to Rav Kook (which the latter responds to in Letters I:45).

R. Alexandrov seems like a fascinating character. He published several short works that I'm dying to find the time to delve into.

Berlin and Jerusalem

Berlin and Jerusalem have an interesting relationship. Ever since the 19th Century, when there was widespread sentiment that "Berlin is the New Jerusalem", the cities been, in a sense, antipodal. We all know about the prescient words of the Meshekh Chokhma, and we know about the fortunes of the two cities since then.
I was reminded of their antipodality this week. Both Jerusalem and Berlin were divided cities for parts of the 20th century. Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 and Berlin between 1961 and 1989 (in truth, it was divided for a longer period than that, but without a wall).
Yes, as the world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, it clamors for Jerusalem to be redivided. In fact, this partition of Jerusalem is championed by the same folks who wrote all those articles comparing the Separation Fence to the Berlin Wall.
Do an experiment: gauge the reaction of people to the statement "Berlin will never again be divided" with the statement "Jerusalem will never again be divided".
Some might argue that Jerusalem is already divided de facto. That may be true, and I am certainly not arguing that the idea of partitioning Jerusalem should not be carefully considered. I AM, however, saying that there's not a snowball's chance in hell that Gilo will end up on the Palestinian side of the partition (look at a map of Jerusalem today and a map of Jerusalem in 1967; there's no way that we're going back there). And I AM saying that a partition of Jerusalem, in any form, would be tragic.

Parsha Playlist

Listening to my youtube playlist (which shows pretty clearly that I came of age in the early 1990s), I was reminded of a reading of a well-known Gemara that I posted, and which somewhat relates to this week's parsha as well as to my post on last week's parhsa.
Enjoy.

The First FFB

This is an oldie but a goodie (the rabbi formerly known as Yehupitz recalled it to me). it never actually appeared on this blog, but on the short lived "Maven Yavin" blog. It also brings me back to a less cynical point in my life (I wrote this 4 years ago but developed the kernel 13 years ago already). Here it is:

Although much has been written on the Ba'al Teshuvah experience, the experience of FFBs (Frum From Birth) presents its own set of challenges. For a number of years, I have seen Yitzchak Avinu, the world’s first FFB, as a paradigm for those challenges, especially as his experience unfolds in this week’s parsha, Toldot. Please bear in mind that this in no way exhausts the potential to read Yitzchak in this light.

This parsha tells Yitzchak’s story. Abraham’s death is recorded at the end of last week’s parsha even though he lived to see the events at the beginning of this week’s. Once he ‘passed the torch’ to Yitzchak after his marriage to Rivkah, and his story is no longer relevant to the continuity of God’s covenant with man.

Yitzchak’s story is summed up it the first verse of the Parsha: This is the story of Yitzchak, the son of Avraham; Avraham begat Yitzchak.

That’s who Yitzhcak was: Avraham’s kid. Rashi directs us to a Midrash here that states that Avraham and Yitzchak were virtually indistinguishable, so there would be no room for cynics to suggest that Yitzchak was the son of anyone else. The Midrash communicates the latent message of this verse – that Yitzchak’s entire life, entire experience, goals, attitudes, and even the way he presented himself, were strongly shaped by his upbringing in the house of Avraham.

It’s not easy to be ‘The Rabbi’s Kid’. Dad’s the guy who hears the Voice of God, but the kid’s the one who ends up getting sacrificed. From a very young age, the pressure to speak and act in a particular way are enormous, as everyone has different expectations from ‘The Rabbi’s Kid’. I’ve seen with my own two eyes how two students may be carrying on in the exact same manner, but the Rabbi’s Kid is singled out because he ‘ought to know better’. The kid would wish nothing more that to simply be like everyone else, with little or no expectations.

In a sense, every FFB is a ‘Rabbi’s Kid’, to the extent that they live in a culture where they are keenly aware that they have different expectations from those in the surrounding culture. The child is tethered to the values and behaviors of the parents, with little or no opportunity to discover for themselves what would make a person desire or choose this awkward lifestyle.

In the second verse of the Parsha, Yitzchak’s experience is contrasted by the experience of Rivkah, the ultimate NCSY story. Again Rashi points us in this direction; she was born to a wicked man, in a wicked place, and had a wicked brother. She’s the ultimate Ba’alat Teshuva, having had no expectations given her upbringing.

But in the third verse, again, taking Rashi’s approach, we see that this introduction was almost a set-up for what ensues. When they pray for a kid, Yitzchak is answered, not Rivkah. Someone who overcame so much and someone who was given everything on a silver platter, and the latter’s prayers are more powerful. Rashi even tells us that prayer of a 'tzaddik ben rasha’ – the righteous the son of the wicked – is qualitatively inferior to prayer of a ‘tzaddik ben tzaddik’ – the righteous the son of the righteous. Why?

I’ve heard in the name of R’ Simcha Zissl of Kelm that the key term is ‘tzaddik ben tzaddik’ and not just ‘ben tzaddik’. The process by which ‘the son of the righteous’ who, by default, by habit, would be acting in a manner that would be consistent with ‘righteousness’ at conventionally understood. It’s no small matter for a person to become a ‘tzaddik ben tzaddik’.

Religious growth can be conceptualized into two categories – change which manifests externally and change which does not manifest externally. Rivkah always had an external benchmark, a starting point against which to gauge her growth. Yitzchak had no such luxury. If he was to grow and mature as a religious person, any change would be completely invisible to the world. It is a process which requires a great degree of self-awareness, to distinguish between elements of one’s personality which are habit, and those which have been freely affirmed. There is a certain comfort in ‘externalizing’ one’s religious growth, which can be seen regularly in the contemporary Orthodox community. This implicitly recognizes that interior growth with no external manifestation is very, very, difficult to affect and engenders constant insecurity with one’s own religious state.

The verb ‘to pray’, in Hebrew, is reflexive. Jewish tradition has understood prayer as a process of self-discovery and self-judgment. The prayer of a tzaddik ben tzaddik is indeed a potent prayer.

Yitzchak’s personality, in the Jewish mystical tradition, is connected to the process of ‘judgment’, again reflecting the process of ‘pure judgment’ by which he must scrutinize himself.

He is seen as the originator of the mincha prayer – said at a time where both the sudden clarity of morning and the confusion and darkness of night are absent. There’s light, but it’s old light.

Yitchak follows in his fathers footsteps, struggling against adversity to dredge the wells that his father had originally dug. Is that not the ultimate FFB experience? Redigging our fathers’ wells? Trying to rediscover the freshness and life within them?

Haloscan comments

The Responsibility of Leadership and the Teitel Arrest

Egla arufa, recorded in Deuteronomy 21:1-9 is one of the Torah’s more obscure mitzvot. If a corpse is found in the vicinity of a town, that entire town, represented by its elders, must expiate itself of the murder by performing an atoning ritual (breaking the neck of a calf at a dry riverbed) and declaring that they did not perpetrate the murder. The Talmudic Rabbis nevertheless attribute some guilt to the town and its elders: perhaps they could have provided the unfortunate victim with an escort, or perhaps they neglected to offer hospitality to the victim or the perpetrator (see Sifrei and Malbim to Deut. 21:7), thereby indirectly causing the crime. Similarly, the Rabbis assigned some indirect responsibility for accidental homicides to the High Priest (see Num. 35:25 and Rashi ad. loc.).

Opinion pieces and editorials covering the arrest of Jack Teitel (colorfully and creatively now known as “the Jewish terrorist”) have largely either assigned blame to the national religious/ far right/ West Bank/ American religious immigrant community for creating a context for this type of crime to flourish, or sought to deflect or deny the responsibility of those communities (while, of course, condemning the acts).

Rabbi Rafi Feuerstein, a board member of the Tzohar Rabbinic Organization, published an op-ed in which he calls on the rabbis to publicly condemn (but not apologize for) the act, because otherwise silence will be construed as acquiescence. R. Feuerstein comes very close to hitting the nail on the head: He acknowledges that the role of the rabbi – as well as the teacher, leader, or any other public figure – is to keep an open eye on those marginal individuals from whom despicable acts may emerge, specifically, to prevent those elements from hearing messages that would enable them to draw frightening conclusions.

Alas, this is where R. Feuerstein misses the mark in a fashion that is typical of Israeli rabbis. Israeli rabbis – even those on the moderate to left end of the Religious-Zionist spectrum such as R. Feuerstein and other Tzohar rabbis – cast themselves first and foremost as ideologues and thinkers (I have not yet seen the Coen’s Brothers’ new film “A Serious Man”, but I did see the trailer snippet about how one of the rabbis that the main character seeks out has no time for an audience because he is “busy thinking”; though a caricature, there is some truth to it, especially with regard to the Israeli rabbinate). As such, R. Feuerstein sees as his primary goal to make sure that the ideological pronouncements made by himself and his colleagues are articulated in a manner that does not allow them to be construed by those on the margins as agreement or encouragement of criminal behavior. He even goes further – the rabbis should make an ideological pronouncement clarifying that the values they espouse conflict with the actions of this “lone wolf”, lest silence at this time be construed as acquiescence.

Had R. Feuerstein adopted a different image of the role of the rabbi – one that I believe has a stronger historical tradition and is more in line with the needs of the present Jewish community – his message might have been somewhat different. The rabbi indeed has a duty toward the margins of society: not an indirect duty to make sure that such elements do not become monsters, but a direct duty to engage and address the needs of that constituency as any other member of the rabbi’s flock. A rabbi is a pastor, not a policeman and not a public intellectual.

In that sense, R. Feuerstein should have called for the rabbis to accept some blame in the manner of the town elders during the egla arufa ceremony: denial of any active wrongdoing, but acknowledgment that perhaps they could and should have been more attuned to the needs and thoughts of their constituents – even the most marginal of them. I am not so naïve to think that the rabbis are responsible for gauging the mental state of every affiliated Jew everywhere in the world. Yet, like the town elders of the egla arufa or the High Priest of the accidental killer, they do bear some guilt for failing to notice and address someone who needed help. In fact, closer attention to the individual, even at the expense of demagoguery, may have helped prevent the crimes in question.

PLanet Names Update

[No, I'm not 'back']
About 10 months ago, I mentioned a contest to give Uranus and Neptune Hebrew names. I suggested Rahav for Neptune and Elyon for Uranus, but later mentioned that I prefer Shahak for Uranus, as suggested by BZ.
Well, four names have made the final voting round - two for each planet. Both Rahav and Shahak are on the list, and both BZ and I are listed amongst those who proposed the names!
Woo-hoo!
Vote for Rahav and Shahak!

My New Hobby

Blogging was my primary hobby for about 4 years. It was a good hobby. It helped me hone my writing skills to the point where I now write (and edit and translate) for a living. However, once writing became my primary occupation, it lost some of its luster as an outlet.

So I’ve found a new hobby: Teaching. While teaching and rabbinating, writing was an outlet. Now that I have been out of teaching for over a year, and now that I no longer have to engage in it professionally, with all that entails, I can return to it as an amateur, and be quite happy doing so. I just completed teaching Ezra and Nechemiah to a small group at Camp Moshava’s Beit Midrash Program, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It certainly helped that I felt no pressure to perform or to do anything other than what I simply wanted to do. It did not have to be ‘like an angel’. And – I thoroughly enjoyed the experience (this shiur was the dry-run for my OU podcasts on E-N, but with much more banter and tangents). Thanks, talmidim and talmidot, for restoring my love of teaching. It’s been a lot of fun.

I know now that I will never go back to teaching professionally, but that I will continue to make it a real part of my life.

Podcasting

A while ago, I started blogging about the book of Ezra, then stopped. I am, however, doing the OU's Nach Yomi podcasts for Ezra/ Nechemiah, and the first 2 shiurim are up. They will average about 20 mins in length, though Ezra chap. 2 is a bit longer. Enjoy!

The Roseanne Barr Hitler Cookies Heeb Issue

The uproar reminds me of some of the comment I got when I told the student newspaper at UMD that Jewish men are circumcised because Jewish women need to have 10% off of everything. Some people (like the entire Muslim world, and also a few Jews, generally a generation older than me) do not understand this particular brand of humor (which I discussed here).

Another example of this type of Holocaust-related humor: One of the funniest bits of comedy I've ever seen, the "Survivor" scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Another example, also from Heeb magazine: A fake Palm Pilot ad with a protrait of Elie Wiesel admonishing one to "Remember. Never Forget."

Here's another classic example:
Q. How many Jews can fit in a Volkswagen?
A. 10,005. 2 in the front, 3 in the back, and 10,000 in the ashtray.

Here's the thing: I don't think that Barr's antics are particularly funny, but that's just because they aren't funny. Maybe if it were more of a audio-visual sketch it would be funnier, like if whe were goose-stepping around the kitchen, discussing the cookies with a faux-German accent. "Und remembah: zeez cookies vill make vun fleishig."
But that's neither here nor there.

Please also note - in each of the examples cited above, the person delivering the joke is Jewish. Otherwise, it's not actually funny. It's one of those "black people can call each other nigger" things that's, well, best evidenced by the name of the magazine in question, Heeb. If the magazine would be published by, say, the UN, it would be terrible. Roseanne Barr dressing up as Hitler is not the same as Prince Whatever dressing as a Nazi. Humor is a form of rebellion (the editor of Heeb refers to the fact that, in the Warsaw Ghetto, they referred to Hitler as 'Horowitz'). Similarly, and to demonstrate that this type of humor is not unique to Jews (though we seem to have a knack for it), it is reported that as he was being grilled alive, the Catholic St. Lawrence said to his captors: "This side is done; turn me over." Had the same line been stated by one of his captors, it would have added insult to injury. Coming from the mouth of the victim, it is both funny and defiant.

Book Announcement/ Review: The Single Volume Rambam

[Full disclosure: I was involved in the publication of this volume, as I translated the Hebrew introduction into English and have helped them with their website and English language communications. That said, I gain nothing from increased sales.]

Debate has long raged between the community of philosophers and the community of Torah scholars regarding the intellectual legacy of the Rambam, with each side claiming him as his own. The Rambam of the beit midrash and the Maimonides of the university can seem so different that it is hard to reconcile them into one person. In fact, many have gone to great lengths to minimize or discount those aspects of the Rambam that seem at odds with the beliefs of the particular scholar.

There is, however, a third Rambam, who is often ignored. He is not the contemplative, philosophical Rambam of the academy, nor the great halakhic authority whose every word teaches mountains of halakhot. He is everyman’s Rambam, the Rambam that was preserved best by those Yemenite communities who saw the Rambam and his Mishne Torah as a practical guidebook for every aspect of Jewish life. Of course, some could delve deeper and some remained closer to the surface, but the image of the Rambam was one of inherent and supreme simplicity. They viewed the Yad as its author intended it – as a comprehensive but intelligible guide to Jewish life.

The vision of the editors of this volume is to restore this forgotten image of the Rambam. They did so by doing primarily two things, though they have done a host of other things as well: they have published the entire Mishne Torah in a single volume with no commentary, and they have meticulously restored the version of the text based primarily on the best Yemenite manuscripts, omitting the thousands of errors that have crept into the various printed editions. In addition, there are several helpful indices to help the reader navigate the text.

I recall hearing Rav Lichtenstein opining that learning Rambam Yomi is far more useful than learning Daf Yomi. With the Rambam, one truly gets a systematic overview of the entire Torah she-Be’al Peh in a coherent, organized fashion.If the goal is ‘beki’ut’, mastery and familiarity with a broad corpus of information, the Yad is a far better vehicle to that end than Daf Yomi. Furthermore, the Yad presents a much more holistic vision of all of Torah that is best appreciated through the overall structure of the Rambam’s magnum opus. It remains, to this day, the single best restatement of Torah she-Be’al Peh, and perhaps the single greatest monograph, ever produced by the People of the Book. The present volume refocuses the learner on that aspect of the Rambam which is the aspect that the Rambam himself chose to highlight in his introduction, and which guided the name that he chose for his masterwork.

Of course, the present volume certainly has value as a desk reference and in schools where multi-volume editions can be cumbersome or where specific passages of the Rambam are studied on their own. The volume is quite beautiful as well. Nevertheless, its greatest contribution is in the restoration of that aspect of the Rambam that has been omitted from the yeshiva as well as the academy – the man who created a digest that would allow the average Jew to understand and live the fullness of his heritage.

The volume is (or will be) available at local Jewish bookstores. It is being distributed in the US by R. Yankel Levitz (718-377-0047), and available worldwide through the project’s website: http://www.mishnetorah.com/en/