Crazy Video

This is unbelievable. If you know who Dov Shurin, aka Ben Israel, is, then the concept of the video isn't at all shocking, though its execution may be. Enjoy!

Cool Link

Just found this site called ‘Charity Navigator’, which evaluates data, obtained from the IRS, on a large number of NPOs and charitable organizations. For example, here are YU, Gesher, and Gush. You can learn a lot about these organizations by looking at these links. By the way, ‘American Friends of Tzohar’ has nothing to do with my organization; we don’t yet have a U.S.-registered identity.

Israeli Schizophrenia

If you listen long enough to discussions about religious-secular relations in Israel (and I get plenty of that with Tzohar), a paradoxical picture will begin to emerge: On one hand, there’s a sense that there’s a real rift between the two populations, and that in many respects, that rift is growing or at least standing pat. Poltically, the religious are marginalized. Even those areas which are traditionally under religious provenance are being threatened, and the religious institutions are responding by becoming more entrenched and trying to expand their control in those realms.

At the same time, you hear of a ‘thirst’ for authentic Judaism from within the secular population. You hear statistics, for example, that in the army, Shas gets more votes than any other party. On my block, most families built Sukkot – mostly kosher but some not – as what’s probably the Israeli cultural equivalent of a Christmas tree. The overwhelming majority of Israeli couples, according to a recent survey, would opt for a traditional wedding even if civil or non-traditional alternatives existed! Fasting on Yom Kippur is still in the consensus, as is keeping certain basic elements of kashrut. Non-Orthodox schools with strong Jewish curricula – such as the Tali network – are very successful. The list continues.

I’ve chanced upon a distinction which seems to resonate with many people (religious and secular) that I mention it to. It probably will sound weird in English: Israelis are not interested in religion; they are interested in Judaism (in Hebrew – they’re not looking for dat, they’re looking for Yahadut). Anything which is legal, institutional, bureaucratic, etc. is almost automatically discounted from being meaningfully Jewish.

Obviously, reality is much more complicated than that, and I don’t pretend to really ‘get it’. But I’ve found the distinction useful.

Populist Gadlus

Gil reports the following from R' Ephraim Wachsman's speech at the Agudah Convention:

some Torah scholars become famous simply because the laypeople like what they have to say and aren't really Gedolim

R' Gil then speculates as to which populist pseudo-Gedolim R' Wachsman could possibly be referring to, discounting R' Y.D. Soloveitchik and R' Aharon Soloveichik as possibilities.


I think I've figured it out, though. It must be the author of the following quote, which appeared in a New York Times interview in 1975 and was excerpted in an NYT obituary in 1986:

'You don't wake up in the morning and decide you're an expert on answers,'' he said. ''If people see that one answer is good and another answer is good, gradually you will be accepted.''

The author of this quote, of course, is R' Moshe Feinstein (I remember once hearing from R' Yosef Blau that many in the Yeshivish world were upset about this quote because it doesn't really express what gadlus is, much as REW contends. R' Blau felt that this quote hits the nail on the head regarding what gadlus is).
In fairness, REW might be saying that being popular isn't necessarily a rayusa, but it's not a ra'ayah to gadlus either. In any event, given Lakewood politics, by bet is that it was a veiled reference to the wildly popular Kashrut.org, run by the Rabbis Abadi, formerly of Lakewood. Not everything has to be directed against Modern Orthodoxy, y'know.

ADDeRabbi News and Comment

• Charles Krauthammer has an excellent, in my opinion, op-ed in which he rakes Sacha Baron-Cohen over the coals for his Rolling Stone interview, especially where he talks about the importance of exposing indifference to anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred in the American heartland.


• This is truly astounding. McDonald’s changed their label from gold-on-red to gold-on-blue so that people will not mistake unkosher branches for Kosher ones. The Tel Aviv Rabbinate (R’ Lau) approved this arrangement, but the Jerusalem Rabbinate is still debating it. I find it baffling. Why? Are they simply assuring a brand name? What it represents? I don’t know, but after recent events (the cancellation of the agunah conference for dubious reasons, recent statements from R’ Amar about amending the Law of Return to exclude converts), I have started to wonder what religion they represent.


• Apparently I’m a month late in discovering that Paris Hilton has released a line of ‘Heiress’ perfume. I think she’d have much greater success marketing [I had something really funny to say here, but ADDeRebbetzin nixed my posting it on the blog. It’s really not so bad, but it presumes some basic knowledge of PH’s history. Whatever. Shalom Bayis. You can post your guesses in the comments.]

A Harsh Moral Lesson

The story of Yaakov taking the Brachot from Esav is one of the most dramatic in all of Chumash. There's so much going on - the whole complex of relationships between each of the four principals, the plot and its execution, and the subtexts and context.

One lesson that I think clearly emerges, which I recently saw that R' Samet also concludes from his essay on the Parsha (it's much better - and very different - in Hebrew) is that:

The proper moral decision is not always between good and evil; sometimes it
is between a greater and a lesser evil - but this does not exempt the one
who commits the lesser evil from his debt.

I'd tinker with the last line - it does not negate the right of the wronged party to collect his debt. I'd also formulate the lesson a bit differently differently: Sometimes, doing the right thing in a particular situation comes at a very, very steep price.

Arutz 7 Interview

I was interviewed by Yishai Fleischer of israelnationalradio.com at the OU conference. The interview begins about 24:40 of this audio show.

Never Mind about Chabad

Funny thing. I write a post about the violence at Ponevezh and Satmar, two of Lubavitch's antagonists, and its absence in Chabad itself. Two commenters alluded to violence that broke out at 770 that same day. Surprisingly, there's very little about it in the news, though Dovid gives some idea what happened.
UPDATE: Tzemach Atlas has more, and this comment thread on Vos Iz Neias has a bunch.

Anyhow, never mind about the Rebbe smiling from the grave.
Sad, though. I remember speaking with my colleague at UMD after he had attended the Kinus Ha-Shluchim in past years. It sounds like an incredible event for the shluchim and their families. Too bad this kind of thing has to happen. But as the old saying goes, when you play with fire, someone will get burned.

The First FFB

Last year, I wrote a post for Maven Yavin called 'The First FFB'. It's probably not my best post, but it's definitely one of my favorites. It speaks to my own situation and to the situation of my parents, especially my father, whose name is Yitzchak and whose Bar Mitzvah Parsha was Toldot. Growing up, I didn't have too many friends whose parents were both FFB (which was fairly atypical in Baltimore).

My father tells the story of a young couple's Kiddush Club from about 30+ years ago in B-more (no, Laz, you didn't invent it ;-). This group had a cholent on a blustery winter Shabbat morning. My father made a comment like, "Boy, there's nothing like a hot cholent on a cold Shabbos." Members of the group then proceeded to one-up him with foods - shrimp, cheeseburgers, bacon - that beat cholent hands down, even on the coldest of Shabbatot.

The humor of the story is in the encounter between the FFB experience - in which that cholent stands near the pinnacle of culinary delight (if it's REALLY cold) - and the BT experience, where this brown sludge is a far cry from the pleasures that the world enjoys and that the BT abandons.

I think about this stuff every year this time, for some reason. I reflect on the expectations that were placed upon me as a child and young adult, and the degree to which those expectations are the heritage from parents who somehow felt that they themselves didn't live up to every expectation.

And then I wonder just how many generations I'd have to go back in order to find the ancestor who filled his parents' every hope.

And then I wonder if I'll be able to keep myself from pouring all of that unresolved expectation into my own kids.