FailedMessiah.com

Israel Kicks Out Daughter Of Man Who Saved Jews During Holocaust

She has committed no crime. Her father was honored by Yad VaShem as a Righteous Among the Nations.

But the story gets even worse.

Science Proves Homosexuality Biologically Based – Can Being Gay Or Lesbian Still Be A Sin?

What if homosexuality really is biologically based and therefore something inborn, not something learned or adopted? Would this change the negative halakhic (Jewish legal) view of homosexuality?

I ask this question because a new study just published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences seems to have proven homosexuality…

Letter From Refugees Of Genocide Surfaces

If you were Prime Minister of England or President of America in 1940, what would you have done if you received the following letter:

A Truly Kosher Business

We've focused a lot lately on the abuses the Rubashkin family heaped on their workers in the family's Postville, Iowa, Agriprocessors slaughterhouse.

What follows is a flip side to that, what a truly kosher business should be.

GUEST POST: Wiping Out Amalek

Is the mitzvah to totally wipe out the nation of Amalek a barbaric anachronism? Is it no different than the Holocaust? Should we write it out of Judaism? If not, how should we view it?

Yeshiva: They're Old, They're Sick, They're Holocaust Survivors – Evict Them

Back in April of last year, I suggested we start a Haredi Hall of Shame after learning a Brooklyn yeshiva had…

What, If Anything, Is Wrong With This Statement?

“I’m not happy when any living creature dies—a Jew, a fly, a donkey.”

Is there anything morally wrong with this statement?

Mark Your Calendars

Professor Saul Lieberman's 25th yartzeit is coming up. UTJ has a memorial program scheduled featuring Dr. Elijah Schochet, "“The Prioritization of Human Life in Halakhah and Aggadah.”

Details after the jump in the extended post…

Orthodox Judaism and Non-Jews – Seperate and Unequal

Rabbi Chaim Brovender has an "Ask the Rabbi" column in the Jerusalem Post. I'd always heard good things about Rabbi Bovender. Here is a brief synopsis of his career from the Jerusalem Post that explains some of them:

…He moved to Israel before the Six Day War and delivered mail on a motor scooter. He served in the IDF. After the Six Day War, the young Yeshiva University graduate and graduate student in Semitic languages at Hebrew University, began opening the world of Jewish literacy to college graduates arriving from abroad. The typical Brovender students had Ivy League degrees, but they couldn't tell you why the menora in the Temple had seven branches and a Hanukkah menora had eight. Rabbi Brovender directed them to Torah study and developed a successful method for imparting the tools they would need to decode the primary sources of the Jewish people. He guided them through life choices with his mix of straight talk and criticism-deflecting humor. Because his credo was that everyone should study Torah, that meant women, too. So he started groundbreaking women's study centers in Jerusalem, including classes in Talmud. A learned friend confided that she had known that "Brovender's" was synonym for advanced Torah education for women before she knew that there was indeed a Chaim Brovender behind it all.

THE YESHIVOT had different names - Hartman's, Shapell's, Yeshivat Hamivtar, Bruria, Midreshet Lindenbaum - but wherever they were, what made his study programs especially attractive was Rabbi Brovender's respect for the individualism of each student. He wouldn't have been proud if the Harvard medical student or the Bennington poet had abandoned their secular studies. Just the opposite. He hoped that the special skills, talents and knowledge of those educated in the secular world could now be brought into the religious world and would enrich it, just as the Torah world would enrich those who embraced it in the secular world.…

Rabbi Brovender also founded ATID.

Yet a recent Ask the Rabbi column has this question and answer:

Q: On a French website Q&A, it was said that it is forbidden to give a gift to a goy. Is it your opinion? Thank you.

A: The question of whether we can give presents to a non Jew is discussed in the gemara and properly formalized in the Rambam and the shuclchan aruch. The Rambam says (Matnot Aniyim 7,7):

Jews are obliged to support the poor non-Jew with the poor of Yisrael, and this because it is the way of Shalom."

In the laws of Avoda Zara 10 4, the Rambam lists certain limitations in our dealing with the non Jew and ends by saying "and you cannot give them a present if it is for no particular reason".

The Rambam summarizes in Melachim 10 12:

"The Rabbis directed us regarding the non-Jews to visit their sick and to bury their dead with the Jewish dead, and to support their poor with the poor of Yisrael, and all of this in order to maintain the peace".

In theory the notion that Jews need to be separate has much to commend itself. Clearly, in this world living in peace with your friends and neighbors is and important principle. The Rambam tells us that we have to navigate the two positions intelligently and that chazal have given us some operative directives. If you feel that it is important to give a present to a non Jew, then by all means do so. Shalom, peace, trumps all the other possibilities.

Understand this well. Following this line of reasoning, a Jew can only give a gift to a non-Jew if giving that gift serves a purpose for the Jew. Either it must benefit the Jew in some tangible way (a gift to one's employer on his birthday, for example) or it must be given to prevent antisemitism.

But you can't give a gift to your neighbor just because s/he's your friend.

Orthodoxy views non-Jews as inferiors. In an ideal world, according to Orthodoxy, Jews would have no contact with non-Jews at all. Non-Jews would be completely shunned.

As it stands, this is not feasible, largely because non-Jews, experiencing this shunning, might react with hatred and, as long as they are the majority and greatly outnumber us, this hatred could lead to violence and Jewish deaths.

Rabbi Brovender, a Centrist or Modern Orthodox rabbi, cites the Rambam approvingly, as if nothing had changed since the 12th century.

Worse yet, Rabbi Brovender's approach turns the concept of Ohr LaGoyyim (a light onto the nations) into a one way street. Jews take but only give for the most venal and self-serving of reasons.

Judaism needs a major overhaul, a true reformation.

Those of us upset at the corruption and backwardness of the haredi world often delude ourselves into believing Modern Orthodoxy holds promise, that it will somehow stand up to haredi threats and abuses and win out in the end.

Increasingly, it is clear to me that hope is misplaced.

I.Q. and Race

Malcolm Gladwell writes in the New Yorker:

…The WISC [Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children]is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use dogs to hunt rabbits.”

“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.

This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”…

He goes on to show that the differences in IQ scores between blacks and whites reflects the lower level of cognitive stimulation black children often get, in large part because black children are more likely to grow up in single parent homes than white children, and because of urban inner city culture. The difference is not genetic, it is cultural, and it can be fixed – in part with better schools and with government social welfare programs that do not encourage out of wedlock births.

It's worth it to take the time to read the entire piece, especially because Commentary Magazine (disgracefully, I believe) spent a lot of energy promoting Charles Murray's and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve, and hasn't had the decency to retract despite the evidence proving those two men wrong.

If reading isn't your thing, you can hear a podcast interview with Gladwell by clicking here.

What is More Important? Saving a Life or Burying a Jew Intact?

The Ottawa Citizen reports:

…Rabbi Reuven Bulka, who has worked for years as an advocate for organ donation and was recently named chairman of the board of the Trillium Gift of Life Network, says people oppose organ donation, even within the Jewish faith. But he says they haven't thought the issue through.

"Many lay people say, 'We've grown up with the idea that when you are buried, you have to be buried whole.'

"So I say, 'Didn't you also grow up with the idea that saving life is the all-encompassing and overarching Jewish value that supplants every other value? Are you telling me that the obligation to bury a person whole is so sacred that it trumps saving a life?'"

Rabbi Bulka says that the obligation of burying the body with all its parts was valid before the 20th century. But it was trumped by modern medicine and the obligation to save life, and not idly stand by while the blood of your neighbour is being spilled.

A person who has a diseased kidney removed is not offending God because he is only buried with one kidney, notes the rabbi.

"It's an emotional thing and it's hard to dent because it keeps on coming up. It's frustrating," says Rabbi Bulka. "When are we going to get to the point where people get it, because it's so obvious."…

This "obvious" life saving, this so-called "overarching Jewish value" to save life, is missed by the vast majority of haredi rabbis who, in a typical haredi manner forbid their followers from donating organs but, at the same time, allow their followers to receive organs, largely because the organs are usually harvested from non-Jews.

Haredim consume this precious resource but rarely, if ever, contribute to it.

If a non-Jewish group refused to donate organs but haredim did donate, and if Jews were the majority of these organ donors and the members of that non-Jewish group demanded donated organs for their own use, bumping Jews further down recipient lists and assuredly killing some of them as a result, haredim would be the first to demand this non-Jewish group not receive organs.

It is a testament to the kindness of Americans and non-Haredi Israeli Jews that haredim are given organ transplants at all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

<sarcasm>Note:

But, of course, as our holy gedolim teach, Eisav hates Ya'akov, goyyim hate Jews. So it won't be long before goyyim stop this kindness and push all Jews off the recipient lists. The same will happen in Israel where, as we all know, secular Israelis are no different from goyyim because they have thrown off the yoke of our Holy Torah, the same Holy Torah that forbids haredim from donating organs in the first place.

And what of Rabbi Bulka? Isn't he frum? No, children, Rabbi Bulka is "modern." Modern rabbis are not frum. And, as we all know, there is no difference between Modern Orthodox and Conservative or even Reform, God forbid – they're all pretty much goyyim anyway.</end sarcasm>

The above note was added as a kindness to save ed, Edd, Meyer, Archie Bunker, and so many others the trouble of posting the same information as serious, non-sarcastic comments in the comments section below.

Haredim and Crime

A reader writes via email:

…One of the sheva mitzvot incumbent upon ALL peoples (according to Judaism) is to set up a justice system. So as Jews, we preach to others that this is what they are obliged to do and Lubavitchers in particular have from time to time been involved in "outreach" to non-Jews, based on the sheva mitzvot. Then, when the government of our host country (the one we CHOOSE to live in, even when we have the choice to move to a Jewish country) acts righteously and fulfills that commandment by setting up a proper justice system that even its leaders are subject to, instead of encouraging them by upholding the system and its values, we, or some of our brethren, think nothing of undermining that justice system and holding it in contempt…

Readers?

Do You Believe In God? Does It Matter?

I have a friend, a former Orthodox Jew, who is a deist. If I understand her position correctly, she deals with the dichotomy between the world as it is – and, more particularly,  the Jewish community as it is – on one hand, and God on the other, by removing God from day-to-day dealings with the world and humankind. So when rabbis hurt little children or Orthodox Jews are rotten to those who left the fold, this is the fault solely of the Jews involved – God has nothing to do with it. It is not God's responsibility.

I on the other hand see God as involved in the world on a much more detailed level. That leads me at times to either blame God (at least in part) for the sins committed by man or to negate God altogether.

Whether God is at fault or not, whether He even exists or not, I think the truth is the world is what it is because we – pretty much all of us – have made it this way.

Nathan Englander tells a story [* please see below] that illustrates this well. He was in Washington, DC recently and found himself near the Sudanese embassy. He sees a lone picket walking in front of the embassy carrying a protest sign. The man seems to be a holdover from the 60s, an old hippie.

Englander's first thought is the guy is a meshuggenah, a crazy person. But to his credit Englander immediately realizes he's made an error in judgment – we who do nothing, who go on with our lives as if there is no genocide in Darfur or famine in Somalia, are the truly crazy ones.

Is God sitting back watching, waiting for us to do the right thing? Waiting for us to feed the hungry, house the homeless, care for the sick and frail?

Is God deeply but silently involved in all this madness, madness that one day we will somehow view as orderly and just?

Or is God nothing more than a figment of our imaginations, a near-universal wishful thought, a mass hysteria brought about by evolution?

No matter what God is or is not, no matter if or how He interacts with the world, we are still left with only one sane choice – we have to make this world better, we have to make this world kinder, we have to make this world just.

Whether it's stopping a child rapist or feeding a starving child, we all must be orthodox or orthoprax when it comes to this.

If Jews could somehow stop obsessing with ritual particulars and instead start obsessing about helping people, this world would be a much better place. And that, I believe, would make God, whatever He is, far happier than He is today.

*I wrote a similar story a few years ago and mentioned this to Englander after his talk last week. I sent it out, got rejected, rewrote it, got very strong positive responses from writers but still have not placed it.

(I've been told it's too Jewish for the general market and too controversial for some of the Jewish market because it can be read as anti-Orthodox. Then there is the question of what genre it is, and how it would fit in with other works.)

I'll post it here. Please let me know if you like it.

Egypt Arrests and Deports Sudanese Refugees Sent Back to Egypt by Israel

Remember when Ehud Olmert decided to deport Sudanese refugees to Egypt, promising that these poor people would not then be arrested or harassed by Egypt and would not be sent back to the Sudan? Remember how human rights activists inside and outside Israel doubted Olmert's word just as they doubted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's? Remember how some of us argued that these deportations were against core Jewish values?

Sadly, it seems we were correct. Ha'aretz reports:

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees is investigating whether Egypt broke its promise not to deport Sudanese refugees back to their country of origin after they had illegally crossed into Israel, UNHCR's Cairo spokeswoman told Haaretz.

The investigation, which also involves Israel's Foreign Affairs Ministry, revolves around 48 Sudanese refugees whom Israel deported to Egypt two months ago.

The spokeswoman, Abir Atfah, said her organization asked the Egyptian authorities to allow the UNHCR to meet the refugees, who were deported back to Egypt on August 19, but this effort failed. Atfah believes the 48 refugees were arrested as soon as they entered Egypt.

"Some of the refugees deserve recognition as asylum seekers. We are very troubled by the possibility that they were deported back to Sudan," Atfah said. She added that 23 of the refugees had asked to be recognized as asylum seekers.…

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem is trying through the embassy in Cairo to gain information about the group of refugees, a ministry official told Haaretz. Ministry officials said they have so far been unsuccessful.

One Sudanese refugee who is in Israel said a relative of his who had been deported to Egypt told him over the phone she was detained in Egypt for three weeks until she was flown to Sudan. She was questioned by the Sudanese authorities and then released, he said.

The Rebbe – "If you love your father, mother, sister, brother, more than me, you are not worthy of being mine."

1. "If you love your father, mother, sister, brother, more than me, you are not worthy of being mine."*

                 –Jesus, as quoted in Matthew 10:37, speaking in a discourse to 12 disciples as Jesus is sending them out to teach unlettered Jews the 'authentic' path to God.

2.

            – Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Igros Kodesh 17, p. 52 as quoted in Professor Menachem Friedman, "Habad as Messianic Fundamentalism," in Marty, "Accounting For Fundamentalism," U of Chicago Press, 1994.

3. Please discuss.

*The parallels between this chapter of Matthew and the theology of Chabad, especially under its last three rebbes, seems astonishing. A quick reading finds the following, along with the one noted above:

• Sending out disciples.
• Find and teach "lost Jews," i.e., Jews who have strayed – or have been forcibly kept from – from ritual observance.
• Give freely to those "lost Jews" you find.
• Don't raise money here in the center to sustain you in the outskirts, raise money in the outskirts.
• Preach the doctrine truthfully but be careful – and be shrewd – you will be surrounded by enemies.
• Those that help you and bless you help and bless me and I and God will reward them for it. Those who do the opposite will be cursed. (The negative of this coupling is shown mostly in hasidic stories told by Chabad rebbes and leaders. Those that try to impede the "tzaddik" are often shown to be later injured or to suffer in some way. Conversely, that person may do "teshuva" and receive commensurate blessings.)
• "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body…" (Think of the 6th rebbe who supposedly told Soviet authorities as a gun was held to his head, "That little toy may frighten someone with one world and two [i.e., many] gods but it does not fighten one like me who has only One God but two worlds [i.e., this physical life and the afterlife]."
• And, as RebelJew notes in the comments below, the Moshiach (messiah) Campaign itself.

I've posted the entire chapter below, after the jump. See if you can find any more parallels to Chabad thought.

New Reform Prayer Book Includes Prayer For Resurrection Of The Dead – Prayer Removed 122 Years Ago Returns

The JTA reports:

The Reform movement's rabbinic association is set to publish a new siddur, or prayer book.

Mishkan T'filah (Sanctuary of Prayer) is 712 pages long and more than a decade in the making. The new prayer book was beset by delays and still does not have a final publication date, but is expected to be available shortly after the High Holidays.

A key feature of the book is its double-page layout, with the right side featuring traditional prayers translated and transliterated, and the left featuring related readings and "spiritual commentary," according to Rabbi Peter Knobel, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and chair of the book's editorial committee.

The book also features the return of the traditional prayer for the resurrection of the dead, which was removed in 1885 by the movement's Pittsburgh Platform. Knobel said the reintroduction was divisive and the movement's earlier version, which praises God who gives life to all, is retained in the new book.…

I'm speechless. I really am.

Rabbi Gil Student Censors Anything That "Undermines" Orthodox Judaism

Rabbi Gil Student writes on his blog Hirhurim:

In order to achieve more transparency in moderation of comments on this blog, let me be clear about a policy that I have not been implementing with sufficient consistency but will going forward. Comments that attempt to undermine Judaism will be deleted. It is not out of fear but out of annoyance. Find yourself another soapbox. Skeptics are welcome on this blog to read and to contribute comments, but not to preach their skepticism.

I have no doubt that skeptic blogs will take this as an admission that traditional Judaism cannot withstand criticism. Let them. It is nothing but a willful delusion.…

Of course, it is not a "willful delusion." Rabbi Student has been deleting challenging comments unannounced for years, skewing the 'debate' he hosts to make his positions appear stronger.

When do I delete comments or ban commenters?

1. If a commenter uses more than one name/alias, especially to make it appear as if his argument has more support than it truly does.
2. If a commenter uses abusive language directed at other commenters or others.
3. Foul language.
4. Spam, spam-like behavior.
5. Missionary activity.
6. Lying to make an argument appear stronger, as in quoting a source but distorting its meaning or lying about the actual quote. (I.e., "Ploni, quoted in Smith, http://www.example.com/smith/ploni/shmaryswrong.html/, says the earth is most definitely flat and Einstein agrees with him as quoted there." The source actually says, "Ploni, quoted in Smith, http://www.example.com/smith/ploni/shmaryswrong.html/, says the earth is not flat and there is no scientific doubt about this."
7. Leaving comments without using either your real name --or-- one alias. In other words, no unattributed comments are allowed.
8. Posting other people's personal information, including addresses, telephone numbers, etc.

The NY Times: Can Jews Save Non-Jewish Lives On The Sabbath?

Noah Feldman, a former student of Maimonides yeshiva day school in Brookline, Massachusetts and currently a law professor at Harvard and a adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine) writes in an article titled The Orthodox Paradox:

…One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, [this would be Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik] that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.…

The sad fact is that there is little, if any, halakhic (Jewish legal) support for the doctor's position on the origin of the rabbinic permission to save non-Jews on the Sabbath. Non-Jews are saved because, if we did not do so, non-Jews would not save us and, worse yet, may actually kill us. That is the rabbinic reasoning behind the loophole that allows us (not "commands us," allows us) to save non-Jewish life on the Sabbath or at other times and locations where such lifesaving would be in conflict with Jewish law.

You can see modern day examples of this throughout this blog on posts dealing with Ethiopian Jews and their rescue. In this case, the people needing rescue were considered "doubtful" Jews (safek Jews) under Jewish law, a legal category that, while questioning the Jewish status of these people commands (note the term used here: "commands") rescue as if they were fully and unquestionably Jewish.

Even so, many commenters treat these people as if they were fully non-Jewish, and then go on to excuse the rabbinic and political leaders – like the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson – who refused to help save them. Another time this issue has come up is when Israel has sent disaster relief teams to Africa or Asia. Invariably there are a chorus of voices from the ultra-Orthodox world condemning this.

Yet, in practice, throughout much of history, it seems Jews have treated non-Jews on the Sabbath, have saved their lives and given whatever aid possible. This may be because the fundamentalism common among Orthodox Jews today was uncommon throughout most of history. Or it may be that the human need to provide aid and succor overwhelms any religious strictures to the contrary.

Indeed, the history of Jews and non-Jews in ancient Judea during most of the Greek and Roman eras shows that people interacted, often with a high degree of socialization and friendliness. (Indeed, many of our kashrut restrictions – gevinat akum (forbidding non-Jewish cheese), halav akum (forbidding non-Jewish milk), bishul yisrael (forbidding non-Jewish cooking of many foods), and pat yisrael (forbidding non-Jewish bread under many circumstances), all come at least in part to separate Jews and non-Jews.

These restrictions (often promulgated by Beit Shammai, sometimes by violence and force, like the incident described in the Jerusalem Talmud Shabbat 1:4, the source for many of the restrictions noted above and described by the Talmud as the "darkest day" for the Jewish people since the making of the Golden Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai) were accompanied by a commensurate restriction – the forgoing of the command to be a light onto the nations of the world, to reach out and teach monotheism to them.

This closure of Judaism marked, until the flowering of Muslim Spain in the two centuries before Maimonides, after whom the Brookline yeshiva day school is named, the ghettoization of Judaism, a turning inward and, some would say, backward, into a reliance on magic, superstition, incantations, "demon" avoidance and a blend of neo-paganism and monotheism. Orthodoxy, especially haredi Orthodoxy, prizes the fruits of this backward slide – it prays to angels along with praying to God; it prizes the folk medicine of a backward era, often over the highly advanced science and medicine of today; and, in the face of overwhelming genetic evidence  to the contrary, it continues to see what to them a very real  physical difference between Jews and non-Jews, almost, but not quite, as if they were referencing two different species, not two different religious outlooks.

This is, I suspect, the overriding cause, the first (if usually unspoken) reason behind the tightening strictures put on conversion by haredi rabbis and the sad but all too predictable willingness of so-called Centrist Orthodox rabbis to go along with them.

If conversion to Judaism is an intellectual shift, the rejection of polytheism and the acceptance of monotheism (and this is exactly how it is presented throughout the Bible and in very early rabbinic literature), stricter conversion standards and higher hoops for prospective converts to jump through are not necessary.

But, if conversion to Judaism is a metaphysical shift, involving the nature and origin of the prospective convert's soul (and this is how conversion is often portrayed in latter rabbinic literature starting about the time rabbis became especially concerned with demons and began to formulate prayers to angels), then increasing stringencies deemed necessary to ascertain the "nature" of the prospective convert's soul can, to those less rooted in empirical reality, seem reasonable. After all, the soul cannot be seen; there is no way to detect it. making conversion more and more difficult, more and more demeaning, will drive away all but the most committed of the potential converts.  That we may convert only a fraction of those that truly merit conversion, well, that is the price we have to pay for a religious purity determined by the status of an object – the human soul – that we can neither see, qualify or quantify.

This latter approach is concerned with finding Jewish souls "lost" in non-Jewish bodies. It is an idea foreign to Biblical thought and foreign to the earliest layers of rabbinic thought, as well. Yet it dominates halakha (Jewish law) as it is practiced today.

Reasonable people save lives first and ask questions later. Indeed, this is exactly what most Jews do, regardless of their religious outlooks.

Still, it is problematic to have a body of religious law and thought that so demonizes the Other that it is willing – and. in fact, endorses, even if only in theory – allowing a non-Jewish infant to die in a Sabbath building collapse when he could otherwise be saved.

To those who believe, as Schneur Zalman of Liady, the author of the Tanya and the first Chabad rebbe, did. that source of non-Jewish souls is wholly evil, letting a non-Jewish baby die when he could otherwise be saved is perhaps not problematic (Tanya, end of chapter 1):

מה שאין כן נפשות אומות העולם הן משאר קליפות טמאות שאין בהן טוב כלל…

The souls of the nations  of the world, however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever…

For the rest of us, as it always has, saving life will trump everything else. We are not here on this earth to judge souls. We have no capability to do so. All we can do is judge people as individuals by their actions.

Apologists will note that the only permission to save Jews on the Sabbath comes from the idea that breaking Sabbath law to save a Jewish life assures that Jewish life will have more Sabbaths to observe. There is a very real question, they point out, whether or not non-Orthodox Jews can be saved on the Sabbath because they do not keep the Sabbath properly, if at all, and saving them only assures many more Sabbaths spent in violation of the law.

What apologists do not tell you is how that halakhic problem is resolved in Jewish law.

It is resolved by pointing out that any Jew, no matter how non-observant of Judaism he may be  at this moment, has the potential to return to full observance. There are no barriers to repentance. Therefore, he must be saved.

The non-Jew is still a non-Jew. He will never observe the Sabbath because he is not commanded to do so by God. Therefore, because he will not and cannot legally under Jewish law observe the Sabbath, he is not to be saved.

But allowing non-Jews to die in Sabbath fires, drownings and building collapses makes for bad public policy, especially when those non-Jews are in the majority and have armies and police forces. So the rabbis ruled that Sabbath law was to be set aside to save non-Jews, "for the sake of peace."

The Jewish doctor cited by Feldman was "wrong;" the rabbi "right." And that is perhaps the most serious indictment of Orthodoxy you will ever see.

[Hat Tips: Dr. Gershon Mendel and Dr. S. Rofeh-Filosof.]

The Rabbi MK and the Attorney, Round 5

Shahar Ilan writes in Ha'aretz:

They don't understand that barring entry to an honest man like Hartog is an insult to the Knesset, not to Hartog. Many of us are responsible for the fact that he broke down, and we will all pay the price for the slap on the face.

No profound understanding of human nature is necessary to understand that the slap delivered by Amnon De Hartog - the Justice Ministry official who approves support for public institutions - to MK Yakov Cohen reflected serious distress. For 15 years Hartog has guarded the public coffers and has fought our battles. And when last year he endured an unremitting offensive led by MK Moshe Gafni of United Torah Judaism, he remained alone. Hartog is a very gentle man. When he slapped Cohen on the face he found an unacceptable - and for him very uncharacteristic - way of making clear that this nightmare cannot continue.

The Knesset presidency barred Hartog from entering the building for the rest of his life. The truth is that had this punishment been imposed a day earlier, he would have considered it a prize. In recent months, his every visit to the Knesset could turn into a nightmare. Every time he appeared before a committee he could expect [personal] attacks by ultra-Orthodox MKs, and particularly Gafni. Gafni did not hesitate to insult him and accuse him of working for the benefit of national religious education, because his children study there.

Many people in the Knesset thought it was a scandal, but nobody did anything about it, especially not the heads of the committees that were supposed to restrain Gafni. Hartog's big mistake was that he did not refuse to come to the Knesset. The Ethics Committee discussed the subject last Monday, and like a trade union that protects its members, it didn't even reprimand Gafni. What they don't understand in the Knesset is that barring entry to an honest man like Hartog is an insult to the Knesset, not to Hartog.

The ultra-Orthodox press conducted a propaganda campaign against Hartog, and published pictures of him repeatedly. Hartog, a very religious man, lives in a mixed neighborhood with both Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox residents. There were synagogues in the neighborhood where they refused to pray with him. And let it be clear: When Hartog fought against ultra-Orthodox institutions, he did so from a halakhic standpoint, which found it incomprehensible that religious people could steal and receive money fraudulently.

It is not unusual that the ultra- Orthodox use Holocaust-related terms when attacking someone they see as their enemy. For Hartog these attacks hit a sensitive nerve. His father, a Holocaust survivor, died a few months ago. He didn't understand how one could say such things about someone whose parents survived the Holocaust. Every noble act by Hartog was interpreted negatively by the ultra-Orthodox. Two years ago he fought to have children in a Hadera ultra-Orthodox school removed from a building next to a high-tension wire. The ultra-Orthodox depicted this as a war against ultra- Orthodox education.

There are people who can say they sounded a warning. Haaretz reporter Yuval Yoaz, for example, published an article about Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann, who abandoned Hartog. And an attorney, Rabbi Gilad Kariv, filed a complaint to the Ethics Committee against Gafni. But what about the approximately 100 MKs who are not ultra-Orthodox, many of whom witnessed the attack and remained silent? What about the attorney general's staff, who did not understand that in the end Hartog would break down? What about the organizations fighting for good government, which did not come to his defense? What about the rest of the press, which did not fulfill its role in defending the man who safeguarded the money that belongs to all of us? What about me, who was the person most familiar with Hartog's work, and still did not think to sound a warning?

Many of us are responsible for the fact that Amnon De Hartog broke down, and we will all pay the price for the slap on the face; both with the money that will now flow without interference to non-government organizations that should not receive it, and with a marked increase in the level of corruption. Some people are irreplaceable. Hartog is one of them.

Previous posts: 1,  2, 3 and 4.

Judaism's Own Untouchables – The Sexual Gift That Never Stops Giving

Writing on Jewschool, David Kelsey points out what would be the biggest stumbling block to recruiting new ba'alei teshuva – if the BTs knew about it. For the most part, potential BTs do not know. I think it's time to change that.

Simply put, if your mother did not go to the mikva and immerse following her menstrual period immediately before you were conceived, you are what is known in halakha as a ben  (or bat) nida. And you are, according to halakha, blemished, tainted, and far more likely to do evil than a Jew born to a mother who did immerse. Therefore, halakha advises that untainted Jews not marry you – or your descendants.

That's right – Judaism has a caste system and BTs are down near the bottom of it.

Several great rabbis have ruled that ben nida does not apply to a BTs who comport themselves in a good (subservient) way. (Perhaps the most normal of these rulings comes from the Steipler Gaon, who points out that even the most haredi of haredi families must statistically have a blemish like this in its background and that, since the taint is never removed, the taint must still remain and exist in every one of us. Therefore, we don't need to worry about who is and who is not a ben nida.) But that has not stopped wide swaths of the haredi world from forbidding their children to marry BTs, and even children of BTs.

I first heard of this issue early in my contact with Chabad. I heard about it from other BTs, more experienced than I, usually as a warning – Don't even think about marrying Rivkie or Chanie. Her mother went to the mikva and yours probably did not, so you can't marry her.

Chabad rabbis would spin this problem by saying that a BT's children could marry into a 'non-tainted' family. And there was always the occasional exception to the rule, handy for pointing out the 'openness' of Chabad. Of course, that exception nearly always involved a BT with a lot of money or a 'untainted' girl with serious mental or physical problems.

No matter how you slice it, Orthodoxy has a caste system based on a metaphysical taint that can never be removed. How many Jews would become Orthodox if this were widely known? How many non-Orthodox philanthropists would fund Orthodox institutions?

A lot fewer than do so today would be my guess.

Wouldn't it be nice to see how many that would be?

Chabad Takes Major Donation From Fraudster; Rabbi Morris Esformes' Nursing Homes Have History Of Dangerous Care And Abuse

The Jewish Press reports on the new Chabad museum, community center, synagogue and school planned for Alaska:

Chicago philanthropist Rabbi Morris Esformes has pledged to sponsor two new historic landmarks: the Alaska Jewish Historical Museum and Community Center, and a separate facility for the synagogue, preschool, and future day school of the Lubavitch Center of Alaska.

The pledge was made during a welcoming reception and dinner for Esformes at the Lubavitch Jewish Center of Alaska, an event led by Lubavitch Center director Rabbi Yosef Greenberg; Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich; State House of Representatives Speaker John Harris; former Anchorage mayor, Rick Mystrom; and renowned founding Alaskan Jewish community members, David and Shani Green.…

But despite this, the project was under-funded. Enter Chicago philanthropist Rabbi Morris Esformes, known for his generosity towards educational and humanitarian institutions across the globe, and for his support of small Jewish communities around America. “Every child should have the opportunity to receive some form of Jewish education,” Esformes says.

Toward this end, Esformes has been involved in establishing Jewish community centers, preschools, Talmud Torahs, Sunday schools and Jewish day schools across America…

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Well, not really. Esformes made his money from poorly run nursing homes and fraud:

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2006/November/06_civ_803.html

Larkin Community Hospital in Miami and its current and former owners, Dr. Jack Michel, Dr. James Desnick, Morris Esformes and Philip Esformes, have paid $15.4 million to settle federal and Florida civil health care fraud claims against them, the Justice Department announced today. Additionally, 34 related companies owned by the Esformes that were used to operate nine assisted living facilities are part of the settlement along with Claudia Pace, an employee of one of the Esformes-owned companies; and Frank Palacios, a long-time employee of the hospital.

The settlement resolves the civil case entitled United States v. Jack Jacobo Michel, M.D., et al., which the government filed in 2004, alleging violations of the False Claims Act. The state of Florida joined the suit later that year.

The government alleged that in 1997, Larkin, then owned by Desnick, paid kickbacks to physicians in return for patient admissions. The United States contended that the primary recipient of the kickbacks was Jack Michel, who was paid for patient admissions to Larkin by himself and his brother, Dr. George Michel. Jack Michel purchased Larkin in 1998.  In 2000, Desnick was a party to a $14 million settlement with the United States for a similar kickback scheme from 1992 to 2000 at another facility he owned, Doctors Hospital of Hyde Park in Chicago.

The United States also alleged in the Michel suit that from 1998 to 1999, Jack Michel, George Michel, Morris Esformes, Philip Esformes, Frank Palacios and Claudia Pace conspired to admit patients to Larkin for medically unnecessary treatment.  The government asserted that some of these patients came from assisted living facilities owned and operated by Jack Michel, Morris Esformes and Philip Esformes.

“The Department of Justice is committed to vigorously litigating cases about conduct that undermines the integrity of the Medicare and Medicaid programs,” said Peter D. Keisler, Assistant Attorney General for the Department’s Civil Division. “We will not tolerate health care providers who pay kickbacks or perform medically unnecessary treatments on elderly beneficiaries in order to generate Medicare and Medicaid payments.”

The case was investigated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Florida Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. The case was handled by the Justice Department’s Civil Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida in Miami and the Office of the Attorney General of the state of Florida.

Esformes' homes have housed sex offenders unsupervised within a population of mentally ill, retarded and elderly patients. Residents in his homes have died from heatstroke caused by the horrible conditions of Esformes' homes. His homes have been fined the largest amounts states can fine. They are regularly on government watchlists for substandard care. Download esformes_florida.pdf

Rabbi Esformes is a bad man. But that does not stop Orthodox Jewish causes across the world from taking his money – money earned on the backs of taxpayers and vulnerable adults – and honoring him. Conservative institutions like the University of Chicago have taken money from Esformes and honored him.

What good is Judaism if a man like Esformes can be honored? Not much good, I'd say.

Here is JWB's file on Rabbi Esformes (Or below as a pdf.)

Download jewish_whistleblower__rabbi_morris_i. Esformes, more unregistered sex-offenders and violations in his nursing homes. UPDATE_ numerous heat related deaths at his homes +.pdf

The Rebbe and the Holocaust: Chabad's Little White Lie

Rabbi Yankie Tauber writes on Chabad.org:

…In his writings and discussions on the subject, the Rebbe rejected all theological explanations for the Holocaust. What greater conceit -- the Rebbe would say -- and what greater heartlessness, can there be than to give a "reason" for the death and torture of millions of innocent men, women and children? Can we presume to assume that an explanation small enough to fit inside the finite bounds of human reason can explain a horror of such magnitude? We can only concede that there are things that lie beyond the finite ken of the human mind. Echoing his father-in-law, the Rebbe would say: It is not my task to justify G-d on this. Only G-d Himself can answer for what He allowed to happen. And the only answer we will accept, said the Rebbe, is the immediate and complete Redemption that will forever banish evil from the face of the earth and bring to light the intrinsic goodness and perfection of G-d's creation.…

Of course, Yankie Tauber is fibbing.

Previous posts: 1 & 2.

Here's the entire Chabad.org page in pdf, for your archives:

Download what_the_rebbe_said_and_didnt_say_about_the_holocaust_the_holocaust.pdf

[Hat Tip: Friar Yid.]

Chabad Responds To "Attacks" On The Rebbe Based On The Rebbe's Justification Of The Holocaust

In response to this piece by Professor Yehuda Bauer, we have the following rebuttal from Chabad:

How the Rebbe understood the Holocaust
By Eliezer Shemtov

In his op-ed in Haaretz on June 1 ("God as surgeon"), Prof. Yehuda Bauer refers to the opinion of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe regarding the Holocaust.

Without responding to his unwarranted, unacademic, personal attacks against the Rebbe, I think that Bauer gravely misunderstood the nuances and delicate concepts that the Rebbe was conveying in his 1980 letter to Knesset member Chaika Grossman.

The letter to the late MK Grossman was written to an individual whom the Rebbe surely understood to be in a position to correctly understand its contents without more explanation. I am sure that Prof. Bauer, too, writes in one language when corresponding with colleagues and in another when writing for the general public. Nothing in the letter to Grossman contradicts anything the Rebbe said before or after; anything said before or after simply expounds upon and clarifies the concepts written in that letter in a relatively condensed manner. The quoted letter is published in "Likutei Sichot" (Vol. 21, page 397). I would suggest that any serious student of this issue study that letter in its entirety and original before forming any opinion.

Following, however, are some of my personal insights into the matter:

In the letter, the Rebbe was responding to MK Grossman's published questions regarding the Rebbe's published views.

The Rebbe first expresses his astonishment at the fact that she based her criticism on an unedited version of the Rebbe's talks, which was subject to slight misquotes or lacking adequate context, and admonished her for publishing criticism without first checking with him what he meant to say.

The Rebbe then establishes in no uncertain terms who the "good guys" and who the "bad guys" are. When referring to those who perished in the Holocaust, we say "Hashem yikom damam" - meaning "may God avenge their blood." We refer to them as kedoshim, holy individuals. When referring to Hitler and his like, we always add the epithet "yemach shmo," that is, "may his name be obliterated." The Rebbe then goes into a lengthy, detailed explanation of his view, addressing the issues at hand point by point in a detailed albeit condensed way.

Prof. Bauer quotes the Rebbe as saying that "Hitler was a messenger of God in the same sense that Nebuchadnezzar is called 'God's servant' in the Book of Jeremiah (Chapter 25)." How do you, Prof. Bauer, explain Jeremiah's reference to Nebuchadnezzar?

The Rebbe, with this quote, simply draws attention to the biblical precedent seeing in each and every event the hand of God, however inexplicable to the human mind or painful to the human heart. Bear in mind that Nebuchadnezzar was not rewarded, but punished, for what he did.

In his letter, the Rebbe points out both a similarity as well as a distinction between Nebuchadnezzar and Hitler. Whereas the massacres in Jeremiah's times are understood to be a punishment, the Rebbe insists that the Holocaust cannot be understood in this way. The comparison with Nebuchadnezzar was merely intended to make the point out everything that happens in this world is part of God's design, however incomprehensible it might be to the mortal mind.

Here we find yet another example of the inaccuracies appearing in Prof. Bauer's article. He writes: "The Rebbe's stance, therefore, is clear: The Holocaust was a good thing because it lopped off a disease-ravaged limb of the Jewish people - in other words, the millions who perished in the Holocaust - in order to cleanse the Jewish people of its sins. The 'surgery' he spoke of was such a massive corrective procedure that the suffering (i.e., the murder of the Jews) was minor compared to its curative effect."

This is a gross misinterpretation. Prof. Bauer misunderstood the comparison to surgery. Careful reading of the letter will show that the example of surgery is brought only in order to illustrate how something as horrible as an amputation, although beneficial, can seem criminal to the uninitiated. It is by no means brought in order to imply that those that perished were "amputated" for the benefit of the survivors.

The Rebbe clearly writes that although we have no understanding as to why the Holocaust had to happen, we do believe that it is for the benefit primarily of those that perished (not merely for the benefit of the survivors). The Rebbe does not attempt to explain what the benefit is; he simply asserts that it must be for the (eventual?) benefit of those who perished (especially taking into account our belief in resurrection and the world-to-come).

The Rebbe points out that even when the one going through the surgery knows that it is for his benefit, he still cries out in pain, as do those nearest and dearest to him. It is perfectly normal and theologically acceptable for a believing Jew to cry out in pain and clamor to God for mercy, when suffering or when witnessing the suffering of others.

These are just a few examples of how slight inaccuracies in quotes and context can generate conclusions totally contrary to those intended. One must be more careful when quoting our sages and their words and make sure that it is done accurately before taking issue with them.

Rabbi Eliezer Shemtov is director of Beit Jabad del Uruguay in Montevideo.

There are several schools of thought in classical Judaism about why bad things – mega bad things – happen to the Jewish people. Most are predicated on God's involvement in the bad, and explain that by saying we do not truly understand the 'evil.' If we could view it from God's perspective, the reasoning goes, we would only see good.

A favorite example given is the operating theater. Imagine waling into a gallery overlooking an operating room. There behind the glass is are people dressed in white cutting off a man's leg. You have never seen surgery. You do not even realize there is a medical treatment called surgery. What do you think when you see the 'horror' below you? You scream, you try to get the 'butchers' to stop mutilating the man. But, in truth, what these men are doing is saving the life of that patient.

The problem here is not with the Rebbe's analogy or Professor Bauer's understanding (or lack there of) of it. The problem is the Rebbe made statement's without carefully thinking about how they would be viewed by people who are not steeped in the particular theology espoused by him. A more current example of this lack of forethought comes from Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who, not so long ago used the explanation of the Ari for the Destruction of the Second Temple and the deaths that surrounded it to explain the Holocaust. Rabbi Yosef's remarks were met with a similar firestorm of disapproval.

I wrote a piece for the American Jewish World explaining – but not necessarily endorsing – Rabbi Yosef's position. That piece was in response to a piece similar to Professor Bauer's, this one written by an old friend, Holocaust scholar Stephen Feinstein. I recall Rabbi Moshe Feller, the head Chabad rabbi in the upper Midwest, being very pleased with that piece and hoping the JTA would pick it up. (The JTA did not.)

My piece didn't change Stephen Feinstein's mind, largely because the fine distinctions needed to make these types of analogies work – in this case, the amputated limb is not itself bad, per se – are difficult to accept for those who do not buy into this line of reasoning to begin with.

Going back to the example of the Ari, he was explaining the Destruction of the Second Temple 1500 years after it happened. But what he was really doing without expressly saying so was explaining the Expulsion from Spain less than 100 years after that tragic event, roughly the same distance between it and the Ari's generation as the Holocaust and ours.

The Rebbe would say after this experience that it is wrong to explain or justify the Holocaust. It is simply too close, to raw, and no explanation will be accepted.

I would say that a God who needs to treat an illness by roasting alive hundreds of thousands of Jewish babies is not much of a God. The Rebbe, I think, would reply that an illness that requires the roasting of those babies as treatment must be a horrible, horrible illness.

In essence, this is exactly what is happening today between Professor Bauer and Rabbi Shemtov.

The Rebbe's explanation requires belief in a perfect, kind and just God who does no evil. To accept that requires accepting unspeakable horrors as good, divinely mandated and endorsed. For most people, even believing people, this is very difficult to do.

The Rebbe's words cut like jagged-edged swords. They were widely publicized and hurt many, many people, especially survivors.

The Rebbe meant no harm, but harm was done, nonetheless.

Professor Bauer's words are not "unwarranted, unacademic, personal attacks against the Rebbe." They are words of a survivor, a man who saw unspeakable horrors and spent his life documenting them so the world would not be able to forget, not be able to sweep a few million butchered Jews under the rug.

What Chabad should do is admit the Rebbe's error, his lapse of judgment, and then move on. But Chabad will not do this because it will never admit that its rebbes were anything less than perfect.

Leading Israeli Rabbis: Do Not Help Darfur Refugees Who Reach Israeli Soil

Here is a piece by Matthew Wagner from today's Jerusalem Post. Wagner reports Rabbi Dov Lior, the rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba and a leader of the National Religious right wing has ruled that Israel should not aid Darfur refugees who have found their way to Israel. (Rabbi Lior earlier ruled that these poor people should be stopped at the borders and pushed back into the Sinai wilderness.)

His ruling was echoed by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva and another leader of National Religious Jews. Efraim Zuroff, also an Orthodox Jew, of the Simon Wiesenethal Center's Israel office also agrees.

First, Rabbi Lior:

Israel has no moral responsibility to aid Darfur refugees, and their plight must not be compared to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Chief Rabbi of Hebron-Kiryat Arba Dov Lior said on Wednesday.

He was responding to a query on the "Yeshiva" Internet forum.

Lior's questioner said Israel was obligated to help Sudanese refugees who reached its borders just as the nations of the world were morally responsible to help Jews suffering under Nazi Germany.

But Lior disagreed: "The Holocaust is not a good example [of a general moral obligation that can be compared to Israel's obligation to Darfur refugees]," he said. "During the Holocaust, Jews were hunted. The Germans wanted to destroy all the Jews wherever they were. The Swiss who saved the Jews [sic] knew that someone was hunting them down and wanted to murder them.

"We have enough problems of our own with immigration absorption. We need to take care of our own 'Sderot refugees' and we do not have budget reserves. We have enough poor people in Israel. There are plenty of nations that can help those refugees besides us.

"The poor of one's own country take precedence over other peoples' poor."

Now Rabbi Aviner:

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva, said Jewish law obliged Jews to treat all human beings with loving kindness.

"We have to do it not because of the Holocaust but because God commanded to treat all of His creations, especially those created in His image, with loving kindness.

"We don't do it for the publicity or to look good in the eyes of the goyim. Jews have done acts of loving kindness in the past even when they were paid back with hatred," Aviner said.

However, he also said our own poor and homeless, including Israelis "expelled" from the Gaza Strip, came first. "We are a country of refugees," said Aviner. "We simply do not have the resources."

Now Efraim Zuroff:

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office, agreed with Lior that comparing the plight of Jews during the Holocaust to that of Sudanese refugees was inaccurate.

"Sudanese who managed to reach Israel had already escaped ethnic cleansing by entering Egypt from Sudan," he said. "The move to Israel was an attempt to find a better haven.

"Obviously, as Jews who were victims of genocide, we have a special duty to help stop the ethnic cleansing inside Sudan. But at the same time, Israel has limited resources. We cannot possibly help all Sudanese refugees," he said.

The case being discussed here are refugees who walked across the the Sinai and illegally crossed into Israel seeking shelter. They are victims of genocide who fled to Egypt, were persecuted there, some were sent back to Darfur by Egyptian authorities, and others fled to Israel.

To say, as Rabbi Lior does, that the "poor of one's own country take precedence over other people's poor" is disingenuous. That halakha is talking about sending money or aid to another city or country. Then, all things being equal, the poor of your own town or family come first. But, if the poor in another country are starving to death, and yours merely skip one or two meals per week, or eat less choice foods for the Sabbath, the halakha mandates aiding the poor starving to death in that other country.

So what are Rabbis Lior and Aviner really saying? They are saying this – Darfur refugees are not Jews. The halakha quoted is talking about helping Jews. The implication here is clear. Darfur refugees do not deserve our help because they are not Jewish.

But the truth is, once these poor people get to us, they are our poor, and they must be aided just like any other poor person in Israel. That is the halakha. (Some of you may recall biblical verses about how to treat strangers, verses that also say, "…because you were once strangers in Egypt.")

So what we have here is two prominent right wing National Religious rabbis with huge followings. Both misrepresent the halakha, it seems for political reasons.

These rabbis are concerned about aiding settlers who refused to leave Gaza, lost much of their benefits as a result, and now suffer – all because they listened to these very same National Religious rabbis (and others, as well) who ordered them to remain in Gaza.

As for the Sederot refugees, aiding them is not a matter of a shortage in funds – it is a matter of s shortage in political will.

As for Zuroff, he is right and he is wrong. Yes, the parallel is not exact. But he raises a straw man rather than deal with the actual situation. No one is talking about taking in all or most of Darfur refugees. We are dealing with a few hundred people, not millions, and the state – and, just as importantly, the Israeli private sector – has more than enough money to help these people.

The saddest thing of all here is noting Rabbi Lior's background:

…During the Holocaust, Lior himself was a refugee. He and his family were expelled from Poland and wandered through the Soviet Union. Both his parents died of starvation.

Lior is one of the most respected and influential religious Zionist rabbis in more right-wing circles. Many of his students hold key positions in national religious high schools and he is the spiritual authority for the Ariel Youth Movement.…

What did God spare Rabbi Lior for? To repeat the mistakes and evil of his parent's oppressors?

I will say one very controversial thing about this sad affair. Scholars study the formation of the Hitler Youth. They seek to answer, in part, a fundamental question: How could an entire generation of children be, for want of a better term, brainwashed? How could Hitler, yemach shemo, have 'cloned' so many little Hitlers?

Perhaps we should study the Ariel Youth Movement and its members. By this I do not mean to equate Rabbi Lior with Hitler or his movement with Hitler youth. But I do see parallels between Rabbi Lior's history of racism, and his teaching of this racism to youth, and what happened in Germany.

This is a very sad day for Judaism, and an even sadder day, I'm afraid, for God.

And, yes, I do see parallels with the late Lubavitcher Rebbe's position on (not) aiding Ethiopian Jews, where he also cites din kadima (the poor of your own town come first) as a reason to not help save starving, tortured Ethiopian Jews.

Evolution Treife?

Writing in Ynet, Yitzhak Kakun complains about the 'secularization' of Shavuot that is becoming increasingly common in Israel. Secular Israelis gather in lecture halls and theaters to listen to and participate in discussions about Jewish history, Zionism, the origin of the universe, etc. Kakun does not like this because he considers these gatherings to be perversions of Judaism, and Orthodox rabbis who participate in them to be traitors:

…The Shavuot tikkun popular with the “enlightened” secular public is a desecration of what is holy, on the day of the receiving of the Torah. We sometimes see people with a kippah on their heads (and not necessarily Reform Jews) who attempt to give their stamp of approval by participating in discussions at an illusory tikkun.…

Of course, some of what bothers Kakun bothers me, as well – especially the admixture of Eastern polytheistic religious thought with Judaism, something that occurs at a minority of these gatherings, usually linked to the rave scene. But Kakun is upset with more than Zen Judaism:

So why do they find a reason to attack our Jewish roots at the lectures they give on this holy night in particular? Is the night of Shavuot intended to teach us Darwin’s doctrine of evolution? In fact, the opposite is true.

This is truly the heart of his argument. Evolution is treife because it appears to contradict the written Torah. Therefore, understanding the origins of life – a topic that takes up a good chunk of Genesis – is forbidden. That there are Jewish sources dating back almost 2000 years which speak of a world much older than 6000 years, and a history much more complex than a surface reading of Genesis gives, is lost on Kakun.

Kakun's view, which is shared by haredim (Rabbi Slifkin book bans, etc.), is closer to fundamentalist Christianity than to traditional Judaism. It is a view that asks us to abandon rational thought and simply believe. No mainstream Jewish movement has ever asked this. The idea of suspending rational thought is foreign to Judaism. Today, acceptance of that foreign concept has become a benchmark for Orthodox belief. How strange.

The Dishonesty Of Menachem Lubinsky & Kosher Today

Menachem Lubinsky is a paid mouthpiece for Agriprocessors and Rubashkin. Lubinsky writes and edits Kosher Today, the kosher food industry's "trade paper," and covers controversies at Agriprocessors. But Lubinsky does not disclose past or current relationships with Agriprocessors and Rubashkin. This is, to say the least, deceitful and unethical. But this is Orthodox Judaism and the kosher food business, and ethics and truth do not seem to be on the radar screen of those who make, distribute or consume kosher food.

Lubinsky has a hit piece this week, reprinted in full below after the jump, 'exposing' the Forward's "crusade" against Agriprocessors. In brief, here are Lubinsky's main points in Rubashkin's defense:

1. Other companies have been sued by workers for the exact same reason workers are now suing Agriprocessors. The Forward fails to mention this in their report.
2. The government monitors and regulates treatment of workers. That is enough supervision to ensure fair treatment.
3. Non-kosher plants are worse.

Let's deal with Lubinsky's points in order:

1. Yes, the Forward does omit this fact. But by omitting the fact it omitted a very strong point against Agriprocessors – the workers won those other lawsuits.
2. If government supervision is enough to ensure workers are fairly treated, it should follow logically that government supervision is enough to ensure food is free from non-kosher ingredients in countries like the US that have strong labeling laws. Therefore, it should be that any food marked, for example, Vegan, should be kosher for Jews to consume even without kosher supervision. I suggest you all follow Lubinsky's logic and start to buy products that have no kosher supervision but list no non-kosher ingredients on their packaging. If it's fair to trust the government to deal with worker abuse, even though many Jewish laws dealing with worker abuse are biblical (d'orita), then certainly it is okay to do the same with food, where most of the applicable law is rabbinic.
3. Even if this were true – and there is no indication that it is; in fact, with Agriprocessors, the opposite may very well be true – it does not make it kosher. Two wrongs simply do not make a right.

A reader forwarded this letter he sent to Kosher Today:

I have read with interest the article in today's Kosher Today regarding the ongoing issues at Agriprocessors in Iowa. It is most interesting to me however, that not once in your 'coverage' was there any mention that your editor-in-chief, Mr. Lubinsky, has also acted professionally on behalf of Agriprocessors, handling some of their PR needs and placing some of their advertising. Some of that work may have actually been done in regard to this labor issue and to counter the reporting of the Forward.

This is truly troublesome to me, a kosher consumer and member of the orthodox community, that this has not been disclosed to readers. There are many Halachos, Jewish Laws, relating to honesty and this seems to fall very far outside the norm.

Now, not only has this story been covered in the Jewish media, but it is now in The NY Times, quoting material from your weekly newsletter as industry gospel, without such knowledge that the author is/has been on the payroll of Agriprocessors, specifically in a PR capacity.

Please explain how this can be rectified, so as not to continue to mislead the Kosher Today, and broader, readership.

Of course, Lubinsky has been called on this before, including here. Neither he nor the companies and rabbis he works with have ever tried to rectify this gross ethical lapse. Clearly, they do not believe conflicts of interest need to be disclosed.

(You can also add this to list of things the NY Times' Samuel G. Freedman missed in his coverage of Agriprocessors worker abuse and the Conservative Movement's Hechsher Tzedek.)

Agriprocessors and its rabbis broke Humane Slaughter law. Agriprocessors also broke EPA regulations and, it seems, OSHA regulations. It also broke the National Labor relations Act. During all of these offenses, one class of people have been overwhelmingly silent about Agriprocessors failings while loudly defending the company and the Rubashkin family from "attack." That class of people? Orthodox rabbis, many of whom profit from Agriprocessor's business.

Tuesday night is Shavuot, the "anniversary" of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. The Torah prohibits much of the worker and animal abuse Agriprocessors has been accused of. These are biblical offenses. Yet our rabbis remain silent.

All the drashot and speeches about accepting the yoke of the Torah are meaningless if the Torah's representatives stand silently by while the poor and weak suffer. They make a mockery out of God's Torah, and they make a mockery out of Judaism.

Perhaps this Shavuot is the time to make your rabbi own up to his responsibility. If he does not, make sure you find a different synagogue to go to this coming Shabbat.

[Hat Tip: Chaim Yankel.]

Rabbi Dov Lior – Racist

Rabbi Dov Lior, the rabbi of Kiryat Arba is an ethically challenged individual. Never has this been more clear than today, when Rabbi Lior issued a ruling regarding refugees from Darfur who have fled to safety in Israel. First, Rabbi Lior's ruling:

Israel must not allow Darfur refugees into its territory or enable them to stay in the country, Kiryat Arba's rabbi Dov Lior said in a halachic ruling published on Arutz Sehva's website Wednesday.

"We are not currently in a state of peace. We are in a state of war, surrounded by enemies, and we don't know whether tomorrow they (the refugees) will join those who hate us," Rabbi Lior said. "Therefore, the State of Israel must not allow such a thing."

The rabbi added that the fact that Sudan fought against Israel during the War of Independence in 1948 was another reason why the refugees should be rejected.

Jews fleeing Nazi terror should not be allowed in Palestine, Britain or the US because Germany is an enemy state, we are all at war with Germany, and these Jews may one day turn against us.

Support Lior? Fine. Then also support the British Mandate authority and the Roosevelt Department of State.

Isn't Lior from a Chabad family? Does anyone know? Tell us in the comments. It would certainly make sense, given the Tanya's racist attitude.

I tried to find Rabbi Lior's ruling on the English-language Arutz Sheva website, but could not find it there. It's only up in Hebrew. Now why would that be?

Sharpton v. Hitchens: A Debate About God

That's right. On Monday May 7, Christopher Hitchen's, author of a new book supporting atheism, debated Rev. Al Sharpton at the NYC Public Library. The topic: God Is Not Great.

Here's a blow by blow account from the NY Times and, courtesy of the NY Public Library, here is the entire audio file. (It takes a minute or so before you hear anything, so please be patient.)

Realize what you are about to listen to – a debate where most of you will root for Al Sharpton.

[Hat Tip: Luke Ford.]

Rabbi Harry Maryles On Homosexuality

DovBear interviews Rabbi Harry Maryles. An excerpt of Harry's:

…My objection to the forbidden homosexual act is not so much to the fact that the Torah calls it a Toevah. It is more to the seriousness of the offense as a capital one. To that end, I equate it to Halachic adultry (a man and a married woman other than his wife). I consider them equally wrong.

But although I find homosexual acts more difficult to deal with emotionally, intellectually I think adultery is a greater ‘wrong’ (…for lack of a better word).

For a heterosexual, the sex drive need not be satisfied through adultery. There are legal ways to satisfy that drive. But to a homosexual, the drive cannot be satisfied in any way that is Halachic. Thus it is much more difficult for a homosexual to live a Halachic lifestyle than it is for a heterosexual. Transgressions by homosexuals should therefore get more sympathy, in my view, over transgressions by heterosexuals. But in this world, I’m afraid the opposite is true.…

Pretty much what I've written, as well.

Yeshiva Evicts Elderly and Handicapped Poor

A haredi yeshiva buys an adjoining apartment building with the intent to use it as dorm and study space. Many of the building's residents are elderly and handicapped immigrants from the Former Soviet Union who pay reduced rents under rent control and through Federal housing programs. They can only be evicted under a loophole in NY law that allows a building to be converted for use for charitable or educational purposes. The yeshiva sends residents eviction notices, but it does not make any provision to help them relocate or find affordable housing.

Is this ethical? Moral? I think not.

The yeshiva? The Mesivta and Yeshiva Gedolah of Manhattan Beach, NYC. The rosh yeshiva? Rabbi Joshua Zelikovitz.

We should start a haredi "Hall of Shame." Rabbi Zelikovitz would fit right in.

Former RCA Head – "People have a lack of appreciation and think of non-Jews in simplistic ways”

A former president of the RCA is taking an important stand on what has become a tough issue in Orthodoxy – how Orthodox Jews view and relate to non-Jews. The New Jersey Jewish News reports:

Are yeshiva and day school students taught to value friendships with non-Jews, or are they being given lessons in fear and mistrust?

Rabbi Kenneth Hain, former president of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, has been asking this question and has found some disturbing answers.

“Extreme views are current and popular. It’s easy to be lazy and name-call,” he said. “People have a lack of appreciation and think of non-Jews in simplistic ways.”

Hain, religious leader of Congregation Beth Shalom in Lawrence, NY, believes such attitudes are prevalent in day school and yeshiva education. “People are kind of shocked when they get to college campuses after 12 years in Jewish day school or yeshiva and find out non-Jews are real people, too, and they have worthwhile, valuable, and intelligent things to say,” he said in an interview.…

[H]e describes ramifications for social action and tzedaka. “What does Jewish tradition say about saving the life of a non-Jew? And what about charity — which has priority, the victims of [Hurricane] Katrina or the Jews of Jerusalem?”

Hain does not intend to resolve these tensions — only to warn of the danger in not confronting them.

Rabbi Hain is speaking on this topic at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy/Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston on Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m. Would anyone care to tape this and/or report on this for us? If you're able to do this, please let me know.

PETA Praises Chief Rabbi

Why? Because Rabbi Metzger banned the use of fur skinned from animals that are still living. However, PETA's letter seems to be based on an erroneous Ma'ariv report claiming Rabbi Metzger had banned the use of all fur. Rabbi Metzger reacted after watching this (gruesome) video, yet he only banned fur skinned from animals that are still alive.

Better Dead Than Reform? Chabad, It Seems, Says Yes

RebelJew has an incisive post on rabbis – Chabad rebbes prominent among them – who told their followers to remain in Europe rather than escape to life and freedom in America or Israel:

Around the Chabad observance of Yud Shvat (the yahrzeit of the 6th Rebbe), much discussion is expended on the Holocaust, anti-Zionism, mesiras nefesh, and particularly, the ultra-frum response that kept hundreds of thousands from fleeing Europe. The 6th Rebbe of Chabad indeed advised that, given the proper service of Jews, there might be no war.…Other gedolim advised their followers to stay, counseling that a secular Zionist Israel or a free America would cause damage to the people's frumkeit. Similarly, at Chaf Dalet Teves, the yahrzeit of the first Chabad Rebbe, much discussion centers on the fact that the first Rebbe supported the oppresive Czar over the forces of egalite' under Bonaparte.

As a justification in these cases, Chabadniks will point out that frumkeit remained strong in Russia, but it did not in France. Similarly, they felt it was better for the people to die in Europe than to live in America and risk diminishing their Jewish observance.…

RebelJew points out that France at the time of Napoleon was not "frum," and that nothing much is left of pre-war European Jewish learning, while yeshivot flourish in Israel and are supported by the government there, and America has an exponentially growing, flourishing haredi community.

He also writes:

However, my question is on the logic. Since when do we push away pikuach nefesh vadai on a safek (perhaps they will lapse in frumkeit). Would not a better course have been to save themselves and the people and then attend to them in the new places with extra kiruv, extra leadership, as has occurred thoughout the history of Judaism? Now, we get to the real point. Did these Rabanim not have faith in their own ability to lead? Did they prefer millions of dead Jews or Jews living in squalor and oppression to having to face up to their own insecurity in their abilities to shepherd the flock? Was it more important to keep them nursing from pure dogma than to save them from almost certain death?

And this is the question I would like you to answer: Better dead than Reform? Is there any defense for this behavior by Chabad rebbes and other gedolim? I don't think so. Do you?

A Moral Challenge

Ha'aretz reports:

…"I sat in the synagogue during the Kabbalat Shabbat service and I said to myself: Is it real? After all, there are no Jews in Lublin, where did they come from?" said Yakub Weksler, a 63-year-old resident of the city, with excitement. "Until now I would just walk by this building, and now it will be a true home, a home of prayer."

Yakub Weksler is not exactly his name. He grew up with the name Romuald Waskinel, and he discovered his Jewish roots when he was 35 years old, after 12 years as a Catholic priest. His Polish mother revealed to him that during the war, his biological mother had entrusted him to her. She didn't remember his parents' name or where they came from. In 1992, Waskinel discovered he is the son of Yankel and Batya Weksler, and he found two of his uncles in Israel. He adopted his father's first name, Yakub.

His identity is split. Only after consulting with pope John Paul II did he decide to continue serving as a priest. Today he is a philosophy professor at the Lublin Catholic University, and accompanies groups to the Maidanek concentration camp, where his parents were murdered. He defines himself as "a Jew, the son of Jesus the Jew."

Waskinel-Weksler attended Sunday's ceremony at the synagogue wearing priestly robes and a black knitted skullcap. "God puts little people like you and me to the test, but we must remain as faithful to him as we can," he said. He considers himself a loyal Catholic as well as one of the Jews of Lublin, and is concerned that the new synagogue will not have a minyan of 10 worshipers for Shabbat prayers. "I have a prayer book, but the problem is that I don't know how to pray," he replied in response to the question of whether he would join the minyan.…

I have two hypothetical questions:

1. Would it have been better for this man to have died as an infant at the hand of the Nazis rather than live his life as a Catholic priest?
2. If you answered yes, why did you do so? Do you have sources to support you? If you answered no, why? Do you have sources to support you? Either way, please cite those sources.