National Scholar Updates

The Jerusalem Post, September 6, 2017, published the following: In an astonishingly vitriolic attack on progressive Jews, Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Amar said that Reform Jews “deny more than Holocaust deniers….Today there was a hearing on the Kotel on the petition of the cursed evil people who do every iniquity in the world against the Torah – they even marry Jews and non-Jews,” said Amar…They don’t have Yom Kippur or Shabbat, but they want to pray [at the Western Wall]. But no one should think that they want to pray. They want to desecrate the holy. They are trying to deceive and say that extremist Haredim invented [prayer arrangements at the Western Wall]…It’s like Holocaust deniers, it’s the same thing. They shout, ‘Why are there Holocaust deniers in Iran?’ They deny more than Holocaust deniers.”

Reading these words, uttered by the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and former Chief Rabbi of Israel, is profoundly distressing.  They reflect the self-righteous religious arrogance characteristic of zealots who demean and oppress those who do not share their beliefs. Has Rabbi Amar ever sat down with Reform rabbis and dealt with them as fellow Jews and fellow human beings? Has he ever given serious thought to Reform theology? Certainly, as an Orthodox rabbi, he does not accept Reform; he sees Reform as a force for undermining the authority of halakha and the divinity of Torah. But does he think that calling names enhances the position of Orthodox Judaism? Does he think that it is intellectually or morally acceptable to slander opponents, or that such slander will convince anyone of the truth of Orthodoxy or the falsity of Reform?

When anyone thinks that he/she alone has the entire Truth, and that everyone else is an agent of falsehood—this is the basis for religious extremism, persecution, and violence. What is required today is what Dr. Menachem Kellner calls “theological humility.” Yes, we know we have the truth; but we also must be humble enough to realize that other people see things differently from us, and that they have a right to do so. We need to be able to make room for those with whom we disagree.

Below is an excerpt of a paper I delivered at a conference dealing with religious tolerance and mutual respect. It reflects a religious worldview very different from that of Rabbi Amar and so many others of his ilk.

I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, as were both of my parents. My grandparents had come to Seattle early in the 20th century from towns in Turkey. My ancestors had lived in the old Ottoman Empire since the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Spanish religious intolerance at that time was counter-balanced by Ottoman religious tolerance.

In Seattle, Jews were a tiny minority of the general population. Sephardic Jews — who had come to Seattle from Turkey and Rhodes — were a relatively small minority within the city’s Jewish population. My grandparents, like the other Sephardic immigrants, spoke Judeo-Spanish as their mother tongue. I thought it was perfectly natural and normal to grow up in Seattle with Turkish-born grandparents who spoke a medieval form of Spanish!

Aside from being part of a small minority of Sephardic Jews in Seattle, our family also was religiously traditional and most closely identified with Orthodox Judaism. Orthodoxy is a small minority among American Jews, consisting of perhaps 10% of American Jewry. Although I was a member of an extraordinarily minute segment of humanity, I learned to love my family’s traditions. I eventually became an Orthodox Sephardic rabbi, and an author of many works relating to Sephardic and Orthodox Jewish law, history, and worldview. Indeed, my life has been based on the truth and vitality of my religious beliefs and traditions.

I strive to live according to the truth of my faith. Yet, I also am struck by a massive reality: I am part of a Sephardic Orthodox Jewish community that represents an infinitesimal percentage of humanity. There are at least seven billion other human beings who live according to their faiths, and who know little or nothing about mine. If I have the true way of life — one for which I am willing to live and die — how am I to relate to the overwhelming majority of human beings who do not share my faith?

Growing up as an Orthodox Sephardic Jew in Seattle, I learned very early in life that I had to be very strong in my faith and traditions in order to avoid being swallowed up by the overwhelming majority cultures. I also learned the importance of theological humility. It simply would make no sense to claim that I had God’s entire Truth and that seven billion human beings were living in spiritual darkness. I surely believed — and do believe — that I have a profound religious truth that guides my life. But I also believed — and do believe — that all human beings have equal access to God, since God has created each one of us in God’s image.

Some years ago, I read a parable (in the writings of Dr. Pinchas Polonsky) that helped me clarify my thinking. Imagine that you have carefully studied a painting day after day, year after year. You know every brush-stroke, color, shadow… you know every detail of the painting and you understand it to the extent humanly possible. And then, one day someone comes along and turns on the light. You then realize that the painting you had studied to perfection is actually part of a much larger canvas. As you stand back, you realize that you need to re-evaluate your thinking. The segment of the canvas that you have studied all these years has not changed; you still know every detail; it is still absolutely true. Yet, you must now study your truth in context of a much larger canvas.

Each faith, at its best, has a very true understanding of its piece of the larger canvas. But when the lights go on, each faith must come to realize that it represents part of the picture but not the whole picture. A grand religious vision must necessarily entail a grand perception of God: God is great enough to create and love all human beings. God sees the whole canvas of humanity in its fullness.

One of the great challenges facing religions is to see the full picture, not just our particular segment of it. While being fully committed to our faiths, we also need to make room for others. We need, in a sense, to see humanity from the perspective of God, to see the entire canvas not just individual segments of it.

Religious vision is faulty when it sees one, and only one, way to God. Religious vision is faulty when it promotes forced conversions, discrimination against “infidels,” violence and murder of those holding different views. How very tragic it is that much of the anti-religious persecution that takes place in our world is perpetrated by people who claim to be religious, who claim to be serving the glory of God.

While religion today should be the strongest force for a united, compassionate and tolerant humanity, it often appears in quite different garb. Religion is too often identified with terrorism, extremism, superstition, exploitation…and hypocrisy. People commit the most heinous crimes…and do so while claiming to be acting in the name of God.

Our voice should be one of mutual understanding; we should remind ourselves and our fellow religionists that God loves all human beings and wants all human beings to be blessed with happy and good lives. There is room for all of us on this earth. We need to foster a religious vision that is humble, thoughtful, and appreciative of the greatness of God.

Everything in life starts with the self as shaped by the well of life experiences. Hillel embraced this concept and is quoted in the Talmud as follows: “That which is hateful to you do not do to others; that is the entire Torah, everything else is commentary; now go and study” (Shabbat 31a). His maxim assumes common denominators among people, but commonalities may be belied by the disability divide or by not knowing disability protocol and the appropriate ways to interact with people with disabilities or with disabilities other than one’s own. When the disability well is dry, determining “that which is hateful to others” may result in outdated paternal or patronizing approaches, under or over-sensitivities, unrealistic assessments of ability, and assumptions that disability is self-defining and the primary self-identity.

Although disability touches most people, it does so to varying degrees. Limited disability exposure may contribute to approaches which are misguided and driven by one’s own emotional discomfort. Optimal engagements depend on disability awareness to develop a foundation, a toolbox for appropriate interactions to individualize per person and disability. Followers of the Torah are also guided by a concomitant study of the intersections of Judaism and disability. These intersections serve as starting points for developing appropriate and realistic attitudes toward disability. They provide firm foundations for meaningful interactions so that there is more that can be drawn from the well of experiences and Torah values leading to greater understanding of “that which is hateful to others” in disability matters.

In Torah, in fact throughout Tanakh, there are references to the intersections of Judaism and disability. Rabbinic and current commentary on the intersections have wide ranges. Some commentary reinforces Judaism’s compassion toward disability, while others provide a historical account of how approaches toward disability have changed. There is also a body of disconcerting literature by sages, probably reflecting discomfort with disability, which claims that people with disabilities, depending on the condition, should be permanently relegated to subordinate statuses. This approach to disability received widespread, but not universal, support; and vestiges still remain.

A fresh starting point for understanding what Judaism says about disability begins with a contemporary lens to study overt and covert textual intersections and understanding commentary based on its historical time. The outcome will contribute to better disability approaches for improved relationships. Others have started this study; this article will continue the discussion.

Disability

The Torah contains many passages about justice and mercy, not all of which specifically reference disability. Throughout the text, God commands that we should assist the widow, the orphan, and the poor. Assisting is the fulfillment of justice, tzedek, or loving kindness, and does not equate with superiority.[1] Leviticus (19:14) is disability specific. This is the passage when God warns against cursing the deaf or placing a stumbling block before the blind, referencing two physical conditions, although interpretations include metaphoric references, too. Torah understood the incumbency of justice for people with disabilities before George H. W. Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This civil rights legislation, motivated by justice, focuses on people, not disability. The ADA ensures that people with disabilities receive equal opportunity in broad areas such as employment, higher education, utilization of public services, and communications.[2]

As with all civil rights legislations, ADA laws were enacted, since dependence on individual definitions of justice and goodwill are unreliable for the establishment of equity. The ADA categorized disability on three tiers: physical or mental impairments that substantially limit one or more major life activities; histories or records of such an impairments; and perceptions by others of impairments (P.L. 101–336). The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 broadened the ADA to include more general limitations, such as self-care (P.L. 110–325).

There is nothing monolithic about disability that includes visible or invisible physical or cognitive conditions; congenital or adventitious onsets—and nobody is exempt from the latter, which may be the result of disease, aging, accidents, and violence; nuanced or extreme variations, stable or progressive diagnoses, among other variables. Those with visible disabilities usually have to explain what they can do; those with invisible differences have to explain what they cannot do. However, Judaism did not need the ADA to categorize disabilities, since mention of diverse disabilities and conditions abound in Tanakh. These references describe notable personalities, identify impairments, or are used figuratively. Biblical personalities, including Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, were not exempt from disability, but even their conditions did not preclude distorted notions of disability and misapplied justice—at best—especially in terms of practicing Judaism within the community.

Historical Perspective

With the best of intentions to preserve Jewish heritage, some of our sages, even in relatively recent times, reinforced that Judaism values those who are most competent at fulfilling mitzvoth,[3] which would exclude people with disabilities from full communal participation. Biblical and rabbinic texts reflect the general thinking of their time, and grouped diverse disability types together.[4] A seventeenth-century rabbi in Israel questioned whether non-disabled people are allowed to violate Shabbat to save a Deaf person.[5] Violating Shabbat to save a life is usually justified with the understanding that the one saved will keep future Shabbats. The rabbi felt that since the Deaf are not obligated to keep Shabbat, why should they be saved? The Hafetz Hayyim was shocked by this rabbi’s thinking.[6] To grant the rabbi some fairness within a historical framework, the deaf experience of yesteryear, marked by the inability to communicate with language prior to sign language, is not comparable to the experience of today. Still, the casual approach to the life of any group of people is disturbing.

In another illustration of equating disability with the inability to fulfill mitzvoth, which presupposed how God saw people with disabilities, Marx cites Numbers Raba 7:1:

When Israel came out of Egypt, the vast majority of them were afflicted with some blemish. Why? Because they had been working in clay and bricks and climbing to the tops of buildings. Those who were engaged in building became maimed through climbing to the top of the layers of stone. Either a stone fell and cut off the worker’s hand, or a beam or some clay got into his eyes and he was blinded. When they came to the wilderness of Sinai, God said, “Is it consonant with the dignity of the Torah that I should give it to a generation of disfigured persons? If, on the other hand, I wait until others take their place, I shall be delaying the Revelation.” What, then, did God do? He bade the angels come down to Israel and heal them.

Marx writes “Why did God need to heal those with disabilities before He could offer them the Torah? Apparently, partnering with Israel for the Torah required competent partners capable of implementing the precepts and even interpreting them—thus the need for physical and intellectual capabilities.”[7]

The intersection of Judaism and disability includes yet other dimensions to attitudes and stigmatization. Some say it was only the most severe disabilities in rabbinic culture that led to exclusion based on the inability to transmit Jewish norms and culture, such as those at the upper end of mental illness. Other might have been regarded as disabled only when their condition prevented them from full participation in communal activities.[8] On the other hand, some rabbinic leaders, especially those with disabilities, countered the notion that people had disabilities due to unsavory character or as punishments for transgressions by stating that God’s motives are beyond human comprehension. One sage, the Steipler Rebbe, showed so much respect for individuals with severe disabilities that he rose when they entered a room.[9]

Perceptions of Disability Evolve

The aforementioned seventeenth-century rabbi and others like him notwithstanding, Judaism and most sectors of general society are not tightly stuck in the past when it comes to disability matters. Even terminology has shifted. Over the past 30 years, the term handicapped, hand-in-cap, a beggar, has become unacceptable; the term disabled people has been replaced with people with disabilities—putting people first. The term disability is not used in Tanakh, although its substitute may be blemish or moom, which is a broad description of a disability or impairment.[10] Mooms were probably reflective ADA categories without specificities. Over a 40-year span in the desert, vision and hearing most likely deteriorated, mobility disabilities were acquired, and a percentage of the population probably had cognitive disabilities—a point extended into all of Tanakh.

Monolithic societies did not and do not exist, but prior experiences with disability were vastly different than they are today. Blindness in Tanakh reflected a condition of isolation without mobility and orientation training; deafness was indeed isolating without sign language; and rehabilitation was unavailable for those with mobility disabilities. Weakness from low blood sugar (diabetes), breathing issues (asthma), and cardiac conditions were not addressed. Additionally, there were no special education schools or classes for those with the range of cognitive disabilities. Disability was a personal or family issue; the community did not have to make adjustments nor were there advocates for accommodations. Disability was a pity, a problem of the individual and his family, for which little could be done.

Sampling of Disability References in Tanakh

Blindness and deafness are frequently paired together and constitute a high frequency of disability references, but they are not mirror opposites. Blindness, not a communication disability, thrusts the sighted into new levels of sensitivity and awareness.[11] From the ancients to modern times, fascination with it has contributed to distorted assumptions as the blind have been portrayed from the pitiful to mystical.[12] A mute who lost his hearing prior to acquiring language was presumed to be intellectually undeveloped without cognitive skills for full inclusion and legal responsibility.[13] Blindness has been sensationalized more than deafness throughout the ages, but the frequent literal and metaphoric pairing in Tanakh can render both on a sensational level. In Isaiah, the prophet states, as a rebuke to Israel: “Hear, deaf ones, and look (in order) to see, blind ones. Who is blind, but my servant? Or deaf, as my messenger whom I sent….Seeing much but observing nothing; (having) hearing hear not attending…” (Isiah 42:18–20).

Blindness makes its Torah debut in Parashat Toledot: “And it came to pass, when Isaac had become old and his eyes were too dim to see…” (Genesis 27:1). It seems that he lived most of his life as a sighted person and only old age contributed to disability onset. The same can be said for his son. At the end of his life, Jacob experienced visual loss, as referenced in Vayehi immediately prior to blessing his grandsons, Joseph’s sons: “Now Israel's eyes had become heavy with age, [to the extent that] he could not see. So he drew them near to him, and he kissed them and embraced them…” (Genesis 48:10).

There is a covert message in these two descriptions. The text does not indicate depression or a diminishment of selfhood based on reduced vision. Visual loss is presented as a matter-of-fact reality. Reading between scriptural lines, there is no mention of self-identification as men without vision. Rebecca took advantage of Isaac’s condition, for a greater good, but Jacob’s determination of placing his right hand on the younger grandson was not diminished by his visual loss. He did not accede to Joseph’s wishes to place his right hand on the older one’s head based upon a self-identity as old, blind, and therefore without the capacity for independent judgment. Additionally, there is no reference that Joseph thought of or treated his father as incapacitated based on visual loss. 

In Deuteronomy (28:28), Moses makes clear that “God will strike you with madness and blindness” upon disobeying his word, although blindness here is probably used metaphorically rather than as an ultimate punishment. Perhaps the most seemingly severe passage in Torah regarding disability exclusion, blindness and others, is found in Leviticus (21:16–24) when God states that any of Aaron’s descendants “who has a defect, shall not come near to offer up his God's food. For any man who has a defect should not approach: A blind man or a lame one… mis-matching limbs … a broken leg or a broken arm.” The biblical scholar Martin Noth minimizes the stark impact this passage might have by stating that these laws were narrowly applied to the functions of the priests within the Temple and did not apply to their other functions.[14] Additionally, broken limbs are temporary conditions.

Preceding this passage, as previously referenced in Leviticus (19:14), God’s warning about against cursing the deaf or placing a stumbling block before the blind can be taken literally or metaphorically. Juxtaposing these two passage from Leviticus, is blindness a condition that warrants compassion or punishment? It depends on the definition of blindness. Maimonides defined visual blindness as one kind of blindness because we are all blind in some area of life, a definition which places ability and disability along a continuum. There was also a dispute with Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Meir about the ability of a person who is blind to carry out mitzvoth and therefore be included in community religious practices. Rabbi Yehuda disqualifies the blind; Rabbi Meir does not. A talmudic sage who was blind, Rabbi Joseph, concluded that it is disadvantageous for people who are blind to be exempt.[15] Still, blindness or being in the dark has always been considered a threatening status as shown by the ninth plague which rendered darkness to Egyptians in Exodus 10:21–23. In Judges 16:21, the Philistines preferred taking out Samson’s eyes to try to destroy him as opposed to limb amputations, which was done to try to destroy Rabbi Akiva.

In addition to blindness in old age, Jacob might have also had a mobility disability after the angel touched his hip socket (Genesis 2:24), but the outcome is ambiguous. Mephiboseth, Jonathan’s son, who was dropped by his nurse as an infant, self-identified as man with a mobility disability. Upon speaking to King David he said, “Your servant is crippled” (Saul II 19:27). Throughout Tanakh, there are references to what seem to be cognitive disabilities. In Proverbs, fools are specifically referenced, but it is unclear if the references are to those with learning or developmental disabilities or those who deviate from the right path out of choice not inability. Shoteh, defined as those with a range of cognitive differences, were deemed unable to conduct their own affairs, wed, and not responsible for following mitzvoth.[16]

Moses, the greatest communicator in Torah, self-identified as a man with a disability to resist leadership and appealed to God that “I am not a man of words…I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). Perhaps it was his disability that caused outbursts of temper since physical expressions were easier for him than articulation, (Shemot 2:11; Shemot 32:19; Numbers 20:1).  Yet, there is no reference that Yitro encouraged his daughter to seek another mate due to Moses’s speech impediment (Shemot 2:21); nor did Korah proclaim that Moses’s disability was a reason to forfeit leadership, (Numbers 16); nor did Moses’s siblings (Aaron and Miriam) reference disability when they complained to God about him (Numbers 12:1). These four diverse personalities with different relationships to Moses and different reasons to reference his disability, did not. The only reference to his disability was referenced by Moses himself. Additionally, nowhere in the Torah does it say that “God spoke to Moses, the man with a speech disability, saying…”. In other words, disability was only applied in self-description. 

Sensitivity

…And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

—Genesis 1:27

…Who gave man a mouth, or who makes [one] dumb or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?

—Exodus 4:11

People with disabilities were created in God’s image, and attitudes toward disability should consider God’s part in the creation of disability.[17] The juxtaposition of these two biblical passages continue to be overlooked. Throughout the ages, disability was a stigma, a sign of inferiority, and a reason for shame. Ironically, the second passage is in dialogue with Moses after his selection to be the Israelite leader, thus communicating God’s part in assigning disability and His encouragement not to allow disability to be the primary self-identity, whenever possible.  Moses had shame; God was not ashamed of him nor did He allow disability to serve as an excuse from any commandment. God was sensitive to Moses, but made clear that provisions would be made so that his disability did not impede ability. Moses spoke through Aaron.

Sensitivity is a personal reaction. Some say that the wording of prayers can create anxiety, such as the morning prayer when we say “Blessed are You…...who opens the eyes of the blind” or the Shemah (“Hear O Israel”).  If taken literally, might these wordings stir anxiety?  If taken figuratively to mean new insights (opens eyes) or paying due diligence (hearing) to the unity of Hashem, then the wordings are less severe or offensive.[18]

Inclusion

Inclusion of individuals and families where disability is present remains a challenge in the Jewish community, specifically regarding social life, synagogues, and education. These families may be excluded from invitations for Shabbat meals. Families with children with disabilities are both like other families and yet different.[19] The differences may contribute to discomfort since hosts may not know disability protocol or disability-specific protocol, expectations of behavior, or make assumptions about extra work to accommodate the children of their friends. 

Synagogue inclusion translates to the awareness for physical modifications for universal access, the availability of texts in alternate formats, retention of sign-language interpreters, and so on. On membership applications, there can be a section to specify special needs; families with disabilities are not uncommon. Planning committees can include members of all ages with disabilities to discuss integration into activities.[20]

Rabbinic institutions and lay leadership seminars can promote disability awareness. Teens can be asked at Kiddush to serve those with disabilities before satisfying themselves. In Jewish education classes and schools, educators can continue to employ strategies and integration to maximize potential, to lessen dependence, and integrate people with disabilities into the community as much as possible.[21] Of course, one has to be realistic. Students with sensory, physical, or cognitive disabilities cannot expect suspensions of trips to museums, theatrical performances, or ski slopes, but accommodations can be offered.

Inclusion also translates to withholding judgment and showing patience. People with hidden disabilities may not be able to fulfill expectations for reasons unknown to the observer. People with limited ability to express thoughts, either due to physical or cognitive conditions, do not expect others to complete their sentences. How many times did God interrupt Moses in the Torah by claiming he is slow of speech? The technicalities of being natural and using words such as see when conversing with people with visual disabilities requires heightened awareness at first, but then becomes causal upon realizing that people are not necessarily defined by disability.  Judaism also does not view the individual as defined by disability.[22]  People with disabilities frequently claim that attitudes are the greatest barriers toward integration.

Enhancing disability awareness, developing realistic assessments of ability, and appreciating Judaism’s overt and covert communications of respectful approaches to disability all contribute to more meaningful engagements. This is a process leading to know “that which is hateful to others.”

I live a more or less Orthodox Jewish life; “more or less” is necessary to say, since despite what Orthodox Jews like to believe, Orthodoxy is not measured by an absolutely uniform standard followed by all. The halakha is applied by observant Jews and interpreted in different ways and degrees (Do you trust the eruv? Do you ever, anywhere, take off your kippah? Do you eat in a vegan restaurant?). Also, as I learned early on in my discovery of Jewish observance, there is a big difference between orthopraxis and orthodoxy, and in fact praxis, with its ambiguous interpretations and applications, is a lot less fuzzy than matters of belief, faith, and the language of faith in Judaism.

The nuances and variations in practice and belief, and the disjunction between them, are perhaps more in the front of my mind and edge of my awareness than they are for many people who grew up in observant Orthodox households and who have really had only one way of life. My parents created a home with a Jewish identity, to be sure, which was reinforced by skeletal rituals—berakhot said by rote on Friday night, staying home from school on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur (we fasted while my mother cooked for the “break-fast”), basic Bible classes in English in my father’s study when we were very young (but really before the age of understanding), Passover Seder with extended family and wonderful food and a ponderous Haggadah—but no structured Jewish education, no Hebrew or religious school or bar mitzvah, no shul-synagogue-temple even on the Holy Days (my parents were averse to suburban Judaism), no dietary restrictions or time-restraints beyond being present at the Friday night dinner table. The home rituals were strongly memorable and evocative, but not intrinsically strong enough to set an anchor in Judaism and Jewish identity, i.e. a mooring in lived tradition; emotional ties to Judaism were barely distinguishable from loyalty to parents’ cultural identity and expectations.

In college in the 1970s, a remarkable Classics teacher named Dan Gillis commanded me to write my senior thesis, as a Classics major, on Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian who wrote in Greek. When I asked, Who is Josephus? he replied, Go and find out. Just like that. Dan Gillis is not Jewish, but in this instance and others, he revealed a kind of rabbinic sagacity, which for him was instinctive. He saw in me an untethered, anxious, passionate, and unformed person, who was asking the basic question of a late-teen, Who am I? and coming up with confused answers; and he saw that the genuine answer lay, in part or entirely, in my discovering my Jewishness. He could not instruct me in Jewish learning but directed me as he knew how, as a Classics professor, by having me read a Jewish-Greek author from Roman antiquity. I wrote a complicated, essentially unfinished thesis about Josephus’ attitude toward the Jewish rebellion against Rome and his presentation of Jewish extremism. But that first engagement with Josephus and first-century Judaism made me look in a contemporary mirror that I had never held up to myself. That year, as a senior, I went to Shabbat dinners and events at Hillel, and learned more Hebrew rituals by rote, and appreciated the kind of camaraderie and shared song typical of a Shabbat table. I graduated college in 1978, but, as I discovered, did not leave Josephus, or the interest in Judaism to which he led me, behind on campus.

In the 1970s, Josephus was a marginal author at best in the fields of Greek literature and Roman history, mostly neglected or avoided deliberately by Classicists and ancient historians. In the profession of Jewish history of the Second Temple period, Josephus’ many books were used but not read, plundered ungratefully for information and facts for which he is the unique and indispensable source, read against his intention and according to an agenda, even reviled. But it was Josephus who helped me win good offers from graduate programs in Classics, when I applied in 1980. In the applications, I quoted parts of my undergraduate thesis, which attracted the attention of conventional Classicists who were tired of “more of the same” from students and colleagues; they told me so when I arrived. Josephus remained in the background, together with the development of my concomitant, deepening connection to Judaism, as I cleared the usual high hurdles preceding a PhD.

It was not opportunism that brought me back to Josephus, but something more personal. As one of my teachers in graduate school said, a person’s choice of dissertation topic reveals something deep and fundamental about that person— a yearning, a fear, a problem, an existential assertion. This is true even—and especially—if a person writes about a technical, soulless problem in scholarship. But my “return” to Josephus was neither technical nor soulless. I do believe, following into myself the thread of my teacher’s insight, that I chose to write about Josephus—in particular, devising a method to use his Bellum Judaicum to compose an “internal history” of Jerusalem in the first century ce—because I felt the need, at least, to deal with, learn about, confront, identify with, or reject, my Judaism; to figure out my own internal history, and start writing and living the next, postponed chapter.

A dissertation on Josephus required me to go to Israel—a good place for both doctoral research and self-examination (self-confrontation). My grant applications stated the justified need to learn Hebrew, and to learn in their original language some of the texts and laws that Josephus knew, quoted, and lived from the time of his first awareness. In other words, I proposed to try to get closer to Josephus’ Jewish self, which he combined with his acquired Greek learning and identity. I also told the granting agencies of my intention to study with some of the great scholars of the Second Temple period in Jerusalem (among whom was the great Menahem Stern, with whom I did read Josephus in a memorable class with two students); and to walk and learn the places Josephus knew and wrote about. These arguments were persuasive; I won study grants to Israel. The first trip to Israel has made all the difference.

I had not lost but indeed recovered my Jewish identity in my lifetime, not through a sudden, spectacular insight or extraordinary experience, nor epiphany beyond the power of words to express, but through academic study. Josephus led me to the gates of Jerusalem. It started with methodical study of Hebrew, just as my love in Classics also began with the love of an ancient language, Latin (the language of Josephus’ oppressors and patrons); it continued through slow learning of basic texts, lectures by great scholars in university classrooms (and not, at first, institutions founded for the purpose of spreading Jewish learning and bringing back Jews like me), visits to archaeological sites. Thus I entered modern Judaism through the first century, when the Temple still stood.

Admittedly—and this is difficult for me to admit, lest it be misunderstood, even by myself—I remember without sentiment or sensation that practically from the first expectant moment after my arrival in Israel, I felt a familiarity and closeness, a sense of place and purpose and deep personal resonance in the various societies I encountered, however strange to my experience were the land (resembling neither Missouri nor New Jersey) and language (unconnected to any I had learned so far). I was drawn in by the intellectual vigor that the language and texts offered and required, an excitement and challenge made more immediate, urgent and relevant than those offered by the classical texts that I had devoted years to learning; for the Jewish texts, and the arc of Jewish history, were part of a vital, i.e., living and lived, tradition. The more I learned, the more I realized that these things—Jewish identity but also Jewish practice (!)—were a part of me already, simply latent and un-activated. All this was reflected in excited letters I remember writing to family and teachers, 35 years ago. But I admit, as well, that the outline related here has developed, hardened, clarified—calcified?—over the years, as I’ve shaped my own narrative for myself and a few intimate relations (I’ve never told this story from a podium).

Obviously my gradual decision to live an Orthodox life—Shabbat, kashruth, tefillin and daily prayers, liturgy, and ritual—was more complex and less solitary than the private, intense experience in the classroom and my private study space. It involved not just learning and wonderfully unfolding personal insight, but also living with distant relatives in the Old City and learning their Orthodox rhythms; reading and hearing a large array of rabbis and teachers outside the university as well; informed (and also ignorant) experiment; slow accretion of new old customs, readjustment of exterior and interior life. The gradualness of my own Orthodoxy, the flux and reflux of laws and customs, demonstrate that an observant life not only rests on one Big Decision, but also requires myriad, even daily smaller but crucial decisions which are not always consistent with each other. It is the nature of such an intended life of structure, law, decision—even if Orthodoxy is not always thought of in this way—that one must cope every day with possibilities of which a life lived without such structure is unmindful. That was one of the most powerful aspects of an observant life: one must constantly observe what one says and does; it is a “mindfulness” with ancient roots.

If I were ever to write the full story of both the beginnings and the continuation of my Jewish life—which I am not likely to do—it would have several components. It would include an expanded, introspective discussion of the instinctive feeling, preceding my ability to articulate it, that Jewish ritual, learning, rhythms and society filled an empty place within me that I did not know was empty, or even existed. It would include a more detailed, less impressionistic discussion, with references to Jewish thinkers and teachers, of the “mindfulness” of an Orthodox life that I mentioned, i.e., the sanctification of the essential elements of any human life. It would include philosophical reflection on the religious life as a perpetual act of creation, which requires incessantly making separations, distinctions, and definitions. It would include reflection on the desire for the kind of the embracing, engaging, affirming, warm community in shul and neighborhood and larger society that I found in Israel, and that brought me back here to live. It would include an acknowledgement of sacrifice and unintended hardship, particularly the distance and separation from my family in the United States—not only the separation of continents, but the restrictions on communal cooking and eating that inevitably placed a kind of mehitza between us. It would include marrying an observant woman from a strict Orthodox background and raising children with her. It would include educating our children in the Israeli religious school system, which has brought not only affirmation of a life-choice but also deep dissatisfaction with the education system here.

But all that is for the unwritten memoir. Here, my purpose has been a brief description of the beginning of my “return” to Judaism and Jewish identity. It has been told as I remember it, from the distance of years and habit. It began, actually, with the scholarly purpose of understanding the texts left by a first-century pious Jew from Jerusalem.

There is an acute danger, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes, in the Jewish people’s status as a minority community with its own unique foundational texts, traditions, practices, and modes of dress and behavior. The danger is that many minorities—especially minorities that, like the Jews, view themselves as having a special role to play in unfolding historical narrative of human civilization—tend toward insularity, parochialism, and even exclusionary elitism. Certainly, the idea that Jews must carefully police the boundaries of their community in order to preserve the character and integrity of Judaism and Jewish life is strong within the rabbinic tradition. Many instances of rabbinic legislation were designed to keep Jews mindful of this fact in their social interactions with non-Jews, and to hinder Jewish adoption of non-Jewish practices and philosophies.[1] But while the careful preservation of Jewish life and tradition on its own terms is certainly necessary, it is important to keep in mind that it also entails potential pitfalls.

Rabbi Hirsch frames the problem as follows:

There is one particular danger which is to be feared by a Jewish minority. It is what we would like to call a certain intellectual narrow-mindedness. This danger becomes especially acute the more closely a minority clings to its cause and the more anxious it is to preserve that cause. We have already pointed out that . . . a minority depends for its survival on whether it can further and foster within all its members the spirit of the cause it represents. . . . However, precisely such dedication to its cause may easily lead the minority into intellectual one-sidedness. This may well stunt to a degree the development of the minority’s unique intellectual life.[2]

The critical importance of cultivating Torah scholarship and religious dedication within the Jewish community is unquestionable. At the same time, even an appropriate focus on those goals can lead—and has led—many committed and punctiliously observant Jews to regard the knowledge and experiences of those outside of our “daled amot” as unnecessary, worthless, disdainful, and ultimately dangerous to our spiritual and temporal lives. Rabbi Hirsch addresses this concern by encouraging Jews to “regard all truth, wherever it may be found on the outside, as a firm ally” of Torah, “since all truth stems from the same Master of Truth.”[3]

Rabbi Hirsch’s prescription lies at the core of various Modern Orthodox philosophies. From Torah im derekh erets to Torah u’madah and others, Judaism’s religious ideal is understood to entail that traditional rabbinic teachings be combined with the very best of Torah-consistent knowledge produced outside the bet midrash from medicine to physics, economics, law, politics, philosophy, literature, and many others.[4] Typically, members of the Jewish community committed to this approach look to secular disciplines, to the knowledge and insights into the world and the human experience produced by the scholars, researchers, and practitioners of these fields.

Less common, however, is the interest in other faith traditions to see what insights they may have to offer to the continued development and enrichment of Jewish religious thought, practice, and lifestyles. Such hesitancy is not surprising. Jews and Judaism have a long and painful history of interactions with other religious communities, especially those under whose dominion we have lived, often as an unprotected and vulnerable minority.[5] Likewise, the Torah and rabbinic literature are filled with warnings and laws designed to distinguish between Judaism and other faiths, to separate between Jews and gentiles along religious lines, and to distance Jews from being influenced by or adopting the teachings and practices of other religious traditions.[6] Even acknowledging all the legal niceties over whether particular faiths in their contemporary manifestations actually constitute avodah zarah,[7] the underlying tenor of suspicion and separation from other religions looms large.[8] Of course, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s seminal essay, Confrontation, looms large in this conversation as well.[9] The Rav’s strident opposition to many forms of interfaith dialogue, coupled his broader philosophy of Torah and halakha as a comprehensive, internally consistent, closed, and coherent normative system calls into question the integrity and authenticity of learning from, adapting, and integrating the insights and experiences of other faiths and religious communities into our own.[10]

II

Despite this standard hesitancy to engage other religious traditions as sources of insight into Judaism, halakha, and Jewish communal life, my own work as a scholar of Comparative Jewish and Islamic law and legal theory suggests, to me at least, that there is much value in such endeavors. Interactions between the Jewish and Islamic intellectual traditions have a long and fruitful history. The Qur’an contains many rabbinic narratives and teachings, such as the story of Avraham destroying his father’s idols,[11] and the principle that “whoever kills a soul . . . it is as if he has killed all humankind; and whoever saves one soul, it is as if he has saved all humankind.”[12] Moreover, while the history is murky, it is almost beyond doubt that the development of a sophisticated and systematic Islamic jurisprudence in the eighth and ninth centuries owes much to the culture of rabbinic and talmudic learning that Muslim scholars encountered following the conquest and settling of Iraq and Israel.[13] Additionally, hadith, or traditions about the exemplary conduct of Mohammad, have been incorporated into rabbinic texts to teach ethical principles.[14] Furthermore, the stress that medieval Sephardic halakha placed upon authenticity through mesorah may be product of an epistemological culture where information had to be historically accurate to be authoritative, an idea cultivated by Islamic legal theory.[15] Finally, Rambam’s innovative subject classification of halakhic topics in the Mishneh Torah likely owes much to the thematic structure of the furu’ ul-fiqh works written by Muslim jurists.[16]

This kind of borrowing of concepts, teachings, and methods between the Jewish and Islamic traditions is a natural and universal phenomenon. It is an instance of what Alan Watson calls “legal transplants.”[17] Although some of the norms and institutions of most legal systems are relatively fixed, all systems evolve and change, often slowly, in response to social, economic, political, cultural, and other developments. Practitioners and actors facing jurisprudential challenges in their own system often look—either intentionally or subconsciously—to the analogous successes and failures of other legal communities in addressing similar problems. Doctrines, methods, and ideas that have worked well in other comparable contexts may then be adapted and integrated to meet current concerns.[18]

To be clear, as a committed halakha-observant Jew and rabbi, I do not think that Judaism should, or even really can, uncritically adopt teachings, practices, or ideas from the Islamic tradition. I am personally sympathetic to the modest claim that rabbinic Judaism and Jewish law is best understood and implemented from an internal perspective that relies on the truths and methods embraced by its own texts and traditions.[19] At the same time, I think that a famous comment by Rabbi Dr. Isidore Twersky appropriately encapsulates a reasonable and fruitful approach to these kinds of interactions. He wrote,

When you know your way—your point of departure and goals—then use philosophy, science, and the humanities to illumine your exposition, sharpen your categories, probe the profundities and subtleties of the masorah and reveal its charm and majesty; in so doing you should be able to command respect from the alienated and communicate with some who might otherwise be hostile or indifferent to your teaching as well as to increase the sensitivity and spirituality of the committed.[20]

I take Rabbi Twersky to mean that it is not only reasonable and permissible, but helpful to turn to other disciplines and other intellectual traditions as tools for problematizing, clarifying, and ultimately elevating our understanding and practice of Torah. Different thought systems in different disciplines from different times and places have grappled with similar issues in very distinct ways. In some cases, they offer novel answers to familiar questions that for a variety of reasons may not have been fully explored by the rabbinic tradition. In other instances, these “outside” sources raise previously unconsidered issues and questions relevant to our own religious practices and commitments that provide points of departure for new and enriching explorations of Torah and halakha. In both cases, as long as we are firmly and humbly grounded in a search for meaning in Torah and rabbinic thought rather than on a quest to impose meaning from without (and to be sure, how to do this is no small concern, and worthy of another article in its own right), engagement with other thought systems and disciplines can enhance our Judaism.

Two brief examples can help illustrate how our understanding and practice of halakha may be enhanced and enriched by placing traditional rabbinic perspective in conversation with the experiences and insights of Islamic religious law and legal practice. The first concerns Islamic law’s rich tradition of systematic legal philosophy, a discipline that is largely absent from rabbinic legal thought, but which could help address several contemporary challenges to the integrity of and public trust in halakhic decision making. The second relates to important lessons that Jews can learn from the Muslim experiences with the centralization of Islamic religious law and legal authority in government agencies, backed ultimately by the state monopoly on the use of coercive force to enforce the law.

III

Very early in Islamic legal history, Muslim jurists developed highly systematic ways of thinking about Islamic religious law in jurisprudential terms.[21] Systematic jurisprudential analysis is largely absent from traditional rabbinic writings; there are a variety of reasons for this, the exploration of which is beyond the scope of this short piece. Unlike the rabbinic tradition, the kinds of questions and concerns associated with what we in the West call legal philosophy, or what Muslim scholars call usul ul-fiqh (the roots of [legal] understanding) are central to Islamic legal though and practice. As a result, the Islamic tradition has a rich literature considering questions such as what is the relationship between God’s law and revelatory sources; what makes a source of law authoritative; how does one know that a source is authoritative; what determines the meaning of a material or rational source of law; how does one know what a particular source means; what is the relationship between God’s law and human understandings of God’s law; is human reason a legitimate source of law; what kinds of analytic and interpretive methods provide a reliable cognitive bridge between God’s law and Man’s mind; what makes a legal opinion a legitimate basis for religious practice; what is the relationship between law and language, law and ethics, law and custom, law and the coercive powers of government?[22]

These are important questions. They are questions that, if applied to halakha, go to the very heart of many contemporary debates within the observant Jewish world about what halakha is, how it works, and what halakhic authorities, communities, opinions, and modes of practice can be regarded as legitimate within the rubric of eilu v’eilu divrei Elokim hayyim. Of course, we can and have constructed responses to many of these concerns from the perspective of rabbinic thought by drawing on widely dispersed talmudic and midrashic teachings,[23] kelalei horaah,[24] codified prescriptions in Mishnah Torah, Arbah Turim, Shulkhan Arukh,[25] and helpful glimpses into the legal methodologies and theories of prominent posekim gleaned from rabbinic responsa.[26] Rabbinic treatments of these issues rarely manifest as systematic responses to particular jurisprudential questions, however. They do not evince comprehensive theory of what halakha is and how halakha works.[27]

As mentioned earlier, there are good internal reasons why halakhic scholars have been largely unconcerned with developing any systematic jurisprudence. Nevertheless, at least today, the failure to do so is at least partly responsible for poor understandings of the internal logic and simultaneously principled and pragmatic methods of halakhic decision making. Moreover, the lack of a comprehensive halakhic legal philosophy contributes to popular deprecations of contemporary halakhic decision making, especially in “hard cases”—such as igun, women’s ritual, industrial kashruth, geirut, and others—as political, subjective, and unprincipled.[28] It is true, to be sure, that developing halakhic doctrine in these and other fields entails substantial considerations of policy in addition to the formal application of rules;[29] and it is true, too, that halakhic judgment almost always entails a measure of subjectivity, whether in the apprehension and classification of relevant facts, the assessment of sources, or the analyses and application of texts.[30] But this does not also mean that halakhic decision making is necessarily unprincipled, arbitrary, or illegitimate. Other legal systems developed systematic approached to jurisprudence as responses to just these kinds of concerns.[31] The ways in which Islamic legal theory addresses these issues can be particularly adaptive and helpful in the halakhic context, since the workings of both systems—grounded in both textual and oral revelation, eternally relevant for their adherents, legally binding but not typically formally enforceable, decentralized, etc.—are so similar.

IV

Many observers associate Islamic religious law with the kinds of strict regulations and harsh punitive practices of modern Muslim-majority states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. These countries do, of course, present themselves as Islamic states governed by Shari’a law,[32] but viewed in historical context the marriage of religious legal authority and government power exemplified by these nations departs substantially from traditional relationships between law, politics, and religion in Islamic societies. For much of Islamic history, religious law and political power were kept separate from each other.[33] Islamic religious norms were formulated by scholars and jurists, or fuqaha, working privately or under the patronage of charitable trusts known as waqfs, which supported schools, mosques, and educational chairs.[34] While the judges who staffed religious courts were indeed paid by the ruler, they did not apply laws made by the sultan or local prince, but relied on the doctrinal rulings and scholarship produced by the fuqaha who typically avoided entanglements with the government.[35] In this context, local rulers routinely supported a plurality of religio-legal norms; several different religious courts, each representing one of the several distinct schools of Islamic jurisprudence, typically coexisted in any given jurisdiction at the same time, and Muslim citizens were free to bring their cases to whichever courts they wished.[36] Moreover, matters of private religious practice—things we would classify as mitzvoth bein adam l’Makom—were usually beyond the jurisdiction of the courts entirely. When individual Muslims had religious questions—about what to eat, how to pray, when to fast, whom to marry, or how much charity to give—they asked for and received fataawa, or legal opinions from whichever religious scholar they happened to identify with at the time.[37] The state did make law, to be sure, but it neither controlled religious legal scholarship nor determined the right answers to religious questions.[38] The role of government was understood to be limited to areas of policy and discretion left unregulated by religious standards.[39]

This changed drastically beginning in the early sixteenth century, when the Ottoman sultans sought to consolidate and unify their large empire by controlling Islamic religious law. They began by adopting the doctrinal positions of only one of the four schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence, the Hanafi school, as the official law of the empire.[40] They also appointed Hanafi jurists to newly created positions as official legal authorities for cities, provinces, and the entire empire. By marrying religious and political authority, the Ottoman sultans were able to harness the religious commitments of their Muslim subjects to reinforce their own power.[41] Whereas Islamic religious law and practice had previously been pluralistic, decentralized, private, and largely voluntary, under the Ottomans it became centralized and hierarchical, unitary, and subject to coercive government enforcement.

For a variety of reasons associated with the rise of Wahhabism and similar ideologies as a religious movement in eighteenth-century Arabia, the experiences of Muslim societies with European colonial powers and colonial law, and economic and the geopolitical circumstances under which many Muslim states gained independence during the twentieth century, many Muslim countries continued the trend toward the centralization of religious authority in government functionaries begun by the Ottomans.[42] Today, almost every Muslim country from Morocco to Malaysia has adopted some aspects of Islamic law—usually religious family and personal status laws—as the law of the state.[43] Some countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, have gone farther, adopting at least in name the entirely of Islamic religious law as state law.[44] In doing so, however, these countries have qualitatively changed the traditional way Islamic law operated, and have created a strange hybrid of religious doctrine, politics, and state policy.  

In most cases, these changes have brought substantial problems to the Islamic religion, Muslim citizens and religious adherents, and the states themselves. When religious law and observance existed independent of state power, religion and government operated in delicate balance, providing mutual checks on extremism in either sphere. Islamic law was dynamic, pragmatic, and adaptable; divorced from state control, there did not have to be a single official answer to most legal questions. Instead, jurists of different school of Islamic thought offered a range of alternative avenues for legitimate religious observance that Muslims were largely free to adopt or reject on a voluntary basis. This encouraged scholars to be responsive to local and temporal economic and social concerns, promoting congruity between religious law and life. State control over religious authorities and religious legal norms substantially undermined many of these positive characteristics. In their stead, Islamic religious law in the coercive hands of government has become formalistic and unresponsive to real world conditions, and has come to be viewed by many as draconian, repressive, and distinctly unworthy of respect or reverence.[45]

The Jewish people, too, are currently contending with questions related to the centralization of religious authority, and the relationship between halakha and government power in a Jewish state.[46] Any casual observer of Israeli religious politics is familiar with at least some of the issues that revolve around the official Israeli rabbinate, and in particular its government mandate of bureaucratic control over marriage, divorce, personal status, conversion, kashruth, and a variety of other issues related to the intersection of halakha and public life in Israel. Numerous articles and personal testimonies have suggested that this centralization and coercive enforcement of particular understandings of Jewish law have negatively impacted many Israeli’s and Jews’ respect for Judaism, halakha, and religious leadership.[47]

The issue is not limited to Israel. In the United States, too, there is substantial discontent, cynicism, and distrust with attempts to create centralized, uniform halakhic standards in areas like kashruth and geirut. Uniform policy, consistency, the establishment of best practices, predictability, and oversight are, to be sure, only some of the benefits of more centralized, organized, and uniform standards of halakhic practice.[48] But there are drawbacks as well.[49] Uniformity and centralization of religious authority and standards makes it harder for properly committed but unique and independent-minded members of our communities to find contexts conducive to their religious growth. Formal policies and bureaucratic regulatory processes also leave many halakhically legitimate modes of practice outside the mainstream. Although this is problematic in its own right, it has the added detriment of potentially contributing to a stagnation of creative and enriching developments in Jewish thought and halakhic practice. Several authorities have noted the importance of preserving non-normative viewpoints in order to maintain the potential for alternative modes of practice when circumstances call for it, l’fi haMakom v’haZeman. This becomes more difficult when religious standards are set from the top down, and communities and rabbinic leaders are expected to conform in order to situate themselves within broader centralized frameworks.

As we grapple with such issues, it may be helpful to look beyond our own daled amot to the experiences of other communities with characteristics similar to our own that have also experimented with various forms of centralized religio-legal authority and associations between religious law and state power. The Muslim example is a powerful one. Of course, the two situations are not exactly the same; important historical, cultural, political, and sociological differences urge thoughtfulness and caution in drawing uncritical conclusions about how Jews should think about these issues. Nevertheless, it is helpful to expand our horizons and consider what we can learn from others—even from other faith communities, including the Islamic tradition. If we are clear about our own commitments and objectives, we can use such interactions to enhance Jewish life and practice, raising the esteem of Torah and God in the process.

BOOK REVIEW

THE INESCAPABLE TRUTH

by Rabbi Dr. Sanford H. Shudnow

"It has already become clear that 'good' is life, and 'evil' is death. True ideas are referred to as 'life' and the untenable as 'death.'"

-- from The Guide of the Perplexed, Book I:42

by Moses Maimonides, 12th Century

            Perhaps the name of the review should be a "Retrospective on the book The Inescapable Truth and its author, Rabbi Eliezer Y. Gottlieb." The reason is partly because Rabbi Gottlieb had a profound affect upon me in my younger years. It was a privilege seeing him in class, and his kind and patient way, especially with some of our younger students. I was one of his older students.

            It's about time for this review. More than enough time has passed since my teacher Rabbi Eliezer Y. Gottlieb had written his book The Inescapable Truth. I was studying at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, Illinois, the famed Skokie Yeshiva. Rabbi Gottlieb, was my teacher in Talmud. He was a wonderful, friendly, brilliant teacher, who requested of me that I write a book review of his newly released book.

            Rabbi Gottlieb was especially hoping that I might write a favorable review that would appear in a variety of rabbinic journals of the day. I thought  at the time that I could do this for my beloved teacher, but once I started reading the book, I felt that it was a little too fanciful and could only be accepted by serious so-called 'Torah True' believers. I kept my thoughts to myself and did not write the expected review

            It is now over forty years since those days, and only now do I feel the need to write a review of Rabbi Gottlieb's book. Perhaps it is really a retrospective on Rabbi Gottlieb, as well as on his book. Why now, and why write from my home in Sydney, a world away from the Skokie Yeshiva in the suburbs of Chicago?

            I was sitting in the newly refurbished beit midrash (chapel), in our local synagogue in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, and noticed on one of the book shelves of the new library, Rabbi Gottlieb's distinctive 1971 book, its lovely yellow dust jacket adorned with the Star of David motif. More than nine thousand miles (fifteen thousand kilometers) from the scene of my unfulfilled promise, that book on the shelf served as a witness, pointing a finger at me, saying, "Haim Shudnow, you know what you promised your teacher in July of 1972. Now do it."

            I thought a great deal about the book and Rabbi Gottlieb. I waited until I returned to my home outside Washington, DC and retrieved my copy of the book from my personal collection there. I knew exactly where it was.

            The book with his handwritten Hebrew inscription to me is precious and personal. He had bestowed the book upon me, inscribed the frontispiece with a moving, flowery message, writing  a blessing of excellence in Torah and pure fear of God and that I may cause light to shine. It is signed E.Y. Gottlieb.

            I pulled the book gently off the shelf and looked at it, reread the impressive blurb on the author, learning things about him that I never fully realized, of his birth in Kolno, Poland and intensive Torah learning under the greatest rabbinic sages, including Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, and receiving his semicha (ordination) under Rabbi Aharon Kotler, He then managed to escape from Poland to Lithuania, and from there to Japan in 1941.

            While I knew nothing about his earlier years when studying with Rabbi Gottlieb, I am now so personally touched, since my own mother was born in Poland and I spent three years as a U.S. Navy Chaplain stationed in Japan. While in Japan, I heard many stories of the yeshiva students saved during the Holocaust, having sought refuge in Japan.

            Looking to see the name of the publisher, I was amazed to realize that my teacher's book was published by the premier Jewish publishing house -- Philipp Feldheim Inc. Once I started my rabbinic studies in Manhattan, I would spend much time visiting the various Jewish publishers, which especially included Feldheim Publishing and Behrman House, on East Broadway.

            I should have known then, that if Rabbi Gottlieb's book was worthy of being published by Feldheim, it must be a truly worthy book; but I didn't realize that in those halcyon days.

            Why didn't I write a review of the book back then in 1972?  The simple answer is, after having delved into the book and reading his perspective, it didn't fit with my Jewish Torah worldview at the time. My problem was that Rabbi Gottlieb's belief system was so deep in Torah Min Ha-Shamayim -- Heavenly or Divine Torah -- trying to prove that the Torah could not possibly have been written by human beings, and that all of our Judaism, all of the Torah -- everything, comes directly from Heaven

            Rabbi Gottlieb set about proving this premise. Today, I believe that his proofs are persuasive, eloquently presented and fit with what eventually became my perspective on Torah.

            The intended purpose of The Inescapable Truth is clearly set forth at the outset in the preface. Rabbi Gottlieb writes:

"The purpose for which this book is intended is twofold. Its first and principal aim is to share with the many who hold true Orthodox beliefs identical to my own . . . . These are the ideas which have formed the basis for my own strong beliefs in Orthodox religious ideology."

"Secondly, I fervently hope that most of what is expounded herein may have a convincing effect upon many people who were heretofore skeptics about religion in general, and Orthodox Judaism in particular." (p. ix)

            In retrospect, I find that many of his ideas, while quite extreme, are convincing. For instance, the Sabbatical laws: if one is trying to establish an agrarian-based society that will be successful in the Land of Israel, how could it be that any human author/leader would set up laws requiring the land to lie fallow for an entire year?  That is, that one would not plant, not tend the crops or harvest them, nor sell the produce. This means a full year and into the next. That year is known as Sh'nat Ha-Shemita.

            The Jubilee year, which is the 50th year -- the Sh'nat Ha-Yovel -- is also to be observed. What is the actual meaning of the Jubilee Year? The society observes the usual Shemita or 49th year, which is 7×7 plus the 50th year or the Jubilee year and then into the next year, the 51st year, in reality the first year of the next cycle. That is almost three years that the land has not been worked. It would take months to bring the fields and farm land back into condition for productive agriculture.

Why would any human being write and impose such unworkable laws? Only God could have given these commandments and assured the people that He would provide them sustenance during those years.

            Rabbi Gottlieb adds that even if a human being came up with such a system, he would eventually retract the rules, since he would in no way wish for the next generation -- for his children, for his grandchildren to suffer such restrictions and burdens. He would have to admit that he had made up the laws himself, and that they are no longer obligatory.

            Looking at the chapter headings, it is easy to see what amazing an undertaking Rabbi Gottlieb had taken upon himself. There are ten chapter headings: Positive Skepticism, Nature Testifies To Its Creator, Why Religion?, Which Religion?, The One and Only True Judaism, Torah From Heaven, Free Will Vs. Secular and Religious Determinism, The Immortality of the Soul, Christianity and Zoological Anti-Semitism, Did The Catholic Church Finally Ordain The Truth?.

            My particular focus on Rabbi Gottlieb's book has been his chapter six: Torah From Heaven. This chapter includes subheadings that could make one's head spin: Ten Proofs, Acceptance of the Burden on Themselves and Their Progeny, Uniqueness of Judaism's Beginning, The Obvious Necessity of the Epic of Sinai, Liars or Fools, Beliefs Transformed into Historical Facts, The Ordinance of the Sabbatical Year, etc.

            Sitting here in Sydney in my usual prayer seat and pondering many of the learned challenges emerging from The Inescapable Truth, I realize just how brilliant and profound the teachings of Rabbi Gottlieb are and the profound impact he made upon his many students.

            Rabbi Eliezer Y. Gottlieb may not be a household name and his book may not be on everyone's book shelf, but he and his book deserve a second look and deep thought. We must all revisit the questions raised in his book. Rabbi Gottlieb was very clear, very correct, and his perspective in seeing the Torah as a Divine document, not only a divinely inspired document, rather Torah Min Ha-Shamayim --Torah From Heaven.

            I hope and pray that this retrospective review of Rabbi Gottlieb's book will lead to it receiving proper recognition. It is quite a brilliant and beautifully written exposition, dealing with many of the questions that arise as we endeavor develop a deeper connection with our Jewish heritage. This is my prayer.

            To our members and friends,

            I now have completed my fourth year of working as the National Scholar of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals. It has been an honor and privilege working to promote our vision nationwide primarily through teaching and teacher training, and also through writing and internet classes. This report summarizes my various projects and activities over the past year.

            My major areas of focus have been:

·        Teacher Training:

o   One of our central goals is to train rabbis and educators to spread our vision of Torah to schools and communities. We build bridges with people in the field to work together, and have a greater impact on students and communities across the country and beyond.

o   I taught a course to Honors Rabbinical students at Yeshiva University, on Teaching Bible in Synagogues. The success of this course, which began in 2012, has made it a regular feature of the Honors Rabbinical program.

o   I have been working regularly with the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (CHAT), doing teacher trainings in person and also serving as a resource for their entire Bible faculty as they develop a new curriculum.

o   I participate annually at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah’s Bible Study days in June.

·        Community Education:

o   There is a serious thirst for the kind of learning represented by our Institute, and a sizable number of communities have invited me to give individual lectures, Shabbat scholar-in-residence programs, and classes in Tanakh and Religious Philosophy. Through a combination these programs, we reach thousands of adults directly each year.

o   Most frequently, I served in my capacity of Rabbinic Scholar at Kehilath Jeshurun. This involved speaking in the KJ Sephardic minyan weekly and giving regular classes in KJ, including a survey of the entire Bible, a History at Home series in Great Biblical Scandals, and running symposia co-sponsored by the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

o   In October, I gave the annual Levy Lecture at Queens College.

o   In January, I spoke at Citi Field as part of the Orthodox Union’s “Torah in the City” convention. Approximately 1500 people attended the convention.

o   In February-March, I gave a six-part series as part of the Yeshiva University Community Beit Midrash program.

o   In May, I was the keynote scholar at the Chicago Board of Rabbis learning convention.

o   In addition to the many weekday classes and programs, it was gratifying to visit communities as a Shabbat or Yom Tov scholar-in-residence in Thornhill, Ontario; New York, NY; Palo Alto, California; and Teaneck, New Jersey.

·        Publications:

o   This year, I published two books:

o   Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi: Prophecy in an Age of Uncertainty (Jerusalem: Maggid, 2016). In March, I was featured on the radio show, “Rabbi Wechsler Teaches” to discuss this book.

o   Increasing Peace Through Balanced Torah Study. Conversations 27 (New York: Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, 2017). This book contains essays that lie at the heart of the Institute’s religious ideology.  We have distributed it to communities across the country, including communities that invite me to be a scholar in residence.

o   I have begun working on a new collection of essays on Bible, focusing on the interaction between tradition and academic methods of study.

I thank the co-sponsors of the two books, who made their publication and distribution possible.

For Haggai-Zechariah-Malachi: Levy Family Foundation, Sephardic Publication Foundation.

Thank you also to those with whom I have learned Torah who contributed: Linda and Shlomo Brody; Margy and Perry Davis; Faith Fogelman; Simon Gerson; Simone and Elias Hannema; Joseph Jerome; Joel Marcus; Jane Mushabac; Judy Nadelson; Ron Platzer; Bina Presser; Gideon and Shara Schor; Karen and Roy Simon; Joan Weber; and several others who wished to remain anonymous.

For Conversations 27: S. Daniel Abraham; Joshua Angel; in memory of his wife, Rita Angel; Bengualid Family Foundation in memory of Sylvia Knafou Bengualid; Marco Dilaurenti; Levy Family Foundation in memory of Leon and Elsi Levy; Alan and Kathleen Shamoon; Ronald and Adele Tauber; Sephardic Publication Foundation.

·        Internet Learning:

o   We have significantly expanded our Online Learning section on our website, https://www.jewishideas.org//online-learning.

Below is an itemized listing of the various classes and programs I have given over the past year in my capacity as National Scholar of the Institute.

·        June 19-20: Three lectures at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Annual Bible study days.

·        June 28: Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto teacher training.

·        July 7-28: Four-part mini-series at Lamdeinu, Teaneck.

·        September 14-28: Three-part mini-series at Lamdeinu, Teaneck.

·        September 23-24: Shabbat scholar-in-residence at BAYT in Thornhill, Ontario.

·        October 27: Annual Levy Lecture at Queens College.

·        November 12: History at Home Lecture at Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.

·        December 17: History at Home Lecture at Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.

·        January 14: History at Home Lecture at Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.

·        January 15: Lecture at the Orthodox Union’s Torah in the City at Citi Field.

·        January-April: Ten-part series for Honors Rabbinical Students on Teaching Bible in Synagogues.

·        February-March: Six-part series for Yeshiva University’s Community Beit Midrash.

·        February-March: Six-part series at Lamdeinu, Teaneck.

·        March 5: Guest on Rabbi Wechsler Teachers radio show.

·        March 10-11: Shabbat scholar-in-residence at the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue in New York City.

·        March 31-April 1: Shabbat scholar-in-residence at Congregation Emek Beracha in Palo Alto, California.

·        April 6: Lecture at New York University.

·        May 15-22: Two-part mini-series at Lamdeinu, Teaneck.

·        May 17: Guest scholar at the annual Kallah of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.

·        May 30-31: Two Shavuot lectures at Congregation Ohr Saadya, Teaneck, New Jersey.

·        October-May: Seventeen Lectures surveying the Bible at Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.

I also continue to teach courses to advanced undergraduates at Yeshiva University, something I have done since 1996. This past year, I taught for the first time a course on the opportunities and challenges that arise from the interface of traditional and academic Bible study. I look forward to bringing elements of that course into future teacher trainings and scholar-in-residence weekends across the country.

Thank you all for your support and enthusiasm, and I look forward to promoting our Torah vision for many years to come.

Rabbi Hayyim Angel

National Scholar

Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals

It’s not too late to prevent a catastrophe

An open letter to Chief Rabbi Mirvis regarding the Dweck Affair

Dear Chief Rabbi Mirvis,

The Jewish community is looking to you for wise guidance regarding the Dweck Affair, and appreciates your desire to respond sensitively and carefully. At the same time, your statements (and your silences) to date have not been reassuring.

I’m writing as a member of three communities: as a British citizen, as an Orthodox Jew, and as a long-time member of the Spanish and Portuguese community. I speak only for myself, but I am confident that others share my views on this matter. Indeed, I’m somewhat reluctant to express such unoriginal thoughts, but I believe that it is important to speak up at times like this.

The fundamental question at stake here is how to respond to attacks on a rabbi when those attacks, even if based on legitimate differences of opinion, are expressed as bile-filled rants, and focus on the character of the speaker rather than the issues under debate.

First, as a British citizen, I understand that it is undesirable for internal Jewish disputes to be aired in public. But communities, especially religious ones, are judged by how they treat the extremists within their midst. Remaining silent in the face of egregious character assassination makes us accomplices. Extremism within our own Jewish community must be repudiated by responsible religious leadership—just as we demand of the leaders of other communities—and we should not be viewed as passive onlookers when our Jewish (and British) values are being trampled upon.

Second, as an Orthodox Jew, I interpret the silence of the centrist Orthodox rabbinate in response to charedi provocations as a sign that, yet again, we will cave readily to extremism, and lack the courage of our convictions. Rabbi Marc Angel has written extensively about the damage that this phenomenon has caused. The mistaken belief that the confidence of the ultra-Orthodox can be retained while responding to the needs of the larger Orthodox community, especially its youth, is naive. Young people are looking to leaders such as Rabbi Dweck, and to you, to help them navigate the reality in which homophobia is no longer socially acceptable, and many of them have friends who are gay and wanting to live lives of Torah and mitzvot. They do not expect the Rambam to be sensitive to LGBT issues, but they will not forgive contemporary rabbis who minimize the problem, and speak glibly of the pain suffered by a significant part of the community. And perhaps worst of all is the message this affair sends about our values as an Orthodox community: that even as we begin the period of Bein HaMetzarim, we are more concerned about ideological purity than sinat chinam.

Third, as a member of the Spanish and Portuguese community, I am hoping that you will stand up for the traditional principles of rabbinic independence and local governance. You have an important role to play as a spiritual leader. But Judaism is not Catholicism, and the Chief Rabbi (whether of Britain or Israel) is not the Pope. So I would expect your first reaction to any calls that you “fire” a rabbi, from whatever source, to be a clarification that this rabbi is not employed by you and does not serve at your pleasure.

You recently conveyed through your spokesman that you are assuming full "responsibility for bringing this episode to a suitable conclusion” and that you will “establish a dignified and appropriate format which will allow for concerns relating to a wide range of Rabbi Joseph Dweck’s teachings and halachic rulings to be considered”.

The most “suitable conclusion” to this matter, in my view, would be to announce that you have looked into the lecture given by Rabbi Dweck and have found nothing in it to justify the vile attacks that followed; and that ad hominem attacks against distinguished rabbis are unacceptable. Such a statement would neither refute nor endorse the views of Rabbi Dweck, but would give you an opportunity to remind the community that we celebrate machloket leshem shamayim, and that conformance with your opinions—or indeed the opinions of any other rabbi—is not a condition for serving as a rabbi in the UK. Nevertheless, the community is no doubt eager to hear your own analysis of the halakhic, moral and social aspects of this issue, perhaps in a lecture at a later point in which you address the substantive arguments made by Rabbi Dweck and others.

But I fear a different ending, which in my view would be disastrous: namely, that you announce that an investigation has been conducted; that Rabbi Dweck has “clarified” his comments; and that you nevertheless deem him fit to continue to serve the community. Such an outcome would, by omission, fail to address the real issue as I’ve outlined above. But it would also have a chilling effect on the Orthodox community in the UK, by signalling that rabbis should avoid addressing controversial issues, lest they be subject to an inquisition. Young rabbis are looking to you to reaffirm their right to speak honestly and freely, and to follow their consciences without fear of prosecution. And the damage would extend beyond the shores of the UK, as rabbis the world over who might consider posts in Britain reflect on the humiliation of one of their most talented and thoughtful colleagues.

Yours,

Daniel Jackson

Connections in a Modern World

On the eve of Rosh HaShana 1948 (5706), the first Reform rabbi to be officially appointed in Germany since 1936 arrived in Berlin to cater to the needs of the local community. Rabbi Steven Schwarzschild, a young HUC-ordained rabbi who fled to the United States with his parents at the beginning of WWII, returned to Germany despite huge opposition by the Orthodox establishment both within Germany and within the relief organizations that were heavily influenced by the American and British Orthodox circles.

This opposition was not based only on theological divisions or the question of denominational differences. The demographic conditions within the Jewish community in Berlin at the time were such that a large part of the community survived the war only due to the fact they were in interfaith marriages. At that time, almost all liberal rabbis before and after the Holocaust did not acknowledge interfaith couples. When members of the Jewish community received food parcels from relief organization in post-war-shattered Berlin, conversion was a central issue. Both the Orthodox circles and the relief organizations feared that the arrival of a Reform rabbi would create an influx of “New Jews” who survived the war as Aryan Germans. The political faction of the Zionists and Orthodox Jews within the Berlin Geminde (community) board repeatedly warned that the Jewish community would become divided and might even disappear as "a Reform approach to conversion will alter our Jewish identity."

However, none of this actually took place. Upon arrival, Rabbi Schwarzschild did not know how to solve the flood of conversion requests. After consulting with several rabbis, he decided to adopt in full the conversion criteria issued by Rabbi Munk, the Berlin Orthodox Rabbi who preceded Schwarzschild. Those criteria were written with the support of the Belsen (Hareidi) rabbinical board, Chief Rabbi Herzog, and the Reform Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. He was then criticized by the Liberal faction of the Geminde but was appointed an honorary president of Mizrachi-Germany (the Zionist-Orthodox party).

Today this seems, however, to be a somewhat naive approach. The gap between the Liberal denominations and Orthodoxy is not only theologically and halakhically huge, but it is also based on different philosophical, religious, and social foundations. It is very hard to imagine a situation such as the one that took place in Berlin or the one in Bombay taking place today. How could Orthodox institutions and rabbis work with Liberal denominations in a reality where the possibility of finding a common ground on the difficult questions (for example, kiddushin and gittin, LGTBQ matters, patrilineal decent, egalitarian synagogues, etc.) does not seem to exist? In this reality, cooperation limits itself to political matters (Israel, federation issues, anti-Semitism) and acting “civil” within the large community.

The Paradigm Is Different

A few months ago Rabbi Tzfania Drori was interviewed about Minister Naftali Benet's visit to a Solomon Shechter school. The visit created a stir within Israeli politics as it was perceived as a de-facto recognition of the validity of Conservative Judaism. Within that context Rabbi Drori, said

The first thing I did when I came to NYC in the 1960s was to go to a Reform synagogue and see what it's about… .Later in Los Angeles I went to see their schools…. I can't say I wasn't interested. I've seen the positive as well as the negative within them….We must not excommunicate or boycott anybody.

This statement, which in the past might have caused another round of statements about Liberal denominations, went almost unnoticed. This was not because nobody heard about it; it reached the front page of leading news websites. It also was not because Rabbi Drori is an unimportant figure. On the contrary, at 79, Drori, Rosh Yeshivat Kiryat Shmona and a student of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, is one of the leaders of National-Orthodoxy in Israel. The message was quietly received because his statement didn't call for a change in politics nor for a change in halakha. He simply reiterated the need to know what “they” are about and to get to know “them.”

The frame of the conversation about Liberal denominations is changing. The postmodern reality we live in negates the need to always find solutions. In the past we would aspire to find a solution because the very existence of Liberal denominations jeopardized one of the foundations of Orthodoxy – securing the truth with regard to God's revelation. Today the reality allows us to live within our own individual narrative.

Rav Shagar z"l writes

Meeting different types of believers and non-believers will not weaken my faith but strengthen it. As Hasidic Jews tend to do, I will be able to recognize the divine in everything. The theological question of "which faith is better?" becomes meaningless in a postmodern world, but this does not harm my attachment to my tradition.

(Broken Vessels, 2003)

The postmodern reality, as Rav Shagar illustrated in his writings, changes the foundation of the way we act religiously. In today's world we can create a different landscape when interacting on a denominational level with Liberal Jews. Meetings are not about a need to seek solutions to halakhic questions and matters of politics. People can simply enjoy a conversation or just appreciate meeting other Jews and try to bridge over decades of mutual suspicion.

Orthodoxy itself is a modern being. While maintaining the traditional approach to halakha and minhag, Orthodoxy functions in a way that was constructed in a modern setting and dealt with a Jewish community that believed and thought in modern terms. Although Orthodoxy will probably continue to thrive, as recent surveys show both in Israel and in North America, the way Orthodoxy is dealing with new and old phenomena is changing. New approaches that allow observing a traditional way of life in a postmodern reality are popping up across the spectrum. When dealing with Liberal denominations, here too, new ways are arriving and we must listen to the voices that are fighting to preserve a traditional halakha while living in a narrative-based reality.

Unlike Rav Kook, due to multiculturalism that is a characteristic of the postmodern reality, I am no longer in need to justify myself in front of the other or to identify him within myself—not the Jewish “other” nor the non-Jewish “other”…

(Rav Shager, To Illuminate the Openings, 2013)

Orthodox Jews no longer live in a reality where the existence of “other” Jewish denominations is a threat. This does not mean that Orthodoxy became pluralistic and believe all denominations are a reflection of truth. In a world where Truth is no longer a goal, we all know we live within different narratives. Orthodoxy is not threatened by the existence of other narratives. In fact, one can argue that the postmodern reality allows more room for a “simple” traditional way of life that does not attempt to bridge between the reality and tradition (by modernizing Jewish values and converting modern values). As Rav Shagar writes, no one needs to justify anything anymore nor does he need to convince anyone. Communities can simply live side by side and try to meet without solving the gaps between them but rather accept the gaps.

Working in a Different Reality

In the past two years I have been fortunate to lead the Mechadshey Kedem initiative, which seeks to create conversations between Israeli Zionist-Orthodoxy and North American Liberal denominations. This initiative is founded on the spiritual and existential value that all Jews have a shared destiny and that we are all part of the Jewish people. Those thoughts, while obvious to many, are not always reflected in the way Orthodox and non-Orthodox denominations relate to each other.

As part of this initiative we go to yeshivot and midrashot (in Israel) and ask them to open the door to Liberal rabbinic students from HUC, JTS, or other rabbinic schools. Last year alone we had more than 100 participants in this new initiative. In almost every place we visit, from Haredi-Leumi yeshivot to the Kibbutz HaDati midrashot, there is never an apparent expectation that the Liberal Jews who are guests will “see the light” or “repent in Teshuva” as a result of the meetings. Instead, it seems most rabbis and students are interested in knowing more about other Jews who think and observe differently. The fact that we don't know each other is becoming a real threat to the very nature of the Jewish people.

The willingness to sit and share Talmud Torah with a rabbinical student who is representing, more or less, the opposite of the yeshiva concept of its graduate, is not merely a kiruv moment or a political gesture. In a postmodern reality, one can be a zealot for halakha and at the same time learn with a fellow Jew who thinks differently. One does not need to accept the core value of pluralism and to view the Other as a legitimate reflection of truth. One can hold firmly to the halakhic world view, while agreeing to be in touch with Jews who think, believe, and operate differently. We must not see this as pragmatism or as a new-age style of Ahavat Yisrael. There is something much more profound that is possible in the relationship of Orthodoxy and Liberal denominations.

Some Final Thoughts

The postmodern reality allows us to bring back the notion of a joint-family to the discussion table of the Jewish people. Family members argue with each other all the time. However, even when they strongly disagree, they will still sit around the same Shabbat table and share the same worries and laughs.

I can vouch that in all sessions we held, I have never seen anyone try to raise a solution to the big questions thinking he will convince a member of the other side. Instead, people were sharing life experiences, insights on verses, on Gemara and prayer. People were getting to know each other. They felt connected, they argued for hours, sometimes shouting over this question or the other, but they didn't try to convince. They tried to interact.

In the past few decades, Orthodox Jews preferred not to interact at the peer-to-peer level with other denominations. The discussion was left to the rabbinic elite and the connection between denominations was limited to non-religious issues and social gatherings. I do not believe the Kahal should take the place of the rabbis, leaders, and posekim. However, the postmodern reality allows us to interact without trying to solve everything. It allows the Kahal to redeem the relationship within the Jewish people and it also allows the rabbis and leaders to be in touch without constantly seeking solutions but rather connect amongst each other.

We all have experienced a Seder, a holiday meal, or Shabbat with family members with whom we do not agree. We argued… but then shared the last piece of cake. I truly believe that if we will learn how to establish a real relationship, the cake will follow—and by then we might even know how to share it.

“Linda, please take my advice. Travel abroad when you are young and strong. Don’t wait until you are old because it might become too difficult to get around. Save America for last—when you are retired.”       

—Mae Axelrod

My passion in life was first ignited by listening to the wisdom of my paternal grandmother. Her name was Mae, an immigrant from Kiev, and she was the one who instilled in me the idea to start traveling as soon as I could. Mae was a cultured and very curious woman who always yearned to visit Europe. She constantly dreamed and talked about walking the winding streets of Italy to see some of the greatest works of art and architecture.

            So finally, she and my grandfather made a trip to Europe. But when she finally fulfilled her lifelong dream of a voyage to Italy by boat in 1954, my grandfather had trouble walking, and it was difficult for him to move around. The trip was tiresome; he had no stamina, and the broken old streets were a challenge for both of them. They had waited too long, she told me, to go on a sightseeing trip. Needless to say, it was very disappointing. They finally took that trip and could hardly see what they set sail to experience.

And so it was—upon graduating from college with an art degree and wanting to see all the great works of art—traveling became my greatest desire and passion. And following the advice of my grandmother, whom I greatly loved and adored, I listened to her wise words and was ready to hit the road as soon as I could. Never once did I consider a trip to the Caribbean. I wanted to see the exotic and culturally rich places first. After all, at 22 years of age, youth and strength were on my side, and although I had a small budget as a teacher, it made it all that much better, as I loved staying in tiny hostels and taking public transportation wherever possible. I did have the summertime free to explore, so I was not going to waste any time.

Then when I met my husband Josef, who seemed to share my passion. He agreed to close his business a few weeks in the summer so that we could take a trip. It all worked after a bit of maneuvering, and together we have spent our life visiting and exploring places that offered us the most interesting glimpse into other worlds. We loved meeting a variety of people, and we did it without organized tours, with only a carry-on suitcase, one pair of hiking boots, a copy of the Lonely Planet Guidebook, and a great deal of enthusiasm, curiosity, and guts.

We spent each year researching countries of interest and what was accessible to us for a visit. And this was even before computers, internet, and hotels.com. Little did we know that traveling would soon become an addiction, and I can say without question, it has been the most enriching thing we could do for ourselves. You find your real self while traveling, and the world is a true classroom for those who are interested in learning through experiences.

And then when we had our son Zohar, he also learned to share our passion and came with us on all our summer trips. We started him at five years old, and we knew that he would get much more out of traveling the world than going to camp or playing basketball. We equipped him with his own carry-on suitcase, taught him how to do his own laundry in the shower, and gave him a small allowance for purchasing souvenirs of his choice. It was because of him that we were actually able to get an invitation to visit Bhutan from the Royal Government. But that story is for later in this article. So from the age of five until he was 16, Zohar was part of our travel expeditions.

Of course, you can’t get to remote places, especially on a limited budget, without putting up with some discomforts. That is a given. Zohar was a real trooper, and I have to admit, so were we. But if the sights are worth it, then who cares about the lack of running water, no electricity, snakes in the room, filthy streets, and frightening modes of transportation, not to mention having to take a slew of inoculations before going. It all goes with the territory, as they say.

But there was another added plus to our adventures that we had never anticipated. Traveling can take you on a spiritual journey into yourself. It can change how you interact with every aspect of the world, both as a person, and also surprisingly as a Jew. You get to know yourself better in so many different ways and on so many different levels. So, with nothing more than being lucky enough to have been raised in America where air travel is a possibility, I have been blessed with the opportunity and time to see the world and have reaped so many benefits. My adventures have given me the richest experiences to call upon to help me navigate through life’s challenges. Whether it was that visit to Mother Teresa’s hospital, or peering through the bushes as the African women sang together while doing their laundry along the river banks, those experiences and faces of the people are embedded in my very being. They continually define me as a person and I call upon those memories to help keep me grounded.

The following travel vignettes are just a few of my stories where I felt stronger as a Jew spiritually and humbled as a human being. I have been traveling for 45 years and have never missed a summer trip. I still haven’t seen America. That will come last, as my grandmother advised. I invite you through this article to come on a journey with me through some of my most wonderful, notable, and spiritual travel experiences.

“Mom, Dad, why can’t we go to Disneyworld like the rest of my friends? Where is Haran?”

                         —Zohar Kastner, age 12

Trip to Haran, Eastern Turkey

In keeping with our desire to see the world and all that it has to offer, it was my husband Josef’s idea to find out where Haran is located, since Zohar’s bar mitzvah parasha was Lekh Lekha, and what a unique bar mitzvah experience it would be for our son to be in the actual place where God told Abraham to leave Ur and travel the road to Israel. After doing some research, we located Haran, which is in Eastern Turkey. We planned a summer trip there, and as soon as school was out, off we went. After landing in Erzurum, Turkey, we rented a car and drove miles to this remote place called Haran. It is situated near the headwaters of the Euphrates River, and nearly all the traffic between Mesopotamia and Canaan, Egypt, and the Hittite Empire had to pass through Haran. What a place it was and still is.

Standing there was standing in ancient Jewish history. There was nothing modern about Haran. The city itself was full of ruins, and the locals even showed us where Abraham’s father was buried. But it was the beehive structures where the people and animals lived that really put us in a time machine back thousands of years. We were invited into one of them, and we actually felt like we had returned to archaic times. I guess we actually did. It was thrilling. The road that took us to Haran through the plains of Turkey were traveled by Abraham as he was looking for a homeland. He slept in one of these conical houses. This place was truly a treasure of our faith and how great it was to stand in such a place with my son Zohar, before reading Lekh Lekha. The three of us were overwhelmed by the experience, and if anything, this made his bar mitzvah parasha authentic and jump out of the pages of the Torah when he read 10 weeks later at the Kotel in Jerusalem.

“When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.”

—Isaiah 41:17

Trip to Mali, Africa

Josef and I, loving architecture and art, decided to visit Mali, Africa. We chose Mali for three reasons: First, it is known for the greatest African art, in particular, the famous Chiwara antelope wood carving. Second, we wanted to see the famous Sudanese mud architecture, specifically, the Djenne Mosque complex in the desert. Mud architecture is a skill passed down through generations, and the buildings are entirely molded by human hands. Third, we wanted to visit Timbuktu, an entire sand city in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

Most people who visit Mali are with organizations such as Save the Children or Doctors without Borders. It is an extremely poor place. But then there was us—off to see some Unesco-protected works of human achievement with only our copy of the Lonely Planet guidebook. Never did I think that I would encounter situations and make decisions that were totally out of my consciousness. After all, I was raised in New York City and lived here my entire life and had no problem navigating the subway system and protecting myself against local robbers and scam artists.

But what do you do when you encounter 30 people, dehydrated from lack of water, running toward your vehicle in the middle of the desert, wanting to take the water that you filled in your jerrican, which was sitting on the roof our jeep? It was terrifying. Would they kill us for the water? Would they kidnap us? Would they leave us to die in the desert of dehydration? And if we gave them our water, then we would have none to continue our desert journey or worse yet, to return from where we started. I turned to Josef, who was not as panic stricken as I was, and he responded by quoting a line from the bible about giving water. He turned to the bible for answers to this serious dilemma. I was stunned at first, but where on earth could I come up with an answer to such a vexing dilemma. I went completely numb from fear of dying in the desert and becoming one of those bleached skeletons in the sand that artist Georgia O’Keeffe painted so strikingly. Should I put on my red t-shirt at this point, so my dried up bones would be visible from the air when they hopefully came looking for us, if they came looking for us? What do we do?

Josef on the other hand had faith in the people that they would not harm us and just needed to drink water badly. He also looked at the map and said we would probably find water in a few hours at the Niger River. What kind of river? I thought. The kind with parasites and diseases? But we stopped the jeep regardless of my panic. The thirsty group all came charging at us, and we poured them water, hoping for the best. Much to my surprise, they even thanked us in in Bambara. Somehow we were guided by our faith in Judaism, although this situation was beyond anything I ever thought I could encounter in my lifetime. But following Josef’s lead, relying on the wisdom from Isaiah, we helped them. We did find water later on and I was sure to say thank you to God as well!

“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

 —Isaiah 41:10

Timbuktu, Mali

But the story did not end here. The following week we decided to drive to Timbuktu, which is a sand city in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Josef, now a bit more experienced after the water experience, now decided to check out the road to Timbuktu with the Minister of Roads. Could you imagine walking into the office of the Minister of Roads unannounced? We did and had a lovely chat with the man in charge. After getting the logistics, we left with a land rover, which was an animal of a vehicle, a driver speaking only Bambara, and ourselves. This time, being smarter, we took a case of water and a few sandwiches. One small detail that was left out by the Minister of Roads, was that roads in the Sahara were only tracks from the jeep that traveled before you. Asphalt, which I earned a new respect for in Africa, ended one hour into our journey and we were only following faint tracks in the sand. It was nerve-racking, and I was asking myself all the way how I allowed myself to get into this situation. It was like my travel passion had run away with my brain power.

But we made it after 13 hours of travel to this magnificent sand city with a glorious skyline as we approached. The Tuareg tribe people, clothed in indigo blue robes, riding camels, were in the entrance of the city to greet us, as if they knew we were coming. We found the one hotel to stay in, while our driver Ollie insisted on sleeping on the roof of the jeep. I was not particularly excited about returning the same way back to Bamako, the capital, so when four stranded young people from the Peace Corp asked if they could hitchhike back with us, I said “yes” and was thrilled to have some youth and muscle along for the scary ride. We walked around Timbuktu for two days in sheer amazement that a city could be built from sand. It was really one giant sand castle. Of course it needed constant repair, which you could see happening on every building. And while they were repairing, the sandstorms were constantly blowing, making it even more of a challenge to keep the city from being swallowed up by the forces of nature. It was fascinating, and we even got to meet the mayor of the sand town and his two wives.

But getting back to the hitchhikers, it was a good thing that they came with us, because on the way back, our jeep sank into quicksand, like in one of those horror movies, sinking half-way down until it hit solid sand. We could not even open the door of the car and had to climb out the window. Apparently it had rained and it was our hard luck that not only did the sand turn to mud, but the tracks in the sand from the car before us (the so-called road) had disappeared. The car went down, there was no road and now we had no direction. We only had the compass to rely on that Josef to this day wears on his watchband. So, with only our bare hands and steel plates that our driver had luckily brought along, we all took turns digging the car out with our bare hands. It was hours of tiresome work, and did I mention—we had no water left. We formed a dam to help stop the mud from flowing but as the sun was setting, the desert started to cool off and the mud started to crack and dry up.

After an intense powwow, it was decided that we were not going to attempt moving the car until morning. So we all decided to go to sleep at this point to conserve our energy. We slept either in the jeep, under it, on top of it, on the side of it, or near it until morning. I never closed my eyes, as a hoot here and there kept my panic attack going and with eyes wide open, I became a terrified night watchman. We considered at one point walking 50 kilometers at night which was the estimation of the nearest town, but everyone was too exhausted for that. And who knew how long our flashlight batteries would last.

And so it was—we waited until morning to push the car out of the sand. We did manage to get the jeep going eventually, and with long broken-off petrified tree branches, Josef and the Peace Corp boys surveyed the terrain looking for safe places to drive the car. The girls and I were filtering mud through a handkerchief and added a few drops of emergency iodine drops to the bit of water that we managed to salvage. We would of course only drink it if we were at death’s door as it was a watery mud cocktail. Yuck!

We did finally make it back to a town, starving and thirsty, and the two boys were dropped at the hospital as they were suffering from malaria. The luggage rack of the car was kaput at this point and fell off. The jeep literally plowed through trees and anything in the way and we even had to cross a river with the vehicle. Stones were put in the water to keep us afloat.

Now you might ask at this point what this experience did for me spiritually, except for the fact that I had to turn to God at many moments to pray that we come out of this adventure alive. Josef quite honestly was worried about making it back to the hotel before Shabbat. But I will attempt to answer this question on a different level. I have come to realize through this harrowing experience that the circumstances of our life are not always in control. Humankind likes to think in straight lines. We leave from a departure point and arrive at our destination. But the dessert terrain throws you completely off. Maybe I experienced something like the Israelites felt when they left Egypt and took all the riches with them. What good did the riches do in the desert? I actually thought of them while undergoing this experience. Can I ever again take water for granted, or solitude, or a road, or food, or a compass or a comfortable bed to sleep in? The desert tests you, and I managed to pass the test, perhaps with a very low grade, but I passed. And the Israelites wandered the desert for 40 years? What a remarkable people!

“The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”

—Elie Wiesel

Trip to Crete, Greece

Just this past summer, Josef and I took a trip to Crete, Greece. Oh, those gorgeous Greek islands where people come from all over the world to just swim, sun, and rejoice in one of God’s paradises. It is stunning in scenery and just a place to enjoy nature at its finest. We try to go each summer, and this year, we met a delightful couple who were staying in our 10-room hotel. They were about our age, and they both recently retired and chose Crete as their first stop to celebrate their newfound freedom. They were from Germany.

Since we were the only two couples staying in this small hotel, we ended up eating our meals together on the lovely tavern overlooking the Libyan Sea. We told them about our life, children, and work and shared experiences about traveling. They did the same. It was only during Shabbat while sitting on the taverna that they asked which town we would be driving to today. They knew we liked to explore the towns and really didn’t take a swim until very late in the day. We told them that it was Saturday and we don’t drive on Saturdays. They asked why. We told them that we were Jewish and Saturday is our Sabbath. She froze. Had she never met a Jew before? She looked at us with piercing eyes. Now I know why you have never visited Germany she said. We responded, “yes.” Then her eyes filled with tears and she came over to me and put her arms around me with a tight hug. She said, “What can I say about such an ugly part of history that is so difficult to understand. I apologize for my country,” she said, “I apologize for Germany for what we did to your people. I apologize, I am so sorry.” She continued to weep. I had never encountered any German person who apologized to me personally for their country and the atrocities that they committed. We were both silent and I honored the silence. She did too.

“In school, my friends called me ‘Fish.’ As a child, my grandmother used to prepare gefilte fish, using the bathtub as an aquarium until it was time for the slaughter. The fish and its scales have been a recurring image in my architecture, probably because the scent of the fish has clung to me all these years.”                          

—Frank Gehry

Trip to Bilbao, Spain

Frank Gehry, whose Hebrew name is Ephraim, is acclaimed as being the greatest architect of the twenty-first century. He just recently received a Medal of Freedom award from President Obama. He is most well-known for his exquisite masterpiece—The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is a magnificent example of the most groundbreaking architecture done in titanium with undulating curves that were all conceived and designed on a computer. It is innovative, highly unique, and world-famous.

 Wanting to see it, Josef and I traveled to Bilbao, Spain for a long weekend, just to see this architectural wonder. We rented the audio tour to take around the museum with us. As I was listening to the recording about the inspiration for the design of the museum, I was shocked to hear about Gehry’s description of his childhood experience of fish-watching. What I mean by fish-watching is that when he was a child, his parents, who were the children of Russian and Polish immigrants used to keep fish swimming in the bathtub before the Jewish Holidays. As a youngster, this vision must have been a bit disturbing, but right before the holiday, his mom would scoop the fish from the tub, club the fish to death, and then take it to the kitchen to prepare a special fish concoction for the holiday meal. Of course I thought, as I remembered hearing those stories from my grandmother! This was all in preparation for the making of the gefilte fish. Fresh fish, swimming around in the bathtub until it was time to grind it into that molded lump of sweet boneless cold fish stewed with carrots and onions and covered with horseradish.

But it was this sight of the fish wiggling and slithering around in the tub that became the influence for one of the world’s greatest innovative pieces of architecture. The image of the shiny scales of the fish were turned into titanium rectangles strategically placed in an undulating pattern with curves that captured the movement of the fish squirming in the limited space of a bathtub. Who would ever imagine that one of the most sophisticated works of architecture in the world would all be credited to the Jewish Holidays and the start of a holiday meal with that delicious piece of gefilte fish? Go figure that the power of building in a new and different way with the use of a computer could come from a traditional Ashkenazic food. That piece of sweet fish to commence a holiday meal has now risen to the heights of sophistication and actually does taste better after seeing the influence that it has had on the modern world.

 Then you will go safely on your way, and you will not hurt your foot. When you lie down, you will not be afraid.               

—Proverbs 3:23–24

Trip to Bali, Indonesia

One of the most beautiful places in the world is Bali, Indonesia. Bali is the only island in Indonesia that is Hindu. It is an artist’s paradise filled with beautiful wood and stone carvings of Hindu deities, and the Balinese people are often taught from a young age how to make these beautiful sculptures. Their artistry is part of a tradition that is passed down from generation to generation. And when we do get the opportunity to visit Bali, we even like to stay in a wood-carving village called Mas, where we can watch the artisans at work enjoy their traditional craft.

Josef and I went twice in our life to this exotic paradise, and both times we were blown away by the natural beauty and by the peacefulness of the island. Bali has an aura of being truly blessed and the people seem to appreciate all that they have. One beautiful sight you see everywhere is the people bringing offerings to the gods at the temples. These offerings are shallow baskets made out of leaves with incense sticks protruding out, along with and an assortment of oils and other beautiful things. For example, if you just had rice and meat for lunch, a little bit of it goes into the offering, which eventually will be left at a chosen religious statue or in front of a home. It is the here and the now that is representational of the Hindu culture, and it is in those offerings to the gods that they express their appreciation for what they have. It is another way of giving thanks.

One morning, when Josef and I were ready to embark on a journey around the island and we checked out of our hotel, there was a surprise waiting for us outside. Our rented car was surrounded by garlands of jasmine flowers and incense. Local people were gathered around our vehicle and they were praying for our safe journey. They thanked both Josef and me and their gods for bringing us to their beautiful island. It reminded me of the prayer that we say before a journey for a safe trip, Tefilat haDerekh. Of course the color, the smell of the flowers, and the incense added to the prayers, but the wish was the same. Halfway around the world, strangers wish each other safe travels. Every time I say the Tefilat haDerekh prayer before a trip, I think of the Balinese people who so elaborately demonstrated their wish for us.

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”

—Marcus Garvey

Trip to Sfax, Tunisia

One of our most interesting trips was to Tunisia. Sfax, which is the second largest city in Tunisia, is not a particularly touristy place, but after doing much research, we decided to make our way to Sfax, which has two old beautiful synagogues, a medina, and some old ruins. We had a picture and an address of the old synagogue, so that was going to be our first stop. The streets were difficult to navigate so we had to keep asking for help along the way.

Finally, we were led to a synagogue, the Azria synagogue, but it looked nothing at all like the picture that we had. We asked a man on the street if there was another synagogue and he said to follow him. He took us into a shop and we looked for a person who spoke English. The woman in the shop said, wait here. In a few minutes, a man of about 65 came to the store and told us his name was Azriel. We told him we were looking for an old synagogue and showed him the picture. He told us to follow him. The event made me a bit nervous as I was now following a stranger through the streets of a foreign country looking for a synagogue. But along the way he was greeted with friendly hellos by young people who he said were his students. He was a math professor at the University. I felt a bit relieved. He also quietly told us that he was Jewish and there were only six Jews left in the town of Sfax, which was once a thriving community.

And then suddenly we spotted the synagogue—the same one that was in the photograph. It was called The Beth El synagogue, and it was large and had a place of prominence on the street. There was broken glass and garbage littering the porch and barricades around it with a security guard stationed in a small booth. We asked our new friend Azriel if we could see the inside and he looked at us puzzled. Do you want to really go inside? We said yes, very much so. So he said to wait and he will return shortly. So we waited patiently next to the security guard, trying to make conversation, and after about an hour, a taxi pulled up with Azriel and a very old hunched over man. The man carried a large keychain with rusty castle like keys dangling from the ring. He spoke no English, so Azriel was our translator. Azriel, the old man, two detectives and the security guard were now all trying to open the front door to the synagogue with those rusty old keys. It took a while until they found the right one.

And so we entered this once beautiful building where bird droppings and broken glass littered the floor. The old man still had very little to say and Josef tried to talk to him but it went nowhere. He asked if he was Jewish and he didn’t respond. Perhaps he was fearful with the two detectives. Then Josef thought how nice it would be to chant the popular psalm “Asherei yoshevei veitekha.” The old man lit up and continued to chant out loud with “Od yehalelukha selah.” And so they continued. He knew it all by heart and was glowing as he recited the words. They were singing to God in an old deserted synagogue, and it was glorious. It was probably many years since the walls of that synagogue heard Jewish prayers. I was watching in amazement and as I looked at the two detectives, the security guard, and Azriel, all of us with tears streaming down our faces. What an emotional experience!

Azriel then took the castle keys out again and attempted to open the lock attached to a long bar that opened the cabinet to the Sifrei Torah. I felt like Indiana Jones who just raided the lost ark. They were very elaborate and we offered to arrange to have them brought to Israel where they would be preserved, since this synagogue had obviously seen better days. They declined. We imagined that the Torahs are believed to protect the entire town and it was out of the question to remove them. But how precious a moment for us, that we got the rare opportunity to be with the last few Jews in Sfax, in an old synagogue, with two Muslim detectives. Who would believe the treasures we found were these two elderly Jewish men, singing to God in an abandoned synagogue!

“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”

—Mother Teresa

Trip to Kolkata, India

One of the creepiest places that we visited was Calcutta, India in the 1980s. It was not only poor, but many of the inhabitants lived on the streets in shabby dwellings with no sewage or basic amenities. There was disease and malnutrition all around us, and it was shockingly sad to see. And all of this was amidst some exquisite colonial architecture. But it was a part of the world too, so we decided to go. I am glad that we did.

There were many volunteers from many foreign countries who came to help. Mother Teresa spent much time in Kolkata, and her famous hospital called “Mother Teresa’s Hospital for the Dead and Dying” was a landmark where we got the opportunity to meet some extraordinary young people who came even on their honeymoon through their churches to help out in her hospital. This was a far cry from the usual honeymoon vacation that we know about in the states. One such couple that we met at breakfast invited us to join them in their morning assignment in the hospital. We decided to do it, so we went with them. I was surprised seeing the name on the front of the hospital—Hospital for the Dead and Dying—as it really struck me as strange to put such a name on a hospital. Don’t we go to the hospital to try to get better?

We stepped through the door and both Josef and I stopped in our tracks. There were wall-to-wall cots with a skeleton human being in each bed. It was horrifying. Terrified, we entered and asked this young couple what they were dying of. The purpose of the volunteers they told us was to make their existence easier and more comfortable before their death. They told me that they were dying of malnutrition and infections, things that we conquered a long time ago with antibiotics, vitamins, and nutritious food. I asked if I could run back to my hotel and bring antibiotics from my suitcase, or a bag of peanuts, or some juice. Perhaps I could save just one life? Was there any reason why these poor souls had to die when the cures were so in reach? I am still soul-searching to come up with answers to this question. To keep them just comfortable with a cool washcloth or a smile seemed useless to me, when I had the cure with me in my hotel room. But I was discouraged to do so and was told it would not help. That picture never leaves me. It certainly makes you realize how important it is to give charity to food banks, hospitals, and research to help people where solutions can be made available. The intelligence behind the concept of relieving the plight of the poor and underprivileged in Judaism certainly took on a more pronounced meaning for me in Kolkata. Nobody in the world should enter a hospital for the dead and dying from malnutrition and ailments we have cures for. Nobody.

  “Look at situations from all angles and you will become more open.”

—Dalai Lama

Trip to Bhutan and Tibet

Two of our most amazing trips were to Bhutan and Tibet. Bhutan is a small kingdom sandwiched between India and China, and it has only recently put itself on the tourist map, allowing the west to penetrate into this very secluded Tibetan Buddhist culture. It is also a very expensive country to visit because of its remoteness and limited number of visas that are allotted each year. Unfortunately, the standard of living in Bhutan is quite low, although there is a good educational system and plenty of food and medical facilities. Strangely, there is still a national dress which is mandatory for residents and a national style of architecture.

At the time of our trip about 23 years ago, television and movies were banned there, and you could not even find Coca-Cola. The king, who was in full command, was happily married to four sisters, each with her own house, situated on a mountain slope in close proximity to each other. It certainly makes it easier on the king to have only one set of in-laws! And people in Bhutan are known to be very happy, living in their Himalayan Shangri-La amidst the highest mountains in the world dotted with ancient temples and monastic life.

I had my eyes set on Bhutan for years as I wanted to see this extraordinary place. But it was very difficult to get a visa, as they only allowed a small amount of tourists in each year, and the government was very selective about granting visas. So, year after year, I tried to get a visa through the consulate with no luck. Eventually, only by taking a stroll on Shabbat with Zohar and Josef and striking up a conversation with the salesman in a carpet shop, did we get three visas to enter Bhutan as guests of the Royal Government. Zohar was the one who noticed the sign on the store—Tibetan carpets. Apparently, the Tibetan rug salesman was a relative of the governor of Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan, and through his contacts the three of us got two-week visas to visit any part of Bhutan we chose along with a private guide and driver. We also got permits to enter many of the Buddhist Dzongs, which are temple complexes, many of them over 1,000 years old. And all of this for the grand total of $200.00 for the three of us.

In addition, part of the visa requirement was for me to visit the art school to see traditional Bhutanese painting and to tell them about American art education. And so it was. We flew to Bhutan with Zohar sitting in the cockpit next to the pilot. Flying over the Himalayas was jaw-dropping. Once arriving, our first stop had to be the art school, and I was indeed shocked to see that students were human Xerox machines, having to draw complicated and detailed dragons over and over again until the image was etched into their memories. It had to be a perfect replica and after they mastered one, they were then given another Xerox to copy. If art was their chosen field, which their parents decided at an early age, they were put into the art school, where they only learned English and art. There was not an ounce of creativity to be found anywhere in the art school, and I was shocked to see that a school like this existed.

            One of the students asked me to look at his own personal art and offer some constructive criticism. For that, we had to drive to his home. He did a beautiful painting, an exact rendering of a temple as he saw it. I told him it would be fun to add some mountain flowers in the foreground to give it more life and interest, but he was puzzled by my suggestion as there were no flowers in front of the temple. He could not comprehend that you could add something into a work of art from your imagination. I wish I could have painted the expression on his face. He was shocked and actually threatened by such an idea. Even Zohar was shocked by his response. I told him to just think about it for a few days, hoping he would get used to the idea. He never did.

But the most intriguing of our experiences in Bhutan were the long discussions we would have with our young guide named Timlay. And here is where Judaism came into play. While sipping Tibetan tea on a mountain slope, taking in the stunning scenery, Timlay was describing his belief in Buddhism. Josef then asked Timlay, “If you found $200 (which is equivalent in the United States to $200,000) on the ground, what would you do with it?” Timlay did not even stop to contemplate an answer. He immediately said he would give half to a poor person and half to the Buddhist temple. Then he asked Josef what he would do with the money. Josef said he would use the money to invest and participate in a local business where he could make much more money, and then perhaps he could feed everybody in the monastery from the business. Timlay found it very hard to understand such a concept and it troubled him for days. The question is, of course, how does a nation flourish and progress? Josef repeated to Timlay that the two of them could work in the local business and provide food every day and give goods to the poor and give charity as well to the temple. This is perhaps a more constructive solution for the $200 found money. Timlay’s mentality was that there could only be one solution. He was never allowed to contemplate finding various solutions to a problem. In Judaism, we encourage creative thinking to find solutions. This is a concept that we take for granted. It was shocking for Josef and me and even Zohar that this young man from another culture could not understand this.

“You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”

—Albert Camus

Trip to Istanbul, Turkey

On one of our trips to Istanbul, we got the rare opportunity through a Muslim friend of ours to attend a mosque service that included the Sufi Whirling Dervishes, a mystical branch of Islam, with fascinating rituals. The Sufis are an old sect who believe that closeness with God is achieved by elaborate whirling that slowly and methodically leads you into a trance. Our friend Omer drove us to this elaborate mosque complex, and I was instructed to go upstairs, where the women were seated on the floor. I also had to cover my hair completely with the traditional scarf. This was not a tourist show, but the real thing, and Josef and I were very excited to have the rare opportunity to not only witness it, but to participate in it. Josef was seated downstairs next to our friend Omer. They were kind enough to bring him a chair.

Once it started, I realized that I was totally sandwiched in between rows of women and there would be no way to leave if I wanted to get out. There wasn’t an ounce of empty space and no passage for a quick escape if it got too intense for me. And so it was, the men below were chanting and twirling in a frightening rhythm, starting slowly and getting more intense as he continued. The women were swaying and undulating while sitting shoulder to shoulder to a much defined rhythmic pattern. It kept getting louder and fiercer and it actually was quite frightening. And as the twirling leader gained momentum with his whirling and spinning, so did his voice and so did we. I didn’t have to move. The women moved me, while one of them was constantly pushing any stray hair that had fallen out from under my head scarf back in. It was forbidden to show any hair in this mosque. I could very well see how people could fall into a hypnotic trance or an altered state of consciousness by the repetition, swaying, and voice of the leader. It was strong and unnerving, like a sort of run-away train getting louder and louder and more intense. I was very much relieved when it was all over and was anxious to meet Josef and Omer outside to hear of their experience. I definitely entered a surreal place both mentally and physically and was happy to be out of there. I couldn’t help but think of the Zohar, not my son Zohar, but the mystical Kabbalists in Judaism. Being unfamiliar with both the Sufis and the Kabbalists, I did realize one thing. Both seek to unlock some inner world or offer some spiritual advancement. Is it really possible to transcend time and space by performing spinning rituals or studying the Zohar? Is it all to seek an escape from the chaotic world around us? All I know is that I will take that night at the mosque to the grave with me. But until then, I will continue to ponder that night of mysticism that I was so fortunate to participate in. When Omer comes to visit New York next time, I must find an equal enlightening experience in Judaism to share with him. Any ideas?

 “Blessed are YOU, Lord our God, King of the Universe,

Who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us about removing the hametz.”

Las Fallas Festival in Valencia, Spain

On the 15^th through the 19^th of March every year, a crazy festival takes place in Valencia, Spain. One year we were lucky enough to stumble upon it by accident, and it was so insane but so fantastic, that we have been returning ever since. It is called Las Fallas, and it is a festival of loud noise, fire, fireworks, pageantry, and incredible artistry. Enormous cardboard, wooden, plastic, cork, plaster, and papier mâché figures of enormous size, sometimes reaching over 60 feet high, are constructed during the year by chosen artists. These are placed in various plazas in Valencia. Some of the figures are well-known local personalities, and some are made especially for children. But most are satirical versions of international politicians and celebrities.

All day long, as tourists look at these sculptures, there are processions taking place and pyrotechnical explosions all over the city. You feel the earth shake, and it sounds like you are in a war zone—smoke and all. At the end of this festival there is a fire parade at night through the city, and all of these sculptures are stuffed with fireworks and are blown up. Yes, the fire department is there and surrounds each sculpture to put out the fires while the crowd watches in excitement, cheering as these fantastic works of art meet their demise. It is one big bizarre street festival and is great fun to see.

The origin of this festival, as explained to us, is a celebration of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. It was a Middle Age custom to burn candle holders that held their candles during the dark winter months. When spring comes, they don’t need the candle holders anymore, so they set them on fire. That has been the standard explanation of Las Fallas. But recently, while traveling in Madrid and visiting the Sofia Reina museum to see Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, we stumbled upon the real explanation of the Las Fallas Festival, or at least an explanation that made more sense. We were lucky enough to take an English tour with an expert of Picasso and Guernica. He was so knowledgeable about the details in the painting and so intelligent, that I could not resist asking him at the end of the tour, if he knew anything about Las Fallas festival in Valencia and its origin.

He responded with an affirmative yes, and he then asked us if we ever heard of the Jews. Not wanting to blow our cover, we responded that yes, we have heard of the Jews. He then told us that each spring the Jews who lived in Spain had a strange custom of doing a sort of spring cleaning and then they would burn food in bonfires outside their homes. He told us that this was the real origin of Las Fallas Festival. Josef and I looked at each other and we said to him with a big smile, I think that it had something to do with a holiday called Passover. He responded, “Yes!”

Now I always have said that “You don’t come to Spain to be Jewish.” Spain has other things to offer, but Jewish history was wiped out with the stroke of a pen by Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492. That is, unless of course you come to Las Fallas festival in Valencia. Here, through fire and caricature, the Jews and their culture left their influence in a grandiose, fiery, and cunningly creative way.

“How numerous are thy works, O Lord! You made them all in wisdom;

 The earth is full of your creations.”

—Psalms 104:24

Of course an article such as this would not be complete without mentioning Mother Nature and all of the wonders of the world. If one ever doubted the existence of God, just take a safari in South Africa to see the animals in their natural habitat. Can you imagine what the Ark must have looked like with all of those magnificent creatures? Don’t miss the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, which in my opinion is the most beautiful piece of architecture ever created in memory of a beloved departed wife. Mt. Everest in Tibet is a powerful sight along with the Karakorum Highway in Pakistan, and Annapurna mountain range in Nepal. They are a constant reminder that nature can be challenged but inevitably is in control. Try traveling the silk route across China on public transportation and marvel at the variety of people and places along the way. Sleep in the sand under the stars of Sinai, visit the Zen Gardens of Japan, feast your eyes on the sunflower fields in Spain, and watch the people worship the Ganges as they cremate their dead along the river banks. Machu Picchu, the pyramids of Giza, the 2,000 pagodas in Pagan, Burma, along with the Angor Wat in Cambodia are all well worth a trip. They will never cease to amaze and whether they were God-created or the gift of creativity given by God to humanity, the world has some astonishing things to see and are well worth going beyond our daled amot, to take a look. All of these wonders are an affirmation of God’s handiwork and are among my favorites. But let’s not forget what tops the list of the awesome and powerful. The airplane. We are blessed to live in the jet age that includes kosher food, movies, and even wi-fi on board. I am forever grateful to Orville and Wilbur Wright for sticking with their idea against all odds. Without them, all of this would be impossible.

“The purpose of life is to perfect ones character.”

—The Vilna Gaon

My Final Thoughts

So here ends just a few of my experiences with Josef and Zohar that not only influenced my life, but in the process, confirmed to me the genius of the Jewish people. Travel is and will always remain a wonderful way to invest in yourself, and the world is a great classroom. That is why I will continue to travel as long as I can. I still hear my grandmother’s wise words, and I know that she is sitting on my shoulder for every trip. By exploring, growing, making new friends, witnessing other cultures, and walking the streets of history, I have far more to think about and reflect upon as I grow older. I have been truly blessed with not only rich memories of colorful places and people, but through my personal lens of travel, I have also developed a much deeper appreciation of the gift of Judaism.