National Scholar Updates

The University Network of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals reaches many hundreds of students on campuses throughout North America. We provide students with our publications, and serve as a resource to them on issues relating to Judaism, ethics, Orthodoxy etc.

We sponsor Campus Fellows who arrange programs for students on many campuses. We also sponsor regional conferences on topics that promote a grand and inclusive vision of Orthodox Judaism.

We are pleased to announce that the Institute has received a very major financial commitment in order to dramatically expand our work with university students. This multi-year commitment has enabled us to engage a new director for our Campus Fellows program: Rabbi Daniel Braune Friedman. Rabbi Friedman will begin his work for the Institute as of May 1, 2014. Raif Melhado will continue to work under the aegis of our University Network and Campus Fellows program.
Raif is a full time student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, and has done great work with our Campus Fellows program during the past several years.

Daniel Friedman was born in Montrose, NY and graduated from UMass Amherst,where he met his wife, Hannah. Following graduation, Daniel studied at Yeshivat Darchei Noam, worked for the National Jewish Outreach Program and then began his rabbinical studies at YCT. A highlight of his
career as a rabbinical student included facilitating and participating in various social action programs all over the world. Daniel also makes it a priority to engage with other movements and faiths. He was honored with the Irving Weinstein Memorial Award for the Advancement
of Interdenominational Cooperation. Daniel has held rabbinic
internships at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, Congregation Bais Abraham in St. Louis, Beth Israel Medical Center and New York University. Currently, he is a Pastoral Resident at Hartford Hospital. Previously, Daniel and Hannah served as Jewish Chaplains at Oxford University.

The University Network is a free service provided to students by the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals. Information about the University Network, and applications to serve as Campus Fellow, can be found on the bottom right of our homepage at jewishideas.org

We express profound gratitude to our patrons of the University Network. They are the Institute's partners in bringing an intellectually vibrant, compassionate and inclusive Torah Judaism to an ever-growing number of students.

Rabbi Marc D. Angel has just come out with a book of short stories, "The Crown of Solomon and Other Stories." Published by Albion-Andalus Books, the 150 page soft cover book is available through the online store at jewishideas.org

Here are some comments on the book:

These wry parables of Jewish wisdom and ignorance touch a nerve. We find ourselves thinking about these characters long after we've put the book down—this one timid and self-demeaning until she suddenly is not, that one stubborn and aggressive, another, hesitant beyond reason. The stories quietly ambush assumptions of many kinds. —Jane Mushabac, CUNY Professor of English, author of "Pasha: Ruminations of David Aroughetti."

While reading Rabbi Marc Angel’s The Crown of Solomon and Other Stories, I could not stop wondering whether David Barukh, the unrecognized Sephardic Mozart, was a metaphor for the last two centuries of the Ottoman Sephardic culture, a metaphor for all the wasted opportunities and unrealized potentials! Rabbi Angel’s stories demonstrate that Sepharadim can still teach modern American readers a thing or two, a lesson in honesty, or modesty – or, maybe, how to turn a defect into effect. Rabbi Angel does not idealize his Sephardic characters, not even the rabbinic ones. Some of his rabbis, like Hakham Shelomo, are wise in an a la turca way; others are quite average, like Hakham Ezra; some are humble, honorable and even saintly like Rabbi Bejerano - and yet others are frivolous and self-centered, like Rabbi Tedeschi. All are convincingly human and quite imaginable in real life. The lay characters of the stories are simply conquering in their charming simplicity, in their human rootedness and in their folk wisdom. While reading Rabbi Marc Angel’s new book, I felt everything was in its place. It takes a person deeply rooted in both cultures, traditional Sephardic and modern American, to tell so Sephardic a story in a language such as English, and who makes everything feel totally right. Dr. Eliezer Papo--Head of the Ladino Program at the Department of Hebrew Literature;Head of the Sephardic Studies Research Institute,Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Ever since his novel, The Search Committee, I have been waiting anxiously for Rabbi Marc D. Angel's next work of fiction. The short story collection The Crown of Solomon and Other Stories was worth the wait! A unique and moving collection that allows the reader insight into Sephardic Jewry's rich heritage." Naomi Ragen--Author of The Sister's Weiss and the Ghost of Hannah Mendes

Whenever I think of the huge demonstration of Hareidi yeshiva students at the beginning of this month, I think of Gateshead Yeshiva in England where I spent many years studying Talmud. It is Europe’s most famous yeshiva and a bastion of Torah study in the Hareidi world. Paradoxically, I also think of Spinoza’s incomparable masterpiece, the Ethics, written in a small room in Voorburg, the Netherlands.

I come from a completely secular background with no Jewish education, but good schooling in secular philosophy where Kant, Hume and Wittgenstein reigned supreme. When I ventured to have a look at Gateshead Yeshiva with the intention of learning Talmud, I did not know what was awaiting me. I expected a Jewish university for talmudic studies where enlightened teachers and students would discuss the latest problems in theology and talmudic historiography. But nothing was further from the truth. This was not even Yeshiva University. It’s not just that there were no secular studies and no talk about Plato’s theory of immortality or Leibniz’s famous theodicy; this was an altogether different planet. There was nothing but one supreme endeavor: learning Talmud, combined with Rabbi Aryeh Leib Heller’s (1) classic Ketzos HaChoshen and Rabbi Yaakov ben Yaakov Moshe Lorberbaum’s (2) Nesivos HaMishpat, two brilliant talmudic works.

There were 300 of us, and we slept in our overcoats in what some people called a bedroom, where the temperature was far below zero. Our neigel vasser (3) was frozen in the morning. There was no lobby in the yeshiva where we could relax, nor was there a cafeteria. We knew that the food we ate was practically taken from the mouths of our roshei yeshiva. Our menahel ruhani (spiritual mentor), Rabbi Hizkiyahu Eliezer Kahan z”l, was as poor as a church mouse but looked like a king in his spotless frock coat and with his long, carefully combed white beard. He was a “Nevardoker” – a student of the famous Nevardok Yeshiva (called after a city in Lithuania) of pre-Holocaust Europe, which was dedicated to strict discipline and unfailing religious devotion. The non-Jews in Gateshead knew that when Rabbi Kahan, who walked as upright as a soldier, passed by in the afternoon, it was exactly 4:00 p.m. – not a minute later and not a minute earlier. They could not help but take their hats off to this remarkable human being who was a great tzaddik.

When you entered the yeshiva, you were no longer sure in which century you were living – the 5th, 12th, 17th or 20th. This was a world unto itself, made up of singularly focused people. There was no walking out to the street for a few minutes to get some fresh air; no option of going to a kosher restaurant to get a cup of coffee or have a falafel; no chance of meeting a religious girl studying at the famous Gateshead Seminary. Although 150 of them were right around the corner, they were light-years away from our yeshiva. Not only was it dangerous to walk in the streets, since so many drunken people wandered around, but no one even had any interest in doing so. It was considered bitul zman (a waste of time). There was one supreme goal: shtaigen in lernen (excelling in learning).

The roshei yeshiva showed incredible integrity, deep religiosity and a total absence of any personal agenda. There was no competition between them, no scandals and no quarrels. Just Torah in all of its splendor. What counted was the service of God through learning the Talmud, a holy text of infinite sublimity. This monumental text took them back to Mount Sinai, and through its pages they relived the greatest moments in all of Jewish history. There was much naiveté, a withdrawal from the world, which made the rabbis seem like human angels while studying the laws of damages and injuries. There were also mussar shmoozen. These were not intellectual discourses like Kant’s sophisticated insights about ethics; they were emotional, often spontaneous, outbursts of love for God and man. Through the singsong chants, they would lift us up to heaven and ask of us to be supreme human beings and Jews. Nothing in this world comes close to those religious experiences.

I spent 12 years in yeshivot, and then completed my Ph.D. Today, when I speak with many people who reject the yeshiva world and criticize it harshly for its faults, I realize that although I agree with many of their critical assessments, they fail to understand the inner music of these institutions.

They do not realize that this introverted but remarkable world somehow lifted the Jews out of their misery throughout history and gave them the strength to survive all their enemies under the most intolerable conditions brought on by anti-Semitism. It was this denial of time that made the Jews eternal. The yeshiva world was no doubt very small compared to what it is now, but until the emancipation it was the pride of the entire Jewish world. The Talmud afforded the Jews wings, enabling them to fly to other worlds; to return to the past that no longer existed; and to look toward worlds that were still to come. It became the Jews’ portable homeland, and their complete immersion in its texts made them indestructible even as they were tortured and killed. The Talmud became their survival kit, which ultimately empowered their offspring to establish the State of Israel, nearly 2000 years after they were exiled from their land. This is unprecedented in all of the history of mankind.

For nearly 2000 years the yeshiva world made Jews view life sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza called it – from the perspective of eternity. Indeed, it allowed them to leave behind ordinary history and become a-historical. Jews stepped out of history because it was the only way to survive in history. And so the yeshiva world gave the Jewish people a tool for survival, which no one could match for the last 2000 years. Had the yeshiva world not done so, the Jewish people would never have endured, the State of Israel would not have been created, and no Jews – neither religious nor secular – would have lived in this wonderful country. All Israelis owe their lives to the wondrous yeshiva world, whether they like it or not.

In some way, Spinoza was a yeshiva student. He lived in his small room in Voorburg, and that was his beit midrash. Like the yeshiva students, he nearly never left it. There he built his universe and wrote his magnum opus. Consistent with his own philosophy, he too lived outside of history. His deep thoughts, insights and noble feelings are not of this world.

They too are the product of sub specie aeternitatis and therefore suspect. In the long run they will break down, because one might be able to escape this world, even for a long time, but ultimately one needs to return. Thoughts that are eternal and untouchable are too beautiful and, for most people, unreachable. And so it is with the yeshiva world. Learning Talmud without being able to put much of its teachings into practice is too abstract and too unworldly.
With the establishment of the State of Israel, Jews were forced to re-enter history. But after 2000 years of living as yeshiva students and followers of Spinoza’s saintly teachings, it is a painful transformation. Most of our leaders, our government, and the roshei yeshiva have not yet realized that we are still hanging in suspense. We live with one foot in the world of the yeshiva and Spinoza, and the other foot on the ground with all its challenges and harsh realities. Our political leaders want us to come down and stand with both feet on the ground, while the yeshiva world wants to stay in the beit midrash of Spinoza, in heaven. Both will have to realize that their goals are unrealistic. It is much too early to decide whether we should come down with both feet on the ground, or continue to stay in heaven with at least one foot. We still find ourselves at a crossroads. One is reminded of the story told about a former premier of China who was asked what the impact of the French Revolution was on modern European history. His reply was, “It’s too early to say.”

What our political leaders have to ask themselves is whether it is already possible to fully return to history. Our enemies surrounding us are getting stronger and stronger. Their hate increases daily. Israel now finds itself in an unprecedented and precarious situation, more and more isolated. We are close to becoming, once again, a nation that “dwells alone,” as our biblical arch-enemy Bil’am stated thousands of years ago. (4) Can we really afford to fully enter into history bound by its normative rules, and be defeated by these very rules because we are not yet strong enough? Wouldn’t it be better to stay with one foot in the world of sub specie aeternitatis, outside of history? In fact, isn’t the very existence of the State of Israel a bit too miraculous to fit the norms of history? Perhaps we should make sure that some of our people, our yeshiva students, continue to live outside of history so that they can rescue our nation if history does not accept us as real players and we would otherwise disappear. Isn’t it true that we are treated as a people with no history, as the United Nations, many European countries, and even the American administration use double standards when judging us, not allowing us to be part of conventional history? We are still living through the birth-pangs, as yet unable to say what the baby will look like.

On the other hand, it is our Hareidi roshei yeshiva and those recognized as the gedolei hador who are guilty of not realizing that we Jews must return to history at some point, and if they don’t want to join us they may lose us altogether and they themselves may not survive. They seem to be completely oblivious to the radical change that has taken place in the Jewish world – including their own yeshiva world – after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. We have been taught that in the long run it is impossible for all of us to stay outside of history. The Holocaust has taught us that we cannot survive ad infinitum without entering history. We have too much eternity and too little geography. To argue that our yeshiva students are the ones who really defend us against our enemies, and that we do not need soldiers, is an escape from reality and as anti-halakhic as can be. It is a rewriting of Judaism that the Hareidi leadership cannot even accuse the Reform of doing.

Both the secular and the Hareidi utterly lack historical perspective. The secular have to learn that we may need to keep some people outside of history, and the Hareidi leadership will have to realize that now that we have a state of our own, all of us, without exception, must serve in Tzahal because we are trying to get back into history. In fact, every young Jewish male outside of Israel should feel it his absolute moral obligation to serve for a few months in the Israeli army, because by now world Jewry is depending on the State of Israel, if only so that when it really goes wrong in Europe or the United States there will be a haven for them.

It cannot be denied that the Israeli government made a major blunder in the way it handled the need to draft yeshiva students for army service. Some Knesset members believe that they won, but in reality it was a monumental loss and they became the laughing stock of Israeli society by arguing for equal service by all. Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as equality in the army. Some people risk their lives, others do not. If all were equal, the army wouldn’t function. We also know that a Jewish State will never be able to put people in jail because they learn Torah.

Both parties should have learned from the great British Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin who states that there are no ideal solutions in this world. There are only tradeoffs. “You cannot combine full liberty with full equality… Justice and mercy, knowledge and happiness can collide,” says Berlin. It is not that such perfect harmony cannot be created because of practical difficulties. It is that “utopian solutions are in principle incoherent and unimaginable… so there have to be choices.” One can only choose how much equality and how much liberty, how much mercy and how much justice. Belief in a perfect world “cannot but lead to suffering, misery, blood, terrible oppression.” (5)

The only thing the government can do is suggest that Hareidi yeshiva students go for basic training and build yeshivot in the army. The students would have to walk around in uniform and learn full time, learn with other soldiers, do community service, or something similar. Fair? Certainly not. But fairness is not a value that can always work in the military.

Only a tradeoff can work; there is no other option. And by allowing these students to study while in the army, we at least remind ourselves that we may still have to be an a-historical people and that we cannot yet afford to live solely within history. It is still too dangerous. If some of us are full-time cooks in the army, others can be full time learners in the army. Much too expensive? Sure! But you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Still, the greatest mistake was not made by the government but by the Hareidi leadership. When it organized a demonstration in which nearly 600,000 black-hatted yeshiva students participated to show their love for Torah, one could hear a pin drop just before the crowd burst out in an unprecedented cry of Shema Yisrael. That was the perfect opportunity to prove their love for our brave soldiers and all of Israeli society by having all 600,000 men and women recite prayers for the welfare of the soldiers and all Jews in Israel. That would not only have been a great kiddush Hashem; it also would have turned Israeli society around and healed much of the animosity between the Hareidi and non-Hareidi communities. Yeshiva students would have been seen in a different light. Instead of having upset hundreds of thousands of Israelis, among whom many have lost their sons and daughters in combat, it would have created an entirely different atmosphere in the country. There is little doubt that most yeshiva students would have done it with great love. The failure to ask them to do so is not just a missed opportunity. It is completely irresponsible and a terrible tragedy. When the world-renowned, Hareidi halakhic authority Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Aurbach z”l was asked to which graves of tzaddikim one should go to pray, he said to go to the military cemeteries. The fact that the Hareidi leadership did not tell 600,000 of their followers to pray for our soldiers proves beyond doubt how small-minded are those who are recognized as gedolei hador.

To paraphrase Spinoza: All noble men are as great as they are rare.
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1. Rabbi, talmudist and halachist in Galicia, 1745-1812.
2. Rabbi and respected posek in Lissa (today known as Leszno), Poland, 1760-1832.
3. Water put near one’s bed at night for washing hands upon arising.
4. Bamidbar 23:9.
5. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Halban Publishers, 2007) pp. 142-3.

The Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals has been co-sponsoring a ten-part series of weekly classes with Lincoln Square Synagogue in the First Book of Samuel (68th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan). Wednesdays from 7:15-8:15 pm from January 29-April 2. With this series winding down, we are discussing the possibility of future classes. Stay tuned for further announcements.

As a bonus to all participants in the series at Lincoln Square Synagogue, we distributed copies of my new book published through the Institute, A Synagogue Companion. By now, all Institute members should have received copies of A Synagogue Companion. If you are interested in ordering multiple copies to distribute at your school or synagogue at a significantly reduced rate, please contact Rabbi Marc Angel, at [email protected].

The regular Conversations schedule is on track, with the next issue scheduled for publication in May. You may acquire copies (paperback or kindle) of my recently republished collection of essays on Tanakh, Through an Opaque Lens, at amazon.com. My next publication project through the Institute is a Holiday Companion that will contain insights and explanations of the readings, prayers, and rituals of the holidays. It should be available some time next fall. I'm also working on a new collection of essays on Tanakh, with a focus on learning methodology. We will be publishing that through Kodesh Press.

Some other teaching highlights from February-March include: Shabbat Feb 7-8: I was the scholar-in-residence at Yeshiva University. We explored the interrelationship between traditional and academic methods of Tanakh study.

Shabbat Feb 15: I taught the Shabbat morning class at Congregation Ohav Shalom in New York: Hur and Pharaoh's daughter.

Sunday Feb 23: I gave a class on Megillat Esther at the Kingsway Jewish Center in Brooklyn.

Shabbat Feb 28-March 1: I was the scholar-in-residence at Cornell University.

Monday March 3: I taught a class on the nature of Midrash to 12th graders at the Heschel High School in New York.

In March, I gave a four-part series to rabbinical students at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in Riverdale, NY on the Book of Jeremiah and underlying learning methodology.

Thursday March 6: I conducted a teacher training session on the Book of Jeremiah for the Tanakh faculty at the Ramaz Upper School in New York.

Shabbat March 7-8: I was the scholar-in-residence at Congregation Shaarei Orah in Teaneck, New Jersey. This Shabbat featured several talks on Sephardic and Ashkenazic liturgy and philosophy and how a study of both deepens our appreciation of tradition.

Thursday March 20: The Institute for Jewish Ideas sponsored a book reception for my two most recent books: Vision from the Prophet and Counsel from the Elders (OU Press, 2013), and A Synagogue Companion (Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, 2014). It was at the Drisha Institute in Manhattan. Speakers included Rabbi Marc Angel, Rabbi Saul Berman (Yeshiva University), Rachel Friedman (Drisha Institute), and Rabbi Shaul Robinson (Lincoln Square Synagogue).

I welcome your ideas and suggestions. Please feel free to contact me at [email protected].

(A Devar Torah relating to Parashat Shemini - Leviticus 9:1 - 11:47)

There are times when the Torah tells us a story that serves as a metaphor for issues that we face today. This week's Torah Portion - Parashat Shemini - relates the strange story of Aaron's sons Nadav and Avihu. As sons of the first Kohen Gadol (High Priest), Nadav and Avihu were also Kohanim who received instructions from their father on how to conduct the sacrificial services inside the newly inaugurated Mishkan. When they entered the sacred space designated for the Kohanim to offer sacrifices, the Torah relates a peculiar incident:

Aaron's sons, Nadav and Avihu, each took his fire pan, placed fire on it, and then incense on it. They offered it before God, but it was unauthorized fire which God had not instructed them to offer. Fire came forth from before God and it consumed them, so that they died before God.

The Hebrew word for "unauthorized fire" is "esh zara," which, in addition to "unauthorized," is also translated as "foreign." Both of these translations point to the fact that Nadav and Avihu entered the House of God and introduced foreign elements that were strange to Judaism and Jewish tradition. By introducing these foreign practices, they tampered with the traditional flow of the services, and doing so was considered such a grievous offense that they were consumed by fire.

I read Jewish newspapers as much for the advertisements as for the articles. A quick scan of the advertisements by synagogues and Jewish organizations tells you what's really going on in the Jewish community. Synagogues that are desperate to "draw in the big crowd" will resort to anything these days. In recent months, I have seen advertisements for "Buddhist Shabbat Meditation Services" and "Gospel Shabbat Concerts," and a colleague recently told me how shocked he was that a synagogue held a "St. Patrick's Day Purim" event.

What can we say about this growing - and in my opinion disturbing -- phenomenon in the Jewish world? Perhaps we have, in fact, failed to make a compelling case for "old school" Jewish tradition, but are these wild, quick fix alternatives really the answer to our problems? Is the introduction of Buddhism, Gospel choirs, St. Patrick's Day revelries, or any other "esh zara" into our services the only way to infuse new meaning into tradition? Do those who lead or attend such spins on Jewish spirituality actually feel that they are participating in something with Jewish meaning?

Our transmission of a meaningful, compassionate and relevant expression of Jewish tradition certainly leaves a lot to be desired. But there are limits to where we can and should search for answers to our pressing questions. Judaism is a rich, vibrant and fascinating tradition. It is intellectual, spiritual, cultural, communal and personal all at once. We have a vast treasure of Jewish literature, along with 3000-plus years of history. Shall we give all of that away in the name of filling seats one Friday night at a gospel performance in synagogue? True creativity lies in the ability to infuse ancient traditions with modern meaning. Conducting a Shabbat service with a Buddhist twist is hardly creative. It's a cheap imitation.

Nadav and Avihu brought an "unauthorized offering" whose spirit was alien to Jewish tradition. The foreign flames that they introduced in the services came back to burn them. Indeed, a powerful metaphor for many rabbis and congregants today.

Questions of personal status are among the most sensitive issues in Judaism and thus require responsible rabbinic leadership.
That is one reason why there was such an outcry last year when Israel’s Chief Rabbinate refused to allow my teacher, Rabbi Avi Weiss, to vouch for the Jewishness of a couple marrying in Israel. While the Chief Rabbinate ultimately backed down and agreed to accept Rabbi Weiss’ word, there are still unanswered questions regarding this episode.

On Jan. 4, 2014, the Rabbinical Council of America — a leading Orthodox rabbinic association — issued this statement: “Recent assertions that the Rabbinical Council of America advised the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to reject the testimony of RCA member Rabbi Avi Weiss are categorically untrue.”

The problem with this statement is that when I visited the chief rabbi’s office with Weiss’ attorney, we were told directly that the chief rabbinate was acting upon the recommendation of RCA officials.

We may not know who is telling the truth in this case, but we do know that the RCA has not been candid about its recent approach to conversion.
In 2007 the RCA drafted a new centralized policy on conversions. This policy brought conversions under the auspices of a new and more stringent approach. At the time, there were some who warned that this new policy could lead to retroactive annulments of previously accepted conversions.

But the RCA protested loudly that it would never retroactively reject conversions and that to do so would be a blatant Torah violation. In 2008, the RCA’s Rabbi Steven Pruzansky dismissed suggestions that the new policy would lead to the reevaluation of all past conversions by RCA rabbis as “an especially despicable falsehood, as it serves only to make generations of converts in the Jewish community anxious about their status and acceptance in the community at large.”

“The reality is that not one past geirus is being reviewed by the RCA or the Beth Din of America, and such was never contemplated,” he wrote, using a term for conversion. “To even suggest otherwise is to blatantly violate the Torah’s numerous admonitions against tormenting the ger.”

Yet we now know that the RCA is casting aspersions on prior conversions by its own members. We know this thanks to Karen Brunwasser, who last month wrote about her personal ordeal in The Washington Jewish Week.
Brunwasser spelled out how, despite her Orthodox conversion nearly 35 years ago, she was rejected by the Israeli chief rabbi’s office in her initial attempts to establish her Judaism and thereby marry her beloved fiancé. She wrote movingly of the emotional turmoil she went through and how she was concerned that it might affect forever her relationship with the new family she was hoping to join.

The RCA, through its Beth Din of America, played a crucial role in actively hindering Brunwasser’s effort to marry.

Brunwasser converted as an infant with a beit din made up of Orthodox rabbis who were graduates of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school and RCA members. Rabbi Bernard Rothman, a former RCA vice president, wrote a letter to the chief rabbi’s office vouching for Brunwasser’s conversion. In this letter, Rothman praised the head of the beit din that converted Brunwasser, Rabbi David Wachtfogel, as an Orthodox rabbi of the highest standards.

However, as was the case with many RCA rabbis of that era, he was for a time a rabbi in a synagogue in which men and women sat together. Many of these rabbis took jobs at synagogues with mixed seating after receiving explicit guidance on the matter from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, mainstream American Orthodoxy’s leading authority.

In the past, conversions by Orthodox rabbis who had served in mixed-seating congregations were routinely accepted in the Jewish community. But now, thanks to the direction of the current leadership of the RCA, such decades-old conversions are being rejected.

Thus, on Aug. 11, 2013, Rabbi Michoel Zylberman of the RCA’s Beth Din of America wrote the following in an email to Israeli chief rabbi’s office regarding Brunwasser’s conversion: “We are unable to approve the conversions done by a rabbi who serves in a synagogue without a mechitza.”

Zylberman continues: “Of course, one can argue with this position and if you want to be lenient here on the basis of other authorities you can do that which is right in your eyes.”

Responding to apparent confusion on the part of the chief rabbi’s office regarding Rothman’s current status with the RCA, Zylberman concludes: “With respect to the letter of Rabbi Rothman in which he is signed as a ‘former Vice-President of the RCA,’ that was twenty years ago and he did not sign in the name of the organization.”

Despite what the RCA promised in 2008, it is retroactively negating and rooting out converts who were for decades fully integrated into the Orthodox Jewish community. In doing so, it has set a dangerous precedent that should make every convert afraid and all of us angry and disappointed in its leadership.

A few years ago, I spoke about domestic violence on Yom Kippur. Afterward, two very sweet members of my synagogue came up to me and said, "Rabbi, you shouldn't speak about such ugly things from the pulpit. That doesn't happen here."

I thought to myself, "Two rows behind you and a little to the left, it does."

Domestic violence happens in Jewish homes. This article is the reopening of the conversation, because we need to confront this issue. I wish we didn't have to. But this isn't only an issue in the Catholic Church. It is much closer to home than we'd like to admit.

Abuse happens within Jewish families. Physical and verbal abuse happen in Jewish families.

We don't like to talk about what is ugly and painful. We feel shame in revealing our less than perfect family lives. We don't want the outside world to know. We don't want each other to know. So we remain silent. But we are hurting. Some of us are suffering, right here, in our midst. Others inflict deep pain upon those they claim to love.

Victims of abuse can be women or men, young or old. It has been suggested that, on average, Jewish women stay in abusive relationships for five to seven years longer than non-Jewish women, primarily because they don't want to believe that Domestic Violence happens to Jewish women.

There are aspects of traditional Judaism, present even in modern congregations, that maintain the weak position of the victim in the face of abuse. Here are two:

1) Some rabbis have invoked the Jewish ideal of "shalom bayyit," of maintaining peace in the home, as justification for sending a woman back to her abuser. Some rabbis continue to counsel this way, and have only served to disempower suffering Jews.

2) A get, or Jewish divorce decree, by Orthodox law, can only be issued by a man, who can torment his partner with the get's legal power and its control over the wife's future. This makes the vulnerable woman an agunah, a chained woman, trapped by Judaism's rules.

These two aspects of traditional Jewish life are problems. They make victimization possible within Jewish families, and they must be changed. We must take the deeply Jewish step forward and, together, condemn abuse of any kind in our community.

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Abuse can be physical, sexual, verbal or emotional. It can come in the form of the ongoing use of demeaning words like "you're stupid," or ugly, or crazy. It can be total access to and control over bank accounts and finances. It can be threats to injure children or pets. It can be monitoring and limiting friendships, going out, talking on the phone.

Domestic violence is not about having a bad temper or being out of control. It is about power and control—one person exerting power and control over another. Domestic violence impacts on the entire family, injuring also the children who witness abuse by hearing it or seeing it.

I offer two anonymous testimonies from Jewish victims of abuse. One is physical, and might help those in verbally abusive relationships say, "Oh, that's not me." But the second is a case of verbal abuse, perhaps even harder to escape.

1) "The Jewish Community sees my husband as a respected professional who is educated, talented, outgoing, friendly, loving, caring, and compassionate. They were not witness to what took place in the privacy of our home. No one saw him hit, kick, and choke me. No one heard him tell our child, 'Mommy's dead.' No one was present when he threatened to commit suicide in the presence of our child, wipe me off the face of the earth, and promised that I would not survive the night."

2) "I have a boyfriend who is charming to everyone, a real mentsch, sharp thinker—and everyone around looks up to him. So you can understand how I feel alone in how I am feeling, since everyone thinks so highly of him. It's difficult to talk to him about anything because everything I say is either "stupid" or "crazy." Sometimes I have to lie because I'm afraid of how he'll react to certain things. I don't mean to ramble—today was just a bad day. He says it's my fault that the relationship is going south. I know I have to distance myself from the relationship but, honestly, I don't think I can."

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We bear witness to these anonymous testimonies, wondering whether or not people sitting near us are in similar situations. We wonder, perhaps, what to do with the inescapable knowledge that there is, most likely, someone reading this article who is hurting.

So how do we do that? We can turn to halakha, Jewish Law, for guidance. The following is a brief summary of a lengthy teshuva, a Jewish ruling, by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, entitled "Family Violence (HM 424.1995)":

1) Beating and other forms of physical abuse, such as sexual abuse, are absolutely forbidden by Jewish law.

2) Verbal abuse is absolutely forbidden by Jewish law.

3) An abuser has the responsibility to acknowledge his behavior and do teshuva by getting help.

4) Parents may never cause a bruise to their children, no matter what decisions they make regarding corrective parenting.

5) Children may not beat their parents, even when parents were formerly abusive themselves.

6) The requirement that one preserve not only one's own life (pikkuah nefesh) but others as well, demanded by the laws of the pursuer (rodef) and of not standing idly by when another is in danger (lo ta'amod al dam ra'ekha), not only permit, but require others who discover spousal or parental abuse to help the victim report the abuse and take steps to prevent repetition of it. Jews who suspect that children are being abused must report such abuse to the civil authorities, no matter what the consequences. Saving a life takes precedence over the presumption that parental custody is best for the child.

These policies are halakhically binding. They are not optional. We are commanded by our tradition to protect ourselves and to intervene when necessary for others. There are times when it is necessary to act to protect the vulnerable.

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Opening up darkened spaces is a scary, saddening task, but it is a sacred one as well. We've been taught by our tradition that "anyone who saves one soul, it is said about her that she has saved a whole world” (TB Sanhedrin 37a).

And one person's safety is reason enough for us all to spend the energy talking about abuse.

Perpetrating violence on an intimate partner is an affliction with a spiritual dimension that threatens the welfare of the entire community. We act with commitment to the health of our community when we hold abusers accountable. We act in accordance with halakha's call to pursue justice when we declare that abusers cannot remain in our midst and must dwell outside the camp.

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The fabric of our Jewish homes is tradition's instruction to create spaces of safety. The fabric of our homes is our Jewish ethics, which demand that we pursue justice. The fabric of our homes is our developing liturgies and holy days, which call upon us to heal and create wholeness in our world.

For the welfare of both the individual homes we are blessed to have, as well as the collective one we create together, I pray that we commit ourselves to doing so.

May our homes be safe and healthy.

When I was in high school, a friend and I decided we needed to know whether God existed. It was a big public high school on Long Island, full of Catholics and Protestants who went to church and enough Jews to support a kosher bakery just around the corner from the football field. Everyone got along pretty well. But apart from bar mitzvahs, first communions, and the Civil Rights Movement—which galvanized much of the town’s clergy—daily life didn’t seem to have much to do with religion. God was mostly for holidays.

Yet I myself sensed God’s presence much more often, from an early age. For whatever reason, I always felt there was more going on than met the eye, that there was a Being up there Who cared about me and cared about right and wrong, and had set a right and a wrong in this world. It wasn’t a popular topic as the Vietnam War raged and college dorms started going co-ed and offering birth control pills. But for a few of us, it was pressing, and endured.

My friend was Presbyterian, and we met in choir at school, where I had some of the most intense and moving experiences of my life singing texts such as “O Magnum Mysterium” and “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs.” What was I to make of this? My family didn’t keep kosher, but I went to Hebrew school three times a week. I didn’t believe what I was singing, but I believed what I was feeling. So did my Christian friend. Our discussions were heartfelt and searching. We were hoping God existed, because without God the world seemed random and notions of good and evil too subjective. And if God did exist, it would matter a lot how we behaved—and we’d have to find a path.

In retrospect it’s obvious that we both really did believe, though I don’t think either of us thought there was only one correct path to follow. We knew we weren’t the first to ask these questions, and we didn’t expect to have to invent religion for ourselves. But we thought it mattered a lot to God what we would do. For me, it was going to mean looking at the best evidence there was of what God had said, what had been revealed to humankind in words—I needed a source. Sooner or later, that would mean text.

And so I set about searching, and though the only path to God is one that takes a lifetime and renews itself every day, I do feel that I found what God wanted of me in Modern Orthodoxy. I don’t think I could have landed anywhere else, and I’m always surprised to learn what a small—and to hear some tell it, fragile—outcropping of world Jewry it is. I don’t think my experience of God or life is unusual, or the demands of Modern Orthodoxy philosophically difficult or severe (financially might be another matter), at least not for anyone who believes in God as a Being, Creator, or Consciousness outside of ourselves. Perhaps what’s unique about my journey is just that I kept running into people who could explain things, and as diverse as these people were, all of them believed, and all of them were careful with language—words being so powerful, of course, that God used them to create the world. One by one, these teachers and what I learned from them prepared my steps: Baruch Ata ... haMeichin m’tsadei gaver. The first time I said that blessing after we moved into Los Angeles’ Pico-Robertson neighborhood, I knew that I was home.

So my journey began at the intersection of words and music, cobbled with contradictions and smoothed by these teachers, who seemed to come along at just the right moment. An avid piano student from the age of 7, I first signed up for choir at age 12, just when Hebrew School was ending and Junior Congregation was now for younger kids. I fell completely in love: music plus poetry, each making the other more compelling, sending the other to soar! The next years overflowed with madrigals and motets, oratorios and gem-like modern works—Brahms and Barber, Randall Thompson, Debussy and Distler—in a choir that met first period every day in high school. Beautiful years! All of it gorgeous and emotional, yet separate, mostly, from my Judaism. Would I allow myself to think about God while rehearsing Haydn’s Creation, lost in the exquisite trio section of Psalm 19: The day that is coming speaks it the day, the night that is gone to following night…? In a word, yes. Even so tortuously translated, it sang and it spoke. When the texts turned Christian—“For unto us a child is born”—I found a way. My cousin had a baby boy; Handel’s bursting fountain of sixteenth notes captured the miracle. On Sabbath and holidays in my Conservative synagogue, we prayed, well, differently; Cantor Victor Jacoby’s ringing baritone filled the room, brought down a heaven of its own. It was exotic, and it, too, was mine.

In college I began to feel more self-conscious about all this. Still hooked on choir, I noticed that the other choral majors sang in church groups and planned for church jobs. I also noticed that the occasional Jewish piece we sang was much less affecting than the Christian works. Then in graduate school, where I went to earn a Master of Music degree, I met my first important religious teacher, a secular Israeli: the great maestro Abraham Kaplan, whose father had formed the first choirs in Israel (then Palestine) and who himself spent 16 years teaching at Juilliard, directing New York’s Camarata Singers and preparing choirs for Leonard Bernstein. The first time I visited his study at the University of Washington, I saw on his desk a small stained-glass ornament that said, “The Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.” Then, under his baton I sang the great Requiem masses of Mozart and Verdi, transported into a realm of holy inspiration grounded in texts that must have been relevant but that he didn’t believe either. Yet he led, and taught, with complete certainty, his interpretations informed by the text but transcending it; in performance it seemed he dissolved into the mind of the music. It’s a little hard to imagine if you haven’t performed with a great conductor, but perhaps if you’ve watched Dudamel you’ve seen it for yourself.

Of course this was very affirming. Professor Kaplan seemed to have no problem feeling and expressing the power of music as real or holy in a generic sort of way; like him, I could reject the meaning of the words without denying what the music was teaching me in vague spiritual terms. This now seems obvious; words are just humanity’s best attempt to share what people think they know—approximations, tools. No one would confuse the word “love” with the feeling, or say it encompassed it. So I could make a kind of separation in my mind between what the music offered and the words that had carried the composer to its discovery.

But it didn’t answer my religious questions. How was I to relate to God myself? Words are important too. Hadn’t God communicated with humanity that way? Calling Lekh lekha to Abraham, sending Moses off to Pharoah armed with verbal admonitions? Not to mention dictating the entire Torah, exactly general and specific enough to last 3,000 years so far and presumably to eternity? Whatever I’d learned studying music, it wasn’t the Torah. That was still to be found.

Around the same time I met Professor Kaplan, I also met another Presbyterian, though he considered himself “lapsed.” This young man, a medical student, was also very concerned about both religion and words and—first one, then two conversions to Judaism later—he became my husband. He had a strong belief in God, but the religion he’d been raised with, he said, was built on metaphors, and the metaphors no longer made sense to him. This became an insurmountable problem for him as a Christian, but only increased his desire to understand what God really did want. Late into the night when he wasn’t at the hospital, we would wrestle these questions together, until finally he started his residency and said he’d have to revisit religion when he was sleeping more than one night in three. That left me on my own for three years, during which I thought long and hard about whether Judaism might be wrong and Christianity right—I read the New Testament and wondered whether it was possible that God’s kingdom was already here, and that all we had to do was love one another and He would be with us. I didn’t have any Christian teachers outside of the great composers, but in any case I couldn’t accept it, couldn’t believe.

I went on to study journalism in New York while David finished his residency, and when we both returned to the Northwest, I invited him to visit the synagogue I’d joined in Tacoma, Washington. At Temple Beth El there, he found that the words of the Reform siddur Gates of Prayer made more sense to him than what he’d left behind in church. With Beth El’s very thoughtful Rabbi Richard Rosenthal, z”l, he started reading Franz Rozensweig and Rav Kook, and studying them with him on Wednesdays. One day he asked what it would take to convert, and Rabbi Rosenthal said, “Whenever you’re ready.” David had a Reform conversion, and that meant—to my understanding and training at that time—that my best friend and I would be able to marry, and continue a religious journey together. A year and a half later, we did.

We ended up in Los Angeles in the post-denominational congregation of Reform Rabbi Mordecai Finley, whose services plus lunch and bentching lasted until 2 P.M. on Saturdays and who taught us not only the weekly parasha—including stories I’d never learned, like Jacob and Tamar, Pinhas, Bilaam, Nadav and Abihu—but also the concept of spiritual discipline, the idea that the ritual commandments provide opportunities for us to bring God into more of our day-to-day actions and that, moreover, they were in the text. This was something I’d been waiting for: a way to live with God in mind. Although they were presented as voluntary, I loved each new mitzvah and concept I discovered.

The Torah asks us not to eat pork or shellfish. The Torah tells us not to place a stumbling block before the blind, literally or metaphorically. The Torah—God’s instructions!—held all sorts of commandments and stories, and by the way, many of them were very confusing without the interpretation of sages over the generations since. With that ancient elucidation, Rabbi Finley noted, they became both clear and ingenious—separating milk and meat, for example, as a way to delineate life and death in the world hour by hour; separating wool and flax, adjuring us to know when to be strong and forceful versus when to be soft. There were other commandments too, he noted, that we couldn’t understand but could take on faith—faith, something that came easily to me!

Rabbi Finley also encouraged us to hear Orthodox teachers—one year he sent us out to Orthodox synagogues on Shabuoth, and my husband David and I actually went to B'nai David-Judea, which many years later would become our home. But religiously we were still comfortable where we were. I served as one of three lay cantors, singing and arranging prayers, even directing a choir and trying to find some spiritual richness in the music. I did, a little, especially Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Our eldest daughter became bat mitzvah there, and when my beloved father died, there were tools both elevating and comforting with which to mourn him. We studied Hebrew with Rebbetzin Meirav Finley, and the holy language began to speak to us on its own.

It was a time of unfolding light, affirming to me what I’d long suspected: that my ancestors had hung on tight through persecution and pogroms to more than Shabbat candles and Pessah seders, as wonderful as those were. There was more there, enough to fill many lifetimes, and we were beginning to see what it was.

What drew us the rest of the way, once we encountered it, was the beauty of observance and a growing certainty that it was, in fact, commanded—as I’d sensed since high school, God surely cared what we actually did. We attended a three-part-seminar on the Orthodox view of marriage, taught by Rabbi Baruch Gradon of the Los Angeles Kollel, to which we were invited by friends who’d become Orthodox the year before, and after that I joined a series of living room classes sponsored by a Hareidi “outreach” organization called Ashreinu. The leaders of that group, Mrs. Shira Shapiro and Rabbi Moshe and Bracha Zaret, welcomed us into their modest homes for Shabbat dinners, the first we’d experienced in an observant setting, not minding that we drove there.

We were very moved by their example. Everyone at their tables, including the youngest of their children, could discuss the parasha better than most of the adult Jews we’d ever met. They were gracious and intelligent and their conversation was always rich with meaning. They were notably comfortable talking about God—something I’d only been able to do before with my Christian friends in high school, and then with my husband. And they were distinctly un-cranky—about their children, their jobs, whatever they discussed. In these religious homes, everything was seen as a miracle—exactly as I had been experiencing life all along. A high goal, they said, was to see God behind every tree, every lamp, every occurrence—to see far more than met the eye.
In my new class, taught by Mrs. Ivy Kalazan, concept after new concept lit up my world.

The shofar, she taught us, represented the blowing of God’s breath through the shell of our physicality. Our connection to God was un-severable, like the vertebrae of the spine, and could be damaged but never broken. The flame of Shabbat candles represented our yearning and reaching toward heaven, and the beauty of Judaism could bring holiness to a humble leaf of lettuce—by our washing and checking it to ensure it held no bugs. Everything physical has a spiritual correlate, she taught, and since God made men and women different physically, there must be spiritual differences as well.
This politically incorrect observation was something I’d always believed; here I had a religious explanation, grounded in the most basic understanding of creation.

I also read Blu Greenberg’s How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household and started observing the mikvah laws on my own, and then I read Rabbi Ezriel Tauber’s To Become One and studied privately; these laws and the concepts behind them, from the notion of what’s hidden being the most sacred to the idea that water is the closest we have to a physical emanation of God’s presence, were dazzling and answered questions I didn’t know I had. They illuminated, decoded in a way, my relationship with my husband, while protecting it at the same time from any possibility of boredom or routine. These ideas are so basic to Orthodox understanding, growing out of hundreds of generations’ grappling with text (in this case, Bereishith and Vayikra), and yet to David and me they were entirely new, while at the same time not seeming foreign. And it was ancient, proven wisdom: my grandmothers, and their grandmothers, had followed these laws. I was restoring a link in the chain.

For all of these reasons, really from the very first Orthodox lectures we attended, David and I began to walk our lives into this world of beauty and commandment. We loved our synagogue but my leading services on Shabbat mornings now seemed off; shouldn’t I be present for my family, instead of warming up my singing voice in the shower and getting ready to perform? We had long ago stopped shopping on Shabbat, but shouldn’t we also stop driving, and gardening, and turning on the lights? It might mean alienating my non-observant Jewish family, not to mention David’s Protestant one, which had been tested enough by his first conversion; it would also mean a second conversion for him. We loved our mixed neighborhood and we’d have to sell our home. We loved our local public school, but Ivy Kalazan taught in a religious high school—this material was available to children, during the day?—so they would change schools; that was probably the hardest thing of all. But we wanted them to know the beauty of this new way of life, and to understand it, just as we wanted them to take music lessons, study science and learn to read.

When the time came, we asked Shira Shapiro of Ashreinu to recommend a synagogue, and she suggested three: B’nai David, another that was Modern Orthodox and an Aish HaTorah center, all in Pico-Robertson—not the more Hareidi part of town where she lived. Later I asked her why, and she said that because I’d been leading services, she thought I’d be more comfortable in a synagogue where women had a larger role. That surprised me—it hadn’t seemed important to me at the time—but it turned out to be good foresight on her part.

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, at B’nai David-Judea, won us right away. Rav Yosef’s derashot were all about the text—how Moshe’s trials inform our own, how commentators understand the characters through back stories gleaned from textual hints, how individual words—individual words!—open windows onto worlds of meaning beneath the surface, and how all of this calls us to high personal responsibility every moment of our lives. On top of that, B’nai David was full of people just like us; by some estimates, fewer than a third of its members (at least at that time) had been raised in Orthodox homes. We were greeted there with lunch and dinner invitations, Purim baskets, and Pessah recipes, shiurim about holidays, lashon haRa, medical ethics, and maintaining the dignity of the dead while preparing them for burial. We also heard, though less frequently, about mixed Arab-Jewish schools in the Negev, and occasionally we heard from Israeli thinkers and journalists, and leaders of projects for Ethiopian emigres or Darfur. We signed up to deliver meals to the poor through a program very careful to protect their anonymity. More recently, we’ve joined a group of about 15 congregants who meet bi-monthly with a similar demographic from the liberal Islamic Center of Southern California. Coming from such a rich and challenging intellectual world before Torah, all of this was absolutely necessary for us to be observant and still feel like ourselves. I think this is true of most of the congregation, and of all of our friends there.

I hadn’t thought the shul’s women’s tefillah group, called Shirat Chana, would matter to me; remember, I’d decided that leading services compromised my observance of Shabbat. But it turned out to be quite helpful in our transition; when my middle daughter was bat mitzvah age, she was able to lain and lead services just as her older sister had, albeit at Minha with only nine men allowed to be present. Other innovations I would appreciate only later: for example, women carrying the Torah through the women’s section, which thrills me every time, especially when I carry it myself. The mehitzah at B’nai David goes right down the middle, and women can get as close to the bima, the Torah and the derasha as any man can, meaning we can see and hear everything and move if we can’t. Women at my shul say Kaddish, and I am able to say Kaddish for my father every fall. Sometimes we have women as scholars-in-residence, a woman is president of the congregation this year, and I myself am a kind of gabbai: for seven years now, I’ve been in charge of arranging which men and boys will lead Shabbat Shaharit, Musaf, and Anim Zemirot. David and I did not join B’nai David-Judea for any of this, but I would have felt much less included—and increasingly so, as time went on—without them. Because our journey has always been a joint one, if I were not fully involved (my husband does go to daily minyan on his own, a pleasure for him), it’s hard to see how it could have endured.

I’m not saying it’s been perfect. We had to step farther out of the world we knew than I had expected. Travel is harder, most restaurants are out. Raising our son and daughters, some things turned out to be impossible because of Shabbat; sadly for me, this included Los Angeles’ excellent children’s choir, along with any high school with a full orchestra or band. Even at Shalhevet High School, which is unusual in its attention to the arts, against the competing demands of four Judaic classes and a full academic program, the choir I direct meets just twice a week after school—far short of what defined my own high school years. This kind of thing has raised questions that Modern Orthodoxy tries to answer but doesn’t quite—for example, does God want us to be a light unto the nations while hiding our children away in schools with only one another, at a time and place in history when children learn together from every place on earth?

Also, I sometimes encounter signs of tribal chauvinism—a sense that Jews are somehow superior, ethnically, culturally, or otherwise, to non-Jews. This is beyond my ken, and strikes me as wholly unworthy of a worldview that celebrates the ultimate value of every human being.

But no culture is perfect, and every choice has its price. David and I still live in the big, diverse city of Los Angeles; we’re still news junkies; and we’re still hopelessly romantic about the flow of history and our small place in it—now we’re tied to a particular strand, one that feels ancient, eternal, and true. The evidence we have for this is partly on paper and partly in our hearts, as close as breathing and a just a bookshelf away.
And Modern Orthodoxy opened to us huge troves of text, all growing from the root of the Torah like the branches of a flowering tree, exquisite separately and together. That is what I set out so many years ago to find: a way to follow God’s instructions, one that works in the world we live in with all its challenges and mystery, and that ties us to God. Whatever our failings, David and I now can try to make our lives the fullest possible expression of those instructions as we are so grateful to finally understand them. This is a gratefulness that goes, and takes us, far beyond words.

In Praise of Praising Together - A review essay in Praise of Nehalel (Jerusalem: Nevarech, 2013)
By Rabbi Alan Yuter

This engaging Siddur is the post-modern expression of a thoughtful, educated, worldly, urbane, and religiously sensitive modern Orthodox lay person. The Siddur’s magic lies in the originality of its concept, the personal voice that provides an Everyman’s perspective as expressed by one thinking and feeling individual, and the public sharing of one person’s personal response to prayer.

The Siddur’s concept is a call to prayer, Nehalel, “let us praise the Lord together,” as individuals in community. This tasteful title is an invitation to the sacred, calling upon individuals to join in the common commitment to prayer. This Halakhic Siddur, as innovative that it is, never strays beyond the legal limits of the Orthodox rubric. It follows the Ashkenazic Nusach.

This Siddur, prepared by Michael Haruni, is dedicated to the memory of his parents; the dedicatory words of which bring to life the visions of religion lived, honestly, naturally, and piously. His mother “lived every smallest and largest moment of her life intensely aware this is happening under the gaze of her Creator.” This sensibility permeates the pictures that breathe new life into the old words of Nehalel.

Nehalel is a visual tribute to this vision. Haruni uses photography to juxtapose nature, Israeli historical and spiritual sights, and the expansive beauty of Creation, all in order to animate the words of the Siddur. This literary technique is not common in Jewish religious literature. The Torah, which contains Laws, Prose and Poetry, and is called “poetry” by God [Deut. 31:19], provides the precedent for Nehalel’s religious—aesthetic agenda. The Laws memorialize the narratives, while the narratives interpret the Laws, and the poetry moves the person toward God, the Creator of the world, the Torah’s Narrator, and Lawgiver. Haruni’s art serves as a visual commentary on the liturgy’s written words, providing the music to which the words are sung as well as the meanings that dart in and out of our souls as we pray. By praising together, Nehalel’s audience finds God in the written word, the historical moment, and in the natural world, all of which are summoned to converge in the spiritual moment of communal prayer.

Haruni’s father’s biography embodied the image of the archetypal Jew who wandered from the oppression of Iran to the freedom afforded by the sacred stones of Jerusalem. Both father and son share the insight that God is the non-slumbering Keeper of Israel; the father, with the faith to suffer adversity on the road to redemption; the son, with the inner vision to make music by harmonizing the insight of eye and ear, the logic of mind and heart, and the passion of conception and conviction.

Haruni, an exceptionally well-informed Orthodox layman, who is neither a professional Judaic scholar nor an ordained rabbi, translates the liturgy accurately, tastefully and thoughtfully. Quibbles regarding details are inevitable; his renderings are always thoughtfully responsive and reveal a thinking and traditional Jewish mind.

The volume opens with a two page picture of billowing clouds, dark green leaved trees, and a pasture that moves from dark to light green. The visual statement being made is that God the Author of Nature is the same God Who gave the Torah and Who hears prayer, the concern of the Nehalel prayer book.

The elegant God Who created nature also gave Haruni, the religious artist, the wisdom to know what he does not know and to seek the learned advice of others more erudite, including some very high powered rabbis and Orthodox academics. This standard of excellence of execution is prefaced by wonderfully inspiring Forward and Introductory essays.

Rabbi Daniel Landes, the senior scholar of Pardes Institute, with his erudite passion for the poetry of prayer, is the perfect choice to introduce this particular prayer book. Following the master Halakhist graced with the poetic soul, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, R. Landes explains to the reader how to change literature into liturgy, how this prayer book is a book which will help one to pray, how to see the invisible Divine light, how to dialogue with God and find answers in the words and scenes of this Siddur. Additionally, R. Landes provides the hermeneutic key that unlocks the theological magic of Nehalel. The reader is asked to see the words and read the scenes visually, and see how everything comes alive, hopefully including the reader/prayer. The volume’s title, Nehalel, “let us praise,” is the invitation for us to experience this together.

In his introduction to this Siddur, Rabbi Dr. Zvi Grumet, one of modern Orthodoxy’s most literate, professional, accomplished, and sensitive souls, focuses on Nehalel’s juxtaposition of “word and image;” he teaches that when we pray we talk to God and when we are spiritually open, God talks to us in the words that we use. Note well that R. Grumet is a master teacher whose trove of learning is shaped by his aesthetically and literary sensibilities. By declaring, clearly, correctly and astutely, that Nehalel “is a visual midrash on the liturgy,” R. Grumet concisely and precisely points to how the prayer book is to be read, understood, and used.

Ever aware that Maimonides demands that prayer is more than the mantic mumbling of words, Haruni, in his words, says “by juxtaposing of photographs that portray the meanings of the texts,” the words merge into the picture. This technique recalls liturgical public reading of the Torah. The reader must not read from a pointed, vocalized text. The reader must supply the vowels and thereby interpret and confront the text with his own, individual, idea contributing mind. Haruni asks his readers to make the effort to pray and spend the time to make prayer meaningful. He also challenges the reader, when engaged in prayer, to soar one’s soul, to be sincerely and authentically religious in the prayer moment.

This sensibility is uniquely both modern and Orthodox; in liberal Judaisms,” like liberal Protestantism, prayer is not about talking to God. It is about saying and affirming what a particular voluntary community believes or does not believe about God. For most Orthodox Jews, prayer is something to be done, an obligation to be discharged, and when done in a prayer quorum, an exercise to be performed in an identity affirming social context. Yet for the modern Orthodox Jew, real prayer is indeed a statement of what we should believe as we also affirm our place in our own community, but that is only prayer’s moral minimum. In Haruni’s words, prayer is premised on “the awareness that we stand in the presence of our Creator,” and it is to this end that Haruni’s pictures of Creation inform the visualizing individual in prayer by stimulating the soul to spiritual growth.

For Rabbinic Judaism and the prayer rubric it created, the God of nature is also the God of history. After kindling the Shabbat candles, which is redemptive human fire made by human initiative, two contrasting evocative pictures of the Western Wall are presented; one a photo in black and white of old Jews remembering the sad past, which is followed by a dark night view of an orange-yellow fire-like light piercing the darkest of the night. The black and white photo is an epitath; this contrasts with the fire-like light that praises the God of the past Who brought the dry bones of the Jewish past back to life. This stunning juxtaposition reminded me of the 9th of Av Nahem prayer where it is recalled that God brought the Wall down in fire and with that very same fire will in the messianic future build up that Wall. That picture reminds the visual reader that prayerful future is now, the Shechina has in our time returned before our eyes in mercy to Zion, and so too has Israel returned home.

After offering the liturgical blessings to be recited, those same dazzling colors, yellow and orange, color and comment on the hands of a female reciting the Sabbath candle blessing. When Israel observes the Sabbath, paraphrasing Ahad Ha’am, the Sabbath preserves Israel. Given their juxtaposition, the engaged reader/praying person uses the visual stimulation of the photo to react and more critically, to respond to the literature of liturgy, allowing the liturgy to serve as a stimulating libretto to the prayer enterprise that is called “life.”

At the very center of the Shabbat candles photo cast in orange and yellow hues is a small, pure white light. In the next picture, commenting on “those seated in your house have found happiness,” the beginning of the weekday prayer recited before the Sabbath, that white light, shining from the East [See Deuteronomy 33:2 and Isaiah 58:10] , alluding to the primordial Eden [in Aramaic, “Eedan” means time!], is more pronounced, more visible, and lightens the entire view. This light now emanates from the recesses, shadows, and tunnels of the Wall, deftly and lovingly making the statement that God has indeed come home and so too has His people. This insight is available if we have the inner eye to pray with the Siddur with the perspective of living history.

In modern Orthodox synagogues, Yedid Nefesh, very appropriately and correctly translated as “soul mate,” is sung before the Sabbath Greeting, or Qabbalat Shabbat, prayers are recited. The sun, here colored in white light, emanates a yellow glow above it and an orange glow below it. At this sacred, liminal moment, the prayerful Jew is entering what Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the “sanctuary in time.” The ordering of photos provides the footlight to the high light, that pure white light that we now realize was that Divine light that was created on the first day of creation, that lit Moses’ scrub bush but did not singe it, that shined inside the cloud that guided our ancestors in the wilderness and exile, and now has three residences: [1] in the infinite reaches of the cosmos, [2] in the sacred Temple precinct, and [3] in our praying hearts, if we start the fire. The highlighted passage, in brown/orange, “Light up the earth with your glory and we shall delight and rejoice in You,” animates the shining words. The theological statement here being made is that God’s cosmic light informs and inspires the first person’s inner state of being, delight, which gives rise to an outer expression, to rejoice in the Lord. Here the attentive reader realizes that the volume’s title, Nehalel, is the human dialectical response to the personal Divine call.

The Siddur then turns to Psalm 95, where the Hebrew text is set in a cloud-filled sky which flows from the cloud sky white to the oceanic visual blue, anticipating the colors of the Israeli flag, and the wilderness whose sun drenched sand is slowly being covered by the inevitably encroaching Shabbat shadows. Both Hebrew and English texts are shrouded in blue, with the highlighted passage, the words on and by which we are invited to meditate, “The ocean is His—He produced it and the terrain, too, was formed by His hands.” At the moment when the Divine and the ephemeral meet, the Creator and creation both rest, together, and the prayerful Jew responds to the infinite eternity of which the finite individual is a part.

Psalm 98 contrasts the white sky, which happens to be God’s abode [Psalms 115:16], to Israel’s green pasture on the left in all but the end and top of the picture a clearly newly planted Israeli forest on the left. In the upper right distance we see the unredeemed Transjordan hills. Haruni’s highlighted verse, “My pasture and all within will be enraptured, while the trees of every forest sing in exultation,” captures the secret of Creation. We have here the personification—not the deification—of nature. See also Psalm 19:3, where day and night will have something to say and have an opinion to express regarding their Creator, all with the sound of sacred silence. The Creator of the world has chosen His land to be personified, to come to life, and to be renewed by the handwork of His people.

Psalm 97 presents a dark background contrasting on the top of the page with white words, alluding to pSheqalim 6:1, which describes the Torah that was written with God’s first day creation, the white and black primordial and perfect light; at the bottom of the page we find the orange natural light of lightning. As land makes borders for shapeless water, writing enables the writer, both Divine and mortal, to create worlds for words.

This celestial firework show testifies that God is the King of the cosmos. The orange highlighted verse, “His thunderbolts will illuminate the planet, the earth will witness and tremble,” announce the Presence of that King. For paganism, the god/king is a tyrant; in Israel, the God Who is King invites His people into eternity. It is as if God calls out to Israel, nehalel, let us join together in recognizing God as our king.

Psalm 98’s Hebrew text presents a white text on a hunter green background, with the light blue highlighted verse, “Adonai has made his redemption known, and His justice visible to the nations.” The secular Ben Gurion is depicted, here wearing an out of character suit and tie, with a picture of Herzl over his head and two Israeli flag banners on either side, in the now famous black and white picture, declaring that Israel a free, autonomous nation state of the Jewish people. The juxtaposition of thunder of the Divine King, given to the secular Ben Gurion, to announce in history what was declared in Heaven in thunder, is full of ancient and modern irony. Haruni’s genius in Nehalel is its invitation for all, in and with the first person collective plural, to praise God together, with no one losing their voice. Without even a suggestion of a divisive polemic, Haruni’s modern Orthodoxy sees sanctity in individual creativity.

Haruni’s Nehalel is not blindly romantic; it affirms faith in the face of realism. In Psalm 99, God is king and rules all peoples; on the other hand, that terrestrial real estate is also God’s earthly footstool; however, the Dome of the Rock and East Jerusalem are not in Jewish hands. The highlighted verse, in blue, “Exalt Adonai our God and worship at His footstool, for He is sacred,” reminds the sensitive reader that God and not the State is sacred, allowing the reader the right to read the passage according to his or her own political proclivities. The occasional red of the Palestinian homes and the Golden yellow Dome contrast with the white Temple plaza and blue Psalm verse. Haruni seems to me to be saying that the pattern of redemption is in place; with strength, faith, peace and patience, redemption will continue at God’s planned pace.

Above we described the art of artful prayer that the modern Orthodox Jew is open to embrace. The Siddur Nehalel is Zionist; it reflects popular, main stream Halakhic opinion, and is a work of soul rather than scholarship, with scholarship informing the narrative of the soul. On the other hand, Haruni carefully asked scholars to review his work and nothing was suggested that violates the modern Orthodox religious consensus..

At http://torahmusings.com/2013/02/book-review-roundup-ii/, we find another view, by Rabbi Ari Enkin:
“I was immediately taken aback by the beauty and structure of the new “Nehalel beShabbat” siddur. This nusach Ashkenaz siddur, containing all the relevant prayers for Shabbat, is extremely unique and represents a fresh new dimension in the publication of siddurim. Similar to the “Nevarech” bencher, the Nehalel siddur is packed with extremely powerful and stunning full-color glossy photographs….
The photographs are intended to assist the worshipper in finding inspiration in the words he is reciting. …One of the photographs that accompanies Lecha Dodi features a panoramic nighttime view of the Old City of Jerusalem with the words “v’nivneta ir al tila” highlighted…..
As part of the Shir Hama’alot that follow the Shabbat afternoon mincha, Tehillim 123 features the infamous Nazi-Era photograph of a rabbi wearing tefillin being taunted by Nazi soldiers on the streets of Poland with the words “rabat sava la nafsheinu; hala’ag hashananim habooz l’gei yonim”.
This siddur is extremely Zionist in nature, complete with the prayer for the State of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF. It also has a prayer for soldiers still missing in action, not to mention a special Harachaman for the soldiers in the Birkat Hamazon. So too, many of the photographs are of Zionist themes, such as the famous Ben Gurion Declaration of independence, Kibbutz and kibbutznik related photographs, as well as highlights of modern aliyah (e.g. “v’hu yolicheinu komemiyot l’artzeinu”).
It would be remiss not to point out that many of the photographs in the siddur include women, and in some cases, the sleeve lengths and neckline exposure do not meet halachic consensus.
The “Nehalel” Siddur certainly offers readers a colorful and alternative prayer experience. The typeset is exceptionally crisp, clear, and well-spaced making for a very pleasurable read. The English translation is an impressive merge of modern and ecclesiastical English. The “Adonai” transliteration rather than the more common “Hashem”, “God” or “Lord” is an important feature for those who pray in English. Women are well represented with their own zimun, a misheberach and baruch shepetarani for bat mitzva girls, and more. Even those who, for whatever reason, will choose not to use the Nehalel Siddur for regular worship will still find it to be an attractive showpiece and “coffee table” item."

Rabbi Enkin read Nehalel, is impressed by the artwork, and judges the volume for the position it takes, against the benchmarks of Judaism as he understands them. The book is, for R. Enkin, “extremely” rather than “passionately” Zionist. This seemingly innocent choice of diction implies “excess.” Nehalel is also “Feminist,” allowing what is technically not forbidden but which has been disapproved on policy grounds by the great rabbis whose subjective taste carries the “consensus” which is the benchmark of propriety for R. Enkin’s Orthodoxy. There are indeed non-Zionist Orthodox Jews and Nehalel was not composed for them. R. Enkin is not reviewing, or explicating what Nehalel is doing artistically, religiously, or ideologically; he is measuring the volume against the norms that his social world calls “Torah.”

According to R. Enkin’s world, an ideological view revealed in the review, only an Orthodox rabbi has the right to think religiously and deeply and express onself creatively. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, indeed does have the talent, erudition, and qualifying esoteric ancestral tradition to be creative; conventional religious Jews do as they are told to accept what they must because they lack tradition, erudition, and the talent. Therefore, as a pretty coffee table work of art, Nehalel serves a culture function. R. Enkin’s explicit—but not only—problem is “that many of the photographs in the siddur include women, and in some cases, the sleeve lengths and neckline exposure do not meet halachic consensus.” For him, halachic “consensus” refers to the opinions of the Hareidi rabbinic establishment. Hence the polite but patronizing comment that Nehalel may appear on the Orthodox coffee table because it is pretty and the volume makes for unthreatening conversation. What is also here being said, subtly, deftly, yet unmistakenly, is that Nehalel does not, for R. Enkin, belong in the main stream consensus Orthodox pew.’’

Like Rabbis Landes and Grumet, I initially took no notice of the “offending” photos of Israell women. And for good and obvious reason. According to Maimonides [Laws of Forbidden Intercourse 21:2], Jewish Law only forbids sexually suggestive non-contact gestures, gazing, and conversation. I have failed to find an explicit, religiously binding Oral Torah norm that clearly requires all Jewish women to cover their elbows. Those who care to act strictly of course have a right to do so; but without an explicit Talmudic norm, the norm may not be imposed on others. The post-Talmudic consensus of some rabbis [a] does not bind all Israel, [b] cannot be claimed to be law until we clarify these rabbis’ identity, jurisdiction, reasoning, and cogency, and [d] why would this restriction apply to a non-suggestive, two dimensional, black and white old photograph.

Haruni has created both a modern Orthodox prayer book and a modern Orthodox artifact that talks to Jews who have no time for silly, unbecoming games.
Michael Haruni has not only compiled a wonderful prayerbook, he has shown what a thinking Jew is able to accomplish; he inspires his readers, among them me, to take God seriously, and he has created a model for modern Orthodox creativity.