National Scholar Updates

     I joined the debating society of Franklin High School in Seattle during my junior year. I joined because I was relatively shy and not a very good speaker. By rights, the debate coach—Mrs. Eva Doupe (pronounced Du-pay) shouldn’t have accepted me. But she did. And that literally changed my life.

Mrs. Doupe had faith in her students. She encouraged us, challenged us, criticized us, honed our talents, forgave our shortcomings. She had high expectations, and she expected us to work hard. She was rightly regarded as one of the best high school debate coaches in the State of Washington, and her students did well in the various debate tournaments in which they participated.

Aside from improving our oratorical skills, she taught us the importance of preparing thoroughly. Each year, the National Forensic League issued a topic that all schools would debate for that school year. We had to research the topic and be able to make a strong case both for and against the resolution at hand.

I asked Mrs. Doupe, “If we feel strongly about the affirmative or negative cases, why can’t we just debate on the side that we believe in?” She answered: The goal of debate is to make us think carefully about opposite ways of looking at the same question. If we must argue both the affirmative and negative positions, we learn how to value both sides. There are compelling arguments pro and con, and we need to open our minds to seeing things from opposing angles.

She also taught us the art of “impromptu” speaking. She would prepare topics on slips of paper and put them in a basket. She then called on each of us to draw a topic, think about it for 30 seconds, and then deliver a five-minute talk on it. She gave us rules: Start with a catchy opening statement; formulate an outline of what you want to say; conclude with a strong line. Don’t bluff. Don’t pretend to know something when you don’t know it. Don’t speak longer than five minutes, but not too much less either. No er’s or um’s. Speak with clarity and confidence. Have eye contact with your listeners.

In order to succeed at impromptu speaking, she emphasized the importance of reading widely, thinking about issues in the news, drawing on personal experience, relating to the interests and concerns of the audience. Don’t speak at people, but engage with them.

As a Junior in Mrs. Doupe’s class at Franklin High School, little did I imagine that I would spend the bulk of my lifetime as a rabbi, public speaker, and communicator of ideas.

* * *

When I was a senior at Franklin High School in Seattle, my teacher for Language Arts was Mr. James Britain. Even after these many years, I remember him and his class quite vividly.

I invariably got A grades on all my papers. But once, Mr. Britain marked my paper with a D. I think I learned more from that D than from all my A papers. What was the paper about, and what did I learn?

Mr. Britain often presented the class with challenging assignments. Once, he asked us to walk around the outside of the school building and to observe its architectural details. Another assignment was to study a painting and analyze it as carefully as possible—its colors, perspective, lighting, etc. His goal was to teach us to “see,” to focus on detail, to look for the usual and the unusual.

One day, he played a recording of atonal electronic music for the class and asked us to write our impressions. I was outraged by this “music” and wrote a scathing essay condemning it. This was not music at all! It was a cacophony of senseless screeching, painful to the ear. Mr. Britain gave me a D on this paper. He wrote me a one line comment: “In order to learn, you must open your mind to new ideas.”

When I spoke to him afterward about my “unfair” grade, he calmly explained that I had entirely missed the point of the assignment. He indicated that I should have listened carefully, with an open mind; I should have tried to understand the intentions of the composer; I should have put aside my preconceived notions so as to experience the music on its terms—not on mine. Only after I had processed the experience with an open mind was I entitled to offer my judgments about it. Think carefully, don’t rant.

That was one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned—and one of the most difficult to apply.

We all have fixed ideas on a great many topics. It is often painful to hear opinions that conflict with our sure understanding of life. New ideas, unusual approaches, unconventional artistic expressions—these are difficult to absorb. It is tempting—and usual—to shut off ideas that challenge our own views and tastes. It is very common for those who have different views to talk at each other, or to talk against each other; it is far less common for people actually to listen to each other, to try sincerely to understand the ideas and approaches of others. To open our minds to new ideas demands tremendous self-control and humility.

* * *

September 1963 was the first time I got on an airplane. My friend Morrie Butnick and I flew to New York to begin our freshman year at Yeshiva College.

In those days, Seattle was a relatively small city with a tiny Jewish population. Coming to New York was an amazing change of venue—a bustling city of millions, and a large and diverse Jewish community. It was an exciting time, and eye-opening in so many ways.

One of the most powerful eye-openers for me was Professor Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, who taught Western Civilization. For me, and probably for many other out-of-towners, this was the first experience with a teacher who was an Orthodox rabbi with a Ph.D from Harvard. Dr. Greenberg was young, tall, somewhat gangly, with an engaging smile. To me and many others, he was a model of the synthesis between traditional Torah learning and general secular education. One could simultaneously be a learned rabbi and a world-class historian.

Dr. Greenberg was a phenomenal teacher. His lectures were riveting. He engaged us in conversation, invited questions, and spoke with genuine enthusiasm. He assigned many and diverse readings, including readings from the New Testament. Some students objected to being assigned to read texts from another religion. Dr. Greenberg then announced that the readings in the New Testament were optional, and no one had to read them who felt uncomfortable doing so. But he reminded us that the New Testament/Christianity were basic components of Western Civilization and that it would be valuable for us to have some basic knowledge of them.

Dr. Greenberg was (and still is!) a unique figure in the Orthodox Jewish world. While deeply committed to tradition, he is something of a revolutionary. As a historian aware of historical process, he sees Judaism as a living organism that naturally evolves with time. He, and his wife Blu, were pioneers of Orthodox Jewish feminism. He was—and is—an articulate and often lonely voice for interfaith dialogue—not merely friendly conversation, but deep discussion of the basic elements of faith and spirituality that unite and separate us. His writings and lectures on the Holocaust are classics for those seeking to understand the spiritual and intellectual framework of that nightmare of human history.

Because he was a creative and original thinker, he was often marginalized by the arch-traditionalists who feared and resented his teachings. That made him an intellectual and religious martyr of sorts—and this very notoriety contributed to his great popularity among his students!

Rabbi Dr. Irving Greenberg taught us so much in his courses on Western Civilization. But perhaps the greatest thing we learned from him was to candidly face the challenges of being traditional Orthodox Jews while being true to the demands of modernity. To be an Orthodox Jew, even a rabbi, did not entail turning off our minds. Quite the contrary. The grandeur of Judaism is best approached with a searching mind and a yearning heart.

* * *

Rabbi Dr. Maurice Wohlgelernter, known popularly among his students as "The Reb," passed away on Saturday night June 22, 2013.

I first met The Reb in September 1963, as a freshman in his English 101 class at Yeshiva College. He was an astonishing teacher. He demanded clarity in our writing, marking each of our papers with an overly active red pen. He crushed our egos with his harsh grades—but he taught us, and taught us very well. To get an A from The Reb made it all worthwhile!

His career was multi-faceted. He served for many years as Rabbi of a synagogue in uptown Manhattan. He taught English writing and literature at Yeshiva College, Baruch College, and later at Touro College and NYU. No one who took The Reb for a course can ever forget him.

He was devoted to the study of Torah and Talmud. He was in the first class of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and he was the one who coined the title "the Rav" for Rabbi Soloveitchik. The Reb studied Talmud all through his lifetime, and always saw himself as a yeshiva bochur.

He earned his Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University, and went on to author books and articles on literary topics. He was a master stylist who valued the power of words. Well into his 80s, he was writing and publishing significant articles, including several in our Institute's journal, Conversations.

The first wedding the Reb performed as a young rabbi was for one of his classmates, Paul Schuchalter and his wife Dorothy. Rabbi and Mrs. Schuchalter are my wife's parents—my in-laws. When Gilda and I were married in 1967, The Reb recited one of the Sheva Berakhot. We retained our friendship over the years, meeting regularly for a cup of coffee, some literary discussion, analysis of issues in the Jewish world, and more. It was a singular honor and privilege to have enjoyed this friendship for just about 50 years.

I always thought that "The Reb" had another significance: the Rebel. And that is what he was. He rebelled against nonsense and hypocrisy. He had no patience for superficial glitz and inflated egos of overly comfortable establishment figures. He was a source of agitation to those who feared his sharp tongue, his utter unpredictability, his energy, his intellectual restlessness. Perhaps he was such an amazingly popular teacher precisely because he was a rebel who brooked no nonsense, who was committed to truth at all costs. He had a phenomenal sense of humor, but he took life and ideas very seriously.

I am grateful for having had the privilege of being part of his world. He was one of a kind, unforgettable. He will always remain—for all of us who knew him—a source of blessing, strength and wisdom, and he will always be prodding us to follow his inspiration in being devoted to truth, in being a rebel against shallowness, mediocrity, and hypocrisy.

* * *

The Kotzker Rebbe (1787–1859) was an insightful Hassidic master whose wisdom continues to impact on thinking Jews of our times. He made an important observation based on the fact that the Torah was originally given and taught in Midbar Sinai, the wilderness of Sinai.

He taught as follows: The Divine Presence only rests on one who sees him/herself as being in the wilderness. No matter how much one has learned, he/she still remains in a place that is vast and untouched—i.e., there is so much more to know. And just as a wilderness remains empty and unproductive unless it is seriously cultivated, so a person remains empty and unproductive unless that person expends tremendous energy and effort to attain wisdom. Only such a person can merit genuine knowledge of Torah and the blessing of being touched by the Divine Presence.

The Kotzker Rebbe had little patience for pseudo-scholars and pseudo-intellectuals. He was repelled by the phenomenon of self-contented, self-righteous and arrogant individuals whose vanity made them think they were great and important. He despised sham piety, pretentiousness, and inflated egotism.

I was recently reminiscing with a friend about our years at Yeshiva College during the 1960s. One of the teachers who made a lasting impact on me (and on so many others) was Professor Alexander Litman. Dr. Litman taught philosophy in a unique way. He took a topic from Plato and suddenly—he WAS Socrates. He asked us questions, probed all aspects of the issue, he challenged our assumptions. He made us think! Other professors of philosophy may have given academic discussions about philosophers: Dr. Litman was a philosopher.

I remember Dr. Litman’s slow and deliberate way of speaking, his cryptic smile, the sparkle in his eye when he made a particularly clever remark. He would end class with an announcement: “We will meet again on Thursday…if there is a Thursday.”

Dr. Litman knew a tremendous amount. But like Socrates, he saw himself as a searcher for truth. He understood that in spite of all that he had read and learned, he was still in a wilderness, far from achieving ultimate truth. He might well have identified with the words of Socrates: “And I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise;…he is only using my name by way of illustration as if he said: He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.”

The Kotzker Rebbe probably never read Plato, and Dr. Litman may not have been familiar with the teachings of the Kotzker. But both of these men, like all genuine teachers, understood the essential qualities required of those who strive for wisdom: humility, critical thinking, hard work. Both of these men, like all genuine teachers, taught their students to think, to reject glib and superficial people who pretend to be learned or wise.

Students are those whose minds are active, interested, searching. Non-students are those who are intellectually stagnant, vacuous, self-contented. Students always feel they are in a wilderness, with so much more to learn and so much territory that needs to be cultivated. Non-students feel they know a lot, that they have truth in their pocket, that they are smarter and cleverer than most everyone else.

* * *

When I think back on my years at Yeshiva College (1963–1967), I am forever grateful for having studied with a number of truly remarkable professors. One of the best was Dr. Louis H. Feldman (October 29, 1926–March 25, 2017).

Dr. Feldman taught classical languages. He had very few students—there were four of us in my Latin class. When I registered for Latin, one of the upperclassmen warned me: Feldman is a very tough teacher; you should avoid him if you can. But instead of discouraging me, that warning whetted my curiosity.

Aside from teaching us Latin, Dr. Feldman taught us how to think critically. While I have forgotten most of my Latin, I have not forgotten his intellectual guidance.

In his lectures, he gave us the following notice. “Everything I tell you might be true or might be false. But if you ask me a question, I’ll always give you the correct answer.” We had to listen carefully when he spoke; and we had to use our critical faculties to assess whether the information he was giving us was true or false. If something sounded wrong, we had to ask him for clarification. His basic point was: Don’t rely on authorities, not even your own professor. Think for yourself; think carefully and analytically.

Sure enough, on one of his exams we all answered a question “correctly,” and we all were marked wrong. When we objected, since we only wrote down what he himself taught us, he replied with a wry smile: “Yes, but I wasn’t telling the truth then! You should have been more perceptive, you should have challenged me.” So we all received poor grades on that exam; but we learned a lesson that transcended Latin: We learned to be attentive, critical, self-reliant.

Dr. Feldman assigned us to write a paper that we would present to the class orally. Since I was taking a class in Chaucer at the time, I decided to write a paper on Virgil’s influence on Chaucer. When it was time for me to present my paper, Dr. Feldman sat in the back of the room. No sooner had I made my first point, Dr. Feldman raised his hand. “How do you know that Chaucer drew that phrase from Virgil? Maybe he came up with it himself?” I was a bit flustered, but replied with some confidence: “Professor Thompson, who is a foremost authority on Chaucer, wrote specifically that this passage was drawn from Virgil.” Dr. Feldman said: “I don’t care what Professor Thompson or anyone else thought. You have to demonstrate that in fact Chaucer was drawing on this passage from Virgil. Quoting this professor or that professor does not make something true.” “But he’s an authority,” I replied. “Don’t rely on authorities,” said Dr. Feldman. “Analyze things for yourself. Citing an authority doesn’t prove your point.”

That was a powerful lesson that has stayed with me over the years. Whereas it is very common in religious life to rely on “authorities,” Dr. Feldman taught us to think for ourselves. Yes, we certainly can and should learn from scholars, but ultimately we need to make evaluations of our own. Because rabbi X or authority Y said something does not in itself make something true.

Dr. Feldman had strict rules when it came to submitting our papers. He would deduct one third of a grade for every five typos/misspelled words/grammatical errors. We had to proofread our papers very carefully before handing them in; we knew that he graded strictly. The first paper I ever published was a term paper I wrote for Dr. Feldman comparing five English translations of the Aeneid. Dr. Feldman submitted the paper on my behalf to the Classical Journal—and it was published during my senior year at Yeshiva College.

Aside from his brilliance as a teacher, he was a singular role model. He was not only a world-class scholar of Greek and Latin; he was a Torah scholar who could often be seen in the Bet Midrash well into the night as he studied Talmud. He was serious, but very witty; he had a ubiquitous smile and dry sense of humor. He was strict but not austere. He was demanding but not pedantic.

It is one of the unique joys of life to have studied with great teachers. It is one of the unique qualities of great teachers to expand the intellectual horizons of their students. Dr. Louis H. Feldman was that kind of teacher and that kind of human being.

* * *

When I had been in the rabbinate for only a few years, I asked myself a painful question: What could I possibly do in order to succeed? I was working with as much energy and self-sacrifice as I could muster, and yet nothing seemed to be changing. Was I prepared to spend a lifetime spinning wheels or treading water?

I discussed my dilemma with Rabbi Meyer Simcha Feldblum, my Talmud teacher at Yeshiva University. Rabbi Feldblum reminded me of a talmudic lesson. When the priest in the Temple in ancient Jerusalem was grinding the spices for the incense offering, someone was required to stand by him and say: “Grind them fine, grind them fine.” The reason is that “The voice is beneficial for spices.” Yet what benefit could a voice have in this process?

Rabbi Feldblum answered: The priest would inevitably reach the point where he thought that his grinding made no difference and that nothing was happening. He would want to stop. So he needed someone to encourage him: You may think that you are not accomplishing anything, but you are perfecting the spices. Keep at it. Ultimately your grinding does make a difference.

This lesson applies to all who wish to transmit the teachings of Torah to their children, grandchildren, students, and members of the larger community. The work will often seem to be in vain, yielding no visible results. But we must continue our task with selfless devotion. Something is happening. We may not see the results now, and we may never live long enough to see the results—but something is happening. The words and teachings of Torah are being planted. They will eventually take root. They will blossom.

Maimonides has taught that the religious person must be a model of human excellence: gentle, honest, friendly, and courteous. People should look at that person and wish to follow the example, recognizing that Torah has the power to create such ideal individuals.

Those who wish to transmit Judaism must strive to be exemplars of Judaism at its best. Being a religious Jew means living with failure, personal and communal. It means falling short, feeling lonely and misunderstood. But if we ourselves can strive to reach our ideals, and if we can convey our ideals to others with sincere devotion, we can lead lives imbued with genuine meaning. And that is success.

* * *

Haham Solomon Gaon passed away on 19 Tevet 5755 (December 22, 1994). During the course of his lifetime, he impacted on many thousands of people. He served for many years as the Haham of the Spanish and Portuguese community in London; and was the founder and director of the Sephardic Studies Program at Yeshiva University in New York.

As one of Haham Gaon’s first students at Yeshiva University in 1963, I want to share a few thoughts about a man who was not merely a teacher, but a mentor and friend. Had I not studied with Haham Gaon, I almost surely would not have become a rabbi; had he not been a constant guide and friend, I almost surely would not have had a rabbinic career spanning five decades.

Solomon Gaon was born in Travnik, Yugoslavia in 1912 and studied at the yeshiva in Sarajevo. Both his parents died in the Holocaust. He received his rabbinic ordination from Jews' College in London. In 1949 he became Haham (Chief Rabbi) of the Sephardic congregations of the British Commonwealth. With Alan Mocatta, he is credited with revivifying a declining community. Beginning in 1963, he became involved (initially on a part-time basis) with Yeshiva University in New York, and was integral in the founding of its Sephardic Studies Program. While in New York, Haham Gaon was closely identified with Congregation Shearith Israel where he attended services regularly.

Haham Gaon had an uncanny understanding of human nature. He seemed to know what was on your mind without your ever having to tell him. He was one of those rare rabbis and teachers who actually cared about others with a fullness of concern. He held impressive titles and received many honors; but he was among the humblest people I have ever known. Whatever he achieved was not directed at self-glory, but was for the glory of God. He spoke to all people with respect and kindness. He was as non-judgmental a rabbi as I have ever met. His motivating emotion was love; his compassion and empathy seemed to know no bounds.

Haham Gaon seemed to have boundless energy. He traveled extensively; he visited many Sephardic communities around the world. He spoke at many conferences and scholarly gatherings. As busy as he was, he always seemed to have time for family, friends, and students. He and Mrs. Gaon were gracious hosts; they enjoyed being with people, sharing happy times.

Haham Gaon had a lively sense of humor. He also had gravitas. He knew how to carry himself with great dignity while still not becoming aloof.

Haham Gaon, like the classic rabbis of Sephardic tradition, placed great emphasis on prayer. He seemed to have a remarkable spiritual intimacy with the Almighty. When Haham Gaon prayed, all of us in his presence felt an extra spiritual energy in the room.

In an article I wrote on Sephardic models of rabbinic leadership, I referred to Haham Gaon:

As a young rabbi, I learned much from my teacher Haham Solomon Gaon, with whom I studied at Yeshiva University, and to whom I turned for guidance for many years thereafter. I once complained to Haham Gaon that I was called upon by various organizations and committees to attend their events and meetings. I felt I should be exempt from these communal responsibilities, so that I could devote more time to my studies. I thought the Haham would support my request. Instead, he gently rebuked me. He said: The people who devote their time and effort on behalf of the community need to know that the rabbi is with them. They need to see the rabbi, to hear the rabbi’s suggestions, to know that the rabbi appreciates and participates in their work. Yes, you need time to study; but you also need to devote time to working with members of the community. Haham Gaon was a Haver haIr, a friend of the community.

I went on to write that the classic Sephardic rabbinic model personified by Haham Gaon has been on the decline. “For a variety of sociological and psychological reasons, there has been a sea change in Orthodox rabbinic leadership in general—and an even more profound change in Sephardic rabbinic leadership. The upsurge in the influence of extreme Hareidi religious authorities has dragged much of Orthodoxy to the right.”

Haham Gaon represented a balanced religiosity, deeply faithful to tradition while deeply sensitive to the needs and feelings of modern men and women. Haham Gaon was a model of dignity, compassion, and total commitment to the People of Israel and the State of Israel. He did not attempt to validate his religiosity by adopting “Hareidi” style rabbinic garb; on the contrary, as a proud Sephardic rabbi, he refused to compromise his own traditions in order to curry favor among others. He respected Ashkenazic rabbis who were faithful to their traditions, and he expected them to be respectful of his traditions.

The broadness of vision, tolerance, spirituality and humanism of the Sephardic rabbinic tradition is on the brink of extinction. At the very moment when the Jewish world needs exactly this kind of spiritual leadership, we miss Haham more than ever.

             Since before the days of Israeli statehood, rabbis have written responsa about how the state should treat the minority Arab population. Following the Six Day War, these responsa expanded to address questions of how halakha views relinquishing Israeli territory, Arab sovereignty, and the treatment of terrorists (and their families), and more. Posekim (halakhic decisors) from both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic camps have written about these issues, and some of these responsa were written by Israeli chief rabbis over the last 70 years. In those teshuvot (responsa), the Sephardic chief rabbis tend to emphasize the importance of fair treatment for the Arab population, and post-1967, a willingness to trade land for peace. On the other hand, the Ashkenazic chief rabbis tend to view the biblical issue of lo tehonem (generally understood as the prohibition of allowing non-Jews to acquire territory in Israel) as a total, non-negotiable prohibition, and are unwilling to negotiate with Arab parties in any way that involves relinquishing territory.

This is not to say that there aren’t Ashkenazic posekim who have written in favor of Arab sovereignty or fair treatment of Arabs. However, this paper will focus on the piskei halakha of five former Israeli chief rabbis. From the Sephardic chief rabbis, I will be looking at the responsa of Benzion Uziel, Hayyim David Halevi, and Ovadia Yosef. Of the Ashkenazic ones, I will focus on Shlomo Goren and Avraham Shapira. I have chosen to limit my research to these five rabbis for two reasons. First, the number of teshuvot on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is vast and non-uniform; it would be difficult for me to make a broad statement about all of the Ashkenazic or Sephardic piskei halakha on this topic. Second, I want to write about rabbis who were clearly involved in political processes as well as religious ones, because part of my argument hinges on the political reality of Ashkenazim and Sephardim throughout history.

Why is there such a stark contrast between the way these Sephardic and Ashkenazic chief rabbis speak about Israeli-Arabs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I believe that Sephardic piskei halakha about Israeli-Arabs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not be viewed in a vacuum: rather, they are reflective of a Sephardic approach to halakha throughout history, and are also influenced by the treatment and role of Sephardim in Israel.

            First, I will define what I mean by Sephardic halakha. Then, I will speak in broad terms about the differences in how Sephardic and Ashkenazic halakha developed and offer a few reasons for those differences, based primarily on Zvi Zohar’s research. Then, I will speak about Sephardim in Israel in the twentieth century. Finally, I will discuss the differing halakhic opinions on Arabs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the five posekim mentioned above.

What Is Sephardic Halakha?

 Following the pogroms of 1391 and the expulsion of 1492, Jews from the Iberian Peninsula (Sephardim) resettled across the Middle East. However, they did not adopt the practices of the Jews who lived in the regions in which they resettled. Instead, Jews throughout the regions began to take on many of the new Sephardic Jews’ customs.^[1] This trend was further amplified following the codification of Sephardic halakha in 1565 in Rabbi Yosef Caro’s Shulhan Arukh. Middle Eastern communities (except for the Jewish community of Yemen) generally accepted the text as authoritative,^[2] which meant that many of the laws these communities were following came from a Spanish posek. Even Iraqi Jews, who had been the premier rabbinic authorities since the time of the Babylonian Talmud,^[3] began to refer to themselves as Sephardic following the publication of the Shulhan Arukh.

 In the last century, the amalgamation of Sephardic and Middle Eastern halakha has grown further. Rav Ovadia Yosef, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983, declared Rabbi Yosef Caro as the mara de’atra (master of the place) of Israel. Rav Ovadia believed that because Rav Yosef Caro lived and codified Jewish law in Israel, Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews living in Israel should follow the halakha as stated in the Shulhan Arukh, and not their own local, traditional customs. This assertion was met with resistance by both Moroccan and Yemenite rabbis; the former rejected the claim that Rav Caro was the mara de’atra, and continued following their own customs.^[4] Rav Ovadia even went so far as to criticize the Ben Ish Hai, one of the most prominent Iraqi posekim of the nineteenth century because he would cite Ashkenazic and Lurianic stringencies in his writings.^[5] This claim angered many within Rav Ovadia’s own community. Despite some opposition, Rav Ovadia’s piskei halakha have become the most prominent contemporary Sephardic teshuvot, and Sephardim (and even many Ashkenazim) use his teshuvot to determine practical halakhic practice.

For these reasons, I will be referring to halakhic literature from the entire Middle East and North Africa as Sephardic halakha. This does not mean they are the same, and many of the most prominent “Sephardic” posekim are actually not from the Iberian Peninsula.

General Differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Halakha

Rabbi Marc Angel has argued that an essential difference between Ashkenazic and Sephardic posekim is that Ashkenazim tend to view the halakhic process as both an intellectual and metaphysical process. This meant that access to halakha was reserved for rabbinic figures, and when it was discussed, it was often in ways that neglected the real-life impact on the daily lives of people. On the other hand, Sephardic posekim have seen halakha as naturally woven into life, and not extraneous to it.^[6] In his view, that difference in outlook helps to explain why Sephardim tend to be more lenient in their piskei halakha, while Ashkenazim are stringent and often adamant about retaining tradition. Angel also claims that Sephardic piskei halakha emphasize that religious observance should be enjoyable, and do not subscribe to the asceticism of many Ashkenazic responsa. In other words, in a line Angel quotes from Rav Hayyim Yosef David Azulai’s writings, Sephardi piskei halakha cling to the Kabbalistic notion of hessed (kindness) and Ashkenazic piskei halakha to gevura (heroism).

            Zvi Zohar names another distinction between the development of Sephardic and Ashkenazic halakha, and offers reasons for why these schools developed as they did. Zohar argues that unlike Ashkenazic posekim, who, following the Enlightenment, adopted the Hatam Sofer’s stance of hadash assur min haTorah (anything new is prohibited by the Torah), Sephardic posekim were willing to engage with innovation and treated each new question on its own terms. The first explanation Zohar offers for the difference in approach is what he terms “contextual-environmental”.^[7] According to that approach, rabbinic responsa are a product of the contexts in which they are written. European Jewry did not know they were in the midst of a cultural revolution until after the French Revolution^[8] and immediately following the revolution, the Reform movement was formed. In response, European posekim felt the need to curtail any innovative thought in halakha, because they were worried it would lead to the loss of halakhic practice altogether. On the other hand, Sephardic rabbis realized innovation was coming, because they saw European innovation before it began to happen in the Islamic world. Because they could see that the world was experiencing a fundamental shift, they did not think that adding more stringencies to would keep people invested in traditional Judaism.

Additionally, unlike the anti-religious nature of the European Enlightenment, reform in the Islamic world was not anti-clerical.^[9] Rabbis in the Middle East were not suddenly dealing with a hostile, skeptical population, as were European rabbis. Because of that, they were able to approach new questions with greater flexibility.

            The other approach Zohar presents is what he terms “immanent factors,” or the Sephardic attitude in general toward halakha and Torah.^[10] Sephardim believed that part of the Torah’s timelessness was its ability to be rediscovered in every era. They did not subscribe to the notion that anything new is forbidden by the Torah.

 Another “immanent factor” affecting the development of Sephardic religious worldview was the openness to philosophy and secular studies.^[11] Because Sephardim valued the study of math, medicine, and other subjects, rabbis were expected to have knowledge and expertise in these topics. An example of this attitude can be found in Rabbi Israel Moshe Hazan’s Sefer She’erit haNahala. Hazan praised enlightenment thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn for “restoring the Holy Tongue,” and was not critical of them, as Ashkenazic rabbis often were.^[12] Interestingly, one of the critiques hurled at Rav Ovadia Yosef from other Sephardic rabbis was that his objection to learning secular studies, such as science and art, was directly in contrast to how Sephardic posekim historically viewed engaging with those subjects.^[13]

Zohar offers many examples of these Sephardic attitudes from across the Sephardic world. One example of this attitude toward innovation can be seen through a teshuva written by Rabbi Abdallah Somekh, the leading posek in nineteenth-century Iraq. In 1877, Jews living in India asked Rabbi Somekh if they could travel by train on Shabbat, if they paid before Shabbat. An Ashkenazic rabbi had ruled against it because he considered it to be uvda d’hol (weekday activity), but Rabbi Somekh ruled that although one could not use an intercity train on Shabbat (an issue of traveling outside of the tehum, or distance one is allowed to travel on Shabbat) there were no issue of uvda d’hol when traveling by local train on Shabbat.^[14] Rabbi Somekh did not assume that new technology was automatically problematic on Shabbat. Instead, he looked closely at each individual example (in this case, the intercity versus local train) and made a separate, specific decision for each case.

Sephardic Piskei Halakha about Non-Jews in the Nineteenth Century

Sephardic piskei halakha about non-Jews in the nineteenth century often focused on the merits of non-Jewish people, society, and language. Rabbi Abdallah Somekh’s writings serve as a good example for the prevalent attitudes and practices of the Sephardic world at large because he served not only as the posek for Jews in Iraq, but also for those who settled in India and other parts of Asia. He also was the teacher of a number of important Sephardic rabbis, so his teachings continued to have influence beyond his life. Jews around the globe turned to “Babylonian rabbis,” and to Somekh specifically in the nineteenth century. One striking example is a teshuva by Rabbi Somekh about hiring a non-Jew to extinguish a gas light in a synagogue on Friday night. An earlier rabbi had ruled it was permissible to do so, because if a fire would erupt, the non-Jews might attack the Jews in response.^[15] However, Rabbi Somekh prohibited this practice, because he thought it was unlikely that the gas light would start a fire. He adds, though, that if there was a fire, it would not cause the non-Jews to cast libel, because the non-Jews and Jews “all have become almost as one people.”^[16] Rabbi Somekh thought that the integration of Jews and their neighbors was positive, even to the point that halakha could change and reflect that integration. 

Rabbi Israel Hazan also had favorable ideas about the Arabs among whom he lived. In She’erit ha-Nahala (written in 1862), he referred to the Arabs as “gentiles influenced by the positive side of reality.”^[17] In a fictional dialogue in the book between a European Jew and a Middle Eastern Jew, the Europeans refers to all “Orientals” (both Jews and non-Jews) as colorful and different. Rabbi Hazan, like Rabbi Somekh, believed there was a strong feeling of unity between Jew and non-Jew.

Sephardim in Israel during the Mandate Era

As is clear from the halakhic literature mentioned above, some Sephardic posekim spoke favorably of their non-Jewish neighbors. Without generalizing about relations between Jews and non-Jews in Muslim lands, there were positive elements in these relations.  However, the prevalent narrative of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel today is that Jews under Islam lived with under difficult conditions; when Israel was founded, they were forcibly evicted from their homes.^[18]  But this tells only one part of the long, complex story.^[19]

            Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor argue that Sephardic Jews during the British Mandate saw themselves as the clear mediators between the surrounding Arabs and Ashkenazic Jews, because they were culturally and linguistically similar to the Arabs, and had lived amongst them for centuries. The Association of the Pioneers of the East is a strong example of an organization with this belief. Founded in 1918 by Bney Ha’Aretz (Jews who had lived in Palestine pre-World War II), the organization attempted to build a bridge between Jews and Arabs through cultural and educational initiatives.^[20] In 1920, the organization combined with the Council of the Sephardic Community in Jerusalem (though each also maintained its own identity), and created the General Organization of Sephardic Jews. One of the goals of that organization was also to develop a positive relationship between Arabs and Jews.^[21] After the Arab Revolt of 1936, former members of the Association of the Pioneers of the East founded a political party called the “Liberal Party,” whose goal was to mend the Arab-Jewish relationship.^[22]

 However, during the Mandate period, Ashkenazic Zionist leaders prevented Sephardic Jews from ascending to political power. To the Ashkenazim, Sephardim did not fit into the pattern of Zionism as a European nationalist movement.^[23] As a result, Sephardim were forced to demonstrate their commitment to Zionism.^[24]

Sephardim were outraged by their exclusion from the Zionist organizations. The Union of Sephardic and Oriental Jews in the Land of Israel, founded in 1939, criticized the Jewish Agency for not including Sephardim in a delegation in England in 1939. The Chief Rabbi of Egypt, Yosef Katawi Pasha, also criticized the Ashkenazim for ignoring and excluding Sephardim.^[25] Rabbi Katawi even rejected the Peel Commission in favor of a binational state.^[26] Notably, though he was of Sephardic descent, Rabbi Benzion Uziel managed to work his way up the political ladder. He was the only Sephardic included in the delegation to England in 1939, and he did not criticize the Yishuv organizations as many of the other prominent Sephardic figures did.

            I believe this history is relevant because the teshuvot written by the Sephardic chief rabbis below are undoubtedly affected by the history of those who wrote them. If the posekim viewed themselves as the inheritors of a tradition of peacemakers between Jews and Arabs, one must view their halakhic writings as a continuation of that tradition. 

Israeli-Arabs and the Conflict in Halakhic Literature

All of this brings us to examine the attitudes of Sephardic posekim toward Arabs and the conflict. Of the list I mentioned earlier, there is somebody notably missing, and that is Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Rabbi Kook was the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi in Mandatory Palestine. Rabbi Kook’s works have famously been used as the mantra for the settlement movement. However, it is difficult to know how Rabbi Kook felt about Arab autonomy, because he died before the state was established. He clearly believed strongly in the power of the Land of Israel, and the power of the Jewish presence in the land. However, many of Rabbi Kook’s writings were interpreted by his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, and then used as the basis for the settlement movement after 1967.^[27] It is unclear if Rabbi A.I. Kook was as inherently political as his son, or if his writings were misconstrued in a way to fit Rabbi T.Y. Kook’s and Gush Emunim’s ideology.

Still, there are certain writings that offer a glimpse into Rabbi Kook’s philosophy around non-Jews and innovation at large. Rabbi Marc Angel writes about three issues where Rabbi Uziel and Rabbi Kook differed, and they are reflective of traditional Ashkenazic and Sephardic attitudes. The first was in his approach to conversion: Rabbi Kook believed that people could not convert for marriage, and they needed to keep all of the mitzvoth upon becoming a Jew. Rabbi Kook felt that only the best non-Jews could become a part of the Jewish people.^[28] Second, Rabbi Kook thought that the issue of conducting an autopsy on a body (the prohibition of nivul hamet, desecration of the body of the deceased) only existed for Jews, and that autopsies could be performed on non-Jews. Finally, Rabbi Kook did not support women’s suffrage.

Rabbi Uziel harbored different attitudes toward non-Jews and innovation. He felt that if a person came with the intent to convert in order to marry a Jew, the person should be allowed to convert, and even if they did not know all of the mitzvoth. Rabbi Uziel emphasized the need to ensure that the children from these marriages would be Jewish. Rabbi Uziel also ruled that if done respectfully, both Jewish and non-Jewish bodies could be used for medical autopsies. He believed the prohibition of nivul hamet applied to Jews and non-Jews alike, because “there is no difference between Jews and non-Jews, in the sense that all are created in the image of God.”^[29] Finally, Rabbi Uziel ruled that women should be allowed to vote and hold public office. He did not see the lack of historic precedent as a reason to deny women this basic right.^[30] Rabbi Uziel generally took a more universalistic outlook, based on the fact that all human beings are created in the image of God. Rabbi Kook generally took a more particularistic outlook, less open to change.

Rabbi Uziel spoke specifically about the Arabs. He called on the Jewish state to extend a true hand of peace to the Arab nations, because “the Jewish people are a nation of peace.”^[31] Rabbi Uziel called for peace with all of the people in the land of all backgrounds and religions.^[32]

The tradition of writing in favor of peace with the Arabs and rights for the Arab minorities did not end with Rabbi Uziel. Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi, the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv from 1973 to 1998, was a devoted student of Rabbi Uziel. He received a question based on an anecdote from Yebamot, which explained the story of the Gibeonites in Samuel. Rabbi Yohanan explains that David put Saul’s sons to death as a way to placate the Gibeonites, because many had died at the hand of Saul when he killed their priests, who they depended on for their livelihood.^[33] Rabbi Yohanan calls the killing of the Gibeonites a hillul Hashem b’farhesia (desecration of God’s name in public), and the only way to repair it was by exacting retribution, which is what David did.^[34] The questioner was outraged: Should Jews pay credence to the slander of the non-Jews? Why are Jews put to death for the sake of what non-Jews think?

 Rabbi Halevi answered that this story in the Talmud actually teaches how Jews must treat the minorities that live among them. Israel has an obligation to give charity to all its citizens and ensure they are able to earn a livelihood. By treating them well, Israel makes a “kiddush shem shamayim v’shem yisrael ba’olam” (a sanctification of God’s name and Israel’s name in the world.)^[35] For Rabbi Halevi, there was a text-based precedent for fair treatment of non-Jews that applied in the contemporary context. 

Rabbi Shlomo Goren and Rabbi Avraham Shapira wrote much more explicitly about land for peace than earlier Ashkenazic chief rabbis (such as Rabbi Kook), which makes it easier to analyze their writings in relation to the Sephardic Chief rabbis. This is true because the piskei halakha of theirs that I am referencing were written after the Six Day War. It is easiest to analyze Rabbi Goren’s writings in comparison to Rav Ovadia’s, because they wrote about the same issue.

Rabbi Ovadia’s responsum is notable because it is such an outlier in the Religious-Zionist world. The teshuva, titled Mesirat Shetahim Me’eretz Yisrael B’makom Pikuah Nefesh (giving away land in Israel in order to save life), was first presented in a lecture in 1989 at Mossad HaRav Kook, and was later published in a number of other places. It is a 14-page, 10-section responsum, where Rabbi Yosef rules that if it is clear, beyond all doubt, that giving land to the Arabs will result in peace, the government may give land to the Arabs, because no mitzva comes before saving a life. In the case of pikuah nefesh, Rav Ovadia ruled emphatically that the prohibition of lo tehonem is set aside. Rav Ovadia explains that even the Ramban, who considers living in Israel as a Torah obligation, does not believe that holding onto territory at the risk of one’s life is necessary.^[36] He also adds that because Israel does not have full control of the territories gained post-1967, it is not considered to be the full occupation (kivush gamur) that is required for ownership by the Torah, so it is not a problem to relinquish that land to other people.^[37]

Rabbi Goren ruled that there is never a circumstance that would allow the state to give land to the Arabs. Unlike Rav Ovadia, Rabbi Goren believed that according to the Ramban, every day that Israel does not annex the West Bank (and Gaza) fully, they are failing to fulfill the mitzva of inheriting the land (lareshet).^[38] He believed that Israel does, in fact, have halakhic sovereignty over the land, because conquering land through war is a halakhically valid way to acquire land.^[39] Additionally, Rabbi Goren believed that it was prohibited to cede land because of lo tehonem,^[40] but even if the state chooses to give up sovereignty politically, that act of relinquishing would not have any bearing on the land’s halakhic status.^[41] Rabbi Goren wrote that although individual Arabs may be given rights, the prohibition of lo tehonem prevents Israel from allowing the Arabs as a whole to be given a national homeland on Israel’s territory.^[42]

            Rabbi Avraham Shapira protested the expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif in 2005 for similar reasons as those outlined by Rabbi Goren. He believed that the Israeli government, soldiers, and everyday citizens were all prohibited from giving land to Palestinians under the prohibition of lo tehonem and because of the positive commandment of yishuv eretz yisrael.^[43] Rabbi Shapira believed that included in this prohibition was the requirement of every soldier to refuse (non-violently) to obey an order to remove Jews from their homes^[44] (a point that Rabbi Goren makes as well in the teshuva above).^[45] Shapira adds that there is no question of obeying the law of the land (dina de’malkhuta dina) in this case, because the government is acting against the Torah. He ends the teshuva by stating that only the greatest talmidei hakhamim should write piskei halakha on these issues,^[46] which leads one to wonder which posekim Shapira considered unqualified to deal with these questions.

Conclusion

            Why do Rabbis Uziel and Halevi advocate for fair treatment and rights to minorities, whereas Rabbi A. I. Kook’s writings pointed in a different direction? Why was Rabbi Ovadia Yosef willing to allow land to be exchanged for peace, while Rabbis Goren and Shapira vehemently opposed any relinquishing of land or Arab autonomy, and even advocated for Israeli citizens to protest the government’s decision to evacuate Jews? I have argued throughout this paper that these attitudes are not random. Sephardic piskei halakha have historically been more universalist in orientation and more accepting of non-Jews and non-Jewish customs than Ashkenazic piskei halakha. Additionally, Sephardic Jews have historically seen themselves and have been seen by their neighbors as part of the Arab world.

Notes

Book Review

Pesah: Insights from the Past, Present, and Future (The Habura, 2022)

Rabbi Hayyim Angel

          It has been delightful becoming acquainted with The Habura, a recently-founded England-based organization that has been promoting thoughtful Torah learning since 2020. It is headed by Rabbi Joseph Dweck, Senior Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Community of the United Kingdom (see www.TheHabura.com).

          The Habura promotes the inclusion of Sephardic voices and ideas in Jewish discourse, coupled with an openness to the broad wisdom of the Jewish people and the world. In this regard, their work strongly dovetails ours at the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

          Their recently published Passover volume contains an array of twenty essays. The first two are by Sephardic visionaries of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Rabbis Benjamin Artom (1835-1879, Hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese Community of the United Kingdom) and Ben Zion Uziel (1880-1953, first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel). The rest of the book is divided between contemporary rabbis and scholars, and younger scholars who participate in the learning of The Habura.

          The essays span a variety of topics pertaining to Passover in the areas of Jewish thought, faith, halakha, and custom. The authors stress the need for different communities to remain faithful to their interpretive traditions. Too much of the observant Jewish world has capitulated to a stringency-seeking approach that ignores dissenting opinions and fosters conformity. The essays in this volume seek to rectify this outlook. Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and other communities should be true to their halakhic traditions and customs, and learn from one another instead of striving for conformity with the most restricted common denominators.

          In this brief review, I will summarize three of the essays I personally found most enlightening.

          Rabbi Dr. Samuel Lebens addresses a surprising formula early in the maggid section of the Haggadah: “If the Holy One, blessed be He, had not taken us out of Egypt, then we, our children, and our children’s children would have remained slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” On its surface, this claim seems unsustainable. After all, there is no Pharaoh today. Are we really to think we would be slaves to Pharaoh?

          No. We are supposed to pretend that we otherwise would still be slaves. This theme at the outset of the maggid relates to the statement toward the end of maggid, “In every generation a person is obligated to regard him/herself as if he/she had come out of Egypt.” We must imagine that we ourselves were redeemed from Egypt, and we therefore experience the slavery and redemption in our Seder.

          Lebens argues that in addition to elements of faith and community-building, all religions have a component which arouses the imagination. Sometimes, we imagine based on a reality. For example, we believe God really did create the cosmos. However, it is imperative to also live our lives constantly seeing ourselves as God’s creations (see Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on the first of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20).

On other occasions, tradition demands that we pretend so that we live our lives in a certain way. It is insufficient to merely believe that God redeemed our ancestors from Egypt thousands of years ago. The Haggadah then demands that we imagine ourselves to have been enslaved and redeemed. If we do not invoke our imaginations, we remain distant with the identification required to transform our identity and actions. If we internalize the religious program of the Haggadah, we become more sensitive toward the underprivileged, since we too were enslaved and redeemed.

          Daniel Osen also exploits the Haggadah’s directive, “In every generation a person is obligated to regard him/herself as if he/she had come out of Egypt.” He employs this concept to explain the puzzling omission of Moses in the Haggadah (he is mentioned once in passing in most contemporary versions of the Haggadah, but in earlier versions of the Haggadah even that reference was absent).

This phenomenon is commonly explained as a means of highlighting God’s central role in the exodus. Osen adds a dimension by noting that we may experience the exodus better in our imaginations if we do not dwell on a specific historical person. This interpretation creates a direct relationship between God and the Jewish people of all generations.

          Rabbi Abraham Faur uses the Pesah narrative in the Torah to reflect on alarming contemporary trends toward tyranny in Western culture. A basic feature of utopian societies is that one is forbidden from criticizing the ruling class. To suspend critical thinking—the great threat to tyrants—the political elite will suppress anything that promotes scrutiny.

          It is specifically the family unit promoted by the Torah that enables people to oppose tyranny. Faur quotes Frederick Engels, who wrote in 2015 that Marxism attempts “to end home and religious education, to dissolve monogamy in marriage…to shift mothers into factories, to move children into daycare nurseries…and, most of all, for society and the state to rear and educate children.”

          Tyrants recognize that promiscuous people with weak family bonds will become submissive citizens of the state. Contemporary “woke ideology…is an intentional attempt to promote values that contradict the family structure.”

          Jacob brought his family to Egypt ish u-beto, every man arrived with a family (Exodus 1:1). Pharaoh attempted to destroy Israelite families, first by enslavement, then through the secret murder of infant boys, and then finally publicly decreeing that Israelite boys be drowned.

          Tyrants also control the information released to the public, and censor or punish anything that contradicts their narrative. The new Pharaoh suddenly forgot that Joseph had saved Egypt, and instead promoted fear and hysteria against the Israelites. A person raised in Egypt would not have known that there were alternatives to the enslavement and murder of the Israelites. In contrast, a strong family might be able to think critically, because it has access to traditions and memories older than the tyrannical state.

          Tyrannies often pretend to act for the best of the people, but critical-minded people see through their hypocrisy and lies. Pharaoh is a banner example of this evil: When Moses approached Pharaoh after the plague of hail, he demanded that men, women, children, and animals be released to the wilderness to serve God. Pharaoh responds, “may the Lord be with you, if I send you and your children; behold that evil is before you…the men may go and worship the Lord” (Exodus 10:10-11). Pharaoh presents the journey into the wilderness as dangerous for women and children, and therefore permits only the men to go. Pharaoh thereby postures as the protector of women and children.

          Of course, the family-oriented, critical-minded Israelite women saw through Pharaoh’s outrageous pretense as a defender of human rights, since Pharaoh had decreed the murder of their sons. He could not care less about the welfare of them or their children. They followed Moses into the wilderness with their children, and sought out God’s word at Sinai.

*

          I had the privilege of giving a three-part series for the Habura in February-March, 2022. You may view these lectures at:

Tanakh and Superstition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD68xZ4J4M8

Torah and Archaeology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN1XAtia_x0

Torah and Literalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K__jp8V9sXY

The Institute looks forward to further partnering with The Habura in the future and building our shared vision together.

As we are in the season of Yom Hashoa, I think of Rembrandt’s superb Large Self-Portrait, which is exhibited at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It cast a spell on me when I first saw it. But on Yom Hashoa it invites thoughts that penetrate deeper and deeper into my very being. When trying to do the impossible—imagining what happened to members of my family and to millions of other Jews who perished in the Holocaust—Rembrandt’s self portrait awakens me from my slumber.

On Yom Hashoa one can virtually smell the blood of the six million Jews killed, including one and a half million children. Walking through YadVashem in Jerusalem, I see the faces of many of them, and it is not difficult to imagine that these children could have been mine. After all, I missed the Holocaust by a hair’s breadth.

Rembrandt’s portrait looks more powerful than ever after such a moment of reflection. He was twelve when the Thirty Years’ War began, and this painting was done four years after the devastation of Europe ended. In those days there was no market for Rembrandt’s many self-portraits. They were not painted for clients, nor were they expected to be sold. This was integrity at its best: masterpieces painted with no regard for remuneration or even career advancement. They were created just "to be,” because there was no way to suppress them in the mind of Rembrandt’s genius. An overflow of unrelenting authenticity.

At a time like this, I think of the millions killed during the Holocaust and ask myself what I have done with the life granted to me but denied to those millions. True, one must do something for a living, but Rembrandt reminds us that if we want to really live we must show flawless integrity and demonstrate great authenticity. It is all about making a genuine contribution to the world, with no regard for gain, and even being prepared to pay the price of one’s rank and position in the conventional community. A person must make sure that he can look at himself in the mirror at the end of his life and say, I lived my life; it did not just pass me by.

We live in a world where there are too many beauty salons. We have created a cosmetic world in which man’s real face is hidden, yet we are told that this is what life is all about. People try to convince us that we live in a world of dishonor and impropriety; that it is wishful thinking to believe in virtue and integrity; and that the only way to survive is to substitute selfishness for goodness. They claim that in order to endure one must be suspicious, and that authenticity is a non-starter. We are told to be more evasive and smooth-tongued in order “to make it.” In this way, man engages in a life of fear, and needs to believe that ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men. (*)

Rembrandt lived among the Jews of Amsterdam, my birthplace, and had a close relationship with them. He no doubt heard of the many Portuguese and Spanish Jews who were burned to death by the Inquisition, or had run away from Spain and Portugal because they knew that one needs to be authentic in order to live. They taught him that if man is not more than human he is less than human, and that the art of being a Jew is to know how to go beyond merely living and not become just a memory. It is our destiny to live for that which is more than our selves. Perhaps it is this great message of Judaism that prompted Rembrandt to begin painting for no gain and no career.

And so I stand in front of Rembrandt’s Large Self-Portrait and realize that in the face of the Holocaust I need to create my own self, with my integrity intact, and with no gain or fame, so that I will not be put to shame when millions who had no chance to live will ask me what I did with my life, and, God forbid, I will fall silent.

*****

* See Abraham Joshua Heschel’sThe Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York:
Schocken Books, 1966).

Creation

            To a religious person, the universe is filled with hidden voices and secret meanings. The natural world, being the creation of God, signals the awesomeness of its Creator.

            The Torah opens with the dramatic words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not begin with the story of God’s revelation to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, nor with specific commandments. The first chapter of Genesis establishes in powerful terms that God created the universe and everything within it.

            An ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah interprets the Hebrew word “bereishith” (in the beginning) to mean “behokhmah” (with wisdom).[1] According to this translation, the Torah opens with the statement: “With wisdom did God create the heavens and the earth.” A human being, by recognizing the vast wisdom of God as reflected in the universe He created, comes to a profound awareness and relationship with God. Indeed, experiencing God as Creator is the beginning of wisdom.

            Moses Maimonides, the pre-eminent Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, has understood this truth. He teaches: “Now what is the way that leads to the love of Him and the reverence for Him? When a person contemplates His great and wondrous acts and creations, obtaining from them a glimpse of His wisdom, which is beyond compare and infinite, he will promptly love and glorify Him, longing exceedingly to know the great Name of God, as David said: ‘My whole being thirsts for God, the living God’ (Psalms 42:3). When one ponders over these very same subjects, one will immediately recoil, startled, conceiving that he is a lowly, obscure creature…as David said: ‘As I look up to the heavens Your fingers made…what is man that You should think of him (Psalm 8:4–5)’”[2]

            The source of the love and fear of God rests in the contemplation of the world which God created.

The Torah and the Natural Universe

By opening with the story of creation, the Torah teaches that one must have a living relationship with the natural world in order to enter and maintain a living relationship with God. Jewish spirituality flowers and deepens through this relationship. The ancient sacred texts of Judaism, beginning with the Torah itself, guide us to live with a keen awareness of the rhythms of nature.

            Jewish spirituality is organically linked to the natural rhythms of the universe. To a great extent, Jewish religious traditions serve to bring us into a sensitive relationship with the natural world.

            An ancient teaching is that God “looked into the Torah and created the world.”[3] This statement reflects a belief that the Torah actually predated Creation and served as the blueprint for the universe. This enigmatic teaching has been subject to various interpretations. But perhaps its main intent is to reveal the organic connection between the Torah and the universe. Since the laws of the Torah are linked to nature, it is as though nature had been created to fit these laws. The natural world was created in harmony with the revealed words of the Torah. A talmudic statement teaches that God created the world only on condition that Israel would accept the Torah. If not, the world would again be reduced to chaos and void.[4]

            The Talmud (Makkot 23b) suggests that God gave the people of Israel 613 commandments. There are 248 positive commandments, corresponding to the number of limbs in the human body. There are 365 negative commandments, corresponding to the number of days in the solar year. This means that the Torah’s commandments are ingrained in our very being: in our limbs, in the years of our lives. God’s original design in Creation was related to His original design of the Torah and its commandments. The natural universe and the spiritual universe coalesce.

This harmony may also be implied in the blessing recited after reading from the Torah. The blessing extols God “Who has given us His Torah, the Torah of truth, and has planted within us eternal life (hayyei olam).” The phrase hayyei olam has been understood to refer to the eternal soul of each person; or to the Torah, which is the source of eternal life for the people of Israel. Yet, perhaps the blessing also suggests another dimension of meaning.

The word olam in biblical Hebrew usually refers to time—a long duration, eternity. In later Hebrew, it came to mean “the world,” referring to space rather than specifically to time. Hayyei olam, therefore, may be understood as “eternal life,” but also as “the life of the world.” The blessing may be echoing both meanings. Aside from relating to eternal life, the blessing might be understood as praising God for planting within us the life of the world. That is, though His Torah, God has tied our lives to the rhythms of the natural world. Through this connection with the natural world, we are brought into a living relationship with God.

Jewish tradition, thus, has two roads to God: the natural world, which reveals God as Creator; and the Torah, which records the words of God to the people of Israel. But the Torah itself leads us back to the first road, the road of experiencing God the Creator. The Torah and nature are bound together.

The relationship of Torah and nature is evident in Psalm 19. This psalm has played an important role in Jewish religious consciousness, since it is included in the Sabbath liturgy (and is read daily in some communities). The Psalm has two distinct parts, which at first glance seem to be unconnected. It begins: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament tells His handiwork. Day unto day utters the tale, night unto night unfolds knowledge. There is no word, no speech, their voice is not heard; yet their course extends through all the world, and their theme to the end of the world.” It goes on to describe the sun which rejoices as a strong man prepared to run his course. “Its setting forth is from one end of the skies, its circuit unto the other extreme, and nothing is hidden from its heat.” But then the Psalm makes an abrupt shift. It continues: “The Torah of the Lord is perfect, comforting the soul…the precepts of the Lord are rights, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes.” From a description of the glory of God as manifested in the natural world, the Psalm jumps to a praise of the Torah, God’s special revelation to the people of Israel. The Psalm seems to be composed of two separate segments.

The enigma of this Psalm’s organization, however, is easily solved. Psalm 19 is teaching that one may come to an understanding of God both through the natural world and through the Torah. God has provided us with two paths to Himself.

This concept underlies the organization of Jewish prayers, both for the morning and evening services. In both of these services, the recitation of the Shema—the biblical passage proclaiming the unity of God—is a central feature. In each service, the Shema is introduced by two sections, each concluding with a blessing. Although the words of these sections vary between the two services, their themes are identical. The first section praises God as Creator, the One Who called the universe into being, Who set the sun, moon, and stars in their rhythms, Who separated between day and night. The second section praises God as the giver of the Torah, as the One Who loves Israel. Only after reciting both sections do we recite the Shema and the subsequent prayers. The God of creation and the God of revelation are One, and we may find our way to Him through His world of creation and through His revealed word.

Sunrise

            Certain moments of the day are particularly conducive to pensiveness. At dawn, with the rising of the sun, the sky in the east awakens with color and light. At sunrise, one experiences the still-fading darkness of night, along with the faintly emerging light of day. It is an in-between time, vague, pregnant with possibility.

            Jewish tradition has long taught that the ideal time for morning prayer is at sunrise. It is considered particularly virtuous to pray at that time, when the prayer is in harmony with the emerging sun. The prayer of the morning extols God, Who “in His goodness ever revives each day anew His work of creation.” The rising sun is symbolic of this daily recreation of the universe. At the very moment when the sun rises and the world seems to be re-created—that is the preferred moment for the morning prayer. In that mysterious, quiet, in-between time, we experience God the Creator both in the skies and in the words of our prayer book.

Sunset

            Sundown, too, is a mysterious and poetic time. The sun is dropping out of sight. The sky in the west is streaked with red and purple. In a short while, the world will be plunged into darkness.

            Jewish tradition has understood the connection of human spirituality with the natural world. Jewish law prescribes that the afternoon prayers be recited before the sun sets. Many Jews recite the afternoon prayers just as the sun is setting. The night prayers are to be said ideally when the starts in the sky can be seen.

            The daily prayer rhythm brings the worshipper into the natural rhythm of sunrise and sunset.

Changed Perceptions

              The rhythms of the sun and moon govern our times of prayer, our religious festivals, our meditation of the universe[r1] . The phenomena of nature evoke within us responses to the greatness of God, the creator, and we recite blessings on witnessing the powers of nature.

            Centuries of Westernization and urbanization have profoundly affected Jewish religious sensitivity. There has been a steady and increasing alienation between Jewish religious observance and the natural world, with a parallel diminution in sensing the awe of God as Creator of the natural universe.

            To illustrate the changed perception, we may consider the commonly observed Jewish religious experiences that recur on a regular basis. Modern Jews identify their religious lives with such events as the Passover Seder, the High Holy Day synagogue services, Friday night Shabbat ceremonies and meal, the study of Torah, synagogue worship. The common denominator of these observances is that they generally happen indoors. They are observances in a synagogue, a home, or a place of study.

            If we were to consider the situation of the ancient Israelites, we would be confronted with a different religious sensibility. The most important observances for them would have included the three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, when they would journey to the holy city to celebrate Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkoth. They would include the observance of bikkurim—the bringing of the first fruits to the Temple, a ceremony which was a great outdoor celebration. They would include the festivities that took place during the harvest festivals, the sharing of harvests with the poor, the bringing of animals to Jerusalem to be offered as sacrifices. Almost everything, in fact, would have involved being outdoors in contact with the natural world.

            Obviously, we have moved a long way from the agricultural life of ancient Israel to the urban life of contemporary society. Our religious images and observances, the things we consider essential and meaningful, have been transformed over the generations due to the sociological and demographic changes. By urbanizing religion and by placing its most important events indoors, we have lost touch with the original religious insight which connected us with the rhythm of nature.

            Jewish law often speaks in the old “natural” language. It describes the times of prayer in relation to sunrise, sunset and the stars at night. Today, though, we are more likely to speak of prayers as taking place at 7:00 am or 6:00 pm, for example. In former times, Jews knew that the Sabbath had ended by going outside and looking for stars. If it was dark enough to be able to observe three stars, then the Sabbath was over. Today, calendars and synagogue schedules list the time when Sabbath ends with the precision of mathematics, with no need to witness the stars at all. A person may pray in the morning without having experienced sunrise; may pray in the afternoon without having experienced sunset; may say evening prayers without having seen a star in the sky. Religious life can be celebrated indoors with the assistance of clocks and calendars, without the need arising to go outside.

            By bringing religion indoors, some of our feeling of awe for the universe and its Creator has been lost. The regular daily connections with nature which Jewish tradition has prescribed are no longer easily experienced. But losing contact with the natural world threatens to make religion increasingly artificial, removed from its basic life source.

            The Jewish ideal of a religious person has undergone a change over the centuries. Until relatively modern times, the ideal religious personality would have spent much time outdoors, and would have had ample opportunity to contemplate the wonders of the universe and the wisdom of its Maker. The ideal Jew lived in harmony with nature and participated in its rhythms. The notion that ideal piety can be found in a pale, scholarly, undernourished saint who spends his days and nights studying Torah in a study hall is not true to the original Jewish religious vision. The biblical heroes and prophets, the talmudic sages, the medieval pietists and mystics—all were involved in outdoor religion.

Prayer and Windows

            Attitudes on spirituality are suggested by the kind of windows used in places of worship. Windows are the connection between the indoor world and the world outside. The location and transparency of the windows indicate the extent to which worshippers are expected to relate to the world outdoors while they are engaged in prayer in the synagogue.

            The Talmud (Berkahot 34b) records the opinion of Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: “A person should not pray except in a house that has windows….” The proof text is drawn from the Book of Daniel. Since Daniel offered his prayers while looking through a window in the direction of Jerusalem, so this precedent should be followed by subsequent generations. Rashi, the great talmudic commentator, explains, “Windows cause one to concentrate the heart, since one looks toward the heavens and one’s heart is humbled.” According to this opinion, a person praying indoors may reach a higher spiritual level by looking out a window to see the heavens.

            Yet, windows in synagogues have varied from place to place and generation to generation, reflecting different attitudes toward the outside world. In some synagogues, windows were built high up on the wall, above the height of any person. This was done in order to prevent people from being distracted from the prayers by letting their eyes wander to the outdoors during services. Windows, which serve to bring the outside in, also serve to connect the inside with the outside. If praying requires concentration on the words of the prayers, windows can be distracting. Indeed, a fear of the distraction of windows emerged in many communities. The Magen Avraham, a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh (O.H. 90:4), states that one’s eyes should be directed downward during prayer. “Nevertheless, when one’s concentration is broken, one may lift the eyes toward the heavens in order to awaken concentration.” In a sense, windows—placed high on the walls of the synagogue—are a necessary evil to be used only if one’s concentration on prayers is deficient.

            Stained glass windows, though they may be very beautiful, were not incorporated into religious architecture merely for the sake of beauty. Rather, stained glass is an effective way to create an inside environment that shuts out the external world. There is no intrinsic need for us to place stained glass windows in our synagogues; indeed, these windows reflect a philosophical attitude on prayer and our sense of spirituality. They protect the indoor world from intrusions from the outside.

Sacred Space

            The Torah records the dream of Jacob in which he saw a ladder connecting heaven and earth, with angels ascending and descending its steps. When he awoke from his dream, Jacob said: “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.” Jacob was frightened. He said: “How full of awe is this place. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Jacob took the stone which he had used as a pillow and set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on it as a sign of consecration. He named that place Beth El, the house of God (Genesis 28:16–19).

            The ladder in Jacob’s dream symbolizes the connection between the physical world and the spiritual world, between the finitude of matter and the infinity of spirit. These two seemingly opposite domains are connected and related to each other. At the instant of that recognition, Jacob recognized that he was in a sacred place. His immediate response was to take a simple rock and sanctify it, making it a symbol of God’s presence of earth. Certainly, God cannot be limited to a particular stone or any other specific place. God transcends space, just as He transcends time. Yet, Jacob consecrated the place so that this physical space was also to be considered “the gate of heaven.”

            This story dramatically demonstrates a key feature of religious understanding and experience. While God cannot be limited to a particular space, yet a human being can set aside a place and recognize it to be sacred, a point of connection between self and God. While the entire world is a manifestation of God’s will and power, and as such is a reflection of sanctity, yet humans can designate specific places as being sacred. We can create new spiritual realities, new gates to heaven. Sacred and non-sacred space may appear objectively to be the same; but within the mind of a religious person, they are different kinds of worlds.

            Upon entering a synagogue with stained glass windows, we enter a religious realm, a world unto itself without reference to anything outside. It is irrelevant where such a synagogue is actually located: it might be in the middle of New York City or in Jerusalem or atop a mountain or along a sea shore. To a person inside the synagogue, the outside world is closed out; it cannot penetrate the colored windows.

            The underlying motivation for creating such windows is the belief—whether acknowledged or not—that prayer can best be experienced in a place which is closed off from the distraction of the outside world. When one enters a synagogue with stained glass windows, one knows immediately that this is a place of worship. The “inwardness” of the building makes its message known.

            There have been many synagogues where windows have been clear, where worshippers could see what was going on outside. In such synagogues, people could recite their prayers while also viewing the gardens, trees and other outdoor scenery. The synagogue of Rabbi Joseph Karo in Safed, for example, has clear windows through which one can see the wonderful mountainous scenery of the Galilee.

            Since the natural world and the spiritual world are organically connected, the Talmudic requirement of praying only in a building with windows makes much sense. The windows, though, should provide an opening between the person praying and God, Creator of heaven and earth. The windows in our synagogues are also windows to our souls. They represent our attitudes toward the outside world and toward the inside world, and toward the world inside each of us. Even when we pray in synagogues that have stained glass windows, we should keep our minds open and receptive to the world outside the synagogue buildings.

Halakha

            Jewish religious tradition provides observances and symbols that bring one into as full an awareness of God’s presence as possible. The natural world unfolds the glory of God the creator; but one can grow accustomed to the phenomena of nature and take them for granted much of the time. Halakha, Jewish law, adds a dimension of specificity to Jewish spirituality. It is not merely a poetic, artistic experience; it also involves specific activities to do and not to do. It is a full system and guide for life; through its precepts, one maintains a continuous relationship with God.

            Since halakha is an all-encompassing guide to life which describes what God wants us to do, it is essential that we understand its role in our lives. Observing the mitzvoth is a way of connecting with the eternal reality of God. To treat halakha as a mechanical system of laws is to miss its meaning and significance. Halakha provides the framework for spiritual awareness, religious insight, and even spontaneity.

            At the root of halakha is the awareness that God is overwhelmingly great, and that human beings are overwhelmingly limited. Humility is the hallmark of the truly religious person. One must be open to the spirit of God that flows through the halakha. Halakha is the ever-present link between God and the Jewish people. Through observance of halakha in the spirit of humility, one has the opportunity to live life on a deep, spiritual level. The goal of halakha is to crate righteous, saintly people—those who live their lives in constant relationship with the Almighty.

Renewing Jewish Spirituality

            A rabbinic teaching has it that the way of Torah is a narrow path. On the right is fire and on the left is ice. If one veers from the path, one will be destroyed by either the fire or the ice.

            The Torah way of life is balanced, harmonious and sensible. It imbues life with depth, meaning and true happiness. Yet, it has not always been easy to stay on the narrow path.

            Veering to the left freezes the soul of Judaism. Classic Judaism expresses itself through its connection with nature and its commitment to the basic texts of Judaism—the Bible, Talmud, halakhic codes, philosophical works. These are the sourced of its warmth and harmony that imbue the rhythms of Jewish living with meaning. When one abandons Jewish belief and observance, this is a turn toward the ice. Inevitably, it leads to a breakdown in Jewish experience and Jewish identity.

            Veering to the right leads to the spiritual destruction cause by fire, or excessive zeal, religious extremism. This tendency manifests itself in a spirit of isolationism, self-righteousness, and xenophobia. It reduces the Torah way of life to self-imposed physical and spiritual ghettos.

            A basic challenge for modern Jews is to re-capture and renew the sources of spiritual vitality within the vast Jewish tradition. We need to reconnect with the sacred, and reconstruct Jacob’s ladder that linked heaven and earth. We need to avoid the ice and the fire—and to maintain a clear, serene and focused path in our relationship with the Almighty.

Book Review:

Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn, To Be a Holy People: Jewish Tradition and Ethical Values

(Urim, 2021, 263 pages)

By Rabbi Hayyim Angel

That Jewish tradition holds ethical values at its very heart needs no demonstration. The giants of our tradition, including Rabbi Saadiah Gaon, Rabbi Judah Halevi, Rambam, and Ramban, identify morality as a central pillar of the Torah’s value system. However, the interplay between ethical values and halakha requires careful examination and analysis.

Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn has been writing on this interface for decades, and shares his many years of wisdom and scholarship in his recently published collection of essays, To Be a Holy People. An ordained rabbi who also holds a doctorate in moral philosophy, he is uniquely qualified to explore the relationship between halakha and ethics.

          Overarching values such as the infinite worth of every human life created in God’s Image, justice, compassion, and human dignity shape the system of Jewish law. The messianic vision of the prophets presents an ideal to which we must actively strive.

Rabbi Korn analogizes the Jewish ethical system to a tree: “Its branches are specific positivist laws, its trunk is formed by the overarching values, and its roots are the ultimate messianic dream that nurtures the entire living body” (19).

          Halakha requires an external ethical system that informs its decisions. As Ramban observes (on Leviticus 19:2), it is possible to fully observe all laws, yet still be a disgusting, boorish person. Therefore, the Torah commands us to be holy, that is, to be upright, refined people through the Torah (see Ramban’s further comments on Deuteronomy 6:18). Halakha is not a value-neutral system in a vacuum, but must be informed by justice and compassion. If valid halakhic approaches exist, the proper course for rabbinic decisors is to adopt opinions more consistent with moral principles.

          For example, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) published a study in 2010, adopting the position that it is prohibited to donate vital organs on the grounds that clinically certified brain stem death is an insufficient condition for halakhic death. Therefore, vital organ harvesting is murder, and is prohibited even to save another person’s life. However, the RCA also permitted receiving vital organs from others, even though those organs must of course be harvested from donors.

Rabbi Korn first demonstrates that halakha recognizes a morality outside of itself. Autonomous moral principles must inform halakhic decisions. Even if a technical analysis of halakhic sources potentially could yield the RCA’s conclusion, their decision violates the basic ethical principles of fairness, objectivity, and reciprocity.

Several prominent rabbinic decisors disagree with the RCA’s halakhic analysis and permit organ donation. The Halakhic Organ Donor Society (HODS) lists over 300 Orthodox rabbis, including members of the RCA (among them this writer), who accept brain stem death as halakhic death. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate also accepts brain stem death as halakhic death, and thereby also rejects the notion that it is permitted to receive organs but not to donate them.

The primary argument of Rabbi Korn, however, is not to advocate for the halakhic position that permits organ harvesting. Rather, he insists that rabbis on both sides of the debate must adopt morally consistent positions. Those rabbis who rule that organ harvesting from a clinically brain dead individual is murder also must insist that it is forbidden to receive vital organs.

          Rabbi Korn also writes about other several vital areas of the interface between halakha and ethics, including warfare, liberty, the universal vision of Judaism, and religious fanaticism.

If many Jews perceive halakha to have lost its ethical moorings, it will devolve into a set of laws no more attractive than any other legal system. Those who insist on an insular Judaism that ignores ethics distort the Torah. “Only when halakhah manifests a deep passion for justice and human sensitivity will it secure the allegiance of most Jews today” (73).

Rabbi Korn challenges us to reflect carefully on the moral imperatives for living a holy life. As Rambam emphasized (Introduction to Mishna, Helek, 2; Guide of the Perplexed III:31), God expects that all people who witness Jews properly observing the Torah will be impressed with the Torah’s wisdom and justice:

Observe them faithfully, for that will be proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, “Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people.”…Or what great nation has laws and rules as perfect as all this Teaching that I set before you this day? (Deuteronomy 4:4-6).

          May our community all adopt this vision of halakha and morality, and may all humanity draw inspiration from the messianic ideals of Tanakh.

Is it proper to play video games? What about young children?
 

A recent survey found that respondents spent an average of 16.5 hours per week with video games. While the numbers were high for children, especially teens, the numbers were also surprisingly high for adults. Three-quarters of those aged 44-64 reported that they spent about 16 hours per week on video games.

While it is fine to spend some time on amusements such as video games, it is difficult to avoid overdoing it. Those who play these games often become “addicted” and keep playing one game after the other. Time flies by.

If one wishes to play video games, or to allow children to play, one needs to be quite disciplined. First, one needs to decide what games are proper and which are not. Then, one needs to fix time limits and stick to them. More importantly, one needs to calculate risk/benefits of playing video games altogether. Is the recreational benefit I or my children gain from these games greater than the risk of wasting an inordinate amount of time that could be spent on more constructive things?

Within careful limits, video games can provide recreational value for children and adults. It is important to establish proper limits…and keep to them.

Is it proper to buy an expensive luxury car?

The question goes beyond expensive luxury cars, but relates to the general category of conspicuous consumption. Should people live in huge mansions, wear expensive jewelry, have multi-million dollar summer homes etc.?

On one level, people can buy whatever they can properly afford. On the other hand, no one should feel the need to go into debt in order to buy luxuries beyond their means.

Some people buy luxury cars/homes/jewelry because they see these things as signs of “success.” They wish to impress others with their wealth. It’s a classic stereotype of the “newly rich” that they want to flaunt their riches. It’s not so much the luxuries that they want—they want public recognition. While some may be impressed with such ostentatious displays, others will see these things as highly pretentious and vain.

Our religious traditions stress modesty, moderation, humility. These are values that promote inner strength and self-reliance…the ability to stay true to oneself without seeking to call undue attention to oneself, without needing to show off to others.

The things we buy—cars, homes, clothing, jewelry etc.—are reflections of who we are. When we make our choices, we should make them wisely. 

Is it proper to stop someone from talking during davening?

Who would be so brazen as to come to a place of worship…and engage in chattering? How could anyone, with even the tiniest sense of reverence, profane the holiness of a synagogue with idle talk? Surely, observant Jews fully understand that the synagogue is a place of kedushah, a place of prayer to the Ribbono Shel Olam.

Surely.

The problem is that in spite of what I just wrote, synagogues and minyanim often are places where people do indeed chatter. They talk with friends and seat-mates. They discuss the latest news in business, sports, current events, shul politics. They socialize.

But what if you really want to pray with full heart and concentration? And you can’t pray properly because the person next to you or behind you is talking.

If you chastise the talker, he/she gets angry or annoyed. If you give a “be quiet” signal, he/she thinks you’re being rude or self-righteous.

You complain to the rabbi, who makes an announcement for people to refrain from talking during services. And the people keep talking.

You have a sign placed on the eastern wall: “If you come to shul to talk, where do you go to pray?” People smile…and keep talking.

Obviously, people come to synagogue not only to pray…but to socialize.

Yes, if someone is talking during services, you should signal your disapproval. If you were at the opera or theater, wouldn’t you hush chatterers who were ruining the experience for you and everyone else?

Perhaps all synagogues should have a separate room for chatting. In the sanctuary, no extraneous talking allowed: if you wish to socialize, please do so in the adjoining room where you won’t be disturbing fellow congregants…and won’t be offending the Almighty.

The Torah emphasizes repeatedly the importance of treating those around us with kindness and recognizing their fundamental humanity. This ongoing emphasis implies the Torah’s awareness that each of us is inherently self-interested and, consequently, that we require reminders and even commands to look outside ourselves and acknowledge the value and inherent holiness of others.

Often in the Torah’s presentation of such ideas, individuals who are not ourselves and whom we should treat as ourselves come from within our community and need our help: the widow, the orphan, and the poor among us. And, indeed, attending to the needs of fellow Jews is central to Jewish practice in the contemporary world—although there’s still significant work to be done in that area.

The sources for this mandated kindness and recognition of one’s self in the other are well-known and widely varied. To offer just a very few examples, Jewish texts underscore gemilut hassadim (found in Pirkei Avot 1:2 and many other places), injunctions to care for the orphan and the widow (first in Shemot 22:21–23, but nearly a dozen more times as well), and the mitzvoth that require caring for and seeing oneself in one’s neighbor, all of which point to Judaism’s concern for other Jews, especially those who are vulnerable or lack power. Rambam’s rationale for caring for the widow and orphan specifically highlights the importance of recognizing another’s feelings even when we ourselves do not share those feelings; he writes that a person is required to show special care for widows and orphans because their spirits are low and they feel depressed (Hilkhot De’ot 6:10). He reminds us of the importance of placing oneself in the sufferer’s position in order to express genuine sympathy, a difficult but necessary endeavor.

However, beyond this emphasis on those who fundamentally differ from us but, ultimately, come from among us, the Torah also insists upon an even more difficult responsibility: that we behave humanely to those from outside our community, the stranger or the Other. This Other is also required to be treated as an equal, as we learn throughout Torah. In vaYikra 19:34, we read, “The stranger who lives among you should be treated as a fellow citizen; you should love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” This common formulation—you should love another because you were strangers in Egypt—is meant to create an implicit connection between ourselves and everyone else. We have the imperative not only to remember the experience of stranger-ness, but to apply it meaningfully to our ongoing interactions with others. In every moment, as we see someone struggle, we are instructed to say to ourselves, “I was once a stranger in the land of Egypt” as a way to reorient ourselves to the plight of others, to see them not as separate—as fully and entirely Other—but as akin to us, sharing our own experience.

Our memory of that experience is so remote, though, and usually so fully relegated to collective rather than individual memory, that we need tools—such as the Seder—to help us flex that muscle of remembrance. That this verse ends with “I am the Lord your God” also recalls for us our shared origins with all of humanity: We were all created beTzelem Elokim, in God’s image. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks highlights this point when he writes that “Pesaĥ is the eternal critique of power used by humans to coerce and diminish their fellow humans.”[1] As the Mishnah in Sanhedrin 4:5 articulates, there was a single source for all humanity for a reason: “Because of this, humanity was created as one person, to teach that anyone who destroys one life is considered as having destroyed the whole world.” While some strains of Jewish thought teach that Jews are superior to others, a significant tradition exists that negates that opinion. As Hanan Balk explains of Rambam’s approach, “Maimonides emphasizes that the fundamental of free-will applies to all human beings and that every human being can achieve the highest possible rank in the realm of spirituality.”[2] Balk notes Rambam’s similar approach to Jews’ and non-Jews’ equal ability to serve God, to love God, to access divine prophecy, and even to achieve the holiest spiritual state. According to these views, all humans’ shared origin and similar godly potential are fundamental to recalling every person’s humanity, regardless of the person’s other qualities or identities.

For all people, not just Jews, understanding the true personhood of the Other is an ongoing struggle. When we look at someone who seems different, particularly when we have been conditioned by popular representation to see that person through a lens of various stereotypes and preconceptions, we struggle to see ourselves in the Other. With few opportunities to know Others on a deep and personal level, we find ourselves in a self-perpetuating cycle of distance from the Other: He or she is unfamiliar, so we separate ourselves, so he or she becomes even less familiar.

Allowing ourselves to live in this increasing spiral of isolation has obvious practical ramifications in decreasing mutual understanding and sympathy but also has profound ethical ramifications for Torah-observant Jews, effectively preventing us from living the Torah’s injunctions toward the Other. As Jews, we understandably and necessarily separate ourselves from Others in order to maintain religious community and a sense of identity that is, in some ways, part of the national and universal whole and, in other significant ways, quite separate from it. These choices put us in a logical bind, though: If we are indeed to live the mitzvoth related to the ger toshav, (technically, a non-Jew who observes the Noahide Laws, but now more often simply considered an ethical non-Jew), we have a responsibility to overcome certain aspects of the particularistic lifestyles we have chosen and learn to see ourselves in the Other as well as the Other in ourselves, a task made more difficult by our separation from these Others.

For high school students, just on the cusp of adulthood, the struggle may be even more pronounced. First, high school students are still young and, developmentally, are just emerging from an age at which they naturally see themselves as the center of the universe. For those who can conceive of the larger world, they may feel themselves to be relatively powerless and therefore not implicated in ethical decision-making. Perhaps most importantly, though, our students tend to have even less practical experience with people who are not like them than Jewish adults do. Especially for Jewish Day School students, whose lives revolve around an Orthodox community, the Other may be fully hypothetical or exist in their lives only as a bit player: the Haitian security guard at school, the Filipino housekeeper, the Catholic family down the block, the strangers at the mall or on the city bus.

Jewish Day School students, more than students of other backgrounds, are isolated from cultural difference. To some degree, most American school systems are broadly polarized by race, religion, and class because of historical and current realities of racial and class segregation, but the Jewish Day School system uniquely encourages a separation from others. It does so for valid and valuable reasons, including the basic practicalities of Torah learning, but also because of the strength that comes from community and from being surrounded by those with similar values and beliefs. As a minority faith, Jews have done well to separate themselves and create pockets of safety and security, something we understandably want for our children. Even as we may value diversity on certain levels, we recognize the importance of learning about one’s own culture in a meaningful and ongoing way, and, for those of us with children in Jewish schools, we have determined that self-knowledge—a deep understanding of Torah, Jewish history, and Jewish culture—is more important than the diverse friendships and intimate relationships with others that would come from a more integrated education.

And yet, as the Torah teaches, we must still genuinely value understanding the experience of the other. The obvious place in the Day School curriculum to compensate for this loss of diversity is the literature classroom, and I believe that a robust literature curriculum should be considered an ethical, religious imperative in Jewish schools. Rather than being seen as a potential site of undermining or conflicting with Jewish values, as is sometimes the case, English class is a site for reinforcing the very values that may be neglected by having a Jewish Day School in the first place.

Torah teaches that we must understand and even love the Other; the Jewish Day School model removes our students from contact with the Other (and, conversely, the Other from contact with our students). Literature class, while perhaps an insufficient substitute for real-life interactions, nonetheless allows students who, in service of other necessary values, are removed from the broader community to recognize a universal humanity and therefore provides them with a complete Torah education that would otherwise be incomplete. Literature in Jewish Day Schools should not be regarded as existing in service of eventual job seeking, nor about preparing students for college or offering them Western cultural literacy, although those may be tangential benefits. Instead, the study of literature makes a fuller, truer observance of Torah possible; it provides access to the sensibilities and sensitivities toward which Torah guides us. Torah wants us not just to “do” things but to become something better than our current selves, and literature provides steps toward that lofty goal.

To fulfill the religious and ethical purpose of studying literature, we must therefore read texts that delve deeply into the lives of people who are distinct from us, whose values and experiences and choices differ profoundly from ours. Understandably, this effort may feel initially antithetical to Jewish education, which may wish to protect students in every way from too much encounter with the outside world. But we are already protecting them by providing physical and cultural isolation; too much of this sort of protection will prevent them not only from understanding the world but from fully living the Torah’s commandments in regard to the Other. Our tendency toward maintaining comfortable distance is certainly understandable, especially when it comes to our youth, whom we want to protect in every way. But a true engagement with Torah consistently involves facing uncomfortable truths about the world, truths that challenge our perceptions about our own place and offer us insight into others’ experiences and perspectives.

The unease that accompanies a novel such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for instance, might make teachers want to avoid it. Fears around parents’ and administrators’ reactions, students’ discomfort, and our own difficulties talking about the novel make it easier to sidestep. However, this is one of those foundational novels that provides students with precisely the difficult insights into our shared humanity that the Torah requires.

I have heard people wish for a more “palatable” text that still introduces us to the painful reality of slavery—one that does not include rape, vivid descriptions of beatings and scars, bestiality, murder, and the many other degradations of slavery—but that nonetheless could show students something of the slave’s experience. Of course, even a cursory thought about this wish reveals its impossibility. What we need to know about slavery is precisely this reality; a sanitized version does not serve its purpose. When I teach this text, I preface it by discussing the history of slavery and the Middle Passage, about which many students are largely unaware. I also warn them about the difficulty of the text, not only in its language and use of the supernatural but also in its emotional difficulty. I encourage students to take breaks as they read, to talk with each other about what they’re learning, and to face the pain in manageable ways, surrounded by a community of readers.

But reading the novel feels absolutely necessary to me, as it exposes students to a world with which they are not familiar, in which white men are the feared enemy and every person’s trauma is permanently written on his or her body. To remember what it means to have been a slave means, in this case, to face the more recent memories of slavery in America and to understand in this visceral way what slavery meant and continues to mean for black Americans, not only as Others whose experience matters to us but as human beings who are us. Experiencing slavery, even vicariously, helps us to think of ourselves as having been slaves; but this principle applies not only to literal slavery but to any experience of having been a stranger. We have to experience it to know it, and literature helps us to do so.

This foundational history can, of course, be taught in history classes, but hearing the voice of a character who lived the experience is both more emotionally powerful and more humanizing. Naturally, literature must be taught in conjunction with history because knowing the fuller picture of an individual’s experience—its geopolitical import, how power shapes choice—is crucial to a complete understanding of any situation. But history must also be taught in the context of extended (rather than merely excerpted) narrative in order to emphasize the humanity of the individuals involved in larger historical events. In learning about slavery in history class, for instance, students are often taught that slaves were dehumanized or treated like animals. But in Beloved, the character Paul D talks about the experience of being held in chains and watching a rooster, Mister, strut past him:

"Mister, he looked so… free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher…". Paul D stopped and squeezed his left hand with his right. He held it that way long enough for it and the world to quiet down and let him go on.

"Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you'd be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D again, living or dead.... I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub."

Paul D’s musings offer students an entirely different insight into the feelings of dehumanization, an emotion-driven sense of what “dehumanization” means when applied to individual human beings. Hearing Paul D’s voice shows them some tiny portion of his pain and, simultaneously, makes him into a real person. We can know that slaves were treated as animals, but hearing what that means to an individual who experienced it provides a more profound, more lasting understanding of what that historical fact meant to the individuals who lived it. In other words, it allows students not just to know but to feel that we should love the stranger as ourselves and to recognize the ramifications of withholding that love.

Interestingly, Day Schools tend not to shy away from extreme depictions of violence and degradation in one area, and that is the Holocaust. Our students are painfully aware of the physical and emotional traumas wrought on Jewish families in 1930s–1940s Europe; even very young children know about the death camps, the cattle cars, the tattooed numbers, the family separations, the starvation. Certainly by the time they reach high school, our children know about the human lampshades and soap, the piles of shoes and gold fillings left behind, and Mengele’s unthinkable experiments. These inhumanities may feel more important to teach in a Jewish context because they happened to us; they are the stories of many of our students’ own great-grandparents. Knowing these stories is a way of showing love and care for our own people. But if we believe that our students are capable of hearing these stories, just as we believe they are capable of reading the kinnot on Tisha B’Av or learning about the Crusades or the Inquisition or the blood libel or anything else that was done to the Jews, so should they be able to learn about the inhumanities practiced on African Americans or Cambodians or Japanese Americans. Knowing these stories is a way of showing love and care for the Other. And both of these—loving both the neighbor and the stranger—are central to living a life of Torah.

Perhaps we feel that high school students are simply too young to be exposed to these issues, but high school seems to me the optimal time; if we do not reach students while they are developing their understandings of the world, we miss a significant opportunity. In particular, while they remain sheltered in the safety of a Jewish school, they are most in need of this contact with the outside world. Without it, these students, fully obligated in mitzvoth, are largely prevented from understanding the Other in any deep and meaningful way. Importantly, when we recognize that we do share disturbing images and ideas in reference to Jewish oppression but not (or certainly not as much) in reference to others’ oppression, we may come to realize that our squeamishness is not only about violence or sexual assault but about whether we were the victims or the bystanders or even the perpetrators. A narrative that presents us as victims is more comfortable, if not less upsetting, because it maintains a narrative we wish to perpetuate, not of our own victimization but of our own innocence. Recognizing the ways in which white people, some of them Jews, may have benefitted or continue to benefit from racism in America is a much more difficult conversation.

Torah demonstrates for us the centrality of narrative in our understanding of the Other, and we might even begin each year’s study of literature with a literary study of a biblical text. The kind of study I suggest here is what might be termed “The Bible as Literature,” but in a far different way from the more controversial understanding of that term. Generally, when religious Jews hear “Bible as Literature,” they think of the documentary hypothesis and a study of Torah as having human authorship. However, that definition of “as literature” only holds true if one believes that the study of literature focuses on authorial intention and the writer’s role in the text. As Reader-Response Theories teach us, though, there are many other approaches to literary interpretation that do not involve probing the author’s intentions or the history of the text’s creation and publication. “Bible as Literature” can instead involve a close study of the characters’ motivations and thought processes as well as the perspectives from which their stories are presented.

We can easily see that the Torah’s reliance on complex narrative itself constantly pushes us towards these difficult conversations. One of the most impactful narratives for me is the story of Hannah, not because I affiliate myself principally with Hannah in her suffering but because I recognize myself in the flawed character of Eli, who judges too easily and believes too quickly that he understands the entirety of a situation by seeing certain behaviors that seem, wrongly, to point to a firm conclusion. When Eli critically asks, “How long will you remain drunk? Remove your wine from yourself” and is subsequently put in his place by Hannah, who fills in for him the pieces of her story about which he had made false assumptions, I am reminded of the many ways in which I have made similar errors. That lesson can be so powerful and important, but this biblical story is only a starting point for students (and all of us, really) to engage with the dangers of judgment and assumption. To understand the Other, in this story, is to feel Hannah’s pain and to feel Eli’s guilt, both absolutely essential to being a fully empathic, Torah-observant Jew.

One might ask, then, why Shemuel I or other biblical narratives are not sufficient for this sort of work since they present precisely the kind of character insight that can help readers see their own flaws and consider their treatment of others. But the kinds of Others our students encounter are broader than those discussed in Torah narratives, and while empathy and understanding may be transferrable skills, understanding the specific details of a range of experiences is work begun in Shemuel and continued in a vast array of texts that approach different time periods, types of people and experiences. Seeing Hannah’s story as a starting point to understand more contemporary experiences of Others can powerfully reinforce certain values: the dangers of pre- or misjudgment, sympathy for others’ pain, avoiding assumptions based on insufficient knowledge, and the genuine depth of others’ feelings. Similar lessons can be garnered from a range of biblical narratives, staging the groundwork for similar but more contemporary or wide-ranging approaches to narrative interpretation.

This kind of interpretive work requires recognizing that the reader’s affiliation with Yaakov rather than Esav is intimately connected to the narrative voice and the perspective from which the story is presented. When we read throughout Bereshith Chapter 27 of Rivka’s plan to obtain Yitzhak’s blessing for Yaakov instead of for Esav, we remain in the home with Rivka and Yaakov. We hear their planning and recognize them as the central characters of the narrative. We become privy, in the Torah’s spare prose style, to their emotions and thought processes, and we feel ourselves affiliated with them. Of course, we feel that affiliation from external factors too, including our outside awareness of Yaakov as one of the avot and ourselves as descended from his line and commentaries that present Esav as crafty or even villainous, but even aside from that knowledge, the narrative itself—its use of voice and perspective—establishes Yaakov as the character intended to win the blessing and demonstrates the lengths to which he and his mother go to achieve a divinely ordained outcome.

We are briefly made aware of Esav’s feelings in the heart-wrenching line: “Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father.” But we quickly move away from Esav’s narrative and return to following Yaakov’s development, making clear to readers that Yaakov was our intended subject all along and should be the focus of our interpretation. A literary reading of this story asks us to identify and articulate our affiliation and recognize the ways in which that affiliation shapes our understanding and interpretation of the narrative. Were the narrative to leave Yitzhak’s house and follow Esav outdoors as he worked to hunt for his father and fulfill his father’s desire, we would potentially have quite a different impression of the characters’ choices and decisions.[3] By considering other perspectives as we read, we can recognize our own fallibility as readers and the ways in which perspective shapes our interpretations. I would argue that a very similar process takes place when we read any literary text, and learning how perspective functions can help us to become not only more sensitive readers but more sensitive human beings.

The point in not restricting this kind of study to biblical narratives but extending it in the broadest possible way is to take biblical narrative as a starting point and recognize that there are countless other narratives in the world that also deserve our attention. Every person has a story, and every person’s story needs to be heard, not just to validate their experiences but to shape our understandings. When we learn about the experiences of someone who is like us, we begin in a small way to move outside of our necessarily limited perception of the world: other people, even those like us, interpret the same experiences in different ways. But when we branch even farther out, we begin to see that different entire worldviews exist in legitimate ways; the more of these stories we know, the more meaningfully connected we can become to all of humanity, and the more we can recognize our God-given shared humanity. Without knowing the stories of others, we can begin to believe, mistakenly, that our lives and perspectives matter in a way that others’ do not. When we remind ourselves that others have compelling lives and perspectives too, we can align ourselves with this most conceptually difficult of Jewish values: that we are all created in God’s image. Literature is a primary means of internalizing this central Jewish truth; without it, believing ourselves to be uniquely godly is far too easy and can lead us to decisions antithetical to those the Torah demands of us.

            To some degree, then, the study of literature is a constant exercise in perspective. To demonstrate the value and potential danger of being absorbed into another’s perspective, I often use the extreme example of The Godfather in my classes (although, as the years pass, I may have to choose something more contemporary). Any mafia film or text focused on the criminal’s perspective, from The Sopranos to Ocean’s Eleven to Breaking Bad, chooses to present the human side of mobsters, thieves, and criminals. Readers or viewers are captivated by the mobsters’ internal politics, relationships, sense of virtue and retribution, and views of the world. At the same time, stepping back from those texts can help us to move outside the topsy-turvy world in which these thieves and murderers seem to make ethical choices, and reorient ourselves to the disconcerting experience of having felt aligned with criminals. Accepting such narrative wholesale is potentially morally problematic, but recognizing the ways in which we can be unintentionally manipulated by such use of perspective can help us to become more attentive readers of text and of the world. Doing so requires some level of sophistication, but helping our students to hone that analytical ability is precisely the teacher’s role in literature courses.

            Just as we see that a narrative from Esav’s or Hagar’s perspective would drastically alter our understanding of those stories and our affiliation with or empathy for the characters, so too we see that the perspective in secular literature must be firmly viewed through Torah values. Catcher in the Rye, a work I teach every year to 11^th graders, has frequently been banned for its central character’s vulgarity, disrespect of authority, and misanthropy. My students believe almost unanimously that, were they to meet Holden Caulfield in person, they would dislike him immensely. Indeed, he is externally deeply dislikeable. But what they see from reading a story told entirely from his perspective is that he is a troubled young man, suffering from the loss of his brother to cancer and wounded by his parents’ inattention. His unpleasant behaviors become more understandable in the face of our entry into his head, and a number of students have expressed their increased willingness, after “meeting” Holden, to give others the benefit of the doubt when they behave in socially inappropriate ways. If reading that narrative gives students even a moment of pause in considering how they judge another, then Catcher in the Rye serves an ethical purpose. Those who wish to ban it imagine that readers are so unsophisticated that they will envision every protagonist as a role model. As my students demonstrate year after year, though, they do not see Holden as an aspirational figure but as one who can help them to recognize the fundamental humanity of even a difficult and unpleasant person. He can, in other words, make them kinder.

            The danger of such a reading is to lead readers towards a kind of moral relativism, which can feel frightening or, at least, destabilizing. If, for example, we begin not only to root for criminals or “bad guys,” but to understand and sympathize with their motivations, do they in some ways become too understandable? Will every behavior seem permissible if it has a rationale, even a corrupt one? From decades of teaching literature with ethics at the forefront of conversations, I can say with some confidence that this is not a risk. On a continuum of “us” on one side and “them” on the other, the experience of hearing the Other’s perspective can begin to move a character from fully Other to at least comprehensibly human. He or she is still not me, and never will be, but I can begin to understand his or her motivations not as those of a monster but as those of a person—a person who has made bad choices, perhaps, or who has been misinformed or traumatized or raised with a different set of values—but a human being nonetheless.

            Because this shifting of the Other’s place on that continuum can have such powerful effects, I go out of my way to share the voices of Others with my students. For instance, I relish the opportunity to bring Christian poetry into my classroom because that voice is so absent from my students’ understandings of the world. When they read the beautiful, moving, faith-driven work of John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Mark Jarman, they begin to understand how faith motivates the lives of these differently religious writers. Far from having a proselytizing effect as some might fear, hearing these voices allows students to say, “These poets believe in something completely different from what I believe, but their faith is as deep as mine.” Or they might say, “These Christians also struggle with or question their faith,” as indeed they do. That kind of understanding is the first step toward genuine conversation and understanding, and if it can be presented within the comfortable, Jewishly-oriented environment of a Jewish school, it can allow students to understand the Other within a framework of Jewish values. To avoid this kind of material only ensures that students will learn about it in some other way that will less effectively equip them to consider it within a Jewish framework.

            Ultimately, perspective and voice are central to our moral understanding. The more texts we can read from a variety of perspectives—and the more attuned we become to the way narrative choices shape our understanding of the world—the better off we are as actors in the real world. Given that most day schools include moral, Torah-centered behavior as among their stated goals, literature falls firmly within a curriculum that supports the Torah goals of a school. Far from being only a necessary skill for entering the work force or getting into law school, literature that includes the broadest possible range of voices and experiences itself fulfills a Torah value. Without it, we would be hard pressed truly to internalize the basic fact of God’s spark in every human soul. When we do not know the stories of Others—their travails and successes, their pain and joy—we create barriers that prevent our fulfillment of the injunction to love the stranger and to remember that we, too, were slaves. Importantly, those two statements are part of pair; the all-important “because” that connects them reminds us that our love for others grows from our understanding of our own history, and our understanding of ourselves comes from our love of others. We cannot separate these, just as we cannot remove others’ stories from our study of Torah. The two go hand in hand, and a Torah education that does not include stories written by, for, and about the stranger is incomplete.

Book Review

Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Exodus (Regnery Faith, 2018)

Rabbi Hayyim Angel

          This review is a sequel to my recent review on Dennis Prager’s volume on Genesis, at https://www.jewishideas.org/article/review-dennis-prager-genesis.

          Dennis Prager is far better known as a political commentator than a Bible Scholar. Nonetheless, he is animated by his belief in the Torah and its enduring moral messages for humanity. His commentary, as the book’s title suggests, is rooted in a rationalist approach to the Bible.

          Whether or not one agrees with all of his politics or individual interpretations of the verses, Prager’s commentary is strikingly relevant when he emphasizes the moral revolution of the Torah and the vitality of its moral teachings to today’s overly secularized Western world. Rather than serving as bastions of moral teachings and American values, universities are increasingly at the vanguard of attacks against God, the Bible, family values, Israel, and the very notion of an objective morality. Prager pinpoints several of the major differences between the Torah’s morality and the dangerous shortcomings of today’s secular West.

          Throughout his commentary, Prager makes his case for belief in God, providence, the divine origins of the Torah, and the eternal power of the Torah’s morality. He also offers a running commentary on the Torah, bringing insights from a wide variety of scholars and thinkers, as well as from his personal experiences. In this review, we will focus exclusively on the former, as it is here that the commentary makes its greatest contributions.

          The God of the Torah is the most important idea of human history. Among its revolutionary contributions: The God of the Torah brings universal morality to the world. Good and evil are not merely societal opinions, but objectively real. God and morality give humanity hope for a better world. People have infinite worth and dignity and can elevate their lives in holiness. We aspire to universal brotherhood and human equality. There is a non-physical reality outside of nature, giving ultimate purpose to the universe. Human beings have free will and can and should make moral choices (93-97). These transformative ideas offer humanity the chance for redemption.

          Belief in one God is emphatically not identical to belief in the God of the Torah. The God of the Torah judges the moral behavior of every human being by the same moral standard. “A god in whose name believers cut innocent people’s throats, behead them, burn them alive, and rape girls and women—as is being done at the time of this writing by Islamist terrorists in the name of ‘the one God’—cannot be the same god as the God of the Torah, the God who gave the Ten Commandments, who commanded His people to ‘Love the stranger,’ and demanded holy and ethical conduct at all times. Likewise, those Christians who in the Middle Ages slaughtered entire Jewish communities in the name of Christ also clearly did not believe in the God of the Bible…” (132-135).

          Prager maintains that without the God of the Torah, there is no way of demonstrating that murder is objectively wrong. The twentieth-century atheist philosopher Bertrand Russel admitted that he could think of no better argument against wanton cruelty than, “I don’t like it.” We need God to declare murder as an absolute wrong, and not merely “I don’t like it,” or “I think it is wrong.” A common contemporary argument posits that murder is wrong on utilitarian grounds: We don’t murder others because we don’t want others to murder us. However, this argument is an abject failure. Most murderers do not want to be murdered. They murder nonetheless because they think they can get away with it. For suicide terrorists who do not mind being killed in return, the argument becomes entirely irrelevant. Finally, evil ideologies can overrule the utilitarian argument. For example, Hitler insisted that the Nazi extermination of Jews was for the betterment of the human species. Prager concludes, “In sum, it is unlikely there has been even one would-be murderer in history who decided not to murder because of the argument, ‘We don’t murder others because we don’t want others to murder us’” (258-260).

          Prager cites Thucydides’ fifth-century BCE History of the Peloponnesian War. Athens and Sparta were at war, and Athens pressured the island of Melos to support their war efforts. The Melians wanted to remain neutral, so Athens threatened Melos with destruction. “Is this your idea of fair play?” the Melians asked. The Athenians answered, “So far as right and wrong are concerned, there is no difference between the two. The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” Athens went on to besiege and destroy Melos, murdering the men and selling the women and children into slavery. Prager notes that 2400 years later, the nineteenth-century atheist Friedrich Nietzche wrote with contempt of those who sympathized with the Melians’ moral appeals. The God of the Torah combats this idea (322-323).

The Torah constantly emphasizes the significance of remembering our past. Remembering teaches us gratitude and wisdom. Remembering also connects us to the past and reminds us that we are part of an ongoing people and ideal. Pharaoh’s first act is to forget Joseph (Exodus 1:8). He therefore has no gratitude to Israel and instead wickedly enslaves them and decrees the murder of their baby boys. The Torah treats memory as an essential component of identity and morality. Prager extends this lesson to modern times. “Nations, too, are their memories. A nation that doesn’t remember its past…ceases to be the nation it was. This may be happening now in a number of Western European nations that teach their young people to consider themselves ‘world citizens’ or Europeans rather than members of a specific nation. It is also happening in the United States, where the level of ignorance of the American past among young Americans is unprecedented” (5-6).

In our society, intelligence and knowledge are valued far more than wisdom. One terribly mistaken believer in secular education as a replacement of religion for moral values was Sigmund Freud, who naively wrote in 1927, “Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them, the replacement of religious motives for civilized behavior by other secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively” (The Future of an Illusion). Knowledge and intelligence are useful for technology and science. However, societies need wisdom far more than intelligence or knowledge. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Iran all had or have intelligence and knowledge, but abused them for evil purposes. While the failure of German Christianity during the Holocaust (with a few notable heroic exceptions) is almost universally acknowledged, the moral failure of secular education and secular intellectuals in Germany is almost universally ignored (46, 136-138, 229-230).

The commandment to honor one’s parents is the guarantor for the civilization to endure. Parents transmit culture, religion, and ethics. The breakdown of the family ensures the breakdown of the civilization. A standard feature of totalitarian regimes is to shift children’s loyalty from their parents to the state or ideology. Strong families serve as bulwarks against totalitarianism (258).

          Pharaoh initiated the ruthless slavery, but the entire Egyptian society went along with him. The same can be said of Nazi Germany, where most Germans were not as evil as Hitler. These and so many other similar stories teach that you do not need a great number of truly evil people to carry out massive evil. You need only: 1) Ordinary people who allow themselves to be indoctrinated by the truly evil people; 2) People who benefit from the evil; and 3) A paucity of courageous good people. Prager laments, “I am convinced courage is the rarest of all good traits” (9).

          The heroic midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, may not have been Israelites. Their inspiring morality lies in their fear of God (1:15-21). Fear of God is a necessary ingredient to build a society of moral individuals. Of course there are individual good atheists as there were good pagans. And there are numerous people who practice religion who are wicked. However, a universal moral code from a universal God who judges all humanity is the only way to build a moral society (10-11).

          Through these and so many other religious-moral teachings, the Torah was a revolution in world history, and continues to bring relevant teaching to the modern world.

(This article is excerpted from Marc D. Angel, Remnant of Israel: A Portrait of America’s First Jewish Congregation—Shearith Israel, Riverside Books, New York, 2004.)

The 1880s ushered in a period of mass immigration, with many hundreds of thousands of Jews among those seeking a new life in America. Some immigrants were fleeing oppression, and some were simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families. The image of America as a promised land with streets paved of gold attracted the poor and downtrodden of Europe. Between 1880 and 1900, the United States population surged 50 percent, from 50 million to 75 million.

Among the throngs of Jewish immigrants were many who were fleeing the pogroms and persecutions in Tsarist Russia. Most entered the country though the port of New York, and a large majority remained in New York City and environs. To Americanized Jews, their incoming coreligionists posed new challenges. The newcomers, for the most part, were poor, unfamiliar with English, and unskilled by American standards. They were very much “old country” in their garb, language, religious outlook, and manners. They needed places to live, jobs, schools for their children, and medical care. In short, they needed help in adapting to American life.

The Jewish immigrants crowded into tenements on the Lower East Side of New York, eventually also spreading out to other neighborhoods in uptown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The native American Jewish community established agencies to help the immigrants, and expended considerable energy and resources to assist them. Certainly, there were sometimes tensions between them culturally, economically, and socially. Yet, to the credit of the New York Jewish community in particular—and American Jewry in general—much good work was done to assist in the absorption of the immigrants into American life.

Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), a descendant of old and distinguished Shearith Israel families, became an ardent spokesperson on behalf of these immigrants. She spent time with Russian-Jewish families in their tenement homes and sought ways to alleviate their misery. A noted poet in her day, she expressed her empathy with the plight of immigrants and gave voice to American idealism at its finest. Her poem, “The New Colossus” was inscribed on a plaque and affixed to the Statue of Liberty in 1903. In it, she wrote her now famous words:

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Among the millions of Jews who arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1924 were 30,000 to 40,000 Sephardim who were mostly from Turkey, the Balkan countries, Greece, and Syria. The existing Jewish agencies that helped immigrants were geared for Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews like themselves. They did not easily recognize the Sephardim as Jews because the Sephardim did not have what they thought of as typical “Jewish” names and because they did not speak Yiddish….

The Sisterhood [of Shearith Israel] established an “Oriental Committee,” whose sole task was to work with newly arrived Sephardim. The Sisterhood operated settlement houses on the Lower East Side specifically for the Sephardim. The one at 86 Orchard Street opened in 1913, and a larger one at 133 Eldridge Street opened in 1918. These settlement houses provide social services, advice, meeting places, youth programs, a Hebrew School, and even a synagogue.

Shearith Israel’s spiritual leader, Dr. Henry Pereira Mendes, was very interested in the welfare of the immigrant Sephardim. His assistant, Rabbi Dr. David de Sola Pool, worked most actively with the Sisterhood’s “Oriental Committee” and with the Sephardic immigrants themselves. He represented Sephardic interests at meetings of Jewish social workers and charity agencies, and wrote articles explaining their background and needs to the Jewish community at large….

Shearith Israel’s commitment to the Sephardic immigrants entailed a remarkable expenditure of time, effort, and money. Had Shearith Israel performed no other public service at the time, the congregation would still have reason for pride in its social action work.

However, the social conscience of the congregation found expression in other causes as well. Several members of Shearith Israel made particularly notable contributions to the improvement of life in New York City—and well beyond.

Maud Nathan

Maud Nathan (1862–1946) was a social activist and a strong advocate of women’s rights. She was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement and was appointed by Theodore Roosevelt as the head of the women’s suffrage committee in his National Progressive Party. She became an international figure in the women’s rights movement, addressing conferences on the topic in such places as London, Lucerne, Stockholm, Budapest, the Hague, Canton, and Peking.

Maud Nathan was once confronted by an opponent of women’s rights. The critic asked her derisively: “Would you want your cook to vote?” She answered calmly: “He does!”
A member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Maud Nathan had deep roots in American life. A member of Shearith Israel, she was imbued with a commitment to public service. She was a founder, and the first President, of Shearith Israel’s Sisterhood, established in 1896.

Throughout the nineteenth century, almost all charity and social action work in New York was conducted on a denominational basis. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews each had their own separate institutions and agencies to meet the needs of their communities.

By the end of the nineteenth century, individuals from the different religious groups began working together. Maud Nathan was one of the first Jewish women in American to be involved on the highest levels in a social action cause that crossed denominational lines.

Josephine Shaw Lowell, a prominent personality in the New York social service world, invited Maud Nathan to become involved in the work of the Consumers’ League of New York, which was founded in 1891. Maud Nathan not only joined this group, but went on to serve as its President from 1897 to 1917. She also served as Vice-President of the National Consumers’ League that developed on the model of the New York Consumers’ League.

In her work for the Consumers’ League, she and her colleagues addressed the terrible working conditions of young women clerks in New York’s department stores and shops. The basic insight of the Consumers’ League was that the problem was caused not just by the callousness of employers but by the thoughtlessness of consumers. If shoppers would demand proper conditions for store workers, the employers would be forced to comply. The Consumers’ League printed a “white list” naming the stores that met at least the minimum standards required by the League. At first, only a few stores earned the right to be included on the list. It soon became clear, though, that consumers were becoming sympathetic to the cause. More and more shoppers were patronizing “white list” stores and many were refusing to shop in stores that exploited their workers.

Through persistent hard work and ongoing negotiations with employers, the Consumers’ League brought about a revolution in working conditions for the store clerks. The success was so monumental that other cities and states copied the New York model, which won adherents internationally as well. Maud Nathan described the history of the Consumers’ League in a book she wrote called The Story of an Epoch-Making Movement.

Through her work for the women’s suffrage movement and in the Consumers’ League, Maud Nathan left an imprint on American history. In eulogizing her at her funeral on December 15, 1946, Rabbi David de Sola Pool referred to “her strong spiritual insight.” She is noteworthy for having been able to translate her spiritual insight and idealism into practical action that helped her fellow human beings.

Maud Nathan was outspoken in her criticism of anti-Semitism and racial prejudice. She felt that group hatred and bigotry were increasing in New York during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her autobiography, Once Upon a Time and Today, she reminded her readers:

Prejudice produces humiliation which is not easy to bear. And the sad part is that the nature becomes warped and the spirit of kindliness and friendliness is changed into bitterness and resentment. To live in peace, there must be mutual confidence, trust, cooperation, no antagonism. How often, instead of mutual respect for differing spiritual values, there is suspicion, intolerance. Does not this intolerance find its final expression in the un-American principles of the Ku Klux Klan?

She saw herself as a victim of discrimination, both as a woman and as a Jew. Still, she took pride in the fact that he had “been able to make her protest count, because she persisted.” She devoted her life to advocating the American—and Jewish—ideals of freedom, mutual respect, and social justice.

Alice Davis Menken

A remarkable contemporary of Maud Nathan, also an active leader within the Shearith Israel community, was Alice Davis Menken (1870–1936). She, too, descended from early Shearith Israel families who had served in the American Revolution. Her husband, Mortimer Menken, was a successful New York attorney, and served as Parnas of Shearith Israel from 1922 to 1926. Alice Menken was President of Shearith Israel’s Sisterhood from 1900 to 1929….

Alice Menken’s interest in helping shape a better society went further [than the Sisterhood’s operation of settlement houses on the Lower East Side]. She was troubled by evidence of delinquency and vice among poor young Jewish immigrants. These young people often grew up in horrendous conditions and it is no wonder that some of them fell into anti-social behavior. Alice Menken believed that the way to deal with such individuals was through genuine, kind assistance and not through punishment. The goal was to rehabilitate them, not to harden them. In 1907, she was a prime mover in founding the Jewish Board of Guardians, which created a system of volunteers to look after wayward young people. Volunteers were given responsibility for supervising Jewish youth who had been placed on court-ordered probation.

In 1908, she organized a group of women from the Shearith Israel Sisterhood to work with the probation department of the Women’s Night Court of New York City. The Sisterhood group took responsibility for delinquent women so that they would not have to be incarcerated. In 1911, she helped found the Jewish Big Sister Association, through which women would “adopt” young women who were at risk of leading anti-social lives. Through one-to-one relationships, the “big sisters” could help guide the “little sisters” to constructive and fulfilling lives.

Alice Menken set a personal example for service. In the period from 1919 to 1922, in cooperation with the probation department, 346 probationers were under her own supervision—for as long a period as required by each of them. The average age of these women was 20, and 197 of them were foreign-born. Alice Menken spent time getting to know the young women, and assessing their needs and wants. She sought to find ways of helping them to help themselves. Almost all of the women for who she took responsibility went on to live better lives—returning home, finding jobs, establishing families of their own. In at least one case, Alice Menken took a probationer home to live in her own house, making her part of her own family for several years! The young woman went on to live a good life, and was ever appreciative of this incredible generosity of spirit.

In 1920, Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed Alice Menken to serve as a member of the Board of Managers of the Reformatory. In this capacity, she strove to improve prison conditions and to eliminate solitary confinement. She believed that prisoners needed an environment that offered them the possibility of rehabilitation.

In 1933, she published a book entitled On the Side of Mercy, in which she discussed her philosophy (and her actions) relating to problems in social readjustment. She wrote

We must seek a balanced philosophy of life. We must live to make the world worth living in, with new ideals, less suffering, and more joy….And when the cry of distress is heard from those overtaken by moral disability, organizations and individuals whose creeds are different, but whose ideals are one, respond in full measure. In this way the new generation, maturing during these years of depression, will be cheered to action and taught something of human and spiritual values.