National Scholar Updates

Identifying the Problem

…the player directly responsible for Hapoel losing this critical game was the team's goalkeeper, Haim Cohen. His amateurish blunder in letting the ball slip through his hands gave Maccabi their first goal, and the second was the result of Cohen's poor positioning for the free kick. Nor was this the first game this season in which Hapoel has been let down by Cohen. His tendency to make mistakes under pressure has surely eroded his teammates' confidence in him; Hapoel manager Aryeh Rubin is rumored to be looking for a replacement...

…but the star of the game was referee Shimon Levy, who capped a series of strange decisions by ignoring a clear foul in the 43rd minute, when Maccabi defender Shai Golan brought down Hapoel's Yuval Sharabi several meters inside the Maccabi penalty area. Had Levy awarded the penalty to Hapoel it this point, when they were only one goal down, the whole game would have developed quite differently. The foul was plain to see and the TELEVISION replays left no room for doubt—but Levy brushed aside Hapoel's demand for a penalty kick. Hapoel's complaints over this decision are entirely justified and should force the Football Association to reconsider whether Levy is suitable to serve as a referee in Premier Division games…

These are fairly typical, albeit fictitious, excerpts from reports on football games. American readers are invited to translate the terminology into that used for the gladiatorial contests they call "football,” but the essentials will remain valid in any parallel sporting context. Player X played poorly, player Y was outstanding, this one did this and that one failed to do that, and so forth. In short, this is standard fare for followers of sports reports in the papers, radio, and television, or for one who shares impressions with his or her friends in the pub, bar, or wherever.

But is it kosher? Is it halakhically permissible to write, read, speak, or otherwise communicate such sentiments in this way?

Let's skip over any potential halakhic issues that may or may not exist with regard to professional sports per se and focus solely on the seemingly minor aspect of the way a game is reported and analyzed, whether in real time or afterward.

From a halakhic standpoint, material such as that above is riddled with major problems. The main problems stem from the fact that in the commentary, reporting, and “Monday morning quarterbacking” that accompanies and follows every game, the people involved are being publicly vilified—the goalkeeper was “amateurish,” he positioned himself “poorly,” he “let down” his team in a critical game—and not for the first time. As for the referee, he is presented as being totally incompetent.

These are serious charges and they run the gamut of halakhic prohibitions stretching from rekhilut, which is usually translated as “tale-bearing,” to lashon haRa (malicious reports) if the material is factually true, to motsi shem ra (slander) if it is not.

Let me stress immediately that I am not interested, here or anywhere in this article, in entering the halakhic jungle of what does or might constitute an infraction of each of these prohibitions. I am not personally qualified to define what does or might come under each heading, but even if I was, the detailed legal analysis is not the issue. At this stage, the point I wish to make as strongly as possible is that the everyday activity of following the news and keeping up with current affairs—via reading the papers, listening to the radio, and watching television—involves exposure to (and likely infringement of) halakhic prohibitions relating to the complex of topics we commonly lump together under the “lashon haRa” label.

Nor is the lashon haRa complex the only set of halakhic issues involved: urging that someone be fired, as the report does with respect to both the player and the referee, is also problematic—on both moral and legal grounds. Talking the same way with your buddy in the bar seems to be in a different category to writing in a paper or commenting on the radio—because the guys in the bar are just “letting off steam” and have no way to translate their assessments of players into practice. Or so we used to think. But nowadays, when thousands of irate fans can write comments on the team's website or Facebook page, their comments become part of a mass campaign that can and does result in actions—such as dismissing that player or pushing the referee out of top-level football. Taking someone's livelihood away, without compelling cause and due process, is not only morally reprehensible but also proscribed by halakha.

What might constitute “compelling cause” and who has the right to decide that it exists, are legal issues. Once again, I am not concerned here with the practical legalities; rather, I seek to create the awareness that there is a halakhic issue, potentially a serious one, in something as seemingly marginal and “innocent” as talking about a sports game and criticizing the performance of the participants (players, referees, coaches, etc.) involved. Certainly, the fact that in societal terms this is considered normative behavior does not make it halakhically permissible.

I have deliberately chosen to start with the seemingly flippant example of a sports report as a method of highlighting some of the halakhic problems that we all ignore every single day. By “we,” I mean everyone who consumes media of any sort. Anyone who never reads a newspaper, listens to the radio, watches any television, surfs the net, or uses social media, is not included in “we”—but if such a person exists at all, he or she is not going to be reading this publication either.

Having made that admission, let me now broaden the scope and, in so doing, deepen the problem. All the issues pertaining to the football game cross over from the sports pages/programs to the culture pages. The book/movie/theatre review is an even bigger halakhic minefield. Cohen's new novel is silly—and downright childish in parts; Levy's performance as Macbeth was shrill, unconvincing, and generally over-the-top—he really isn’t capable of taking on Shakespearean tragedy. As for Sharabi's latest album, it's nowhere near the quality of his earlier ones.

Turning to the business pages, we find Cohen Manufacturing Ltd. reported lower sales and profits last year. The company's most recent acquisition has contributed nothing to earnings so far, while its costs are higher than those of its peers—yet it paid larger bonuses to senior management than last year. The paper's business columnist summarizes the company's performance as follows: the CEO's vision is flawed; management is doing a lousy job; and the board is stuffed with pals of the CEO, who have no compunction in awarding outsize remuneration packages to the CEO and other senior managers. Not only is the recent fall in Cohen Manufacturing's share price justified, it says, but further falls can be expected. There is no good reason to hold these shares at current prices, certainly not to buy them.

Finally reaching the front page, we find that the mayor of a small town, one Shimon Levy, is under investigation for molesting and, in some cases, raping women who sought his help to obtain welfare support. The Trade Minister, Haim Cohen, is being accused of receiving kickbacks on trade deals he was instrumental in negotiating with some foreign countries. And the main headline is that the Prime Minister, Aryeh Rubin, secretly met Arab leaders to discuss a proposed peace treaty in which Israel would cede control of territories it holds.

Back in the pub—or perhaps outside the shul—where you and your friend usually meet and shoot the breeze, you both express disgust and revulsion about Levy's purported crimes. You suggest he should be locked up for 20 years, but your friend says that people like him should be forcibly sterilized—a comment that is overheard by some other people and generates a spirited debate, because one of them is a friend of Shimon Levy and another is his wife's cousin. However, everyone agrees that Cohen, the minister who took bribes (reportedly…) should “do the honorable thing” and resign immediately, thereby cutting short his promising political career.

As for the Prime Minister, the usual split develops between those willing to give peace a chance and those who believe you can’t trust any Arab leader and should not offer them anything. One young fellow mutters that if Aryeh Rubin agrees to an Israeli withdrawal, he should be “eliminated.”…

The Solution—Part 1: Getting Real about the Problem

So it's not just Monday-morning quarterbacking about the sports game over the weekend. It's certainly not just about what constitutes rekhilut, or lashon haRa, or whatever. It is actually far more fundamental than legal definitions regarding specific halakhic prohibitions.

The real problem, I venture to suggest, is this: One of the most important areas in modern life with which halakha has yet to confront, in the most basic sense, is the one we call “mass media.”

The interaction between technological progress and sociological and political development has driven—and is continuing to drive—huge changes in the way people communicate with and about each other. Mass media began in the eighteenth century with the development of pamphlets and newssheets, moved into newspapers in the nineteenth century and then—in the last 100 years—exploded into radio, television, internet, and now, the newest stage, social media.

Yet while all this has been happening, halakha has fallen ever further behind. The primary focus of halakhic concern with regard to the media, at least in recent decades, has been in the area of immorality in the sexual context. Thus attention has been centered on offensive content in the various media, with “offensive” referring largely to the gamut of sex-related issues, from modesty (and lack thereof) to outright pornography, and their impact and influence on individuals—especially children—and on society as a whole.

This is, of course, entirely justified. Indeed, the severity of the moral and legal problems posed by the internet in general and now by social media, is such that it has long transcended religious/conservative groups and is now widely recognized by all parts of society. In the halakhic context, it is obvious that not only overtly pornographic material, but also the use of scantily-clad models in advertisements, involves transgressions of various laws, as well as being morally offensive.

Unfortunately, the focus on sex-related problems has become obsessive and all-encompassing—and this may be the reason why other halakhic problems stemming from the production and consumption of mass-media materials are downplayed, overlooked, and even ignored. I was personally made very aware of the dichotomous and distorted view that religious (from Hareidi to Modern Orthodox) people took of the media when I worked as a journalist. It can be summed up in the reaction of "Oh, you cover economics and finance—that's OK,” which I heard umpteen times, from rabbis, rebbes, and laypeople alike.

That statement is not merely completely wrong and utterly fatuous. It also betrays stunning ignorance of the problems posed by the media. It is, in fact, a far-reaching admission by the person making the statement that Judaism as he or she understands it and halakha as he or she observes it are totally disconnected from modern media and communications—which is to say, from modern life.

For some reason, Orthodoxy has decided to draw the line between it and the modern world on the sex front, but not on other key fronts—such as communications. This is a convenient state of affairs, but it doesn’t stand up to any kind of rigorous scrutiny.

The comparison between the ongoing intensive struggle against sexual license on the one hand versus the lack of struggle over the production and consumption of regular media content, is the starting–point for any serious discussion of “media and halakha.”

Probably the most fundamental question that needs to be raised and to which answers need at least to be sought is philosophical: Does Judaism accept modern notions of free speech? If this strikes you as far-fetched, perhaps you should think again and try not to react from the gut.

It's pretty clear that Judaism is opposed to free sex, free love, or whatever other slogan is used to legitimize sexual license. It is also clear that there are major restrictions on what you can say about people in the context of normal inter-personal discourse—the lashon haRa complex of laws referred to above. But what about free speech as a basic element of democracy, in politics and society? What can you say, in the public arena, about people who are public persona, in whatever sphere?

The question, in other words, is whether it is possible to construct a theoretical framework relating the halakhic concepts defining permitted and forbidden topics of discussion and methods of expression to the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of democratic societies? If such a construct can be developed, then it should be possible to derive practical guidelines as to how to report, comment, and discuss matters ranging from sports games to national security in the various media, with these guidelines covering everyone from participants in chat rooms on the internet to editorial writers in the leading newspapers. On the other hand, maybe the gulf between the demands of halakha and the reality of modern mass media is too wide to be bridged?
If—and only if—such a theoretical construct can be put in place, then it is possible to advance to the more practical, but no less fascinating, question of whether there can be “kosher media.” That phrase currently relates to media that are “clean” in the context of adhering to laws and mores regarding modesty and avoiding content and material that is sexually provocative or otherwise immoral. It does NOT relate to the substantive content of the material appearing in the media or to its implications in a wider societal context, as will be discussed below.

First, however, some comments with regard to the theoretical/philosophical issues. I have not conducted an extensive, let alone exhaustive, search of all likely or possible sources, even those accessible on the internet. Nevertheless, on the basis of the search I have made myself, or indirectly through others, I strongly suspect that there is very little discussion of these issues. However, there certainly has been some analysis, in articles published in both rabbinic and general publications, mostly in Hebrew, mostly written by Modern Orthodox rabbis. Hareidi material on this topic, if it exists, is more difficult to locate because it is not published on the internet.

Based on the material that I have seen and read, the following tentative conclusions emerge:

• There is very little attempt to address the underlying philosophical questions. The thrust of the discussion tends to be practically halakhic—may one do this or that, is specific behavior permissible (in the public arena, e.g. criticizing incumbent office-holders or candidates for office). The deeper issues are largely ignored or glossed over.
• There is a corpus of halakhic material relating to the issues under discussion, notably the works of the Hafetz Haim in the area of lashon haRa and allied prohibitions—although both the Hafetz Haim himself and contemporary scholars use other sources, including the main codes (Shulhan Arukh, etc.) and other important works (such as Rabbi Yonah of Gerondi, in medieval Spain). Although all the halakhic literature, going back to the Talmud, relates to publication or dissemination of information, facts and rumors, innuendo, and so forth in the public sphere, none of it takes into account a culture in which a) the public's “right to know”—and to comment—is a central value and feature of social and political life; b) holders of virtually all public positions are required—and hence expect—to be criticized and held accountable for their actions; and c) proactive dissemination of (partial and one-sided) information is the norm (press releases and press conferences), and/or is obligatory (corporate and other disclosure mechanisms) and hence taken for granted.

• Within this practically-oriented approach, the analysis—even of authors sympathetic to democratic society as we know it—points strongly in the direction of a negative conclusion. That is to say, the halakhic framework makes it very difficult in theory, and virtually impossible in practice, to permissibly produce and even to consume most of the news and current affairs (in the widest sense) material presented in the various mass media. I realize that that is a rather sweeping statement, but that's my assessment of the material I have seen.

• That conclusion is not usually overtly stated, for whatever reason. But the result is that the entire discussion then moves from leKhathila (a priori) to bediavad (a posteriori), which is probably one of the reasons that the analysis is then one of practical halakha: the starting point is, "in the existing circumstances, what can one do or not do.”

• Since the issue is presented as a practical halakhic one, it is perhaps unsurprising that the direction or approach adopted as a general solution is to establish an entity (e.g. a newspaper, or a political party or faction) that is separate and distinct from those already existing in the public arena and to place this entity under direct, ongoing rabbinic supervision. This mechanism, it is assumed and proposed, will enable specific problems to be dealt with in an authoritative and timely manner.

• However, the analyses themselves disclose several flaws in the way the authors approach the problem. The first flaw, as already noted, is the avoidance of an overall theoretical structure. The construction of such a structure is relegated to a vague and utopian future with quasi-messianic undertones—meaning that it's not something achievable in the here-and-now, so let's not relate to it in detail.

• Other flaws stem from a tendency to confuse the problem with the solution or from the unintended consequences of proposed solutions. Both of these subjects need to be considered in greater depth.

The Solution—Part 2: Don't Confuse the Problem with the Solution, and Don’t Make the Solution into a New Problem

In any attempt to define and analyze the problems posed to halakha by modern mass media, it is essential to realize—and accept—that many of the attempts to “solve” aspects of these problems have proven to be unhelpful. That is because either their premise is flawed from the outset—they are unaware of the real problems or they ignore them—or, worse, they become part of the problem rather than comprising part of the solution.

The most obvious and most widespread “solution” to the problem posed by mass media is to categorize the problem as being part of the wider phenomenon of secularization. Since this is, by definition, a negative phenomenon from the perspective of religious Jews, the solution has been to apply the standard response toward aspects of secularization, namely to proscribe it—to make it assur, illegal. However, this negativity is a very blunt weapon and is very hard to live with. The second part of the solution, therefore, is to replace the offensive mass media with acceptable or “kosher'” ones.

In practice, since at least the late nineteenth century, this has been the main response of Orthodox Judaism to the rise of mass media. The main battleground was—and to a great extent still is—print media, primarily newspapers and magazines, but it has extended to radio and, after largely skipping television, is now focused on electronic media, i.e., the internet and its derivatives.

Reviewing this prolonged struggle and how it has played out and is still being waged, it seems to me that it has been a strategic failure, although it may be argued that in tactical terms—meaning the specific cultural battles fought between Orthodox and non-Orthodox in various countries and cultures over the last 150 years—the existence of separate Orthodox media outlets was helpful and perhaps even essential. Nevertheless, over the long run, the attempt to create and maintain so-called kosher media has generated negative consequences that, I would argue, have ultimately outweighed the positive achievements.

The negative consequences fall into three categories:

1. "kosher pigs"
2. "echo chambers"
3. unintended consequences

"Kosher Pigs"

The most common problem resulting from the establishment of "kosher media" is that these are only kosher in some respects, while in others they are as flawed as the regular media. This is reminiscent of the midrashic comment on the difference between pigs and other ritually unacceptable animals. Of the two criteria for "kosherness" laid down in the Torah, namely chewing the cud and cloven hoofs, the pig falls down only on the former. Because its hoofs are cloven, it proudly presents its paws and hoofs to onlookers—whereas its digestive system, of course, remains hidden.

Orthodox media are obviously "kosher" with regard to lewd and sexually provocative content, and this can be ascertained immediately. However, the way they present news, information, and, especially, commentary and criticism, requires much more careful examination. The examination should encompass two elements: what they do report, and in what terms, prominence, and tone? Similarly, what do they not report, or relegate to relative obscurity, or adopt a negative tone in their reporting? Whom and what do they criticize, with what degree of vehemence—and with what motives?

This topic is obviously extremely sensitive, although it is quite amenable to analysis, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Almost all Orthodox media were ideological in origin and were established to serve an agenda, whether overtly religious and/or ideological, or political/religious. Therefore each media form had, from inception, its clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys.”

Furthermore, within the framework of the lashon haRa halakhic complex, there are categories of people—such as "evil-doers,” "heretics," and so forth—whom it is permissible or even desirable to present in a negative light, to criticize, and even to vilify in public. Once a media outlet is established by a religious group with a clearly defined agenda that identifies "them" as "bad guys"—and obviously "us" as "good guys"—then the ground rules are clear-cut. "They" must be either ignored or, if mentioned, then in a negative tone or undertone.

All Hareidi and, over time, almost all dati-leumi media (I relate to those in Israel; I assume the American scene is similar, if not identical), have been sucked into this self-righteous mode of self-censorship, which is usually accompanied by "rabbinic oversight" to make sure the relevant rules are being obeyed. A simple, relatively innocent but nonetheless telling example of this mindset is the following story:

In the mid-1990s, the then Satmarer Rebbe visited Israel and, naturally, conducted large gatherings such as tischen during his visit. The Shabbat he spent in Jerusalem was a major event in Hareidi circles, not just for his direct followers but for many "unaffiliated" Hareidi youngsters. Despite these objective facts—or, more likely, because of them—Hamodia, the party newspaper of Agudat Yisrael and hence a bitter ideological foe of Satmar, totally ignored the visit and the events held during it, although its readership was fully aware of them and many participated in or were directly impacted by them.

This level of reality-denial is increasingly impossible in the modern world, as information permeates all but the most hermetically sealed societies. Even in the mid-1990s it was a pathetic attempt, but it spoke volumes about the theory and practice of Hareidi media.

Yet this is the way Hareidi groups relate to each other—either by ignoring rival groups' existence and viewpoints or, worse, by virulent criticism that is either overt or, in more sophisticated cases, implied through the use of biblical, midrashic, talmudic, or other metaphors, code-names, and 'role-models.’ Obviously, with regard to non-Hareidi, secular, or non-Jewish persons, groups, and organizations, there is even greater leeway, and this license is commonly used, whether to deny or distort, ignore or misinform, criticize, or vilify.

"Kosher pigs,” in short, are those many (probably most) Orthodox or Hareidi media outlets that proclaim that they are clean in terms of smutty, lewd, and sexually provocative content, and that their overall operations are under rabbinic guidance—all of which is true. However, by closely defining their ideology and mission, they effectively award themselves licenses to say what they please about—or ignore—all those persons, entities, and organizations that oppose their ideology, or that have been categorized (by the rabbinic authorities exercising guidance) as opponents.

"Echo Chambers"

The "kosher pigs" phenomenon inevitably leads to a phenomenon known in the media world as "echo chambers"—in which a paper, radio, or television station, or blog adopts a very clear line and thereby comes to attract people who largely agree with that line and to repel those who largely disagree. As the degree of interactivity in media has grown, the responders (in radio chat shows, or internet chat rooms) become ideologically and politically homogenous in a self-reinforcing process.

The result is that readers of a specific paper, listeners to a specific radio station, or viewers of a specific television channel tend not merely to hold shared views, but also to become increasingly convinced of the validity of their views—in favor of this and opposed to that—and increasingly negative toward opposing views.

This is a widespread phenomenon, symbolized in the United States by media such as the New York Times and Fox News, but it is a particular blessing for religious and especially fundamentalist groups and their media. It permits the pretense of in-depth analysis and serious discussion, although the content is seriously—and often entirely—skewed in the direction suited to the ideology of the specific medium. The essence of classic journalism, namely the presentation of different views in a fairly objective and dispassionate manner, is avoided or abused.

Religious media have always been echo chambers. As noted earlier, that is their raison d'etre. They have no truck with alternative views—even of other religious groups. In the Hareidi sector this is taken for granted: if Hamodia would not report the very fact of the Satmarer Rebbe's visit, what chance is there that he would be granted an in-depth interview to present his ideas? Or that Yated Ne'eman would run a feature on a major yeshivat hesder? The very suggestion is ludicrous—let alone that one of the leaders of a secular political party be allowed to write an op-ed explaining why he thinks Hareidi young men should serve in the army.
Although it is taken for granted that secular media should give Hareidi spokesmen space or air-time, the opposite is a non-starter.

Yet Hareidi newspapers claim to have upgraded themselves and become serious media organs—because, after all, they carry AP stories about the French presidential elections and Bloomberg analyses of Federal Reserve monetary policy. Yes, there is a problem with Germany, because the current Chancellor is of the female gender—ditto for stories on U.S. foreign policy. But at least there is coverage of world news and the larger Hareidi papers providing their readers critical information about what's happening outside the local or global Hareidi ghetto.

The underlying rationale behind this is that all the members of “our” group—however defined—should be exposed to or excluded from the same set of views and even news and, presumably, be influenced accordingly. The inevitable result is the creation and proliferation of intellectual and social echo chambers, in which group members absorb and exchange stilted perspectives that are reinforced by repetition among themselves.

This pattern is now prevalent in dati-leumi society in Israel, thanks to the proliferation of media catering to this group—which, like Hareidi society, is obsessively engaged in splitting into ever more self-defined sub-groups, but when viewed from without is actually highly homogenous. The media in question include daily and weekly publications, radio channels and a growing range of blogs and other sites. In these media spaces, datiim-leumiim talk to each other, about each other—and to the virtual exclusion of others.
Thus all the problems identified above with respect to Hareidi media have resurfaced in the dati-leumi sector—with one major difference: Whereas the trend in the Hareidi sector is of movement from a totalitarian structure, imposed rigidly from above, that is gradually opening up as the envelope is being pushed by many people in many directions, the datiim-leumiim are moving in the opposite direction.
They are coming from an open structure, in which they consumed primarily secular media, with their own as a side dish or dessert, to a structure in which they are choosing to “diet,” cutting down or eliminating secular media consumption, and increasingly preferring “their” media.

The driving force behind the change in the media consumption patterns of dati-leumi households is probably a growing backlash against the crudity (in the sexual and other contexts) of the main secular media. However, another factor is the desire to create an ideological echo chamber, especially in the area of primary interest and concern to the dati-leumi sector, namely Eretz Yisrael—meaning settlement, primarily in “the territories”/Yesha.

Unintended Consequences

The overall motivation behind the efforts to create religious media, now and in the past, can be summed up under the heading "veHaya mahanekha kadosh" (Deuteronomy 23:15)—"your camp should be holy.” This verse is interpreted so that “camp” means every social unit from household to sector of society, and “holy” means separate, as per Rashi's comment to Kedoshim tihyu (Leviticus 19:2). In other words, the goal was positive, at least in the value framework of the religious leadership, and the end justified the means, flawed as they may be.

However, as in most human endeavors, numerous unintended consequences resulted from the way this goal was pursued and how the means themselves evolved over time. Many of these unintended consequences have been negative, some profoundly so. All assessments are necessarily subjective, but the consequences that seem to me the most unfortunate are these:

1. Commercialization trumps ideology

The last 25 to 30 years have witnessed enormous changes in Israeli society, which can be summed up under the headlines of “the demise of ideology” and, in tandem, “the rise of the individual/privatization.” This process has seen a decline in the strength of all political and ideological groupings, one facet of which has been the loss of funding, whether from state sources or from the group's own membership. In the context of media activities—publishing newspapers, running a radio station, etc.—this has meant that the owners and managers of the medium have been obliged to seek funding from commercial sources, primarily advertising, but also sponsorship or co-ownership.

The inevitable result has been a process of commercialization, with all its attendant ills. Analyzing the range of halakhic issues connected directly to advertising could fill an issue of Conversations, but the general point to be made here is that the introduction of commercial considerations affects every aspect of a media enterprise, including and perhaps especially its ideological soul. Indeed, whether a so-called religious newspaper or radio station can exist in a commercial framework, and if so to what extent, is an open question.

2. The systematic desecration of synagogues and Shabbat

The most specific—and most severe—damage wrought by commercialization has been on the sanctity of the synagogue and prayer services held therein, and on the sanctity of Shabbat.

A broad spectrum of publications has developed that seek to provide material for religious Jews to read on Shabbat. Let us assume that their declared goal is to detach their target audience from the reading of secular newspapers on Shabbat—a very widespread practice in dati-leumi households in Israel and Modern Orthodox households in the Diaspora. In other words, their motivation is positive—or was, originally.

However, in order to survive in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace, these publications have been obliged to do some or all of the following: a) expand in size; b) broaden their range of content; and c) upgrade their visual presentation (glossy format, colored photographs, etc). This costs money, which comes mainly from advertising. The result is that publications that originally presented 2 to 4 pages of divrei torah, and perhaps some “news” such as publications of new books dealing with Jewish learning, history, and similar topics, began branching out into features relating to rabbis or other personalities, historic or living, events or developments presumed to be of interest to the publication's leadership, and so on. All this is accompanied by a large and growing proportion of the space available being given over to advertising—of everything from apartments to appliances, as well as specifically religious items, from books to tefillin.

In short, the divrei torah publications metamorphosed over the years from sheets and pamphlets to newsletters and even magazines that could effectively compete for the interest of the religious household against the secular and even religious newspapers and weeklies. However, these “divrei torah publications” are distributed via synagogues, with the result that today, in the vast majority of dati-leumi synagogues in Israel, there is a large selection of these newsletters and magazines available on Friday night and usually throughout Shabbat.

Many, if not most, members of the congregation now spend some, most or all of the service reading this material—including during keriat shema, the amida, hazarat hashat"z, and the Torah reading. Furthermore, despite the unquestionable violation of umpteen halakhot regarding prayer in general, prayer in synagogue and behavior in synagogue even not during prayer, very few rabbis or wardens have taken a stand against this plague, which is intensifying steadily, in scope and scale.

As an aside, I would add that Hareidi synagogues suffer from the same syndrome, but in different forms. Interestingly, in many Hareidi synagogues the problem of extraneous literature distributed during prayer services is worse on weekdays, but is by no means absent on Shabbat. Once again, I have rarely if ever seen or heard of attempts by rabbis or wardens to prevent this practice.

In sum, what has happened in this sphere is reminiscent of the U.S. army lieutenant in Vietnam, who was instructed to "pacify" a village suspected of having been infiltrated by the Vietcong. He reported back to his commanders that "in order to pacify the village, we destroyed it.” Similarly, in order to preserve the sanctity of the Sabbath from the depredations of the secular papers, the so-called religious papers have destroyed the sanctity of the Sabbath, the synagogue, and religious services as a whole.

3. Poisoning minds and hearts

In tandem with the process of the infiltration and pollution of the synagogue with material that is increasingly a-religious, even when it isn’t overtly commercial (a recent headline I saw in one publication was "events in Beer-Sheva this week"), is the politicization and radicalization of the divrei torah themselves.

In this sphere, the process has seen the Torah material move from being a discussion of items or topics in the weekly parasha or related to festivals, fasts, etc., drawn from classic sources and presented by contemporary rabbis with their own thoughts, to the parasha or festival becoming a springboard from which the rabbi or other writer launches into his (or, only in left-wing publications, her) ideas. In many cases, the correct term for what is being presented, by specific writers and by the publication as a whole, is an agenda that, whatever its inherent merits, has subverted the purported purpose of the publication, namely to disseminate divrei torah.

Of course, the writers and publishers will claim that what they are writing and publishing ARE divrei torah. That is precisely the problem: They are so convinced of the validity and value of their ideas, ideology, or approach to issues on the local, national, or global agenda that they conflate their opinions with divrei torah. When the writers or publishers are themselves rabbis, as is more often than not the case, this identity between subjective personal opinions and so-called divrei torah is quickly and easily achieved.

Unfortunately, in many cases this attitude is not merely negative but actually dangerous. As the dati-leumi camp veers steadily toward extremist and simplistic views on a broad range of religious, political, and social issues, the echo-chamber effect of the opinionated and highly politicized pseudo-religion pumped out by many of the pamphleteers generates growing damage. The tendencies toward ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, and general intolerance, which are becoming hallmarks of dati-leumi youth, are thereby intensified and exacerbated. By extension, the effort of religious liberals to break out of the extremist mold pushes them, in turn, to “extremist liberal” approaches in their divrei torah, which are as skewed and opinionated as those of their counterparts.

4. The dilution of rabbinic authority

But the ultimate unintended consequence, if perhaps the most predictable one, is that the attempt of the rabbinic establishment (of any specific group and of the religious sector as a whole) to control the religious media has backfired and resulted in an erosion of its own authority. More correctly, it has made a major contribution to the general process of the erosion of rabbinic authority that is underway.

The erosion process takes two forms. One is what one might term the "Canute syndrome,” exemplified by King Canute, an English king in the era of the Viking invasions, who reportedly parked his throne at the seashore and commanded the tide to turn back. The rulings and even curses pumped out by a broad swathe of Hareidi rabbis and rebbes over the last generation, against the use of computers, cellular phones, MP3s and then MP4s, internet, and so on, have been of comparable effectiveness.

If anything, the fact that the rulings had some temporary influence on at least some people has made the problem worse—because the person who obeyed the rulings for some time and then found that “everyone” was using the machine in question felt that he was being made a fool of. And if he didn’t feel that way, his kids did—and drew the relevant conclusions, so that the next prohibition landed on largely deaf ears, and the one after that merely made its author look ridiculous.

But the more dangerous form of erosion of rabbinic authority stems from situations of perceived conflict of interest. The source of rabbinic authority is the perception that the rabbis in question are defending what they sincerely believe to be the demands and dictates of the Torah, as the practical expression of God's will. Thus even when the rabbinic decree seems pointless, as in the Canute syndrome, it is not considered baseless. Like much else in Jewish life, it is a clash between what looks to be a hopeless cause, even if a just one, and a seemingly inexorable force, although a negative one. It is a declaration of faith and, in Hareidi theology, it expresses the idea that we can only—but must—do whatever is in our power, and the rest is in the hands of the Almighty.

However, if the sincerity of the rabbinic motivation comes under suspicion, then the entire theological and ideological underpinning collapses. Unfortunately, the trends noted above, such as commercialization on the one hand and the swing toward extremism on the other, have cast shadows over the involvement of rabbis in the religious media (and much else besides).

Rabbis, no less than laypeople, now tend to be pigeon-holed in terms of their stance, attitudes, views, and orientation. However, to make matters worse, most rabbis do not merely have ideological agendas, as in the past. Prominent rabbis are involved in politics, directly or indirectly, at local and national levels. They seek to disseminate their ideas, dispute rival ideas, and critically gain and solidify support for themselves, their ideas, the institutions they head, and the movements or parties with which they are associated. In all of this, they are no different from any other leadership group in that they need the media—and, if they provide “good, juicy copy,” by saying or doing things that attract attention and, yes, sell newspapers, then the media needs them, too. Of course, “their” media organs will champion them in any event, while rival organs will denounce them—but from a business and even from a leadership perspective, everyone benefits.

This process means that rabbis, as public figures, have become sucked into the celeb society. Indeed, in their own circles, rabbis and rebbes are THE celebs. Hareidi kids collect rabbi cards and pictures like other kids collect athletes or rock stars. In this environment, you would have to be superhuman not to have an ego issue—and although there are a few rabbis of exceptional humility, most are merely human, not superhuman.

In short, we have a situation in which rabbis who are prominent personalities, who have institutional interests to promote, and who have a political or ideological agenda, have been granted influence or even control over media outlets that have enormous power within these rabbis' communities. Even if the rabbis themselves are capable of avoiding the conflicts of interest created by this situation—and there are some—their coterie of advisers and executives often are not. They will abuse and exploit their power, because the dictum that “all power corrupts” does not have a caveat “except when wielded by religious people”; a more plausible addendum might be “especially when wielded by self-righteous people.”

The result is a growing cynicism regarding religious leadership that is inherently no different from the widespread cynicism toward leadership generally. The cynicism stems from a lack of conviction that the leadership is motivated solely, or even mainly, by the desire to advance the cause which it proclaims. If Moshe Rabbeinu faced that problem (repeatedly), it's hardly surprising that contemporary leaders do, too. But because the media tend to exaggerate and amplify these doubts, and religious media do so with relish vis-à-vis people they identify as their opponents, in the end everyone is tarred with the same brush. In the incisive talmudic phrase: "Kol haposel, beMoomo posel"—anyone who seeks to disqualify others tends to label them with his own faults.

The Solution—Part 3: Elements of Correction

"Religious media" are not the solution to the halakhic and moral problems presented by modern mass media. They have resolved some of the existing problems but have themselves become part of the overall problem, while creating entirely new ones. What, then, can be done?

The first essential step is to recognize, on the one hand, the scale of the problem and, on the other, the unsatisfactory nature of the solutions currently being employed. The problem is not a technical one, of how to edit the front page of tomorrow's paper without violating halakha, but rather how to address the mega-issue of applying halakha in the public arena in a modern society—and, especially, in a Jewish state in which there are large religious and Hareidi minorities, along with an irreligious majority, a large number of non-Jewish citizens (Muslim, Christian and a-religious) and many foreigners, from tourists to refugees.
How is public discourse to be conducted in these circumstances? What may be said about individuals, groups, and institutions and what is forbidden or unacceptable (not necessarily the same thing)? What is the relationship between democratic concepts such as free speech, the public's right to know, accountability to voters, etc., and halakhic concepts such as rekhilut and lashon haRa?

The second step is to begin to grapple with these big issues. Ideally this would be done in a large virtual tent, in which would be gathered, from the outset, all the various viewpoints. In practice, it is more likely that individual scholars or specific institutions will begin the process on their own initiative, and that their efforts will spur responses, debate and further discussion, moving the process forward from within, rather than it being prodded forward by exogenous forces. As it moves forward, it should also broaden to encompass a wider range of approaches.
There would be no agreement on fundamental issues, at least not for a long time—but the initial object is not to achieve agreement or even consensus, rather to define what the disagreements are. That would open the way to the third critical step—and the first practical one. Once the larger debate is underway and the issues are being publicly aired, then the worst excesses of the current situation would be fully exposed.

There would then be an opportunity for developing consensual positions over ground rules—not for matters of principle, but of practice. These would be akin to ceasefires and confidence-building measures, rather than peace treaties. Religious and Hareidi groups could surely come together around a set of guidelines for how to relate to each other and their respective leaderships and, by extension, how to relate to non-religious and non-Jewish persons and groups. That would involve accepting that the halakhic permit to vilify and besmirch 'heretics,’ 'evil-doers' and others may be best left unused, in favor of the more basic axiom of not doing unto others what you would not like them to do to you. Lambasting the secular leadership while denouncing anti-religious or anti-Hareidi rhetoric is not a persuasive approach, apart from being hypocritical and self-serving.

Having thus seized the moral high ground in the debate over the role of media in society, religious thinkers could then plausibly propose ways in which various media could be made less anti-social, less raucous, and more responsible. An obvious place to start would be with talkbacks and other forms of response by the general public. Here there could be actual halakhic rulings for religious people—and perhaps non-halakhic but moral guidelines for all people—defining how they could participate in a constructive discussion with their peers, instead of abusing the anonymity granted by the internet to spew venom against other individuals and to indulge in the coarsest forms of expression.

These religious thinkers could and should include rabbis of various stripes, who would desist from their pointless and self-defeating attempts to impose their will and views on their narrow groups of followers, instead seeking to guide and influence the general public.

The one thing that is certain is that the communications revolution will continue. Personally, I believe that the mass media cannot maintain their present nihilist and socially destructive trajectory for much longer and that a major change for the better will occur. Wouldn’t it be nice if, after generations of having being dragged along by the forces of change, Jewish religious leaders became part of those forces, helping shape a change for the better?

I would not presume to present a bibliography on this topic, nor even to identify seminal articles. However, the following articles, one in English and one in Hebrew, serve admirably as an introduction to the halakhic issues involved in journalism. Even in that context, they are in no way encyclopedic, nor do they attempt to address wider issues. Fascinatingly, although they date from 2001 and 1995 respectively, they are already obsolete, in the sense that they do not relate to the internet and its impact. But they certainly succeed in providing an entrée into the halakhic source material and the legal and moral complexities of the reporting of news from an halakhic perspective.

Sources:

“Journalism, Controversy, and Responsibility: Halachic Analysis”
Steven Oppenheimer, D.D.S
Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society XLI; Spring 2001– From 5761
http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/english/journal/oppenheimer-1.htm

Rabbi Ari Shvat
Newspapers and news – mitzvah or prohibition
Appeared originally in “Talelei Orot” and now on the Yeshivot Bnei Akiva website
http://yba.org.il/show.asp?id=33936&big_cat=1590

Ethnic tensions among Jews are a transnational, diachronic phenomenon, amply documented by Jews as well as by outside observers. Tradition prescribes Jews to rescue other Jews from affliction, underscored by the halakhic concept of pidyon shvu’im (redemption of captives) and the talmudic dictum kol Israel arevim ze baZe, which teaches that every Jew is responsible for the other.[1] Yet, when the factor of physical remoteness between two communities was eliminated, these time-honored values frequently dissipated. As one eminent historian quipped, “ahavat Israel is inversely proportionate to distance.” [2]

Scholars of the American Jewish experience have discussed such conflicts at length and have usually understood them as one defining feature of a particular historiographical period. During the so-called Sephardi era of American Jewish immigration (1654?1840), we are told, Sephardim lorded it over their Germanic coreligionists, sometimes refusing to marry them, while beginning in the 1880s Germanic Jews gave their Eastern European brethren the cold shoulder, labeling them “wild Russians” and “uncouth Asiatics,” until all groups seamlessly mingled following restrictive quotas of the 1920s that largely barred further Jewish immigration.[3] But historians have not yet examined in comparative context ethnic tensions among the world’s Jewish communities, nor are they accustomed to applying sociological, psychological, or anthropological tools to deepen our understanding of these conflicts. This article, inspired by social scientific approaches, reveals two distinct clashes among Jewish ethnic groups that appear consistent across space and time: “ranked stratification,” where issues of superiority and inferiority inform the discourse, and “co-ethnic recognition failure,” where ethnic belonging is denied.

Both historians and sociologists recognize that ethnic belonging is constantly negotiated and that a group’s self-ascribed definitions are contextual and transform through time. Particularly in the case of Jews, whose variegated ethnic and religious identities overlap and are exceedingly complex, an explanation of terminology is imperative. Our frame of reference begins in the late seventeenth century with two groups conventionally known as “Sephardim” and “Ashkenazim.” In recent centuries, Ashkenazim have been understood to comprise two subgroups, both of whom ultimately trace their roots back to “Ashkenaz,” the medieval Hebrew word for “Germany”: Jews of Central European or Germanic origin, who spoke German or a western form of Yiddish, and Eastern European Jews, who typically spoke Yiddish or Slavic languages. Sephardim—from the medieval Hebrew word for “Spain”—are also divided into two subcategories, both of them of remote Iberian origin: Western Sephardim, who after their exile from the Peninsula settled in various lands in the West, including the Americas, and spoke Portuguese and Spanish; and Eastern Sephardim, Jews who settled in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey and the Balkans) and mainly spoke Ladino, a Jewish language that fused early modern Castilian with Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, and French, and developed in the East after the exile from Iberia. A third group, much larger than both of these two Sephardi subgroups combined, are Jews native to Arab and Muslim lands with no Iberian origins, who largely spoke Arabic and Persian languages. Since World War I, these ancient communities, indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, have increasingly been subsumed under the category of “Sephardim,” itself a process of diasporic Jewish reunion, as we shall see. However, for the sake of geographical and linguistic accuracy, this third group will be referred to in a separate category—for lack of a better term, as Mizrahim (the Hebrew term for “Easterners”).

Brothers and Strangers

Ranked stratification among ethnic groups is perhaps inevitable. Psychologists have found that “individuals who identify strongly with a group will be particularly motivated to establish its positive distinctiveness vis-à-vis other groups.” [4] Phrased another way, intense ethnic identity often goes hand-in-hand with self-exaltation or disparagement of the other. The gulf separating Sephardi from Ashkenazi Jews was in part informed by a variety of ethnic superiority myths that traced the ancestry of the former group to King David and the Judean Kingdom, and more recently to the glories of “Golden Age Spain,” a period from roughly the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, when Jews in the Muslim Iberian Peninsula supposedly attained a high degree of socially integrated culture and learning without losing their religious allegiance. By contrast, Ashkenazim and other Jews seem to have not cultivated parallel ethnic superiority myths, although some individuals did tout lineage to great Jewish scholars or ancient mystical traditions. Historian David Nirenberg suggests that the Sephardi obsession with noble roots arose after the persecutions of 1391, when thousands of Iberian Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, thereby blurring the distinctions between the peninsula’s ethno-religious communities. Claims to aristocratic lineage—reinforced by armorial bearings and often fabricated family trees—helped individuals and families distinguish themselves from Christian neophytes. [5] The absence of parallel nobility myths among Ashkenazim may help to explain why Sephardi hegemony continued in the Americas even after Ashkenazim became the numerically dominant Jewish population.

Demands of the “host society” that Jews adopt Westernization is a second factor that exacerbated intra-group tensions during the process of diasporic reunion. The east-west divide among Ashkenazim did not arise until the first half of the nineteenth century, when emerging nation states in Western and Central Europe, implementing programs of Emancipation, demanded that Jews wholly identify as French-, German-, or Englishmen by discarding their linguistic and sartorial distinctions and shrinking their Jewishness into nothing more than a religion, devoid of any sense of peoplehood or yearning for the Land of Israel. By the mid-nineteenth century, once the majority of urban, Central European Jews had left the “ghetto” and acquired middle class status, they re-identified as “German Jews” and labeled their unemancipated brethren as “Ostjuden” (Eastern Jews) or those of “Halb-Asien” (Half Asia) [6]. With the mass westward immigration of Eastern European Jews in the 1880s, these latter began to fully embody their two functions, as both threat and foil to German Jews.[7]

American Sephardi Jews, whose ancestors in Spain and Portugal had been forcibly converted to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and were thus fully conversant with Western society by the time they abandoned the Iberian Peninsula and reverted to Judaism, underwent similar embarrassment and redefinition during the mass influx of Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire beginning in the early 1900s. This encounter, most notably developed in the United States of America, brought into currency the dichotomous terms “Old” or “Western Sephardim” versus “New” or “Oriental Jews,” and eventually “Eastern Jews” or “Eastern Sephardim.” Both diasporic reunions—those among “Ashkenazi” Jews and those among “Sephardi” Jews—were informed by the “modernization of Jewish life and consciousness,”[8] perhaps better described as modern Westernization.

The approach of German Ashkenazi and Western Sephardi Jews toward their “Eastern” coreligionists was undeniably philanthropic. But this benevolence was deeply informed by a double-pronged goal: to “deflect from themselves political and popular opinion critical of immigration and the immigrant and to set a standard of conduct for the immigrants that would effectively neutralize nativist sentiment.” [9] Historian Steven Aschheim’s description of encounters between the two Ashkenazi groups in Central Europe also holds true for Western and Eastern Sephardim in America: they were at once “brothers and strangers.” [10]

We can locate some parallels to the Sephardi/Ashkenazi fissure in the Dutch American colonies. In Suriname, where Portuguese-speaking Jews had founded an autonomous Jewish community in the 1660s, friction arose after Ashkenazim began to immigrate in the late seventeenth century. Initially, they prayed alongside their Western Sephardi coreligionists and adopted their rituals and Hebrew pronunciation. Joint worship under Sephardi cultural and political hegemony had also been the norm in Recife, Brazil, where an open, largely Iberian-origin community openly professed Judaism from the 1630s until the fall of the Dutch colony to the Portuguese in 1654. [11] Recife’s community was too short-lived to experience the full ramifications of diasporic reunion. But in Suriname, once Ashkenazim had reached a critical mass in the 1710s, cracks in the blended community began to appear. Sephardi leaders designated a separate house of prayer for Ashkenazim, even as the latter remained under the legal jurisdiction of the Sephardi Jewish court. Continuing religious disagreements led Sephardi leaders in 1724 to petition the colonial governor for an official separation, which was formalized in 1734, resulting in the formation of an independent Ashkenazi court of Jewish law. [12] Anti-Ashkenazi animosity persisted for generations. Sephardim perceived German Jews as more assimilable than those of Polish origin to Portuguese Jewish culture, but both Central and Eastern European Jews were vulnerable to disparaging remarks. In the 1780s, Surinamese Sephardi leader David Cohen Nassy sneered at his coreligionists’ “ridiculous manners,” “superstitions,” and “bigotry,” which he thought were exacerbated by the influx of Polish Jews.[13] That these internecine prejudices could prevail in a colony 90 percent of whose population was enslaved and of African origin speaks to both the insularity of the Jewish community from white Christian society and the power of intra-Jewish conflicts to override the ascriptive identity that would ultimately recast Sephardim and Ashkenazim as simply “Jews.”

Over a century later, similar dilemmas developed in Britain’s overseas colonies, where Jews of primarily Iraqi origin and Ashkenazim from various European lands relocated in the late nineteenth century. Arnold Wright, at the turn of the next century, noted that in Singapore there “was always a certain element of antipathy between the Ashkenasi and the Sephardi Jews which found expression more often in the first generation than in the second…The Baghdad Jews have two synagogues which they frequent, the German [or Ashkenasi] Jew keeping himself strictly apart and being as often as not rationalist.” Memoirist Eze Nathan, who had himself grown up in the Singaporean Arabic-speaking community, found Wright’s account “only slightly exaggerated.” [14]

Rifts also developed in Australia, whose native-born Jewish community was less than half of one percent of the total population in the early 1900s. These Jews, primarily of Ashkenazi origins, had limited observance or knowledge of Jewish traditions, identified as Australians (or British subjects) of the Jewish faith, and saw themselves as part of Australian society in every realm except religion.[15] They actively opposed the immigration of 2,000 Eastern European refugees in the 1920s, balking at their Yiddish and strong Jewish observance. Like the nineteenth-century “German” Jews of America, Australian Jews feared their own status in broader society would fall. Their rabbis and secular Jewish leaders supported restrictive immigration, petitioning the government in the 1920s to stem the influx because, they claimed, it would pull the existing Jewish community into destitution. With the rise of Nazi power the following decade, the Australian Jewish community’s German Jewish Relief Fund raised £50,000, even as they attempted to bar Jewish refugees from entering the country. The Australian Jewish Welfare Society, fearing an intensification of anti-Semitism locally, advocated that no more than six Jewish exiles enter on any ship, each group to be accompanied by an English teacher.[16] Nonetheless, it should be noted that Australia’s acceptance of 15,000 German refugees over three years was relatively speaking the most generous policy of any nation.[17]

During the mid-twentieth century, a new subethnic group further diversified Australia’s Jewish community. Its members, the majority of whom had been dislodged from their homes in India, Burma, Singapore, and Shanghai during World War II, and shared distant Iraqi origins, founded The New South Wales Hebrew Association in 1953. [18] The selection of an ethnically vague name suggests not only uncertainty about collective self-definition, but also a reluctance to choose an identity associated with things “Oriental.”[19] Three years later, amidst internal dissension, the group re-launched itself as the “New South Wales Association of Sephardim.” A local Ashkenazi rabbi and advocate had urged them to do so since [sic]: “The fact is all of you are Sephardim and the Sephardim have a proud heritage.” [20] Anthropologist Myer Samra argues that the “imputation of Spanish genetic origins” served multiple purposes: the established Australian Jews were familiar with what a Sephardi (but not an Iraqi or Mizrahi) Jew was; it countered the inferiority of Oriental self- and ascribed-identity; and it facilitated Jewish immigration during the White Australia Policy, which barred non-whites, including initially most Mizrahim, from settling in the country.[21] By the mid-1980s, Myer observes, the “need to stress Spanishness” had declined in the Australian Jewish community, in part as a result of their acculturation to normative Jewish identity, in part due to the rescinding of the White Australia Policy in 1973. [22]

Australia is a particularly interesting case since the recency of internal Jewish friction allows us to examine the process of identity amalgamation and separation as it was taking place.[23] The striking parallels to the contemporaneous U.S. and Israeli Jewish communities confirm a worldwide trend beginning in World War I whereby Sephardi Jews (of Iberian origin) and Mizrahim (Jews native to Arab and Muslim lands) banded together with other non-Ashkenazi Jews under the “Sephardi” banner in order to achieve political power, visibility, and acceptance in the larger, normative Jewish community.[24] In the United States, a parallel decision was ultimately made to politically unite—under the “Sephardi” banner—all non-Ashkenazi Jews, who in the process were implicitly proffered Iberian ancestry, even when it had never existed, as in the case of Iranian, Ethiopian, or Bukharian Jews. [25]

As we have seen, similar dynamics of confrontation and re-definition were repeated whenever and wherever two disparate and sufficiently sizeable Jewish diasporic groups were brought together in the same locale after generations of no direct contact. Their initial differences included geographical origin and language, and consequent variations in cultural and religious background, profession, and formal education. Often, as in the case of native-born Jews and immigrants, class exacerbated these tensions. Each of these diasporic reunions was characterized by a reluctance or refusal to participate together in religious rites or communal matters, to intramarry, to identify as members of the same group, and in some cases to support immigration, all of which coexisted with the impulse of philanthropy. Sometimes these group relations displayed an arc beginning with coexistence, culminating in formal separation, and ending with mingling as either the group boundaries blurred through acculturation and intramarriage or, as in the case of Suriname, when the colonial authorities brought a formal end to separatist practices.[26] In other cases, such as “Ashkenazi” versus “Sephardi/Mizrahi” relations in Australia and the United States, the impediments against a unified Jewish community have not yet been fully dissolved.

Co-Ethnic Recognition Failure: The Denial of Shared Identity

One overlooked aspect of intra-ethnic Jewish tensions in modern times, much more puzzling than any antipathy heretofore discussed, is co-ethnic recognition failure, one person’s denial of a group member’s common ethnicity. In contrast to the disparaging “we are Israelites, they are Jews” mantra of the German-Eastern European encounter,[27] or “we are Sephardim, they are Oriental Jews” [28] impulse in Western-Eastern Sephardi relations, the cause of this failure to include is genuine ignorance of Jewish cultural variation. Co-ethnic recognition failure is a category of “experience-distance,” intended for use by social analysts, in distinction to “native, folk or lay categories,” which are “categories of everyday social experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors.” [29] Phrased bluntly, “co-ethnic recognition failure” is an awkward term that obscures to non-specialists its immediately identifiable meaning. Yet the concept of “failing to recognize” approximates the experience as retold by its targets, who recalled not “being taken for Jews,” and not being “believed to be Jews.” [30]

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, who are the principle targets of this phenomenon, have recorded their experiences in oral interviews, newspaper articles, and memoirs over the course of the twentieth century, and continue to do so. More recent targets are “Jews of Color,” who trace their non-Ashkenazi ancestry to conversion, inter- and intramarriage, or adoption. [31] Their testimonies suggest that many Ashkenazi Jews are “generally unaware of Jewish multiculturalism.”[32] As anthropologist Jack Glazier notes, co-ethnic recognition failure also underscores the parochial self-awareness of Jews who assumed that only “Yiddish and its associated cultural symbols defined Jewish identity.”[33]

One early example dates to the tenure of Mayor William Jay Gaynor (1909?1913), when a number of Ashkenazi Jews of the Lower East Side, protesting street disturbances and neighborhood disputes, petitioned him to remove the “Turks in our midst.” The main problem with the complaint was that these “Turks” were actually fellow Jews. Upon learning of their mistake, the Ashkenazim—primarily Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern European origin—withdrew the petition, deciding to settle the matter “among themselves.”[34] Eastern Sephardi Jews, with their unfamiliar physiognomy, Mediterranean tongues, and distinct religious and social customs baffled their Ashkenazi brethren. One young Russian-born woman of New York City was both captivated and confused by Jack, a young man of uncertain ethno-religious identity she had met at a ball in 1916 organized by a Ladino newspaper. “At first glance,” Clara wrote, “I thought him Italian. The way he spoke, his countenance and his gestures were like those of the Italians. But later, when we began seeing each other, he swore to me that he is a Spanish-speaking Jew.” Clara’s parents objected to the union because they did not believe that Jack was indeed Jewish, forcing Clara to appeal to the newspaper editor to verify in print “if it is possible, that a Jew who doesn’t speak Jewish, and doesn’t look Jewish, can nevertheless have a Jewish soul.” [35]

This problem of co-ethnic recognition failure propelled Bulgarian-born Moise Gadol to launch the country’s first Ladino newspaper in 1910. The Eastern Sephardi newcomers Gadol first met when he arrived in New York described shared identity denial as their worst immigrant hardship.[36] With tears in their eyes, they related that when they presented themselves for employment, they were “not believed by the Ashkenazim to be Jews, except with very great efforts and with all sorts of explanations…”[37] Many Eastern Sephardi job seekers learned to arrive at Ashkenazi-owned establishments bearing copies of Gadol’s weekly La America in their hands, and were able to convince incredulous employers of their Jewish identity “by showing our newspaper with [its] Hebrew letters,” peppered with announcements from the Ashkenazi press. [38]

The multiple reports of this experience from a variety of sources—contemporaneous and reminiscent, Jewish and non-Jewish—make it clear that co-ethnic recognition failure was neither folkloric nor a case of social snobbery. Forged of genuine ignorance, it occurred in every place where Eastern Sephardim settled, including, aside from New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Seattle.[39] Even without full and detailed cognizance of the multiple cases experienced across the country, Gadol was a good enough journalist to recognize that his weekly “would not suffice to recount one part of this sad situation.” [40]

Jews of Arab lands, whose mass immigration began after the rise of the State of Israel, also confronted this irksome phenomenon. Both Nitza Druyan and Dina Dahbany-Miraglia document that Ashkenazim often failed to recognize Yemenite Jews as coreligionists and coethnics.[41] This denial of shared ethno-religious identity, however, carried with it a sharper racial sting. With their “dark skin” and “curly hair” (the terms are Dahbany’s), Yemenite Jews were frequently mistaken for gentile African Americans and resorted to strategies long familiar to the country’s black community. When seeking apartments in Jewish neighborhoods, Yemenite Jews would dispatch a lighter-skinned family member or friend in their stead. When soliciting employment, particularly before the 1960s, they sought “the mediation of a friend or a relative.” [42] Yemenite Jews, with no Judeo-Arabic newspaper they might present to incredulous Ashkenazim as proof of their Jewishness, were forced to employ tactics traditionally used by many African Americans and Hispanics in a racially discriminatory America. The denial by Ashkenazim of shared ethnicity with Eastern Sephardim (and more recently, with “Jews of Color”) reflects the racialist idea, which intensified in the nineteenth century, that one defining marker of Jewishness is phenotype. [43]

Sephardim and Mizrahim experienced the repercussions of co-ethnic recognition failure on many levels. On the one hand, as we have seen, the denial of shared ethnicity and religion was personally painful and frustrating to immigrants who had been born and raised as Jews, understood their Jewishness as a heritable—and thus inalienable—identity, and were now being mistaken for non-Jews. Psychological studies suggest that “individuals require connectedness and belonging with others in order to function optimally,” and that “rejection and exclusion from social relationships…can lead to anxiety, negative affect and depressed self-esteem,”[44] something Gadol seems to have fully understood. Ashkenazi rejection of Sephardim as potential marriage partners may have played a role in the high rates of intermarriage among first- and second-generation Eastern Sephardim. According to estimates, unions between Eastern Sephardim and non-Jews in Seattle during the 1930s and early 1970s were four and three times as common, respectively, as marriages between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. [45]

Another unintended consequence of co-ethnic identity failure was unintentionally passing for other ethnic groups. In 1914, David de Sola Pool, spiritual leader of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel, remarked that many Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim had not been included in Jewish immigration statistics “because they have been passed as Turks or Greeks, not being easily recognizable as Jews, either in name, language or physical appearance.” [46] HIAS officials stationed at Ellis Island were qualified to deal with Eastern European Ashkenazim, but were not familiar with the languages or names of Mizrahi and Eastern Sephardi Jews. Thus, many or most of these Jews passed by Ashkenazi immigration officials unnoticed and did not receive the assistance to which they were entitled. [47] Until Eastern Sephardim were appointed as volunteer interpreters at Ellis Island, many others slipped through HIAS’s philanthropic cracks and were often turned back to their native lands.

Nevertheless, some Jewish immigrants embraced being passed over as an opportunity. As early as 1893, Eastern Sephardi Jews were asked to pose as indigenous (and implicitly Muslim) Middle Easterners at the Chicago World’s Fair. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes that roughly four-fifths of the “inhabitants of the Turkish village on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Exposition were Jews,” from merchants, clerks and actors, to servants, musicians, and dancing girls. Only when the “Streets of Constantinople” came to a virtual standstill on Yom Kippur was the charade exposed as a public secret.[48] New York Sephardi leader Joseph Gedalecia, who had himself immigrated to the United States via Paris as “a Frenchman,” noted in 1914 that many Jewish immigrants native to Greece and other Mediterranean countries intentionally passed as non-Jewish. [49] Reminiscing on Sephardi communal affairs from his Los Angeles home in 1976, Albert J. Amateau claimed he knew “fifty or more” Sephardim who “changed their names and pretended they were anything but Jews,” one passing for a Christian Italo-Frenchman.[50] Many Eastern Sephardim allegedly succumbed to the temptation to “pass” for business reasons, Amateau alleged, including the multi-millionaire Schinasi brothers of New York tobacco factory fame. This, however, did not prevent them from later embracing the Sephardi community as prominent leaders and philanthropists. [51] This apparent relief at being excluded from or by a group highlights a recent finding that “social exclusion can sometimes be a positive experience.” Eastern Sephardim who actively embraced or willingly accepted a variety of non-Jewish Mediterranean identities are paradigmatic of the “self-expansion model,” whereby individuals seeking more benefits than their natal group provide and pursuing more desirable opportunities elsewhere, happily sever their ties.[52]

Co-ethnic recognition failure seems to have led some Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim to internalize the Ashkenazi image of them as non-Jews or “Turks.” American-born Ben Cohen, whose family had immigrated from Monastir in 1910, confessed: “We used to speak about the Jewish guys, and the Sephardics were different. Really strange.”[53] An elderly Eastern Sephardi of Indianapolis interviewed in the 1980s recalled being warmly greeted at a recent party by many “Sephardics” and “even Jewish people.” [54] Eastern Sephardim in Los Angeles also tended to identify as “Sephardic” and to reject the term Jewish as a self-referential.[55] The Ladino term for Eastern European Ashkenazim, “Yiddishim” (composed of the word “Yiddish,” a reference to both the language and Jewishness, and appended to the Hebrew plural suffix[56] ) reinforced the idea that Ashkenazim were the only authentic Jews. Syrian Jews were also complicit in reinforcing a model of “authentic” Jewishness. These immigrants referred to Eastern European Ashkenazim as “Jewish” or “Iddish.” A male Ashkenazi Jew was an “Iddshy,” while a female an “Iddshiyeh.” Syrian Jews referred (and still refer) to themselves as “S-Ys,” the first two letters of “Syrian,” and nicknamed Ashkenazi Jews (of any background) as “J.W.s” or “J-Dubs,” from the first and last letters of the word “Jew.”[57] New York’s Syrian Jews used these terms unabashedly, constructing a world trifurcated into “Syrians” (meaning Syrian Jews), “Jews” (Ashkenazim), and “Gentiles.”[58] These ethnic terms, like the use of Ladino and Arabic words and phrases in English speech, undoubtedly cultivated an “‘in-group’ spirit,” as Joseph Sutton suggests,[59] but reveal much more. If the established group was Jewish, what was the immigrant, minority group? The origin of these monikers within immigrant Jewish communities suggests that Eastern Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in a part of their psyches assigned “true” Jewish identity to Ashkenazim, with the implicit negation of their own authentic Jewish belonging. An extreme example is the case of Yemenite Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States after World War II and sometimes called each other shvartze and shvartze khaye, the derogatory Yiddish expressions for “nigger” (literally, “black”) and “nigger beast” (literally, “black beast”), respectively, terms they heard from the mouths of their Ashkenazi contemporaries.[60] Here again a Jewish subgroup internalized the majority group’s parochial—and in this case racist—perception.

As with ranked stratification, co-ethnic recognition failure in Jewish immigrant communities appears to be a transnational phenomenon. In 1920s Argentina, when an Ashkenazi woman wed a Syrian Jew, her family “suspected that she was involved in an exogamic relationship. The groom’s knowledge of Hebrew prayers helped convince them that they were not giving their blessing to a “‘mixed’ marriage.’”[61] Ashkenazi denial of the Jewishness of Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim was among the longest-lived of immigrant memories, perhaps because it threatened the most crucial aspects of a newcomer’s adjustment: collective identity, livelihood, and love.

Yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that this failure to recognize group belonging was not exclusively a function of a hegemonic Ashkenazi majority interacting with an Eastern Sephardi or Mizrahi minority. Steven Aschheim found that during World War I, many Eastern European Jews were apparently unconvinced that German Jewish soldiers were fellow Jews.[62] José Estrugo, an Ottoman-born Sephardi who settled in Los Angeles in 1920, noted that Ashkenazim who immigrated to the Anatolian Peninsula in early 1900s were not believed to be Jews, since they did not have “Spanish” names, nor did they speak “Spanish.” The matriarch of one prominent Sephardi family of Istanbul, whose granddaughter had fallen in love with an Ashkenazi merchant, objected to the union because, to her understanding, someone who did not speak Spanish could not be a Jew.[63] In the course of his fieldwork among Indianapolis Sephardim, Jack Glazier once observed a non-Jewish Spanish-speaker chatting with older Ladino-speaking congregants in the local Sephardi synagogue. One worshiper asked the visitor how she managed to speak such good Spanish, despite not being Jewish.[64] Acculturated European and American Ashkenazim who traveled to lands with majority Sephardi/Mizrahi populations in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were often taken for European-origin Christians, largely based on their dress. U.S.-born Semitic scholar Cyrus Adler, who visited Damascus in 1891, noted that one “old [Jewish] man wasn’t satisfied that I was a Jew simply from being able to speak Hebrew, so he made me recite the Shema.” [65] Nahum Slouschz (1872?1969), an Odessa-born writer and Hebrew literature specialist who was traveling in Libya, found that both the governor of Tripoli and a Turkish administrative officer assumed he was a European Christian accompanied by a Jewish dragoman. Hayyim Habshush, Slouschz’s hired translator, probably presumed the same. “It was no avail for me to explain that I was not a Rumi (Christian),” Slouschz recalled, “nobody would believe me.” [66] Slouschz was even more astonished by his reception by Jews on the island of Jerba: “I passed through the market unnoticed. I was evidently taken for some French Colonial, loafing through the town.” Only after he began to converse in Hebrew to an “old rabbi” did the local Jews realize his Jewish identity.[67]

The impulse to equate one’s own Jewish culture with normativity and even exclusivity seems to be a factor of membership in an overwhelming majority, or of insulation from the wider world and its ethno-linguistic complexity (or both). But more broadly, these encounters speak to what Aschheim calls “the problem of Jewish identity in the modern world,”[68] or perhaps better phrased, the consequences of westernization for modern Jewish diasporic relations. This crisis, as it effected Jews worldwide, brought into question the “nature and meaning of Jewish culture, commitment, and assimilation.”[69] It also raised questions about the non-Jewish groups Jews were “mistaken” for. Where did one boundary begin and the other end?

History Lessons: Ashkenazi/Sephardi Relations in Historical Perspective

Ranked stratification and co-ethnic recognition failure may be the most salient features of Ashkenazi/Sephardi conflicts in modern times. Yet, as this brief comparative survey suggests, these tensions are structural in nature, rather than culturally specific to any Jewish ethnic group. Social class, longevity in the land, ethnic superiority myths, fear that newcomers would cause status demotion, and the Westernizing demands of broader society seems to be the main factors that interfered with intramarriage, communal worship and cooperation, and support for unimpeded immigration. Cultural insulation and hegemony, on the other hand, determined the denial of shared ethno-religious belonging. Yet, ranked stratification and co-ethnic recognition failure were two sides of the same diasporic coin, an international currency that memorialized what happened “when diasporas met” in a Westernizing age.

Some would argue that intra-Jewish friction has been transient and minor when compared to ethno-religious solidarity, and that the frequency or severity of “prejudice” or “discrimination” in the Jewish community is exaggerated. This skepticism compels us to think about the nature of historical sources, what causes such sources to come into being, and what ensures their preservation. It is not an accident that nearly every documented case of co-ethnic recognition failure is told from the perspective of the person denied shared ethnicity, or that most complaints about “Ashkenazi racism” come from Eastern Sephardim, Mizrahim, or “Jews of Color,” for it is they who bore the consequences. Such an experience was memorable and meaningful for them because it imperiled employment opportunities, romantic or marital liaisons, participation in the Jewish community, and the psychological wellbeing that social inclusion can bring. The denier of shared identity, on the other hand, would have found the experience of little importance, and thus had few incentives to recall or document it. Good historiographical practice demands that we consider the experiences and memories of non-normative groups, even if the narratives of the mainstream do not echo them.

Another important incentive for downplaying intra-Jewish hostilities may be that they are embarrassing to lay members of the communities and to scholars of the American Jewish experience whose academic and Jewish identities overlap. Intra-ethnic conflicts—whether past or current—contradict the dominant themes of American Jewish history, and subvert a “Jewish ascent narrative” that begins with flight from persecution, continues on to immigration and hardship, and resolves in a unified, albeit acculturated, American Jewish community. This imagined progression has been popularized in the best known U.S. Jewish novels, memoirs, and films (if not in much of American Jewish historiography), and represents the mainstream community’s preferred mode of self-representation to the outside world.[70] But ignoring or deemphasizing internal conflict also means dismissing the power differentials between groups that erase or edit out marginal views from the historical transcript. It also means neglecting the multi-lingual immigrant documents (such as the Ladino press or interviews recorded in Spanish, Arabic, or Farsi) that centrally position immigrant hardships and exclusion from the broader Jewish community. Here again, the historical discipline demands that we consider neglected sources and how these may reshape our narrative of the American Jewish past.

The argument that intra-Jewish tensions were insignificant tacitly implies that a unified Jewish community has already been created via an American-style “mizug galuyyot,” a Jewish melting pot of diasporic groups into one cohesive people.[71] Advocates of this ethical imperative seldom if ever acknowledge that the process of Jewish diasporic encounter and redefinition has always been closely informed by power differentials, with numerically dominant or hegemonic Jews shaping much of the discourse, arbitrating Jewish normativity, and dictating the cultural model. The risk for smaller or disempowered Jewish groups is always that Jewish unity will be achieved through the assimilation—in effect, disappearance—of their subcultures, rather than through the amalgamation or incorporation that “mizug galuyot” deceptively implies. No conversation about ahavat Israel within the framework of Jewish communal unity should ever take place without the awareness of the power dynamics we have examined in historical context. Similarly, no narrative of American Jewish history should ignore the process that dictates how we should remember the Jewish past, and what we should forget or ignore as “unimportant” or “unrepresentative.”

The increasing ancestral diversity of the American Jewish community in recent years ensures us that these uncomfortable issues are not confined to the past.[72] It would be foolhardy to argue that Jews were and are somehow unaffected by received attitudes, or by the fears and racial ideas of their broader non-Jewish environments. No degree of Jewish religious or ideological conviction can ever overpower these influences. If Jews today were to view their intra-group relations less in religious terms, and more in historical terms, a new conversation could begin.

[1] On some of these issues see Babylonian Talmud, Shavuot 39a and Selwyn Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus, Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period (London, England: F. Cass, 1992). I thank my students Lily Brown and Tamara Chung-Constant for the social scientific insights they inspired while enrolled in my classes at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst during the fall 2010 and fall 2011 semesters.
[2] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932?2009) related this maxim in a graduate seminar on Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which I attended at Columbia University in the early 1990s. The Hebrew phrase may be roughly translated in this context as “love for one’s fellow Jews.”
[3] This view is best summarized by Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492?1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 2: 1000?1006.
[4] Christopher M. Federico and Shana Levin, “Intergroup Biases as a Function of Reflected Status Appraisals and Support for Legitimizing Ideologies: Evidence from the USA and Israel,” Social Justice Research 17: 1 (March 2004), 47?73; 52.
[5]David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (2002): 3?41.
[6]Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800?1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin: 1982), 3; 31.
[7] Ibid., 12.
[8] Ibid., 3.
[9] Jack Glazier, Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 9.
[10]Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers.
[11] Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 12.
[12] Wieke Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname (Leiden: KITLV, 2010), 196–197; Gemeentearchief Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Stukken betreffende gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, 1650–1798, no. 1029, “Extracte uijt het Register der Resolutien van de Ed. Agthb. Heeren directeuren van de Societeijt van Suriname,” January 6, 1734, 890–894.
[13]David Cohen Nassy, Essai Historique sur la Colonie de Surinam (Paramaribo, 1788;
reprinted Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1968), part 1, 83 and 85.
[14]Eze Nathan, The History of Jews in Singapore, 1830?1945: A Personal Account by Eze Nathan (Singapore: Herbilu, 1986), 58. The square brackets in the quote are Nathan’s.
[15]Myer Samra, “Israel Rhammana: Constructions of Identity Among Iraqi Jews in Sydney, Australia,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, 1987, 106?107.
[16] Ibid., 107?108.
[17] Ibid., 109.
[18] Aaron Aaron, The Sephardim of Australia and New Zealand (New South Wales, Australia: self-published, 1979), 55.
[19] Samra, “Israel Rhammana,” 267.
[20] Ibid., 268.
[21] Ibid., 314.
[22] Ibid., 317; A. C. Palfreeman, “Non-white Immigration to Australia,” Pacific Affairs 47: 3 (Autumn 1974), 344?357; 349.
[23] Samra, “Israel Rhammana,” 36.
[24] For the emergence of this trend during World War I see N.a., “Sefardíes,” in Eduardo Weinfeld and Isaac Babani, eds., Enciclopedia Judaica Castellana, 10 vols. (México: Editorial Enciclopedia Judaica Castellana, 1951): 9: 496?519; 496.
[25] Ben-Sion Behar, “Sefardím, Ma No Orientales,” La America (October 29, 1915): 2; http://www.americansephardifederation.org/about.html (last accessed 1/11/12).
[26] On the end of the practice in Suriname see Vink, Creole Jews, 202–204.
[27] Isaac Mayer Wise in The American Israelite (January 28, 1887): 4. The exact phrase, which actually alludes more to national origin than an east-west ethnic divide, is: “We are Israelites of the nineteenth century and a free country, and they gnaw the dead bones of past centuries…we let them be Jews and we are the American Israelites.”
[28] Joseph M. Papo, Sephardim in Twentieth Century America: In Search of Unity (San José and Berkeley: Pelé Yoetz Books, 1987), 52; 54.
[29] Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 2005, 62. The authors prefer the expression “category of practice.”
[30] See, for example, Moise Gadol, “El rolo del jurnal ‘La Amerika,’” (December 29, 1911), p. 2.
[31] Joel Sanchez, “Wrestling with the Angel of Identity: Jews of Color,” M.S.W. thesis, Smith College, 2006, 17. See also Diane Kaufmann Tobin, Gary A. Tobin, and Scott Rubin, In Every Tongue: The Racial and Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People (San Francisco, CA: Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 2005) and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007).
[32] Sanchez, “Wrestling with the Angel of Identity,” 17.
[33] Glazier, “The Indianapolis Sephardim: An Essay,” Shofar 3:3 (1985): 27?34; 31.
[34] William Isaac Thomas, Old World Traits Transplanted (Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1971 [1921], 200, citing “Rene Darmstadter, The Jewish Community (manuscript),” which I have not been able to locate.
[35] “Tribuna Libera: Lo Ke Nuestros Lektores Pensan: Porke No?,” La Bos del Pueblo (May 26, 1916): 6. Clara’s letter appears in Ladino translation only.
[36] [Moise Gadol], “El rolo del jurnal ‘La Amerika,’” La America (December 29, 1911): 2. The short-lived newspaper Gadol says he launched before La America in reaction to co-ethnic recognition failure was probably La Aguila, the country’s first Ladino newspaper.
[37] [Moise Gadol], “Por La Lingua,” La America (December 9, 1910): 1.
[38] Ibid. For another example of La America used as proof of Jewishness see [Moise Gadol], “La Nasión Judía i nuestros ermanos de Turkía,” La America (January 5, 1912): 3.
[39] Max Aaron Luria, “Judeo-Spanish Dialects in New York City,” in John D. Fitz-Gerald and Pauline Taylor, eds., Todd Memorial Volume Philological Studies, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 2: 7?16; Jack Glazier, “American Sephardim, Memory, and Representation of European Life,” in Stacy N. Beckwith, ed., Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 307-309, 310, “Stigma, Identity, and Sephardi-Ashkenazic Relations in Indianapolis,” in Walter P. Zenner, ed., Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 47?62, 51?52, and “The Indianapolis Sephardim: An Essay,” Shofar 3:3 (Spring 1985): 27?34, 31?32; Leon A. Ligier, “The Chicago and Los Angeles Sephardic Communities in Transition,” The American Sephardi 2: 1-2 (1968): 80-82; 80; Walter P. Zenner, “Chicago’s Sephardim,” American Jewish History 79:2 (1990): 221?241, 233?234; Stephen Stern, The Sephardic Jewish Community of Los Angeles (New York: Arno Press, 1990), 98?100 and “Ethnic Identity Among the Sephardic Jews of Los Angeles,” Young Sephardic Voice (1974): 143; Joan Dash, “Sephardim in Seattle,” National Jewish Monthly (May 1963): 12–13, 49–50; 12; Marc D. Angel, “Sephardic Culture in America,” in Abraham D. Lavender, ed., A Coat of Many Colors: Jewish Subcommunities in the United States (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977), 277?280; 277 and La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982), 52; Papo, Sephardim in Twentieth Century America, 47; Richard Glaser, “Greek Jews in Baltimore,” Jewish Social Studies 38: 3/4 (summer-autumn 1976): 321?336; 328; for Atlanta, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh ball gumbo: culinary tales of the Jewish South (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 166; and for Syrian Jews, Joseph A. D. Sutton, Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush: The Story of a Unique Ethnic Jewish Community (New York: Thayer-Jacoby, 1979), 23.
[40] [Moise Gadol], “Por La Lingua,” La America (December 9, 1910): 1.
[41] Nitza Druyan, “Yemenite Jews on American Soil: Community Organizations and Constitutional Documents,” in Daniel J. Elazar, et al., eds., A Double Bond: Constitutional Documents of American Jewry (Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America: 1992), 93?100; and Dina Dahbany-Miraglia, “American Yemenite Jews: Interethnic Strategies,” in Walter P. Zenner, ed., Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 63?78.
[42] Dahbany-Miraglia, “American Yemenite Jews: Interethnic Strategies,” 67. For Yemeni Jews as a physiologically varied group often mistaken for gentile Hispanic and black in the United States, see Yael Arami, “A Synagogue of One’s Own,” in Loolwa Khazzoom, ed., The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage (New York: Seal Press, 2003), 101?113; 104.
[43] The idea that Jews embody indelible, physical differences, however, is much older. See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
[44] Cynthia L. Pickett and Marilynn B. Brewer, “The Role of Exclusion in Maintaining Ingroup Inclusion,” in Dominic Abrahams, et al., eds., in The Social psychology of inclusion and exclusion (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 89?111; 90.
[45] Albert Adatto, “Sephardim and the Seattle Sephardic Community,” M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1939, 63 and 64; David Sitton, Sephardi Communities Today (Jerusalem: Council of Sephardi and Oriental Communities, 1985), 357.
[46] David de Sola Pool, “The Immigration of Levantine Jews into the United States,” Jewish Charities (1914): 4,11: 20.
[47] See, for example, [Moise Gadol], “La Nasión Judía i nuestros ermanos de Turkía,” La America (January 5, 1912): 3 and “El emportante raporto del Bureau Oriental,” La America (January 12, 1912): 2.
[48] Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “A Place in the World: Jews and the Holy Land at the World’s Fairs,” in Jeffrey Shandler and Beth S. Wenger, eds., Encounters with the “Holy Land”: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1997): 60?82; 68.
[49] N.a., “Discussion,” in Jewish Charities 4:2 (1914): 29.
[50] American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati), Joseph M. Papo papers, Albert J. Amateau to Joseph M. Papo, April 7, 1976, 2 pages, p. 1.
[51] Ibid., p. 2.
[52] Tracy McLaughlin-Volpe, Art Aron, Stephen C. Wright, and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., “Exclusion of the Self by Close Others and by Groups: Implications of the Self-Expansion Model,” in Dominic Abrahams, et al., eds., in The Social psychology of inclusion and exclusion (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 113?134; 126?127.
[53]Glazier, “The Indianapolis Sephardim” and “American Sephardim,” 309. Cohen was a World War II veteran and resided in Indianapolis until the 1950s. Monastir is today the city of Bitola in the Republic of Macedonia.
[54] Glazier, “Stigma, Identity, and Sephardic-Ashkenazic Relations,” 51.
[55] Stern, “Ethnic Identity Among the Sephardic Jews of Los Angeles,” 136.
[56] See, for example, Maír José Benardete, “A Look into the Historical Significance of the Sephardim, their History and Culture,” in Marc D. Angel, et al., Four Review on Stephen Birmingham’s Book The Grandees, Tract No. 9 (New York: Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 1971), 27?37; 35?36.
[57] Sutton, Magic Carpet, 151; Jack Marshall, From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2005), 46; Victory Bulletin [Brooklyn, N.Y.], 1942?1945, passim; and personal observation.
[58] Linda Cohen, “Captain Silvera, Community, M.D. Doing Valiant Work in England,” Victory Bulletin 3: 2?3 (February-March 1944): 3.
[59] Sutton, Magic Carpet, 151.
[60] Dahbany-Miraglia, “An Analysis of Ethnic Identity Among Yemenite Jews,” 179, “Acculturation and Assimilation: American Yemenite Jews,” Perspectives: Research, instruction and curriculum development, a journal of the faculty, New York City Technical College, CUNY X (1987?1988): 121?134; 130, and “On the Outside Looking In: Reflections of a Natural Feminist,” [3], [4] and [5] (unpublished, unpaginated manuscript, courtesy of the author). For parallel examples in the State of Israel see the aforementioned works by Dahbany-Miraglia; Morris B. Gross, “Exploration of the Differences in Pre-School Learning Readiness and Concomitant Differences in Certain Cultural Attitudes Between Two Subcultural Jewish Groups,” Columbia University, Ed.D., 1966, 1; and Lev Hakak (Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, trans.), Stranger among Brothers (Los Angeles: Ridgefield Publishing, 1984), 117?118. For an example of the term applied to an Eastern Sephardic Jew see Jodi Varon, Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 52.
[61] Ignacio Klich, “Arab-Jewish Coexistence in 1900’s Argentina: Overcoming Self-Imposed Amnesia,” in Ignacio Klich and Jeffrey Lesser, eds., Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), 1?37; 19?20.
[62] Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 250.
[63] José M. Estrugo, Los Sefardíes (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1958), 65.
[64] Glazier, “American Sephardim,” 315.
[65] Ira Robinson, ed., Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters, 2 volumes (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of American/New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1985): I: 46.
[66] Nahum Slouschz, Travels in North Africa (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1927), 168.
[67] Ibid., 253.
[68] Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 252.
[69] Ibid.
[70] See the literature and media discussed in Edward S. Shapiro: We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
[71] See, for example, Nissim Rejwan, “From mixing to participation: Social implications of the rise of Israel’s ‘Black Panthers,’” The New Middle East 32 (May 1971), 20?24; 22.
[72] Tobin, et al., In Every Tongue; Suzanne Selengut, “Jewish Like Me,” The Jerusalem Report (April 11, 2011), 28?31 and 33.

Most discussions of the recent gathering at Citi Field have focused on the logistics of the event and the topic – the dangers of the Internet. With such a focus, however, we may very well be missing something of great importance. What struck my attention was the name of the organization staging the event: Ichud HaKehillos Letohar HaMachaneh, or the Union of the Communities for the Purity of the Camp.

It is my understanding that though this is far from the first use of the expression “the Purity of the Camp,” it has risen to prominence only in recent decades. I think it is a telling term, both for what it says and what it leaves unmentioned. And I would suggest that understanding its use might help us make some sense of contemporary dynamics in the Orthodox world.

What are the goals of purification, and how might the goals be different for an organization dedicated to making the camp upright as compared with one seeking to purify it?

Purification aims to remove impurities, to make something 100 percent unadulterated. It is about perfection. Anything threatening such perfection must be identified and eradicated. As with disease, a small infection left uncontained can sicken the entire body.

The emphasis, in some communities, on purity and purification might help explain why, for example, the Internet is seen as deserving of a stadium-scale event. With the easy availability of pornography and foreign ideas, the Internet is a danger to ensuring purity.

It also, I would suggest, explains a number of other phenomena: the increase in recent years of book bans to ensure ideological purity; the homogenization of Jewish day school education, with parents seeking to place their children in increasingly less diverse environments – ideological bubbles where they will not be exposed to those children, let alone those ideas, not certified as pure; and the narrowing of the diversity of Torah perspectives into one true and exclusive interpretation (by which many people of different perspectives all proclaim that Jewish unity is achieved only when everyone agrees with me).

We can now also explain the efforts over the last decade to make ever more stringent the requirements for conversion, and the attempts to annul retroactively, years later and en masse, previously unsuspicious conversions. This is only possible when there is a fear of admitting impure elements and not rooting out hidden impurities. And some people thus fear that the purity of the camp is under grave threat.

These issues and the generally widening distrust over kashrus and many other matters are all about purity and impurity – and when purity is the highest value, the slightest impurity is the greatest danger.

Yet there is something critical missing here: morality.

A focus on – an obsession with – purity does not require any particular concern with morality. And so now perhaps we can understand why the dangers of the Internet appear to be a greater concern among some people than the dangers of child abuse. Even why reporting abusers to secular authorities can be seen as worse than the abuse itself – the former, involving the impure secular world, threatens purity in a way that abuse, within the community of the pure, does not. It might also be why all sorts of financial crimes seem so common – they do not threaten purity and perhaps are, according to some odd logic, justified by strengthening the purity of the community.

Too often these days it appears that some of us have lost touch with very basic moral values, including respecting the dignity of all of God’s creations. If we ask ourselves whether or not our actions meet a standard of yashrus/uprightness instead of tohar/purity, perhaps we would be more reluctant to undertake some of these actions.

How did purity become raised to such exalted status anyway, and become applied to the Camp or Community rather than to individuals in their religious improvement?

The weekday Amidah, the central prayer of Jewish worship, includes among all its praise, requests and thankfulness nothing about purity. We pray for tzedek and wisdom and a number of other character traits and blessings, but not for purity.

We often talk about the importance Kiddush Hashem and the horror of Chillul Hashem. When we elevate purity above other values such as yashrus, then we also rank it above avoiding its opposite, and end up justifying chillulei Hashem in the name of purity – after all, it need not matter what the impure think of us, and it becomes irrelevant when impure Jews and non-Jews witness what to most observers appear to be lapses in morality and desecrations of God’s name.
Do we really want our children to grow up and be pure souls without being upright souls, to live in a purified camp rather than one recognized the world over for its uprightness? Perhaps it is time to form an organization called Ichud HaKehillos LeYashrus HaMachaneh, the Union of Communities for the Uprightness of the Camp.

Secular subjects are taught with various approaches in Jewish schools. Some take the approach that they are a necessary evil, and are taught only because they are required to do so by the civil authorities. They believe that only really worthwhile learning is that of limudei qodesh. Others take a more positive attitude toward limudei chol, considering them important at least for purposes of earning a living. Others go even further and consider all knowledge to have some intrinsic value. Scientific truth has sanctity in that it attests to the wisdom of the Creator.

Mathematics stands out somewhat from other subjects. Not only is the truth in mathematics not merely empirical but provable by reason, but there are also many areas in limudei qodesh for which an understanding of mathematics is essential. In some cases, the mathematics may even be considered part of limudei qodesh. An excellent example of this is the study of RMBM’s Hilchot Qiddush Hachodesh. There RMBM presents what is essentially a mathematical algorithm for determining the Jewish calendar.

Hilchot Qiddush Hachodesh of RMBM’s Mishneh Torah is divided into 3 distinct parts, which were almost certainly written at 3 distinct times in RMBM’s life. The first 5 chapters describe how the calendar was set during Talmudic times. It follows the rest of Misheneh Torah in relying on Talmudic sources. Chapters 6 through 10 comprise the second part and in chapters 6-8, contain the algorithm for determining the calendar in our times. It is this material that we are concerned with here. [1] The last part deals with astronomical calculations useful for determining when the new lunar crescent may be observable. This is only relevant for when the calendar is determined through observation, and has no direct bearing on the previous 5 chapters.

We will first sketch an outline of the ideas in Chapters 6-8 of RMBM. The summary we give will take advantage of our modern notation for numbers and some modern terminology. RMBM used the common gematria notation, which makes the explanation more cumbersome. We will then examine some of the mathematics that we can learn by studying RMBM.

A Summary of RMBM’s Calendar Algorithm

The modern Hebrew calendar is fixed, so that it is generated by a mathematical algorithm which is based on approximations to the lengths of orbits of celestial bodies. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, which means that it is based on approximations to the length of the month and the length of the year. [2] The day is divided into 25920 units, called helakim or parts. Thus there are 7 x 25920=181,440 parts in a week. A month is considered on average to have 29 days plus 13753 parts. Thus a month has on average 29 plus 13753/25920 days, or about 29.5305941 days. This is remarkably close to the modern astronomical value (29.5305888 days).

The length of the solar year is based on the assumption that nineteen years have 235 months. Multiplying the number of parts in a month by 235 gives 179,876,755 parts in 19 years, or 6939 days plus 17,875 parts. Dividing by 19, gives an estimate of 365 days plus 6397 and 12/19 parts in a year. In decimals, this is about 365.2468 days. The modern astronomical value of the mean tropical year is about 365.2422 days, so this is closer to the modern astronomical value than that of the Julian calendar estimate (365.25 days), but not as close as that of the Gregorian calendar (365.2425 days).[3]

The calendar is divided into 19-year cycles. The 235 months in each cycle are apportioned to the years so that 7 of the years have 13 months while the other 12 have 12 months. This is known as the Metonic cycle and was used in the ancient Babylonian calendar. The Jewish calendar version has the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th months in the cycle as the ones with 13 months.

What remains is to set the calendar for each particular year. This is done by first setting the day of week that Rosh Hashanna of each year falls on. Since we know the approximate length of the year, knowing the days of the week of 2 successive Rosh Hashannas determines the exact length of the intervening year.

The determination of the day of the week for Rosh Hashanna is done through the calculation of a number called the molad.[4] This is a number associated with every month of every year, and is defined by an inductive algorithm. An epochal molad is associated with the first month of the first year, and the molad for any subsequent month is calculated by adding the number of parts in a month to the molad of the previous month, modulo the number of parts in a week.[5] The day of week that Rosh Hashanna of a particular year falls is determined by the range of values in which the molad for Tishrei of that year falls, according to some precise rules. Generally, these rules say that the day of the week should correspond roughly to the number of days that the molad value represents. Adjustments are made so that Rosh Hashanna never falls on days 1, 4 or 6, and so that the length of year is always within certain parameters.

The actual calendar for a given year depends on the length of the year and the day of the week on which it starts. The algorithm is formulated so that there are only 3 possible lengths for a 12-month year and for a 13-month year respectively.[6] The lengths of months within the year are determined by the length of year. The final refinement of the calendar is a function of the days of week of Rosh Hashanna of 2 successive years, which determines Torah readings.

It is evident from the above description that the calendar algorithm is a purely mathematical one. The terms year, day etc, are purely notional ones, and should be thought of as numbers consisting of the number of parts which the algorithm assigns to them. To be sure, in implementing the algorithm, we use actual days. However, this involves a simple process of counting these days by observing sunrises and sunsets. Anyone who knows the current year, the position of the current day in that year and the current day of week can implement the algorithm.

Mathematics of the Calendar

Joseph Justus Scaliger was a 16th century French scholar. In his De Emendatione Temporum (1593) he writes: “Of all methods of intercalation that exist today, the Jewish calculation is the oldest, the most skillful, and the most elegant." There is indeed much interesting mathematics in the calendar that is well worth studying. Here we give an outline of some such topics.

1)Representations of numbers and their operations.

We learn about our number representation at an early age. As a consequence, we tend to identify a number with its representation. In truth, a number has an intrinsic meaning apart from its representation, and it is only comparatively recently in human history that our current way from representing it has become widely accepted.

The modern representation of numbers is a decimal (base ten) positional system. There are ten symbols:0,1,..,9 which are strung together, and their position in the string determines their value. The rightmost symbol has the value assigned to the symbol if it were standing alone. The one to the left of it has ten times this value, the next one a hundred times its value, and so on. These values are then added together to get the value of the string.

The operations of addition and multiplication on numbers are straightforward using this system. If an operation results in a number greater than ten, it is divided by 10, the symbol for the remainder , being between 1 and 9, is put in the rightmost column, and the quotient is carried over to the remaining columns. We continue this way, going column to column.

An alternative system of representing numbers is the gematria system used in many ancient societies. This is an ordinal system, where numbers are represented by the letters of the alphabet, the value of a letter being dependent on its position in the alphabet. Larger numbers are formed by stringing together smaller numbers. A disadvantage of this system is that very large numbers must be formed using very lengthy strings. The rules for operations on numbers using this system are also much more complicated.

The decimal positional system originated in India. It became known to Persian and Arab scholars in the 9th century, and it greatly facilitated their study of mathematics and astronomy. RMBM, erudite scholar that he was, surely was familiar with it and must have used it in his private computations. Nevertheless, in Mishneh Torah he uses the gematria system which his readers would be familiar with. [7]

A close examination of RMBM however reveals that he actually is using the essential ideas of positional notation, albeit in a different form. After all, he has to use numbers as large as 181,440 (the number of parts in a week). When he says that an hour consists of 1080 parts, he is really saying that he is using another unit to handle numbers greater than 1080. Similarly, the unit of a day is used to handle numbers greater than 24 hours, or 25920 parts. Thus, instead of using position to deal with large numbers, he simply gives special names to the numbers 1080 (an hour) and 25920 (a day). And instead of using a uniform base 10 system, he uses a system with mixed bases (1080, 24 and 7).

All this is explained by RMBM in 6.9. where he states:

When in doing the computations for the molad, whenever the parts add up to 1080, you discard them, and add 1 to the count of hours.

This is the analogue in our notation of carrying over values greater than ten to the next column. RMBM gives a similar algorithm for handling values greater than 24 hours.

These days, the use of the decimal position system is widely accepted. Even the purists among Jewish educators appreciate its simplicity, elegance and ease of use, despite its foreign origin. Most translations of RMBM's Hilchot Qiddush Hachodesh render his numbers using our decimal notation. It certainly makes the computations easier to follow, but is somewhat misleading, as his original readers would mostly have had to do these calculations solely within the gematria system. For someone whose goal is to study RMBM for its own sake, an interesting exercise is to try to reconstruct these calculations. It takes patience, but can be done.

At the other extreme, if one's goal is to understand the calendar as efficiently as possible, it makes sense to abandon RMBM's day-hour-part system completely and represent all values using decimal notation. Although this loses some of the significance of the role of the numbers in setting the calendar - the day of week of Rosh Hashanna is primarily determined by the day-value, but with notable modifications - it certainly makes the algorithm easier to analyze and program.[8]

2)The Euclidean Division Algorithm

The division algorithm is taught in grade school. So much attention is focused on the mechanics of carrying out the algorithm with modern number representation that the essential simplicity of the idea behind it and its justification is lost. Euclid did not use
positional representation , and the algorithm is independent of the particular representation of the numbers involved.

The algorithm says that if a and b are whole numbers, then either b divides a evenly, or b can be divided into a to produce a quotient q and remainder r, with the property that r is
smaller than b. The method for finding q and r is as follows: If b is already less than a, then q=0 and r=b. Otherwise, start subtracting multiples of b from a. The differences become smaller as the multiples increase, so eventually we must reach a point where it is less than b. This is the remainder r.

When determining the representation of a number greater than 10 in the decimal positional system, by moving multiples of ten a position to the right, one is implementing this algorithm by dividing by 10. Likewise in RMBM's algorithm, when converting
parts larger than 1080 to hours and parts, one is dividing by 1080 to get the quotient (hours) and the remainder (parts). Thus RMBM is giving a clear statement of the algorithm in the quote from 6.9 above.

3)Modular Arithmetic

At the end of 6.9, RMBM says:

When the days add up to more than 7, you discard 7 from the count and keep the rest. For we do not calculate to know the actual number of days, but to know on which day of the week, and in which hour and in which part the molad will be.

The concept that RMBM is introducing is that of congruence modulo an integer m.

If m is a positive integer, we say that 2 integers are congruent modulo m if their
difference is divisible by m, or, equivalently, if they have the same remainder when they are divided by m. For a given integer a, the set of integers congruent to it modulo a is called the congruence class of a. The set of all such congruence classes is a finite set, called the integers modulo m, and denoted Zm. Thus multiples of m are considered to be equivalent to 0 in this set. We deal with Zm when we are interested, not in the number itself, but in its remainder when divided by m.

So, RMBM says, the relevant set of values for the molad is not the integers (Z), but Z181440 .

Another instance where modular arithmetic arises in calendar calculations is in the 19-year Metonic cycle, where the relevant set is Z19 .

4) Functions

The notion of function is essential to modern mathematics. If to every value in a domain, a value is assigned in another domain, we say that we have a function from the first domain to the second. An example is the assignment of a Tishrei molad value to each year, which is a function from Z to Z181440. Another example is the assignment of day of week to a molad value. This assignment depends on the position of a year in the Metonic cycle, so is a function from Z181440 x Z19 to Z7. The composition of these two functions gives the assignment that we are really interested in, from Z to Z7. (The function from Z to Z19 is reduction modulo 19, the assignment of an integer to its congruence class modulo 19.)

5) Induction

The principle of mathematical induction says that if one has a function assigning a value to the integer 1, and a rule telling how to define a value for an integer provided that the value for the previous integer is known, that one has a function assigning a value to all positive integers.

In 6.8 RMBM states:

If you know the molad of the current year, and add to it the appropriate remainder [depending on whether it is a regular year or a leap year], you will obtain the molad of the following year. And so it is year after year until the end of time. The first molad is that of the first year of creation (2 days, 5 hours 204 parts).

Thus RMBM is giving a precise application of the principle of induction.

6)Other mathematical topics

A more detailed analysis of the calendar gives rise to several other interesting mathematical topics.

One can ask for the periodicity of the calendar, that is how often the calendar repeats itself. It turns out that the period is 19 x 181440 /d years, where d is the greatest common divisor of 181440 and 69715 (the number of parts mod 181440 in a 19-year period, which is 5. Thus the period is 689472 years. As a consequence we can consider the molad function as one from Z689472 to Z181440.

One can ask for the inverse of this function, that is, which years have a given molad. The answer uses a concept that is known as the extended Euclidean Greatest Common Divisor algorithm. It turns out that for a given molad there are either 3 or 4 values in Z689472 which take on that molad value, depending on its congruence modulo 5.

Details of these and other topics can be found in the reference in footnote 8.

Conclusion

The calendar plays a central part in Jewish ritual life, yet the principles behind it are generally not well understood.[9] From the point of view of Jewish studies, mathematics is essential for a thorough understanding of its calendar. RMBM’s superb understanding of the mathematics involved and his lucid exposition come through in the study. The contemporary student has the advantage of modern notation and terminology which makes the mathematics considerably more accessible than previously.

From the point of mathematics education, the calendar offers motivation for studying several important topics. The mathematics teacher often encounters skepticism from students as to the usefulness of the subject, and studying the calendar makes the mathematics come to life and gives it meaning. There is a natural symbiosis between the two subjects, and serious thought should be given to find a way to integrate them.

[1] A description of the Jewish calendar was by the Muslim scholar al-Birundi in the early 10th century. An earlier work by Saadia Gaon exists only in fragments. The mathematician R. Abraham b. Hiyya (also known as Savasorda), in his Sefer Ha’Ibbur, described the calendar about 50 years before RMBM. His work closely resembles that of RMBM, who may have used him as his source.

[2] The lengths are of necessity approximations, since they are not constant over time.

[3]The discrepancy between the approximate length of the calendar year and the length of the tropical year implies that the calendar dates in our days occur about a week later in the season than when the calendar was first instituted. If instead of using the metonic estimate for the number of months in a year, we used the astronomical value, the average year length would be about 365.242256 days. Thus about 99% of the discrepancy in year length is due to the error in the metonic estimate. However, the sages in instituting the calendar had to find a small integral number of months to fit into a small integral number of years. Given this constraint, the choice of Metonic cycle was probably optimal.

[4] Molad is usually traslated as lunar conjunction. RMBM distinguishes beteween molad amiti, the true molad, and molad emtzai, which is best thought of as a theoretical number. It doesn’t correspond to any real time, but is a value used to determine the calendar.

[5] This concept is presented in more detail below.

[6] Since the difference between the moladim of 2 subsequent months equals the number of parts in a month, the difference between the moladim of 2 months which are 19 years apart will differ by the number of parts in 19 years. This guarantees that, although there is much variation in the length of the year, the average length of the calendar year will be exactly 365 days plus 6397 and 12/19 parts.

[7] In contrast, al-Biruni used Indian decimals in his description of the Jewish calendar.
His readers had already been introduced to this representation of numbers by the mathematician
Al-Khwarizmi. RMBM's readers, on the other hand, were mostly not familiar with this notation.

[8] See “A Mathematical Analysis of the Hebrew Calendar”, http://www.math.uga.edu/~lenny/papers/PaperList.html, where this is done.

[9] The mischaracterization of the molad as a physical event in the Artscroll siddur and the Chabad web site attests to this. This is also seen in the way the molad is described in printed calendars and announced in synagogues. Instead of using the natural, Jewish way of referring to the week day by its number, it is translated into its secular equivalent. For example, Day 2, 5 hours becomes Sunday evening at 11 PM. The purpose of such a translation eludes us, since to use the molad for its intended purpose, one would have to translate it back into a number. What is even more bizarre, some calendars adjust the molad in summer for daylight savings time!

Issachar and Zebulun are said to have founded an economic model that has become popular within a segment of Orthodox Jewish society. The model is commonly viewed as follows: Issachar “bore the yoke of Torah,” devoting himself exclusively to study, while Zebulun was a successful global merchant. Recognizing the benefits and deficiencies of their single-track careers, they contracted to share the rewards, if not the burdens, of their respective interests. Each brother received goods produced by the labor of the other. Lacking time for constant study, Zebulun financed his brother’s cerebrally pious lifestyle and, in return, was guaranteed a portion of Issachar’s metaphysical reward. Issachar avoided traditional work but, thanks to Zebulun, he could still put food on the table.

The paradigm just described turns out to be based on a superficial and incomplete reading of Issachar’s image in the Bible, in the traditional biblical commentaries, and in the literature of the Sages.

As with many midrashic themes, the Sages derived the concept of an Issachar-Zebulun partnership from cryptic but suggestive biblical language. The relevant biblical passages are below. The first is from Jacob’s poetic blessings of the tribes; the second, from the blessings of Moses. The final passage is from an account of King David’s coronation in the Book of Chronicles (translations from the New JPS version):

Issachar is a strong-boned ass,
Crouching among the sheepfolds.
When he saw how good was security,
And how pleasant was the country,
He bent his shoulder to the burden,
And became a toiling serf (Gen. 49:14-15).

And of Zebulun he said:
Rejoice, Zebulun, on your journeys;
And, Issachar, in your tents (Deut. 33:18).

Of the Issacharites, men who knew how to interpret the signs of the times, to determine how Israel should act; their chiefs were two-hundred, and all their kinsmen followed them (I Chron. 12:33).

To celebrate David’s ascension to the throne, Chronicles reports, nearly all the tribes of Israel sent large delegations of their best soldiers to Hebron. The Issacharite team was unique; instead of fighters, they sent a small cadre of two-hundred men who were expert in reading the ”signs of the times.” This expression is ambiguous, and the precise nature of the two-hundred Issacharites is something of a mystery. Jewish translations and commentaries provide multiple explanations, including suggestions that they were astrologers, astronomers, or gifted policy makers with broad expertise on national issues. The Midrash identified them as legislators who were experts on the Hebrew calendar, specifically, the rules of intercalation (i.e., when and how to add a thirteenth lunar month to the year). Having mastered this highly technical area of the law, the Issacharite council was charged with determining -- for an entire people -- the proper days to observe the biblical holidays. This must have been a daunting responsibility, as both religious observance and national unity depended on it.

The central biblical source-text on Issachar is our passage from Genesis. However, the metaphors in Jacob’s blessing, while detailed and colorful, are hardly transparent. Jacob compares the tribe to a crouching, toiling donkey, who willingly bears some sort of burden as “a toiling serf (mas ‘oved)”; but it is unclear from the text whom Issachar serves and of what his service consists. Rashi, following the Sages, defines Issachar’s burden as Torah study, and he adds Zebulun’s supporting role to his portrait. On the surface, Rashi appears to promote the current paradigm, in which Zebulun goes to work and earns a living while Issachar “sits and learns.” Read carefully, however, Rashi’s description is nuanced and strikingly different from that paradigm.

The popular model assumes that by virtue of his single-minded dedication to Torah study, Issachar had a right to Zebulun’s financial support. But Rashi himself underlines Issachar’s responsibilities, rather than his privileges, and says nothing at all about Issachar’s rights to external subsidies. As a serf who “bent his shoulder to the burden,” Issachar owed specific services, not only to his patron but, in Rashi’s words, to “all of his Israelite kinsmen.” For the privilege (not the right) of Zebulun’s investment, Issachar was obligated, according to Rashi, “to provide [the nation of Israel] with religious instruction and with [decisions on] the intercalation of the calendar,” i.e., setting the calendar and the holidays. Rashi’s model essentially depicts Issachar as a utility, providing a real, if spiritual, commodity to the nation. Issachar’s scholarship was only a means to satisfy the Jewish people’s religious and cultural needs; it was not as an end in itself.

In Rashi’s portrayal, as it happens, Issachar also brought a physical commodity to his partnership with Zebulun. On the words “he saw how good was security (va-yar menuha ki tov),” Rashi cites the view of the midrash and Onkelos that Issachar’s land produced superior fruit, allowing him to spend minimal time at work in the orchard. A related midrashic opinion, not cited by Rashi, takes the expression “when he saw . . . how pleasant was the country” at face value; “this refers to his land,” in the words of an alternate view (yesh omrim) in the midrash. But even Rashi’s conception of Issachar includes an element of real labor. Rather than a completely passive recipient of charitable gifts from Zebulun, Issachar grew his own fruit and utilized his merchant brother to bring them to market. On at least some days, we would find Rashi’s Issachar in the orchard, rather than the beit midrash.

Other exegetes on the pages of Mikraot Gedolot offer alternative views of Issachar that are worth considering in contrast to the currently popular model. Rashbam, following the midrashic thread mentioned previously, portrays Issachar as a farmer rather than a scholar. Seeing “how pleasant was the country,” Issachar preferred an agrarian lifestyle, became highly successful and wealthy, but was also heavily taxed by the Israelite kings in the form of tithes from his vast produce. Much more harshly, Ibn Ezra suggests the Issacharites “lacked courage” and were thus assessed a draft-dodging fine or, to avoid conquest, they paid protection money to the surrounding powers. Ibn Ezra’s portrait of a rather emasculated Issachar appears to be inspired by our passage in Chronicles; if they were able to fight, why would Issachar not send soldiers to King David’s inauguration, like the other tribes? (Interestingly, Onkelos portrays Issachar in the very opposite light. Following another midrash, he says that Issachar achieved extraordinary military success against his enemies, turning them into “toiling serfs.”) For the Rashbam and Ibn Ezra, Issachar was never dependent on the financial support of any other tribe. In fact, the reality was just the opposite; by establishing a mostly self-serving economy, Issachar -- not Zebulun -- was in debt to his brothers. His books were regularly audited and he was forced to give up a substantial percentage of profits to the national treasury.

Moses’ two-word blessing to Issachar is even more mysterious than Jacob’s. How should we interpret a blessing of “rejoicing in tents”? The peshat (natural) approach, taken by several traditional commentaries, is straightforward and parallel to the previously cited explanations of Jacob’s blessing. Represented by tents, the Issacharites were shepherds and farmers, in contrast to the merchant-marine Zebulunites. Again, midrashic exegesis takes a different approach. The Sages read “tents” as a symbol of Torah study; recall that Jacob is also called a “dweller in tents” (Gen. 25:27). Like Jacob’s, Issachar’s “tents” were taken to mean “tents of Torah study,” i.e. batei midrash, financially maintained by Zebulun’s profits. One may be tempted to say that the midrashic approach supersedes the natural one, and that in this case the popular Issachar-Zebulun model is in perfect agreement with the midrash. But peshat and derash are both legitimate and religiously significant layers of biblical interpretation. I believe that the Sages did not preclude the idea of Issachar being blessed with agricultural fruitfulness; rather, they added the additional element of scholarship to the more obvious peshat interpretation. When we imagine Issachar, we may picture both.

One additional biblical reference to Issachar must be included in this discussion. From Deborah’s Song in the book of Judges, we get a view of Issachar’s character during a period of national crisis:

And Issachar’s chiefs were with Deborah;
As Barak, so was Issachar --
Rushing after him into the valley.
Among the clans of Reuben
Were great decisions of heart.
Why did you stay among the sheepfolds
And listen as they pipe for the flocks?
Among the clans of Reuben
Were great searchings of heart! (Judges 5:15-16)

Perhaps Ibn Ezra was correct and the Issacharites would have made poor soldiers. Still, when Barak and Deborah led Naphtali and Zebulun in battle against Sisera, Issachar enlisted voluntarily and served courageously. The neighboring tribe of Reuben, in contrast, sat out the war. The Reubenites themselves, of course, believed that their lofty contributions were necessary and sufficient: “Among the clans of Reuben were great decisions of heart,” Deborah sang with bitterness and sarcasm. After all, the Reubenites were the (self-appointed) thought leaders of Israel, who could count on thousands of their flock to attend spirited rallies at a moment’s notice. At their conferences, they had “great searchings of heart,” analyzing the issues of the day from all possible sides. But Reuben’s meetings and pronouncements were irrelevant to the public, produced no meaningful action, and only highlighted Reuben’s isolation; in the end, they “stayed among the sheepfolds,” (bein ha-mishpetayim; ironically, the very same expression Jacob used with respect to Issachar) remaining on the nation’s periphery. In an earlier era, Reuben had fought at the front lines with Joshua, to pay his debt for the patrimony Moses granted him east of the Jordan. But now, in the age of the Judges, the Reubenites were secure in remote villages far from the Canaanite armies, and they saw no personal gain from joining Barak’s war. Issachar, in stark contrast, remained empathetic to their brothers, and fought alongside them when needed.

Orthodox Judaism promotes neither a single religious archetype, nor an ideal “Torah personality,” nor a monolithic economic theory. Over the centuries, our religion has accommodated multiple paradigms for all aspects of life. There are many great and varied figures in our history and in our literature from whom we can draw inspiration. The Issachar most of us know -- the full-time scholar -- was never held up by our Torah or our Sages as the one and only model of authentic Jewish living. His image has taken on other, no less ideal, forms in biblical and rabbinic tradition, including that of a man who loves to work the soil under his feet and returns home daily soaked in the sweat of physical labor. That Issachar is no less a ben Torah than the one who has never left the beit midrash. With a sense of responsibility stretching beyond his own borders, the Issachar we have described is the one the Jewish people can look to for support and for leadership, on and off the battlefield. It is time to rethink our fixation on the two-dimensional Issachar, to the exclusion of all others. The others, on closer examination, may be even more inspiring.

The pace of technology grows so dizzyingday by day that it’s likely we’re now living more in the future than we are in the present.What were once mere imaginings of science fiction films -- the “futuristic” landscapes of Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis,the flame-belching towers of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the gravity-defying dream scapes of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, to name but a famous few-- have proven, in fact, to be visionary. They have become our actual homes, our daily workplaces, our shopping malls and amusement parks. Stepping out of the subway into the digital blitz of Times Square after dark, for example, we might feel much as though we werehurtling headlong into cyberspace itself. Doubtless, we already inhabit a world where, as one modern author has observed, “technology is visceral…pervasive…Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.” Standing herein the midst of this brilliant, hypnotic, infinitely distracting (and, one might argue, ultimately illusionary)21st century atmosphere, would any of us notice the unadorned glow of a Hanukkiyah, Hanukkah lamp?

I raise the question to make a simple point. As human beings, we are eminently fallible, always distractable. Rabbi Moses Isserles (the “Rema”),in a gloss on the Laws of Prayer (Hilchot Tefillah 101:1),clearly suggests as much when he questions whether we ought to repeat a section of the Shemoneh Esrei if our attention wandered when we recited it the first time.The Rema’sargument is straightforward.What’s to prevent us from being similarly distracted the second time around? Still,though as physical beings we are all of us prone to distraction, as spiritual beings we try to transcend. As Jews in particular, we try to develop a capacity to hone in on a more truthful spiritual realm beyond the often-illusory realm of distractions in the material world. And that is the metaphorical significance of the question about Hanukkah lights in Times Square.

As thinking Jews,with an abiding allegiance to Jewish ideas and ideals,we try to see beyond the big lights of the big city in order to discover a more permanent, a more honest beacon that shines true, no matter how hidden, no matter how small. As thoughtful beings, we come to recognize true worth in the quality of our experience not in its quantity. Perhaps that, too, is what the Rema above is getting at, cautioning us against mere repetition of a blessing without a concomitant unclouded concentration and a meaningful change in spiritual perspective.

In his essay“Maamar al ha’Emunah,”Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman wonders how the great Greek philosopher Aristotle – to whom the Rambam attributed genius just below the level of ru’ach ha’kodesh and nevuah, divine spirit and prophecy – could somehow, despite his great intellect, fail to see past the illusions of the material world. Rav Wasserman concludes that Aristotle’s failing was an overriding attraction to the very physical olam ha’zeh and a consequent reluctance to turn away from its many seductive attractions.

Among the many heirs to Aristotle,committed to the continued transmission of Greek thought and practices known as Hellenism, were the Seleucid Syrians, whose kingdom was established from a slice of the divided empire of Alexander the Great, himself a world conqueror tutored first-hand by Aristotle. It is against these Seleucid Greeks that the warrior Maccabees fought long and hard, their ultimate spiritual victory coalescing into the very essence of the Hanukkah holiday. If we examine the decrees issued against the Jews of the Seleucid Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes – as traditionally described in the discussion of Hanukkah by the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch (139:1) – we find the inevitable battle lines of Hellenism versus Judaism being drawn. Unsurprisingly, Antiochus sought to annul the Covenant between Israel and its Lord, “And Antiochus decreed prohibitions against the Jews, forbidding them to study and practice their Torah Laws.” The ancient extra-canonical Scroll of Antiochus, Megillat Antiochus,specifies (in verse 11) three gezerot, prohibitions, in particular. The enemy king’s designs were to uproot and eradicate the practice of a) Shabbat, b) Rosh Chodesh, and c) Brit Milah.

What makes this precise choice of prohibitions so pointed, in light of the above discussion, is the symbolic spiritual value they possess. First, the light of the Shabbat candles is analogous to the light of the Temple Menorah rededicated by the Maccabees; indeed, the Talmud itself (Shabbat 21a) introduces this analogy between Shabbat and Hanukkah candles in launching its locus classicus discussion of the Hanukkah holiday. Next, the so-to-speak “rekindled” light of the moon at Rosh Chodeshi s analogous to the renewal of the Menorah’s light after a period of spiritual darkness.Finally, the eight days of Brit Milah are analogous to the Talmud’s description of a tiny cruse of pure oil that, nonetheless, burned by divine miracle for eight days, exemplifying the transcendence of quality over quantity.

This theme of quality versus quantityi s reflected again in the Hanukkah “Al haNissim” prayer, which speaks of“the strong defeated by the assumed-to-be-weak,the many defeated by anacknowledged few.” The small burning “wicks” of Judaism outshone the bright lights of the imperial force of the Syrian army, the spiritual light of the Temple Menorah here dispelled the illusory darkness of the physical, earthbound Seleucid empire indebted in so many ways to Aristotle and Alexander. Despite the variety of traditional and ethnic culinary delights that have come to be associated with the “feast of lights,” there is no chiyuv of seudat mitzvah attached to Hanukkah, no obligatory festive spread. In celebrating the holiday, we acknowledge Israel’s rescue from spiritual annihilation. By contrast, because of the threat of physical annihilation that faced the Jews at the first Purim,we indeed rejoice n that holiday with the mitzvah of a substantive physical meal.

By publicizing the true meaning of Hanukkah, by placing the Hanukkiyah in the public eye – even in Times Square – we appeal to all humankind, Jew and non-Jew alike, to come and share, as an agudah achat,in the spiritual insights the Hanukkah lights afford us. The Talmud itself (Shabbat 21b) affirms this.Beit Shammai, the School of Shammai,maintains that we kindle the Hanukkah lights “keneged pri ha’chag.” The suggestion is that the lights correspond to the mussaf sacrifices of Sukkot that were brought specifically in consideration of the seventy gentile nations, meant to beseech Divine protection of the shivim umot ha’olam as our colleagues and compeers on this earth.

Rabbeinu Bachya ben Asher quotes a midrashic parable on the Torah portion of Beha’alotcha. A king once asked a beloved subject to prepare his home for a royal visit. Rather than flushing with pride, the poor fellow grew mortified. How could he host in his humble cottage a king accustomed to glorious gifts, golden goblets, and bountiful banquets at court?When the king arrived, resplendent in his retinue, the subject nervously fumbled to hide in shame the simple meal he had prepared. Yet, the king declared, “For love of you, my humble servant, I prefer this simple, heartfelt offering to all the artificial trappings my palace provides.”

The lights of Hanukkah are the Jewish nation’s simple offering for all the world to wonder at and reflect upon. They are a gift to God from the heart and soul of the People of Israel. Is it any wonder that the Master of the Universe, Who created at will the blazing sun, the bright moon, the luminous stars and galaxies, nonetheless, like the king in Rabbeinu Bahya’s parable,prefers our tiny, flickering lights of the Hanukkiyah which continue to outshine, from the time of the Maccabees to this very day, the brightest lights and biggest cities of history’s greatest empires.

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We thank all those who shared their ideas on how to make Orthodox synagogues more meaningful. We've chosen SEVEN winners. Their suggestions can help our synagogues and communities be stronger, more creative, more engaging. The winning essays are from Pam Ehrenkranz (Stamford, Connecticut); Yael Kassorla (Atlanta, Georgia); Dr. Alan Krinsky (Providence, Rhode Island); Rabbi Arnold Samlan (West Hempstead, New York); Barbara Mendes (Los Angeles, California); Leonard Stein (Beer Sheva, Israel); and Hinda Bramnick (Boca Raton, Florida).

We hope that you discuss these suggestions among friends and congregants.

Let us work together for an intellectually vibrant, compassionate and inclusive Orthodox Judaism.

Enhancing the Role of Women

By

Pam Ehrenkranz (Stamford, Connecticut)

I keep asking Orthodox rabbis, “How would Shabbat morning services be any different if every woman in the community stayed home?” Interestingly, the responses are uniform: “We would feel bad, but in practice, nothing would change.”

Being told that your presence is irrelevant will ultimately have an effect. It did on me. I began to wonder: If I am not necessary, and I can pray alone, and many rabbis believe that I have no obligation to be at communal prayer, why go? Why get dressed, walk in the freezing cold or the unbearable heat, to a place, where, for all intents and purposes, my presence is superfluous?

To be clear, I am observant and respectful of traditional approaches to halacha. I am also respectful of innovative, as well as simple, ways to be more inclusive, to make women relevant, without crossing the boundaries of halacha. Some of those ways are already being implemented in minyanim around the world and the Modern Orthodox world needs to broaden the discussion about women and the synagogue.

Granted, many women are quite happy to be shul spectators;& o are many men. Yet everything an organization does speaks about its values, right down to how the phone is answered. As of now, we are not only signaling that women do not count in a minyan, but that they don’t count at all. So here are some thoughts about what we might institute as a way of saying that women are very much counted in the community; that their scholarship is admired; that their presence is critical. None of these concepts are new in the marketplace of ideas; they have been talked and written about in so many places that I cannot credit them to anyone in particular, only to a growing climate of opinion:

1. Don’t start davening until 10 men and at least 2 women are present. At partnership minyanim, it is often the case that the group waits for both ten men and ten women. For our purposes, it is not the critical mass that is at issue—it is the message that without women, we do not constitute a Kehillah.

2. Invite women scholars to deliver divreitorah from the bimah and to be scholars in residence. Thanks to places like Drisha, Nishmat, Matan, Pardes, and Yeshiva University’s graduate programs for women, we have a dynamic group of women who are inspirational, knowledgeable and worthy of our attention.

3. Have a woman read the prayer for the Agunah. The agunah issue needs to be on the minds of the congregation and this is an appropriate way to accomplish that.

4. Offer equal education for boys and girls. In places where the boys are learning separately, the girls’ curriculum should be the same. There is no danger in teaching girls to leyn. Hopefully, they will be able to join women’s tefillah groups if they want to, or help their children in the future, when they learn for their own bar and bat mitzvahs. To borrow a slogan, educated Jews are our best customers. They come back, they engage, they lead and they are the future.

5. Eliminate the language of "women's" and "men's" learning. It's adult learning and like wine and a good meal, it is better when it's shared.

6. Encourage women to fill leadership roles in the synagogue. As women are no longer illiterate, they can no longer be lumped into the category of slave or minor when it comes to education, status and ability. It is no longer reasonable to bar them from the boardroom. It would seem to reason that if a woman can make decisions as president of an Ivy League university, a judge, or a surgeon, she can handle the synagogue board meetings.

7. Invite new moms to recite BirkatHagomel in their own voices.

8. Welcome and promote women’s tefillah groups. Many have been meeting for over thirty years, some inside and some outside of synagogues. It not only promotes Jewish literacy, it helps find a way to include young girls and women actively in the service.

So to the rabbis who have the power to make changes in their shuls, I say, it is not enough to just feel bad about women staying home from shul. Take a step and welcome women in.

Using New Technologies for Teaching and Learning Torah

By

Yael Kassorla (Atlanta, Georgia)

There are two conflicting pressures for the religious Jew in today’s society: the need to deeply connect with Hashem, and the lack of time to do so.

Although most of the emphasis has been on getting people through the door for Minyanim and other synagogue-centric events, I think it is also important to connect with members through electronic means as well.

I know how important a religious Jewish discussion group was to me when I needed to more deeply understand the parasha or some issue of halacha; but unfortunately, those discussion groups are not usually synagogue affiliated. Instead, they are loose affiliations of every type of observance level and minhag, which can become both frustrating and confusing. We need to contain this enthusiasm for learning within our own Kehillah.

Our rabbis and lay-people need to stop using the internet as a podium, and start using it as a point of discussion, bringing the probing questions of the study-hall to everyone with access to a computer or smart phone.

Through the use of a moderated Facebook page, for example, or a Diigo<http://www.diigo.com>&nbsp; group (which affords the ability to not only bookmark websites, but highlight and comment upon them) synagogue-affiliated rabbis can conduct asynchronous discussion weekly with groups of synagogue members who find themselves unable to attend the usual lunch-and-learn or study sessions with the rabbi, but who hunger for intellectual stimulation and deeper understanding of Torah and Talmud.

Then, instead of technology working to alienate our membership, technology can, instead, cement them. Those who feel disconnected can reconnect and, when they do get back through those synagogue doors, they can feel like they haven’t really been away.

It’s time to stop ignoring the internet and start embracing it. Our rabbis must be educated in this new medium in order to reach, especially, our youth and young adults.

Synagogue Citizenship

by

Alan Krinsky (Providence, Rhode Island)

A common lament heard during the last decade or two draws attention to the commoditization of virtually all aspects of our lives. This process has infiltrated education and healthcare, despite the fact that knowledge and health are, in some regards, priceless values. And such consumerism has even reached religion.

Following the example of “Cafeteria Catholicism,” many people now view their religious lives from a consumer perspective: I purchase what meets my needs and discard the rest. This trend has even impacted Modern Orthodox synagogues, where commitment to minyan and behavior in synagogue can be lax.

We require a different model—not consumerism, but rather something akin to citizenship. We ought to reconceptualize our very notion of synagogue membership. Members should not be seen as consumers, whose needs and desires must be satisfied. Instead, as with citizenship, membership should be experienced as a privilege with important responsibilities, with the synagogue community as a sort of polity in which members have a stake.

In many Hareidi synagogues, meaningfulness is evident. Yet it is the meaningfulness neither of consumers nor citizens, but rather of subjects. And although the Modern Orthodox too recognize that, ultimately, we are servants of the Holy One, this need not be reflected in an apparent conformity and obeisance to an unchallengeable Daat Torah reminiscent of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.

By contrast, we ought to build places of meaning with a more engaged, activist bent, where new people are given citizenship — not membership — applications and welcomed as citizens, not merely members. If we cater to and treat our members as consumers because we fear them leaving, then we will get consumers; but if we raise our expectations and ask our members to be committed citizens, we will find such citizens and together build attractive and meaningful institutions.

Rethinking the Modern Orthodox Synagogue Model

by

Rabbi Arnold Samlan (West Hempstead, New York)

·Rabbinic Leadership – Rabbis must move from being sole authorities to being facilitators, connecting pods of knowledge and knowledge holders.

·Women’s Contributions - Orthodox synagogues that do not allow women to lead or speak publicly lose out on their knowledge, leadership and insights. Orthodox synagogues must fully benefit from the potential contributions of women. The commitment, through concrete actions, must permeate Orthodox Jewish communities everywhere.

·Relevance - Orthodox synagogues’ values must integrate into the real lives of their members. The synagogue must communicate the values that add to the broader society in which its members live, and empower its members to bring those values to bear on a multi-cultural, democratic society.

·Increasing meaningful access - It's time for every Orthodox synagogues to be fully handicapped accessible (including the bima). Synagogues need new siddurim that have modern translations, do away with inexplicable Kabbalistic ramblings, and challenge pray-ers to explore prayers’ meanings rather than spoon feeding pre-digested answers. Rabbis and those who teach Torah have to be honest and open to the fluidity of traditional practice and beliefs that has been true throughout Jewish history, and allow openness to acceptable alternatives in so many areas of halacha and practice.

·Language - Orthodox synagogues must stop, and encourage members to stop, using the word "religious" to equal "traditionally observant" or "Orthodox." I have friends in each Jewish movement (as well as those outside of movements) who are deeply religious. Spiritual superiority complexes do not have a place today

·Expand chesed –Orthodox synagogues should lead in bringing chesed to the world. Synagogues should work in food kitchens, volunteer in homeless shelters, run blood drives.

·Move towards spirituality - Synagogues need to help Jews to recognize the connection between the practice, services, and broader spiritual goals.

Orthodox Synagogues Need Leaders of Women

by

Barbara Mendes (Los Angeles, California)

Women are half the Jewish people. In today's congregations, the women in attendance may be wage-earners in need of blessings for success . Today's full-time Moms are educated and sophisticated members of society. Women function on the highest levels of the global society in which we live. Can't we harness more of their power by making the synagogue a place that stimulates and inspires them without insulting their sense of worth?

Women who are intellectually and spiritually engaged in prayer services enrich a congregation with power and spirit.

I suggest creating a post called Rosh ha Nashim, or Eim ha Nashim, or some Hebrew title designating the Leader of Women. It should be a post of honor. The Leader of Women would be available to guide newcomers who need help, and would inspire and strengthen all the women.  The Leader of Women would know which women need special blessings. She would know which members of the congregation need special help. How would she know? Women communicate with one another, and become aware of issues in a natural way.

Modern women can fall in love with our beautiful prayer services. Devotion and attention to prayer is one of the great powers of Judaism; I believe the women of today's world have as much need for these magical prayers as do men. Having a leader of their own will inspire and guide women to be more engaged in communal prayer, putting mystic rewards in their reach. I am the first to see that women don't need the communal prayers the way men do, but this call was for ways to strengthen the Orthodox Synagogue, so I am addressing the prayer services held in that setting.

Ha KadoshBarukh Hu looks and sits on both sides of the mehitzah. The Holy One sees the power and passion on the women's side. Only Ha KadoshBarukh Hu could have created the human trajectory which led to the powerful women of today's world.

I believe Orthodox women would be empowered, strengthened, educated, and inspired by having a leader of their own. I believe that inspired women strengthen and inspire the congregation, even if they are not counted in the minyan. The very fact that it's not an endless obligation for them can add zest and excitement to women's participation in formal prayer services.

Let us join forces to call out to God. Let a Leader of Women be appointed to focus and harness the spiritual strength of women, which in turn will strengthen the entire congregation.

Making Synagogue Real

By

Leonard Stein (Beer Sheva, Israel)

If the creative voice of the Jewish people flourishes, Orthodox synagogues will become more meaningful and attractive.

Here's a simple method to avoid prayer as a heavy burden: slow down. A prayer leader whoraces through an Amidah does not allow the community to reach out to their Creator. Fast praying is a developed habit. If the synagogue changes the rate of words spoken to even a normal speaking pace, the community will strengthen. Creativity in prayer occurs not only when finding ourselves praying the Amidah honestly, but when we are given the room to provide our own supplications. It doesn't have to take an hour in the fashion of the early sages; even 10 minutes of prayer with a personal supplication will affect the meaning of the synagogue.

Furthermore, a synagogue should hear their members' voices. Allow anyone, including women, the opportunity to give a devarTorah on Friday night. People who give divrei Torah know how enriching it feels to study the parashah, struggle through contradictions, and search the soul for a personal ?idush. Why not give this opportunity to the folk? Signing up for this week's 5 minute devar Torah, which necessitates learning and public speaking, will awaken everyone. A synagogue should sign people up to read a portion of the week's parashah. What was once common practice has been relegated to the hazan. Those who haven't learned or forgot the ta’amim (trop) can learn from volunteers, and Torah will literally flow from the mouths of the people each week.

Offer creative learning opportunities that break stereotypes. How about learning piyutim on Tuesdays or learning agricultural halakhot through planting the synagogue's organic garden? Tying the passions of this generation with tradition has always strengthened a community.

When such creative outlets open, more people will love going to synagogue.

Making Orthodox Synagogues More Meaningful

By

Hinda Bramnick (Boca Raton, Florida)

Many people perceive that Orthodoxy is turning to the right. Those on the right feel that staying right of center is only way that traditional Judaism will survive.  Jews in the center or left of center are becoming demoralized.

The question of how to make Orthodox shuls more meaningful can be answered by examining how things are done in Boca Raton, Florida. The Boca Raton Synagogue has employed very ordinary tactics to get to where it currently is.

There are three basic components that make a synagogue the kind of place that congregants want to attend. They are diversity, expansion, and pride.

Boca Raton Synagogue (BRS) has been consistently growing its membership for over 20 years. Our rabbi proposed that Orthodox ideologies and practices could be expanded to meet the needs of the community.  His motto was “today’s drivers are tomorrow’s walkers”.  That forethought not only opened the doors to prospective congregants, but it succeeded in changing the mentality of the frum community.

Diversity became apparent when smaller groups within the congregation asked for their own minyan, and it was granted to them. Women asked for inclusiveness in education and religious rites.  Some were permitted immediately, such as Hakafot. Educational opportunities for women to learn and teach were also embraced.  We have not yet arrived at full access for women in religious life, but it is a work in progress.

Expansion of our membership became the bi-product of our diversity. We became a multi-cultural shul.  We were encouraged from the pulpit to welcome our fellow Jews who had not experienced a spiritual way of life. It had the effect of making us more tolerant of each other.

We became a proud congregation.  When a new rabbi was appointed, we knew that his big tent philosophy would continue to benefit us.

We are an evolving congregation, ever in a state of change. If we dialogue with our rabbis and express our wishes for a more vibrant Jewish experience we can affect the shifts we would like to see in our synagogues.  

Petitional prayer, the parts of prayer when we ask for things, plays a central role in Judaism. Of the 19 blessings in the Amidah, the centerpiece of the Jewish prayer, 13 of them are requests.

The question on the minds of many people who pray is: Does it work? It is, after all, hard to see direct results from the requests made in prayer. This reality results in people not praying or not taking prayer seriously.

Some understand the ability for prayer to change our fate as miraculous. Simply put by Ramban, Nachmanides, “All of our tefillot are miracles and wonders—but they lack overt changes in the nature of the world.” According to Nachmanides, each and every time prayer works, a miracle has occurred—nature has changed. We are not always able to recognize it. This is a very important approach; it is the approach of hope. We should never give up on the possibility that God will step in.

Others have accepted the power of petitionary prayer, but look at it a bit differently.
Have you ever gone whitewater rafting? If you have, you know that you will never be able to turn your raft around and paddle upstream—the current is simply too strong. The challenge of whitewater rafting is to avoid capsizing, to avoid the rocks (see Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, Geologist of the Soul, 91–92).

The same goes for prayer. Some will argue, like Nachmanides, that we can turn the raft around and change the course of nature. Others disagree; they say that although prayer cannot turn the raft around, it can help avoid the rocks. It can make someone’s illness more bearable and may even be able to extend life. Ultimately, though, one cannot fully control the course of the raft.

Both of these approaches accept the notion that prayer can actually change an expected outcome—either entirely or partially. For many, these opinions pose a theological problem. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks comments on one aspect of the challenge of prayer:

Let us suppose I pray for something. Either it is good that this happens, or it is not. If it is, then God does not need my prayer to make it happen. He will make it happen anyway because it is good and God is good. If it isn’t good, then God will not bring it about, however hard I pray. The proof is none other than Moses. When Moses prayed for God to forgive the Israelites, God forgave them because God forgives. But when he prayed that he, Moses, be allowed to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land, God did not grant him his request. He told him to stop praying. It was not going to happen however hard or long Moses prayed. So prayer does not change God’s mind in any simple sense. (http://www.rabbisacks.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Letters-to-the-Next-Generation-2-Reflections-on-Jewish-Life.pdf)

Rabbi Yosef Albo notes that our understanding of prayer is a very high-stakes matter:

The reason which leads men to doubt the efficacy of prayer is the same as that which leads them to deny God’s knowledge. Their argument is as follows: Either God has determined that a given person shall receive a given benefit or he has not so determined. If he has determined, there is no need of prayer; and if he is not determined, how can prayer avail to change God’s will that he should now determined to benefit the person when he had not so determined before? For this reason...they say that prayer does not avail to enable one to receive a benefit or to be saved from evil which has been decreed against him. (Sefer HaIkkarim, Part IV:18)

I’d like to suggest another way of looking at prayer—a reinterpretation of the petitions we say, in the hope of helping people find meaning in Jewish prayer.
Supplicatory prayer can be an engine to motivate. By paying attention to all of the requests we make in the Amidah, we quickly realize that the world as we know it is less than ideal. The result is that we say to ourselves, this is not the world as I wish it to be.
The initial reaction to seeing the world this way is to turn to God and say: “I don’t want a world of war; rather, I want world peace. I don’t want a world of sickness; rather, I want to world of health. I do not want unredeemed world....”

This is where our tradition puts us in the driver’s seat. If the requests we make are for the benefit of the world and we see the world as less than good, we have a responsibility to make those things happen. Prayer is turned from a moment of vulnerability into a call for action.

When the rabbis composed petitionary prayer, they were giving us just the first step, the ability to articulate what the world should be like. The next step, the fulfillment of prayer, is our responsibility. The multitude of requests is meant, to serve as a shock to our system as the person praying realizes that while so much time has been spent pointing out particular needs ...might there be anything more that we can do?
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik notes this in “Redemption, Prayer and Talmud Torah,” where he writes:

Prayer enlightens man about his needs. ...It teaches him how to behold the vision and how to strive in order to realize this vision, when to be satisfied with what one possesses, when to reach out for more. In a word, man finds his need -awareness, himself in prayer. Of course, the very instant he finds himself, he becomes a redeemed being.

I think, however, that Rabbi Soloveitchik stops short of full redemption as he claims that a person is redeemed when he is able to form words and cry out to God. Rabbi Soloveitchik’s model is the Israelite’s period of slavery in Egypt. At first there was silence (absence of need awareness), then a voice, and then a word—the birth of prayer (Exodus 2:23–24).

The problem with using this as the model of prayer is that it comes from a time when the full expression of human dignity—individual self determination—was not possible. All the Israelites could hope for was divine intervention. On the other hand, in times when freedom does exist, then the ultimate act of redemption is taking action. Full redemption is symbolized by a person’s freedom to take responsibility for his or herself.
A biblical model that fits this paradigm is the story of Esther and Mordechai. The entire Purim story is one of human responsibility. The moment Esther pays an unannounced visit to Ahashveirosh is the exact moment she steps up to take the fate of the Jewish people into her hands.

This approach helps explain the connection between prayer and sacrifice. The animal offering of Temple days represented the owner of the sacrifice who sacrificed himself up to God. So it is with prayer, today’s stand-in for the sacrifices. Just as the animal sacrifices in the times of the Temple were brought with the realization that owner was giving of himself, prayer must also be offered with the commitment on the part of the “owner” of the prayer, to give of himself—not as an act of self surrender but by taking responsibility for the contents of the requests.

Although Rabbi Soloveitchik believes that the greatest act of fidelity to God is the realization of helplessness, this new focus sees taking responsibility and committing to act as the ultimate measure of sacrifice—of giving to God. In this way, independence and self-sacrifice go hand in hand.

Rabbi Daniel Landes explains,

Each of the middle petitionary blessings has ethical consequences for us who pray it. Since we ask God to do these things, it must be in God’s nature to do them; and since we are made in God’s image, it must be in our nature also to do them, when we act in a Godly way. The middle blessings are, therefore, more than requests we make of God. They are equally a catalogue of our own responsibilities. Knowledge for instance, refers to Talmud Torah, Torah study, one of the greatest mitzvot because it brings all others in its wake. (My People's Prayer Book, Vol. 2: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries—The Amidah, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman (Editor), 101)

Here is one example regarding the blessing of Barekh alenu et haShana haZot—Bless us this year:

Understood traditionally in the broader sense of a prayer for parnasah, an adequate livelihood, this blessing obliges us to provide others with the ability to provide for themselves. We are to help them find employment, arrange funding to help them establish businesses, provide them with loans or gifts, and welcome them in to partnerships in our own enterprises….” (My People's Prayer Book, Vol. 2: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries—The Amidah, by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman (Editor), 120)

If we are more sympathetic, more committed to study, and more devoted to peace and repentance after we pray, then prayer does work.

Now, we can also understand one of the most enigmatic prayer of the Ashkenazic High Holiday liturgy. U’teshuvah u’tefillah u’tsedakah ma’avirin et ro’ah haGezerah—repentance, prayer, and charity remove the evil decree. Many are uncomfortable with this prayer, and many reinterpretations are offered to resolve any discomfort. But with our interpretation of prayer, we can take it literally. These actions do remove the evil decrees, because they ignite us to act. We have the ability and obligation to remove misery from the world. It is our prayer (and repentance and recognition of the need for charity) that energizes us, not just to complain, but to act in such a way that changes the world for the better.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel highlights the revolution that prayer is supposed to bring:

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.” (Susannah Heschel (ed.), "On Prayer," Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 262.)

Lately, a strange feeling has gotten hold of me. I am not yet able to fully articulate it, but something tells me that God is relocating to a different residence. He has hired a moving company, and they are at this time loading all His furniture and possessions into a van and awaiting His instructions as to the destination. The truth is He’s been thinking about moving for a long time but has not yet done so because we, in our ignorance, are still busy visiting His old home, completely blind to the fact that the curtains have been taken down, most of His furniture has already been removed, and He is standing in the doorway, dressed in His jacket and ready to go. He nevertheless listens to us, smiling and feeling sorry for us that in our utter blindness we still believe we are sitting comfortably in His living room, chatting, and having coffee with Him, while in fact He is sitting on the edge of His chair, gazing longingly at the door, dreaming of His new home.

Synagogues—whether Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform—are no longer His primary residence. Surely some of the worshippers are pious people who try to communicate with their Creator, but overall, the majority of these places have become religiously sterile and spiritually empty. So God is moving to unconventional minyanim and places such as Israeli cafes, debating clubs, community centers, unaffiliated religious gatherings, and atypical batei midrash. The reason is obvious. In some of those places people are actually looking for Him. And that is what He loves; not those who have already found Him and take Him for granted. He is moving in with the young people who have a sense that He is there but cannot yet find Him. It gives Him a thrill. In some of these cafes He encounters young men sporting ponytails, without kippot, but with tzitziyot hanging out of their T-shirts, praying in their own words, attempting to find Him. In secular yeshivot, He meets women in trousers and mini-skirts who are earnestly arguing about what it means to be Jewish and who kiss mezuzot when they enter a fashion show. Then there are those who, to His delight, are keen on putting on tefillin once in a while and do this with great excitement; or who enthusiastically light Shabbat candles Friday night and can get into a serious discussion about Buddhism and how to combine some of its wisdom with Kabbalah and incorporate it into Jewish practice.

No, they don’t do so because it is tradition, or nostalgia, as their grandparents did, but because they sincerely want to connect, to grow and become better, deeper, and more authentic Jews—but at their own pace and without being told by others what they ought to do. They won’t go for the conventional outreach programs, which try to indoctrinate them and are often terribly simplistic. No, they strive to come closer because of an enormous urge and inner explosion of their neshamot. No better place for God to be, even if these attempts may not always achieve the correct goals and are sometimes misdirected.

At these unconventional sites, theological discourses take place over a glass of beer, and the participants talk deep into the night because they can’t get enough of this great stuff called Judaism. Many of these people want to study God and understand why He created the world and what the meaning of life is all about. What is the human condition? What is a religious experience? How do we confront death? What is the meaning of halakha? What are we Jews doing here in this strange universe? They realize that life becomes more and more perplexing, and these questions are therefore of radical importance. These are, after all, eternal issues. Who wants to live a life that passes by unnoticed? It is in this mysterious stratosphere that God loves to dwell. He can’t get enough of it.

Regrettably, His interest wavers when He enters conventional synagogues. He finds little excitement there. Many of His worshippers seem to go through the motions, activate their automatic pilot, do what they are told, say the words in the prayer book, and go home to make Kiddush. Few are asking questions on how to relate to God, why they are Jewish, or what their lives really are all about. Many do not want to be confronted with these nasty issues. They only disturb their peace of mind. A nice, conventional devar Torah is good enough. After all, everything has already been discussed and resolved. Regular synagogue visitors only speak to Him when they need Him, but almost nobody ever speaks about Him or hears Him when He calls for help in pursuing the purpose of His creation.

So God is moving to more interesting places. He laughs when He thinks of the old slogan, “God is dead.” It was a childhood disease. He knows we learned our lesson. It is too easy, too simplistic, and has not solved anything. He knows that He has not yet been replaced with something better. Oh yes, there are still run-of-the-mill scientists who believe that they have it all worked out. Some neurologists sincerely believe that “we are our brains” and that our thinking is nothing more than sensory activity. They seem to believe that one can find the essence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by analyzing the ink with which the composer wrote this masterpiece. There are even Nobel Prize winners who believe that we will soon enter God’s mind and know it all, no longer needing Him. They are like the man who searches for his watch in the middle of the night. When asked why he is looking under the street lamp, if he lost his watch a block away, he answers: “This is the only place where I can see anything.” These scientists have still not realized that there are more things, on earth and in heaven, than their research will ever grasp. They have convinced themselves that they are merely objective spectators and have not yet understood that they themselves are actors in the mysterious drama of what is called life.

And God simply winks. During the duration of this long-term disease beginning in the nineteenth century, antibodies have been developing to fight against the denial of His very being. Although atheism is still alive and kicking, many have become immune to all these simplistic ideas. Over the years, more and more antitoxins have accumulated, and we are now stunned by the fact that He, after all, may indeed be in our midst. Suddenly, an outdated hypothesis has come to life again. God is a real possibility, and we had better become aware of that.

But here’s the catch: While the religious establishment is now shouting from the rooftops “We told you so,” it has not yet grasped that this is completely untrue. The discovery of God did not happen because of conventional religion but in spite of it.

The truth is that the great shift concerning God took place far away from the official religious establishment. It is in fact a miracle that some people continued believing in God while religion often did everything to make this impossible. For centuries the church blundered time after time. Since the days when Galileo proved the Church wrong, it was constantly forced to change its position. And even then it did so reluctantly. The enormous loss of prestige that religion suffered because of it is beyond description. God was pushed into the corner. Not because He was not there, but because He was constantly misrepresented by people who spoke in His name. Since the Renaissance, many other great minds have moved the world forward; and although several may have missed the boat, a large number of them introduced radical new perspectives of the greatest importance. Yet, the Church’s only response was to fight them tooth and nail until, out of utter necessity, when all its arguments had run out, it had to succumb and apologize once again for its mistakes. Time and again, religion lagged behind in sharing the victory of new scientific and philosophical insights. Ironically, long before the Church officially sanctioned these new discoveries, they were already part and parcel of the new world. As always, the imprimatur came too late.

Thus, religion paid a heavy price. Its territory became smaller and smaller. The constant need for capitulation made many people leave the world of religion and opt for the secular approach. And the story is not over yet. Scientists are now discussing the possibility of creating life forms in the laboratory that do not depend on DNA to survive and evolve. In all likelihood, several religious leaders will fight this again, with force and ferocity, and will probably have to succumb once more when they can no longer deny the hard facts of science.

But what was happening in the Jewish religious world? Although it cannot be denied that Judaism, too, got caught up in all these debates, and quite a few staunch traditionalists were not much better than some of the church fathers, the overall situation within Judaism was much more receptive to scientific developments. Whereas the Church declared in one authoritative voice— often the synod— that these new scientific discoveries were outright heresy, such pronouncements never took place in the synagogue. This is because Judaism is so different from other religions. Positions of unconditional belief were never its main concern. They were always debated, but never finalized, as was the case with the Church. What kept Judaism busy was the question of how to live one’s life while living in the presence of God and humanity, as expressed in the all-encompassing halakhic literature. Because of that, it did not see scientific discoveries as much of a challenge. There was also a strong feeling that scientific progress was a God-given blessing. The greatest Jewish religious thinker of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, was even prepared to give up on the concept of creation ex nihilo if it would be proven untrue. [1] Although he was attacked for some of these radical and enlightened ideas, the general attitude was: Let science do its thing, and if we were wrong in the past because we relied on the science of those days, we will now rectify our position. Even when the Talmud made scientific statements, many—although certainly not all—understood them to be the result of scientific knowledge of the day, and not sacrosanct. And even when these debates became more intensive, it was never argued that opposing views should be absolutely silenced. There was no final authority in matters of belief, no Jewish synod. At the same time, many sages warned against making science into an idol that is all-knowing and can solve life’s riddles.

Louis Kronenberger notes that

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all…of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.[2]

But today all this has changed. In many Orthodox circles, Judaism’s beliefs have become more holy than the pope. Suddenly, there is an attempt to outdo old-fashioned Catholicism; to insist that the world is actually nearly 5,800 years old; that the creation chapter must be taken literally; that the seven days of creation consisted of twenty-four hours each and not one minute more; that there is no foundation to the theory of evolution; and that the Talmud’s scientific observations came straight from Sinai. That this happened in the past, when there was limited scientific knowledge, is understandable; but that such claims are still made today is downright embarrassing. It makes us blush. We can laugh about it only because the hopelessness of some of these ideas has already passed the point of being disputable. They have faded into flickering embers soon to be extinguished.

Surely it could be argued that possibly science will change its mind. But if the core beliefs of Judaism are not undermined (and they are not!), and as long as there is no indication that science will change its mind in the near future, there is no need to reject these scientific positions. And let us never forget that it is not even completely clear what these core beliefs are! So why fight modern science? [3]

The incredible damage done by doing so is beyond description. It makes Judaism laughable and, in the eyes of many intelligent people, completely outmoded. It makes it impossible to inspire many searching souls who know what science teaches us. If not for this mistaken understanding of Judaism, many people would not have left the fold and could actually have enjoyed Judaism as a major force in their lives.

And it is here that many of us, including myself, are at fault. We blame the Synagogue for this failure, as we blamed the Church hundreds of years ago. Many of us have said, “Judaism has failed”; “It is outdated”; “I am getting out.” But such statements are as unfair as they are illogical. Judaism is not an institution external to us, which one can abandon as one quits a hockey club. We are the Synagogue, and we are Judaism. When Galileo revolutionized our view concerning the solar system, it was not only the Church that failed; we all failed. Those who from the perspective of Galileo claim that the Church was backward are reasoning post factum.

We must realize that although Judaism consists of core beliefs and values that are eternal and divine, it is also the product of the culture during which time it developed. That, too, is part of God’s plan and has a higher purpose. And when history moves on and God reveals new knowledge, the purpose is to incorporate that into our thinking and religious experience. Ignoring this is silencing God’s voice.

According to Alfred North Whitehead,

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.[4]

That is why God is relocating. He doesn’t want to live in a place where His ongoing creation is unappreciated and even denied.

We have replaced God with prayers, no longer realizing to Whom we are praying. We even use halakha as an escape from experiencing Him. We are so busy with creating halakhic problems, and so completely absorbed by trying to solve them, that we are unaware of our hiding behind this practice so as not to deal with His existence. In many ways this is understandable. Since the days of the Holocaust, we have refused to confront the problem of His existence due to the enormity of the evil, which He allowed to happen. So we threw ourselves into halakha to escape the question. But although the problem of God’s involvement in the Holocaust will probably never be solved, we must realize that the purpose of halakha is to have an encounter with Him, not just with the halakha. Halakha is the channel through which we can reach Him, not just laws to live by.

Notwithstanding the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, we must return to God. It’s high time we realize that His being is of a total different nature than we have ever imagined. God can only be understood in a way that is similar to the relationship between a computer hard disk and what you see on the screen. What you see on the screen is totally different from what is inscribed in the hard disk. You can examine the inside of the disk using the most powerful microscope, but you will see nothing even slightly resembling pictures, colors, or words. We are mistaken when we picture God based on the world screen. In no way does it reveal the actual contents of the hard disk, God Himself. All we know is that God’s ways—which we see only through the external sense of sight—is somehow related to the disk. The problem is that we believe we can have a good look at God by watching the screen. But we haven’t the slightest clue of what is actually going on in the disk. The Holocaust will almost certainly remain an enigma, but it can never deny the divine disk.[5]

It is in those who are still uncomfortable with God that new insights about Him are formed. And it will be in those uneasy environments that Judaism will be rediscovered and developed. The need for religious transcendence, and for the spiritual thread that keeps many young people on their toes, is enormous. Numerous secular people are joining a new category of spiritual theologians. Matters of weltanschauung are pivotal to many secular Jews now. The problem is that for them, and for the religious, the Torah is transmitted on a wavelength that is out of range of their spiritual transistors’ frequency.

Yes, we turn on the radio, but we hear strange noises and unusual static. There is serious transmission failure. We are no longer sure where the pipelines are. God has relocated.

In the world of physics, matters are becoming increasingly hazy. Our brains are penetrating places where well-established notions, such as matter and substance, have evaporated. They have been transformed to puzzling phenomena. They have moved, and God has moved with them. Science is becoming intangible, and it’s happening at a speed that we can’t keep up with. It puts us in a difficult position and causes us anxiety. We are all living in exile, within a mystical landscape. Those who are aware of this are alive; those who are not have left this world unwittingly.

The question is whether we move our synagogues to where God is now dwelling. Will we, the religious, live up to the expectations of the young people in cafes and discussions groups who have preceded us? Will we apologize to them and join in their discussions, creating a real religious experience out of our synagogue service? Or will we, as usual, stay put, fight the truth, and then be put to shame?

When will we move Judaism to the front seat so that it once again becomes the leader instead of a follower?

Will we move to God’s new habitat, or are we still drinking coffee in His old home, where the curtains have been removed and He is long gone?

***
There is a serious breakdown that has taken place in the Orthodox community worldwide. Today, most of these communities view themselves as observant, not model, communities. An observant community is one that is concerned primarily with religious observance. As such, it views halakha and a proper Orthodox environment to execute its demands as its priority. It sees its main obligation as ensuring that Orthodox Judaism survives the ongoing encroachment of secularism and assimilation. To a certain degree, its interest in halakha comes at the expense of Judaism itself. It lacks the language and spirit necessary to become a model community conveying the great message of Judaism to all other Jews, and even Gentiles.

Basically, it is defensive.

The Orthodox community does not realize that it is not observance that should be its main concern. Its primary goal should be to create a spiritual environment in which Jews, whether religious or not, take part in the great mission called Judaism, driven by a visionary halakha. Because it fails to understand this, it views strangers with suspicion. They are only welcome after a security check. The language spoken in these communities is of right and wrong, good and bad, safe and dangerous. It is a language of survival.

Mainstream Orthodoxy has fallen victim to a false kind of modernity in which flaunting irreverence has become the norm. Debunking is commonly practiced, and at every turn we experience the need to expose the clay feet of even the greatest. Human dignity, a phrase often used, has become a farce in real life. Instead of deliberately looking for opportunities to love our fellow men and women, as required by our holy Torah, many have rewritten this golden rule to read—in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel—“Distrust your fellow man as you distrust yourself.” People’s lack of belief in themselves has spilled over to their relationships with others. Mediocrity has led them to believe that we are a generation of spiritual orphans. Influenced by materialistic philosophies, many a religious person who once revered his fellows has become part of the problem without even being aware of it.

When observing even those who are fully committed to helping fellow Jews find their way back to Judaism, we see an attitude that is foreign to religious life and thought. We cannot escape the impression that some people, without denying their love for their brothers and sisters, tend to talk down to “secular” Jews. This has become the norm. Constant emphasis is placed on the need to cure the secular person of his or her mistaken lifestyle. But this is asking for infinite trouble. It is based on arrogance. While religious Jews see themselves as the ideal, they relegate secular Jews to second-class status and decide that it is they who needs to repent for their mistaken ways. Such an attitude is based on the notions of contrast and lack of affinity. The secular Jew will always feel inferior. Therefore, the point of departure from which one reaches out to bring fellow Jews closer to Judaism is, at the same time, its undoing. The suggestion that “One should throw oneself into a burning furnace rather than insult another person publicly” [6] may very well apply, since it is the community of secular Jews that is being shamed and treated as inferior.

For Jews to bring others back to Judaism they need to celebrate the mitzvoth that the secular Jew has been observing for all or part of his life, not condemn his failure to observe some others.

Heschel writes, “The foundation should be humility, not arrogance.” [7] There is little doubt that secular Jews, consciously or unconsciously, keep a large number of commandments. Many of them may not be in the realm of rituals, but there is massive evidence that secular Jews are firmly committed to keeping interpersonal mitzvoth. Beneath the divisiveness of ritualism lie the underpinnings of religion, such as compassion, humility, awe, and even faith. The pledges are different, but the devotions are equal. It may very well be that the meeting of minds is lacking between the religious and non-religious Jews, but their spirits touch. Who will deny that secular Jews have a sense of mystery, forgiveness, beauty, and gentleness? How many do we know who lack inner faith that God cares? And how many will not show great contempt for fraud or double standards? Each of these is the deepest of religious values. We must try and make the so-called non-religious Jews aware of the fact that they are much more religious than they may know; that God’s light shines on their faces just as much, if not more, than on the faces of those we call religious Jews.

This not only calls for celebration but may well become an inspiration for religious Jews—not just by honoring secular Jews for keeping these mitzvoth but by taking an example from their non-observant brothers, by renewing these mitzvoth and good deeds in their own lives.

Just as the non-religious person needs to prove his or her worthiness to be the friend of a religious Jew, so the religious Jew needs to be worthy of the friendship of a secular fellow Jew. It would be a most welcome undertaking if the religious would call on the non-religious for guidance in mitzvoth in which they, the religious Jews, have been lax, as well as in how to improve themselves.

There is a significant need for calling Jews back to their roots by showing them that they never left. Once religious Jews learn that secular Jews are their equals, not their inferiors, a return to Judaism on the right terms will come about.

Orthodoxy celebrates its massive growth and unprecedented birthrate, but by doing so, it masks the tragedy of the thousands who are never given an opportunity to get in touch with Judaism or are unaware of how Jewish they really are. The language of condemnation and devaluation that permeates Orthodox classrooms not only makes it impossible for many to enter—but also causes numerous young people who were raised in a religious environment to leave the fold and turn their backs on Judaism. Even worse is the fact that Orthodoxy continues to point to this trend as evidence in support of the need for its insularity and separatism, blaming secularity for this tragic state of affairs, while the truth is that to a great extent it is Orthodoxy itself that is to blame.

***
The primary concern of Judaism is the art of living. To accomplish this goal it is committed to a strong sense of tradition and a determination to realize certain optimal goals. It is this road which has made Judaism unique and makes it stand out among the community of religions. This unique directness from a historical past into a messianic future; from Mount Sinai to justice for the orphan, widow, and stranger; and the ultimate abolition of war has saved Judaism from death by ice and death by fire, from freezing in awe of a rigid tradition and from evaporating into utopian reverie. [8]

Still, what Jews always looked for in the Torah was not just a way of living, nor the discovery of a truth but—this is scarcely an exaggeration—everything. Their love for the Torah was not just molded by particular teachings but by their conviction that everything could be found within its pages. God is no doubt central to Judaism but because the Jews never lost their intimate awareness of the multifarious colors of the Torah and its tradition, no dogma could ever gain authority. Even after Maimonides attempted, under the influence of Islamic theology, to lay down definite formulations of Jewish belief, Judaism refused to accept them as sacrosanct and did not allow such attempts to come between itself and the inexhaustible Torah text. It is for this reason that the kind of tension between religion and the quest for truth is almost unknown in Judaism. No sacrifice of the intellect is demanded.

One look in the Talmud proves this point beyond doubt. The flow of thoughts, opposing ideas, and the making and rejection of opinions and insights are abundant. The interaction between legality, prose, narrative, illusion, and the hard reality is astonishing. It makes the Talmud into the richest of all literatures; not even Greek philosophy was able to produce such a symphony of ideas in which the waves of the human intellect and divinity move forward and backward. There is an absolute lack of systematization, and it is clear that any such attempt was nipped in the bud. From a modern point of view, one might argue that the search for truth in the Torah was not directed toward proportional truth because such a notion was lacking by definition. The most persistent intellectual energy and analytic efforts were devoted to the continual contrivance of beautiful and profound interpretation to discover the totality of life.

Since the Torah was considered God-given, it might have been logical that fundamentalism would ultimately triumph and lead to conflict with science and other disciplines. But this inference is founded on a major misconception. Precisely because the text is seen as the word of God the essential ambiguity of the text was granted implicitly and every verse by definition has many levels of interpretations, both poetic and legal. There is even the compatibility of playfulness with seriousness since the former is a most important component of human existence as created by God.

Today, the attempt to streamline and straightjacket the Jewish tradition and to create a final Jewish theology is a major mistake and a complete misreading of its very character. Although there is, for practical reasons, a need to put halakhic living into a pragmatic context that requires conformity in action, this should never be the goal when focusing on Judaism’s beliefs. It is the task of the rabbis to do everything in their power to rescue Judaism from dogmatism. Although it can’t be denied that Judaism incorporates certain primary beliefs, these beliefs were always kept to the minimum and were constantly a source of fierce debate. Most important, one must remember that such “dogmas” never turned into a reductio ad absurdum. Freedom in doctrine and conformity in action was the overall policy to which the talmudic rabbis were committed, even when convinced of certain fundamental truths. This is also evident when one studies the relationship between the biblical text and the Oral Torah, where we see a minimum amount of words and maximum amount of interpretation.

It is detrimental to Jewish tradition to transform words into fixed clusters of thought and the storing up of whole theories. The idea is not to become the owner of a mass of information, which is entrusted firmly in one’s memory and carefully transmitted into notes. Once one does so, one becomes scared and disturbed by new ideas, since the new puts into question the fixed sum of information that one has stored into one’s mind. As such, ideas that cannot easily be pinned down are frightening, like everything else that grows and is flexible. Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, the ideal is to hear—and most important to receive and respond—in an active, productive way. It needs to stimulate a thinking process that ultimately leads to the transformation of the student.

The attempt today to halakhalize and legalize Jewish thought is missing the whole message of the talmudic way of thinking. It will undermine the halakha itself since it will kill its underlying spirit. There is little doubt that due to the pan-halakhic attitudes that we now experience in certain rabbinical circles, we see the symptoms through which the halakha becomes suffocated and often rejected by intelligent, broad-thinking people. A plant may continue to stay alive in apparent health after its roots have been cut, but its days are numbered.

If the kind of rabbinical censorship that we have lately encountered in relationship to certain books and ideas on Orthodox Judaism was to be applied to the talmudic text itself, it would mean that the best part of this great compendium on Jewish thought and law would be censored and burned.

Freedom of thought must be guaranteed if we want the Jewish tradition to have a future. This applies in particular to teaching. A man or a woman who holds a teaching post should not be forced to repress his opinions for the sake of upholding popular simplistic opinions or even more sophisticated ones. As long as his or her opinions are rooted in the authentic Jewish tradition, and expressed with the awe of Heaven, it must be encouraged—however much this is disliked by some rabbinic authorities.

Uniformity in the opinions expressed by teachers is not only not to be sought, but is, if possible, to be avoided since diversity of opinion among preceptors is essential to any sound education. No religious Jewish student can pass as educated if he or she has heard only one side of the debates that divided the earlier and later sages. One of the most important things to teach is the power of weighing arguments, and this is the foundation of all talmudic debate. To prevent the teacher from doing do so or to bring this to the attention of his or her students is misplaced rabbinic tyranny and has no place in the Jewish tradition. It is the Christianization of Judaism by rabbis.

As soon as censorship is imposed upon the opinions that teachers may avow, Jewish education ceases to serve its purpose and tends to produce instead a nation of men and women, a herd of fanatical bigots.

Today’s talmudists must realize that they can become imprisoned by their own talmudic knowledge. They may have tremendous talmudic expertise, but they may have forgotten that one needs to know more than only all the intricacies of text. One needs to hear the distinctiveness of its content, the spirit it breathes, the ideological foundations on which it stands. To know the Talmud is to know more than its sum total.

Techniques for dealing with individuals whose opinions are disliked have been well-perfected. Especially so when the condemners are people of power and the accused are young and inexperienced. It is an easy and well-known tactic to accuse the condemned of professional incompetence. Most of the time, the dissident is quietly dropped. In the case of more experienced individuals, public hostility is stirred by means of misrepresentation and character assassination. Since most teachers do not care to expose themselves to these risks, they will avoid giving public expressions to their less “Orthodox” opinions. This is a most dangerous state of affairs. It is a way to muzzle genuine and important knowledge and to deny people insight. But above all it allows obscurantism to triumph.

Certain religious leaders, including rabbis, may believe that such tactics of repression and character assassination work, but they should know that although books can be burned, the ideas expressed in them do not die. No person and no force can put a thought in a concentration camp. Trying to do so is similar to the act of somebody who is so afraid of being murdered and therefore decides to commit suicide so as to avoid assassination.

****

Torah study has become nearly impossible, and the problem lies not with the Torah but with people. To read the text requires courage. Not courage to open the Book and start reading, but courage to confront oneself. To learn Torah requires human authenticity; it means standing in front of the mirror and asking oneself the daunting question of who one really is, without masks and artificialities. Unfortunately, that is one of the qualities that modern people have lost. Modern people have convinced themselves to be intellectuals, removed from subjectivity and bowing only to scientific investigation. As such, these people have disconnected from their Self. Because people are a bundle of emotions, passions, and subjectivities, they cannot escape their inner world, much as they would like to. Still, modern people formulate ideas. They may proclaim the rights of the spirit and even pronounce laws. But these ideas enter only their books and discussions, not their lives.; they hover above their originators’ heads, rather than walking with them into the inner chambers of daily existence. These ideas don’t enter people’s trivial moments but stand as monuments—impressive, but far removed.

People are no longer able to struggle with their inner Self and therefore cannot deal with the biblical text. The text stares them in the face, and people are terrified by the confrontation. All they can do is deny the text, so that they may escape from themselves. Since they know that they must come to terms with themselves before coming to terms with the Book, they cannot negate it or disagree with it, as this requires them to deny something that they don’t even know exists.

Does that mean that these modern people are not religious? Not at all. Even the religious person is detached from the spirit. The religious person has elevated religion to such a level that its influence on his or her everyday life, in the here and now, has been lost. It is found on the top floor of his or her spiritual house, with its own very special atmosphere. It has become departmentalized. But the intention of Torah is exactly the reverse. Its words, events, and commandments are placed in the midst of the people, enveloped in history and worldly matters. What happens there does not take place in a vacuum but in the harshness of human reality. Most of the Torah deals with the natural course of a person’s life. Only sporadic miracles allow us to hear the murmurs from another world that exists beyond. These moments remind us that God is, after all, the only real Entity in all of existence. But the Torah is the story of how God exists in the midst of mortal human’s ordinary troubles and joys. It is not the story of God in heaven, but of God in human history and personal encounter.

The art of biblical interpretation is far more than just knowing how to give expression to the deeper meaning of the text. It is, after all, impossible to treat the biblical text as one would any other classical work. This is because the people of Israel, according to Jewish tradition, are not the authors of this text. Rather, the text is the author of the people. Comprising a covenant between God and humanity, the text is what brought the people into being. Moreover, despite the fact that the people often violated the commanding voice of this text, it created the specific and unique identity of the Jewish nation.

That is precisely why reading the text is not like reading a conventional literary work. It requires a reading-art, which allows the unfolding of the essence and nature of a living people struggling with life and God’s commandments.

This calls for a totally different kind of comprehension, one that must reflect a particular thought process and attitude on the part of the student.

George Steiner expressed this well when he wrote:

The script…is a contract with the inevitable. God has, in the dual sense of utterance and of binding affirmation, “given His word,” His Logos and His bond, to Israel. It cannot be broken or refuted.[9]

The text, then, must be approached in a way that reflects a human commitment to ensure that it indeed will not be broken or refuted. This has become a great challenge to modern biblical interpretation. Many scholars and thinkers have been asking whether the unparalleled calamity of the Holocaust did not create a serious existential crisis in which the text by definition has been invalidated. Can we still speak about a working covenant by which God promised to protect His people, now that six million Jews, including more than a million children, lost their lives within a span of five years under the cruelest of circumstances?

The reason for raising this question is not just because the covenant appears to have been broken, but also because history—and specifically Jewish history— was always seen as a living commentary on the biblical text. The text gave significance to history and simultaneously took on its religious meaning.

Can the text still be used in that sense, or has it lost its significance because history violated the criteria for its proper and covenantal elucidation?

Not for nothing have modern scholars suggested that there is a need, post-Holocaust, to liberate ourselves from this covenantal text in favor of shaping our destiny and history in totally secular terms. The Holocaust proved, they believe, that we have only ourselves to rely on, and even the return to Israel is to be understood as a secular liberation of the galut experience.

It is in this context that “commentary” needs to take on a new challenge: to show not only how the covenant, as articulated in the text, is not broken or refuted, but how in fact it is fully capable of dealing with the new post-Holocaust conditions of secularity. Without falling victim to apologetics, biblical interpretation will have to offer a novel approach to dealing with the Holocaust experience in a full religious setting, based on the text and taking it beyond its limits.

It will have to respond to the fact that God is the most tragic figure in all of history, making the life of humanity sometimes sublime while at other times disastrous. The biblical text is there to tell humans how to live with this God and try to see meaning behind the absurdity of the situation.

But above all, modern commentary must make sure that the Torah speaks to the atheist and the agnostic, for they need to realize that the text is replete with examples of sincere deniers and doubters who struggled all of their lives with great existential questions. The purpose is not to bring the atheists and agnostics back to the faith, but to show that one can be religious while being an atheist; to make people aware that it is impossible to live without embarking on a search for meaning, whether one finds it or not. It is the search that is important, the end result much less so. The art is to refrain from throwing such a pursuit on the dunghill of history throughout the ages. The struggle of homo religiosus is of greatest importance to the atheist.

That most secular people no longer read the Torah is an enormous tragedy. The Torah is too important to be left to the believer. The beauty of day-to-day life takes on a different and higher meaning through the Torah, and that will evoke in atheists a faintly mystical anticipation, which they will experience when they are alone or when they watch a sunset at the beach. A voice is born, and it speaks to them; they feels a melancholy that calls forth something far away and beyond. They happen upon a situation that suddenly throws them over the edge, and they get taken in by the experience of a loftier existence. They realize that the god they were told to believe in is not the God of the Torah. The latter is a God with Whom one argues; a God Who is criticized and Who wants people to search even if it results in the denial of Him.

This issue is related to other critical problems. Surveying Jewish history, we see drastic changes in the ways the biblical text was encountered. In the beginning the Torah was heard and not written. Moshe received the Torah through the spoken Word: “The Word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, for you to carry out.” [10] God may be unimaginably far away, but His voice is heard nearby, and it is the only way to encounter Him.

At a later stage, the Word evolved into a written form. Once this happened, there was a process by which the spoken Word was slowly silenced and gradually replaced by the written form. With the eclipse of prophecy, God’s word was completely silenced and could then only be read. As such, the Word became frozen and ran the risk of becoming stagnant. At that stage it was necessary to unfreeze the Word, which became the great task of the Sages and commentaries throughout the following centuries.

Subsequently, a third element gained dominance. The text must be relevant to the generations that study it, while at the same time remaining eternal. Commentators throughout the ages have struggled with this problem. How does one preserve the eternity of the Word and simultaneously make it relevant to a specific moment in time? Many commentators were children of their time and clearly read the text through the prism of the period in which they lived. This being so, the perspective of eternity became critical. It was often pushed to the background so as to emphasize the great message for the present. Much of the aspect of eternity was thereby compromised, and that caused a few to wonder how eternal this text really is.

Others wrote as if nothing had happened in Jewish history. That reflected the remarkable situation of the Jewish people in galut: its ahistoricity. After the destruction of the Temple, Jewish history came to a standstill. Although much happened, with dire consequences for the Jews, they essentially lived their lives outside the historical framework of natural progress. It became a period of existential waiting, with the Jewish people anticipating the moment when they could once again enter history, which eventually came about with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Inevitably, then, some commentators wrote their exegeses in a historical vacuum. They hardly emphasized the relevance of biblical texts to a particular generation. Therefore, the student was often confronted with a dual sentiment. While dazzled by a commentator’s brilliant insight, the student was forced to ask: So what? What is the implication of the interpretation for me, at this moment in time? Here we encounter a situation in which relevance is sacrificed for the sake of eternity.

With the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, Jews are confronted with an unprecedented situation, which has serious consequences for biblical commentary. Due to a very strong trend toward secularism, caused by the Holocaust as well as other factors, the issue of relevance versus eternity has become greatly magnified.

Today, more than ever before, there exists a greater and more pressing need to show the relevance of the text. The radical changes in Jewish history call for a bold and novel way of understanding the text as a living covenant. At the same time, the drastic secularization of world Jewry and Israeli thinking requires a completely new approach on how to present to the reader the possibility of the Torah’s eternity. With minor exceptions, the religious world has not come forward with an adequate response.

Most worrisome is the fact that the majority of Jewish commentary books published today in Orthodox circles comprise compilations and anthologies of earlier authorities without opening any new vistas. It is as if new interpretations are no longer possible. The words of God are treated as if they have been exhausted. It clearly reflects a fear of anything new, or an inability to come up with fresh and far-reaching ideas. This phenomenon has overtaken a good part of the Orthodox scholarly world. Judaism is turning more and more into a religion in which one writes glosses upon glosses, instead of creating new insights into the living covenant with God.

No doubt, not every person is equipped with the knowledge and creativity needed to undertake the task. Years of learning are an absolute requirement before one can make a genuine contribution in this field. Still, one must be aware of the danger of “over-knowledge.” When the student is overwhelmed by the interpretations of others, he or she may quite well become imprisoned by them and so lose the art of thinking independently. Instead of becoming a vehicle to look for new ideas, the student’s knowledge becomes detrimental. This has happened to many talmidei hakhamim.

What is required is innovation in receptivity, where fresh ideas can grow in the minds of those willing to think creatively about the classical sources, without being hampered by preconceived notions. Only then will we see new approaches to our biblical tradition that will stand up to the challenges of our time.

****
We are currently living in a transitional phase of monumental proportions and far-reaching consequences. Our religious beliefs are being challenged as never before. We are forced to our knees due to extreme shifts and radical changes in scientific discoveries; our understanding of the origins of our holy texts; our belief in God; the meaning of our lives; and the historical developments of our tradition. We find ourselves on the precipice, and it is becoming more and more of a balancing act not to fall off the cliff.

We keep asking ourselves: Can we survive and overcome? What are the tools to make that possible? Or, shall we drop our earlier beliefs, give in, and admit our defeat?

In the old religious climate, everything was certain. We knew the truth. Traditional Judaism gave us the foundations, and everything was under control. The tradition was safeguarded behind shatterproof glass, well-protected and unshakable. But now, all certainty is affected by skepticism and the glass has been broken.

Today, faith dangles in the free flow of doubt, and we need to learn how to live in this new stratosphere.

The truth is that Jewish Orthodoxy (from the Greek orthos ("true" or "right") and doxa ("opinion" or 'belief") never existed. Originally, Judaism was highly unorthodox. Although it always believed in God and Torah, it never offered any specifics of what God meant or what Torah consisted of. That was left to speculation, never to be determined. The early Sages, as testified by the Talmud and philosophers, disagreed on some of the most fundamental issues of faith.

But over the years, we wanted more certainty. We wanted it handed to us on a silver platter, so that we could avoid debates and live a life of religious comfort, apathy, and mediocrity. Influenced by other religions, we adopted the need for cast-iron certainty and psychological security. So we began to rewrite Judaism in a way that would fit into the notions of established religions—well-structured, with a good dose of dogma. What we did not realize is that by doing so, we misrepresented Judaism by losing sight of the plot, thus doing it a great disservice.

We need to realize that our epoch of uncertainty is in fact much more conducive to authentic Judaism than all the conviction we've had in previous generations. It forces us to rediscover what Judaism is really about and gives us the opportunity to rebuild where rebuilding is required and leave untouched what should remain untouched.

Because we are compelled to reconsider, we will delve more deeply into the great resources of Judaism and stay away from all superficiality to which Judaism has lately succumbed. The greater the challenge, the more profound are the discoveries. Knowledge is important, but doubt is what gives you an education.

Moreover, we will actually be able to enter the minds of all those biblical figures who lived in constant ambiguity about God and the Torah. Avraham’s great doubts concerning the reliability of God in connection with His request to sacrifice his son Yitzchak was a most traumatic experience. It was the pinnacle of religious uncertainty.

Moshe’s bewilderment at not knowing who God was when he asked to see Him and God’s refusal to reveal Himself are the climax of intense religious struggle. In the desert, the Israelites asked whether God was among them. This came close to pantheism or even atheism. Nadav and Avihu’s unauthorized offering of a "strange fire" in the Tent of Meeting came from a feeling of ambiguity about whether the only way to serve God was by merely following the strict demands of halakha as given by God, or whether one could explore new avenues to divine service.

On one occasion, the Israelites were not sure whether the Torah was indeed the word of God. Korah challenged this very belief and declared that it was not from heaven and that Moshe and Aaron were not prophets.[11] This must have caused a major crisis among the Israelites.

The Torah gives evidence to a most difficult religious journey traveled by the Israelites, full of doubt, struggle, and trauma. Surely some of these doubts were more existential than intellectual, but the latter cannot be disregarded.

Once we realize that uncertainty was part of the biblical personality, we will have a much better grasp of the text and what Judaism is actually claiming. But this is only possible when we find ourselves challenged by those very existential doubts.

There is nearly nothing greater than the free flow of doubt in today’s society. It offers us unprecedented opportunities to rediscover real religiosity. In contrast, the quest for certitude paralyzes the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition that impels humanity to develop its spiritual and intellectual capacity. Sure, this is a risky undertaking, but there is no authentic life choice that is risk free. Life means constantly moving and growing, whereas organic matter that fails to shift and grow decays and will eventually die. So it is with a person’s religious life. The role of religion is to accommodate the blossoming of the human soul and to prevent one from descending into a place of spiritual stagnation.

Whereas our not-so-distant ancestors in the days of the emancipation walked out and left Judaism behind, declaring it no longer relevant, we know better. We won't take that cheap and easy road. We know that Judaism is much too great to abandon, even if there are obstacles along the way. We are aware that Judaism stands head and shoulders above anything else, and that no philosophy or religious practice can replace it, but we have yet to discover what it is that gives Judaism its unique profundity. We still walk in our childhood shoes, knowing that we have not yet entered the world of adulthood. AusdemKindes—in das Mannesalter.[12] We realize that we must be careful not to obscure the real idea of growth, which is not to leave things behind us, but to leave things inside us.

What we all know deep down is that we have to renew Judaism from within. Not by letting it go, but by raising it up. Not through Reform and Conservative Judaism, or Orthodox dogma, but through a radical purifying process that will take years. Until now we have been busy digging and have found some very interesting elements, but we have not yet hit rock bottom and our findings have been too superficial and too few to make a breakthrough.

Over the years we have covered Judaism with too many clinging vines, to the point where we can no longer see or even recognize das Ding an sich, "the thing in itself." A thick scab has grown on Judaism, and it needs to be scraped off. We have to expose the founding pillars and build a superstructure. We must recognize that the barer Judaism gets and the more uncertain we become, the closer we get to where we need to be, until we hit the core. It will manifest itself in many opposing colors, creating an enormous, beautiful canvas. In this new setting it will be clear that religious uncertainty is one of the most powerful ideas, which keeps us on our toes. And it will give us great insight into Judaism’s core beliefs.

Beneath the clinging vines are divine words. For too long we have mistakenly believed that Judaism is the clinging vine itself. Yes, it had its purpose, but that is not where we will find divinity. It is deeper down, beneath the layers. The time has come to remove it. But it has to be done slowly and in such a way that we do not harm the core. We must remove outdated ideas, often borrowed from other religions; remove the galut from halakha, which became overly defensive; and have the courage to see a new religious world emerging, which will offer us the authentic meaning of the divine Torah and mitzvoth.

It will be painful for those who are looking for absolute certainty. We understand the anguish it will cause. But there is no turning back, and after a time the joy of uncertainty and of discovering the deeper meaning behind Judaism will be immensely greater than that which certainty could ever offer us.

The goal is not at all to be sure that the Torah was given at Sinai, or that all its stories are true. There are very good reasons to believe it is, but we don't know for sure and we should not know for sure. Is it not marvelous to take a leap of faith and live according to something that one cannot be sure of? Of what value are convictions that are unaccompanied by struggle?

Faith means striving for faith. It is never an arrival. It can only burst forth at singular moments. It does not arise out of logical deduction, but out of uncertainty, which is its natural breeding ground.

To have faith is to live with unresolved doubts, prepared to rise above ourselves and our wisdom. Looking into the Jewish tradition with its many debates, one clearly understands that those who deny themselves the comfort of certainty are much more authentic than those who are sure.

Faith means that we worship and praise God before we affirm His existence; we respond before we question. Man can die for something even as he is unsure of its true existence, because his inner faith tells him it is right to do so. This honest admission of doubt is not only the very reason why it is possible to be religious in modern times; it is the actual stimulus to do so.

We need to understand that faith is "the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises," [13] and "we can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand." [14]

To believe is not to prove, not to explain, but to yield to a vision.

Of course belief cannot be credo quia absurdum est. It has to make sense and have a lot to say for itself in terms of knowledge and wisdom. Still, just as no building stands on rock-bottom, but on unsure pillars deeply driven into the ground so as to resist an earthquake, so must belief have enough strength to prove its worth without ever reaching absolute certainty.

Faith is like music. It is true because of its beauty not because of its intellectual certainty. Is it not created from impossible paradoxes, as well as a great deal of imagination that surpasses rationality and scientific or historical facts?

David Weiss Halivni writes,

The truly great need no synthesis. They absorb whatever experience offers them. Their intensely creative personalities act like a fiery furnace, melting away contradictions. What emerges is either a harmonious whole or a creative parallelism with parts that mutually fructify and supplement each other. The truly great do not need to trim edges, as it were, to make genuine experiences fit with each other. They preserve them intact. And if their experiences appear contradictory, they build an emotional bridge spanning them allowing both the landscape and the water to be seen. Lesser mortals resort to logical means of harmonization. [15]

The aim of halakha is to teach us the art of living with uncertainty. Halakha was not meant for those who are sure, because nobody can act out of certainty.

The most challenging question in all of life is what do you do and what do you believe when you are not sure. It is that notion that moves the scientist, the philosopher, and most of all the religious personality. We must destroy the security of all conventional knowledge and undo the normalcy of all that is ordinary. To be religious is to realize that no final conclusions have ever been reached or can ever be reached.

Halakha is the upshot of un-finalized beliefs, a practical way of living while remaining in theological suspense. In that way, Judaism doesn't turn into a religion that either becomes paralyzed in awe of a rigid tradition, or evaporates into a utopian reverie. This dynamic can only come about when Jewish beliefs consist of fluid matter, which halakha then turns into a solid substance. The purpose of halakha is to chill the heated steel of exalted beliefs and turn them into pragmatic deeds without allowing the inner heat to be cooled off entirely. Jewish beliefs are like arrows, which dart hither and thither, wavering as though shot into the air from a slackened bowstring, while halakha must be straight and unswerving but still adaptable.

Indeed, we should be careful not to make faith into an intellectual issue. It is much more than that. The moment we look down on those who continue to have unshakable faith, considering them primitive in face of the many challenges, we have overlooked an important dimension of real faith. Besides the fact that such an attitude reflects arrogance, it also misses an important point: Faith is always more than just thinking about faith. Yes, those people who have lost their faith yet still hold on to it, honestly attempting by way of discussion and study to give their lost faith a new shape, should be deeply respected. At the same time, we should not forget that they are searching for something that the "simple" believer already has.

When we place the reflection on faith higher than the direct experience of faith, we are involved in a purely intellectual endeavor. The search for faith can only be genuine when it is personal, deep, and emotional, and the intellect only plays a small part. The accompanying qualities must be humility, the notion of inadequacy, and a strong urge to find authentic faith. Genuine belief is a way of living, not an academic undertaking. It is an experience in which the whole of the human being is engaged.

Doubt only appeals to the intellect. The intellectual approach to faith is always a barer form of existence than faith itself. The reason is obvious. Besides our critical assessment, the other human faculties remain idle. Trust, hope, love and the notion that one is part of something bigger no longer play a role. Instead, life becomes nothing more than only itself. When doubt and skepticism are no longer the most important faculties through which one seeks religious faith, only then is it possible to actually find it. Skepticism, though it has its place, should not be at the center of one’s search. In today’s climate there is a certain gratification in going to the extremes of genius and brilliance until one nearly loses that which one would like to discover. Intellectual thought and scientific discovery can never cover the sum total of the inner life of man. When one prays, one is involved in something that the intellect can never reach. When one studies Torah and hears its divine voice, it becomes something different than what academic study can ever achieve. It is in a separate category, which is closed to the solely scientific mind.

It is vital that we see these facts for what they are. Only when we realize that intellectual certainty is not the primary path toward finding religious truth, will we be able to deal with our new awareness that the transitional phase we now experience has great purpose and has to be part of our religious struggle and identity. It won’t be easy. Novelty, as always, carries with it a sense of violation, a kind of sacrilege. Most people are more at home with that which is common than with that which is different. But go it must.

God has relocated.

[1] Moreh Nevukhim, Part 2, chapter 25.
[2] Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill Co., 1954), 94.
[3] Regarding the claim that the full text of the Torah is divine, or that miracles are possible, it is a matter of debate whether these are completely denied by scientific knowledge or not. Many of these claims are not solely within the sphere of pure science. They touch on matters related to the philosophy of science or in the case of Bible criticism, to literary interpretation and the reliability of archeological findings.
[4] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 234.
[5] I borrow this comparison from my dear friend Professor Yehudah Gellman of Ben Gurion University. See his God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us: A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as the Chosen People (Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah Series, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012).
[6] Berakhot 43b.
[7] See Avraham Joshua Heschel’s many essays in his The Insecurity of Freedom, Essays on Human Existence, New York: Schocken Books, 1972.
[8] Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 268.
[9] George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text.” Salmagundi No. 66 (Winter–Spring 1985), 12.
[10] Devarim 30:14.
[11] See the Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 10.
[12] German for "from childhood to adulthood." Professor G. Heymans, Inleiding in de Metaphysica (Dutch), [Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik in German] (Groningen, the Netherlands: Wereldbiblioteek, 1933), Introduction by Professor Leo Polak.
[13] Samuel Butler and Francis Hackett, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (Nabu Press, 2010), 27.
[14] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2010), 81.
[15] David Weiss Halivni, "Professor Saul Lieberman z.l." Conservative Judaism, vol. 38 (Spring, 1986), 6–7.