Sharp words recently exchanged in the Jewish corners of the internet are extremely revealing about the challenges facing my friends in modern Orthodoxy. And they clarify why I am a heterodox, if generally traditional Jew.

Rabbi Mordecai Willig, a senior figure at Yeshiva University, recently posted a d’var Torah in which he gave a full-throated defense of pre-modern Judaism’s gender hierarchy. Women are exempt from the command to study Torah (or say Shema and wear tallit & tefillin and the like) because they are “naturally more adept at raising children,” which is God’s real work for them. “Even if lifestyles change and women are able to arrange for others to care for their children,” the fundamental order is that “women are to be more private than men,” and should focus on the home.

The opening of Torah study to women a century ago, R. Willig argues, was at best a concession to Jews’ weakened faith. Women should study only as much as will augment their reverence. But too much Torah might encourage egalitarian ideas, like comparing their own intellectual pursuits to men, and desiring comparable social roles.

And now just look at what’s happened since! Left-wing Orthodox teachers are ordaining women “rabbis!” And there are even “egalitarian” “Orthodox” prayer services in “partnership” minyanim! R. Willig goes on to draw a direct line from there to accepting same-sex weddings and all kinds of “post-modern” heresies, all deriving from the mistaken “questioning of one exclusive and absolute truth.”

Given all this, he says, the time has come for the modern-ish Orthodox world where R. Willing lives to re-evaluate Torah learning for women, to reinstate discarded barriers and re-inforce age-old hierarchies, keeping women where they belong.

You might think I am mocking Rabbi Willig, or letting him be hoisted on his own reactionary petard. But actually, I think he is right to identify an
instability that modern Orthodoxy must confront.

At the core of R. Willig’s argument is the faith claim that Halakhah is not a product of human culture, but comes directly and changelessly from God. “We must study Torah with joy and humility,” he writes, “and not dare to change it or question its Divinity, morality or immutability.” Jewish norms are perfect the way they are, and the faithful cannot interrogate them based on ideas external to the Torah system, or hope they change.

That is precisely where we heterodox Jews turn “off the derekh,” and veer from the reactionary path. The whole point is not simply to conform to ancient ways. Received norms and values are deep and holy – and imperfect, because like every cultural product they bear the marks of imperfect human societies.

To Rabbi Willig, women’s exclusion from Torah study and public worship and leadership, their subjection to their husbands and fathers in matters like
marriage and divorce are not regrettable by-products of ancient patriarchy. They are God’s decrees.

From my perspective it is punkt fahrkert, exactly the opposite: those hierarchies are the residue of the ancient society whence they emerged, and should be stripped away as Judaism evolves.

Willig’s real audience in his Dvar Torah is not a Conservative rabbi like me. He is really assailing the “Open Orthodox” – that progressive element at Orthodoxy’s left edge. He wants liberals to answer for their attempts to square the circle, claiming to be Orthodox in belief and practice, yet also espousing genuinely transformative positions, especially about gender roles.

I admire Open Orthodoxy tremendously and count its leaders among my friends. But I think they are vulnerable to Willig’s argument, because some of their ideas really are un-Orthodox, in the best sense of the term. They would probably counter that the Torah contains within it the resources for its own renewal, that Torah is “an ever-flowing spring,” whose meanings are still being revealed. I guess I’m down with all that.

But there is a quantum difference between ancient rabbis saying that the Torah itself never meant for the law of the rebellious child to be practiced, and 21^st century people saying that rabbinic leadership should be re-construed in unprecedented ways.

Gender egalitarianism is not merely a new possibility that emerges from Torah’s ceaseless spring. It is a critique and a challenge. It is our necessary heresy. No matter how scrupulously you observe Shabbat or Kashrut, if you think there is something fundamentally wrong with the gender hierarchy the Torah and the Sages prescribe, that’s a pretty un-Orthodox view. Thank God.

Earlier this summer, Haaretz ran a fine article on changes in left-wing Orthodox life in Israel, especially about gender roles. A small number of Israeli Orthodox women have ascended to positions of significant communal leadership and Torah scholarship, including some who live in highly traditional communities and who are not pushing the envelope on rabbinic titles or egalitarian prayer.

In that article, Prof. Benjamin Brown, a scholar of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, himself religious, predicts a coming split between traditionalist and liberal sectors. Liberals like affirming their Orthodox bona fides, he said, for social reasons and because Orthodoxy is a “brand” that signals “authenticity.” Still, this association is at least partly disingenuous, Brown says: “The liberals should have crossed the lines and switched to the Conservative movement.”

People get to determine their own institutional labels, and I’m not for bullying people into one denominational category or another. But … yeah,
amen. Prof. Brown has a point. We non-Orthodox Jews are not merely faithless and lazy. (Ok, sometimes.) We actively affirm that “creative betrayal” can sometimes be holier that submission, and ultimately better for Judaism.

I admire that my Open Orthodox friends and colleagues do manifest that same heterodox spirit and are really changing the world for a new generation of observant women and men.

But I think Rabbi Willig’s challenge also forces them to answer where they really stand. R. Willig gets in their face in a helpful if aggressive way and asks: “So do you affirm or do you reject the basic rightness of sacred gender hierarchy, in which God demands different things of men and women?” I know that none of my friends would accept such a hierarchy in law firm, bank or hospital, university, lab or newspaper. Do they in Torah? For how long?

Given pervasive intermarriage — 58% of all American Jews marrying since 2000 wed gentiles — it may seem improbable that my colleagues in the Conservative rabbinate will resist the tide indefinitely. But I hope we do. Conservative Judaism would be strengthened if we continue to insist that the integrity of Jewish marriages demands that both partners commit to living as Jews.

I don’t insist on endogamy because of any reactionary instincts. I enthusiastically support liberal policies on homosexuality and gender equality, even though these reject traditional norms.

Also, I am not driven mainly by grim demographic data, although it really should sober up intermarriage advocates. No one should draw optimistic policy conclusions without reckoning with the finding in 2013 by the Pew Research Center that only 20% of intermarried parents raise their children as Jewish by religion, while nearly twice that many, 37%, do not raise their children as Jewish in any way whatsoever. By contrast, 96% of in-married parents raise their children as Jewish by religion.

Continue Reading on The Forward Website…

Manekin’s reply was ungentle. It’s OK. I can take it. At least he found me “well intentioned,” so that’s something, although my “hard-heartedness” did make him “grieve for American Judaism.” I sense I am a member of a large class, there.

Still, I accept a portion of his rebuke. “Where was the good rabbi …” through the “moral nightmare” of Palestinian suffering under occupation, he asks? Fair enough. As my son tells me all the time, I am too placidly, undemandingly “against the occupation” (by which I mean only of the post-1967 territories) without doing anything about it. I should be more direct and consistent.

But I’d like to respond to one of Manekin’s points. He wonders why I – like so many others – lack the “moral clarity” of Amira Hass, Gideon Levy and Avram Burg.

Well, it seems to me that clarity sometimes is purchased only at the steep price of ruling out of court discomfiting questions and filtering out data that challenges one’s premises. Manekin, Hass and Levy excel at asking questions the rest of Israel and her friends might rather ignore. We should be grateful. But they often lack answers – and seem unwilling even to attend – to questions the rest of us regard as ineluctably obvious and pressing.

For instance: “What should Israel do about the fact that Hamas is in power in Gaza and has built a threatening military apparatus, including long-ranged rockets and tunnels created expressly for lethal assaults?” That’s not an existential threat, says Manekin dismissively, not comparable to Israel’s power over the Palestinians. That’s true. So what? You only defend yourself from existential threats? Oh but, Israel knew about the tunnels years ago. Also true. So what? They’ve lost the warrant to defuse that threat now? It’s been years since the suicide bombs. So? You figure Hamas is no longer in that business? Leftist activist Gershon Baskin – who knows Hamas better than most – told CNN that 3,000 martyrs are setting out.

Perhaps I am just a hopeless liberal, and will always disappoint radicals like Charles Manekin. But to me, rare is the problem best solved by “moral clarity,” which all too often is illusory and narrow. I learn more from the more honest, more nuanced and ultimately realer observations by Amos Oz and Michael Walzer (whom Manekin also criticized – probably the only time I will be associated with Michael Walzer. How cool is that?) See also Philip Gourevitch’s excellent comments on the New Yorker site on the moral and political difference between Amos Oz and Rashid Khalidi. In the same category, please go back and re-read Moshe Halbertal’s analysis of the Goldstone report, after the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. David Grossman, too, speaks of the need to make peace with no illusions about our enemies in the Middle East and around the world.

These writers contend seriously with the demands of moral warfare, the demands to reduce civilian death, the demand to improve the lives of those locked into the Gaza Strip … and the need to fight Hamas. That might not seem like clarity. But it brings aspects of morality into the conversation that cannot be ignored.

Dear Friends,

Two weeks into the current Gaza conflict, I may be the only American rabbi left who has not sent any emails to his congregation about the matter. A number of you have expressed some distress about this, and urged me to say something.

My silence should not be construed as wavering commitment. I am a proud Zionist, unambiguously a believer in the worth and virtue of the modern Jewish state in our ancestral homeland.

So why have I kept quiet? Partly, this is because I have been up at Camp Ramah (where we talk regularly about the matter, especially with the Israeli staff delegation and the older campers), with my head out of the office. But mostly, I have kept silent because I just have not been sure what I should say.

Should I say that, facing a ruthless enemy, Israel has not only a right but a moral duty to protect its citizens from Hamas’ (before the war) estimated 10,000 rockets, now capable of striking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv? Not just a right but a moral duty to destroy the dozens of tunnels Hamas has built expressly to attack the residents of Southern Israel? I certainly believe this. And so I grieve for the Israeli soldiers who have fallen honorably in Operation Tzuk Eitan, giving their lives to defend our people in its homeland.

Should I say that the very first rule of moral warfare is to distinguish between civilian and combatant? Should I say that that although Israel faces tremendously difficult challenges – given the asymmetry of guerilla forces and Gaza’s urban concentration – nevertheless this most basic moral demand of a “just war” is simply not negotiable? That our hearts should grieve, that we should not be able to sleep at night, for the hundreds of Gaza non-combatants who died horrible deaths this week, yesterday, today, and are dying right this minute? I believe this too.

Should I concur with Prime Minister Netanyahu when he says that Hamas bears the moral responsibility for placing its missiles and launchers near hospitals, homes and schools? Yes, I do. Should I demur when he concludes that therefore Israel bears no responsibility for civilian casualties? I must demur.

Should I say that it is all a bit rich when Hamas – who send suicide bombers into cafés and onto buses, who lob missiles at city centers – bewail their civilian casualties? Should I say that being “better than Hamas” is no worthy standard for the people of the Torah?

In the end, Israel and those who love her face harrowing moral choices – the duty to act and the duty to refrain. There is no single satisfactory answer. It would immoral and foolish to expect Israel to expose itself to Hamas’ weapons without defending itself. As Rabbi JB Soloveitchik wrote (in his essay “Kol Dodi Dofek”): Zionism means that after the Shoah, Jewish blood will not be left undefended in the face of cruel enemies.  Yet the suffering our forces cause in Gaza cannot be waved casually away as a kind of inevitable collateral damage.

This past Shabbat I was struck by an ugly verse in the parasha [Numbers 31.2]: “God spoke to Moses saying: Wreak Israel’s vengeance upon the Midianites.”

Vengeance is a brutal human impulse, never to be justified. Justice? Yes. Prudence, strength, deterrent capacity? Absolutely. But never revenge.

You may have noticed that when citing the names of terror victims – like the kidnapped boys Eyal, Gil-ad and Yaakov – or fallen soldiers or Shoah victims, it is common to write hey-yod-dalet, or HY”D. This stands for the phrase Hashem yikom damo “may God avenge his blood” (based on Deuteronomy 32.43).

Myself, I never use this phrase, not even for Shoah victims. Some people will tell you that the phrase implicitly stresses that God should exact vengeance, but we humans should not. I find that self-exculpatory and hypocritical. In fact, in almost all things in Judaism, we believe that we should be God’s partners in building the world, and so must put sacred values into practice. To pray for divine vengeance, it seems to me, is to goad people into acts of vengeance. I thought of this at the horrifying immolation of the Jerusalem teen Muhammed Abu Khdeir at the hands of Jewish terrorists, and at the calls for vengeance emerging from various circles in Israel, sadly including the rabbinate, and the politicians, even the Prime Minister.

Operation Tzuk Eitan will end in a day or a week. We will go on like before, rebuilding, re-arming. Thanks to heaven and thanks to their bravery and wisdom, the IDF will continue to protect the Jewish body with distinction. But every call for vengeance, every dehumanizing slur, every calloused reaction to Palestinian death, reminds me how equally crucial it is to care vigilantly for the Jewish soul.

My professional Jewish life began when I entered rabbinical school in 1992, in the wake of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. Its grim findings ushered in the era of “Jewish continuity,” when we tried to counter apathy and assimilation by making Jewish life rich and meaningful. The theory was that people’s Jewish commitments would grow when they discovered how poetic, how wise, how thoughtful, how ethically aspirational real Judaism is. Maimonides and midrash, beyond bagels and lox. Gemara, not the Portnoy’s-complaint-Jewish-mother-guilt thing. Communities of moral purpose, not nostalgia for the Lower East Side. Day schools, Hebrew, mitzvot.

That is the Jewish communal service I have been trained on. I still believe in it totally. This approach vastly deepened our communal Jewish life. But it simply failed to exert the gravity necessary to hold the American Jewish community together. There is no other way to say it. Yes, there are outstanding local communities, innovative experiments in Jewish meaning, rich cultural output and religiously profound teachings.

But whatever we’re offering, it has prompted too few Americans to say: I am a Jew. I must – just, simply must – find lovers, friends and neighbors who will share these commitments so that together we will help the Jewish people thrive in its last great diaspora.

Only fools foretell the future. If you reviewed the views of experts 33, 67 or 100 years ago, most predictions would be wrong. But fools rush in … Unless the vectors change, it looks like American Judaism will be divided into two large camps, and one small one.

• Coming in at around 15 or 20 percent of the whole, there will be those of us who practice liberal Judaism, some a little more traditional, some a little less, but still really and regularly engaged with Shabbat, holidays, kashrut, study, prayer and ethics. This band will stretch from what today looks like “Open Orthodoxy” and left-ward. This is my home field.
• Around 35 or 40 percent of the whole will be “Amish”: Orthodox enclaves, walling themselves off from the rest of society, but passionately attached to their traditions and notably successful at passing them on. Why will this group be so large? Every year, the non-Orthodox population loses 50,000 people, while the Orthodox population adds another 100,000.
• Largest of all will be people of Jewish ancestry with merely vestigial Jewish connection. Perhaps the most chilling fact in all the Pew study concerns these folks: 2.4 million Americans are “non-Jews of Jewish background,” people who had at least one Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, but who now practice another religion or do not consider themselves Jewish. This sector is raising 700,000 of its kids as non-Jews.

Predictably, the first thing every notices in American Jewish population studies is the intermarriage numbers. They are huge. In this new century, 60 percent of Jews have married non-Jews. Removing the Orthodox from the mix, the numbers rise to well more than 70 percent of Jews marrying non-Jews who do not convert.

Myself, I see no point in hand-wringing and moaning over this. I read somewhere (the Torah) that it’s not good for people to be alone. Love is good. As long as we live in America and work and study alongside gentiles, there will be love and intermarriage, like a horse-and-carriage.

But there is no disputing that intermarried families are statistically unlikely to raise intensely Jewish kids. Yes, some will. More won’t. Two Jewish parents will raise their kids as exclusively Jewish by religion at a rate of 96 percent. One Jewish parent married to a non-Jew will raise his or her kids as non-Jews at a rate of 37 percent, and only 20 percent will raise them as exclusively Jewish. More than half of young adult children of intermarriages (i.e. the “millenials”) do identify as Jews, which is good and surprising news. But realistically, these 59 percent are also likely to marry non-Jews, and while it is absolutely wonderful that they express Jewish identification, most also received substantially less Jewish education and remain less involved in Jewish life, says Theodore Sasson, a researcher at Brandeis University and Middlebury College and a relative optimist on this question.

This brings me to mention a recent, widely-read New York Times op-ed, “Being Partly Jewish,” by Susan Katz Miller, herself raised both Jewish and Episcopalian, now raising her kids both Jewish and Episcopalian. Her family celebrates Passover and Easter, Rosh HaShana, Advent, Sukkot, Lent, Christmas and Yom Kippur. She and her interfaith community are brave, she says, daring to give their kids “full knowledge” of their diverse religious traditions and comfort in multiple faiths, so that they will be able to choose to practice one exclusively, or multiple ones synthetically. Either way, she says, it will be “good for the Jews.”

I read Miller’s article with my high school students at the Prozdor enrichment program at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The majority – though not unanimous – view they expressed was perfectly in keeping with their 21^st century Americanness. They thought Miller made lots of sense. This world is broad, they said, not narrow. So it is great to experience the breadth of cultural variety rather than locking one’s self into only one culture. Choice is better than coercion. Education should not be indoctrination.

In a superficial sense, they have a point. Speaking as a contemporary of their parents (and the community rabbi for several of them), it is obviously true that we’ve chosen to raise our kids outside of the enclaves, in hopes that they will be enriched by other ways of thinking.

At the same time, it seems to me that Miller is asking all the wrong questions. Cultures are not tapas menus. You don’t gain “full knowledge” of a tradition by sampling it occasionally, alongside other dishes, with which it may be entirely incompatible. If you don’t know its language from within, you cannot feel comfortable either at Sukkot or at Advent. Such sampling can only make you feel like a dilettante and a deracinated fake. (Arguably, that’s post-modern life. If what I call “dilettantism” and “fakery” strikes you as “creative bricolage,” we’ll just have to agree to disagree.) In the end, promiscuous sampling will drive some seeking souls into the enclaves that repelled their parents, so that they can find something “real.”

A true culture is a world to live in. It structures experiences and enables us to find life’s meaning – for religious cultures, its sacred meaning – in stories bigger than our own lives. For that to work, culture demands commitment, not the consumption of various delightful options of brief duration. American Jews, like our non-Jewish neighbors, have been trained to be excellent consumers. But our community is spinning out of control, centrifugally, because we barely know how to commit to anything beyond ourselves. If a culture is worth preserving, we have to trust it, be loyal to it, wrap ourselves within it.

All this reminds me of a passage in Hillel Halkin’s tremendous book on the medieval Spanish-Jewish poet Judah HaLevi, who left wealthy Spain for Palestine in 1140, to fulfill his dream of living in the Holy Land. Halkin notes that modern interpreters have waxed poetic about medieval Spain as an experiment in convivencia, the “living together” in shared culture of Muslims, Christians and Jews. (Let’s ignore for the moment the significant anti-Jewish bloodshed of the era, often just below the surface.) Modern writers have sometimes condemned HaLevi, he notes, considering his emigration as a parochial betrayal of pluralism.

Halkin’s comments [p.291] are most relevant for the American Jewish community:

“One can have multiple identities, multicultural affinities. One can be an American living in Paris with a Czech father and a Mexican mother and a Japanese wife and a second home in Tuscany and a command of six languages and friends from every country and passions for salsa and Chinese food and Russian literature. All this and much more can fit comfortably into a single person. Yet if this person is not to be a hodgepodge, there must be an organizing principle. Some things must matter more than others; most must be dispensable. And at least one, he must be willing to die for. It can be a friend, a love, a child, a value, a people, a country, a cause, a conception of honor or of dignity, but without it, he is trivial.”

This seems to me right on target. Choosing to be something deeply entails choosing not to be something else. America is probably the Jewish people’s last great diaspora. Some features of American Judaism are surpassingly wonderful. But outside the Amish enclaves, are we suited to live deeply within any Jewish culture? Or is it an amusing hobby we occasionally bring out of the closet? This may be our greatest social challenge: are we trivial?

As reported in the Orthodox blog Vos Is Neias and subsequently in the Forward, Rabbi Noach Muroff bought a desk on Craigslist, only to discover $98,000 hidden within in a plastic shopping bag. Since the woman who sold him the desk informed him that she herself had assembled the desk, purchased from Staples, Muroff knew that the money belonged to her. And he certainly knew that she had not intended to throw in the cash for the $200 purchase price for the desk. Wanting to teach his children about “emes,” Muroff and his wife and four kids drove back to the seller and returned her the cash. She responded with tremendous gratitude, of course, and a cash reward.

What’s especially cool about this story is that this real life event matches the famous story of Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach, from the Jerusalem Talmud [Bava Metzia 2.5]:

שמעון בן שטח הוה עסיק בהדא כיתנא אמרין ליה תלמידוי ר’ ארפי מינך ואנן זבנין לך חדא חמר ולית את לעי סוגין. ואזלון זבנון ליה חדא חמר מחד סירקאי ותלי ביה חדא מרגלי. אתון לגביה אמרין ליה מן כדון לית את צריך לעי תובן. אמר לון למה אמרין ליה זבנינן לך חד חמר מחד סירקיי ותלי ביה חדא מרגלי. אמר לון וידע בה מרה אמרין ליה לא א”ל לון איזל חזר. לא כן אמר רב הונא ביבי בר גוזלון בשם רב התיבון קומי רבי אפילו כמאן דמר גזילו של עכו”ם אסור כל עמא מודיי שאבידתו מותרת. מה אתון סברין שמעון בן שטח ברברין הוה. בעי הוה שמעון בן שטח משמע בריך אלההון דיהודאי מאגר כל הדין עלמא.

Shimon ben Shetach was struggling in the flax business. His students said: Rabbi, abandon this business, and let us buy you a donkey, and you will not have to work so hard. They went and bought a donkey from a gentile, which had a jewel hanging on its neck. They returned to him happily, saying, thanks to this good luck you’ll never have to work again! When he learned about the jewel he asked the students whether the gentile had known of it at the time of the sale. When they said no, he ordered them to return the jewel. [The voice of the Talmud’s editor intervenes, and asks:] But why should this be so?! For later, in Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi’s time it was ruled that although stealing from pagans is forbidden, one may keep an item that a pagan has lost. [So why did Shimon ben Shetach not permit himself to benefit from the pagan’s mistake?] Do you think Shimon ben Shetach is a barbarian?! Shimon ben Shetach would prefer to hear the words “Blessed be the God of the Jews” than all the money in the world.

What a great story! That is real honesty – to tell the truth even when it costs you dearly. And moreover, the Talmud itself shows fearless honesty in telling this parable. First of all, the students are portrayed as treacherous. Not every yeshiva student is such a nice boy, it seems. More powerfully, the Talmud characterizes the law of Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi’s time as fit for “barbarians.” It might, in fact, be legal for Shimon to keep the jewel. But sometimes the scandal lies not in what is against the law, but what the law permits.

I don’t typically echo the words of Vos Is Neias, but I totally concur that Rabbi Muroff performed a Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name. As the Gemara (Yoma 86a) says, the mitzvah of ve’ahavta et Adonay Elohekha [loving God with all your heart] means that you should “make God’s name more beloved through your actions.” When people see someone shaped by the Torah who is honest and kind and refined, they say: What a great religion and what a great Torah! How blessed are those who study Torah!

Amen. Yasher Koach to Rabbi Muroff for making God’s name more beloved in the world. Blessed be the God of the Jews!

You may know that – along with several Ansche Chesed members and Upper West Side clergy – I took the SNAP challenge, and lived for a brief week on the budget of a typical food stamp recipient. I’ve written about this previously, and you can see more at our communal blog.

This Sunday, the eight UWS SNAP challenge communities gathered in a public meeting at our synagogue, Ansche Chesed, to consider steps for further activism. Our new Manhattan Borough President-elect Gale Brewer joined our conversation, with helpful comments about supporting universal free meals for all public school students. You can learn more about this idea here and here. Already Boston, Chicago and LA have some version of universal school meals. Among NYC organizations favoring the plan is the UJA-Federation of New York, the Children’s Defense Fund, the United Federation of Teachers, and a number of churches and synagogues, including our own Ansche Chesed.

Most notable was the talk given by Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. Joel is always an amazing speaker, unbelievably energetic and informed. He’s been working on this issue since his days in the Clinton Administration. His main message: only increased wages and food benefits can wipe out hunger in this rich nation. Community gardens and nutrition education are great, he said. But we have to have perspective on hunger in America and the realistic scope of relief efforts.

Taken together, all the food pantries and all the soup kitchens in America distribute $5 billion annually. The November 1 cuts cancelled $5 billion in annual aid. In other words, the cuts just wiped out all the work of every food pantry in America. The House of Representatives’ favored a farm bill that would cut an additional $39 billion over 10 more years, while the Senate would trim “only” $4.1 billion more. I don’t discount the need to get the budget deficit under control. But this cannot come on the backs of America’s most vulnerable.

Joel’s suggestions for responsible public change focus mainly on pressing elected officials to support policies that help the poor. Call your Senators and House Reps. To those of us in NYC, he urges us to write to Mayor-elect DiBlasio – who has always said all the right things – to use his new office for good, especially to institute universal school meals. You can write the transition team here.

The point of this exercise is two-fold. First, in messages like this, we SNAPpers hope to prompt people to think about the cuts in federal aid to the poor. The government may need to reduce its deficit, but I hope we can think of other ways that don’t wound the most vulnerable. Second, I hope that an exercise like this – obviously limited in time and scope, nothing like actual poverty – does a little to shock us out of comfort, and increase our empathy for neighbors whose lives are much tougher than our own.

Both my SNAP challenges have been remarkably eye-opening. And quite unpleasant. I feel perpetually lethargic, undernourished, cranky.  It is hard to imagine how a person could feel the energy to compete for a new job, or do well in school, if they could eat only on such a short budget for extended periods. Perhaps people’s bodies can adjust to these levels of nourishment. For me, even just a few days into the experiment, I am simply underperforming, mentally and physically.

The first time I did SNAP, a few years ago, what I recall the most is what an impressive abundance of food was on the street in New York – but was inaccessible to me. I would watch people walk down the street eating ice cream or sitting in cafés and think, “wouldn’t that be nice.” It was only a week, and I knew that in a few days, I could rejoin the line at Ben & Jerry’s, if I wished. But what sunk into my consciousness at that time was the feeling of exclusion. All around me was a feast, and, for one week, I was not invited. What must it be like to experience food insecurity – not in some small agrarian village in the developing world, where all your friends and neighbors struggle alongside you – but in the richest city in the history of the world?

On this round through SNAP I am most impressed – as I count my pennies, wondering whether I can “afford” another baked potato, on my artificially short budget – by how much I usually spend on food. If I’m getting by this week on $5 per day, restricting myself to home-made bread, grits, beans and such, gadzooks!, what do I spend on a typical day on food without ever thinking about it? Without even noticing it. And I rarely eat outside the house, rarely visiting restaurants or buying prepared food. But typically I must spend easily twice the SNAP budget, and often more.

According to the most recent USDA data on household food budgets, from July 2013, an adult man not on a terrifically tight leash might spend between $9.75 and $11.95 per day on food. So for five days of my SNAP challenge, let’s say I have saved $30 per day in my food budget. Long before Oxfam, Jewish tradition taught that people must distribute Tzedaka/alms on a fast day (see the Talmud, Sanhedrin 35a, and the Jewish law code Shulhan Arukh YD 256.2), particularly to enable those whose poverty forces them to fast to enjoy a feast instead. This week has not exactly been a fast week for me, but it has been a kind of ethically motivated abstention from food. So I will try to fulfill this tradition in a comparable way, and redirect all that I saved this week (and then some) to hunger relief, at the West Side Campaign Against Hunger.

After a sabbatical from the synagogue and from “Honest to God” — although I hope not from honesty to God — I am returning to JCast Network and to this blog.

It’s good to be back.

Please give a gander and this next post, to follow anon.

Humility and modesty are classical virtues, very central to Jewish tradition, yet not so easily absorbed by modern Jews. Nowadays instead of modesty, we’re inclined to pump up the ego in pursuit of that elusive elixir … self-esteem.

But true self-esteem is not won by telling yourself, or your kids, that they are brilliant and talented. (Of course your kids are, but I am talking about most people.) Truth is, there will always be someone smarter and more beautiful, richer and better at sports. What happens to self-esteem when we realize that?

True self-esteem and self-acceptance is found not by telling yourself the incantation damn I’m good, but by attaching yourself to noble ends, more important than your own life. You’re going to die one day, and the world will go on without you. For a mortal human being to be great, as MLK said in his 1968 sermon on this theme (“the Drum Major Instinct”), you must serve what is beyond yourself. And this will make you noble and great.

Jewish tradition knows that to be a student of Moshe Rabbenu is to strive to be very humble. That doesn’t mean you should flagellate yourself and tell yourself that you’re a worthless nothing. Focusing on your failings will inevitably sap your ability to improve the world. That would be a distortion of true humility, which should inspire your devotion to what transcends your own mortal life, and therefore a moral failing. The very concept of mitzvot – that we are commanded to sacred action – assumes that you can in fact do great things.

But the catch is: this is not about you. Modesty is found in our acts of mesirut nefesh, self-sacrifice and commitment to what transcends our selves. And modesty is undermined by yuhara, ostentatious, attention-grabbing. As the Zohar says [3.168a]: “One who is small is great. One who is great is small.”

Anyway, to cut to the chase. When preparing for last week’s parasha, I looked up a famous Hasidic teaching on this theme, and discovered there is a little twist in the original teaching, which most people omit, and which I want to share with you.

A well-known teaching of Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Parshis’cha [1765-1827] runs: Each person should have two pockets, within which are written two messages. In one pocket you’ll find Genesis 18.27: “I am but dust and ashes,” while in the other you’ll find the Mishna (Sanhedrin 4.5): “For my sake the world was created.” Whenever you need to be reminded of what you’ve forgotten, your smallness or your greatness, you can just reach into your pocket.

As this teaching is reported in Siach Sarfei Kodesh [Polish Hasidica, collected in the early 20th century by R. Yoetz Kim Kaddish Rakatz] the editor makes a terrific emendation, cited to R. David of Lelov, a contemporary of R. Simcha Bunam: “The end of this teaching is missing. It is this: However, most people err, and reach into the wrong pocket, taking the opposite note from the one they really need. Understand this.” [vol. 3, p. 145, #29, ed. Bnai Brak, 1989].

An awesome observation. A virtuous human being is held in the dialectic between small and great, between modest in one’s self-regard and audacious in one’s moral and spiritual aspirations. But the trick is to know when to reach into which pocket. Not so easy. When you find yourself reaching for the note that reminds you how small you are, check again that you’re not trying to escape a demand for self-sacrifice. When you reach for the note that reminds you of your grandeur, check again if you’re not flattering yourself on the cheap.

I’d like to respond to David’s observation with 3 points.

First, David affirmed that his work is not lacking in clear stands, pointing especially to the sections on business and speech ethics. I agree about business ethics, which is among the most Jewish-textually rich portions of book. I’ll apply to this section what I said in my original post regarding the Tzedaka section: it does a stronger job of locating ethical principles in specific norms. I thought the speech ethics section is very edifying, but I think it generally instantiates my main point – again, as an observation of our different paths, not a condemnation of the more liberal path – that Teutsch’s work focuses on broad general values we all share (“Tzelem Elohim,” “God’s seal is truth”) rather than on tightly examining the behaviors which the Jewish normative tradition has applied. I would think Teutsch would wear that mantle happily, since it is what he more or less said about himself. I didn’t say the Reconstructionist book never takes clear stances. I said that this work is mainly a conversation among contemporary liberal rabbis and the Jews who love them about how to apply our values, but too rarely – given my interpretation of Jewish tradition – an ongoing conversation with the normative tradition about specific problems and specific norms. And it is in those areas, about particularly Jewish behaviors, that this work remains less specific.

Second, Teutsch reminds me that “ordering” Jews to follow Halakha won’t work. Ordering? Who said anything about ordering? This language is an almost Pavlovian reflex among liberal Jews. When someone mentions Halakha, liberals accuse them of trying to “order” Jews around or bully them into obedience, as if the only reason anyone would follow Jewish law is that they were coerced to do so. What if they do so as acts of devotion? I and my fellow Observant Life authors attempt to reveal the meaning, beauty and wisdom of the normative tradition. As Franz Rosenzweig wrote in the great essay “the Builders,” people love the law because of its inner power, “the law of everyday and of the day of death, petty yet sublime, sober yet woven in legend; the law that knows both the fire of the Shabbat candle and that of the martyr’s stake. [p. 77 ]” For moderns, the law thrives not primarily because of authoritarian claims, because God or the Shulhan Arukh said so, but rather because its wise spiritual discipline is authoritative, enduring and powerful. It is, as FR said, because “the voice of the commandment causes the spark to leap from ‘I must’ to ‘I can’ [p. 86].” I strongly think that this implied accusation that Conservative Judaism “orders” people to behave is misplaced. I would do nothing but persuade. But the authors of these 2 respective works clearly differ on what sorts of behaviors they would persuade about.

Finally, David implies that that my position on traditional Jewish sexual norms depends on a combination of ignorance of the messy historical reality and “wishful” thinking about a pious past. First, of all, I hope I am guilty of neither transgression. But even if I were, I’m not sure this would undermine my position. I thank David for directing me to Yom Tov Assis’ research on sexual behaviors in medieval Iberia. But what should this contribute to our conversation? I think we’re having a conversation about Jewish norms, the behavior that realizes our values in deeds. That is, by definition, a prescriptive account. Let us grant that 700 years ago, medieval Spanish reality included all kinds of ugly things, like adultery, prostitution, the exploitation of household maids, and the unhappy coexistence of “sister wives.” (All of which, as Assis notes, were condemned by Jewish society’s moral leaders.) Why should we bring these exploitative realities into today’s Jewish virtue-conversation? Like all history, these are descriptive accounts.

But one cannot derive prescriptive norms from social descriptions. You cannot make an ought out of an is. You can only make an ought out of an ought: an argument for which virtues constitute the good life. My argument does not depend on a sanitized or romantic view of sainted ancestors. In fact, no one who studies Halakhic literature could ever think that it is a record of perfect piety. There would be no responsa literature at all if everyone always did what rabbinic authority would have wanted.

I can only repeat what I think should be an uncontroversial – virtually self-evident – tenet of Jewish sexual ethics: monogamous fidelity is the ideal and extra-marital sex is forbidden for both husbands and wives. This position doesn’t depend on whether all Jewish societies attained these virtues, or even whether they all accepted them as virtues. That is an interesting question of academic interest. But the fact that medieval Spanish Jews kept concubines does not undermine my moral claim. Nor is my position vitiated by the existence of bad marriages today. I remain certain that rabbis should teach in accordance with the overwhelming consensus of the Jewish prescriptive tradition: the virtuous life is found in monogamy and fidelity, not polyamory.

If we do not eat differently than our non-Jewish neighbors, do not marry differently, do not work and rest, nor buy and sell differently, then maybe our Judaism amounts to nothing more than vestigial, aesthetic and sentimental ethnic rituals.

Modern Jews spill lakes of ink over what we should believe about God, the Torah, good and evil, ethics and the rest. All of which is important. But how do ideas impress themselves upon life’s raw details? If our non-Jewish neighbors think very similar things to what liberal Jews believe, then what is Jewish about our Judaism?

Give credit to our Orthodox brothers and sisters. They know how to live Jewishly. From my perspective, they are wrong about important theoretical and practical questions. But they clearly are Jews, from clothes to kitchens to bedrooms, on Tuesday and Saturday alike.

Liberal Jews are well-aware of our shortcomings. So it is particularly interesting that in the last half-year, both my own Conservative stream and the Reconstructionist movement have published major works on Jewish practice.

We Conservatives produced The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews, a collection of 40 Halakhic essays [two of which I wrote], edited by my good friend Martin Cohen. The Reconstructionists published David Teutsch’s A Guide to Jewish Practice: Volume 1 – Everyday Living, which won last year’s Koret National Jewish Book Award. [A forthcoming volume will treat Shabbat and holidays, and then another will take up the life cycle and personal status.] Teutsch notes the problem I named: “Often described as a way of life, Judaism must shape the everyday conduct of Jews to deserve that description. But in our time, Jewish approaches to moral thought and action do not usually shape the lives of American Jews” [p. 579]. His book, like ours, addresses this need.

Earlier this year I published an essay “Good Neighbors,” (available here) comparing liberal Orthodox discourse with that of Conservative Judaism, believing that we understand ourselves better by looking at our neighbors, seeing differences and similarities. I’ll follow a similar path here, pointing up some patterns about the way these books show how these two movements practice liberal Judaism. [Reform Judaism, to my knowledge, has not produced a similar work. But some of my comments about the Reconstructionist Guide might also apply to the style of that other, very large, liberal movement.] I offer these in the spirit of a modest apologia, a respectful argument for my own faith.

While The Observant Life is a book about classical Jewish law applied in modern times, Teutsch’s Reconstructionist Guide is proudly not beholden to Halakha. It is a post-legal guide, not a code [p. xxiii], replacing law with “values-based decision-making,” a process of analyzing Jewish tradition to identify the values behind the rules as well as examining modern thought and its mores, and attempting to build a practice upon both those two sources. The Reconstructionist Guide only rarely identifies specific practices to follow. Its point is to help Jews and their communities ask [p. 21]: “How do I weave behavior that reflects my highest moral and spiritual commitments into my daily life?” And “What spiritual activities and disciplines would improve my life, character, family, community, people and the world?”

Those are indubitably the crucial questions, and I admire Teutsch for posing them. But in my view, this Guide falls short, by the yardsticks of Jewish tradition, in leaving the values and virtues too general, too abstract, and insufficiently concrete in specific norms. In this religion, we have always applied rules, specific deeds, by which abstractions become realized in deeds. I think we should continue to walk the path of Halakha [plausibly translated “walking the walk”]. The Reconstructionist guidance often remains too general and indeterminate [“some do this,” “some find that meaningful”], that neither tackles hard questions of what actually to do, nor really opens its ears to the demands of Jewish norms. The book is at its best in chapters on Tzedaka and social activism, which locate value commitments in more precise behaviors. More commonly, its guidance resembles its position on prayer: it’s a good skill to develop, but there is “no one right answer” about how to acquire it; so worshippers should pick “what feels most accessible” to begin with, such as birkot hashachar or pesukei d’zimra, or even “summarizing thoughts” that help one focus [p. 42]. What kind of guidance is that? Myself, I find this bizarrely vague for describing Jewish worship, which classically enshrined the Shema as a twice daily biblical obligation, and the Amida as a shared text for standard worship. It is thanks to those requirements that Jews know these prayers, and share them as foundational texts for mind and heart.

I admire the Reconstructionist book’s distinctive format. It presents Teutsch’s core text, with marginal commentaries by 68 different writers, most of whom are Reconstructionist rabbis, but including bankers, physicians, activists, etc. I admire the participation both of professional teachers and engaged amateurs. This approximates a classical Jewish style, in which other writers’ expansions and criticisms are printed right there on the page in conversation with the central text. Here, it also matches the modern liberal preference for plural voices over unanimity.

Our book has a different style: it consists of 40 stand-alone essays, each written by a Conservative rabbi who labored in research on a given topic. These read more like distinct lectures, without respondents. Different writers may clash in this book, but not because they explicitly comment on each other. Each chapter has a single author, but the various writers’ voices were melded into something like homogeneity. There is less personality on the pages of our work than in Teutsch’s. These are our individual words and our own views, but we’re speaking for more or less authoritatively for a movement, not necessarily for ourselves.

But the limited back-and-forth format of the Reconstructionist book prompts me to ask: who is participating here? Teutsch’s book is a conversation among North American Reconstructionist Jews about living out their values in the early 21st century, in a specific context. Their community aspires, spiritually and ethically. In style, they are vaguely counter-cultural, very liberal with a small l and un-orthodox with a small o. They like yoga and mindfulness meditation [pp. 65-67, 73-75]. They praise “communities of conscience” that oppose the Israeli occupation [p. 252] and critique American tax policy [p. 391]. They urge American consumers to have post-colonial consciousness regarding the exploitation of third-world producers [p. 520]. I share each of these positions, and see their general connections to Jewish values. But I would observe that these constitute Jewish living only in attenuated ways and overly tightly identify Jewish values with specific policy stances.

The Guide’s “values-based decisions” emerge from a conversation among contemporary Jews. But the practices these writers favor generally do not emerge from a conversation with the dozens of layers of Jewish scholars through the ages – not in the tight way that a page of Talmud is a multi-century conversation quoting Moses, Isaiah, Akiva, Abbaye, Rashi, and R. Akiva Eiger all talking about the same thing. These Reconstructionist reflections fit the moment. Certainly these writers bring Bible references and citations from rabbinic tradition. But these are usually the obvious ones, usually homiletical rather than practical, and rarely enter deeply an ongoing transhistorical discussion with historic Sages over how to live.

I mean this observation not as a condemnation – although I certainly prefer my own approach – but as a comparison between our styles. I am sure it is a source of pride to the authors that they place any and all practices on the table for evaluation and re-evaluation as they try to pursue their value commitments. I am sure they think of themselves as free from slavish, unreflective adherence to the old, and more attentive to the demands of the moment than are we hidebound Conservatives.

But I would observe that these two works present very different approaches to the concept of behavioral norms. The Reconstructionist approach is highly selective, sifting the tradition to select those kernels they believe should be replanted. But for me and my colleagues, the Reconstructionist approach is inadequate. To quote a friend of mine, Prof. Don Seeman of Emory University, a deep thinker and Orthodox rabbi: “Selectivity is too simple a language for my relationship to religious authority and the weight of the past.” I know Don would level against me the very criticism I apply to the Teutsch Guide. But I think this phrase is right on: It is not merely a matter of sifting through tradition for ideas you like. It involves really living the holy path, to the greatest extent possible, following the teachings of our Sages, to realize our values in normative deeds, shared by Jews across the world and contiguous through time.

That is what The Observant Life demonstrates, I think: the richness that emerges when one makes the covenant not only with those who are here today, but woven with words of those who are not here today. Our conversation is rich with biblical, rabbinic and medieval authorities. I think this makes our approach deeper, more subtle, less faddish, more learned and wiser. Ultimately, I think it makes it more faithful. It certainly makes it more recognizably Jewish, as an indexical marker of how we live.

Reconstructionist Judaism trumpets Mordecai Kaplan’s phrase that we should give tradition “a vote, not a veto.” But that means only that traditional norms are invited to vote yes to confirm what liberal Jews already want, but are not permitted to vote no. But it is all too easy and lazy to reject uncongenial norms as outmoded, and hastily sprinkle ourselves with self-congratulatory fairy dust for “wrestling” with the tradition.

Admittedly, I am vulnerable to the same objection from traditionalists. Isn’t that just what I’ve done in espousing gender egalitarianism and celebrating gay relationships – refuse to let the tradition vote no? Fair enough, I guess. But I regard those as principled critiques of tradition, even in the service of sustaining it. As the Talmud itself [Menachot 99b] says: “Sometimes violating the Torah turns out to be its fulfillment.” Meanwhile, I keep the mitzvot, and try to learn their wisdom by doing them. Absent a compelling moral claim, I think traditional norms should stand with their yesses and nos. I give the halakha the benefit of the doubt, and strive to fulfill it as an act of worship and virtue.

But Teutsch and the other writers, it seems to me, don’t avoid the trap, or even try very hard to. In most cases when modern and traditional mores clash, the tradition is silenced. Reconstructionists are true modernists: I think they think the modern ways are better, and the old ones should fade. It’s like that old Minnesota Jew said: “Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one.”

This work – and I suppose by extension Reconstructionist Judaism in general and maybe all non-Halakhic Judaism – seems unable to say that anything is assur, just plain forbidden. Its alternative ethos is that if good values can be attained through a given practice, if individuals or communities can make something work, then classical Jewish norms have no business stopping them. But for me, this is no prescription for Jewish integrity or keeping faith with the Torah and Sages, and risks a kind of self-indulgent narcissism. Here are two comparatively smaller examples, and one very big one.

Tattoos come in for positive evaluation in the Reconstructionist Guide, with no discussion at all of the biblical prohibition, because they can “evoke spiritual meaning or use Hebrew words that connect to the act of prayer as a form of walking meditation” [pp. 87-88]. When Teutsch proposes [p. 27] mixing-and-matching different forms of address and different divine names when composing blessings (e.g. Nevarekh et haShekhina, ruach ha’olam instead of Barukh ata Adonay, Eloheinu melekh haOlam) he is motivated by today’s theological concerns and feels no need even to discuss classical norms of Jewish liturgy.

And very dismayingly, this work of Jewish practice cannot even bring itself to affirm monogamy and sexual fidelity within marriage, gay or straight, as absolute Jewish norms. While Jews have generally favored monogamy, Teutsch writes, “it is not obvious that monogamy is automatically a morally higher form of relationship than polygamy.” If “polyamory” – multiple romantic and sex partners – were practiced with honesty, flexibility, egalitarian rules for men and women, with trust and without jealousy, it could help couples “avoid some possible forms of exploitation” and avoids “the violation of vows and the need for secrecy” as found in most affairs. “Perhaps some people can manage it successfully and live enriched lives as a result” [pp. 217-227].

Wait … what?! What did I just read? To his credit, one of the Guide’s commentators, Lewis J. Eron, seems as scandalized as I on this point. Forgive me, but this disgraces a Jewish work that speaks in the name of Torah. Is this Marin County, 1975? Are we supposed to self-actualize, not be so possessive and just be free, man? Sorry, no. No. No. No. Ten thousand times, no.

Also no, there is not a “complex history” to Jewish norms of monogamy and polygamy, as Teutsch claims [p. 222], as if this has been a contested question over our history, with multiple nuances and ample precedents for divergent views. [See p. 261 in our Observant Life book, or Avraham Grossman’s book Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe.] In point of fact, the Bible itself consistently portrays polygamy as the source of family strife. And to the extent there was polygyny in the Middle Ages, it was unpopular with women, their parents and their rabbis [e.g. Rambam], and happened usually when merchant husbands left home for years at a time, when the first wife was infertile or in the case of yibum, the childless widow. None of which has anything whatsoever to do with modern people who choose to have sex with partners other than their spouses.

Despite Teutsch’s disclaim, it is indeed obvious that fidelity to a single sexual partner in a permanent union is the ideal relationship, promoting maximal loyalty, mutuality, trust and care, and minimizing the narcissistic tendency to please one’s self at the expense of the degradation and heart break of others. I sincerely hope my Reconstructionist colleagues know they are playing with fire. God forbid – God forbid! – that Jews should learn from their religious teachers that some couples are mature and trusting and unselfish enough to enhance their marriages by sleeping with other partners. That sounds, frankly, like a sexual abuse accusation waiting to happen. If I were a parent and heard such nonsense from a rabbi, I would find another synagogue. Hakhamim, hizharu bidivreikhem. Sages, take care with your words, and retract when you’ve made a foolish mistake.

Well, long as this is, it is only a blog post. So I will bring this to an end, now, by posing a question: What can it mean for non-halakhic Judaism to speak of guides to behavior? Values and virtues are critical elements in a Jewish ethos. But I believe they require binding norms to hook onto the pragmatic world, and to keep faith with Jewish tradition. That is the most crucial question before us liberals. I hope our Conservative book The Observant Life helps people figure out not only what to value, but how to act. For me, the Teutsch Guide has many merits, but its non-normative commitments prevent it from giving enough real guidance to the perplexed.

A century ago the great poet Bialik summed up what modern Jews need in a new, heterodox religion. Not the Shulhan Arukh, but Halakha nonetheless. He concludes his classic essay Halakha ve’Aggada, or “Law and Lore” this way: “We stretch forth our necks. Where is the yoke?”

Dov’s Friday night TV program Mekablim Shabbat “Greeting Shabbat” on the weekly Torah reading is a hit – at least among that sector of the population who watch TV on Shabbat, but who want to discuss the weekly Parasha. I’m tempted to wonder how many of those can there possibly be. But he said he draws about 10 percent of the Friday night viewing audience. You can see examples on YouTube.

Elboim was here in America connected with his work with the Bina Center for Jewish Culture , a fabulous organization where my own son will be studying next year. (A great organization deserves support.) In my humble opinion, the most critical cultural question in Jewish life is the Jewish character of Israeli life. What Jewish values does Israeli society hold dear? What is its connection to our intellectual and spiritual heritage? What texts and teachings shape the inner life of the “secular” Israeli? What kind of Jew does she or he aspire to be?

Along with a few other organizations, Bina and its incredibly engaging and deep teachers seek to develop a new Jewish language that will permit so-called “secular” people to build meaning through an engagement with classical Jewish sources. The woeful Judaic ignorance on the part the secular majority is – to borrow a term from the political realm – an “existential threat” to Jewish society. We liberal American Jews are also vastly ignorant. But of course the Israelis speak Hebrew, which is both worse (more indefensible) and better (more easily remedied).

But public ignorance is maybe only 49 percent of the problem. It is matched by the inappropriateness of the conventional religious vocabulary, which bars the “secular” population from the richness of the Jewish religious tradition. Jewish life is all too fragmented in Israel, with precious little contact among different population sectors, and precious little exposure to Torah discourse in a compelling way.

What does Torah have say to the lives of people who are not conventionally observant? In truth, EVERYTHING. But you wouldn’t know it from Israeli public life. The spokespeople for the religious tradition are all too often associated with the fanaticism, superstition, bigotry and hypocrisy of ultra-Orthodox enclaves, and the messianism and triumphalism of religious Zionism, difficult to extricate from right-wing politics. How is any one supposed to discover the subtlety, depth and humanism in the Torah from those guys?

My Israeli religious heroes include those of the religious Zionist center-left – still kicking, in a few hardy corners – and especially the folks around secular initiatives like Bina, who are striving to develop a whole new language for talking about Torah and religion. This language won’t resolve into simplistic binary questions about authority: do you or don’t you submit to Jewish law? It won’t be a reactionary loyalty to traditional norms. And by the way, I am loyal to traditional norms. But I don’t think the ultimate point of religion is conformity.

The point instead is to discover the spiritual and moral aspirations within our norms, and apply them to our world and to our lives.

On this point, Elboim said one of the best things I ever heard. This past Shabbat, someone asked him about why he left his own ultra-Orthodox world as a high schooler. “I was too religious to be Orthodox,” he replied.

He meant, I think, that life and Torah hold too much sacred possibility to be exhausted by microscopic conformity to rules – even holy and beautiful rules – in self-segregated “gated communities.” And that life is too full of meaningful sanctity to be restricted to what we conventionally call “religious observance.” (Admittedly, if it is to be Jewish it must find expression in shared communal norms and deeds. These new Torah norms are still forming.)

We all still only stammer this new vocabulary. Words like hiloni/”secular” and dati/”religious” are overly crude binaries to describe what I, at least, would like to see the Jewish people learn to become. We’ve only begun to discover life’s latent possibilities for that special mix of virtue, refinement, spiritual aspiration, social responsibility, learning and worship worthy of the name Torah.

That’s what I aspire to, at any rate. At my best, I should be fortunate to emulate Elboim and be “too religious to be Orthodox.”

A truly inspiring figure and one of the great rabbis in Orthodox America, R. Yosef Blau – the “Spiritual Guide” or Mashgiach Ruchani at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical seminary – spoke a year ago of the power of meeting Palestinians and hearing their own narratives, through the Encounter Program. Here is a report about it, including a video of his speech at the 2011 Encounter fundraising dinner. Yes, you can be an empathetic and universalist Zionist.

Leonard Fein has been “curating” a discussion on the Huffington Post called Liberal Zionists Speak Out. It is quite stimulating. We Liberal Zionists have been most embattled and this conversation needs to be broadcast widely, affirming the ethical standing of Jewish peoplehood, and our need for political sovereignty in a world where not that long ago our enemies murdered millions of us and where real enemies continue to see us as little better than “Jewish Arabs” who should do well to live as a minority in an Islamic state. But the sad but real transformation is that a liberal Zionism of most of the 20th century gave way to a right-wing Zionism of the late 20th century. Myself, I still believe in a liberal Zionism, sensitive both to the claims of Jewish destiny, Jewish cultural commitments and those of our neighbors, both those who are citizens of the state and those who are subject to its rule. Anyway, you’ll enjoy most of these articles, including those by Muki Tsur, Michael Walzer, Stuart Schoffman and Ruth Gavison.

An important discussion in Israel happened this year regarding Hatikva, the national anthem. Supreme Court Justice Salim Jubran stood in silence as Hatikva was played, causing national apoplexy. But, as Bibi Netanyahu recognized, it is not fair to expect an Israeli Arab to sing with reverence the words “as long as a Jewish soul longs within the heart … “

What can Israeli citizenship mean to the 20% who are non-Jewish? The Forward has taken up this question with an interesting proposal about the text of the national anthem, as advanced by their columnist Philologos. That pseudo-nonymous writer is no post-Zionist leftist, but a true paleo-Zionist ideologue, who presses the question of the multi-cultural components of the Jewish state. The Forward site has Neshama Carlebach singing the revised words. See what you think. Compare this to the version sung by survivors in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

Finally, let me offer you an old poem by an old poet, Yehuda Karni, an early immigrant, an early editor of HaAretz, who died in 1949. A moving piece of romantic retro-Zionism, longing to become a single stone in a wall of safety in a rebuilt Israel. I feel it.

Put me in the breach, like every other rolling stone
Fasten me strongly with a hammer
Perhaps I may atone for my homeland and pay off
The sin of a people who has not mended it ruins.

How good to know that I am a stone like every other stone of Jerusalem
How fortunate I am, for my bones are bound into the wall
For why should my body be any less than my soul, which in fire and water
Walked along with its people, screaming and silent?

Take me with all the Jerusalem stones, and place me into the walls
Cover me with mortar
And as they wear away within the wall, my bones will sing
To greet the Messiah.

How should a synagogue community mark Yom HaShoah?

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s *Zakhor* made us pay attention to the uneasy alignment of Jewish “history” – empirical, critical research into the past – and “memory” – emotionally and culturally laden bonds we share with people who lived long ago, who are dead but never really gone, whose lives we carry forward. Contemporary Jews marking the Shoah almost always stumble as we weave history & memory. Too much historical analysis, and we’re really just examining cadavers. But it is so easy to slide into manipulative sentimentality, and our nostalgic veneration of a supposedly authentic, saintly Eastern Europe. No thank you.

Then there are the problems of theology, politics and ethics. Bringing God into the conversation is totally necessary and totally impossible. As R. Eliezer Berkovits said in *Faith After the Holocaust*, it is blasphemy against the God of Israel to fail to ask where He was while His children were being slaughtered. Yet no religious answer makes more than fragmentary sense of the extreme bestiality of the Nazis and their friends. Certainly no answer can be compelling enough for our communities to davven it together as a faith statement. Politically, too often the Shoah becomes a spade to dig with, merely a pretext to talk about Iran or the Palestinians or Pat Buchanan. On the ethical front, you cannot cede either the Jewish meaning of these events or the universal ones. It is bizarrely deracinated to mark the obliteration of European Jewish civilization by talking about Darfur. Yet it is bizarrely self-assertive to talk about *einsatzgruppen*without considering the moral imperative to fight further mass murders. As Ruth Messinger of AJWS likes to say: “*Never Again* cannot mean *Never again should Germans kill Jews in the 1940s*.” All true. All difficult.

How should we mark it? The old stand-by – a survivor sharing his or her story – is in its final act. There are about 200,000 survivors in Israel and about 125,000 in America (according to various newspaper accounts). The youngest camp survivors would be in their 80s, and hidden children would have to be 70. About 12,000 survivors died in Israel last year, or an average of one every 44 minutes. We are the last generation that will hear from them in person.

At Ansche Chesed last year (2011) we had an exceptional presentation from the historian Sam Kassow about his book “Who Will Write Our History“ on the Oyneg Shabbos archives, the efforts by Warsaw Ghetto residents to document the misery going on around them, and the efforts at spiritual survival.

This year we followed up by showing *A Film Unfinished”, an amazing edition of Nazi propaganda footage taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in May, 1942, interleaved with contemporary interviews and additional material. The Nazi film aims to portray rich Jews ignoring the starvation of their poor brothers and sisters as they lived in luxury. The Nazis abandoned the project, apparently because the real cause of all the misery – the sidewalks full of corpses, the courtyards full of human feces, the people in dressed in rags – was all too obvious. Ghetto survivors, now in their 70s and 80s are shown here watching the film, pointing out individuals they recognize among the footage, fearing they will see images of their own parents. People have posted the whole film on Youtube, but I recommend you buy it. Here is a trailer.

Most haunting for me were two things: First, the Nazi camera’s focus on so many *faces* of the Ghetto residents. When you say the number *6 million, *how difficult it is to think of individuals. But staring into these faces – a mix of rich, well-fed faces, and gaunt, starving, scarred, grotesquely suffering faces – is a harrowing experience. As I looked at those faces, I thought to myself – this film is shot in May 1942. Within four months, by September of that year, most of you will have been gassed at Treblinka. You and you and you and you and you are all headed for the *brausebad* and then it will be over. This visual experience was helpful for absorbing the Shoah not as a pile of 6 million dead bodies, but as a passing parade of 6 million living people.

That is the same reason I find very moving the all-night reading of names, as we do here on the Upper West Side every Yom HaShoah. Reading the long list of names, I try to imagine something about these people. I try to imagine the person that goes with this name … let’s say Mordecai Goldberg, Sarah Cohen … attending school, playing childhood games, getting married, giving birth, mourning a loved one.

The other intensely moving part of the film had to do with food and hunger. One scene of the film, apparently a propaganda trope, shows a ghetto resident arranging flowers in a vase. To which one of the survivors comments: “Flowers? When were there ever flowers? If we had one, we would have eaten that flower.” You see scenes in this film that you never see in the worst urban poverty in America. True starvation and people too weak to move. At one point a man takes out a spoon and scrapes something off the pavement to eat it. (Similarly, you see what it looks like when people are literally dressed in rags – literally bags of rags – something you never see even among the saddest NYC street people.) When the film was being shot there were 4,000-5,000 people dying per month in the ghetto, dozens every day, their corpses left in the streets overnight for circulating burial squads to pick them up and lay them into mass graves (also shown in the film).

I came away from these images with a renewed sense of gratitude for the mind-bogglingly abundant food that we have in this country, a renewed desire to recite blessings for every morsel of food I enjoy, and a renewed desire to feed this country’s poor. As I like to, I gave to two of my favorite food organizations, the West Side Campaign Against Hunger in New York and Meir Panim in Israel.

Yet I still feel the enormous power of prayer to re-orient the self, to help us connect to our deepest, wisest and noblest wishes for the world. At least it helps me. The best prayers are a rare combination of mind, heart and will.

These days I am leading a group at the Prozdor high school program at Jewish Theological Seminary on the meaning of prayer for modern Conservative Jews. Last Sunday I thought to bring some examples of powerful prayers in film. (Because, let’s face it, teenagers love video. So do adults. So do I. I love these videos. I LOVE these videos.)

So as long as I’m being honest to God, here are some of my favorite movie prayers.

Check this out, from O Brother Where Art Thou? The opening is hysterical (“Care for some gopher, Everett? No thanks, Delmer, a third of a gopher would only arouse my appetite”). But start at about 1:18 where the escaped convicts find themselves amid a congregation baptizing itself.

Here is a different version with the studio version of the song laid over the entire video reel.

OK, admittedly, there is some satire of what deep Christian thinkers call “cheap grace” – easy forgiveness. But there is also real grace. Real surrender. Real beauty, as people are really carried away, entering the well living waters and being renewed. I find it moving.

Now for something totally different. This is from The Apostle, the 1997 film about a sinful, faithful evangelical preacher, one of the best movies about religion I’ve ever seen, with some amazing acting, by Robert Duvall, who may not be a wartime consigliere, but he can sure act.)

Check out this scene,

especially beginning at 5:30, where the main character Sonny, has just been fired from his church because of his infidelity. He goes to the attic and speaks to God, with anger, honesty, love, rebellion and human personality. All authentic modern prayer has those elements. It’s ferocious: “I love you, Lord, but I am mad at you.” My favorite line: “I always called you Jesus and you always called me Sonny.” We’ve got a relationship here. So what should I do now? What should I do? That’s real prayer.

Let’s get back to Judaism to visit a true classic Jewish American text, The Jazz Singer (1927), the first movie to blend silent and talkie film. It’s the story of a young man who rebels against his family – who wants him to be a synagogue cantor – to become instead a “jazz singer.” In this climactic scene, he returns to sing Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur eve, as his father dies, satisfied with the knowledge that his boy has come home.

This scene is extremely dated, being about 85 years old, but strangely affecting still. Part of what works in prayer is the knowledge, as the Jewish liturgy says, “you are our God, and the God of our ancestors.” Real prayer connects us to the traditions of our forebears. This gives us strength and meaning. Every regularly davvening Jew knows what it is like to feel the ancestor’s hand upon our shoulder, at Kol Nidre or even an ordinary morning.

Finally, a great modern Israeli Jewish text, the film Ushpizin (2005), the work of the great actor/writer Shuli Rand. In this film, Rand plays a former criminal who has repented to become a Hasidic Jew, following the peculiar path of R. Nachman of Breslov, the 18^th-19^th century sage who insists on the power of personal prayer. The character Moshe’s troubles include severe poverty and childlessness, the classical crises which Jewish texts associate with prayer. Moshe especially has to overcome his tendency to violent anger, from his criminal past. In the first clip, at around 9:40, with the holiday of Sukkot about begin, he and his wife, Mali, pray intensely for a miracle, since they lack enough money for the basics of the holiday.

Sure enough, they are given a $1,000 charitable gift, enabling them to buy, among other things, the most perfect etrog in Jerusalem. The story is a little complicated, but suffice it to say that Moshe faces some tribulations, as he hides two escaped prisoners, lowlifes from his past, which prompts his wife to leave him. And when the convicts mistake his precious etrog for a lemon, squeezing it over a salad, Moshe is about to blow. But instead he has this prayerful confrontation with God, which begins around 4:40.

I hope you enjoy these. What do you think? What are your favorite movie prayers? Or other religious scenes?

What I admire about Ash Wednesday is its AWESOME ritual: the smearing of a cross of ashes upon the foreheads of adherents. Walking around New York today, I was so moved by the sight of many Catholics (I think only a very few Protestants do this) bearing the sign of their faith. In this secular age, I admire those who walk around wearing the badge.

First, especially in New York City, one cannot fail to notice the rich ethnic diversity of the Catholic Church: many, many, many Hispanics, some blacks, a few Asians, and still plenty of what we used to call “white ethnics,” Italians, Poles, Germans and Irish. That’s just so cool and broad. That’s what Catholic means, after all: the whole world.

Even more, I admire the symbolic depth of this ritual. Symbols are those evocative mythic and poetic deeds, gestures and words that seize us, and bring us into contact with the ultimate story, what’s really real. For a Christian, I can only imagine, this is an amazingly deep gesture: inscribing your face with a mark that comprehends both your inevitable death – for “you are dust and to dust you shall return” [Genesis 3.19] – and the possibility of your eternal life, symbolized for the Christian by the cross. That’s religion, my friends: You will die; face it. You will live forever; be worthy of it.

We Jews don’t do much with ashes any more. But we should! And we used to. We do have some old practices in this vein that deserve mention. During the communal crisis of a drought, Mishna Taanit 2.1 [=15b-16a in the Talmud] records, they would bring the Torah ark into the public square and place ashes upon it, while the communal leaders would smear the ashes upon their heads. And since the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, grooms were to place ashes upon their foreheads, to fulfill the verse “If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my mouth seal shut if I do not recall Jerusalem even at my greatest happiness [Psalm 137.5-6; Talmud Bava Batra 60b].” These practices connote God’s participation in Israel’s human suffering [cf Isaiah 63 and Psalm 91], and inevitable human mortality. Hmmm. Seems like some Jewish and Christian parallel themes at work here …

At any rate, I wish my neighbors a meaningful day with a powerful symbol. And I wish us all that we may be privileged to see the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah 61.3, that God will “grant joy [*pe’er*] in place of ashes [*efer*] to those who mourn for Zion.”

The most notable example of the Torah’s androcentric orientation is Moses’ command to the Israelites to prepare for revelation [Exod 19.15]: “Be ready in three days – do not come near a woman.” Could any proof be clearer that our Torah speaks mainly to men, and considers women worse than marginal, practically inimical to the religious experience? Almost undeniable, and instantiated by plenty of commentators.

And yet… amazingly, some of the Sages read this verse precisely against the grain, to extract from it a mandate for women’s inclusion in the revelation – precisely the opposite of the apparent semantic meaning. I will paraphrase/explicate the rabbinic teaching, associated with Rabbi Eleazar ben Azarya (2nd century CE), which can be found in the Talmud Shabbat 86a, paralleled in the Midrash on Exodus called Mekhilta [Bahodesh 3] as well as in Rashi’s commentary to Exodus 19.15. (Warning: minor sexual explicitness follows.)

Be ready in three days – do not come near a woman. Seminal emission renders a person ritually impure. This is true whether the semen came from a man in the usual course, or whether it re-emerged from the body of a woman following sex. Whoever’s body emitted semen, male or female, would be considered equally ritually impure. (See Leviticus 15.16-18 for all this.) Semen deposited within a woman’s body could re-emerge for as many as three days, the Talmud says, but may be ignored after that time. Therefore, in warning “do not come near a woman,” Moses is telling his male listeners: do not compromise your wife’s eligibility to be present for God’s revelation. You might come and go, so to speak, but three days later she could still experience ritual impurity from an earlier encounter. You must abstain, Moses says, so that she too can be ready to stand at Sinai, the first time. According to this teaching, men are commanded to avoiding sex for the sake of the women’s experience of God, not for the sake of the men’s own experience.

Now, if a modern traditionalist offered such an interpretation, we’d sniff and call it apologetics, and accuse him of distorting the simple meaning of the Torah. But Rabbi Eleazar ben Azarya lived in the 2nd century! He certainly never knew he should be embarrassed by the Torah’s latent misogyny or androcentrism. He never heard a feminist critique of anything. He is not apologizing. He’s just explaining what seems to him the fullest meaning of the Torah.

And to our great surprise, this position turns out to be actually quite egalitarian. The ritual purity rules for males and females are, in this case, the same. And for R. Eleazar ben Azarya, so too the opportunity for men and women to stand at Sinai is fundamentally egalitarian.

Now, I would not deny Plaskow’s argument, which has a lot going for it. Certainly one midrash cannot disprove the reality of pervasive androcentrism in classical Judaism. Plaskow herself notes this text (p.27 in Standing), citing it as an example of a positive rabbinic instinct for women’s inclusion, although those same rabbis would “continually re-enact” exclusion.

Fair enough. But as a religious Jew and a student of the Sages, my deepest held belief is that the Torah contains the seeds of its own renewal. We certainly must be honest about where the Torah tradition has turned into blind alleys, where it is difficult for us moderns to find meaning. But this ancient text is an amazing counter example, I think, of the power of interpretation to keep Torah alive. It’s the never-dying, ceaselessly growing tree. From two millennia ago, an echo of an ancient rabbinic voice insists that everyone in Israel must be able to share the covenant. If that’s not the Tree of Life, I don’t know what is. I feel we’re all still standing at Sinai the first time.

Last month I posted the earlier comment called “Not So Honest Kars-4-Kids” about the charity which would seem to be intentionally obscuring its Orthodox affiliations, perhaps to attract gifts from Jews and non-Jews who would not otherwise support their mission.

I want to give a big shout out to Josh Nathan-Kazis of the Forward who has been carrying this story … umm…. Forward, with a couple of excellent pieces about that group’s dodgy use of money.

Check out these pieces: http://forward.com/articles/149879/ and http://forward.com/articles/149459/

Well done!

Nonetheless, I keep this fast and the other minor ones, including those whose meanings I do connect with intensely, like mourning Moses’ smashed tablets on the 17th of Tammuz, political extremism on Tzom Gedalya.

I like fasting – it’s physical and spiritual and intense, even as you feel a bit weakened. I realize that not so many people in my corner of the world observe the minor fasts. And I wonder about why that is.

Modern liberal people choose not to fast not only because they don’t connect to ostensibly historical events, long forgotten by everyone. Rather, I think we liberal Jews are not so good at incorporating difficult and trying experiences into our religion. We do what we like to do, and rarely feel called to endure any pain.

Not that I favor religious self-mortification for its own sake, or to emphasize basic human abjection. But I do think that – if religion is to be a rounded spiritual experience, not just a birthday party – it needs to confront the bad news as well as the good, and ritualize them and internalize them. Furthermore religion – at least this one – requires you to bear the yoke. You have to carry practices that try your endurance, not only those which celebrate your pleasure.

That’s how I experience fasting and why I continue it: it helps me internalize and ritualize life’s failures and suffering, and trains me in bearing the yoke of service, even in ways I don’t really enjoy bearing.

It all reminds me of a passage in the short story “My Quarrel with Hirsch Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Grade>, the great Yiddish writer (who just happens to be buried in the Ansche Chesed cemetery). In this work, Chaim Vilner, the narrator, an apostate Yiddish writer who left the world of the yeshiva – obviously Grade himself – encounters an old fellow student, who remains a fierce defender of traditional pietism. The story takes place mostly in 1948, in Paris, and the two hammer out their world views, in the wake of all that each suffered in the Shoah. One gets the impression that Grade is having this conversation in his own head, hearing both the power of the pietistic argument, as well as the inevitability of secularism and apostasy as they force unanswerable questions upon tradition.

The pietist, Hirsch Rasseyner, complains that the liberals only know how to lighten the yoke of Jewish commitment; they never know how to intensify it, until it grabs your whole heart and soul, down into your internal organs. “Lighten the weight a little, they said, so what is left can be borne more easily,” Hirsch says. “But the more they lightened the burden the heavier the remainder seemed. I fast twice a week without difficulty, and they can hardly do it once a year. Furthermore, what the father rejected in part, the son rejected in its entirety. And the son was right! Better nothing than so little. A half-truth is no truth at all. Everyone, and particularly a young man, needs a faith that will command all his intellect and ardor.”

There is a lot of depth to this, even though I have no desire whatsoever to practice ultra-Orthodox religion. But it is certainly true that in my corner of the world we should build up our necks more, so we can bear the yoke better, even when it hurts. We need to, we need these fasts, so we can train ourselves to make religious meaning out of life’s ugliest moments.

See you on Taanit Esther.

If this fine organization was aimed at such obviously suffering populations, it probably would have said so. I guess they didn’t want to be explicit about just whom they would help. Maybe they feared you would not like their target population, or the way they offered to help. So they left it vague. They’ll just help … kids. Who doesn’t like kids?

A couple of years ago I looked this charitable organization up on the internet and learned an important fact: it was based in Lakewood, NJ. We in the Jewish world know that can only mean one thing. Lakewood is a heavily ultra-Orthodox town full of yeshivas. I’m going to guess that the way Kars-4-Kids helps kids is … by sending them to yeshiva! What could be better help than the Torah? And sure enough, their tax filings list among their major initiative: “Private school tuition assistance for children whose vulnerability requires transfer from the peer influences of their public schools.”

At the time I tried to interest my friends in Jewish journalism about this, but they weren’t too attracted, for whatever reason. (Not naming names, but you know who you are.) Sorry to hear that. But glad to hear that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was interested. Last week they wrote about the organization and its track record, which includes significant fines for deceiving donors in Oregon and Pennsylvania. Check out the article here

Kars-4-Kids (and its related arms “Joy for Our Kids” and “Oorah” [which means “awaken”] is a relatively big charity. In the last 5 years, they report taking in more than $102 million. Last year, they gave out more than $19 million in tuition and more than $600,000 in scholarships, of course only to Orthodox programs.

The Star-Tribune quotes the executive director, Eliyohu Mintz, as saying that 1) there was no time in the 60-second radio ads to explain which “kids” would benefit from the donations, and 2) it should not matter anyway, since it is good to help any kid. Why should anyone be so cynical about helping kids?

I have no doubt this group does good work, within their own narrow definitions of “good” and “work.” I sincerely doubt that these folks are personally enriching themselves. None of them is taking this money for Hampton’s vacations and the like.

But I cannot escape the strong sense that this is sheer deception. Total *geneivat daat, *stealing the minds of those whose gifts they are soliciting! If you’re proud of your work, say what it is. But as a charity, if you won’t say whom you’re helping, I have to conclude that you don’t want me to know. I have to conclude that you want to liberate money from benighted people who would never have chosen to donate to yeshiva scholarships and direct it, Barukh Hashem, to where it will do the most good.

All well intentioned people must fight the temptation to do good work with deceptive means! There is no such thing as lying for the sake of the truth. I’m sorry, that’s not worthy of the Torah. As the Kotzker Rebbe said: You can counterfeit anything except the truth.

One last side point: the economics of Jewish day school education in the liberal world are brutal. We cannot make it work except on the shoulders of the hugely affluent. We often look admiringly at the ultra-Orthodox and wonder how they get all those kids through school. I’ve always guessed it is by paying teachers low salaries. Occasionally it might also involve other kinds of exploitation.

You can find the details of the case with a Google search, but suffice it to say that Jerry Sandusky, a long-time assistant coach at Penn State, faces more than 50 counts of sexually abusing 10 young boys over many years. The State College, PA police department investigated but did not charge Sandusky in 1998. He retired from coaching before the 1999 season, but remained closely involved with the program and often visited its facilities. Another assistant coach told Paterno specifically in 2002 that he had witnessed Sandusky abusing a child in the Penn State shower. Paterno evidently passed the information on to his athletic director, and did nothing else. Charges began to be filed in November 2011.

One cannot know all the facts from the news media, and even accused pedophiles deserve a presumption of innocence until conviction. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that we have yet another case of moral authorities sweeping male-on-male sexual abuse under the carpet, exposing additional children to life-destroying abuse, because they simply are not brave enough to deal with the horror of the truth. No need to recount the scope of the massive problem the Roman Catholic Church has had over the years. Other churches are not immune.

Plenty of people have written insightfully, in print and electronically, on this case. (Including my friend Sam Freedman, who gave this Dvar Torah at Ansche Chesed, printed in The Forward.) I would like to add a few reflections as a Jew and as a sports fan.

First, lots of sacred institutions lose their sanctity when faced with this charge. I never would have thought that Joe Paterno – who was often portrayed as the lone noble man among the raft of cheaters, liars and manipulators in college football – would actually stumble on this. It is totally implausible that he was unaware of Sandusky’s behavior. He absolutely had to have known, yet continued to let Sandusky use his connection to Penn State football to impress children. I have no words.

Regarding other sacred institutions: Jewish communities have our share of perversity and evil. It is probably neither more nor less prevalent than in other communities. There are probably a reasonably large number of cases swept under the rug because authorities choose the path of least resistance, which does make us all run crooked. No doubt, it is an enormous moral burden to take the more difficult route. I ask myself – what if I received such a complaint about a trusted friend or colleague? Wouldn’t I be inclined to accept his denials? Would I really call the police – knowing the havoc it would wreak in his life – if I had no unimpeachable evidence of a crime? Doesn’t this person deserve the benefit of the doubt? I can easily see how attractive would be the path of least resistance, eliciting promises from the accused to be good from now on…

Of course this is exactly how serial abusers find dozens or even hundreds of victims – because no one wants to do the agonizingly difficult and disruptive thing: insist that the police investigate any charge. Let law enforcement – not the accused’s friends and colleagues – determine what is credible or not. Yes, this will mean that some innocent, unfairly accused people may be shamed by unwarranted investigations. But I believe the social and moral cost of such wrongs would remain smaller than the cost to child victims of leaving real abusers univestigated.

Jewish organizations have not been immune to sexual abuse charges. A major Israeli rabbi is currently on trial for such a charge. And a number of ultra-Orthodox yeshivot have seen such charges. I imagine that in practice there is plenty of *sha-shtil*,* *or* *“hushing up” of these embarrassing charges, for the same reasons of moral lassitude found in all communities. For instance, the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel in America demands that people consult with their rabbis before calling the police. Wrong answer! (Also, of historical interest, Marc Shapiro referenced a case where a major late 19th-early 20 th century Torah scholar, R. Eliyahu Rabinowitz-Teomim, the *Aderet*, father in law of Rav Kook, reports about himself that he urged the parents of a rape victim not to report to the police, lest the Jewish community get a bad name. Ye gads!)

But as a student of Torah, I am pleased to say that in recent centuries most legal authorities say the right things. People might think charging abuse, especially against otherwise respected figures, is *lashon hara*, or slander. But people should remember that the leading authority on the laws of slander, Rabbi Israel Meir HaKohen, the *Hafetz Hayim*, taught that in some circumstances reporting painful news publically is the only responsible course. One must be sure that the information is true, and that one’s motives are pure, among other conditions. But when reporting will lead to the public good, it may be necessary to reveal [*Hafetz Hayim*10.2]. In our day, the major ultra-Orthodox leader R. Shalom Yosef Elyashiv has urged people to turn to the police when they are certain a crime has been committed [in a letter written in 2004, printed in the journal * Yeshurun*, 2005, p. 641]. Yeshiva University teachers have taken the same route – see for instance R. Herschel Schachter’s audio shiur “Should I Call the Police .”

A relatively early relevant case: In 19th century Galicia, Rabbi Shaul Nathanson of Lemberg (=Lvov) wrote of a case that could have happened yesterday [*Shoel u-Meshiv* 1st edition 1.185]. In 1853 a school teacher in a smaller town was accused of having intercourse with young boys. So of course … he alleged that the accusers were manipulated by his enemies and part of a vast conspiracy against him, and he promised never to sleep in beds with children anymore and he promised to be good. So they sent him to Lvov where he got another job as a teacher. When the new employers heard of the old accusation, they inquired of the first court who told them that there was no proof of anything, so they should trust the teacher. But who could have foreseen what came next…? A few years later a new group of teenage boys in Lvov came forward to say that the teacher had sexually abused them when they were children. The Rabbi ruled that even though children’s testimony has no formal legal standing in Jewish law, it should be powerful and trustworthy enough to prevent someone from working with kids. An important observation: certain charges, by their natures, have to be treated with a different level of suspicion.

The most relevant mitzvah here is *lo taamod al dam re’echa*, do not stand idly by when your neighbor is in danger [Leviticus 19.16]. About this the Sages said [Sanhedrin 73a]: “How do you know that if you see someone about to kill another that you must rescue the victim, even at the cost of the pursuer’s life? From the verse, Do not stand idly by when your neighbor is in danger.” Similarly, the Talmud teaches, one should use any means necessary to rescue people from rape, drowning, attack by criminals or attacks by animals. I cannot possibly imagine a more applicable case of defending *dam re’echa*, your neighbor’s blood, than stopping a child abuser by telling the truth.

Finally, a personal memory: I played sports in middle and high school, in my hometown of Louisville, KY, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I have only great memories of these activities (except for losing a lot). When I was in high school, a kid I had known incidentally through middle school football killed himself with a shotgun. I did not know him beyond football, and had no personal contact with him at all, so I have no idea what prompted his death. But a couple of years later still, one of the coaches of those teams went to jail for sexually abusing boys. (I had ridden alone in cars with that man, but was never harmed.) I always wondered if there was a connection between those crimes and that suicide. I tried unsuccessfully to find an account of either case through Google. Since I have no additional data, and am merely speculating, I’ll omit both of their names from this post. Maybe there is no link. But I think of that poor boy, and wonder who knew about the coach’s crimes. May God show us mercy.

It is time to do what Jews do in such scandals: examine the last names. One can never be sure from such circumstantial evidence, but I cannot help noticing that one man arrested for taking the tests has an apparent Persian Jewish name, while two others have common Ashkenazi names. A fourth was an alum of the North Shore Hebrew Academy, an orthodox yeshiva high school.  Among those paying the test takers – and these are the real cheaters – two were North Shore Hebrew Academy students.

Bad news for the Jews. It’s a bad indicator of honesty in our corner of society.

What’s so bad about cheating, a particular sub-category of lying? First, cheating on tests violates the general moral principle that one should not receive credit or benefit from work one did not do.  Also there is a consequentialist argument: by getting a better score, test cheaters enhance their applications, gaining a leg up in the competition for scarce spaces in school, and diminishing the chances of honest applicants who did nothing wrong.

Moreover, I would focus on the question of personal virtue. Ethics is not only about the deeds one does or the effects of those acts. It is about what makes for virtue, or excellent human character. (In fact, the word ethics comes from ethos,the Greek word for character.) People in general, and religious Jews in particular, should be honest. We should be people of emet. And the Hebrew emet means not only to accurately report the facts, to have our words accurately correspond to external states of affairs. Emet means we should avoid deceit and trickery. We should be sincere (another meaning of emet), with our inner core matching our outer presentation to others.

I don’t mean to rub it in the face of the poor North Shore Hebrew Academy. I’m sure they are mortified at this very public stumble regarding their moral education. I am sure that cheating also could happen in my own kids’ school, which I think is a genuinely moral place. But I am reminded of the Talmud [Berakhot 28a] reports that Rabban Gamliel II tried to bar all the hypocrites and fakes from the Torah academy, admitting only students “whose insides matched their outsides.” Perhaps an elitist demand (for which the Talmud criticizes him) but it is a powerful moral aspiration nonetheless. I hope our Jewish schools educate for that sort of integrity.

People generally – although as a rabbi I am speaking primarily to Jews – should pursue the virtue of this kind of honesty, sincerity and integrity because it is a noble and courageous way to live. You have to face reality as it is, not evade it or skirt your way around it. These young adults have a lot left to learn about life if they cannot reconcile themselves to sub-par SAT scores. I have bad news for you, honey. It’s going to get worse.

But there is always temptation to put one over on someone. With just a little lie, after all, you can really get a leg up against the competition. For this reason, the Sages consider deception as a kind of theft – indeed “the worst kind of theft,” says Tosefta Bava Kamma 7.8 (in Lieberman ed., p. 31. See also Talmud Hullin 94a). Hebrew idiom captures this point: we call deception geneivat da’at, or “stealing the mind.”

Robbing someone of money is bad enough, but a mind is a terrible thing to steal.

On September 30, perhaps the leading Palestinian peace advocate, Sari Nusseibeh, published an essay on why Israel cannot be a “Jewish state.” There are a number of replies out there in cyberspace, including Leon Wieseltier’s excellent comments at The New Republic. See especially Shlomo Avineri’s essay in Haaretz (more below).  Nusseibeh’s essay is total sophistry, perhaps dishonest, or, if not, a very grim omen for the future. I don’t begrudge political advocates the freedom to score rhetorical points in high-stakes contests like the Israeli-Arab conflict. Have done it myself sometimes.

But Nusseibeh falsely posits that states can have no ethnic identity beyond commitments to the rights of their citizens. A “Jewish state,” he claims, would necessarily be either theocratic or apartheid, ultimately fated to disenfranchise its minority citizens. Then he really overheats, stirring up fears that the Israeli government actually aspires to expel the Palestinians to fulfill a biblical mandate to displace ancient Canaanites.

Now, I hold no brief on behalf of the Netanyahu government, and certainly not for the messianic ultra-nationalists on the right-wing fringe. Myself, I’d rather see the religious element shrink in Israeli politics. But we’re nowhere near a theocracy in Israel, where “white meat” (pork) is available in grocery stores and movies play on Shabbat. I believe there are some theocracies in the Middle East … but not in the Jewish state.

And we’re nowhere near apartheid within the borders of the Jewish state – a state in which Arab citizens serve in the Knesset and the cabinet. Did that happen in South Africa? I don’t think so. Admittedly, West Bank Palestinians lack the rights they deserve. And, yes, Israeli Palestinians stand in uneasy relationship to a state whose ideology, whose history, whose national anthem are all about Jewish destiny, in which they cannot participate. But this is not radically different from the experience of minority citizens in most of the world’s countries.  

Avineri’s essay takes Nusseibeh’s apart thoroughly, and it is worth reading. His central point is indispensible: Nusseibeh is prepared to concede priority to the Jewish religion within the state of Israel, but denies centrality to Israel as a manifestation of the Jewish nation. Israel could reasonably be a “civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism,” Nusseibeh writes, “granting equal civil rights to all citizens.” In practice, this is not so far off from what we actually have, of course.

But such a formulation misprises – perhaps willfully and deceptively – how most Israelis and world Jews understand Israel, as Avineri argues. This state was founded as a response to the Jewish people’s millennia of diaspora and of unbroken connection to a homeland, of unspeakable suffering and of a justified yearning for national self-determination, attained at last. This is one of the ways that Judaism differs from Christianity and Islam: it mingles national/ethnic identity with religious culture. It is unlike the way Christians may be French or Korean, and Muslims may be Arab, Bengali or British. We are Am Israel, the Jewish people. The only claim we have to this homeland is national by definition. Even most religious settlers would concede that a purely religious claim (“the Torah says God gave us this land”) is inadequate to settle international disputes. One who denies a Jewish national connection to the homeland has implicitly reduced this conflict to a case of religious bigotry.   

Avineri writes: “Those of us who have no problem recognizing the Palestinians as a people, based on their own self-determination, are thus left with a feeling of bitter disappointment that a Palestinian intellectual and philosopher who – justifiably – insists on the right of the Palestinians as a people to a state of their own, is not ready to accept the self-determination of the Jews as a nation.” Amen to that.

The very idea of a two-state solution is that we are each an independent people and that each of us needs its own country. I recall taking part in a demonstration more than 20 years ago in which Jews and Arabs chanted “two states for two peoples, Israel and Palestine.” It was right then and right now. But rhetoric like Nusseibeh’s evokes the Israeli fear that even the most moderate Palestinians really want a 1.5 state solution: Palestine for the Palestinians alongside a de-Judaized Israel with an incipient Palestinian majority.  

Avineri concludes: “The abyss currently separating moderates in Israel from the most moderate of Palestinians is indeed very, very deep and the chances of reconciliation do not appear to be likely.” Grim. I hope it is not true.

It was hard. Full stop. I found it extremely trying, yet it was most enlightening. Lots of people will tell you that this exercise was “life changing.” I wouldn’t go that far, perhaps, but I am very glad I did it. The food stamp challenge did for me what I expected: gave me some small, admittedly artificial, inkling of food insecurity, and cultivated my empathy for those who know they cannot always open the fridge and find enough healthy food to sustain themselves.

And it provided me a small demonstrative platform to advocate for the importance of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, the official name for “food stamps”). That program is part of the “Farm Bill” – a massive piece of legislation up for renewal next year, which treats a huge proportion of American food policy, here and abroad. With deficit reduction in high gear, SNAP is at risk. It shouldn’t be: more than 44 million people – half of them working poor – receive this aid. The government itself estimates that every dollar of SNAP aid pumps $1.79 back into the economy. Learn more about the issues at the website ofFighting Poverty with Faith, a broad interfaith coalition. And speaking of the farm bill …  if you want to read about the fatal inefficiencies of American food aid abroad, you can read Ruth Messinger’s Op-Ed in the Forward here.

On my own experience, I’d make a few observations. First the main thing is my deepened awareness of how plentiful food is in America … for most of us. Unlike most of human history, even most of the world today, American life is truly a banquet. OK, most of it may be garbage, unhealthy, and obesity- and diabetes-inducing. But food is plentiful, and most of us feel safe. We always can have food when we need it and when we don’t. But last week gave me the tremendously salutary experience of having to count my food. In a small, admittedly artificial way, I had a new experience: deciding to not to eat now so I could eat later. That’s a way of life for more than 48 million Americans in food insecure homes. I certainly feel sensitized, in a very modest way, to that experience.

What did I eat? Eggs, bread (homemade by a friend, assigned a $2 price for ingredients) peanut butter, beans and rice, and a ridiculous amount of grits. Now, I love grits. But the very thought turns my stomach, still, a week later. Food variety is part of the USDA’s healthy eating index. OK, I get it. Blechchch. Fresh fruit and vegetables? One carrot from a grocery store, two pears and five bananas from one of the sidewalk fruit vendors we have here in New York. Also, an apple from my fridge in a moment of desperation, to which I assigned a 35-cent value, based on the fruit vendor prices. Cheating? Perhaps. I still came in under the $27.

No coffee. At all. No one who knows me can believe it. I switched to cheap tea bags – two at a time. And I passed up my other beloved beverages for the week.

How it did it feel? Gray. Often groggy and lethargic. Simply not enough fuel for this machine to fire at its best, physically, emotionally or mentally. Although I repeat that I think it sharpened my empathy. I have a few people who regularly come to me at the synagogue for some money and food cards. One guy – whom I had helped just the previous week and wasn’t really due for me help from me – came to me and asked for some help “because my food stamps won’t arrive until next week.” How could I possibly turn him down?

Did keeping Kosher affect this at all? Interesting. Once I went into a dollar-store to buy a can of beans and noticed that super-cheap ramen noodles were on sale for 50-cents a cup. Of course, I wouldn’t buy these because they were shrimp and pork. But it was notable how much cheaper it would be to fill up on those empty, nutritionless calories. If I were really poor? I would probably be eating the ramen.

But I didn’t feel that a lifetime of self-imposed food restrictions – choosing to bypass McDonalds and whatever else – in any way trained me better for this exercise. I experience keeping Kosher as sanctifying my eating, not as deprivation. I like keeping Kosher. But this was something totally different. I experienced this as inability to access what I longed for, what was before my eyes, but inaccessible.

It’s like the Garden of Eden story in the Torah: that forbidden fruit is “a delight to the eyes, and desirable as a source of wisdom.” Eve and Adam just couldn’t resist. By watching food this week, I felt an inkling of how ancient people – who by definition were almost always food insecure – might have heard that story. Their temptations to steal inaccessible food must have been intense.

Finally, one major Jewish life insight. Modern American Jews can hardly understand the meaning of the weekly feast that is Shabbat. We eat too well all week long. Shabbat is great, sure, but it might not necessarily be the best meal of your week. Especially here in NYC, you might go to a spectacular restaurant during the week days. But for most of Jewish history, people ate dairy or pareve during the week, and not that much of it. And when the sun set on Friday night, it was a time of rejoicing. Last week – I really got it. I have never looked forward to Shabbat as fully as on the Friday when my small period of self imposed poverty would come to an end and I could welcome in the Sabbath Queen.  

That day and the succeeding days are vivid in my memory. We were in Jerusalem, and had no television in our apartment, only a radio, which we kept in the bedroom we shared with our one-year old. After a Saturday night party at a friend’s house, we put the baby to bed and didn’t turn on the radio, so he would sleep. The next morning we didn’t turn on the radio either, and didn’t learn anything of the events until I walked to school an hour later.

It was a fascinating time to be an American in Israel. My recollections are of profound national mourning and heshbon hanefesh, self-examination. The night after the assassination I walked around the Knesset where thousands of people, including Yeshiva students from the occupied territories, were mourning and reciting psalms with genuine pain.

In 1995 it seemed like Israel – and by extension the whole Jewish people – had gone to the brink, peered into the abyss and would pull back toward sanity. The early Oslo period had been full both of hope and rage and accusations of betrayal. It led to the unthinkable – the murder of the prime minister of Israel, a war hero from 1948 and the IDF chief of staff from 1967, for crying out loud! It seemed for a moment that we would all heed the tzav piyus, or the order to reconcile (a Hebrew play on words, borrowed from the phrase tzav giyus, the order to report for military duty). (Check out www.12heshvan.org/eng_index.aspfor a great Israeli organization, maintaining the spirit of those days.)

But all that lasted only briefly. The deep national rifts over Israel’s direction were only more raw and exposed after the continuing bombings of 1996, the failure of Camp David in 2000, the second intifada and the simply incomprehensible bombings of 2001-2003, and the Gaza withdrawal and subsequent rocket attacks. Now, the recriminations have returned, more accusations of disloyalty and treason. We’ve seen this film before, and know where it may end, rahmana litzlan, may God save us.

On the night he died, in his speech before a mass rally for peace, Rabin said: “Violence gnaws away at the foundations of Israeli democracy. We must condemn and isolate it. This is not the way of the state of Israel.” Ken yehi ratzon.May it be Your will.

The remarkable features of rabbinic Judaism include its genuine moderation, its revulsion at extremism and violence, its great esteem for open questions beyond solidified answers. What does it mean that perhaps 85 or 90 percent of Talmudic discussions are left unresolved – awaiting grappling by later readers? The inspiring hallmark of rabbinic literature is that it considers most questions as complex and multivalent, not easily resolvable. That means that even when parties disagree diametrically, they each contribute to a search for truth.  

Likewise, today’s Jews should not follow the typical response of those confronted with sharp disagreement: we should not regard ideological or political enemies as wicked, stupid or dishonest. Unfortunately we see that response all the time from the right to the left and the left toward the right, the Orthodox to the heretical, and the heterodox toward the traditional. That response lays the foundation for violence: since your ideological opponents are wicked liars, it becomes necessary to be rid of them. That’s the Yigal Amir option.

Instead, we should do what the Sages recommended [Talmud Hagiga 3b, paraphrased]: “Make your ear like a grain-hopper – wide going in and narrow coming out. Take in everything and sift it rigorously, to extract the truth.” Your opponents just might have some good points, you know.

That’s the hardest part of being a pluralist. Typically, we adopt the pluralist label to mean that our misguided opponents should bend to accommodate our correct views. But all too rarely does a commitment to pluralism mean that we ourselves actually try to learn from our adversaries, because we concede that they actually have something to contribute to hard questions. Please ask yourself: When was the last time you opened yourself to learning from people who take diametrically opposing positions to yours? I find that most people consider themselves pluralists … just not toward error, which is self-evidence of bad faith.

Sorry, that’s not the way it works. Jewish society – American society, too – needs to scale back on the peremptory rejection of those we disagree with. We ought not tar people as … fill in the blank … racists, fascists, traitors, Nazis, commies, fanatics, whatever. That is the path of messianists and absolutists, who cannot tolerate what they perceive as error and want to purge the field of people they regard as reprehensible. And that way lies delegitimization and demonization, and ultimately paves the way toward violence.

Instead – and this is not easy – we have to be less messianic. Less certain we’re right. Less certain our adversaries are wrong. So we can listen and learn from each other. As Ben Zoma said [Avot 4.1]: Who is the wise? The one who learns from every person.

But these few days are giving me a small inkling – even though this short-term self-imposed restriction exercise is nothing like real food insecurity – of what it would be like to walk through the abundant grocery store of life, with no purchasing power. I was struck today, for instance, by just how many people walk down the streets of the Upper West Side consuming ice cream. Looked nice, too. But not for me today.

My own eating plan has been to purchase inexpensive food for the week, some rice, beans, eggs, bread, peanut butter and grits. I have enough to eat. But it’s certainly a little boring. And nothing compared to the feast that goes on up and down Broadway

On this challenge, participants restrict their consumption to the average food stamp benefit of $4.50 per person per day, or an average of $1.50 per meal. That’s a modest amount for a modest time period – just one week. It’s much more difficult to imagine living on that budget with no end in sight.

I myself will shrink the period by a bit and do only six days – since it seems wrong to me not to rejoice on Shabbat with appropriate celebratory meals. So from the end of this Shabbat to the beginning of the next, I will spend a grand total of $27 on food and drink.

(Hmm. I do have a wedding to celebrate on Sunday, and it’s against the rules both of etiquette and Jewish law not to celebrate with the family. I may have to add another day next week to compensate.)

I will have more to say about this exercise tomorrow morning during Shabbat services in the Ansche Chesed sanctuary, also coinciding with another fine program, the American Jewish World Service’s (AJWS) Global Hunger Shabbat. (Check out that site – good stuff there.) Hope to see you there.

Demonstrative and time-limited exercises like this cannot give a person like me any true experience of hunger and food insecurity. Because “hunger is worse than the sword,” says the Talmud [Bava Batra 8b] and I am certainly not going to die from one week on a budget. But I hope this exercise does attune me more to the experience of the 45 million Americans who receive food stamps, and the millions of American households who struggle with hunger.

I’m also undertaking this challenge to express my belief in the necessity of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP – the official name of “food stamps”). This month the deficit reduction commission will release proposals on controlling federal spending; this year the farm bill will be reauthorized. Now is a time to re-affirm that the wealthiest society in history must remain committed to feeding its hungry citizens.

Keep an eye out for updates from me this week on what the food stamp challenge is like. You may want to give it a try yourself.

Camp is over, after a great season. Today is Rosh Hodesh Elul, and I’m back in New York. Summer is departing, and autumn looms. (And I will resume blogging. Thanks for patience during a hiatus.)

I love autumn, my favorite season. It brings me football, and leaves carried on cool breezes, increasingly frantic preparations for the High Holidays, and readying my kids for another school year. This school year will be particularly emotional, as our oldest child begins his final year in high school, his final year living full-time in our home. That passage certainly makes this 45-year-old feel the leaves swirling away.

Yes, fall is the season for feeling middle-aged, a time for remembering who you used to be, and who you were going to be, and for reorienting your horizons to who you are, and who you might yet become. It’s kind of unbearable, but nonetheless it’s a salutary way to approach the High Holidays, with their insistent reflections on life’s brevity and on inescapable moral and spiritual responsibilities.

Speaking of middle-age …

I’d like to recommend a wonderful lyrical poem on the theme by Rabbi Judah HaLevi (c.1075-1141), one of the giants of medieval Spanish Jewry, an accomplished philosopher and an astonishing poet. Don’t miss last year’s Nextbook biography of him by Hillel Halkin. This poem and others (Hebrew originals with Halkin’s translations) are available in a free e-book at  http://nextbookpress.com/books/1589/the-selected-poems-of-yehuda-halevi/. Have a look at the poem I’m discussing here, which Halkin titles “A Man in Your Fifties,” as #24 there. (Another fine recent work is Ray Scheindlin’s Song of the Distant Dove: Judah HaLevi’s Pilgrimage. You can find this poem, called “Still Chasing Fun at Fifty?” on pp. 184-189 there. In the idiosyncratic translation of Franz Rosenzweig, sub-translated again into English, the final section of the poem appears as #88, p. 258 in Richard Cohen’s edition of FR’s Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda HaLevi.) This poem is a literary meditation upon HaLevi’s real-life pilgrimage from riches and fame in Spain to the Land of Israel, ravaged by the Crusades and poverty. In the summer of 1141, he reached the Holy Land, where he died, presumably very soon after arrival.

In this poem, HaLevi calls on his middle-aged self to grow up. No more lust and sloth and immediate gratification. You’re too old for such lazy, juvenile self-indulgence. Live in accordance with God’s commands, not your own sensual drives. This first half of the poem is fine but not extraordinary, employing a conventional medieval theme.

But HaLevi really hits his stride in the second half, when his pilgrimage toward a grander destiny begins, as he takes a mighty ship out into the Mediterranean Sea, where it is overwhelmed by a terrifying storm. The power of this image emerges when you see that the creaky ship of the poem is not only his carriage to the Holy Land, but is itself a figure for HaLevi’s own dwindling life and his own aging body. It once seemed so strong! The cedar masts stood stiff, the sails billowed proudly and the sailors were skillful and fearless! Now tossed on towering waves, the ship is taking on water, tall masts crumple like straw, sailors are helpless, fainting away with terror, and the passengers pray for death.

But the middle-aged medieval poet does not yet go down with the ship. For although time always erodes our bodies as it leads us onward toward death, mortal people still may discover moments of timeless peace and grace when they place themselves in God’s hands.

The final section of the poem expresses this experience of grace beyond time as it describes the sea storm passing into calm, the sun setting, the stars emerging in the night sky, and their reflections flickering in the ocean water. I’ll give you these lines in Halkin’s translation.

Now the waves subside; like flocks of sheep they graze upon the sea.

The sun has set, departing by the stairs

Up which ascends the night watch, led by its silver-sworded captain.

The heavens are an African spangled with gold, blue-black

Within a frame of milky crystal. Stars roam the water,

Flare and flicker there, outcasts far from home.

The seaward dipping sky, the night-clasped sea, both polished bright,

Are indistinguishable, two oceans cupped alike,

Between which, surging with thanksgiving, lies a third, my heart.

Man, he could write! The image of the night sky, dressed like an African girl draped in precious jewels, reminds you of Shakespeare (“She hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear”).

As a religious person, I find this such a rich expression of deep spiritual absorption. It’s what Freud called the “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and its Discontents, though he averred he never had such a feeling himself. Well, I have, and have been blessed to have them more than once or twice. And I cannot imagine expressing them better than HaLevi’s image of three seas: above, the starry night sky; below, the open ocean, twinkling with starlight; and poised between them lies the third ocean, the human heart.

I love the Weil-Anderson “September Song,” especially the Sinatra version (“And the days dwindle down to a precious few… September, November … And these few precious days, I’ll spend with you.”) But today, on Rosh Hodesh Elul, August 31, 2011, I will reach back to the 12^th century for my “September Song.” Grow up and realize you cannot outrun time. Your aging boat will have to ride out too many storms. But fear not and keep still, for your heart is an ocean.

It’s 100 degrees here in Camp Ramah in the Berkshires. It’s sweltering, humid, buggy and dusty. Pretty miserable. But then, miserable is just what high summer should be on the Jewish calendar.

This week we marked the 17^th of Tammuz, the minor fast day marking the date when a number of mythic calamities befell Israel, the most important of which is the day Moses descended Mt. Sinai carrying the twin tablets of the covenant, carved and inscribed by God, and – upon seeing the people worshipping before a golden calf – smashed them into a million pieces.

In another couple of weeks, on August 8-9^th, we will mark the 9^th of Av, the major (sundown to nightfall) fast marking the date both Jerusalem Temples were destroyed, and when God decreed that the generation that had left Egypt would not reach the promised land after all. (The historical catalog of disaster can be found in Mishna Taanit, ch. 4.)

We mark these hot days generally (and the 9^th of Av specifically) with fasting, sweating, going barefoot, sitting on the ground, no bathing, no celebrations, refraining from meat, wine and sex. Is this just more woe-is-us, oy-vey Judaism? Needless self-flagellation over long-ago suffering? Isn’t life hard enough without bringing up forgotten tragedies? Can’t we just go to the beach?

To the contrary, I think this time of year is among the deepest passages in our calendar – in fact, a real paradigm for Jewish time. The “trees” of Judaism are innumerable details of ritual, ethics and story. But they come together in a “forest” that tell us: Squeeze light out of the darkness. Draw life out of death. Find hope overcoming doom.

At this time of year, our spiritual palette is dominated by the darkness, the death, the doom. And it must be this way, because our only chance to fix this cracked world is to focus fearlessly on the all its genuine brokenness. Whether things happened on the 17^th of Tammuz or the 9^th of Av long ago exactly like the Sages said or not, I cannot miss the enormous mythic, poetic power of the incidents they recalled. To remember the smashing of the tablets is to stare honestly at the truth that God’s plan for the world can be foiled by human faithlessness. We can screw up this world royally. And we have. To recall a divine decree that the generation of the exodus could never enter the Promised Land is to understand that your destiny might actually end up unfulfilled. There is no promise you’re going to make it. You might die in the desert.

Marking a high-summer period of failure, fasting and national mourning is essential to religious integrity. Our summer mourning period keeps us from over-confidence, from being Pollyannas. You know what? It’s actually not all good.

Only by staring into the dark can you extract the light, the life, the hope. And that’s what comes next on our calendar. According to that same chapter of Mishna in tractate Taanit, the 15^th of Av, just a week after the fast, was Jewish matchmaker’s day, a day of love and sex, when young men and women went into the fields to seduce each other into marriages.

I find this magnificent. The Jewish summer calendar says to us: Spend three weeks remembering the smashed tablets of the covenant; remembering the ruined temples; remembering the wandering in the desert for 40 years. But don’t let mourning overwhelm you. After three weeks, stop. And go make babies. First, pay close attention to destiny unfulfilled. Then, go fulfill it.

By juxtaposing suffering and death on one hand, with eros and reproduction on the other, our Mishna calls to mind one of the stirring facts of the last 100 years in Jewish history. What did Shoah survivors do when they emerged from concentration camps and the forests, caves, attics, barns and other hiding places, now gathering into Displaced Persons camps? Many had lost their first families, seen their spouses and children beaten, shot and gassed before their eyes. What did they do next? They married and made babies in extraordinary numbers. The DP camps saw 700 births a month at one point, and more than 50 births per 1,000 people, the highest rate in the world at the time. (I myself know one person actually born in a concentration camp, in the final days of the war. Unbelievable!)

This is our Mishna and the summer calendar that it commands, in living color. The world is full of suffering. So don’t try to avoid it. Bring our suffering, our failures and our brokenness from the back of your mind to the front. Stare at it. Fast over it. Mourn it. And then emerge from it, to rebuild all that is broken, life by life.

The Torah’s authority is bound up with the moral stature of those who teach it. Consider a well-known passage from the Talmud (Yoma 86a) on the verse “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” The Sages understand this to mean you should not only love God with your own heart, but that you should “make the name of God lovable through your actions.”

A sage who does business honorably and behaves like a gentleman (or woman) inspires people to say: “how fortunate are his parents and teachers for having imparted Torah to him (or her). Woe to those who lack this Torah! For behold, this person studied Torah and his ways are so pleasant and his deeds are so virtuous!” But if a Torah student behaves dishonorably in business and rudely with others, then people will say: “woe to that person for studying Torah and woe to his teachers! This person studied Torah, and see how ugly are his deeds and how perversely he behaves!”

People inevitably evaluate the Torah by what kind of people it shapes. Not such a bad thing. It imposes a burden on religious people not only to fulfill the Torah’s rules, but to exemplify moral virtues. Those who falter under such responsibility reflect badly on themselves, yes, but also on the religious culture that produced them. And ultimately, unethical religious Jews make people hate God, for people intuitively understand that only a bad divinity would be served through an evil community.

I have been thinking about this passage during the recent ugliness going on in Israel surrounding the book Torat HaMelekh (“The King’s Torah”). This book, published last year, was composed by two rabbis associated with an extremist yeshiva in the West Bank, and it articulates a merciless, violent ethos toward the enemies of the Jewish people. I myself have not read the book (I have no desire to buy a copy to support its authors), but I have seen copious quotations in the press and in other works.

The book takes, shall we say gently, a maximalist approach to the principle of self-defense. It argues, for instance, that vigilantism – not governmental police power – is the proper mode of Jewish self-defense (p.127). It also claims that if one is certain that children will grow up to be terrorists, the proper Jewish response is to kill them now (p. 207). The authors don’t mention exactly who they refer to with such a teaching, but one can only assume they mean that religious Jews should take matters into their own hands and kill Palestinian children studying in Hamas schools.

Now, there can be no doubt that such a work represents only an extremist fringe, even of radicalized settler Jewry. Nearly all prominent rabbis in Israel have condemned the book. Nearly all, but not exactly all. Most importantly, the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, R. Dov Lior, and R. Yaakov Yosef, son of R. Ovadya Yosef, the leading halakhic authority among Mizrahi Jews, have endorsed it and stick by their endorsement. Lior in particular is a problematic figure. His students were central figures in terrorist Jewish Underground of the 1980s. The murderer Barukh Goldstein was his acolyte, as was Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin. In short, R. Lior’s teachings have consistently been close to circles of violent Jewish extremism.

The controversy over the last couple of weeks has roiled around a criminal investigation of the authors for incitement to violence. (Especially since Rabin’s 1995 murder, Israeli officials have taken a much harder line on quashing potentially dangerous speech. Out of place in America, perhaps, but more apposite in Israel.) For months, Rabbis Lior and Yosef refused to answer police summonses. In the last 10 days, they were picked up and brought in for brief questioning. This prompted widespread protests among Zionist religious Jews, whose public line has often been that rabbis should not be made to respond to something so petty as the law.

Admittedly, one should recoil at the prospect of the state passing judgment on the legality of religious teaching. Religion and the state are already too closely enmeshed in Israel. But you’re living in fantasy land if you think it is merely a hypothetical abstraction when R. Dov Lior endorses a call for vigilante pre-emptive strikes against Palestinian children.

The stakes are unspeakably high, both for individual lives, as well as for politics and the prospect for peace.

But the stakes are also high for the Torah. The authors of Torat HaMelekh, and Rabbis Lior and Yosef are not ignoramuses, to say the least. They know lots of Torah and Jewish sources, and quote them relevantly to make their arguments. As Spinoza said: Every heretic has proof texts.

And that should remind us that God and God’s Torah sometimes need defense from those who would make them detestable in the eyes of the human community. When a sage behaves in revolting ways, people will naturally say: woe to the students of Torah! See the kind of behavior the Torah produces!

The plain and ugly truth is al-Qaeda and Hamas are not the only murderous religious ideologies out there. I sincerely believe that our extremists are not nearly as bad as their extremists. But an honest Jew has to admit that there are sources in our tradition which can support monstrous conclusions. I hope the controversy over Torat HaMelekh forces us to confront those elements. You cannot just wish them away or pretend they don’t exist. We need to lay them bare, and understand the threat of perversion they pose, so that we can teach a more profound Torah, whose paths are pleasant and ethical, and all whose ways are peaceful. (Rabbi Ariel Finkelstain, based in Netivot, has done just this with a work called “Derekh HaMelekh,” the “King’s Way,” countering Torat HaMelekh and presenting a better vision. I am reading it now and may report on it later in this space.)

Despite their erudition in Torah, the writers of Torat HaMelekh and their supporters clearly have lost their moral compass. That’s the mildest thing I can say. Spicier guidance for Torah students can be found in Nietzsche’s trenchant observation: “When going out to fight monsters, take care that you not become a monster.”

I can think of no social transformation in my lifetime as rapid and sweeping as the acceptance now accorded gay people. I understand if some gay people view their public embrace as less than quick or irrevocable. But from the lynching of Matthew Shepherd to Brokeback Mountain to gay marriage … it spins your head how fast it has all come.

Last Friday night, New York state authorized same-sex marriage, making New York one of only five states and DC to take this bold stance. Such a revolution deserves a little faithful and honest Judaic reflection.

I celebrate New York’s decision.

This whole social, ethical transformation poses undeniably hard questions for how we relate to Torah norms about sexuality, family and authority. We’re only beginning to articulate a religious vision for this new world. Gay marriage will help us approach that new vision.

We Conservative Jews worked our way toward accepting homosexuality partly through a legal argument passed in 2006 by our Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, written by my good friend Rabbi Daniel Nevins and two of my esteemed senior colleagues, rabbis Elliot Dorff and Avram Reisner. (That paper, along with others, can be found by clicking here.) They argued, in brief, that it was unfair, socially unproductive, and ultimately un-Jewish, to condemn constitutionally gay people to lives without love partners. So, while affirming that heterosexual marriage remains the ideal, and affirming that the Torah itself forbids male-to-male anal penetration, they argued that all other sexual restrictions on gay men, and all sexual restrictions on lesbians may be considered to have lapsed.

The key ethical leverage of their paper comes from the Talmudic dictum that “protecting human dignity supersedes a Torah prohibition.” It wounds people’s dignity, to say the least, to tell them that God forbids them from loving or being loved.

There are many virtues to this work, and if I had been on the CJLS in those days I would have voted for this paper. But while both its head and its heart are in the right place, I think it is only a first step in transformed religious thinking. By restricting themselves to arguments that could be plausibly based in authoritative sources, Nevins, Dorff and Reisner felt they hewed to a legal method with integrity. Their work still looked like Halakha, even if its conclusion was unprecedented.

But their method was not suited to asking and answering a more fundamental question, which should be central to our approach: What confers kedusha, sanctity, on a romantic and sexual relationship? The classical answer was inextricable from rules governing specific sexual acts. Undeniably, that is a Halakhic question, which cannot be evaded. The Dorff-Nevins-Reisner position helped us respond to it and helped us progress. (By the way, even more traditional

But now it’s time to respond with additional religious depth to the more pressing question: What makes a relationship holy? To answer that question in a Jewish way demands that we identify interpersonal norms for all relationships, no matter the shape of the partners’ bodies, or how they might be.

As a Jew, I find it ludicrous to affirm gay relationships for the sake of a sexual liberation ethic, as if everyone has a natural right to maximize pleasurable experiences. (I was mortified, for instance, by the San Francisco gay synagogue’s prayer book which included a blessing for having anonymous sex, when a partner’s identity is not even known. What value can this possibly be expressing?) A libertarian line is also inadequate. Does Judaism have nothing more profound to say than “everyone should do what is right for themselves?”

If Jewish communities are to affirm what has, until now, been an outlawed sexuality, it must be because we have come to see that gay relationships can conform to our deepest vision of human relationships, as expressed in norms of love, commitment, mutuality and family.

And that is why I celebrate same-sex marriage: because it allows more people to build stable families with loving partners. As Jews we should affirm the Torah’s proclamation: it is not good for people to be alone. We should celebrate when they bind their lives together, aspiring to remain a couple until death parts them. We should believe Isaiah’s prophecy: God did not create the world as a wasteland, but rather created it for people to settle it, building homes and families.

By coincidence, the morning after Gov. Cuomo signed the same-sex marriage bill, in our shul we celebrated a bat mitzvah of a fine young woman, who was brought to the Torah by her two mothers. Those women have built a home and family. They are raising their two children to be ethical, kind and creative people. They are giving them Jewish educations and identities. What more can you ask of them or anyone?

This local celebration deserves a blessing. So does the new possibility for more couples to follow their paths: Blessed are You, Master of the cosmos, who kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to experience this moment.

I named this blog “Honest to God” to refer to one of my deepest religious convictions. The Talmud [Shabbat 55a] teaches that “God’s seal is Truth.” Now, this Hebrew word, emet, has a wider range of meaning than its English counterpart. Honesty, trust, confidence, sincerity, integrity and faith are all part ofemet, as are the more obvious truth and something verified. Being a religious Jew calls me to live these virtues in practice. In human relationships and with God, I strive to “admit the truth in public and speak the truth within my heart,” as we say in the morning prayers, based on Psalm 15. I try to keep the faith and to be faithful, to earn the trust of others and to trust. And since no one can lie before the Seal of Emet, I hope to build a spiritual life that is Honest to God.

The great modern Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig reflected on how to live on earth, facing God’s Seal of Truth. Only the infinite and eternal God can possess complete truth. That is, only for God can truth be a noun. For us – often mortal, finite, ulterior – truth can only be an adverb, a way of responding to the world. “We must have the courage to find ourselves present in the truth, the courage to say our Truly in the midst of the Truth,” he wrote. “Truth counts as God’s truth for me only when I make it my own in the Truly.” [Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 392-3, Hallo trans.]

Sorry about the infamously opaque Rosenzweigian locutions. But what he means is relatively clear: God is True. So people must behave Truly. And that’s what I strive for: to be Honest to God.

This reminds me of a famous ancient parable, from Midrash Genesis Rabbah 8.5:

Said Rabbi Simon: “When the Holy One was about to create the first human being, the angels broke into factions, some arguing: create, and others arguing: don’t create!

Thus it is written, “Love and Truth collided, Justice and Peace attacked each other” [Psalms 85.11]. For the angel Love said: Create humans, for they will perform acts of kindness. But the angel Truth said: Don’t create, for they will be nothing but lies. The angel Justice said: Create, for they will do acts of justice. But the angel Peace said: Don’t create, for they will be so quarrelsome.

What did the Holy One do? God took Truth and threw it to earth. The angels said: Master of the world! Why are you disgracing your chief servant?

God replied: So let Truth arise! Thus it is written, “And Truth will sprout from the earth” [Daniel 8:12].

Much I could say about this great teaching, which shows us human beings to be an unstable mixture of greatness and meanness. But for now let’s focus on the punch line: our very existence is a signal that we inhabit a false world. If the world were totally and authentically true, there would be no room for us imperfect copies. But God made room for us by banishing Truth from heaven.

So where is Truth now? Planted in the earth, an unsprouted seed, waiting to be tended and brought to fruition. That’s our job: pursue the truth, coax it from the earth, clear away the weeds and let truth root and flourish.

Interpreting this teaching, a 19^th century Hasidic master, R. Itzhak Meir of Ger summed it up: “Who could ever approach Truth, as it is in heaven? But now that Truth is cast to the earth, heaven demands of us that we be true, as the truth is on earth” [Siach Sarfei Kodesh 3:24 (1989 ed.)].

And that’s the Truth.