Belogski

This Blog has a New Home

2011-03-26T21:12:00.001Z

This blog has now moved.

Its new home is http://www.rabbibelovski.co.uk/.

Please adjust your Favourites accordingly...

A Thoughtful Post about Limmud

2011-02-25T09:52:00.002Z

Readers may be interested in a very interesting and thoughtful perspective on Limmud from my friend Dr. Ben Elton - here.

Thinking Sabbatical

2011-02-02T12:18:00.003Z

Thoughts from a returning rabbi

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost over, but I will be returning to ‘normal’ in a few days, following a wonderful winter Sabbatical. I’ve spent much of the last few months in one of my favourite places in the world, the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, where I’ve had the opportunity to study, write and consult world-class scholars in my field of Jewish studies; I have even managed to make good progress on my dissertation.

I’m finishing this period feeling renewed and refreshed in many ways: I have in mind ideas for family activities, exciting new projects for my community, fresh perspectives on Israel and Zionism, and complete courses that I hope to teach over the next year.

But most importantly for me, I’ve had the chance to think, something that is a rare and precious commodity. Away from the concrete commitments, deadlines for sermons, pastoral emergencies, meetings and teaching schedules that characterise my professional week, I’ve actually been able to think for the first time in years, not just about my research, but about every aspect of life. I brought my mp3 player to Israel, convinced that I’d need to fill the frequent lacunae with music: I’ve used it once.

Without space and time, essential issues scarcely surface, let alone get addressed – I cannot overestimate the benefit of having had an extended period of contemplation and self-discovery, with, I hope, some tangible, long-term results. While I appreciate that few are accorded the privilege of a Sabbatical, small snippets of personal time and space for contemplation can be carved from even the busiest of weeks. I know this because my wife has been doing it for years, despite juggling numerous overwhelming personal and professional responsibilities, including managing the rabbi. I know that many people, including me, are nervous of doing this: we wonder what fears, insecurities or unresolved issues will surface and so avoid it all costs, instead filling our spare time with noise and other diversions. Yet we sell ourselves short by not conquering these fears.

And during this period, I’ve come to realise something very important. If we don’t appreciate the need to give ourselves space and time, we are unlikely to recognise and encourage its fulfilment in others. For community leaders, this is a stark message: our ability to understand, guide and nurture growth in others is impaired by our neglect of our personal emotional and cerebral needs.

I am truly grateful to Golders Green Synagogue and the United Synagogue, for granting me this period to think, and most of all, to my family, who have been wonderfully supportive, despite my extended absences.

This Blog

2010-12-22T21:48:00.004Z

I haven't been posting much on this site recently, as I've been focusing on the development of two newer sites: Belovski's Shiurim and Belovski: a view with a room. Do look there for shiurim and more 'weighty' articles.

Meantime, I will continue to post here occasionally, including one in the next few days.

A long-awaited trip to Israel

2010-02-02T12:23:00.000Z

My second daughter, Tehilloh, is very excited, as in about a month, God willing, she and I will be spending eight days together in Israel. She will become Bat Mitzvah at the end of June, and this trip to Israel, her first, is her special birthday present from me and my wife.

I have the privilege of visiting Israel often, but for various reasons, my wife gets there only occasionally, and my children not at all. As such, it is a challenge to ensure that our children share our passion for Israel and remain aware of the fact that Israel lies at the centre of all Jewish religious, political and national aspirations. It is too easy for them to spend their childhood in the comfort of Golders Green without properly understanding the importance of Israel and the focal role that it ought to play in their lives and objectives. How does one convey to children living in a Diaspora that is largely happy and supportive of their religious lives that living outside Israel is not ideal? How does one teach Diaspora children to comprehend the miracle of the Jewish return to the Land, celebrate Israel’s successes, commiserate with her failings and identify with Israel and Israelis? How does one make them appreciate that the heart of the Jewish people beats not in Golders Green or Boro Park, but in Jerusalem?

One way that we have devised is to try to take each child for a private, intensive tour of Israel as the main part of the celebration of their religious maturity. I took our eldest daughter three years ago, but I hope that as we get further down the family, my wife will be able to take some of the children for their special tour. The rest of the celebration will be modest – a dinner for family and friends and a Se’udah She’lishit hosted by our community – but the trip to Israel is seen as the ‘big’ experience. While we are there, I hope to take Tehilloh to key places of religious and historical interest (she’s been researching where she would like to go), see some friends, engage in a chessed project and visit a couple of famous people. But mostly, I want Tehilloh to have a fabulous time soaking up the incomparable atmosphere of the Land, to experience its smells, sounds, people, craziness and Jewishness so that she too will get the ‘Israel bug’ that will fill her dreams and aspirations, as my wife and I did years ago. I am confident that this trip will do the job and enable her to understand why when I return from one trip to Israel, I can’t wait to plan the next.

As you can tell, I’m as excited as Tehilloh, even though I’ve done it all before, not least to get eight whole days of private daughter-daddy time. But most of all I’m excited and blessed to have the opportunity to contribute to strengthening Tehilloh’s Jewish identity and helping her to build her connection with our Land.

The place of a non-believing Jew

2010-01-26T15:43:00.001Z

At a simchah recently, I bumped into the father of an old friend, whom I hadn’t seen for many years. Charlie was always known as a forthright person, and it was good to see that the passage of twenty years hasn’t changed anything. He asked me what I consider to be the place of a Jew who doesn’t believe in God. He also told me that he remains a proud member of the community and of the Jewish people (he is, and always was, a staunch member of an Orthodox synagogue), but doesn’t believe in God. Charlie confided that he had asked his own rabbi and claimed that he had ‘been unable to handle the question’.

I think that while it’s a matter of great regret that Charlie doesn’t believe in God, and it would be desirable to discuss his beliefs with him in detail, his question deserved an answer.

My response (admittedly unprepared and delivered while struggling to hear over blaring music) was simple. I suggested to Charlie that even if he doesn’t believe in God, Judaism can certainly provide him with meaningful ideas, practices, and occasions for inspiration that will enhance his existence immeasurably. By continuing his association with the Jewish world, he will benefit from a way to contextualise major life-events, from the support of others and from unparalleled opportunities to enhance the lives of others.

How would you have answered?

A version of this article appeared on Cross-Currents

Ironies and opportunities: reflections on the JFS ruling

2009-12-21T16:30:00.003Z

Last week, the new Supreme Court of the UK dismissed the appeal of JFS, an Orthodox Jewish school, against a judgment that had branded its admission policy discriminatory. The details of the case (which hinged on how the Law views the unique blend of ethnicity and religion that defines Jewishness in the context of the Race Relations Act) are mystifying even to insiders; the final result is deeply disappointing.

Despite this, there are fascinating and surprisingly positive aspects to the judgment, as well as some delicious ironies that cannot go unmentioned. The ruling itself, which was handed down by only the slimmest of majorities (5-4) offers the most extraordinary vindication of Judaism, the motivation of the Chief Rabbi and of the governors of JFS. Is it not remarkable that Lord Phillips, the president of the court, should open a judgment about Jewish status with excerpts from Deuteronomy about intermarriage? All of the justices asserted that the Chief Rabbi (who is the arbiter of Jewish status for the Orthodox community) acted in the best possible faith and that ‘no-one doubts that he is honestly and sincerely trying to do what he believes that his religion demands of him’. The governors of JFS were also deemed ‘entirely free from moral blame’. Put simply, despite falling foul of the Law, the school’s admission policy, and, by extension, Judaism itself, are not ‘racist’ according to any normative understanding of the word.

Yet the greatest irony is the justices’ realisation, in the words of Lord Phillips, ‘that there may well be a defect in our law of discrimination’. How astounding that legislation drafted to outlaw anti-Semitism, among other evils, has been utilised to achieve what Lord Rodger calls, ‘such manifest discrimination against Jewish schools in comparison with other faith schools’. Catholics and Muslims are entitled to admit children to their schools according to their faith criteria, but following yesterday’s ruling, Orthodox Jews are now not. Lady Hale, who, incidentally, voted against JFS, reflected on whether Jews ‘should be allowed to continue to follow [Jewish] law’ in this regard. Indeed, could one fail to agree with Lord Rodger’s assertion that ‘one can’t help feeling that something has gone wrong’? It is good news that several of the justices felt that there may be a problem with the law. However, while any legislative remedy will certainly be very challenging, we will need to muster the support of those who are able to influence this process to ensure that Judaism is treated on a par with other faiths.

Jewish schools like JFS will now have to continue with the chaotic practice test forced upon them by the ruling. While compliance is, of course, mandatory, it undermines everything that the Jewish schools’ movement holds dear: the universal delivery of Jewish education to Jewish children regardless of practice or affiliation. Yet the Jewish community is renowned for its resourcefulness and ability to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Orthodox synagogues have been inundated with new families seeking schools’ ‘practice certificates’ for their children. Many have no previous affiliation to the Jewish community and their attendance at the synagogue is an unparalleled chance to reach out to them and share with them the beauty of Jewish life and observance. It may well be that this unwanted and unfortunate decision has quite unexpected consequences.

Isn't our meat good enough for you?

2009-12-05T20:39:00.006Z

A rabbi goes to heaven and is invited to sit at a banquet attended by Moshe himself. He makes a discreet enquiry and discovers that the food is under Divine supervision. The rabbi whispers in a waiter’s ear, ‘I’ll take the fish!’

Many people are puzzled by the suggestion that a rabbi might endorse some area of religious life but be reluctant to partake in it himself. For example, it troubles people that some rabbis won’t eat from certain kosher butchers; others won’t carry on Shabbat, even inside an area enclosed by an ‘eruv’. One hears the obvious concerns about inconsistency expressed in blunt terms: ‘is it kosher or not? If it’s kosher why won’t you eat it, and if it’s not kosher, why should I?’

It is not possible to make sense of this phenomenon without examining some of the underlying principles of halachah – Jewish law – and how they differ from common assumptions. Some rabbis, for whatever reason, have been unwilling to teach these ideas, perhaps considering them too uninteresting or abstruse for the average Anglo-Jew. I disagree. Indeed whenever I have tackled this topic, be it in conversation, writing or public lecture, it has been met with appreciation and, I hope, greater understanding.

Jewish law is fascinating and complex. Even the word ‘halachah’ (lit. a way to go) indicates a process rather than a ruling. It is a complete system that regulates every area of life, from the mundane to the most profound. Halachah cares not only how we act, but also how we think and feel about ourselves, other human beings, the world itself, and, of course, God. As such, it is all-encompassing in its scope and the opportunity that it gives us to maximise every instant, imbuing it with meaning and purpose. From cradle to grave, boardroom to bedroom, halachah is ever-present, allowing every moment to be experienced through the lens of the Divine.

Yet the comprehensive nature of halachah should not be confused with the desire to create a monolithic society in which everyone behaves identically. Indeed, disagreeing is the halachists’ favourite pursuit: unresolved arguments appear on each page of the Talmud and halachic code; in fact, there is only one chapter (in over 500) in the entire Mishnah that doesn’t contain a disagreement! While there are, naturally, established processes by which practical decisions are made, halachah might best be described as ‘organised disorder’ – a vast array of disagreements built on earlier disagreements. Some view this as an insanely unworkable system; others, me included, consider it to be one of Judaism’s greatest strengths. Disorder and multiplicity indicate range and diversity and are actually powerful tools that allow halachah to be applied in a responsive and case-driven manner, rather than as a blunt, insensitive instrument.

For example, there is an ancient dispute between major kashrut authorities concerning the pulmonary condition of cattle. While some overlook certain lesions of the lung, others (notably Rabbi Yosef Caro, author of the Shulchan Aruch) are of the opinion that animals with such lesions are forbidden. This unresolved disagreement broadly manifests itself in a disparity of practice between Ashkenazim (lenient) and Sephardim (stringent). Yet, understandably, many Ashkenazim choose to be stringent. Another example of this phenomenon is the mediaeval dispute about the distinction between a private domain (where one may construct an ‘eruv’) and a public domain (where one may not). This disagreement resurfaces throughout halachic literature and influences the approaches of modern experts as to where and how one may create an eruv.

Although there are well-established community norms in almost every area of law, we have shown that halachah does not offer a single answer to any legal issue, but an array of possibilities, within a carefully defined framework. Because of this, halachah is able to deal not just with ‘regular’ circumstances, but is flexible enough to accommodate emergency shortages, unexpected financial hardship, and the needs of the spiritually sensitive.

Despite the intricacies involved, Jewish life is greatly enriched by the application and validation of this multiplicity.

Talmudic sources conflict about whether the halachist should incline to leniency or stringency: ‘the power of leniency is preferable’ (Brachot 60a) appears to be contradicted by any number of Talmudic statements. Yet there really is no argument, as it is a given that the rabbi is to be lenient when ruling for others, yet stringent for himself and those who are striving for spiritual perfection. After all, his job is to make Jewish life as manageable, enjoyable and uplifting as possible. This demands leniency, where possible, especially when nurturing the spiritual needs of a disparate community. While there are many complex factors at play, inclusivism seems to me to be critical: given the constituents of a community, a ruling (certainly always based on proper sources and expert advice) must enable as many people as possible to observe their Judaism and feel comfortable within it.

This doesn’t always mean being lenient: a stricter ruling will sometimes be more inclusive, but it is obvious that responsible rabbinical leadership must always incline to leniency when regulating public religious services such as butchers’ shops. Ill-conceived stringency could result in price increases, restricted availability and fewer people observing kashrut. The same applies to building an eruv: the advantages of a community eruv are so clear that they outweigh the need to accommodate every halachic view, which might result in not building it at all.

Well-founded leniencies are squarely within the boundaries of halachah; yet this does not mean that everyone will want to rely on them. Halachah accommodates (and even celebrates) a range of practices for different circumstances and there have always been individuals who have elected to follow stringent practices. Yet while it is entirely reasonable for rabbis to adopt personal stringencies, they certainly ought to explain what they’re doing and why!

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle

Letter to Jewish Chronicle July 2009

2009-07-10T07:14:00.008+01:00

I sent the following letter for publication to the Jewish Chronicle. It appeared in part in today's edition.

Dear Sir

I write to thank Rabbi Tony Bayfield for unequivocally supporting the Chief Rabbi in his attempt to fight the recent Appeal Court ruling against JFS. Rabbi Bayfield’s admirable response illustrates a point I made in my recent JC article – that acknowledging our differences, rather than pretending that they can be smoothed over, enables us to work together on issues that impact on us all. Unlike your columnist, the predictable Mr. Alderman and a number of other ill-informed correspondents, Rabbi Bayfield understands that the JFS ruling rejects the definition of Jewishness accepted by every Jewish movement in the UK, not just the Orthodox, as it insists that Jewishness is defined by practice, not by descent or conversion by any standard. By this criterion, a Sabbath-observant member of ‘Jews for Jesus’ is considered more Jewish than a non-observant born Jew or one converted by any movement. It is lamentable that so many have used this nadir in Anglo-Jewish history to attack the Chief Rabbi, when the ruling so obviously equally affects his detractors, whose interests he is fighting hard to protect.

Yours faithfully

Harvey Belovski (Rabbi), Golders Green Synagogue, 41 Dunstan Road, NW11 8AE

JCoSS: not cross-communal; at best non-Orthodox

2009-06-26T10:43:00.007+01:00

The imminent opening of JCoSS (Jewish Community Secondary School) has generated unprecedented interest. Adorned with the slogan ‘excellence, choice, openness, inclusion’, its website describes it as ‘the first cross-communal Jewish secondary school in the UK’. JCoSS takes pride in its admissions policy, which ‘will treat on an equal basis all pupils recognised as Jewish by any of the UK’s mainstream movements’ and its intention to deliver Jewish studies ‘while being non-judgemental between the various mainstream Jewish traditions’.

JC readers will not be surprised to discover that ‘JCoSS worries Orthodox (United Synagogue) rabbis’ (14/05), nor that in a spurious comparison with Limmud, Miriam Shaviv (21/05) opined that rather than fighting a war already lost, the rabbinate should ‘face facts’ and ‘embrace JCoSS’. The battle-lines seem drawn already.

Before exploring further, I acknowledge the certainty that numerous children from US-type homes will attend JCoSS. However the Orthodox rabbinate might prefer the world to look, we will support and nurture the Jewish lives of our communities’ children, irrespective of the educational choices made for them by their parents. It is no secret that in a rare display of virtual unanimity, US rabbis have strongly opposed formal involvement with JCoSS. Yet this has no bearing on our commitment to our children in the school. There is spirited and evolving debate about how to achieve this: some will run out-of-school programming; others are grappling with alternatives to support JCoSS pupils. And it is with deep sadness that we currently feel unable to work within JCoSS: this painful decision is informed by real concern for our children expressed in the context of legitimate anxieties about its identity.

Unfortunately, behind the happy ‘cross-communal’ picture painted by JCoSS’s professional website and cautiously-worded literature, there lies a confused ideology that conflicts squarely with basic Orthodox principles.

I am certain that JCoSS will indeed try to teach its pupils ‘about all the mainstream traditions within Judaism’, in a non-judgemental way and ‘to understand and respect all the UK’s mainstream Jewish traditions’. This inclusivism may even succeed at a practical level - the school intends its kitchens to be kosher and its weekend programmes to be Shabbat-observant, even if it can’t commit to closing on second-day Yom Tov. But ideologically this descends into pluralistic incoherence. Presumably, pupils will be taught that some believe the Torah to be the unmediated word of God, while others think that it was authored by human beings; that some consider traditional Shabbat restrictions to be optional, but others consider them absolutely binding; that while the Torah itself expressly forbids certain types of relationships, some movements consider them to be valid life-options. And while this dissent is simply a statement of fact, the ethos of JCoSS demands that each of these contradictory options is taught as equally legitimate. Apart from the obvious fact that children need certainty, a sense of imperative and firm ideas to help them build a meaningful connection to their faith, this type of pluralism is theologically untenable from an Orthodox perspective.

In a seminal 1990 essay, later developed into ‘One People’ (Littman 1993), the Chief Rabbi masterfully explains the ‘incoherence of pluralism’ by observing that it ‘presupposes the absence of absolute or normative truth and hence the falsehood of Orthodoxy’. Orthodoxy stakes its being on the existence of some truth that transcends the relativities of time. This is the rock on which pluralism founders… Where truth and falsity are at stake, the idea that both sides of a contradiction are true is itself a contradiction’.

A school whose raison d’être is the validation of conflicting stances on key issues of belief and practice must be considered at best non-Orthodox; in reality it is theologically completely and irreconcilably at odds with Orthodoxy. In that landmark essay, the Chief Rabbi demonstrates that ‘the literature (on pluralism) proceeds on the explicit or hidden premise that Orthodoxy is false’. The somewhat clumsy phrase ‘pan-non-Orthodox’ is a more theologically accurate description of JCoSS than ‘cross-communal’.

I understand the motivation of JCoSS’s founders. The educational world is dominated by Orthodoxy: in varying degrees, the non-Orthodox denominations disagree with Orthodox beliefs and practices, and most acutely with its definition of Jewishness. Why shouldn’t they create a school that incorporates their brands of Judaism? Actually, JCoSS acknowledges that in the event of over-subscription, it will prioritise those ‘who are not considered to be halachically Jewish by… all other Jewish schools’ – i.e. children considered Jewish only by the non-Orthodox. I respect their objectives, albeit tempered by genuine concern for the children of US communities, but I challenge the founders of JCoSS to reciprocate that respect by abandoning the term ‘cross-communal ’ in favour of a more candid representation of their school’s ideology. And I reach out with love to potential parents and urge them to recognise that they may be inadvertently depriving their children of their Torah heritage.

Unsurprisingly, JCoSS has provoked an identity crisis for the United Synagogue. The US has always been good at asserting what it isn’t (too frum, too Zionist, etc.), but imprecise when stating what it actually stands for. Are we too afraid of the consequences to admit that even the welcoming, inclusivist version of Orthodoxy that we champion has clear beliefs and some ‘hard edges’? Sometimes it is necessary to state the obvious: pluralism and Orthodoxy are antithetical. In the words of the Chief Rabbi, ‘pluralism is no more tolerant than Orthodoxy’, since ‘each represents a way of viewing the relationship between belief and truth, and each excludes the other’. We need not be scared of this truth, nor be anything other than respectful of others, such as the founders of JCoSS, who advocate pluralism. Again, the Chief Rabbi’s words seem prescient: ‘the search for unity does not resolve the tensions in the Jewish world. Instead it merely reproduces them’. Failing to articulate the unbridgeable gulf between Orthodoxy and pluralism misrepresents both ideologies and creates false hope for a unified Jewry. In fact, I believe that it hinders cross-communal cooperation in those areas where it is possible.

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle.

Rabbi in Israel - War in Gaza

2009-01-06T12:49:00.009Z

I am sitting in the National Library at the Hebrew University on the third day of a visit to Israel. I am in here to catch up with young people from my community who are studying at various institutions in Israel, but have dedicated today, the Fast of Tevet, to rest and to some private study. Yet instead, I feel motivated to write a short post about the atmosphere here. In the interests of brevity, here are a few points that have stuck in my mind:

Every minyan I have visited is saying a 'Kapitl Tehillim' - a chapter of psalms - after each service, every day, followed by a prayer for the wellbeing of Jews everywhere. For your interest, so far I have been to a shteibl in Meah Shearim, the minyan of a prominent Chassidic Rebbe, a religious Zionist Shul and the minyan at the Hebrew University library.
There is a hand-written note pinned to the door of the lift in the building where I am staying, advertising opportunities to send non-perishable food to soldiers in Gaza. Apparently, there are many such notices, as well as those volunteering to deliver the goods.
I spoke yesterday to the head of a 'hesder' yeshivah; some of his students have been drafted and he is expecting most of the rest of the yeshivah to be called in the event of a prolonged or expanded conflict. This is the vision of the 'hesder' programme: enabling its students to combine Torah learning with military duty.
I also spoke yesterday to a prominent so-called anti-Zionist rabbi who told me that he has encouraged his community to recognise what he called the 'miracle' in the south of Israel: the incredibly few casualties in the wake of 1000s of rocket attacks. He pointed out to me that while many in the Israeli media are observing that this is 'abnormal', that is insufficient - we must see the hand of God in this phenomenon.
How meaningful the additional prayers for the fast day seemed this morning; the primary purpose of a fast day is introspection - I found this rather more manageable than usual. These selichot also contain texts that were, perhaps, easier to absorb than usual: references to the siege on the Holy Temple and our hopes that fast days will be transformed into moments of rejoicing.
I was particularly startled by the word חמסנו - we have acted aggressively - which appears in the alphabetic confession said on fast days (every day in some communities). והמבין יבין.

I am impressed by the sense of calm and normality which seems to exist. Of course, for those with husbands or other family members in the IDF or who live close to the area of hostility, it must be a nerve-wracking time, yet Israelis have learned (sadly) to live normally, despite stress and uncertainty. But most of all, I am struck by the sense of unity and real care and fervent hope expressed by everyone here, of whatever stripe or allegiance within the religious community. I'm pleased that I've been here during this difficult time, as I've learned a lot of good things about Israelis and Israeli society.

May the hostilities end soon and the casualties be very few. May we also value the precious unity that this campaign has engendered and realise that it needn't take a war...

Colour Among The Black Hats?

2008-12-13T20:46:00.007Z

The students of a prominent Eastern-European rabbi were about to join him to light the Chanukah candles. The rabbi noticed a broom near the window next to his Menorah and asked for it to be removed; apparently, he was concerned that in their zeal to emulate him, his followers would place a broom by the window before lighting their Menorahs too. There is a humorous (and definitely fictitious) end to the story: having visited the rabbi, each of his students went home, placed a broom by the window and then removed it before lighting his candles!

A common perception of a significant part of the Orthodox world is that it is narrow, monolithic and stifles individual expression. Detractors often point to the restrictive nature of Jewish law, conformity in dress-style (this criticism is levelled especially at those visible communities with distinctive garb) and the seemingly limited range of educational and other life-choices available to its adherents. There is a sense that the ‘men in black’ all think the same way and live cloned, indistinguishable lives.

There is some truth to this: traditional Judaism is predicated on a belief in the historical truth of the Sinaitic revelation and the eternal imperative of halachah. Its followers will create communities that share religious aspirations, educate their children in a certain way and where religious and social needs can be met. This may create a certain narrowness of experience, but devoting one’s life to a complete system of belief and practice involves accepting that some of the wider experiences of an unfettered life must be surrendered to a higher ideal. The intensity of experience that the religious crave may also lead them to form tightly-knit groups with their own exacting standards and social norms and look to charismatic leaders for guidance in their quest for individual perfection and constant communion with the Divine.

The Modern Orthodox world has attempted to combine serious commitment to Mitzvah observance and Torah study with aspects of contemporary scholarship, culture and engagement with the modern world. But for the rest of the Orthodox world, must fervour and spiritual ambition lead inexorably to conformity and the crushing of individuality, or is there room for personal expression and creative thought?

There will always be those who take refuge in the crowd, preferring to follow rather than to think for themselves; choosing to evade personal responsibility by relying on others. The Orthodox community harbours no fewer such people than any other group, but surely no more.

One can certainly observe those within the community who fear individual expression to the extent that they try to suppress it in others. There have been a number of unfortunate high-profile examples of this. They include banning of books that deviate from a narrow ideological line, attempting to limit higher education, abolishing concerts and other forms of entertainment, and restricting access to even the unobjectionable parts of the internet. Is it possible that some feel threatened by the very individual expression that is one of Judaism’s greatest strengths?

Yet despite these regrettable attempts to recast Judaism as a system requiring all its adherents to think and behave identically, most Jews are pretty resilient in their individual expression! Despite the superficial appearance of conformity and group behaviour that delegitimizes individuality, one readily finds a vast range of ideas, aspirations, ideologies and modes of religious expression. These differences are evident both between and with Orthodox groups. In traditional Jewish teaching, there is a spectrum of opinion on nearly every subject: the nature of God, Man’s free will, how to understand human suffering, the appropriate attitude to art and music, secular studies and even modernity itself, as well as about virtually every area of Jewish observance.

This multiplicity translates into diversity of lifestyle and belief. Even in the most Orthodox of circles, there are those who visit art galleries, love classical music, tour China, learn Arabic and even consider these essential to their religious experience. Others prefer to incorporate ‘secular’ modes of expression into Jewish contexts; in recent years, some highly professional and innovative music, art and literature have emerged. Among the ostensibly monolithic Orthodox, there are staunch Zionists, political lefties, recycling macrobiotics, DIY enthusiasts, aficionados of Kabbalah and those who reject it as mumbo-jumbo. In my own experience I have come across a Chassidic university chancellor and a number of Charedi avant garde musicians.

The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5) observes that God makes each human being different from every other; as such, everyone should be able to say with confidence, ‘the world was created just for me’. A great Chassidic thinker understood this to mean that each of us has strengths and weaknesses that distinguish us from every other person; consequently, each of us has a unique spiritual task. Indeed wrestling with one’s own relationship with God is a Biblical role of the Jew. When Jacob was attacked by an unknown assailant, his name was changed to Israel, ‘because you struggled with God and with Man and you prevailed’ (BeReishit 32:29). ‘Struggling with God’ to forge a religious identity that is individualistic, yet firmly within the portals of tradition, is intrinsic to Judaism. The paraphernalia of Jewish life exist to facilitate this lofty goal, rather than stifle it. On its own terms, Judaism thrives on and celebrates individuality.

Fusing staunch commitment to a specific version of traditional Torah life with a tolerant attitude to the range of valid alternative views is a challenge which has its successes and disappointments. Yet respect for the multiplicity of views and lifestyles that the Torah accommodates is central to its system. We fail the Torah itself by stifling genuine creativity and individuality; but when we validate the legitimate religious choices and ideas of others, we not only create a harmonious and tolerant Orthodox society, but confirm the beauty and breadth of the Torah.

A version of this article appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

A version of this article appeared on Cross-Currents

Heady Reflections On A Sukkot Adventure

2008-11-01T23:09:00.008Z

I looked in the mirror this morning and realised that the bump on my head hasn’t quite gone away. It’s only a couple of weeks since Sukkot, so I thought I’d share the story and what I learned from it.

On the first day of Chol HaMoed (Thursday) I had planned to join my family for a trip to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (see here for another article in which I mention Kew Gardens), However, I was exhausted and decided to stay at home, especially as we were hosting a Sukkot party for my community that evening. My wife and children left the house and I decided to rest, so I donned my pyjamas (remember this for later) and dragged my mattress into the Sukkah.

After an hour and a half, I was refreshed and ready to continue with my day. However, my attempts to return to the house were thwarted by the discovery that the back door was mysteriously locked from the inside. I could see the keys in the lock and, frustratingly, my cell phone on a table within, but I couldn’t access either.

As we leave our front door secured only with a number-lock during the day, I was certain that if I could get into the front garden, I could re-enter the house through the main door. I squelched my way in my socks to the side gate and tried, unsuccessfully, to climb over it, cracking my head in the process. A bit dazed, but not badly hurt, I remembered the ladder at the back of the garden. I intended to climb over the gate and take the ladder with me, but this failed too: while I was sitting on the lintel, the ladder fell back into the garden. I managed to scramble down into the front garden, where, inexplicably, I found the front door locked. I was now standing in the front garden in my socks and pyjamas (remember them?) unable to get into either the house or back into the garden. Contemplating the possibility of a further couple of hours of this situation, I hid behind a car, hoping for some kind of solution.

At this point, a neighbour walked past en route to a funeral. He noticed me and insisted that I come and sit in his Sukkah rather than crouch behind the car. I accepted his invitation, which included a drink and the loan of a sweater and a coat. I then realised that I didn’t know my wife’s cell number, so I called my parents to ask for assistance. The conversation began a little like this: ‘hello, I’m sitting in a neighbour’s Sukkah wearing my pyjamas.’ When they stopped laughing, which took quite some time, they were able to put me in contact with my wife, who was at least a hour away.

There is a small gap in the fencing between our house and the neighbour’s garden, so foolishly, I resolved to return to my own garden. I was hoping to prise open a window or get in some other way. I squeezed through the gap, returned to my own garden and quickly discovered that I still couldn’t enter the house. I was also unable to get back through the gap in the fence (perhaps I should have realised that my eight-year-old son, the usual gap-squeezer, is rather smaller than me), so I was again stuck in the garden in my pyjamas.

I heard a ring at the door, so I climbed the ladder again and peered over. This was one of several conversations I conducted in my pyjamas over the following 45 minutes with passers-by, from my perch nine feet above the ground. The most remarkable was with another neighbour, who approached the house, saw me looking over the gate from a great height and said, with a straight face, ‘hello Rabbi Belovski: the party is this evening, isn’t it?’ When I replied in the affirmative, he thanked me and walked away, making no reference to the fact that I was on a ladder, in my pyjamas, behind the gate, or, most significantly, that my head was bleeding. Perhaps my life is so odd that this event seemed the very paragon of normality.

Two hours after discovering that I was locked out, my wife returned and admitted a rather damp and bedraggled rabbi to the house.

So what had happened? How had I been locked out? That is explained by a remarkable series of ‘coincidences’. While I had been sleeping, the musician booked to play at the evening’s party (an old friend) had arrived at the house to deliver his equipment, wrongly assuming that we would be at home. When no-one answered, he took a bold step: his assistant climbed over the side-gate, discovered to his delight that we had been silly enough to leave the back door unlocked and entered the house. He opened the front door and unloaded his kit. As I was heavily asleep and wearing earplugs, I heard none of this. Assuming that he was doing me a favour, he locked the front and back doors before leaving, trapping me in the Sukkah…

I have retold this story several times, including in my sermon on Shemini Atzeret. It has made people in the UK and in Israel cry with laughter at my plight, but mostly at the thought of the rabbi standing on a ladder in his pyjamas noting the (non) reactions of passers-by. It is the most powerful and real Sukkot message I could have received. Every year, we speak about Sukkot reminding us that life is impermanent, that our material possessions are ephemeral and that our security can evaporate at any moment. We may know this intellectually, but, thank God, most of us have few opportunities to experience this directly, even for a short while. My brief exile from my home made the message of Sukkot more real for me than I recall it having been in the past.

Many people say a prayer before entering the Sukkah which mentions the possibility that in the aftermath of the judgement of Yom Kippur, one deserves the punishment of exile. We ask God to consider our week-long sojourn in the Sukkah as a type of ‘exile’ in place of a full-scale banishment. I thought of this prayer after my little adventure and hope that it remains true for me.

A gezinte winter!

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

Statues in Montreux

2008-08-31T22:52:00.002+01:00

A few days ago, I visited Montreux, a small Swiss town by Lake Geneva. It is picturesque, temperate, and while there are plenty of tourist shops, parts of the town are pretty up-market. It was a lovely place to spend a few hours with the family before driving back into the mountains.

Two significant statues on the lake-front are popular with tourists, both of well-known men who lived good parts of their lives in or near Montreux. One is of Charlie Chaplin, the famous actor and film-director, the other is of Freddie Mercury, a leading pop-star of the 70s and 80s. If we can briefly ignore their private lives (the inscription on the statue of Mercury even mentions the ‘discretion’ of the locals), each of them brought much pleasure to millions of people. Presumably, the residents of Montreux feel honoured that Chaplin and Mercury chose to live in their town and recognised this with lake-side memorials.

I was struck by the lack of a statue of Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, a world-famous posek (Jewish legal authority) who lived in Montreux for a large part of his life until his death in 1966. He was a man of astonishing scholarship, who wrote landmark responsa (published as Seridey Aish, by which eponym the author has become known) tackling the most complex and contentious modern issues. The Seridey Aish was at home in the premier yeshivos of pre-war Eastern Europe, yet was a man of his times, facing modern challenges to traditional Judaism robustly, but with a light touch. He fostered a generation of students, including some of the world’s foremost rabbinical leaders, such as the late Gateshead Rov, Rabbi Betzalel Rakow, zt”l, the late Rabbi Joseph Hirsch Dunner zt”l of London, and ylc”t, Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, shlit”a, the Ra’avad of the Eidah Charedis in Jerusalem.

Where indeed is the statue of Rabbi Weinberg? Of course, hardly any visitors to Montreux will have heard of him and it is unlikely that a bronze likeness of a rabbi would attract the level of interest from tourists to make its manufacture worthwhile; this apart from the obvious halachic issues raised by making a statue in the first place. I’m sure that the matter was never even considered.

Actually, I’d have been rather upset to have seen a statue of the Seridey Aish along the lake-front in Montreux: Rabbi Weinberg immortalised in the company of an actor and a singer. While the contribution of Rabbi Weinberg is immeasurably more significant than, lehavdil, Messrs Chaplin and Mercury, his immortal responsa, which are still debated and relied-upon by halachists the world over, are a far better testimony to his greatness than a bronze cast.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

What’s That For? Musar From A Three-year-old

2008-08-20T17:10:00.009+01:00

I am enjoying the privilege of holidaying with my family in the French Alps, so I am far from a minyan. While my children rarely see me davening, especially wearing tefillin, this morning my second daughter Tehilloh (10) and younger son Shmuel Yosef (3) were in the room during Shacharis. When I was laying tefillin, my daughter remarked to my son that one day he would have to don them. As I was putting on the head-tefillin, my son asked her, ‘What’s that for – does it hold his kippah on?’ Then, being three, he suggested that I might need one to hold my neck on and another to keep my leg in place!

Other than causing me some amusement as I was trying to concentrate on davening, Shmuel Yosef left me considering something important. How often do I (or any of us) actually think ‘what’s that for’ when putting on tefillin? It’s so easy for regularly-observed mitzvos to become rote performances, devoid of real meaning. I realised that it’s easy to lay tefillin each day, but harder to experience the ritual as a means of connecting with God: a tool of subjugation of the most powerful human capabilities to the Divine agenda.

Many people say a meditation before donning the tefillin, one which I have just re-read. It reminded me that:

God has commanded us to wear the arm-tefillin to recall the ‘outstretched arm’ (of the Exodus), placed close to the heart to thereby subjugate the desires and thoughts of our hearts to His service; and upon the head, close to my brain, so that the soul that resides in my mind, together with all of my senses and capabilities, are subjugated to His service.

‘What’s that for?’ Three words of powerful musar (ethical guidance) from a three-year-old: God has many agents. It’s a good focal point with which to approach the pre-Rosh HaShanah month of Elul, which starts alarmingly soon.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

Is It Ethical To ‘Hijack’ An Internet Connection?

2008-08-15T17:08:00.000+01:00

In 2005, a West London man, Gregory Straszkiewicz, was fined £500 and given a 12-month conditional discharge for "hijacking a broadband connection". Using a laptop while sitting in his car, Straszkiewicz had connected to the Internet by piggy-backing on the wireless network of a local resident.

Today, many people access the Internet using Wi-Fi wireless technology, which allows a computer to connect to the web via a router, for which service the subscriber pays a monthly fee to an internet service provider (ISP). Although most such connections are secure, and accessible only via a password, some people leave their service unsecured, allowing free Internet access to anyone with a computer to hand. While breaking a security code to access a network is clearly dishonest, how might Jewish law view the unauthorised use of an unsecured connection, as in the case of Gregory Straszkiewicz?

At first glance, this looks like a simple application of the principle "one gains without loss to another": there seems to be no apparent loss to the subscriber (who has, after all, left the connection unsecured and therefore open to access by others) through unauthorised use of his wireless connection.

However, this may be swiftly discounted, since some financial loss is likely. Many domestic subscribers have capped services: if they download more than a fixed amount of data each month, they are billed extra for it. Additional usage by an outsider may push the monthly total data download over that limit, generating additional cost to the subscriber.

Another consideration is bandwidth, the quantity of data that can be transferred per second via the connection. This equates to the speed at which the connection works: the higher the bandwidth rating, the faster the connection. Unauthorised use of the connection will reduce the quality of the subscriber's use, as it will operate more slowly. So the piggy-backer's activities may result in a more expensive and/or slower Internet experience for the subscriber.

But even with an uncapped provision, where the piggy-backer uses the connection so little that the subscriber detects no deterioration in service (or the intruder uses it at a time when the subscriber is not online), piggy-backing may still be problematic.

The Talmud records a disagreement over whether "borrowing" an item without permission constitutes theft; the Shulchan Aruch rules stringently, which might seem to outlaw piggy-backing. However, the Ritva (Rabbi Yom Tov ben Abraham Ashvilli, died 1330) restricts this ruling to a case where "borrowing" an item could potentially lead to its damage. This clearly excludes piggy-backing, which causes no tangible harm to any material possession of the subscriber.

One might argue that when the subscriber leaves a connection unsecured, he is indicating that he doesn't mind if outsiders "borrow" it. This could be supported by the rule allowing one to borrow a tallit left in a public place, even without the owner's permission. However, the Bach (Rabbi Joel Sirkes, died 1640) assumes that this applies only where a mitzvah can be performed, and when the use is occasional; even when the piggy-backing is infrequent, it is unreasonable to suggest that it is a mitzvah!

Even if Jewish law theoretically allows piggy-backing, it may still be an act of piety to refrain from it. The Talmud refers to Rabbi Lazar's refusal to take a tiny splinter from a fence for use as a toothpick. Although the loss to the fence's owner was insignificant, and therefore taking the splinter technically permitted, Rabbi Lazar realised that if everyone were to adopt this view, the fence would cease to exist. Similarly, although one piggy-backer may make little difference to a subscriber, the presence of many freeloaders will drastically reduce the quality of his service, perhaps even bringing it down altogether.

A further point is that the subscriber is also bound by the terms of his agreement with the ISP: by accessing a connection from outside the premises where the router is located, the piggy-backer may cause the subscriber to be in breach of contract.

In conclusion, we can imagine a limited range of circumstances in which piggy-backing might be allowed, but even so, it is meritorious to avoid it.

Sources

A squatter need not pay rent, provided that the owner has not served him notice and the dwelling is not normally rented out. It is a case of "one gains without loss to another" Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat 364:6, paraphrased

Rabbi Shimon bar Kahana walked past a vineyard with Rabbi Lazar and asked him to take a splinter for him from the fence to use as a toothpick. He refused, reasoning that if everyone were to do so, the fence would disappear. Talmud Yerushalmi Damai 3:2,

There is a dispute about one who "borrows" without the permission of the owner. One rabbi says that he is a legal borrower; another says that he is a thief. Talmud Bava Batra 88a

Unauthorised "borrowing" of an item that cannot be damaged by handling is never considered to be theft. Ritva, Bava Metzia 41a

It is permitted to take a tallit and make the blessing over it... Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 14:4

This only applies to occasional [use] when performing a mitzvah. Bach to Tur, Orach Chaim 14:4

It is forbidden to steal even the slightest amount. Yet if it is something that no-one is bothered about, it is permitted... But the Yerushalmi forbids this, as an act of piety. Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat 369:1

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

Copyright And Software Piracy

2008-07-11T11:52:00.001+01:00

In February of last year, at an event in Bucharest attended by Bill Gates of Microsoft, the Romanian president, Mr. Traian Basescu, apparently made an astounding statement. Allegedly, he claimed that software piracy (unauthorised duplication of software, such as Microsoft Office products) helps the younger generation discover computers and that it is an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft! It is unlikely that either Mr. Gates or those software pirates languishing in jail for infringement of copyright were especially sympathetic to Mr. Basescu’s views.

‘Piracy’ of this sort has a long history in Jewish sources. Some 450 years ago Rabbi Meir of Padua published a new version of the Rambam’s halachic work Mishneh Torah. Subsequently, a Venetian nobleman, Marco Antonio Justinian, also published an edition of the Rambam, which his detractors claimed would leave Rabbi Meir with many unsold copies. Rabbi Moshe Isserlis of Cracow (d. 1572) upheld Rabbi Meir’s right to sell his stock before the other edition reached the market; meanwhile, he forbade his followers from buying the Venice printing. In 18th-century Livorno, a dispute arose between the author of an edition of the Mishnah and his printer. After publication, the printer removed the author’s commentary from the plates and reused them! Rabbi Yechezkel Landau of Prague (d. 1793) ruled that the printer must compensate the author for his loss.

Legislating rights and responsibilities towards such non-tangible entities as copyright is complex: these landmark rulings were vital steps in the development of halachic attitudes towards intellectual property. We see application of this is legislation nowadays to the problem of software piracy.

It is tricky to identify early Jewish sources that discuss title to intangibles - one that establishes a legal right to a concept or other kinds of non-monetary commodities, the development of which required the investment of expertise, resources or time. Such a source could be used to derive a Jewish view of software piracy.

The Talmud (Kiddushin 59a) records the case of a hungry pauper who discovers a cake; before he picks it up, however, someone else snatches it. The Rabbis describe the ‘snatcher’ as ‘evil’, since he has exploited the pauper’s efforts; however, he is not a ‘thief’, nor is the case actionable. We see that effort alone (which equates in our study to intellectual property) does not confer title, an idea supported by the maxim, ‘one who quotes a statement in the name of its originator brings redemption to the world,’ (Megillah 15a). Using someone else’s ideas without acknowledgement is not actually a crime, just bad manners.

Another permissive view of intellectual property could be based on the rules governing squatters. If a squatter continues to live in a property that is usually rented, he must pay rent after the landlord has served notice. This is because financial benefit accrued by one person, even if there is only a potential loss to another, is claimable. This has ramifications for software piracy. One argument advanced to justify copying is that if one has no intention of buying the product, the manufacturer incurs no loss. If the software is duplicated exclusively for private use and none of the people who use it (or secondary copies made from it) would have bought it (all highly improbable), there might be room for a lenient ruling.

Others adopt a less accommodating position. Following the law that someone entrusted with a manuscript may not copy even one letter from it without authorisation, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (d. 1986) prohibits translating book segments without the author’s permission. Accordingly, it would be forbidden to duplicate software without consent. Furthermore, the Talmud asserts that whenever a purchaser breaks the conditions of a contract, compensation is payable; indeed someone who ignores the wishes of the ‘owner’ is termed a ‘thief’. Following this, in a responsum about copying music, Rabbi Z.N. Goldberg (contemporary) notes that even after the sale, the original owner is entitled to retain some aspects of ownership. Halachah would thus recognise a software developer’s right to withhold permission to copy the product, and duplication would qualify as theft. Additionally, Rabbi J.S. Nathanson (d. 1875) asserts that ‘logic’ asserts authors’ halachic rights to their works.

We have examined some ingenious responsa, many of which suggest that halachah forbids software piracy. Of course, Jewish law anyway asserts ‘dina demalchuta dina’ (e.g. Nedarim 28a) – in financial matters, at least, once must defer to the law of the land. As software copyright is certainly regulated by English law, halachah obliges one to adhere to the terms of the purchase agreement.

Side bar

In conclusion, the rabbi wins the case and he has the right to sell his books first, and the only newly-printed edition of Maimonides that one may purchase is the one published by the rabbi. (Responsa Rama – Isserlis – 10)

The printer has caused the author great loss, for if it were not for this new edition, he would have had many more purchasers. (Responsa Noda BiYehudah – Landau – CM 2:24)

Someone who lives in a courtyard without permission must pay rent, whenever the owner intended to rent the courtyard. (Bava Kama 20a, paraphrased; Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat 364:6)

Just as one may not read a (deposited) manuscript, one may not copy even one letter from it. (Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat 292:20)

It is forbidden to translate laws from my works… Some already asked me permission, which I refused. (Responsa Igrot Moshe – Feinstein – YD 3:91)

Anyone who ignores the wishes of the ‘owner’ is called a ‘thief’… If one gives a pauper a coin to buy a shirt, he may not use the money to buy a cloak, since he ignores the wishes of the donor. (Bava Metzia 78a-b)

When one sells an item, one may retain certain rights over it… A cassette vendor may retain sole rights of duplication… Ignoring this is like theft, for with respect to duplication, the cassette is not his property. (Rabbi Z.N. Goldberg, Techumin 6)

An author’s rights to his works are universally established; to say otherwise is illogical… (Responsa Shoel UMaishiv – Nathanson – 1:1:44)

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

The Pope And Praying In Hebrew

2008-06-26T15:56:00.006+01:00

The London Times reports that the Catholic Church is discussing reintroducing the Latin Mass largely abandoned in the aftermath of Vatican II. See here for details. Apparently, the Pope is writing to every seminary urging them to ensure that priests are trained to conduct the Tridentine Mass, which was replaced in the 1960s by the vernacular liturgy said in most churches today. While before Vatican II, every Catholic Church in the world conducted Mass in Latin, today it is recited in the local language.

Readers may wonder why I’m interested in the Latin Mass, something one can safely assume to be of marginal concern to most Cross-Currents readers! The answer is brief and simple. It helped me to realise how blessed we are to have a Hebrew liturgy, which (with a few minor differences here and there) is the same the world-over. Indeed, among the supportive ultra-conservative remarks appended to the article, are a few thoughtful ones that welcome the return of a universal liturgy, allowing people of every nationality and tongue to celebrate Mass together.

The early 19th-century German-Jewish and later reformers genuinely meant well when they replaced certain Hebrew prayers with vernacular equivalents: they hoped to make them more accessible and comprehensible to their worshippers; presumably, this was successful. However (and this is apart from the theological and halachic issues raised by their versions of the prayers), a great deal more was lost than gained. They underestimated the universal value of Hebrew prayers: the capacity of a Jewish national language, the language of God and the Bible, to unite and inspire people; to erase boundaries between those of different cultures and unify them in devotion.

To be fair, this has now been recognised by some non-Orthodox groups, who have re-introduced greater Hebrew content into their services: I’m sure that they have been greatly enhanced by so doing.

But many Westernised Jews have little or no knowledge of Hebrew – not much has changed since 19th-century Germany (where the vernacular was introduced) in that regard. This is a problem that has a solution – learn Hebrew! It’s easier said than done, but the opportunities available (courses, CDs and internet sites, etc.) have never been greater or the rewards (especially the chance to communicate with the natives on a visit to our own Hebrew-speaking country) more evident. Anyway, there are excellent translations of the Siddur available, each serving a different need, which one can consult throughout the prayer service.

I think that the Pope has this one right: the vernacular alternatives to their (and our) prayers are, in the words of one comment to the article in The Times, ‘improvised’ and ‘fabricated’. Do you agree?

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

Shmuel Yosef's Opsheren

2008-06-19T18:40:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Techno-Torah

2008-06-06T15:59:00.004+01:00

A Jewish child is thinking of Moshe about to receive the Torah. Moshe ascends the mountain and God’s hand reaches through the cloud and hands him not tablets of stone, but a laptop, a CD and some Hebrew keyboard stickers! It may seem ridiculous, but these are indeed today’s Torah tools; Shavuot is a perfect opportunity to survey them.

A plethora of websites, searchable databases and desk-top publication tools have sprung up to service every Jewish interest. Computer resources for Torah study are among the most advanced of any field and have completely transformed the way that traditional Jewish sources are accessed.

Hebrew Desk-top publishing

Not many years ago, even typing in Hebrew was a nuisance: one needed to install a special font, type the letters backwards and avoid spilling on to the next line to prevent the text from coming out as gibberish. Next came specialist Hebrew word-processors, such as Dagesh and Davka, which made bi-directional typing easier. While these remain available, standard program suites such as Microsoft Office now come with built-in features that make left-to-right typing straightforward. One need only enable the software (a very simple task) and acquire a keyboard with Hebrew letters or stick some labels on to an existing one and the most powerful publishing, spread-sheet and internet software solutions become available to the bilingual user. Searches can be performed on Hebrew texts and the contents of tables ordered according to the aleph-bet. A mouse-click is all that is required to toggle between typing Hebrew and English characters, which align automatically to produce a seamless document.

Torah web-sites

There are a vast number of internet sites offering Torah ideas and programmes. As with everything on the web, these vary widely in quality, although many are really excellent. They service every shade of observance and knowledge, from the rudimentary to the most advanced, and deal with matters as diverse as making a Seder and obtaining a get (Jewish divorce). There are fun materials for children, serious monographs for academics and everything in between. One can download guides to every aspect of Jewish life, prayer services, halachic rulings and, even, would you believe, study for the rabbinate. Even those in the most observant sector of the Jewish world have caught on to the power of the web as a tool for Torah dissemination. One will find many Yeshivot, outreach organisations and even Chassidic sects represented: Aish, Breslov and Chabad, for example are known for their extensive use of the internet. There are Hebrew-calendar calculators and sites offering extensive libraries of audio files (shiurim and the like) for listening online or downloading to one’s mp3 player. The extent of these resources is quite mind-blowing.

‘Blogs’

There has been a recent explosion of Torah weblogs or ‘blogs’ – web diaries that opine on anything from Jewish law to political issues and modern challenges. Some ‘blogs’ are simply platforms for peoples’ unhappiness with the world; but one can also easily identify other excellent ‘blogs’ that are thought-provoking and refreshing: many important halachic and contemporary Torah issue have been flagged first by the ‘bloggers’, who are viewed with deep concern by some and with great affection by others.

Torah libraries

The biggest revolution, however, has been in the development of tools for the manipulation of research and manipulation of Torah texts. These come in the shape of libraries of Torah materials, available either across the internet or to purchase as disks.

The idea is to make the vast literature of Torah accessible for study and research or for creating materials for lectures, religious rulings and academic presentations. A page of text is scanned and stored on some computer medium, either as a picture (in which case the page appears in its original format but cannot be edited) or is converted into text to be copied and manipulated, but losing the original layout.

However the material is stored, sections can be pasted into word-processing and other documents to develop sophisticated archives and class hand-outs. With a little practice, it is possible to prepare first-rate source-sheets in a fraction of the time that it would have taken to drag a pile of books to a photocopier (assuming one even has all the texts available), cut the copies into fragments and paste them into a single document. The result is easier to read, produces no waste and can easily be improved at a later date.

The range of texts available is astonishing. Even an outline list of topics is lengthy. It includes: Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, classic commentaries from all eras, Rambam, standard halachic works, responsa, mysticism, chassidut, prayer, festivals, Jewish philosophy, encyclopaedias and periodicals.

Looking first at free resources, try Mechon-Mamre for a selection of basic texts, including the entire JPS English translation of the Bible. Hebrewbooks.org has over 15,000 classic texts for free download, mostly of old editions or out-of-print books, many quite obscure; it also offers a really excellent selection of digitised commentaries on the Rambam and some unusual material published during the nascent years of the American Jewish community. Some chassidic websites also allow downloads of specialist Hebrew texts.

Two types of purchasable resources are available: those accessed across the internet for a monthly or annual fee, and those that are purchased outright on disk. The advantages of the web versions are that the cost is spread, they may be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, and don’t ever need upgrading. The versions bought outright generally work faster, deliver higher functionality and can be used even when no internet connection is available, but must be carried around and may be expensive to purchase.

There is a good range of disks available at the lower end of the market. They supply fundamental texts, such as Bible, Talmud and basic commentaries on CD. Some contain English texts, such as translations of the Bible, Talmud and Midrash. In the middle range, also on CD, there is DBS, offering a huge range of commentaries on the Bible and Talmud and a good range of chassidic literature and the Bar Ilan Responsa project, which contains a plethora of rabbinical responsa from across the ages. For the most serious scholars, Otzar HaChochma contains over 28,000 searchable books and periodicals in their original format. Available across the internet or on a 500Mb hard drive, it comes with a price to match its power.

Shavuot celebrates the giving of Torah more than 3200 years ago. While the message of the revelation remains vibrant and exciting, the medium has changed beyond recognition. Using the amazing techno-Torah tools at our disposal is a real way to connect the past, present and future.

Resources

Bi-directional word-processors, keyboards and keyboard stickers:

http://www.jewishsoftware.com/default.asp?page=categories&type=84&id=92

Selected Torah websites:

MiBereshit: http://www.mibereshit.org/newsite/eng/flash.asp

Breslov: http://www.breslov.com/en/index.php/Breslov_on_the_Internet%21

Chabad: http://www.chabad.org/

Jewish Law: http://www.jlaw.com/

Aish: http://www.aish.com/

YUTorah: http://www.yutorah.org/

Virtual Beit Midrash: http://www.vbm-torah.org/

WebYeshiva: http://www.webyeshiva.org/

613: http://www.613.org/

Selected blogs

Hirhurim: http://hirhurim.blogspot.com/

Cross-Currents: http://www.cross-currents.com/

The Seforim Blog; http://seforim.blogspot.com/

Eruv Online: http://eruvonline.blogspot.com/

Belogski: http://belogski.blogspot.com/

Hebrew calendar and Shabbat-time calculators

Hebrew calendar: http://www.kaluach.org/

Shabbat times only: http://www.chabad.org/calendar/location.asp?tDate=&weeks=1&AID=6226

Index of Torah and Jewish academic articles

RAMBI: http://jnul.huji.ac.il/rambi/

Free Torah libraries

Mechon-Mamre: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/index.htm

Hebrewbooks.org: http://hebrewbooks.org/

Purchasable Torah libraries

Basic libraries: http://www.davka.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=4

Bar Ilan Responsa project: http://www.responsa.co.il/home.en-US.aspx (online access)

http://www.jewishsoftware.com/products/Bar_Ilan_Responsa_15_991.asp (buy)

DBS: http://www.jewishsoftware.com/products/DBS_Master_Library_163.asp

Otzar HaChochma: http://www.otzar.biz/index_e.php (online access or buy)

These are only examples. Many other excellent resources are available.

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

Haggadah - Two Views (Pesach 5768)

2008-04-14T15:26:00.015+01:00

The very word הגדה (Haggadah) conjures up wonderful memories of Sedarim past, reliving the story of the Exodus with family, friends and students. It’s used to refer colloquially to the booklet -- a compilation of texts and commentaries -- read at the Seder, but the word itself actually contains a wealth of information about the way in which a truly memorable and effective Seder should be conducted. Allow me to share some ideas:

According to Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen, the way to discover the core meaning of a Biblical word is to look at the first time it appears in the Torah. In the case of הגדה, the root word first occurs in the story of Adam and Eve. When God addressed Adam after the Sin, we find the following dialogue:

The Lord God called to Adam and said to Him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard your voice in the Garden and I was afraid because I am naked, so I hid.’ [God] said, ‘Who told (הגיד) you that you are naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ (BeReishis 3:9-11)

Rashi explains that God’s question is to be understood in the following way:

How do you know? What shame is there is standing naked? (Rashi ad loc.)

Before the sin, Adam and Eve wore no clothes but were not ashamed (BeReishis 2:25); however, they subsequently acquired a sense that there was something embarrassing about being naked.

It can be seen from this that the word הגיד means to acquire new information. This has an interesting implication for Seder night: the story must be told in a way that is new and exciting for the participants. One cannot fulfil the requirement of הגדה (which is primarily directed at one’s children) by merely reading the text or presenting a stale version of the Exodus. Instead, one must find a new angle on the story each year and create interest and fascination by finding new nuggets of information and by telling it in a refreshing way: one that will grab the imagination and retain peoples’ attention well into the night.

Based on ‘Hegioney Halachah’ Haggadah by Rabbi Yitzhok Mirsky

The Avney Nezer of Sochaczew pointed out that an accurate reading of the word הגדה can be derived from the Aramaic Onkelos translation of the word:

And you shall tell (והגדת) your son on that day as follows: because of this that God did for me in bringing me out from Egypt. (Shemos 13:8)

And you shall point out to your son… (Onkelos ad loc.)

It seems that the word הגדה means to show or to demonstrate that something is true, rather that merely tell a story. This fits with the Rambam’s version of the text of a key paragraph of the Haggadah:

In every generation, one is obliged to see oneself (לראות את עצמו) coming out of Egypt… (standard text)

In every generation, one is obliged to show oneself (להראות את עצמו) coming out of Egypt… (Rambam’s text)

While the standard text suggests one’s mindset during the Seder, the Rambam’s text (supported by the Targum) regulates one’s behaviour by re-enacting aspects of the Exodus. The Seder should demonstrate the facts of the Exodus and present them in a tangible and accessible way such that leaving Egypt becomes a real, rather than purely intellectual, experience for the participants.

In fact, the text of the הגדה itself indicates the use of props to turn the Seder into a demonstration, rather than a purely intellectual process. We may only tell the story when the illustrative ‘props’ are in place:

One might have thought (that one should begin telling the story) from Rosh Chodesh (Nissan), so the verse writes, ‘on that day’ (only). But perhaps ‘that day’ means while it is yet daytime (of Erev Pesach), so the verse writes, ‘because of this’. One can only say, ‘because of this’ (by pointing towards something tangible) when the Matzah and Maror are present.

This could be considered the original multi-media presentation: one can only properly fulfil one’s obligation of הגדה by turning the occasion into an experiential show.

Based on the Haggadah of the Shem MiShmuel of Sochaczew

With a little thought over the remaining hectic days until Pesach, it should be possible to plan for a Seder that incorporates both of these ideas: telling the story from a new perspective, and bringing it to life for the participants.

May we be blessed with inspirational Sedarim, the impact of which will remain with us throughout the year. Chag Kosher VeSomayach.

This post originally appeared on Cross-Currents

Shabbat And The Single Jew - part 2 (Mazal Tov edition)

2008-04-13T22:47:00.004+01:00

In one of my first posts on the theme of dating, I discussed the pros and cons of attending singles events on Shabbat and Yom Tov. I suggested that Shabbat and Yom Tov need to be ends in themselves and not just means to some other end, even the laudable objective of finding a life-partner. Those who use most Shabbatot as dating opportunities risk depleting their spiritual reserves and robbing their religious lives of transformative power. Interested readers will find the original post here.

In that post, I offered a specific (true) example:

A woman approached me recently for advice about attending a Purim party. She knew that there was only a slim chance of meeting someone suitable there, yet she felt that not going would leave her wracked with guilt. She took my advice and didn’t attend, instead devoting the evening to Purim pursuits: she later mentioned that focusing on the day alone enabled her to experience her most meaningful Purim for years.

Well, I am delighted to report that last Purim turned out to be more remarkable for the woman concerned than any of us could possibly have hoped (I am writing this at her request). Very late that Purim evening, she visited my home to help prepare for the Se’udah (Purim banquet) the next day. While I was reading the Megillah for my wife in another room, she got chatting over the kitchen sink to a fellow who was also planning to celebrate with us the next day.

As frequent visitors to our home, they had the opportunity to bump into each other on other occasions, and got to know and like each other, although for certain reasons it was not possible to consider furthering the relationship. Until recently that it, when they began to date in earnest. They became engaged this week and the wedding is likely to be in Israel in the summer. My wife and I are absolutely delighted for both of them and we feel honoured to have been instrumental in bringing them together.

It’s an astonishing story, especially as they only met each other because she decided to hang out in my house instead of going to a Purim party designed to enable singles to meet. God works in mysterious ways, and all of us who know the choson and kallah well know quite how extraordinary their relationship is; it has definitely served to remind us of the inscrutability of the Divine matchmaker.

Be assured that this is not an attempt to bash singles events, even those held on Shabbat and Yom Tov. They have their function and serve to bring people together who may otherwise not have met. Yet we should remember that they are only one of many ways in which God can make matches. We are not party to the Divine plan, but must allow Him to work through us in whatever way possible to bring singles together. Perhaps by simply recognising this fact, we open new vistas for His match-making and thus can become partners with Him in this holy work. May we all be blessed with the foresight and inspiration to grasp every opportunity to help others create new Jewish families.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

If You Prick Us Do We Not Bleed?

2008-03-06T21:08:00.006Z

Some pupils at the Yesodey Hatorah girls’ high school not too far from where I live have attracted UK and international news overage (see, for example, here, here, here and here) over their refusal to answer examination questions about Shakespeare. Apparently, the pupils declined even to write their names on the papers, in protest at Shakespeare’s ‘anti-Semitism’, despite the fact that they had not even been studying ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and that by doing so they would forfeit the entire examination. As a result, the school has fallen drastically in the performance tables (it was, quite remarkably, first in the entire country last year and is now 274^thalbeit out of over 3000).

I should interject a word here about the school system in the UK. Many Jewish schools here have what is known as voluntary aided status, which entitles them to state funding for buildings, general studies teaching and a host of other things, leaving the parents to pick up the tab for the Torah curriculum. Of course, this requires the school to meet government educational standards in all relevant areas. The examination in question was a standard government test on material for which the Shakespeare section is a mandatory part of the syllabus.

The principal of Yesodey Hatorah, Rabbi Avrohom Pinter, has been interviewed several times about this curious episode, including on the prestigious BBC Radio 4 ‘Sunday’ religious affairs programme. (You can listen to the interview here: click on the link for ‘Shakespeare and anti-Semitism’). He walks a fine line between supporting the girls in their principled stand, while indicating that he doesn’t really agree with them. It is clearly not the school policy to eschew Shakespeare, since it has bought into a system that requires his works to be taught; at the very least it tolerates its inclusion in the English syllabus and assumes that its students will do likewise.

I think that the issue as to whether Shakespeare was an anti-Semite is irrelevant – it has been debated for centuries. My own opinion (to the extent that I know enough about the subject to have an informed one) coincides with Rabbi Pinter’s. While the portrayal of Shylock has anti-Semitic overtones, there are also very humane, sensitive (dare one say philo-Semitic?) aspects of his character. The bard lived in an age when anti-Semitic sentiments were common; actually it is likely that he was writing with little first-hand knowledge of Jews, as he lived at the end of the 16^th century, long after the expulsion in 1290 and some while before the resettlement in the mid-17^th century. As such, I am not inordinately troubled by Shakespeare’s alleged anti-Semitism.

However, two other aspects of this incident have given me cause for thought. First, even if Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, should this influence whether his works ought to be taught in Jewish schools? Second, should a school support pupils’ principled objection to a syllabus item even if by doing so it significantly damages the school and its reputation?

Tacking the second question first, one could argue that the students (and their parents, who are reported as supporting them in this case) are bound by some kind of understanding with the school, in which they have agreed to engage fully in the stated programme of study. They ‘breach’ this ‘contract’ if they do not participate in the examinations. I don’t accept this argument, as I feel that the very essence of a quality education must encourage a degree of independent thinking and allow for the students to take informed decisions, especially when they are fully aware of the consequences. This is all part of growing up, something which a school must foster; in that respect, Yesodey Hatorah and Rabbi Pinter should be very proud of their students.

Yet there must be limits to this type of freedom within an educational environment. When I was at high school, one of my co-students became an anarchist, changed his name from Darren to ‘Grover Herbivores’ and refused to wear shoes. This provoked consternation and, finally, rage from the school administration, which eventually excluded him from school life. While this extreme example is no more than quaint, it illustrates the fact that conscientious objection to accepted school norms must have limits, otherwise the institution become ungovernable. Of course, at least in the minds of the students, there is a perceived moral dimension to the Shakespeare issues which is patently absent from ‘Grover’s’ unwillingness to wear shoes. Nonetheless, there has to be a balance between personal expression and potential damage to the school resulting from the students’ ethically motivated objections. If students fail to sit examinations or perform very poorly in them the school will eventually be subject to government scrutiny, which will influence the life of every student in the school. Striking that balance is very difficult – this is a genuine clash between private and public need. We all draw the line in different places, but I would advocate maximising the students’ opportunity for personal expression (based on informed choice and awareness of the consequences), only invoking the need for public responsibility when the potential damage is significant. I, like Rabbi Pinter, do not believe that to be the case in the recent school case.

However, before voting too firmly for the girls of Yesoday Hatorah, I would like to challenge the notion that if Shakespeare was an anti-Semite (accepting this for the purposes of this discussion), Jewish schools should not study his works. I find this incomprehensible, especially in a complex and open world where it is impossible to avoid a broad range of views about Jews and, indeed, everything else. Surely studying Shakespeare, even if one vehemently disagrees with his premises, is of great educational value anyway. Perhaps ‘The Merchant of Venice’ should be discussed in a Jewish school in the context of a lesson on the history of anti-Semitism. Perhaps the students should be encouraged to debate whether Shakespeare actually was an anti-Semite and if so, consider from where he derived his information and attitude. Are we so weak-minded that we need restrict our syllabi to the comfortable, familiar and unchallenging? I certainly hope not.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

Must Your Online Shop Shut On Shabbat?

2008-03-06T18:35:00.007Z

Widespread internet use has transformed the way many businesses operate. It is possible to use the internet to sell clothes, household appliances, books, or almost anything. And as websites are ‘open’ around the clock, this raises new issues for Jewish law: since commerce is forbidden on Shabbat, must one close down one’s internet site on Friday afternoon to prevent purchases being made?

Another related ‘hot’ topic is the issue of on-line auctions. May one bid for an item if the auction will end on Shabbat? What if the system bids automatically on Shabbat (when you are outbid in an on-line auction, such as eBay, but have indicated that you will pay more than the current highest bid by putting in a maximum bid before Shabbat)? The core issue is whether a transaction that takes place with no human involvement on Shabbat, even without one’s knowledge, remains prohibited by the laws of Shabbat.

By way of introduction, many authorities assert that the entire corpus of laws regulating commerce on Shabbat is of rabbinical, rather than Biblical origin. While this means they must be taken very seriously (and observed without compromise), in a case of uncertainty, the final ruling may allow for some flexibility.

Some 200 years ago, Rabbi Akiva Eiger considered the permissibility of selling an object when the money is handed over on Friday but remains the property of the vendor until Shabbat. Even though the acquisition happens automatically on Shabbat, he adopts the stringent position and prohibits this.

This point is qualified by Rabbi Zvi Pesah Frank, who asserts that when the entire process occurs on Shabbat, both the vendor and the purchaser transgress, but when the purchase is started before Shabbat and concludes on Shabbat, only the purchaser transgresses. While the owner of a website might not actually sin by ‘trading’ on Shabbat, he or she may be enticing a potential (Jewish) purchaser to sin!

According to this view, it would be difficult to allow a website to remain open on Shabbat, since any purchase made would result in transfer of title to the goods on Shabbat. However, if the vendor’s website can be designed not to actually process the charge on Shabbat, but instead wait to receive payment until the goods are available and ready for shipping, there may be no halachic problem.

Based on this ruling, Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, senior halakhic authority of the American Orthodox Union, is quoted as prohibiting ‘proxy’ bidding for an item when the internet auction ends on Shabbat. However, his ruling seems to ignore the fact that when the sale ends, all that actually happens is that one becomes legally committed to buying the item; until one pays for it after Shabbat, there is no actual transfer of title. This should remain permitted even according to Rabbi Eiger, since no acquisition actually happens on Shabbat.

Offering a fresh approach, Dayan Yitzhak Weiss considered the permissibility of a Jew trading on Shabbat using a vending machine. As the device is left in a public place and is freely accessible to passersby, it provides an excellent precedent for its ether-equivalent, the e-commerce website. After an extensive discussion of the issues, Dayan Weiss permits the use of vending machines when the following conditions are met:

The owner of the machine must declare that the proceeds of the sales won’t be acquired until after Shabbat (to avoid the above-mentioned concern of Rabbi Eiger).
The owner must have in mind that any items purchased on Shabbat are notionally considered to have been acquired by the purchaser before Shabbat commences. In certain circumstances, Jewish law allows the status or ownership of items to be determined in this way, even though the actual selection takes place on Shabbat.
The vending machine is in a public place, which avoids the appearance that the product has been bought from a Jewish business on Shabbat.

It seems reasonable to apply these conditions to e-commerce websites. The website may be considered to be a ‘public place’, and, as discussed above, the site can be designed to avoid the issue of actual acquisition on Shabbat.

While beyond the scope of this study, modern sources also consider the issue of enticing another Jew to sin and the concern that trading in a technically permissible manner degrades the sanctity of Shabbat. However, while there is indeed room for concern that internet trading interferes with the sanctity of Shabbat, even when no humans are involved, many modern halachists have adopted a lenient stance.

Sources

The rabbis forbade many things on Shabbat, some because they resemble Biblically prohibited acts and others because they may lead to committing a Biblically prohibited act. (Rambam, Laws of Shabbat 21:1)

Re: the sale of an item on Friday for money on the condition that it becomes your property the next day, such that the acquisition is concluded on Shabbat. Is it permissible, as no prohibited act takes place on Shabbat since the acquisition happens automatically, or forbidden, as the acquisition is concluded on Shabbat? It is forbidden. (Responsa of Rabbi Akiva Eiger 1:159)

The purchaser transgresses by acquiring title to an item on Shabbat, even if the contract was made on Friday… (Responsa Har Zvi, Oreh Hayyim 1:126)

In conclusion, when one fulfils all the conditions: the machine is not in a Jewish place and located such that no-one can identify the owner and all the preparations are made before Shabbat… there is room to permit its use. (Responsa Minhat Yitzhak 3:34)

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

So... Can You Write God’s Name On A Computer?

2008-01-24T18:31:00.004Z

Does Jewish law allow one to erase God’s name from a computer disk or monitor?

When I first encountered this question, I assumed that it was a joke. What if the response were negative? Would one have to bury old computer disks? What if God’s name appears on a computer monitor? Would one then have to avoid deleting it and instead of switching off, hope for a power cut?

In a passage dealing with the requirement to eradicate idolatry from Israel, the Torah urges us to ‘eliminate their name from that place’. (Devarim 12:3). This is followed by the warning, ‘do not do so to the Lord your God’. (ibid. 4) The Talmud and the legal codes understand this to constitute the Biblical prohibition of erasing any of God’s names (Sifri Devarim 61).

This has many applications: most notably the prohibition of destroying a text in which God’s name appears. In religious circles, people avoid writing God’s name in full (at least in its original Hebrew form) so that they can later dispose of the text. And every Jewish community has a ‘genizah’, where items containing God’s name, such as worn-out Mezuzot and Siddurim are stored until they can be buried.

But would Jewish law allow one to erase God’s name when it appears in a readable or audible form, although not actually written or printed? May one, for example, dispose of a tape recording of God’s name, or record something over it? What is the status of text stored digitally: for example, a word-processing document saved on a computer’s hard drive?

This question was first addressed in reference to the forerunner of the gramophone – the phonograph, a device in which a needle detected grooves on a revolving foil or paper sheet, amplifying them into sound. In a landmark responsum, Rabbi Z.P. Frank ruled that the markings on the paper are not actually letters (as they can’t be read or even seen) and so the prohibition of erasing God’s name does not apply to smoothing out the paper. He notes that the great Rabbi Shmuel Salant only prohibited this because he didn’t understand how the phonograph worked!

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein takes a slightly more circumspect approach to tape recordings: in a responsum dated 1963, he acknowledges that there are no real letters and hence no clear prohibition of erasing the tape, yet he feels that it is improper to erase the tape directly. He recommends an indirect approach (presumably recording something over the name of God, rather than merely wiping the tape blank).

While there are more stringent views, it seems that these rulings can also be applied to magnetic storage devices such as computer hard drives, which may be erased irrespective of their content. However, how would halachah address God’s name displayed on a computer monitor, when one can actually read the letters?

In the case of a CRT monitor, electrons are fired at the inside of the screen, forming light patterns that can be seen from the front. They are constantly refreshed, but at a rate that the human eye cannot detect: in reality, therefore, each letter is formed from a series of pixels (dots) each of which only appears on the screen for a moment before being replaced by another. Rabbi S.Z. Auerbach is quoted as ruling that since no complete letter ever actually exists, this does not constitute ‘writing’; it follows that deleting God’s name from this type of screen cannot be prohibited.

More modern TFT LCD monitors operate in a different way: the pixels forming the letters are all lit at once. The RJJS Journal quotes a Rabbi Hecht who was once asked about installed light bulbs that spelled out the name of God, would it be permissible to unplug them? He responded positively: since the lights are constantly ‘rewriting’ God’s name, cutting off the electric supply does not delete the name, but prevents it from being written. This reasoning, together with other principles, will suffice to allow us to delete God’s name from a computer screen, since anyway, the erasure is performed indirectly. What a relief!

Sources

Someone with a Divine name written on his skin may not wash nor stand in an unclean place. Should he be obliged to immerse in a mikveh, he should do so normally, as only direct erasing is prohibited. (Shabbat 120b)

But for a non-obligatory purpose, even erasing the name indirectly is prohibited, for there is no greater shame than causing God’s name to be erased. (Noda BeYehudah 2:OC:17)

One who erases one of the God’s holy names transgresses a Biblical prohibition. (Rambam, Yesoday HaTorah 6:1)

With respect to a phonograph: if one smoothes out the wrinkles on the paper so that the impression is lost and one can no longer hear the sounds… there is no issue of erasing God’s name… for in reality, there are no actual letters. Even though Rabbi Shmuel Salant wanted to be stringent, it seems that he wasn’t properly aware of how the device works. (Har Zvi, OC 1:280)

With respect to tape recordings, there is no prohibition of erasing God’s name as there are no real letters. Nonetheless, it is improper and one should try to do it indirectly. (Iggrot Moshe YD 2:142)

Shooting electrons is not considered by the Torah as writing, but storing those letters on the diskette may be considered to transgress the Shabbat prohibition of ‘building’... (Nishmat Avraham, quoting Rabbi S.Z. Auerbach)

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

Leading From Behind

2007-12-19T19:24:00.000Z

This week’s Torah reading sees Yaakov at the end of his life dispensing blessings to each of his sons. There is a comparable passage right at the end of the Torah, in which Moshe blesses the tribes soon before he dies. While these two poetic sections are quite similar, I want to focus on a difference:

A lion’s whelp is Yehudah… (BeReishit 49:9)

…Dan is a lion’s whelp… (Devarim 33:22)

Here the lion, as in other forms of literature, refers to the leader. While we would expect Yehudah, the ancestor of the kings of Israel, to be portrayed as a lion, why is Dan described in the same way?

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen explains that there are two models of leadership, which he refers to as ‘head of the lion’ and ‘tail of the lion’. We might call them in modern parlance ‘leading from the front’ and ‘leading from behind’.

Yehudah’s role is to lead the Jewish people from the front, setting the spiritual pace for the nation that will follow his example. The Jewish king marches ahead of his people, constantly raising the standards of observance and morality demanded of the nation. This is an indispensable role, one that truly requires the bravery of a lion to implement.

Yet there is another, no less vital form of leadership: that of Dan, which is conducted ‘from behind’:

All of the count of the encampment of Dan came to 175,600 – they travelled last under their flag. (BeMidbar 2:31)

And the flag of the encampment of Dan travelled – those who gathered all the encampments… (ibid. 10:25)

The tribe of Dan travelled at the back of the Jewish people, gathering the stragglers and ensuring that no-one got left behind. As a result, although Dan could be described as a ‘minor’ tribe, he is accorded great status in Yaakov’s blessing:

Dan shall avenge his people like one of the [important] tribes of Israel. (BeReishit 49:16)

One may also explain that ‘like one’ means that he is compared with the unique tribe of Yehudah. (Rashi ad. loc. paraphrased)

Yehudah may strike out in front, beating the drum to which he hopes that the Jewish people will march. In both national and religious aspirations, he will, perforce, guide them to places that they don’t really want to go: his leadership must comprise a heady brew of idealism and obduracy to succeed in steering the Jewish people towards their destiny. Yet for all his management skills, there is a danger that Yehudah will glance over his shoulder and realise that the people are struggling to keep up with him; worse still, they may not be following him at all. This is where Dan appears to complement the role of the leader: he nurtures, cajoles, even carries the slackers back into the camp and helps them to follow Yehudah. And while out at the front, Yehudah may not even notice the varied needs of the nation in his charge, Dan, who lives among the people, is capable of appreciating their diverse spiritual requirements and devising appropriate means for every member of the community to take his or her rightful place behind the king. This role requires just as much bravery as that of Yehudah, for the Dan’s job is often difficult to implement and deeply counter-cultural in a world that expects identically high standards from everyone. Dan, too, is a lion.

Our communities are blessed with many Yehudah-style leaders: tremendous sages, tzadikim, and outstanding role models of inspirational religious life. The Jewish world would, quite literally, cease to function without them. Yet, at least in some places, this appears to be not quite enough: for the people are in danger of falling behind the aspirations of the leaders. Sometimes the demands made by the leadership (whether it be in life-goals, stringent application of halachah, or other areas of Jewish life), cannot be met by every member of the community; this may lead to disappointment, religious burn-out and a sense of disenfranchisement. Perhaps the Jewish world would profit from a few more ‘Dans’ to gather the strugglers and bring them home: to make them feel loved in a world whose aspirations they find hard to meet and to show them a range of ways of living a meaningful and rich Jewish life with confidence and pride. In fact, at certain times in our lives, all of us may experience the type of disillusionment that the ‘Yehudahs’ can’t quite understand: at those moments, we all need the intervention of a ‘Dan’ to keep us within the fold.

Finally, we are told in an obscure Midrash (quoted in Torah Sheleimah), that the ultimate form of Jewish leadership must combine the attributes of Yehudah with those of Dan:

Mashiach hails from two tribes: his father is from Yehudah and his mother is from Dan. This is why Yehudah and Dan are both called ‘a lion’s whelp’, for the Mashiach will emerge from both of them.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

How The Torah Can Take On The internet

2007-12-17T18:25:00.002Z

Technology has always been seen as a challenge to religious societies and their mores. I recall a discussion with a visitor to my home: the topic of conversation was a man in full Hassidic garb he had seen standing in the street speaking on a mobile phone. What I thought was an interesting synthesis of old and new worlds my guest considered hypocritical for reasons he clearly felt deeply, but was unable to articulate. And a famous London rabbi who resisted the use of video cameras at weddings was once criticised in this very paper for being ‘an enemy of modern technology’! There seems to be a perception that technology and Orthodoxy don’t quite mix!

Recently, computers - and particularly the internet - have thrown up a range of issues that Jewish scholars have started to tackle. The most hotly contested of these is how to ensure that the internet is used safely. The plethora of pornography, nefarious chat-rooms, violence and hate that pervades the sinister side of the web has caused immense consternation in all civilised parts of society; it has encouraged Orthodox leaders to offer strongly-worded edicts to control its use. In many Haredi circles today, use of the internet for essential business use is reluctantly permitted, whereas home use is disallowed; there are residential areas in Israel where few homes have internet access. The exponents of this view feel that the dangers of internet use far outweigh its benefits, and that a ‘kosher’ home should, if at all possible, be web-free. This opinion is reinforced with powerful rhetoric and some quite draconian measures: a number of communities have even incorporated harsh internet restrictions into their school-entrance policies.

Yet leaders of other Orthodox circles have adopted a different view: they realise that the internet is a supremely useful tool that many find indispensable, and that banning it is unlikely to actually stop people from using it. An increasingly common perspective sees the internet as the greatest opportunity for knowledge-dissemination since Gutenberg, one that the religious world should embrace, while simultaneously taking robust precautions to avoid exposure to its disreputable and nauseating parts. This view is tacitly endorsed by the proliferation of Torah websites and other Orthodox internet resources.

But while the internet has occupied centre stage in recent rabbinical pronouncements, many other fascinating issues are raised by computer use. Over the coming months, in a series of occasional articles, I intend to address some of them. Among other topics, we will consider how Jewish law deals with modern intellectual property matters, Shabbat complications generated by internet use and some surprising consequences emerging from the growth in the availability of wifi.

The application of ancient Jewish sources to a modern issue is always an exciting opportunity for Torah scholarship, but the almost paradoxical meeting of the worlds of halakhah and state-of-the-art technology is especially fascinating. I never cease to be awed by the comprehensive nature of Talmudic and mediaeval sources: the corpus of Jewish legal literature contains a vast range of precedents from which any contemporary case can be decided, no matter how extraordinary. Of course, this process has existed since the earliest times and the current issues raised by computers are the successors of topics like protecting copyright, which was addressed many centuries ago by such luminaries as Rabbi Moshe Isserlis (16^th century Poland). In due course, our subjects will give way to the next generation of conundrums; we can’t predict what they will be, but we can be sure that the halakhah contains the tools with which to handle them.

I believe that halakhah can deliver cogent and relevant answers to apparently unprecedented hi-tech problems and that this is one of Judaism’s greatest strengths. The answers emerging from halakhic debate often seem to presage the conclusions that other systems of thought eventually reach by longer and slower means.

The little-understood willingness of rabbis, even of those of the most insular schools, to engage directly with every aspect of modernity is, potentially one of the greatest assets of the contemporary Jewish world, one that we should export to the rest of society. Torah scholars are absolutely dedicated to incorporating the very best achievements of the 21^st century into Jewish life. Yet they are equally committed to taking vigorous precautions to ensure that negative aspects of technology (both the halakhically questionable and the spiritually damaging) are firmly excluded from Jewish society. I hope that this series affords a small taste of this tremendous resource.

Sources

Internet access in the home is only permissible if required for a person’s job. Computers without internet access will be required to have software installed which will prevent such access in order to prevent children from connecting them to the internet. Children of families that do not comply with the rules will be barred from school in order to protect the other children in the class. (Excerpts from internet ban of Lakewood, NJ)

A computer is not a toy. It is a tool, like an electric saw. A blanket ban on home computers is as foolish as a blanket ban on electric saws. But it is just as foolish to leave an electric saw plugged in, out in your living room where there are children. Education is all about teaching our children how to use life’s tools. (Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen)

See http://frumnet.blogspot.com/, a blog devoted to discussing the future of Orthodox internet use.

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

Un-hijacking Hanukah (Hanukah 5768)

2007-12-05T17:28:00.000Z

Many of us will have come across presentations of Hanukah that portray it as the anniversary of the ultimate victory of Jewish history – that of Judaism over the secular culture of the time. In this depiction, a pure, unadulterated Judaism, untainted by any non-Jewish influence, prevailed over an engagement with the surrounding society, its aspirations and intellectual activity.

This portrayal may be at odds with a number of ancient Jewish sources. In an allegorical reading of the laws governing the parah adumah (red cow, the ashes of which were used for spiritual purification), the holy Zohar learns:

'Unblemished’ – this refers to the Greek kingdom, for they are close to the path of truth. (Zohar HaKadosh 2:237a)

In the same vein (although in reality, this has no modern application), one may write certain holy texts in Greek as the sole alternative to Hebrew. The Sages find a source for this ruling in the post-diluvian blessings given by Noah to his sons: Shem, the progenitor of the Jewish people and Yefet, the ancestor of Greece. The usual translation of the verse is:

God shall give beauty (usual translation is ‘broaden’) to Yefet, yet He shall reside in the tents of Shem… (BeReishit 9:27)

The Talmud radically rereads the verse:

God shall give beauty to Yefet, and it shall reside in the tents of Shem – the interests of Yefet shall reside in the tents of Shem. (Megillah 9b)

These sources may indicate that far from rejecting Greek thought and culture, there is a view that incorporates them into the Jewish world. The Greeks developed the aesthetic aspects of life, such as music, art, literature, mathematics, and certain types of philosophy. This is the ‘beauty of Yefet’, which the Talmud encourages us not to revile, but to place firmly within the ‘tents of Shem’.

Yet while we Jews may subscribe to the coexistence of the physical and spiritual worlds, many Torah sources attribute to the Greeks an unwillingness to admit any connection between this world and the next. They may have believed in a higher reality, but considered it to have no impact on human lives. As such, the Torah could be revered as a classic of world literature, but not as the Divine guide to purposeful existence; it could take its place in a library alongside the works of Aristotle, but could never be considered a tool for human elevation.

In this light, we may recast the distinction between Jewish and Greek ideologies and hence the true nature of the victory of Hanukah. Having uncoupled the physical and spiritual worlds, the Greeks saw literature, philosophy, music, etc., as autonomous pursuits, rather than ways of experiencing spirituality within the physical world. In contrast, Jewish life encourages these endeavours only when they are a means to touch the Divine, but never as ends in themselves. The beauty of Yefet can and must live only within the tents of Shem.

The difference between our world view and that of the Greeks may seem slight, but it lies in understanding the very purpose of all cultural and other ‘secular’ pursuits. The victory of Hanukah – one of means over ends – is one that changed the face of the world.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

Yippee: a Journey to Jewish Mazursky

2007-11-14T09:15:00.000Z

‘Yippee: a Journey to Jewish Joy’ premiered at a special showing in London last week

At the end of the film, the middle-aged Jewish woman sitting a few seats away turned to me and asked, ‘What did you think of it, then?’ When I suggested that I needed a while to digest my experience (code for: I don’t want to tell you), she launched into her disapproval of the Breslovers (‘They’re nothing like any Hassidim I’ve ever come across’), the fact that there was filming on Rosh HaShanah (untrue: the cameras stopped at sunset and resumed after Yom Tov, although there did seem to be footage from the previous Shabbos), and, finally, of me, for failing to express an opinion of the film (I would have thought that someone like you – i.e. bearded – would know much more about it). Going to see Yippee: a Journey to Jewish Joy’, was, like the film itself, an extremely Jewish experience!

The film, a trailer for which can be viewed here, records the participation of Hollywood director Paul Mazursky in the Rosh HaShanah 2005 pilgrimage of Breslover Hassidim and ‘fellow-travellers’ to the grave-site of Rebbe Nahman (founder of the Breslov movement) in the Ukrainian town of Uman. Rebbe Nahman encouraged his followers to celebrate Rosh HaShanah at his burial place and in the post-Communist era, this has grown to attract tens of thousands of pilgrims. Mazursky, who describes himself as a secular Jew, was encouraged to make the trip by David Miretsky, his orthodox optometrist in LA, himself a regular visitor to Uman.

The film is light on detail about Breslov: one gleans little sense of the radical nature of Rebbe Nahman’s teachings or what distinguishes Breslov from other Hassidic groups. Yet it highlights one area (mentioned in the film’s subtitle – ‘a journey to Jewish joy’) for which Hassidey Breslov are famed: ecstatic joyfulness at all times. The teachings of Rebbe Nahman are replete with this theme; the lifestyle, aspirations and music of the Hassidim express it in practice. It is this constant happiness that intrigued Mazursky and motivated him to explore a world so distant from that of his comfort zone in Beverley Hills.

There is a nice balance between footage of Uman and clips of Mazursky himself at home in Hollywood, post-Uman, neatly groomed, hair dyed (he is much greyer in the film and had a goatee beard and his arm in a cast following a fall), commenting on the experience and how it had affected him. There are also some clever contrasting scenes: en route to Uman via Kiev, Mazursky’s group had a lay-over in Munich, during which they managed to squeeze in a visit to the Oktoberfest. Beer-drinking and mixed dancing contrasted well with the later scenes of all-male ecstatic Hassidic prayer and dancing. Later in the film, we are treated to a glimpse of the rather normal-looking traders of gentile Uman (just down the road from 25,000 bouncing Breslovers), and hear their views on the annual Hassidic invasion.

However, most of this could be described as light entertainment: the film scarcely scratches the surface of the powerful spiritual nature of Rosh HaShanah in Uman. Apart from a few glimpses of religious yearning, mostly contributed by David Miretsky, we are shown what seems to be a very happy, somewhat shallow and more-than-slightly mad group of people. The profound nature of what is, by all accounts, a life-changing experience, is largely absent. While this may be due in part to the lack of filming on Rosh HaShanah (something that wasn’t mentioned in the film), there was still a (deliberate?) failure to explore the real depth of the experience.

Despite this, I liked the film not so much as an accurate portrayal of Breslov and the Uman-pilgrimage (which it is not), but for the insight it offers into the emotional life of the director himself. Mazursky is rich, famous, hysterically funny and well-liked, yet he is searching for something ‘bigger’. While he never mentions it explicitly, his words and face speak volumes about the emptiness that permeates his life. He admits that while visiting Uman did not make him religious, it touched his heart and that he had become more respectful towards the observant. More than anything, Yippee is a diary of Mazursky’s struggle to find deeper meaning within an outwardly fabulously successful life that seems hollow on the inside. In that respect, if in no other, it is touching and fascinating.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

A Week In Jerusalem

2007-10-31T12:38:00.000Z

My wife and I have just spent a magnificent week in Jerusalem. It was, as always, spiritually uplifting to visit the Old City, daven at the Kotel, absorb the incredible atmosphere of the eternal locus of Jewish physical and spiritual life, all the while sampling a degree of religious intensity that one can easily forget exists.

This time, we were also inspired by the growth of the new city: it was tremendous to see the huge number of building projects, the expansion of residential areas, the streets filled with young people. We were overwhelmed with a sense that without any question, the Jewish future lies in Israel, not elsewhere.

And, we have decided that Israel is the best place in the world for kosher restaurants. While we assiduously avoided mehadrin buses, we had the pleasure of dining at some really great mehadrin restaurants. They offer superb cuisine from across the globe at reasonable prices and despite what everyone says about Israelis, excellent service. (See below for a list.)

With all this to recommend, my wife and I asked ourselves several times during our trip: why exactly do we still live in the UK?

Gong – 33 Rehov Yaffa (Japanese)
Keyara – 8 Rehov Ramban (Bistro)
Yoja – 25 Rehov Emek Refaim (Pan-Asian)
Café Rimon – 4 Rehov Luntz, off Ben Yehudah (Grill or milky café)
Darna – 3 Rehov Horkanus (Moroccan)
Angelo – 9 Rehov Horkanus (Italian)

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

More About The Graves In Sochaczew

2007-10-18T21:01:00.000+01:00

Introduction

Many of you have expressed considerable interest about my interest in Sochaczew (see previous blog here) and my recent visit to the cemetery there. This week, I discovered a fascinating footnote in a sefer called ‘Mareh HaDeshe’, which talks about the rediscovery of the gravesite a number of years ago. Mareh HaDeshe is a biographical work about the two Rebbes of Sochaczew, written by the son of the Shem MiShmuel, who only died in 2000. The book is little known and hard to find (I would never have discovered it had I not overheard someone talking about it on a bus in Israel a couple of years ago. Even then, I couldn’t get it in Israel or in Europe; eventually, a friend found a copy in a sefarim warehouse in New Jersey). It’s a shame that I didn’t discover the footnote before I travelled to Sochaczew, but it’s in the section of the book dealing with the Avney Nezer, which I haven’t yet read. Here is the text in translation (mine):

From Mareh HaDeshe; Rabbi Aharon Yisroel Bornstein, Jerusalem, 5764, privately published

In reference to the burial of the Avney Nezer (Rabbi Avraham Bornstein) in 1910, Rabbi Aharon Yisroel Bornstein writes (Mareh HaDeshe pg 201):

(Main text) They selected an empty area as a burial place opposite the gate (of the cemetery in Sochaczew). This place was chosen deliberately, in order to leave an empty space of four cubits on all sides, so that it would be immediately evident on entering the cemetery.

(Footnote 17) In the records of the Hevra Kaddisha, they wrote that no-one should be buried within four cubits of his grave. They built an ohel (small shrine) around it. Until the ohel was constructed, watches of Hassidim sat there on guard all the time.

Thanks to the unusually distinct place, after many years, they were successful in revealing the gravesite, following the Second World War, when the enemy had destroyed the Jewish cemetery and demolished the ohel, leaving no sign or memorial; they even poured earth over it and levelled the land.

During the Second World War, the Nazis and their assistants (may their names be erased) destroyed the Jewish cemetery and demolished the ohel, leaving behind no trace. They even set up tents and clubs for the troops in the area. In order to do this, they levelled the land and poured earth and building rubble on to it. And what the Nazis (may their names be erased) failed to do, local evil people completed: they cleared the area completely, and turned part of it into a football field for the pupils of a school built nearby; they even used it as a pasture ground for animals. Furthermore, they demolished the wall that surrounded the cemetery.

In later years, after Israel’s association with the Polish state thawed from frozen, Jews returned to visit Poland, as well as the remnants that were left from the Jews there. They saw the ruins and the awful destruction, and the idea arose to return and to re-establish and fence in the cemetery.

Planned by many Sochaczew Hassidim in Eretz Yisroel and in America, headed by a man of dear spirit, one of the well-wishers, our friend, the rabbi and hasid Rabbi Yehudah Vidavsky, and on behalf of the council of immigrants from Sochaczew to Eretz Yisroel, they pursued protracted negotiations with the local authorities to return the area of the cemetery to Jewish control. They removed the structures that the bad neighbours had erected around it and which encroached on its space. Through the generosity of well-wishers, in place of the old wall the area of the cemetery was surrounded with an iron fence and they locked the gate. However, they could not locate the place where the ohel had stood. They had the collected testimony of elderly gentiles, but each of them pointed to a different place. Even the aerial photographs taken by the Allies during the war were unsuccessful in revealing the place, because the tents that had been erected in the area concealed everything.

But Rabbi Yehudah Vidavsky did not give up nor rest, and with the help of men who remembered the place (among them the author of these lines), identified a place as a possible location, and began exploratory excavations – perhaps we would be successful in uncovering some remnants. We had before us two indictors as to the correct positioning: 1) the graves of our rabbis would be found in a place where the surrounding area is devoid of other graves, because they agreed and decided at the time (of the death of the Avney Nezer) not to bury another body within four cubits of him. 2) There would be two graves next to each other, as the Shem MiShmuel was buried later within the ohel adjacent to the grave of his father. Strengthened by the tireless Rabbi Yehudah, who was conducting the excavations almost with his bare hands, they were successful, with the help of God, to uncover planks that had been placed in the grave. They began to dig with great alacrity along the length of a plank and uncovered the whole area of the grave. When they continued leftwards, the place where the Shem MiShmuel’s grave should be found, they uncovered the whole area of the adjacent grave. In accordance with the two aforementioned indicators, they fixed the place of the ohel exactly.

One who starts a Mitzvah also merits completing it: with his active assistance and with the partnership of well-wishers in Eretz Yisroel and in the Diaspora, we built a new ohel, corresponding to the ohel that had been demolished. We fixed it as a place of prayer, seclusion and prostration upon the graves of the righteous, our rabbis from the House of Sochaczew, may their merit stand for us. May the merit of those who acted and those who helped them stand for all eternity.

The War Of The Kings (Lech Lecha 5768)

2007-10-18T20:46:00.000+01:00

Avraham became involved in a war between the powers of his time because of the capture of his nephew Lot. We learn:

They took Lot, the son of Avraham’s brother, and his property and they went. He was living in Sedom. (BeReishit 14:12)

Avraham felt a need to attempt to rescue his hapless nephew, putting himself at enormous risk to do so. The Maharal has no doubts as to the warriors’ true intentions - ‘for these four kings who took Lot, their objective was really Avraham.’ The capture of Lot was a bait to attract their true enemy – Avraham. Why were the four rulers interested in an elderly nomadic monotheist, who kept himself to himself? The Maharal suggests taht this was the first religious war in history, a concerted attempt to wipe the One God and Avraham, His chosen ambassador, from the face of the earth. The new spiritual order and focus that Avraham had introduced caused a major threat to the establishment of the time – one founded on pagan principles, selfish pursuits and little grasp of the sanctity of human life. Avraham sought to subvert all this through monotheism, moral responsibility and the rights and duties of Man. He posed no physical threat to the rulers of his world, yet he challenged the very basis of their values in the most profound way.

This was the true motive for the war – to eliminate Avraham and his new ideas before he became too successful. This is the deeper reason that there were four kings aligned against Avraham, as the number four represents the pull of the physical forces in all directions away from the centre. If we picture Avraham as the one man of God, the ambassador of the One God, then we can envisage the destructive, anti-spiritual forces attempting to undermine his achievements by attacking him on all sides. That the one (Avraham) faced the four kings indicates that the ravages of negativity and un-holiness threatened true spirituality.

Apart the self-sacrifice that Avraham exhibited by saving his nephew, the aftermath of the war has much to teach:

The king of Sedom said to Avram, ‘give me the people and take the wealth for yourself.’ Avraham said to the king of Sedom, ‘I have lifted my hand towards the Lord, the supernal God, ruler of heaven and earth. From a thread to a shoe-strap, nor shall I take from anything that is yours; you shall not say, ‘I have made Avram rich. (BeReishit 14:22-23)

Avraham decided not to take the spoils of war – after all, his motivation for involvement was not personal aggrandisement, but saving his nephew. However, Chazal find a much deeper meaning in these verses. Ravo notes that in the merit of Avraham’s reference to a thread and a shoe-strap, his descendents merited two Mitzvot – the thread of t’chelet / sky-blue that adorns the tzitzit and the strap of tefillin. (See Sotah 17a) The Midrash, which finds references to further Mitzvot in Avraham’s declaration. The thread is seen to refer to tzitzit, the Mishkan, which was decorated with threads of sky-blue and purple, or even the offerings that were brought on an altar whose upper and lower parts were divided with a red thread. Apparently, the shoe-strap makes an oblique reference to the strap of the shoe used in the chalitzah ceremony, the tachash skins that formed a protective covering over the Mishkan or the footsteps of the pilgrims attending the Temple on the shalosh regalim.

The Maharal (Sotah ad. loc.) comes to our aid again. It is axiomatic to Jewish thought that since God is perfect and infinite, we can give Him nothing; rather He gives to us in a unilateral fashion, while He takes nothing from this world. Further, emulating the Divine characteristics is considered to be one of the greatest possible achievements of Man. As the Rabbis put it – just as He clothes the naked, visits the sick and comforts the bereaved, so should we. (Sotah 14a) Imitatio dei, the imperative to become Godlike, underlies much of Jewish life. It follows then that Avraham’s refusal to take something rightfully his was demonstrative of his capacity to realise a Godly life within the physical world. According to the strict law, the spoils of war were his for the taking – they were considered ownerless and therefore available to him. It is even possible that he could have used his material gain for holy purposes, yet he chose to abstain. The law of tzitzit is, in the words of the Maharal, ‘complete connection to God through a Mitzvah.’ The tzitzit represent the notion that through a simple physical object it is possible to connect to God in the most profound way. Both tzitzit and tefillin are made from the simplest materials: wool and leather and, as such, are the reward for Avraham’s refusal to benefit from even the most basic items of the spoil – threads and shoe-straps. They show us the refinement of true Jewish spirituality, in which even the most mundane article hints to a wealth of subtle thoughts and ideas.

A Visit To Sochaczew

2007-10-14T08:07:00.000+01:00

Last week, I fulfilled a long-held desire – to visit the ruins of the Jewish cemetery in Sochaczew, a town some 40 miles west of Warsaw. With a Jewish population of over 3000 prior to its destruction by the Nazis during the Holocaust, Sochaczew was known as a centre of Hassidic thought in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries (as well as being very close to the birth-place of the composer Frederic Chopin).

The Rebbes of Sochaczew were world-renowned thinkers: the first was the son-in-law of the Kotzker Rebbe, Rabbi Avraham Bornstein (d. 1910), known as the ‘Avney Nezer’ after his monumental collection of halachic responsa; he was succeeded by his son, Rabbi Shmuel (d. 1926), known as the ‘Shem MiShmuel’ after his nine-volume collection of discourses on the Torah and festivals. Representing a rare blend of intellectual, psychological, esoteric and inspirational material, the Shem MiShmuel rigorously analyses Midrashic sources, which are used to offer a creative approach to understanding Biblical narratives.

Around fifteen years ago, I was introduced to the writings of the Shem MiShmuel by a friend in Gateshead, and I have been a devotee ever since: his ideas have heavily influenced my own thoughts. My younger son is named for him, and as I am about to embark on a major research project into his writings, it was a privilege to be able to visit Sochaczew to daven at his grave and that of his illustrious father.

On my first visit to Poland some years ago, it struck me that the Holocaust happened very close to the UK – it took just two hours by plane to get to Warsaw from my home on London. This visit brought home again how easily the Nazis might have been more successful in their attempts to invade England, in which case my grandparents could have been victims of the Nazi’s death camps. Yet for reasons we can never know, it was European, rather than British Jewry who fell victim to the horrors of the bestial murder-machine.

My travelling companion and I found the visit to Sochaczew powerful and intense, yet it was outwardly unremarkable. There was no crying, no grand gestures, no throngs of people and nothing even slightly remarkable to look at. The cemetery was destroyed by the Nazis, but since then, a memorial wall to the murdered Jews of the locale and a memorial made from fragments of desecrated tombstones have been erected. The graves of the Rebbes have recently been restored, and an ohel (small building) constructed over them. We were only in Sochaczew for an hour, during which time we said some Tehillim, prayed for various people and davened Minchah. But the most powerful part of the experience was learning two short essays from the Shem MiShmuel, standing close to his grave: it was a truly memorable moment, one that I hope to repeat quite soon. There is something indescribable about standing in a small building in the middle of a field in a hick-town in the Polish countryside next to the grave of a man who made a real contribution to Jewish thought, while studying his very words. Therein lays the beauty of great ideas: they are eternal. The Nazis may have deported and murdered the Jews of Sochaczew and even attempted to erase every trace of Jewish habitation there by destroying the cemetery, but the ideas of the Shem MiShmuel exist for ever in the thoughts of his spiritual inheritors.

For photographs of my trip, please look here.

For more information about the destroyed Jewish community of Sochaczew, please look here.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

Our Lives In Our Hands On Sukkot (Sukkot 5768)

2007-10-01T15:32:00.000+01:00

A little-known rabbinical source explores the relationship between Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot:

Said Rebbi El’azar ben Meriom: why do we make a sukkah after Yom Kippur? To teach that since on Rosh HaShanah, God sits in judgement upon everyone alive and on Yom Kippur, He seals the judgement, it is possible that the Jewish people are deserving of exile. As such, they make the sukkah and exile themselves from their homes to the sukkah and God considers it as though they have been exiled to Babylon…. (Pesikta DeRav Kehana 2:7)

This thought is expressed in a prayer that some people say when entering the Sukkah:

And in the merit of my exit from my house to go outside…. may it be considered as though I had been sent far away as a wanderer….

It is hard to conceive of the modern sukkah as a form of banishment. Many sukkot are comfortable, even luxurious, close to the house, and, in some cases, inside the house. Even writing this from my sukkah in cold, wet England, with light drizzle settling on my computer screen, hardly seems like an exilic experience!

Perhaps this concept can be given a modern interpretation. We are all familiar with the need to get out of our regular environment from time to time: it is valuable to examine one’s conduct, schedule, perhaps even one’s whole life, from an outside vantage point, rather than from within it. Sometimes, one can only commit to life-changes, review one’s aspirations, and, in the words of a friend, ‘rediscover one’s own voice’ away from the demands and expectations of others and the pressures of normal existence.

After the spiritual exertions of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, we may be exhilarated, but exhausted physically and emotionally. Also, the commitments we have made to live better and more fulfilled Jewish lives may be sincere, but they are also fragile. It would be easy to simply slip back into our previous behaviour pattern, with little to show from Yom Kippur. The sukkah provides a welcome ‘break’ from one’s regular environment, enabling one to recover from the Yamim Norayim and consolidate and internalise one’s spiritual achievements. The sukkah allows us the space to scrutinise our lives from the outside inwards, consider our own deficiencies at a dispassionate distance and strengthen our resolve to rectify them. This may be just the sort of ‘exile’ we need straight after Yom Kippur.

Allow me to extend this thought to the lulav and etrog. Every rabbi has quoted the following Midrash when short of a sermon for Sukkot:

Rebbi Moni opened his exposition (of the lulav and etrog): all my limbs shall say, ‘God, who is like You?’ (Tehillim 35:10). This verse was only said in reference to the lulav [bundle]. The spine of the lulav resembles the spine of a person; the hadas (myrtle) resembles the eye; the arovoh (willow) resembles the mouth; the etrog resembles the heart. [King] David said: these are the most significant organs of the body, for they encapsulate the entire person. (VaYikra Rabbah 30:14)

When one takes the lulav and etrog, one is holding oneself in one’s hands, enjoying a rare chance to look at oneself from the outside. One can decide in which direction to point oneself in the year ahead and actually ‘take one’s life in one’s hands’ and start the process.

My wife suggested that this makes the pre-Sukkot careful selection of the lulav and etrog easier to understand: each item is carefully examined to ensure that it meets exacting standards of freshness, completeness and beauty. That examination is the opening salvo of a process of careful self-scrutiny from afar, the blessing of Sukkot.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

The Avinu Malkenu Paradox (Yom Kippur 5768)

2007-09-21T10:55:00.000+01:00

Since Rosh HaShanah, we have said the beautiful prayer Avinu Malkenu – our Father, our King – numerous times. Painfully aware of our inadequacies, we approach God, our benevolent father and ruler, and beg Him to bless us in every possible material and spiritual way. Its first and last lines read:

Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You….

Our Father, Our King, show us grace and answer us, for we have no [good] deeds. Perform acts of benevolence and kindness for us and save us.

The text is familiar, yet the opening phrase of each line expresses a surprising reality about our perception of God, touching on what is sometimes called the ‘immanence-transcendence paradox’. It is axiomatic that God is distinct from everything in creation, perfect and unbounded in every way – as the ruler of the universe, He transcends it. Yet we also perceive Him as our Father, concerned and intimately involved with the affairs of each of us, our constant support and rock. Struggling with this contradiction is a feature of any meaningful religious life.

In the Avinu Malkenu prayer, the paradox is simply stated: it is acknowledged in every line, but not resolved. When we stand before God we ask Him for life, health, success and redemption as though He were our father, yet simultaneously we recoil in awe, overwhelmed to stand in the presence of transcendent, wholly other-worldly, power. We sense that we may have to live with the paradox and not let it overly trouble us.

That is until the Ne’ilah, (closing) service of Yom Kippur. Just before finishing ten arduous days of prayer and introspection, we again say Avinu Malkenu, but append a short affirmation, said only on this occasion and by a person close to death. The key line of this declaration is borrowed from I Melakhim 18:39:

Adonay hu HaElohim.

Translated roughly into English, this equates to saying that God is God, which seems to be tautology. However, the original context of the verse offers some insight: it is the story of the prophet Elijah fighting the false prophets of Ba’al on Mount Carmel. After a fierce religious contest, the outcome of which would determine the fate of the Jewish people, God answered Elijah’s prayers by consuming the entire altar upon which he had prepared an offering with fire. When the people experienced the sudden revelation of the true God:

they fell on their faces and said: Adonay is Elohim.

The name Adonay refers to God in His essence – the ruler of all, unbounded by time or space - whereas Elohim describes Him manifest in this world. There is often a huge dichotomy between our expectations of the perfect King and the harsh reality of the imperfect world in which we live, where suffering and inequity abound. We may find it impossible to accept that the source of all life and love is the same God who allows pain and apparent injustice to exist.

In the time of Elijah, the Jewish people had been attracted to Ba’al worship; like other ancient religious systems, it probably drove a wedge between heaven and earth - between two different and apparently irreconcilable perceptions of the Divine. It acknowledged that God may be in heaven, but claimed that the forces controlling life on earth are not in His control and must be worshipped separately. Yet when the fire of God consumed Elijah’s offering, the people realised, albeit momentarily, that there really is no distinction – Adonay is indeed Elohim. It may remain beyond our comprehension on all but the rarest of occasions, but it is true nonetheless: the God of perfection is the same God who inhabits and is manifest within our imperfect reality.

Declaring Adonay hu HaElohim at the end of Yom Kippur is the profoundest achievement of the entire religious year: the apotheosis of ten days of devotion. It is an incredible, unparalleled spiritual moment, in which we find ourselves able to shout out with complete conviction that Avinu – our Father – is Malkenu – our King.

The earth-shattering collapse of boundaries in our understanding of the Divine that characterises the end of Ne’ilah may only last for a few moments, but its impact must reverberate throughout the rest of the year. One of the remarkable gifts we can take from Yom Kippur is a heightened awareness that the imperfection that seems to pervade our world is not as it seems. A close friend pointed out to me that every experience, including those challenges that seem unfair, unjust or are unbearably painful, emanate from a perfect, all-knowing and all-loving God, who while He is not always evident to us, acts for our long-term good. He is, despite appearances to the contrary, simultaneously Adonay and Elohim. This provides us with a fresh lens though which to greet with fortitude everything that God has in store for us in the year ahead.

Based on a short address given each year by the author to his community at the end of Ne’ilah.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents.

A Special Day (Yom Kippur 5768)

2007-09-21T10:53:00.000+01:00

The sources express considerable interest in the opening lines of the Torah reading for Yom Kippur morning:

God spoke to Moshe after the death of the two sons of Aharon, when they drew near before God and they died. God said to Moshe: speak to Aharon your brother that he should not come near at any time to the holy place from the house of the curtain, to before the cover that is upon the ark, so they should not die, since in a cloud I shall appear upon the cover. With this Aharon shall come to the holy place: with a cow of the herd as a sin offering and a ram as a burnt offering. (VaYikra 16:1-3)

This refers to the prohibition of entering the Holy of Holies (the house of the curtain, etc.), the sole exception to which was the Kohen Gadol on Yom Kippur, whose activities there occupy the rest of the reading. The introduction, mentioning the death of the sons of Aharon, is particularly poignant, as it seems that their unauthorised entry to the Holy of Holies was the cause of their demise. Thinking about the ramifications of the death of Aharon’s sons is considered of some importance:

It is mentioned in the Zohar that anyone who is distressed by the death of Aharon’s sons or even cries tears for them, all his sins are forgiven… The primary purpose of this is that some should set one’s heart to repent of any sins that one may have in hand, for if this happened to such great people, what of ordinary mortals? (Mishnah Berurah, Orech Chaim 621, paraphrased)

The exception, as we have mentioned, is the entry of the Kohen Gadol to perform the special expiation ceremonies on behalf of the entire Jewish people on Yom Kippur. The esoteric writers alight on the word ‘with these’ ((בזאת in the third verse of the Torah reading. They understand the word זאת to refer to a most unusual confluence of occurrences – only in those circumstances could even the Kohen Gadol enter the holy place. In accordance with the writings of the Maharal of Prague and later, the Chassidic writers, these confluence is know as ‘world’, ‘year’ and ‘soul’, more easily understood as ‘place’ ‘time’ and ‘special human being. Only when a special person (the Kohen Gadol) was in a certain place at the right time, would entry to the place be permitted.

The common factor is the lack of space and time. Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year is imbued with a sense of timelessness – we transcend our normal needs and activities to devote a complete day to God. The Land of Israel, and especially Jerusalem and the Temple Mount were said to be able to hold as many people who visited there. The Mishnah notes that although thousands of people were crammed into the Temple courtyard, when they prostrated, there was unexpectedly room for everyone. Even more curiously, the ark, which rested in the Holy of Holies itself, apparently occupied no space itself (the room was larger than the ark). The Kohen Gadol was deemed to express the pinnacle of human spiritual development; this reached its zenith on Yom Kippur, when he was understood to be almost angelic. Only with זאת – on the holiest day of the year could the holiest man at the peak of his spiritual powers enter the holiest place on earth.

We may have no Temple and no Kohen, but we are capable of experiencing 25 hours of intense other-worldliness on Yom Kippur. Armed with a proper understanding of the majesty and potential of the day, we can transcend space and time for one day, touch the Divine and change ourselves and our world forever.

At Least Remember The Rabbi's Joke (Rosh HaShanah 5768)

2007-09-12T17:26:00.000+01:00

A childhood memory: I am walking home from Shul on Rosh HaShanah with my father. En route, fellow congregants are discussing two aspects of the recently-finished services: whether the rabbi’s joke was funny and how long his tekiah gedolah (final shofar-blast) had been. Years later, and now the likely subject of such pre-prandial chit-chat, I hope that I will feel inspired to preach on a topic that will disturb my congregants’ conversations well into lunch, perhaps even beyond their Yom Tov afternoon nap. Should I fail, I trust that they will at least remember my joke and that they will have cause to glance at their watches before my breath gives out!

Preceding Rosh HaShanah, the month of Elul, is traditionally dedicated to introspection, extra prayer and reviewing the past year’s achievements ahead of the season of Divine judgement. It is difficult for anyone with a busy schedule to manage this, but paradoxically, this period can find a pulpit rabbi torn between personal and communal responsibilities.

Part of the problem is simply a matter of time. During this period a rabbi (supported by his lay-team) must ensure that all of the practical details, such as timetabling and arranging officiants, are in place. He will need to rehearse relevant parts of the services, prepare news-sheets containing community information and inspirational ideas, assemble numerous special lectures and, of course, write those all-important sermons. As Yom Kippur and Sukkot approach, the number of halakhic questions that congregants ask increases, and before Yom Tov, senior rabbis will often find their counsel sought by a bevy of junior colleagues. This will have to be fitted around a rabbi’s regular teaching, as well as any pastoral, consultancy and writing commitments.

My ideal Elul would be a more private and personal one. It would consist of days scrutinising the texts of the Yamim Norayim (High-holy days) prayers, repairing relationships with those I have upset during the year, internalising the guides to self-improvement of Maimonides, Luzzato and Rav Kook, exercising more than usual, and getting some early nights. However, since it is simply impossible to completely accommodate both sets of demands, some aspects of personal development must be shelved in favour of communal responsibility.

But beyond the fact that there is insufficient time to achieve everything in the pre-Yom Tov period, there is a clash of paradigms that is seldom mentioned. It is often unclear what expectations occasional congregants have of their Yom Tov Shul visit, but it is likely that they differ considerably from those of their rabbi. Ask an Anglo-Jew, ‘Why participate in the three-times-a-year show?’ and the response will probably be, ‘it’s just something I’ve always done,’ or, ‘I’d feel guilty if I didn’t’. Ask the same question to that person’s rabbi and he will say something like, ‘it’s an unparalleled opportunity to reawaken one’s divine consciousness, repair one’s relationships with other people, and declare God sovereign over all creation.

This explains why a rabbi may conduct himself as though the first day of Rosh HaShanah (in most Anglo-Jewish Shuls, the noisiest of the year) is the ultimate moment of mystical union with God, while some of his congregants are catching up on a year’s news. This mismatch of expectations can inhabit every aspect of the Yamim Norayim experience, including the style and timing of the prayers, what constitutes appropriate conduct during services and, it must be said, the objective of the sermon. Some pulpit rabbis are fortunate to have a community of receptive, intelligent and knowledgeable people, eager to hear an inspirational Jewish message. Yet others may struggle to square the rich aspirations of their own ‘inner’ Yom Tov with the reality of their congregants’ expectations of light entertainment.

These unarticulated tensions can obviously lead to frustration, but also to something worse – a miserable rabbi who assumes that all the preparations have been pointless, even that the Yom Tov season was a failure. To avoid this, I try to focus on two things. First, despite what I have written, I endeavour to plan a sermon that will stir both me and my congregants, by concentrating on some universal aspect of the human condition, such as the challenges of faith or the importance of personal growth. Indeed, I would like to think that my most successful sermons to date were those that almost moved me to tears when I delivered them. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I try to remember that it is a sublime privilege to be the religious leader of a community. For whatever reason, God has granted me the opportunity to carry hundreds of people with me on a spiritual journey at this time of the year: this fact alone allows all of us to share the same inspiration and makes the whole enterprise indubitably worthwhile.

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

A Sense Of The Majesty Of The King (Rosh HaShanah 5768)

2007-09-12T17:14:00.000+01:00

God and God of our ancestors: rule over the entire world, all of it, in Your glory and be elevated over all the earth in You majesty. (Amidah, Rosh HaShanah)

It is well-know that the central them of the whole Rosh Hashanah prayer service is the sovereignty of God. Recognising God as ruler of all history and experience is described by the Talmud and commentators as the primary objective of the day. The shofar service may be seen in the same light as a coronation ceremony for God: sounding the trumpets to announce the arrival of the King.

The lines above introduce the final paragraph of the section of the Amidah dealing with this theme, and seem to contain a redundancy. Why the apparent repetition of ‘entire’ and ‘all‘? The commentators see in this a profound idea: the difference between quality and quantity in our perception of the Divine:

The intention of the apparently redundant repetition in ‘rule over the entire world, all of it’ actually refers to two aspects of the sovereignty of heaven: in quantity and quality. The phrase ‘rule over the whole world’ refers to quantity –the dominion of God should extend over the entire creation and be evident to all. The phrase ‘all of it, in Your glory’ refers to quality – the hope that the entire creation and every tiny part of it will be filled with the glory of God. Only that will be complete Divine rule. (Rabbi Chaim Friedlander, commentary to Amidah)

This is a neat answer to the textual problem – it is a prayer for God’s majesty to pervade everything and in every way. It seems quite theoretical, though, so the prayer continues by expressing the concept in more practical detail:

Everything created shall know that You created it, everything formed shall understand that You formed it, and everything with a breath in its mouth shall declare that the Lord God of Israel is King and His kingdom extends over everything.

The awareness of God’s sovereignty is to be translated into understanding of its consequences and eventually into a declaration of its reality. Again, Rabbi Friedlander:

It is insufficient for them to simply recognise God’s sovereignty…. Their recognition of the sovereignty of God must come to expression through the Jewish people who utilise the creation to perform His will.

This quite startling – the declaration that God is King both in quantity and quality is achieved through action. This is always the Jewish way – thought and theology are only a prelude to action: behaving in a way that expresses the concepts of Judaism. Real, meaningful religious life is to be expressed not merely by thought but by action, for only through action do we change ourselves and improve the world.

In this context, we should see the shofar (and the whole Rosh HaShanah experience) as a clarion not just to awareness, but to action. What we will be doing in the year ahead to make God’s reality more tangible? Will we be more engaged in social projects, religious development and communal activity? Will we see events in the news, especially those involving the Jewish people and Israel, as opportunities to see the Divine? If Rosh HaShanah can help us achieve these objectives even in small measure, it will have been two days well spent.

Not In Heaven (Nitzavim 5767)

2007-09-07T16:37:00.000+01:00

For this Mitzvah is not [too] wondrous for you nor is it distant. It is not in heaven that one would say: who will ascend for us towards the heaven and take it for us in order to tell it to us so that we should do it? Nor is it across the sea that one would say: who will cross for us to the other side of the sea and take it for us in order to tell it to us so that we should do it? For the matter is very close to you in your mouth and in your heart to do it. (Devarim 30:12-14)

The simple understanding of this is that the Torah, once given is in the hands of Man. One need not ascend to the heavens to retrieve it, as it has already been placed in the human domain, nor must one cross the world to find it, as it is accessible to all.

Rashi offers an unexpected interpretation, based on the Talmud:

It is not in heaven –were it in heaven, you would have to ascend after it to learn it.

How could this be so? Perhaps Rashi means that God would give us the means to extract the Torah from heaven. Fortunately, this isn’t necessary, as the Torah has already made it into the human domain. One may extend this to the conceptual realm: no miraculous or supernatural means are required or indeed allowed, to determine Torah law.

This is exemplified by the famous story of the halachic status of the ‘oven of Achnay’ (a type of collapsible portable oven):

It was taught there: they divided it into sections and put sand between each section – Rebbi Eli’ezer purified and the sages impurified. This is the oven of ‘Achnay’. What is ‘Achnay?’ Said Rav Yehudah in the name of Sh’muel: they turned impurified it. (the rabbis disagreed as to whether this oven was subject to ritual impurity).

It was taught: on that day Rebbi Eli’ezer gave all the responses in the world, but they did not accept them from him. He said to them: if the halachah is like me, let that carob tree prove it. The carob uprooted itself from its place for 100 cubits and some say 400 cubits. They said: one may not bring proof from a carob tree. He returned to them and said: if the halachah is like me, let the water spring prove it. The water spring started to flow backwards. They said to him: one may not bring proof from a water spring. He returned and said to them: if the halachah is like me, let the walls of the study hall prove it. The walls of the study hall began to cave in, as if to fall. Rebbi Yehoshua rebuked them by saying to them: while Torah scholars may try to beat each other in halachah, what have you to do with it? They didn’t fall, respecting Rebbi Yehoshua, nor did they stand upright, respecting Rebbi Eli’ezer and they are still standing, but leaning! He returned and said to them: if the halachah is like me, let it be proved from heaven. A heavenly voice emerged and said: what are you doing with Rebbi Eli’ezer, for the halachah is like him in every place! Rebbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: it is not in the heavens. What does ‘it is not in the heavens’ mean? Said Rebbi Yirmiyah: since the Torah has already been given at Mount Sinai, we don’t rely on heavenly voices, for it was already written in the Torah at Mount Sinai: incline after the majority. Rebbi Natan found Eliyahu and said to him: what is God doing just now? He said to him: he is laughing and saying – My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me! (Bava Metzia 59a-b)

The Seforno gives a completely different explanation. He assumes that the Torah tells us that we won’t need prophets to interpret the text for us, nor:

…sages who are distant to explain it for us. It is presented in a way that we can observe it even in exile…

The Torah can be understood by an ordinary person at any time in Jewish history – perhaps this is one of the miracles of Jewish survival.

Kol Isha Today

2007-08-31T18:42:00.000+01:00

The Israeli media recently reported the story of an observant singer, Eliyahu Faizkov, whose high-pitched singing vocals have been banned from some religious radio stations. Apparently, some listeners had objected, assuming that they were listening to the voice of woman.

The mere suggestion that kol ishah (the prohibition of a man listening to a woman singing) should apply in the modern era is bound to raise hackles. In a society where overt sexual behaviour is common-place, this rule seems anachronistic: laughable perhaps, certainly deeply counter-cultural and to many, disempowering and offensive to women. Yet kol ishah is widely observed in the religious world and actually reflects deep truths about male-female interactions.

The key source is the Talmudic statement by Shemuel noting that a woman’s voice is sexually exciting; this indicates that in principle a man should not listen to a woman singing. Almost all sources understand this dictum to refer only to a woman’s singing voice.

The circumstances in which this rule applies has been debated for centuries. Some suggest that Shemuel’s statement was made only with reference to a man reciting the Shema – i.e. he may not say the Shema within earshot of a woman singing. Other important sources understand that the statement is a general one: a man may not listen for pleasure to a woman singing even when he is not praying or saying the Shema, as this would be considered a forbidden form of stimulation. The Shulhan Arukh (code of Jewish law) clearly rules in favour of the second, more stringent opinion.

There is fierce discussion among later sources about men and women singing together in groups, especially around the Shabbat table. Rabbi Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg notes that the common practice was (and remains) that women refrained from singing Shabbat songs in the presence of guests who were not family members. Yet in nineteenth-century Germany women commonly participated in zemirot (table-songs), relying on the Talmudic principle that ‘two voices singing together cannot be distinguished’. This assumes that kol ishah applies only to a solo voice, although the sources do not extend the leniency beyond the Shabbat table. Rabbi Weinberg, while not entirely happy with this reasoning, allows women to sing holy songs in mixed groups, based on the additional assumption that the religious nature of the music precludes arousal. This view has been contested by a number of subsequent authorities and remains a matter of dispute. The ‘traditional’ practice is the norm in most Charedi societies, whereas the ‘German’ custom is common in Modern Orthodox circles.

Contemporary halachists debate whether the restriction of kol ishah should apply to broadcast and recorded music. Rabbi Yaakov Breisch assumes that the prohibition applies with full force in such circumstances, but Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg contends that in the case of a radio broadcast or recording, one is not actually hearing the voice, but an electronic reproduction of it. While this may seem a technicality, the qualitative distinction between live and recorded music is undeniable and since one cannot fulfil the Mitzvah of hearing the Megillah over the radio, presumably a broadcast of a woman’s voice cannot constitute kol ishah. He also connects visual and aural stimulation and rules that when the man cannot see the woman, he may listen to a radio broadcast of her voice. Rabbi Yosef agrees with this position, but asserts that the same leniency won’t apply to a television show! For obvious reasons, he also restricts it to a case where the man has no idea what the woman singing looks like.

For the modern reader, the halachic issues are insignificant in comparison with the conceptual difficulties raised by kol ishah. Are men really aroused by women’s voices? Why is there no equivalent prohibition for women, called, say kol ish? Shouldn’t these rules be dependent on societal norms? If so, hardly anyone today considers a woman’s singing voice to be erotic. (Rabbi Yosef and others assert that the fact that we are comfortable with women’s voices does not remove the prohibition of kol ishah).

The Talmud places the onus on men to avoid listening to women’s voices. It may be polite (and it certainly makes life easier) for a woman to avoid singing in the presence of a man, but the burden of obligation falls on the man to avoid situations that compromise his religious life. There is no obligation for a woman to refrain from singing and no expectation that a woman should stifle her need to sing: sometimes, a man will have to make himself scarce. As with other areas of Jewish life, great sensitivity is required to weigh competing interests – in this case, the very real need of women to express themselves through the powerful medium of song, balanced against the law of kol ishah.

Judaism offers a wise approach to understanding male-female interactions. We delude ourselves if we think that men and women are sexually stimulated in the same way: a cursory glance at contemporary advertising and media is sufficient to dispel that myth. Judaism recognises that men are more frequently aroused by visual and other sensory stimuli than women. To redress this quite natural imbalance, Jewish law imposes a number of restrictions on men beyond those also incumbent on women: one of these is kol ishah. Put simply, creating a healthy and respectful Jewish society demands recognition and regulation of various stimuli, tailored to the needs of each gender.

In a desensitised world, kol ishah seems quaint, almost absurd. Yet it enables us to understand just how delicate our level of awareness should be. It is a tragedy that most men today claim to find nothing erotic in a woman’s singing voice, something that is natural and healthy. Observing kol ishah is one way to rekindle lost sensitivities, enabling us in turn to invest more of ourselves in our special relationships.

Sources

Shemuel said: the voice of a woman is ervah (sexually exciting), as the verse says: (Song 2:14) for your voice is sweet and your appearance attractive. (Talmud Berakhot 24a)

It is prohibited (for a man) to hear the voice of one forbidden to him. (Shulhan Arukh Ever HaEzer 21:1)

Whenever the song isn’t crude and [the man] doesn’t intend to enjoy [the woman’s] voice… while it is certainly appropriate to be stringent (and avoid listening)… it isn’t a surprising view (to be lenient). (Rabbi Chaim Chizkiyahu Medini, Sedey Hemed, quoting Divrey Hefetz)

When I came to the city of Berlin, I saw men and women singing holy Shabbat songs together in the homes of the very orthodox and I was astonished, for it contradicts an explicit law…. But after some investigation, I discovered that Rabbi Ezriel Hildesheimer, and Rabbi S.R. Hirsch from Frankfurt allowed the singing of holy songs together…. (Rabbi Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg, Seridey Aish 2:8)

….Shemuel’s law is not a general proposition as to the sexually arousing character of a woman’s voice, but rather is a restriction on the recitation of Shema under circumstances where it is not possible to maintain proper concentration. (Rabbi Saul Berman, Kol Isha)

The conclusion (of Rabbi Berman)…. is fundamentally mistaken, resulting from the author’s having ignored the key discussion…. (Rabbi Yehuda Henkin, Kol Isha Reviewed)

Do not think that now that everyone is accustomed to women’s voices we are no longer concerned about erotic thoughts…. (Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, Yabia Omer 1:6)

Joke: May a religious man attend the opera? He’s not over* until the fat lady sings.

* doesn’t transgress

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

Hard Questions About Kiruv

2007-08-30T08:59:00.000+01:00

I have been involved with formal and informal outreach for more than 15 years but have only recently started to ask myself a few pointed questions, which I share, anticipating that they will be of value to others.

How do we ensure that those we help to become involved in Jewish observance stay tolerant of others who have not taken the same bold steps as they? Surely we don’t want Ba’aley Teshuvah (the newly observant) to regard their family members as sinful failures. It is likely that their childhood homes were the incubators within which they learned a sense of social justice, the pursuit of truth and the dedication to family values and were therefore indispensable to their ultimate discovery of a Torah lifestyle. Do we, as the facilitators of religious seekers’ spiritual growth constantly emphasise this, or do we see their families as opponents to be defeated?

Perhaps worse, it seems that the newly-religious sometimes maintain their relationships with non-observant friends simply to try to make them religious. It seems improbable, but is it just possible that we encourage it? Picture, if you will, Bob and Jenny, old friends of John (now Yochanan) and Sheila (now Sheindy). Bob and Jenny are unlikely to feel kindly disposed to their newly-religious friends (or indeed Judaism at all) if they discover that Yochanan and Sheindy have only remained in contact with them in the hope of making them frum.

While it is beneficial to develop a confident and firm attitude to one’s own Jewish life, will the products of outreach also remain open-minded towards those who have adopted a different style of Orthodoxy from their own? This can be very painful: I recently heard of a case where two scarcely-observant friends from a traditional community became religious and went off to Yeshivos in Israel: one to a modern-style establishment, the other to a Charedi institution. The acrimony between them over religious issues is now so ingrained that when they come home for vacation, the local rabbi struggles to contain their feuding.

To what extent do we encourage our charges to recognise that integrating key aspects of their previous existence into a newly-observant life is indispensable to mature religious development and a healthy emotional future? People who come late to Judaism are often strongly attached to certain expressions of culture such as art, music and literature, and also to sport. Might it be a little off-beam (and not such great psychology) to encourage them to relinquish these when they become observant? For a time, the excitement of their newly-found Torah life will carry them through, but afterwards, sometimes years on, an inexplicable sense of emptiness may develop. If not addressed, many of us have seen this develop into unhappiness and even doubt about the fulfilment offered by a religious life-style; in extreme (but not uncommon) cases it may lead people to re-evaluate their original decision to become observant. And, crazy at it might seem, addressing this pain may well involve advising people not to adopt new religious stringencies or say more Tehillim (psalms). It could even mean helping them to reintroduce long-abandoned cultural experiences into their lives, albeit with careful guidance. Could The Beatles, Monet or the Boston Red Sox be part of the solution, rather than the problem? Despite conventional wisdom, might it be better to help the newly-observant recognise that they can be fully-fledged members of the religious world without discarding major aspects of their previous lives.

But most importantly, do we constantly re-examine our motivations in helping others to become more observant? Do we focus on them as individuals or see each of them as an opportunity to make another ‘notch in the shtender’? Is it faintly possible that some outreach is conducted with the objective of turning people into a pre-determined product which merely mirrors the kiruv-professional’s own life-style and affiliation? Many people are critical of a certain Chassidic group, whose objective appears to produce new members of the sect, but might some parts of the kiruv world be doing the same thing? Are religious neophytes just potential new members of our group, to be steered into a particular life-style and social-setting? Might, we perhaps without even realising it, envisage the newly-interested couple a few years into their religious journey living in a certain neighbourhood in a certain type of home, their children attending a certain type of school, with certain rabbis advising them, with certain aspirations: he learning in a certain type of institution, wearing a certain type of hat, she pushing a certain type of baby-stroller while wearing a certain type of hair-covering?

To be fair to the incredible outreach professionals who dedicate their lives to sharing the beauty of Judaism with others, many potential Ba’aley Teshuvah are drawn to monolithic parts of the religious world without much encouragement. They may consider what is on offer there ‘more authentic’ with the perceived benefits including rigidity of lifestyle and the comfort of not having to make one’s own decisions. Yet, if we actually encourage that outlook by role-modelling the religious world in that way, we may risk a potential tidal-wave of disaffection and disillusionment ahead of us.

There are, of course, many possible causes of religious disenchantment, including those completely beyond the control of the outreach professionals who engaged the Ba’aley Teshuvah in the first place. These may include pre-existing emotional instability, the unexpected pressures of living in religious society, the disappointing discovery that the Orthodox world isn’t actually perfect, and even a sense of personal failure in comparison with one’s perceived religious responsibilities. Each of these deserves a separate treatment, but we will focus here on religious disillusionment stemming from the outreach process itself.

I hope that it’s not too controversial to suggest that the objectives of outreach are to help each Jew reach his or her full potential as a human being, ultimately through Mitzvah observance and Torah study. Presumably we should get to know those who seek our guidance: learn to love them as individuals; discover their interests, strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs. Developing a sense that the religious needs of each person we meet differ considerably from those of every other can be difficult, but might we be doing those with whom we work a disservice by adopting any other approach? The Sages teach:

When a man mints many coins with one stamp, they all look the same, but while the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed is He, minted each person with the ‘stamp’ of Adam the First, no one looks like any other. (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)

If God created us as individuals, it should be the role of those privileged to help His children along their journey towards Him to foster that individuality. Shouldn’t we try to craft a tailor-made religious path for each of our students? Despite the complexities of doing this, it might just enable them to benefit from the wonders of Torah life without stifling their personality or crushing their need for self-expression.

Is it just possible that the multi-chromatic vision of the Jewish world isn’t the common one in the kiruv scene because some of those in charge don’t subscribe to it? Some of us may have come to believe that there is a single optimum way to be a Torah Jew: one ‘correct’ approach to all Jewish issues, one best way of observing halakhah (Jewish law), one ideal mode of living and one supreme authority for Jewish life. May I suggest, perhaps contrary to prevailing norms, that a kiruv operative would see it as a sacred duty to learn about (and hence validate) the range of Jewish possibilities and to incorporate that into his or her kiruv practice. After all, the magnificent system of thought and practice called Judaism really does have a multiplicity of expressions. Finally, might an outreach professional who thinks that it is his or her mission to turn an eclectic group of non-observant Jews into a bunch of religious clones be in the wrong job?

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents

From Beneath My Desk (Tisha B'Av 5767)

2007-07-23T05:45:00.000+01:00

Certain key occasions in the Jewish calendar invoke strong memories of my seven years in Gateshead Yeshivah. One of my teachers assured me that by spending Yamim Tovim and other special moments in the Yeshivah, I would have a store of powerful experiences on which to draw in later years: I am truly grateful for that advice. I constantly try to recreate those powerful moments in my community, something from which I know my congregants have benefited, perhaps without realising. And even when that isn’t possible, I can retreat into the realm of inspirational memory and lift almost any occasion for myself and my family.

Tisha B’Av is one such day: each year, from Rosh Chodesh Av, two memories are especially vivid, each associated with Kinnot (dirges read on Tisha B’Av lamenting the destruction of the Temples and other Jewish calamities). The Kinnot are perhaps the most demanding texts of our entire liturgy: many of them are written in difficult Hebrew, and are replete with obscure scholarly references that require considerable Talmudic and Midrashic background to appreciate fully. Indeed, rather than plough through all of them, many Shuls (including my own) elect to read only a selection of the Kinnos, accompanied by explanation and elucidation (a job that the ArtScroll edition of the Kinnot has made much easier). The Kinnot are potent, elegant, yet very challenging.

My first recollection is of sitting on the floor as a sign of mourning beneath the desk at which I normally davened (prayed) in Gateshead Yeshivah at about 11am on Tisha B’Av. The Kinnot were well underway, and I admit that I was struggling to maintain my interest in the reading. By this time the sun had risen sufficiently to shine in my eyes through the very large front-windows of the Yeshivah. Remarkably, this coincided with the recital of the famous Kinnah, ‘Tsion’, by Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi (author of the Kuzari), a few translated excerpts of which follow. For a full text, see here.

Zion, will you not enquire about the welfare of your captives? Those who seek your welfare – they are the remnants of your flock….

You are the royal house; you are the throne of the glory of God, so how could slaves have sat upon the thrones of your nobles?

I yearn to be given the chance to wander in the places where God appeared to your visionaries and emissaries….

This lament, apart from being outstandingly beautiful, marks a radical change in the tone of the Kinnot: up until this point they are about destruction, misery and exile, but beginning with ‘Tsion’, they express hope and yearning for a better world. It is hard to describe the impact that the concurrence of the sun shining and the majestic poetry of Yehudah HaLevi had on me. It created a sense of optimism, divine love and context to the hopeless gloom of Tisha B’Av that has stayed with me: I hope that I have managed to convey something of that feeling in words.

The second memorable moment arrived at the very end of the Kinnot, with the reading of ‘Eli Tsion’, a poem detailing all the tragedies of the Temple for which we should weep. It offers a glimmer of hope, in that it compares the tribulations of our history with the pains of child-birth: the torment is not futile, but heralds the rebirth of Am Yisrael: some excerpts follow. For a full text, see here.

Wail, Tsion and her cities, like a woman in child-birth; and like a damsel girded in sackcloth (crying) for the husband of her youth….

(Wail) for Your name, which was desecrated in the speech of those who arose to torture her; and the supplications of those who scream out to You: turn Your ear and listen to her words.

Although the text is powerful and, at least for me, summarises the themes of the entire corpus of the Kinnot, the most well-known aspect of ‘Eli Tsion’ is its tune. This poignant melody somehow synthesises the calamity of Jewish history with our unshakeable confidence in a magnificent future. Regrettably, it has been turned by some into a kind of pop song, sung at an inappropriate tempo, robbing it of its depth and power. During my years in Gateshead, ‘Eli Tsion’ was led by Rabbi Zeev Cohen, who sung it movingly in a high-pitched and haunting fashion, in the Lithuanian style: in one short rendition, he had captured the essence of Tisha B’Av. For a similar (albeit lower-pitched and slightly faster) version of ‘Eli Tsion’, listen to this, a recording of the late Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik, zt”l leading a responsive reading of the Kinnah in Boston in 1978. I cannot lead the poem as beautifully as Rabbi Cohen, but his interpretation has inspired my own reading.

Most importantly for me (and I hope for my congregants and students too), the memories of Tisha B’Av in Gateshead Yeshivah encapsulate the very spirit of the day: redemptive mourning.

May this, truly, be the last Tisha B’Av.

This article first appeared on Cross-Currents