Jewish Current Issues

D'Var Torah, April 14, 2008, Sinai Temple

    A few weeks ago, Jason Kahan asked me if I would give a brief D’var Torah, and I said “Of course, I’d be honored.” Then I looked at what I thought was today’s portion, and it was all about leprosy, skin diseases and menstrual purity. And I thought, “This is going to be the briefest D’var Torah in the history of the Men’s Club.”

     But I discovered that it is actually next week’s Torah portion, and today’s portion is Shemini, which is one of the richest in the Torah. It includes Moses’s instructions about sacrifice and ritual; the harrowing story of Aaron’s sons, who offered “alien fire” to the Lord and were immediately struck dead; Aaron’s heartbreaking silence about it; the Lord’s words to Aaron afterwards; and then the extensive laws of Kashrut -- what we can and cannot eat.

    So I could keep us here for quite a while.

    But by mistakenly reading next week’s haftarah, I came across a story I think provides an insight into the laws of Kashrut, and it will let me keep this D’var Torah pretty brief.

    The laws of Kashrut seem both inexplicable and ineffective. We can eat chickens and turkeys, but not eagles and pelicans. We can eat cows, but not pigs. We can eat seafood, but only if they have fins and scales. We can’t ever mix milk and meat. What is the rationale of these rules? What good do they do?

    To understand Kashrut, it may help to consider not the rules, but rather the ritual. Perhaps what the ritual of Kashrut does is continually remind us that we can make each meal holy. That we are more than what we eat. That we cannot always get what we want, but we can get what we need. These are lessons that can enrich our lives.

    In next week’s haftarah, there is a story about an Aramean army commander, who had leprosy. He’s advised to go see the prophets of Israel, who it is said can cure him. So he sets out on his journey, with 6,000 gold shekels and 10 changes of clothes, and gives the money to the King of Israel, who refers him to the prophet Elisha.

    Elisha tells him, “bathe seven times in the Jordan River, and your flesh will be restored.” And this enrages the commander, who says, “I thought he would invoke the name of his God and wave his hand and cure me. I could have stayed home and bathed in the rivers of Damascus.” You can almost hear him saying, “For this, I paid 6,000 shekels?!”

    The haftarah recounts that his servants calm him down by saying, “Sir, if the prophet told you to do something difficult, would you not do it? How much more when he has only said to you, ‘Bathe and be pure’.” So, the commander immerses himself in the Jordan, seven times, and the haftarah says he was cured.

    Like the advice the Aramean commander got from Elisha, the rules of Kashrut are not difficult. They are a symbolic way of making ourselves pure. They remind us that we must be holy because the Lord is holy. They can help cure us of the disease of taking things for granted.

    And they reflect not simply the advice of a prophet, but the wisdom of the Lord, and they are given to us for free -- and are worth far more than 6,000 shekels,  because they can help us, if we respect the ritual, to lead a richer life. Shabbat Shalom.

-- Rick Richman

"David Ben-Gurion's 1940 Mission to Rouse the Fighting Spirit of American Jews"

MOSAIC MAGAZINE has published an excerpt from my book, Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler, which will be published by Encounter Books on January 30, 2018:

In 1940, as millions of Jews came under Nazi control in the countries conquered by Hitler, and as the route to safety in Palestine remained closed by the British Mandatory power, three of Zionism’s greatest leaders traveled to America. They came at different times, on separate missions, but all three—Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, and David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader who headed the Jewish Agency in Palestine—shared a single goal: to win support in America for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis alongside the British.

This article focuses on Ben-Gurion, the last to come. Writing to his wife Paula before leaving London for the United States, he said he wanted “to see with my own eyes what we can expect from America in wartime.” In particular, he wrote, “I want to know the extent of the contribution America’s Jews are prepared to make for the life of their own people.”

Ben-Gurion would remain in America for four months, on a visit that—like those of his two predecessors—would reveal a great deal not only about American Jews but also about their Zionist visitors. The following brief account draws on Ben-Gurion’s diary, translated into English for the first time, as well as on letters and other contemporaneous documents, most of them previously unpublished.  [CONTINUE READING HERE].

Racing Against History hit No. 6 on the Amazon list of best sellers in New Releases on Jewish History yesterday, prior to its actual publication. 

A Monumental New Volume on Hasidism

 

From Princeton University Press, Hasidism: A New History, written by an international team of scholars, including David Biale UC Davis), David Assaf (Tel Aviv University), Benjamin Brown (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Uriel Gellman (Bar-Ilan University), Samuel Heilman (Queens College), Moshe Rosman (Bar-Ilan University), Gadi Sagiv (Open Univeristy of Israel, and Marcin Wodzinski (University of Wroclaw), with an Afterword by Arthur Green. Here is the publisher's description of the book:

This is the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism. The book’s unique blend of intellectual, religious, and social history offers perspectives on the movement’s leaders as well as its followers, and demonstrates that, far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, Hasidism is a product of modernity that forged its identity as a radical alternative to the secular world.

Hasidism originated in southeastern Poland, in mystical circles centered on the figure of Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, but it was only after his death in 1760 that a movement began to spread. Challenging the notion that Hasidism ceased to be a creative movement after the eighteenth century, this book argues that its first golden age was in the nineteenth century, when it conquered new territory, won a mass following, and became a mainstay of Jewish Orthodoxy. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust decimated eastern European Hasidism. But following World War II, the movement enjoyed a second golden age, growing exponentially. Today, it is witnessing a remarkable renaissance in Israel, the United States, and other countries around the world.

 

The Tikvah Fund Maimonides Scholar Program for High School Students at Yale This Summer

The Tikvah Fund has posted a video for its 2018 High School Institute at Yale this coming summer.

It is one of the finest Jewish educational experiences available to high school students. The application deadline is February 16, 2018.

The program is for current high school juniors (rising seniors) "from diverse Jewish backgrounds who wish to push their intellectual limits and deepen their understanding of what it means to be both an American and a Jew in the modern world." 

Accepted students will study with some of the nation's preeminent professors, authors, theologians, and civic leaders in intensive seminars and workshops.

 

A New Book on Jabotinsky's Legacy

IN THE MAIL from Princeton University Press -- Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism:

The author is Daniel Kupfert Heller, assistant professor of Jewish studies at McGill University.

Here is a paragraph from the Introduction:

Vladimir Jabotinsky, was described by his supporters and opponents alike as one of the Zionist movement’s most spellbinding orators, brilliant writers, magnetic personalities, and provocative activists. … [H]is Odessan Russian and Germanic Yiddish lent him an almost foreign, aristocratic aura in the eyes of the eastern European Jewish audiences to whom he frequently lectured. His early life looked vastly different from the childhood of other Zionist activists from the Russian Empire, most of whom came from provincial towns and Yiddish-speaking, religiously observant homes. Born in 1880 and raised in the cosmopolitan port city of Odessa, the young Jabotinsky was immersed in Russian language and culture and well read in numerous European languages. Graduating from one of the city’s finest gymnasia, he spent several months at a Swiss university, followed by three years as a student in Italy, where he simultaneously worked as a correspondent for a Russian-language newspaper back in Odessa. Although his early work as a poet, playwright, journalist, and political activist had brought him some recognition in the Zionist movement, he gained fame during the First World War for creating the Jewish Legion, which under his leadership participated in the British Army’s conquest of Ottoman Palestine. He also achieved popularity among Zionists for his role in organizing the Haganah Jewish defense network during the Jerusalem riots of 1920. Soon after, Jabotinsky broke with the mainstream Zionist movement and called for a more aggressive approach to dealing with Mandate Palestine’s British colonial administration and Palestinian Arab population. His Union of Revisionist Zionists, founded in 1925, would go on to become one of the most popular Zionist organizations in the interwar period.

Dermer at the Second Annual LGBT Pride Reception

This week, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer held the second annual Pride reception at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., welcoming guests to what he said “can now definitely be called our annual Pride event.”

The guests included the Congressional LGBT caucus and the Wider Bridges, an organization that seeks to strengthen ties between the LGBT communities in North America and Israel.

In his speech, Dermer said:

For 40 years, LGBT organizations have been operating openly in Israel.

For 20 years, Tel Aviv has hosted one of the largest pride parades in the world.

In Israel, there are laws dating back a quarter-century that prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and there are courts that protect the legal rights and privileges of same sex couples.

Members of Israel’s LGBT community … have long served openly in our armed services and have been leaders in politics and diplomacy, science and technology, art and entertainment and every other sphere of Israeli life.

Dermer said that in thinking about the horrific attack on the LGBT community in Orlando last year, and the discrimination and violence that community still faces, “it occurred to me that it is not Jews alone who serve as the proverbial canary in the coal mine”:

Just as the noxious fumes of antisemitism ultimately poison all of society, so too hatred towards the LGBT community threatens all of us.

That is why we must stand together to fight that hatred and to defend open societies, tolerance, and equality and dignity for all.

Today, I believe that this solidarity is more important than ever – for both of us.

For if the forces of progressive values do not stand together and strengthen one another, they will only become weaker and more endangered.

And make no mistake about it. Israel is a force for progressive values in the Middle East. In fact, Israel is the only force for progressive values in the Middle East.

You see those values in Israel’s courts when our Chief Justice dons her robes and you see it when an Arab judge sentences a former Israeli President to prison.

You see it in Israel’s Parliament ever day when over a dozen Arab members of the Knesset are free both to criticize the government from the Knesset podium and to pray in the Knesset Mosque.

And you see it in Israel’s society when a Muslim can proudly give her valedictorian address at one of Israel’s finest university and when a pride parade marches 200,000 strong.

Dermer remarked on how absurd is the progressive case against Israel:

After all, we live in a region where women are routinely treated like chattel, where gays are hanged in town squares and where communities of Copts, Yazidis and other minorities are being decimated.

Now imagine a Middle East with three Israels. Imagine what that would do for the rights and values that progressives are supposed to champion.

Imagine a Middle East where it is as easy for the LGBT community to march in Tehran as it is in Tel Aviv.

Rest assured, Israel will continue to stand with you.

Not once a year. Not only after a horrific attack.

But each and every day, Israel will stand with you.

Israel will stand with you to warn the world about those noxious fumes that threaten both of us.And Israel will stand with you against those who seek a world in which there is no place for either of us.

We will stand with you for our sake, for your sake and for humanity’s sake.

Read it all.

Ambassador Ron Dermer's Yeshiva Commencement Address

From Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer's Commencement Address to Yeshiva University this week (the video is here):

In so many ways, you are the most blessed generation of Jews in over 2,000 years. I know that’s hard to accept because we Jews tend to see the glass as 1/16th empty. But it is true. 

You are blessed to live in a country like the United States. … The blessing of America for the Jews can be summed up in less than a word, less than a sentence, less than a letter. It’s a hyphen. The hyphen between Jewish and American. The hyphen that allows you to be both fully American and true to your faith. … But your generation is doubly blessed. For you live at a time when you are a witness to the miracle called Israel. Jewish sovereignty has been restored. Exiles have returned. Jerusalem has been reunited, never to be divided again. Collectively, Israel has provided the Jewish people with a voice, with a refuge and most importantly, with the power to defend themselves.

 

Individually, Israel has made things possible that would have been unimaginable to your ancestors. If you want to pray at the Kotel, you only need to board a plane. If you want to spend a year studying in Israel, you only need to convince your parents to foot the bill. ...

 

… [I]n the years ahead, always remember that your grandparents and their grandparents going back over 20 centuries would have given anything to trade their problems with yours. 100 generations of Jews dreamed of living at a time when there would be a sovereign Jewish state. You have the privilege of living that dream.

 

But with that privilege comes an awesome responsibility to secure that dream for generations to come. And that responsibility falls on each and every one of you. Because I am not the only Ambassador here today. You are all Ambassadors. For the rest of your lives, you will be Ambassadors of Yeshiva University and the values it stands for -- the values of the Jewish people.

 

 

Read or watch it all. Shabbat Shalom.

 

Podhoretz and Podhoretz on "Making It"

Last month, New York Review Books issued a 50^th anniversary edition of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, a book Lee Smith has called a “masterpiece of American autobiography” that changed what it meant to be a public intellectual. “Nearly 50 years on,” Smith wrote, "it’s clear that, to paraphrase Dostoevsky on Gogol, we all come out from Podhoretz’s overcoat.”

The Tikvah Institute has described the book as “an intellectual earthquake.” It is by turns eloquent, perceptive, funny, and extraordinarily honest and well-written. And it is clear -- from the conversation that Norman Podhoretz had with his son John Podhoretz last month at Tikvah -- that its aftershocks continue. Fifty years after being written, it is still a book for our time.

This weekend, C-SPAN’s Book TV broadcast the conversation, with Eric Cohen, the Executive Director of the Tikvah Fund giving the program a brilliant introduction. It is worth watching in its entirety.

Terry Teachout’s Introduction to the re-issued book, and an excerpt from the first chapter, is here.

(Norman Podhoretz, right, in 1966 with Commentary editors Theodore Solataroff and Marion Magid)

Photo credit: New York Times, Gert Berliner

Ezekiel's Valley of the Dry Bones

This was the drash at Sinai Temple at the Men's Club Shabbat on April 15, 2017, on Ezekiel 37:1-14:

The haftarah this morning is one of the most well-known passages in all of our sacred literature: Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones.

Ezekiel recounts a vision in which the Lord put him in a valley full of dry bones, and tells him to “say to these bones … [that God] will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live again.” Ezekiel did that, and the bones reconstituted themselves and came to life, representing the House of Israel restored, with the Lord promising to bring them back to the land of Israel.

Ezekiel’s prophecy echoes throughout the history of the Jewish people. It was written in the sixth century BCE, during the Babylonian Exile, after the destruction of the First Temple. The Jews eventually returned to Jerusalem, and rebuilt the Temple -- which 500 years later the Romans destroyed – and in the twentieth century, the Jews reconstituted Israel yet again. Today God’s words -- the final verse of today’s haftarah -- are engraved on the columns outside the Yad Vashem Museum: “I will put My breath into you, and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own land.”  

Ezekiel also echoes in the Amidah, the prayer in which we praise God for sustaining the living, through kindness and love, and for giving life to the dead. There is a connection, I think, between those two concepts: We know that our acts of kindness and love live on after us; that they not only sustain others but redeem ourselves; and in that way allows us to live beyond our own mortality.

Which brings me to the Burning Bush dinner held earlier this month by the Men’s Club – whose motto is “Where Jewish Values Come to Life.” Under the leadership of our extraordinary president, Mark Haloossim, it was the most successful dinner in the Club’s 50-year history, with fire trucks donated by Mrs. Orden and Mrs. Nasche to save lives in Israel, and the proceeds of the dinner devoted to fund a new Millennial Project championed by our honorees, Tom and Judy Flesh. It is a program that seeks to pass on to the younger generation the gifts we received from the generations that preceded us, and thus make them immortal.

It is the effort by the Men’s Club to do our part, to do what we can, to further the spirit of Ezekiel, whose words we will now all read together.

                                                                                                                                                                            -- Rick Richman

New Biography of Yitzhak Rabin

Itamar Rabinovich's biography, Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman, is being published today by Yale University Press, the latest offering in its prestigious "Jewish Lives" series.

The publisher describes the book as a "revealing account of [Rabin's] life, character, and contributions [that] draws not only on original research but also on the author's recollections as one of Rabin's closest aides."

One of the interesting facts in the book is Rabinovich's account of the trouble Rabin got into during his service as Israel's ambassador to the United States, when he took a public position in support of President Nixon's re-election against Senator George McGovern.

Rabinovich writes that Rabin "saw Nixon as a genuine friend of Israel, felt beholden to him, and was concerned with McGovern's liberalism." He quotes Rabin's June 1972 interview on Israeli radio: "While we appreciate the support in the form of words we are getting from one camp, we must prefer support in the form of deeds we are getting from the other camp." Rabin's remark produced a strongly adverse reaction in both the U.S. and Israel, with the Washington Post criticizing him in an editorial titled "Israel's Undiplomatic Diplomat."

Rabinovich's book makes it clear he believes that Rabin was one of Israel's most effective ambassadors, developing a close personal relationship with both Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, at a very critical time. 

Today, just outside the Washington office of Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, there is a large picture of a young-looking Rabin, walking at the White House with Nixon. Among a long line of influential Israeli ambassadors, including the first one, Abba Eban, Rabin was one of the most important, before going on to become prime minister. Rabinovich's book is a useful portrait that goes beyond the well-known facts of Rabin's later career to provide context, including some that may be useful in considering the issue of Israel in current American politics.