Category Archives: issues of morality or ethics

Seeing Privilege As A Pain

Sometimes a first-person account is just so sad you could cry. And when the writer seems oblivious to the sadness, well, then it’s sadder still

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently offered a piece written by a Jewish woman explaining her and her husband’s decision to forgo having children.

“As a Conservative Jew raised in the Midwest,” she writes, “I always assumed I’d have kids… In my mind, being a grown-up meant having children.”

During her college days, she stopped in at the Brown University Hillel House and met a young man. Eventually they began to date.

When marriage came up, they discussed how “religiously” to raise their children, and found that they had different opinions. Her partner wanted to observe the Sabbath but she did not. And, if they each did his or her own thing she feared the “inevitable” questions their children would have about their mother’s level of observance.

Then, she writes, “It occurred to me that our potential problems would vanish if we just skipped parenthood.” Problem – at least if she could get her boyfriend on board – solved.

As it happened, after the young man became her husband, he began “losing his religion.” They were busy with their careers and, she writes, “reproducing was the farthest thing from my mind.” Then she found websites of people who had decided not to have children, and shared them with her husband. They laughed together “at jokes about sleep-deprived parents and children misbehaving in public.

So other people, too, they realized, “lacked the drive to make and raise babies, and were they ever happy,” the woman recounts. “They described enticing benefits, one of which particularly stood out for me: having their beloved to themselves and cultivating a devoted, satisfying relationship.”

And so she and her husband decided that “life would be better without kids.”

The couple’s mothers were not happy, as one might expect. His was the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and had told her son in his youth that “If you don’t raise Jewish children, you’re letting Hitler win.”

“There is no coming back from aiding Hitler,” observes the writer, and “so we all avoid the topic.”

But, she insists, she and her husband are happy. They have each other entirely to themselves, without any pesky little people intruding on their relationship. And they owe it all to Judaism, the writer explains, without which she and her husband would never have met at that Hillel House.

“Ironically,” she concludes, “If it weren’t for Judaism… it may never have occurred to me not to have children at all.”

The writer knows, of course, and acknowledges, that Judaism favors children; indeed, she may even know, there is a Torah commandment to be fruitful. But she and her partner have made a conscious decision to reject their religious heritage.

What’s more, the husband and wife are depriving themselves not only of an important mitzvah, and not only of the life beyond death that is a son or daughter, but of the sublime joy of being parents. Sleepless nights and misbehaved children? Some of the most difficult or embarrassing parental situations, any parent could tell the writer, morph with time into some of the most meaningful, even wonderful, memories imaginable.

Is it hard? Of course. What worthwhile endeavor isn’t?

Do parents experience trying times? Yes. Life is trying; that’s its point.

Will it all have been worth it, in fact many millions of times over? Yes again.

And if the writer and her husband really think that their relationship to each other would suffer, rather than be strengthened, by their sharing the privilege of forging a new generation, they are astoundingly naïve. The greatest boon for any relationship is not a shared taste in music, nor a shared desire for childlessness; it is a shared challenging but meaningful endeavor. And when the endeavor is something as momentous as creating and guiding new lives, the bond that can result is most powerful.

Time will tell whether the writer’s and her husband’s bond of mutual desire for childlessness will itself prove sufficiently strong to maintain their relationship. But one thing is certain. The couple’s assumption that the mutual nurturing of a new generation is a mere pain rather than an unparalleled privilege is a sad mistake.

Made all the more sad by the couple’s utter unawareness of the fact.

(For a decade-old essay about the Jewish choice to have children, please see here.

The Import of Empathy

The other day, waiting to board a bus, I was moved to think about empathy.

Unfortunately, the prod came in the form of the opposite, crass selfishness. A young woman approached the group of us waiting to step up into the vehicle and insinuated herself at the front of the long line. She had no visible physical impairment, made no request for anyone’s permission, offered not even a perfunctory “excuse me.” She seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that other people occupied the universe at the time, some even in her immediate vicinity.

I could read the minds of my fellow future passengers. Their faces telegraphed my own mental reaction: Who does she think she is? How would she like it if someone cut before her in a line? Yes, she would probably reply in puzzlement. “But that’s not what’s happening. I am the one cutting in here, not someone else cutting in before me.” The lady, in other words, was empathy-impaired.

“My sins I recount today,” as the waiter, just released from prison, told Pharaoh. I recall myself as a small boy armed with a magnifying glass on a sunny day, incinerating individual ants out of sheer curiosity. I even remember watching without pain or protest as my buddy devised creative ways of dispatching grasshoppers, ever-present victims of little boys in early-60s Baltimore summers. Some claim that killing insects as a child presages the eventual emergence of a serial killer. So far, though, thank G-d, I haven’t much felt the urge to commit murder; and when I have, I have managed to overcome it.

Today, in fact, when an insect finds its way into my home, I always try to capture the invader and escort him or her safely to the great outdoors. (All right, mosquitos are an exception, but they are the aggressors.)

After all, I wonder, how would I like it if I were a stinkbug and someone chose to squash me or spray me with poison or flush me down the toilet? Empathy, again.

Being concerned with the wellbeing of an insect, or for that matter a dog or cat or cow, is but one rung on the empathy ladder. The Torah teaches us that animals, in the end, although they may not be needlessly hurt, exist for human servitude and food, things we would surely not wish for ourselves. Our ultimate and most powerful concern for “the other” is meant to be for other human beings.

What occurred to me at the bus stop was that, while some may gauge human spiritual growth by religious meticulousness or proficiency in texts or the ability to deeply meditate, the most essential marker of spiritual progress may well be how far one has progressed from the selfishness that defines us at birth toward true, encompassing empathy. (I have far to go; caring about bugs is easier than truly caring about people, especially some people. But most of us have, over our years of living, grown, to various degrees, to appreciate empathy.) The severely empathy-impaired, like the girl on the bus line, are essentially children, perhaps infants.

It is the import of empathy, of course, that imbues Rabbi Akiva’s statement (in the Midrash, quoted by Rashi) that the verse, “Love your fellow as yourself” (Vayikra, 19:18) is a “great principle of the Torah.” And Hillel’s famous response to the potential convert who insisted on learning the entire Torah on one foot: “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and study it” (Shabbos, 31a).

Jews the world over are reading and studying these days about Avrohom, the subject of the weekly Torah readings. It is not insignificant that the first of our forefathers is characterized by our tradition not only as the champion of monotheism – the quintessential Jewish idea – but as the paragon of chesed, or “kindness to others.” His rejection of idolatry, even to the point of risking his life, is of a part with his pining for strangers to welcome and feed even when in great pain from his adult circumcision.

Which points to a deeper truth, one that might be germane to the akeida, Avrohom’s “binding” of Yitzchok his son: Although some choose to see human empathy as a simple evolutionary adaptation that helps protect the species, a believing Jew’s dedication to the other is ultimately expressed in the context of his dedication to the Other, that is to say to G-d. We are born utterly selfish; we are meant to strive toward utter selflessness, to care about and for our fellows, and to be, in the end, selflessly dedicated servants of the Divine.

Compartment Syndrome

It’s easy for many of us Orthodox Jews to look down our noses on our fellow members of the tribe who express their Jewishness only on the “High Holidays” and yahrtzeits, to consider them to have missed the point of the Jewish mission. Judaism can’t, after all, be “compartmentalized.” It’s an all-encompassing way of life.

There are, though, even Orthodox Jews, living what seem to be observant Orthodox lives, doing, at least superficially, all the things expected of a religious Jew – eating only foods graced with the best hechsherim and wearing the de rigeuer head-covering of his or her community – who also seem to religiously compartmentalize, who seem to leave G-d behind in shul (if they even think of Him), who seem to not realize that the Creator is as manifest on a Tuesday in July as He is on Yom Kippur.

Which explains how it is that an Orthodox Jew can engage in unethical business practices or abuse a child or a spouse. Or, more mundanely but no less significantly, how one can cut others off in traffic, act rudely, or blog maliciously. Or, for that matter, how he can address his Maker in prayer with words so garbled and hurried that, were he speaking to another mortal, the soliloquy would elicit no end of mirth.

It’s not necessarily the case that such Jews don’t acknowledge Hashem. It’s just that they don’t give Him much thought – even, ironically, while going through the myriad motions of daily Jewish lives. In the most extreme cases, the trappings of observance are essentially all that there is, without any consciousness of why religious rituals are important. What’s left then is mere mimicry, paraphernalia in place of principle.

What’s wrenching to ponder is that even those of us who think of our Jewish consciousnesses as healthy and vibrant are also prone to compartmentalize our Judaism. Do all of us, after all, maintain the G-d-consciousness we (hopefully) attain in shul at all times, wherever we may be? Do we always think of what it is we’re saying when we make a bracha (or even take care to pronounce every word distinctly)? Do we stop to weigh our every daily action and interaction on the scales of Jewish propriety? Or do our observances sometimes fade into rote?

Most of us must sadly concede that when it comes to compartmentalizing our lives there really isn’t any “us” and “them.” All of us live on a continuum here, some more keenly and constantly aware of the ever-present reality of the Divine, some less so. Obviously, those who do think of Hashem and His will when engaged in business or navigating a traffic jam are more religiously progressed than those who don’t. But still.

Rosh Hashana presents all of us a special opportunity to hone our Creator-awareness. The Jewish new year, the start of the Ten Days of Repentance, is suffused with the concept of Kingship (malchiyus). The shofar, we are taught, is a coronation call, and malchiyus is prominent in the days’ prayers. We might well wonder: What has Kingship to do with repentance?

The answer is clear. A king rules over his entire kingdom; there is little escaping even a mortal monarch’s reach, and no subject dares take any action without royal approval. All the more so, infinite times over, in the case not of a king but a King.

And so, we might consider that kingship (or, at least, Kingship) and compartmentalization are diametric, incompatible ideas. If Hashem rules over all, then there are no places and no times when He can be absent from our minds.

Rosh Hashana is our yearly opportunity to ponder and internalize that thought, and to try to bring our lives more in line with it.

Musing: Waters of Unlife

A lengthy piece at the online magazine Tablet describes “new Jewish rituals” that “offer comfort to women who have had abortions.” It begins with the story of a woman who, as a young graduate student, terminated two of her pregnancies and years later came to realize that a “spiritual, ritual way” of “marking the decision” to end the lives of her unborn children “would have helped in resolving” uncomfortable feelings she had experienced.

The woman discovered a group, Mayyim Hayyim, that utilizes a mikveh for that express purpose. A liturgical rite, written by three women – a poet, a psychologist and a rabbi – asks the Creator for help “to begin healing from this difficult decision to interrupt the promise of life.”

According to Mayyim Hayyim’s executive director, Carrie Bornstein, “Oftentimes it’s helpful for people to say, ‘I’m going to move to the next stage of my life, whatever that might bring, and I’m not going to let that experience define me or take me over.’ ”

Another “post-abortion ritual” was devised by a graduate student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. Yet another is in a book edited by four female Reform rabbis.

Actually, there already is a longstanding ritual for non-required abortions. It’s called teshuva.

Motivators

The recent “news” story about a bar mitzvah boy in Dallas who celebrated the milestone of obligation to observe the Torah’s laws by entertaining family and guests by dancing on a stage with a bevy of Las Vegas-style showgirls reminded me of an article several years ago in The New York Times about such crass missing of the Jewish point.

It introduced something that has become de rigueur in some bar and bat mitzvah circles, something called “motivators.”

While perhaps not on the level of the Dallas debauchery, what the article described was sad enough. It highlighted the profession of a young non-Jewish gentleman from the Virgin Islands clad in a form-fitting black outfit, who “regularly spends his weekends dancing with 13-year-olds… at bar mitzvahs,” according to the report. His is a “lucrative and competitive” profession – he is a “party motivator.”

Such folks are paid to attend bar mitzvahs and other events to make sure “that young guests are swept up in dancing and games,” according to the article. The Caribbean crooner was described as smiling ecstatically at one bar mitzvah “as he danced to Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez songs with middle school students” and with their parents.

“Whether you can have a successful bar mitzvah without at least a handful of motivators,” the article asserts, presumably in the name of parents who employ such services, “is debatable.”

One female “motivator,” at a bar mitzvah, “in a black tank top,” was observed at the “children’s cocktail hour” enthralling the 13-year-old boys in attendance. “She just talks about, like, sex and girlfriends,” explained one of the young men, clearly motivated.

Some of the parents are similarly adolescent. While sometimes, the report notes, “they request that their motivators dress modestly… sometimes they request the opposite.”

“Dads especially,” often indicate their preference for provocative women “motivators,” according to the owner of one entertainment agency. Then he heads, he says, unconsciously alighting on an apt metaphor, “to our stable of people” to find the right one for the job.

Were it all a Purim skit, it would be, if in poor taste, perhaps funny. As reality, though, not even the word “tragic” does it justice.

How horribly far the concept of “bar mitzvah” has drifted from its true meaning in these materialistic, vulgar times.

A mitzvah, of course is a commandment, one with its source in the ultimate Commander. And the “bar” refers not to what a bartender tends but rather to the responsibility of the new Jewish young adult to shoulder the duties and obligations of a Jew – the study and observance of the Torah.

And so, a truly successful bar mitzvah is one where the young person has come to recognize that responsibility. Dancers, decadence and the lowest common denominators of American pop culture are hardly fitting “motivators” for such.

The issue is not denominational. There are excesses to be found in celebrations of Orthodox Jews as there are in those of Jews of other affiliations. While the “motivators” phenomenon might represent a particular nadir of Jewish insensitivity, none of us is immune to the disease of skewed priorities, the confusing of essence with embellishment, the allowing of the true meaning of a life-milestone to become obscured by the trappings of its celebration.

In fact, following the directive, a group of highly respected rabbis in the American charedi, or traditionally Orthodox, community, have toned down wedding celebrations (where party motivators are unneeded to get people dancing but where excesses of food and trimmings are, unfortunately, not unheard of). And many of us have taken the initiative to do the same with other celebrations as well, including bar mitzvahs.

At our youngest son’s bar mitzvah celebration, seven years ago, the new man read the Torah portion on the Shabbat after he turned 13, but on the Wednesday before, his Jewish birthday, my wife and I hosted a modest meal for relatives and a few friends – and, of course, our son’s friends and teachers.

There were only three things on the agenda for the evening. My son delivered a d’var Torah, a discourse on a Torah topic, and each of his grandfathers said a few words.

My wife’s father thanked G-d, as he always does at family celebrations, for allowing him to survive the several concentration camps where he spent the Holocaust years, and where he and his religious comrades risked life and limb to maintain what Jewish observance they could.

And my own father, for his part, expressed the deep gratitude he feels to the Creator for protecting him, during those same years, in a Siberian Soviet labor camp, where he and his fellow yeshiva students similarly endured terrible hardships to remain observant, believing Jews. Both grandfathers take deep pride in how their children’s children are continuing the lives and ideals of their parents’ parents, and theirs before them.

And I sat there silently praying that my son would grow further to recognize the mission and meaning of a truly Jewish life, and follow the example of his grandfathers and grandmothers, parents and siblings, uncles and aunts and cousins, many of whom were there to celebrate with him. Thank G-d, he has indeed made us very proud.

The celebration lacked “motivators,” like those in the Times’ article or at the recent Lone Star State lewdness.

But motivators were everywhere.

The Joy of Accountability

A few summers ago, after complaints from local residents, a priest in Tilberg, the Netherlands, was fined several thousand dollars for ringing his church bells just after 7:00 in the morning.

That mid-August, like this one, synagogues around the world – many of them at just about that same time of morning – were sounding an alarm of their own. No complaints were reported about the shofar, or ram’s horn, blasts sounded at the end of morning services. The shofar-soundings began on the first day of the Jewish month of Elul and continue every morning until the day before Rosh Hashana.

The Rambam, Maimonides, famously described the blowing of the shofar on that holiday as a wake-up call – bearing the unspoken but urgent message “Awaken, sleepers, from your slumber.” The slumber, he went on to explain, is our floundering in the “meaningless distractions of the temporal world” we occupy. The shofar throughout Elul calls on us to refocus on what alone is real in life: serving our Creator. And should we choose to hit the spiritual snooze-button, the alarm is sounded the next day, and the one after that.

It is so much easier to sleep, of course, through the alarm clock, both the literal one in the morning and the figurative one that rudely echoes in our hearts as we busy ourselves with the “important” diversions that so often fill our days.

What is more, just as, lost in our morning muddle, we may wish ill on our alarm clocks, we tend at times to resent our life-responsibilities.

How differently we would feel if only we realized the import of obligation – how accountability actually holds the seeds of joy.

The weekly Torah portion usually read near the start of Elul has G-d describing idolatry, the most severe of sins, as bowing down before “the sun, moon or other heavenly bodies that I have not commanded” [Deuteronomy 17:3].

That last phrase was clarified by the Jewish translators of the Torah into Greek, as “that I have not commanded you to serve” – removing any ambiguity from the text; the standard Torah commentary Rashi follows suit.

The Hassidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, however, revealed another layer of the phrase’s meaning.

He noted that there is an exception to the prohibition of genuflecting before something physical: bowing down to a human being. We find, for instance, that the prophet Obadiah bowed before his master Elijah, who, while human, nevertheless embodied a degree of G-dliness. Explained Rabbi Levi Yitzchak: A human being, by virtue of his having chosen and forged a path of holiness in life, is worthy of veneration of a sort that is forbidden to show to any other creation.

What allows human beings to attain so lofty a status, “The Berditchiver” continues, is that we are commanded – creatures intended not just to exist, but to shoulder responsibility. That allows us to become partners in a way with the Divine. And so it is precisely our obligations that exalt us, that place us on a plane above everything else in the universe.

That thought, explained the Hassidic master, lies beneath the surface of the verse cited above. We are forbidden to bow to the sun and moon because “I have not commanded” them – because they are not themselves commanded. They are not charged to choose, instructed in any way to act against their natures.

We humans, however, with our many duties that may cause us to chafe or grumble, are elevated beings, infused with holiness. And our responsibilities are what make our lives potential wells of holiness, what make our existences deeply meaningful.

That idea might grant us some understanding of an oddity: Rosh Hashana is described both as a Day of Judgment and as a joyous holiday. Even as we tremble as we stand “like sheep” before the Judge of all, we are enjoined to partake in festive holiday meals and, as on other festivals, to derive happiness from them.

Perhaps the seeming paradox is solved by the recognition that the reason we can, indeed must, be judged derives directly from our accountability. Even – perhaps especially – when the alarm clock interrupts our reveries, our responsibilities should fill us with the deepest gratitude and joy.

Musing: Two NYT Articles about Israel Say it All

Two recent articles in the New York Times conveyed as informative a picture of Palestinians and Israel as might be imagined. One, on August 4, profiled the “culture of conflict” nurtured by West Bank Palestinians, focusing on Arab teenagers’ delight in throwing large stones at Israel soldiers and Jewish residents of nearby communities, and younger boys’ games imitating their elders’ activities.

“Children have hobbies,” one teen, Muhammad, is quoted as explaining, “and my hobby is throwing stones.”

When a 17-year-old, arrested for his stone-throwing, was released in June after 16 months in prison, the article reports, “he was welcomed like a war hero with flags and fireworks, women in wedding finery lining the streets to cheer his motorcade.”

The second Times piece, the next day, described how, in its headline’s words, “Doctors in Israel Quietly Tend to Syria’s Wounded.”

Most Syrian patients “come here unconscious with head injuries,” said Dr. Masad Barhoum, the director general of one of the hospitals, the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya. “They wake up after a few days or whenever and hear a strange language and see strange people,” he continued. “If they can talk, the first question is, ‘Where am I?’ ”

“I am sure,” he added “there is an initial shock when they hear they are in Israel.”

A 13-year-old girl, who had required complex surgery, was interviewed “sitting up in bed in a pink Pooh Bear T-shirt.” Her aunt, who had managed to locate her and was happy with the treatment her niece had received, told the reporter that they hoped to return to Syria later this week.

“Asked what she will say when she goes back home, the aunt replied: ‘I won’t say that I was in Israel. It is forbidden to be here, and I am afraid of the reactions’.”

The two pieces, taken together, really say it all.

A Time for Stringencies

Chumros, or efforts to go beyond the letter of Jewish religious law’s requirements, have gotten a bad name over the years. And it is true, some stringencies can be unwise, even counterproductive. Some are even silly.

I recall a letter to the editor of a now-defunct Jewish magazine whose writer was deeply upset that an advertisement for a dairy product in an earlier issue had run face-to-face with one for a meat product. Many readers, I’m sure, like me, first thought it was meant as a joke. But it wasn’t Purim time and it didn’t carry any indication of wryness or satire. The writer was serious, and, of course, deeply misguided.

But when a stringency is adopted, either by a community or an individual, for a good reason, it should not be resented or mocked. Sometimes a person may feel a need to draw a broader circle than the next guy’s around something prohibited; sometimes a particular era or community will require the adoption of special stringencies. Generally, chumros present themselves in realms like kashrus or the Sabbath, in the form of refraining from eating or doing even something technically permitted. Other stringencies, though, consist of adopting as one’s norm the example of a great person.

Among the greatest Jews who ever lived was the spiritual head of the Jewish people at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, the famed Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. The Talmud (Brachos 17a) relates that no one ever greeted him first, as he was always the first to offer greetings, “even [to] a non-Jew in the marketplace.”

Now there’s an unusual – unnecessary, to be sure, but clearly laudatory – conduct worth considering these days, when civility seems on the wane. Obviously one can’t walk through a busy pedestrian area greeting every person one sees. In any event, doing so might not endear one to those serially accosted.

But there are many times when one finds oneself in the presence of another individual or two when the option of a “good morning” or “good evening” hovers in the air, easily ignored but entirely available.

Taking the opportunity to convey the wish, the Talmud teaches us, is something praiseworthy.

And for Jews, the more “Jewish” one looks, I think, the more desirable it is to consider taking on the chumra of emulating Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. Because in addition to the inherent goodness of acknowledging another human being, there is the unfortunate fact that some people, for whatever reason, are quick to think of Jews, especially Orthodox ones, as “stand-offish.” And our insular lifestyles, even though they are not intended to insult anyone, can inadvertently reinforce that impression. But it’s hard to maintain a bias against Orthodox Jews when one’s head holds the image, too, of a smiling such Jew offering a greeting.

On a fifteen-minute walk to shul a few Shabbosos ago, I met: two other shul-goers, a Muslim family, and a young man of indeterminate ethnicity. I also passed a fellow washing his car. I wished the identifiable Jews a “good Shabbos” (actually, one of them a “Shabbat Shalom”) and offered the others a smile and a “good morning.” All the greetees returned the good wishes, as did a large man with dreadlocks standing in line with me at the kosher Dunkin Donuts a day later. That’s usually the case. Rarely does someone greeted ignore the greeting; and when he does, it’s usually because he didn’t hear it (or couldn’t believe his ears).

Whether my “stringent” behavior made the world any more civil a place I don’t know, but all any of us can do is our own small part.

Some religious Jews, who – rightfully – value modesty and reticence, may feel that it’s somehow not proper to engage strangers in public places. And in some cases that may well be true. But in many, even most, cases, it’s certainly not.

At least it wasn’t in Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai’s eyes.

A Modest Jewish Proposal

A reporter recently asked me whether I thought Jewish women could be experts in Jewish law. “Of course,” I responded without hesitation.

The journalist was one of the horde of heralds who practically fell over one another a few weeks ago to celebrate – I’m sorry, report upon – the recent graduation of three women from a school whose aim is to place them in synagogues as rabbis, if not quite to call them that.

I elaborated on my response by citing the examples of my own wife and daughter. (We have several, all of them knowledgeable Jews, but I had in mind our youngest, about to be married but for now still at home.) “When I have a question, for instance, about what bracha, or blessing, to make on a food,” I explained, “they are the ones I ask.”

The reporter seemed surprised to hear that there could be questions about blessings. So I elaborated on the fact that much of an entire tractate of the Talmud deals with blessings on food and other things, and that there is a wealth of complex halachic material relating to the proper blessings a Jew is to make on different foods and special occasions. Since brachos entail invoking G-d’s name, I pointed out, it is important that they be made only when required, and that, when required, the proper blessing be made.

There wasn’t time to go into the underlying meaning of brachos, our need to recognize how blessed we are to be able to eat this food or that one, to have reached a milestone in the Jewish year, to have experienced thunder, lightning or an earthquake, or even to have digested one’s food (yes, there’s a blessing to be recited after leaving the bathroom).

The majority of brachos, however, and the volumes of halachic material thereon concern the proper blessings to be made before consuming a food and, if a certain amount is eaten, afterward.

There’s a movement in the larger world these days that promotes “mindful eating,” the conscious focusing on one’s food before consuming it and the retaining of that focus while doing so, slowly and deliberately. That approach dovetails well with the Jewish perspective on eating. We are indeed to stop and appreciate every morsel we consume; and brachos are the key to focusing us on that goal.

Unfortunately, many of us observant Jews are not sufficiently careful with our brachos, reciting them hurriedly and pro forma, without summoning the requisite attention to the meaning of their words, and often while doing something else: working, reading, conversing, even driving. What’s more, as above, the laws governing brachos can be very intricate; not having studied them is a recipe (I’m sorry) for error.

In the non-Orthodox Jewish world, to the best of my knowledge, there is little observance of brachos altogether.

Which leads me to a thought. With all the contemporary Jewish world’s disagreements and disagreeableness, all the polarized points of view and highly charged issues, might a small measure of pan-Jewish People unity be attainable by a collective embrace of brachos?

Brachos, after all, don’t touch upon issues like feminism (they are – well, almost all – gender-neutral) or insularity (they are recited on both cholent and crêpes Suzette). And brachos are not even within firing range of topics like drafting charedim in Israel or forcing changes in their educational system. In other words, they may well comprise a perfect potential Jewish unifier.

For those of us who identify unapologetically with the Jewish past and consider halacha sacrosanct, a renewed focus on brachos would mean strengthening our knowledge about the laws of brachos and undertaking to recite them properly. Instead of mumbling them, let us resolve to pronounce each word clearly and carefully. Instead of a mindless “shkolniyedvoro,” let us try harder to articulate our words and think about what we’re saying.

For the part of the Jewish world that does not consider itself governed by halacha at all, simply focusing on the Divine blessings inherent in our food, and acknowledging them with brachos, should present a wonderful opportunity to embrace a non-hot-button Jewish observance. There are many excellent English-language guides to the recitation of brachos available today.

And for Jews who embrace halacha in principle but feel a need to champion elements of contemporary societal mores, mindful eating and Jewish observance would seem a perfect pairing.

Imagine the importance and laws of brachos being spoken about from the pulpits of Orthodox shuls, Reform temples, feminist yeshivot and Jewish Federation meetings.

No, it won’t bring all Jews to agree on other things. But you know what they say about the journey of a thousand miles…

There’s A Will

A new book, “The Anatomy of Violence,” suggests that “the seeds of sin are brain-based,” at least in a sense. Its author, psychologist Adrian Raine, isn’t speaking of sins like gossip or tax evasion but rather violent crime. And he makes the case that such criminalities may have biological roots, and that “neurocriminology” may provide society with ways of curbing crime.

Both genetic makeup and prenatal environment, Dr. Raine asserts, are factors that can presage a criminal mind. On the most basic level, it has long been clear that there is a correlation between certain “accidents of birth” (or of life) and proclivity to crime. Being born male rather than female, for instance, makes it much more likely that one will become a mugger or murderer. And certain types of damage to the brain have long been observed to yield changes in behavior, sometimes including a proclivity to violence.

Likewise, more mundane things, like an expectant mother’s smoking or consumption of alcohol (not to mention even more severe chemical insults to the brain of a fetus, like exposure to lead or use of other drugs), can contribute to the likelihood of eventual bad behavior on the part of the child later born. That a low resting heart rate, however, correlates with antisocial behavior – a finding relayed by Professor Raine – comes as something of a surprise, as does evidence that fish consumption may have the opposite effect.

Many other factors, of course, biological, environmental and situational, may also contribute to the statistical likelihood that a person will be prone to violence.

Correlation, however, does not mean causation. Shoe size, after all, broadly correlates with math proficiency – most small children are not as good with numbers as are we larger people.

More important still, even causation needn’t be absolute. Professor Raine cites the case of a man who possessed many of the risk factors for becoming a killer. The fellow suffered from a vitamin deficiency as a young child, as a youth had a low resting heart rate; and abnormal structures in his brain, revealed by a scan, were reminiscent of abnormalities in the brains of serial killers. And in his pre-teens, the subject joined a gang, smoked cigarettes and engaged in vandalism. With time, however, he veered from that course, and in fact even wrote a book about the biological roots of violence. Yes, Professor Raine speaks of himself.

“Why didn’t I stay on that pathway?” he wonders.

The answer is simple: human beings have free will. Bad behavior, whether of the sort universally recognized as such or, for a Jew, behavior forbidden by the Torah, is ultimately a choice.

To be sure, as the great Jewish thinker Rabbi E. E. Dessler (1892-1953) famously pointed out, different people occupy different points of a free will continuum. One man’s free-will challenge (because of his nature and nurture) may be to refrain from murdering someone he hates; another’s, whether to opt for a kosher product over a tastier non-kosher one; yet another’s, whether to utter a sentence that straddles the line of derogatory speech.

But Francis Crick (quoted by the professor) was wrong to assert that “free will is nothing more than a large assembly of neurons located in the anterior cingulate cortex.” The choices we make may be processed by our brains, but they are sourced in our souls.

Reviews of the book and its thesis reminded me of the Talmudic statement (Shabbos, 156b) of Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak. There are two opinions in the Talmud about whether astrological factors, presumed to influence the world and most of its inhabitants, have any effect on Jews. Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak was of the school of thought holding that they do. In fact, he declared that someone born under, so to speak, an unlucky star, the planet Mars, will be a “shedder of blood.”

But, he goes on to say, what that means is that he will be either a surgeon, a mugger, a ritual slaughterer of animals or a circumciser. An orientation, in other words, is one thing; its expression, quite another. Because that is a matter of will.

So whether one seeks the sources of personal psychologies in a scan of a brain or a scan of the sky, in a double helix or a double star, whether one peers through a microscope or through a telescope, ultimately we all choose our actions, and thus our fates.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life