Category Archives: issues of morality or ethics

Where Are The Red Carpets?

The letter below appears in today’s New York Times

To the Editor:

I’m neither an “Israel right or wrong” person nor a supporter of what has come to be called “the Palestinian cause.” But one question keeps coming back to me when I read about objections to decisions by Jewish campus groups not to invite speakers hostile to Israel: Where is the push for Arab campus groups to roll out their red carpets to unabashed defenders of the Jewish state?

(Rabbi) AVI SHAFRAN
New York, Dec. 30, 2013

The writer is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

Letter to the Editor of the NY Jewish Week

Below is the text of a self-explanatory letter to the editor of the New York Jewish Week; it is published in this week’s issue of that paper.

December 21, 2013

Editor:

Rori Picker Neiss (op-ed, December 15) is “shocked” at my response to your reporter, who asked me for the rationale of esteemed rabbinical authorities’ opposition to pre-nuptial agreements focused on a future divorce. I explained that “there is a concern that introducing and focusing on the possible dissolution of a marriage when it is just beginning is not conducive to the health of the marriage.”

Ms. Picker Neiss contends that such focus is already introduced, in the traditional ketubah. I don’t know what version of the ketubah she is citing but the time-honored, halachically mandated one contains no mention whatsoever of divorce.

The pledge of support that the ketubah references remains in place in a case of divorce, or of the husband’s death. But that is simply a peripheral implication of the ketubah, which simply lists the husband’s obligations to his wife.

And so to compare the ketubah to the “prenup” used by some today is comparing apples to aufrufs.

Ms. Picker Neiss is entitled to embrace the prenuptual approach if she chooses. But I would only ask her to recognize that there are others who, for entirely defensible reasons, choose otherwise.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Director of Public Affairs

Agudath Israel of America

Too Little Information

At the Sheva Brachos festivities this past summer for the marriage of our youngest daughter, my wife and I heard many wonderful things about our newest son-in-law. Friends and relatives spoke about his impressive Torah scholarship, his modesty, his sterling character. We had already known all that, although it was good to hear all the same. One testimonial, though, particularly impressed me; it was offered by one of the new husband’s brothers-in-law, who, in a short speech, recounted a long-ago lively Shabbos table discussion at his in-laws’ home.

Each member of the family, it seems, had vociferously put forth his or her perspective on some now-forgotten topic. Except, the speaker recounted, for our new son-in-law. When asked by one of the others for his opinion on the matter, the reticent family member’s simple response was: “I don’t have enough information to have one.”

I smiled broadly inside (probably outside too). If only, I mused, more of us were so thoughtful. Instead, our times seem to foster a diametric approach, that all of us must have opinions, with or without the assistance of facts. Call it a Contemporary Commandment: Thou shalt leave no issue uncommented upon.

And so, opine we merrily do, with or without the requisite information, the clay of which cogent opinions are molded – or objectivity, the furnace that forges them.

Whether the topic is gun control, the Affordable Care Act, immigration reform, Afghanistan or the agreement with Iran, we must speak up; full knowledge, let alone comprehension, of all the pertinent details is no requirement. (Mindless animus for the current occupant of the White House is much preferred – but that’s a different essay.)

Opinions have become something like fashion accessories (“Oh, what a nice opinion you have! Where can I get one like it?”), and too often are just purloined from pundits who make us feel righteous – or fearful or angry, the strange preferences of some.

Worse still is opting for “selective information.” Few if any important political or social topics lack two sides. Listening to only one of them because it’s where one has decided beforehand he’d like to land may be enticing, but it’s irresponsible. Shutting oneself in the echo chamber of (take your pick) “conservative” or “liberal” or Democratic or Republican (or Jewish or non-Jewish) commentary is a recipe for intoxication, not enlightenment.

Please don’t misunderstand. We are entitled to have and voice opinions, to take sides. (Some of us do it professionally.) But thoughtful judgment begins with seriously considering all sides of an issue. And yet, while it’s not exactly hard these days to find very different perspectives on any topic, too many of us purposefully avoid the marketplace of ideas (or limit ourselves to one stall). “Oh, I don’t read that,” we glibly say, or “I never pay attention to him” – simply because the “that” and the “him” represent points of view at odds with the speaker’s gut feelings. What somehow gets lost is the recognition that there’s great gain in confronting a different point of view – and none at all in just having one’s uninformed feelings seconded.

A little experiment: Write down the names of the media or pundits you make a point of reading. Now, examine your list to see if they are homogeneous or represent a broad variety of attitudes or perspectives. If the former’s the case, you’re cheating yourself.

Needless to say, there are ideas from which we observant Jews rightly insulate ourselves. But political and social issues don’t usually entail heresy or licentiousness. What they do entail, and require, is complete information, true objectivity and long, hard thought.

Consider, for example, the death penalty. On the one hand, why should taxpayers be burdened with housing and feeding bad people? Executions, moreover, deter other would-be criminals, and can provide victims’ families a measure of solace.

And yet, there’s another hand. Killing a human being is a grave deed, not to be undertaken lightly. And people, at least some of them, can change. And mistaken convictions have sent innocent people to their deaths.

It’s easy to just dismiss the first set of points as callous, or the second as weak-willed. What’s hard is weighing the two sides against each other. But that’s what’s necessary, in the end, to reach an informed, intelligent opinion.

And if the weighing is inconclusive – which happens more than seldom – and leaves an informed, intelligent person ambivalent, well, then, maybe he should just acknowledge the fact.

What? And remain opinionless? Heavens!

Sometimes, though, that’s necessary. And, as our son-in-law understood – and all of us should – there’s no shame in that.

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.