Category Archives: Jewish Thought

Through Jewish Eyes

Maybe you know the old Yiddish joke? Back in pre-war Minsk, Shmerel and Berel are having a conversation. During a pause, Shmerel suddenly remembers a bit of bad news he has to relate.

“Did you hear about Yankel the barber in Pinsk?”

“No,” Berel says haltingly, having picked up an ominous signal from the way the question had been asked.

“He’s not here anymore,” Shmerel says, using a Yiddish euphemism for someone recently deceased.

“Oy!” exclaims Berel, “You mean Yankel, with the huge round nose?”

Shmerel nods a sad yes.

“Yankel who has only one eye?” Again, a confirmation.

“Yankel with that big scar across his cheek and the pimples?!” Another sad nod.

“Ay, yai, yai,” moans Berel. “Azah sheineh Yid!” (“What a beautiful Jew!”)

The story came back to me at the Siyum HaShas. Let me explain.

When people, as so many did, came over to me in various places to congratulate me, a veteran Agudath Israel staff member for a quarter of a century, for the amazing event, I responded, entirely honestly, that my main role was standing out of the way of the many unbelievably dedicated and talented people who did the real work, like the Agudah’s executive staff, the young women who spent days and late nights taking orders and processing tickets, the devoted community askanim and technical facilitators.

(Actually, I do take credit for offering the idea, a year or so before the Siyum, of including chemical hand warmers in the swag bags. You’re welcome.)

I wasn’t even really at the Siyum, at least not as part of the crowd. My perch was in the press box, high above the gathering, a floor dedicated to members of the media, with whom I was charged to interact.

I answered many questions but mostly just steered representatives of the Fourth Estate to members of the tzibbur whom they could interview about Daf Yomi and the Siyum.

One of my few on-camera moments, as it happened, was responding to a German television crew’s question, born of recent events, about what the Siyum means in the context of all the recent anti-Semitic violence. I straightforwardly pointed out that Jews are long accustomed to hatred and adversaries, and are long trained in perseverance. I wonder how that played in Munich.

It was, though, when I watched several reporters intone into their microphones about how so many Jews “read a page of Talmud” daily that Shmerel and Berel appeared before my mind’s eye.

Because the joke about them, of course, is a pointed one. And its point is that we Jews see things differently from other people. To us, beauty is truly anything but skin deep.

And so, when we look at a true Daf Yomi talmid, we don’t see someone “reading a page” of a text. We see someone who, for 2711 days straight, has engaged not only with very complex material, but with holiness itself.

Where a reporter saw “reading,” we saw reverence.

Many journalists wanted to tie their stories about the Siyum into a narrative about the aforementioned violence against Jews we’ve endured of late. They saw “a flare up of anti-Semitism.”

Jewish eyes, though, saw the latest manifestation of “Esav sonei l’Yaakov,” the wages of galus and a message that we need to improve our avodas Hashem.

During a particularly poignant part of the Siyum program, tribute was paid to a man named Mendy Rosenberg, who, despite being severely limited by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), successfully undertook to complete a full Daf Yomi cycle despite a prognosis that didn’t allow him anywhere near the time needed, and, despite eventually having to communicate with his chavrusa through eye movements alone. Reporters saw a broken man doing the best he could. Jewish eyes saw an amazing hero, a gibor chayil and powerful role model for mesirus nefesh.

And when a group of Holocaust survivors were introduced to the approximately 90,000 people at MetLife Stadium and to countless others in myriad venues linked to the proceedings, the media saw the last human vestiges of a world that once was. Jewish eyes, though, saw superhuman connections to our mesorah, which they carried out with them to us from the furnace of Churban Europa.

When the camera was aimed at the Masmidei HaSiyum youngsters, who had participated in the Siyum by undertaking limudim of Gemara, Mishnayos or Chumash, the reporters saw lovable little boys. We saw nothing less than the Jewish future, a, be”H, bright one.

And, finally, when the observers from the outside saw, and dutifully reported on, the “record crowd” in the stadium – not only were the stands fairly full, but the playing field held many more people, including the Rabbanim on the dais, Daf Yomi Maggidei Shiur and many others – Jewish eyes saw, well, Klal Yisrael.

No, not all of it, but enough of it to perceive something else invisible to many observers: the vibrancy, dedication and passion of the collective Jewish neshamah.

Berel would understand.

Abhorrent Action at a Distance

Direct physical attacks on Jews have, and for good reason, unfortunately, dominated the news in recent weeks. But there have been other kinds of attacks on innocent people who are perceived to be Jewish. Like the one committed against Kurt Eichenwald.

Mr. Eichenwald is an award-winning journalist who has written for the New York Times, Newsweek and other major media, and is the author as well of several books. He is also an epileptic, something he has compellingly addressed in some of his writings. And he has been critical of President Trump. Those last two facts dovetailed, regrettably, in a bad way.

After writing in 2016 about what he considered looming improper conflicts of interest in the then-president elect’s international business affairs, the Dallas-based Mr. Eichenwald experienced a flood of online vitriol and threats from people who felt that his criticism of Mr. Trump merited such reaction. It wasn’t the first time he had experienced such internet “trolling.” But spleen venting, while always ugly, is usually harmless.

It wasn’t, though, on the evening of December 15, 2016. One of Mr. Eichenwald’s less constrained critics, using “@jew goldstein” as a moniker and aware of Mr. Eichenwald’s medical condition, sent the writer an electronic graphics interchange format file (or GIF), an animated image. GIFs are usually intended to amuse, but this one, which loaded automatically, had a less benign objective.

The GIF, whose sender added his judgment that Mr. Eichenwald “deserved a seizure,” consisted of a series of bright flashes in quick succession, something that is known to trigger epileptic attacks in those, like Mr. Eichenwald, who are vulnerable to them.

The alleged culprit is one John Rayne Rivello, a Marine Corps veteran from Salisbury, Maryland. A search warrant turned up an internet account he maintained that featured, among other things, a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for his alleged victim, which had been altered to show a fake obituary with the date of Mr. Eichenwald’s death listed as Dec. 16, 2016.

Investigators also found that Mr. Rivello had sent a message to likeminded friends, outlining his plans and stating “I hope this sends him into a seizure” and “let’s see if he dies.”

Mr. Eichenwald didn’t die that day, but the previous evening, when he received the GIF, “he slumped over in his chair,” according to his attorney, Steven Lieberman. “He was unresponsive, and he probably would have died but for the fact that his wife heard a noise – she’s a physician – and she pulled him away from the screen and got him onto the floor.”

Mrs. Eichenwald called 911, took a picture of the strobing light on her husband’s computer and called the police.

Mr. Rivello was originally charged in Maryland for “assault with a deadly weapon” and, briefly, by the Northern District of Texas, under a federal cyberstalking statute.

First Amendment concerns were raised about the possibility that Mr. Rivello was being improperly targeted just for being a bigoted dimwit, which isn’t itself illegal. So the cyberstalking charge was dropped and he was re-indicted in Texas on lesser assault charges.

Mr. Rivello and his lawyer are reportedly still planning on mounting a defense on First Amendment grounds.

That claim is, or should be, easily rejected. The fact that the harm he inflicted was an expression of a political position is no more a defense of the assault than it would be had he punched Mr. Eichenwald in the face. The punch may communicate a message, but it isn’t protected by the First Amendment.

The larger, and novel, question is: Can an “assault” be committed at a distance?

From a Torah perspective, it most certainly can. It isn’t mere rhetoric or poetic license when Chazal refer to things like lashon hara or publicly embarrassing someone as damaging, even killing. Assault needn’t leave any physical trace at all. Such non-contact assaults aren’t halachically actionable, but they are considered criminal all the same.

Damage inflicted on a person by fire, though, even when the fire resulted from negligence – all the more so when set maliciously – is indeed actionable (see Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Nizkei Mammon 14:15). I don’t profess to be a posek, but it certainly seems at the very least arguable that sending an electronic signal may constitute something analogous.

In any event, Mr. Rivello’s case will of course be adjudicated by American, not Jewish, law.

It has been clear for some time now that contemporary secular law needs to evolve to meet challenges posed by new technologies like the internet.

Mr. Rivello’s next hearing is scheduled for January 31. Unless he decides to just plead guilty, his case might prove a good opportunity to rein in some cyberspace miscreancy.

One Way to Keep Every Jew on the Same Page

An essay of mine about the Siyum HaShas and Jewish unity appears in this week’s Jewish Week. It can be read here.

Anti-Anti Semitism

The well-known British doctor and pundit Jonathan Miller, who died last month, felt he had the solution to anti-Semitism.

He was quoted in a 1985 book as asserting that, to end Jew-hatred, “the Jew must constantly re-adventure and re-venture himself into assimilation.”

“I just think,” he continued, “it’s the nobler thing to do, unless in fact you happen to be a believer in Orthodoxy, in which case there are self-evident reasons to keep [living Jewish lives]. But, if it’s done for the sole purpose of making sure that in the future you’ll be able to say the prayers for the dead when the Holocaust is finally inflicted again, then I think it is a [cursed] device.”

The good doctor really should have realized that among the most assimilated Jews in modern times were much of German Jewry in the 1800s and the early part of last century, Jews who, in headstrong manner, adopted many of the practices and attitudes of their non-Jewish neighbors. And we all know how, despite those efforts to become “just Germans,” they were cruelly reminded of who in fact they were.

We “believers in Orthodoxy” could have explained to Dr. Miller that, au contraire, assimilation doesn’t prevent Jew hatred; it breeds it. We Jews are meant to be a people apart, and when we try to forget who we are, Hashem allows others to help us remember.

There is much talk these days, for good reason, about what practical steps can be taken to deal with anti-Semitism. In the wake of countless vandalisms of Jewish sites and cemeteries, physical attacks on Jews in Europe and here in America, and vicious verbal ones on the internet, various means of addressing the idiocy of Jew hatred are being put forward.

They are not without merit. Even though Chazal have revealed the law of nature that “Esav hates Yaakov,” there are efforts that can be made to counter both anti-Semitic acts and anti-Semitism itself.

Advocacy for security funding and increased police patrols are examples of the former. And educational efforts in public schools, of the latter.

There are, of course, chassidei umos ha’olam, people with an appreciation of Klal Yisrael; and then there are the aforementioned heirs of Esav. But there are also many people in our current (we hope final) outpost of galus who have as yet unformed attitudes about Jews. And so, educational efforts can be worthy means of fostering sanity and knowledge in young minds.

Another area in which our hishtadlus can help influence open-minded people to reject haters’ libels and imaginings is “upping our game” in our interactions with others.

All of us “visibly Jewish” Jews are aware that eyes are always on us; hopefully, we take pains to not act in any way that might be seen as uncaring or rude. We avoid cutting others off in traffic or raising our voices in public. We try to project the true image of a Torah-faithful Jew: modest, courteous and civil.

Sometimes, though – through no fault of our own – even our entirely proper restraint and reticence are misconstrued. Not only by people looking for anything they can “interpret” negatively, but even by “pareve” citizens who lack any pre-existing animus for us. Being reserved can be misunderstood as being “stand-offish”; avoiding eye contact can be misinterpreted as condescension.

Many of us who move among non-Jews during our commutes, or who work in non-Jewish environments, have found that being “proactive” in interactions with others can yield much good will.

An obviously observant Jew who enters a building and holds the door open for anyone behind him has likely, with that almost effortless act, left an impression.

An unsolicited “Good morning” to a fellow elevator passenger does the same. We have here nothing less than the testimony of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, that no one ever beat him to a greeting, as he was always first to offer one, “even [to] a non-Jew in the marketplace” (Brachos 17a).

Eye contact, when appropriate, is a statement of respect. And its lack, fairly or not, may be taken as the opposite. And a smile should be part of our faces too. Shammai tells us as much: “Receive every person with a pleasant countenance” (Avos 1:15).

Not long ago, a middle-aged African-American woman was waiting, as was I, for a bus that didn’t come. I phoned my wife to ask if she was free to pick me up at the bus stop, and she was. When she arrived, I offered the other would-be bus passenger a ride to her destination, a public housing project. Surprised but overjoyed, she accepted, and we took her home.

A few weeks later, waiting (I do a lot of waiting) for a ferry, I heard a loud, happy “Hi, Rabbi!” from behind me. It was she. And with her were her adult son and several grandchildren in tow. I returned her greeting (with a smile) and said hello to her family members.

End of unremarkable story. But it made me think about how the lady must have described my wife and me to her progeny. And how it might have influenced their picture of “Jews.”

Just as important – perhaps more so – than increasing security measures, police presence and educational programs is strengthening our efforts to show others who we really are.

Contemptible Comity

The state of political discourse in these United States today – unfortunately, including much of the American Jewish world (including our corner of it) – was well exemplified in the reactions to something Senator Chuck Schumer of New York did not long ago.

When Long Island Representative Peter King announced his retirement from Congress, some were pleased. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, never one to hide her deeper feelings, tweeted, simply, “Good riddance.”

Mr. Schumer, however, although a Democrat, issued a warm tribute to the soon-to-be Republican retiree, who not only is a member of the other party but someone with whom the senator has strongly disagreed on a number of occasions.

Mr. Schumer tweeted that Mr. King, during his service in the House of Representatives, showed that he “fiercely loved America, Long Island, and his Irish heritage, and left a lasting mark on all 3.” The senator added, “I will miss him in Congress & value his friendship.”

How… how… how… DARE he?

Well that, at least, was the reaction of many on the livid left.

“Good grief,” read one of the milder social media responses. “Have you lost your mind?”

Most of the more than 10,000 replies to Mr. Schumer from his followers were decidedly negative, and many were quite outraged. Videos of thumbs-turning-downs, eye-rolling and heads shaking “no” flooded into the senator’s Twitter feed. Some commenters suggested that the former Congressman and current fourth-term Senator, as a result of his contemptible comity, should resign.

To be sure, many Democrats have had problems with some of Mr. King’s positions and statements. He voted to repeal Obamacare, opposed the redefinition of marriage and was a fervent supporter of the Patriot Act.

And he once complained that there are “too many mosques” in America, “too many people sympathetic to radical Islam,” and suggested that “We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.” He also compared football players’ kneeling in protest against racism during the playing of the national anthem to Nazi salutes.

But none of that prevented Mr. Schumer from giving him credit where he felt it was due.

The reaction to Mr. Schumer’s praise of a political adversary was a sad reflection of what plagues politics today, what might be called hyperpartisanosis.. It is no longer enough to disagree or even to engage in verbal duels with one’s political adversaries. They must be enemies – hated, derided, declared evil incarnate.

And the disease exists on both sides of the current political divide. One can, for instance, consider Bernie Sanders (or Barack Obama – remember him?) to be woefully misguided about what American policy toward Israel should be. One can reject totally the idea that a two-state solution – the outcome those two men embrace – is a path to peace in the Middle East. But disagreeing, even vehemently, with that contention, and opposing any move to try to bring such a plan closer do not, or should not, yield to vilifying its proponents or ascribing “Jewish self-hatred” or anti-Semitism to them.

Not every wrongheaded person, in other words, is wicked.

But, of course, the ascribing of wickedness is very much a part of the new blue/red American civil war. One sees it in the online anger and insults, in the bitterly sarcastic questions lawmakers pose to people “’from the other side” giving testimony, in the chants at protests and rallies. No longer do presentations of arguments and evidence suffice. Contempt and invective must be summoned.

It’s nothing entirely new, of course. American politics has long entailed a degree of abuse and incivility. But it seemed that, over the years, things were moving in a more genteel direction.
Alas, it was only an extended blip. Things are worse than ever.

And, as the Yiddish maxim has it, the way that larger society goes, unfortunately, is the way some Jews go as well.

Self-appointed arbiters of ostensible Jewish positions, in coffee rooms and chatrooms, comments sections and letters pages, preach about the unforgivable sins of this or that public figure or holder of a position different from the preacher’s own. There are only black and white; shades of gray are for sissies.

To be sure, there are indeed bad actors in public life, people who well deserve vilification because, well, because they are villains. But not every black activist is Louis Farrakhan; and not every democratic socialist, Joseph Stalin. What’s more: Not every candidate (like Bernie Sanders) with anti-Israel fans and not every candidate (like President Trump) with anti-Semitic ones is necessarily himself either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic.

We all know better than that.

Or, at least, we should.

Why Jews Worry

Some racial or national stereotypes are outright falsehoods. Mexicans may take siestas (as do many Israelis) during the hottest time of the day, but all the workers from south of the border whom I’ve observed have been exceedingly industrious and hard-working.

Other stereotypes are exaggerations, not fabrications. I think some stereotypes of Jews fall into that category. Some of the mockeries aimed at us may in fact have their origin in high ideals. Penny-pinching, for instance, is just a derisive way to refer to frugality; and frugality bespeaks an appreciation for the worth of every single resource with which Hashem has gifted us.

The Torah forbids the wasting of material or money. “Each and every penny,” Rabi Elazar is famously quoted as saying, “adds up to a fortune” (Bava Basra 9b). And fortunes, we all know, can be put to effective, ideally charitable, use. So, while “penny-pinching” can certainly refer to meaningless, selfish hoarding, it can also be the result of a wise recognition that wasting any resource debases it, and us.

Likewise the stereotype of Jews as worriers. Senior citizens reading this may have memories of telegrams (for you young’uns: they were messages sent instantaneously over distances, like e-mails, but for which one had to pay for each letter of each word). The old Jewish joke had it that a Jewish fellow’s telegram to his family far away read: “Start worrying. Details to follow.”

The Jewish worry-wart stereotype, though, may well have its roots in a deep Jewish truth: there is in fact much about which to worry.

That has always been the case, of course. Whether war or other violence, disease or accident, myriad threats have abounded, and continue to abound. Today, though, we are, or should be, particularly sensitive to all sorts of newer things that can harm us. Cars, guns, terrorists, serial killers and… invisible enemies.

Abba Binyamin (Berachos 6a) describes some such potential dangers as sheidim, demons, and informs us that “If the eye only had the ability to see them, no creature could endure” their sheer multitude.

Most of us aren’t sensitive to the presence of sheidim these days. But we certainly are to microbes – noxious bacteria, viruses and fungi – that are everywhere, and whose onslaughts we only survive because of the workings of our immune systems.

To which we generally give nary a thought. Only when our natural biological defenses malfunction do we – suddenly panic-stricken – recognize how fortunate we had been all that time when things went well.

Our mesorah admonishes us to give that thought constant attention. And no less attention to all the other myriad unseen dangers we face. In Modim, we acknowledge “all the wonders and favors that are with us daily, evening and morning and afternoon.”

From the first words a Jew recites upon arising, thanking our Creator for “returning my soul to me with kindness” – our breathing, after all, proceeded all night apace despite the oblivion of our sleep hours – to the brachah of Asher Yatzar, acknowledging the disasters that would follow were our digestive or circulatory systems hampered – we are guided to be keenly sensitive to the potential disasters that face us continuously.

Thus, the Jewish mandate to recognize always what could go wrong in our lives yields a meaningful disquietude. Which informs the worrier stereotype.

The same readers who remember telegrams might remember, too, the long-ago cartoon character “Mr. Magoo,” whose signature trait was sight-impairment (the caricature would never be acceptable these rightly disability-sensitive days).

Bald, big-nosed and behatted, Mr. Magoo’s comicality stemmed from his constant mistaking of objects for entirely other objects (and occasionally people), and from his encounters with an assortment of life-threatening circumstances, which always ended happily, without the protagonist’s awareness that he had ever been in danger in the first place.

He might be happily driving a car off a cliff overlooking a lake and land on a ship’s deck, only to just drive off the gangplank as the ship docked, to motor along on his merry way, never realizing he had ever left the road.

We’re not really so different. We, too, don’t fully appreciate how every day from which we emerge relatively unscathed was a day during which Hashem protected us from threats of which we weren’t even aware. So, worry away. It’s a very Jewish thing to do. It means we recognize what dangers are out there and, hopefully, to quote Modim again, the nissim shebchol yom imanu, the “miracles that are daily with us.”

The “velt” around us in the U.S. will soon be commemorating a secular holiday that really isn’t so secular at all. Thanksgiving’s religious roots really can’t be denied. Whom, after all, is being thanked?

President George Washington made it abundantly clear when, in 1789, proclaiming the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration, he characterized it “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty G-d.”

Klal Yisrael has in many ways positively influenced the larger world. The first American president’s words well reflect that fact.

But our recognition of the signal favors of Hashem is a daily, indeed constant, one.

Beware the Burger!

Back in 2002, a Jewish plot was uncovered by an intrepid investigator and publicly revealed on something called the “Aztlan Communications Network,” the teratoid brainchild of one “Ernesto Cienfuegos,” a pseudonymic Mexican-American every bit as fixated on, and deluded about, Jews as any white supremacist or radical Islamist.

The conspiracy, which pops up in some electronic sewers to this day, is the devious “Jewish tax” that inheres, hidden in plain sight from unsuspecting Gentiles, in secret code on food packaging.

Long familiar to us Hebrews of traditional bent, the various kosher symbols, are, of course, indications that the product so marked was produced under the supervision of a rabbi expert in the intricacies of both kosher law and food science.

Mr. Cienfuegos explained, however, that the arrangement is decidedly unkosher; it is a sinister bilking of innocent non-Jews. If companies pay for a rabbi’s service, he unreasoned, the cost must be passed on… discreetly, of course… to consumers.

Moving back into reality, while companies do indeed pay for hashgachos (as they do for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval), the cost to companies is a very tiny fraction of a cent per item. And in likely all cases, the hashgachah-born increase in company market share – which, of course, is the impetus for a company’s desire to carry a hashgachah – actually decreases the price of products.

Nor is Mr. Cienfuegos compelled to buy one brand of gefilte fish over another. If he found the kosher item more expensive, he could simply opt for a brand that was not supervised by a Rabbi (which, one imagines, he would probably prefer in any event).

Anti-Semites, though, don’t like to be confused by facts; they have bigger things to do, like sow hatred and suspicion.

And so, now, enter a new food-borne Jewish plot: the menacing Impossible Burger.

You may recognize that creation as a non-meat-based patty that claims to be indistinguishable in taste and texture from a traditional hamburger.

But one Joseph Jordan and one Mike Peinovich claim to have uncovered the sordid truth. They announced on “Strike and Mike” – their paywall-protected white power podcast – that the fake meat is, as you may have suspected, part of a Jewish scheme to destroy the white race.

It is an odd accusation (aside from its essential oddness), since the scientist-founder of Impossible Foods Inc. is a lily-white gentleman by the name of Patrick O. Brown. But who knows? Maybe his decidedly un-Jewish name is as fake as his burgers, he has bleached his skin and hidden under his t-shirt lies a tallis katan.

It’s not entirely clear how the newfangled burger ties into the Jewish plot. But it apparently has something to do with the purported dangers of soy and an intent to, as Messrs. Jordan and Peinovich assert, “make it impossible for working people to be able to afford meat, make it impossible for working people to drive automobiles, make it impossible for average people to live in an industrial society.”

And should that case somehow prove less than convincing, Mr. Jordan adds, “They wanna make us into India!”

Making things even more undeniable, he adds that “the new breed of hyper-wealthy Judeo-capitalists in the tech industries especially” want to usurp industries currently run by “goys.”

Mr. Peinovich then provides the coup de grâce: “Oh, you’re not gonna believe this: it’s kosher!”

Oh, no! They’re on to us!

Jew-hatred is so intriguing. Over the course of history, some of it has been of a racial nature. But much, too, has been rooted in religion. Some of it has been political, and some, economic. The target, though, has always been the same.

Human beings connected even rudimentarily to reality should be able to realize that there are no Elders of Zion (at least none who aspire to world control), and no Jews who murder Christians to mix their blood into matzos. And yet, there are, quite literally, millions of people in certain parts of the world who subscribe to such myths. And some who come up with creative new ones, like plots to use hechsherim to bilk the public, or soy to poison it.

While the surprising eruptions of anti-Semitism in unexpected places and the sheer creativity and irrepressibility of Jew-hatred are rightful causes of concern for us Jews, there is also something curiously invigorating about it all.

For it points to what underlies all Jew-hatred: a disorienting suspicion that Klal Yisrael is somehow special. However odd it might seem of G-d, as the famous couplet goes, He did indeed choose the Jews.

What anti-Semites don’t understand, though, is that the mission for which we have been chosen isn’t to subjugate or appropriate but to educate. Keep it under your hat, Ernesto and Joseph and Mike, but Jews are chosen to live lives of holiness, of service to G-d and man, and to serve thus as examples to the rest of mankind.

In other words, fellas, yes, there’s a plot. No conspiracy, though; there’s only one Plotter.

Amino Acids and Us

Like many 60-somethings, I remember being informed in grade school of the imminent solution to the mystery of life.

Triumphantly, teachers described an experiment conducted by two researchers, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, in which molecules believed to represent components of the early Earth’s atmosphere were induced by electricity to form some of the amino acids that are components of proteins necessary for life.

Soon enough, we were told, scientists would coax further artificial formation of primordial materials, proteins themselves and even, eventually, actual life – some single-celled organism like the one from which we ourselves (our teachers dutifully explained) were surely descended.

A half-century later, however, we are left with nothing – not even a pitiful protein – beyond Miller-Urey’s original results. And even that experiment is now discredited by scientists as having gotten the original atmospheric soup all wrong.

Whatever.

The Miller-Urey memory is an important reminder of how, with all of science’s unarguable accomplishments, every generation’s scientific establishment is convinced it has a handle as well on the Big Questions. And of how much more common hubris is than wisdom. It is a thought well worth thinking these days.

No one denies that species, over time, tend to retain traits that serve them well, and to lose others that don’t.

But the appearance of a new species from an existing one, or even of an entirely new trait within a species – things contemporary science insists have happened literally millions of times – have never been witnessed. There isn’t necessarily anything in the Torah that precludes them from happening, or being made to happen artificially. But the solemn conviction that they have occurred countless times and by chance remains a large leap of… well, faith. Which is why “evolution” is rightly called a theory (and might better still be called a religion).

Scientists, to be sure, protest that billions of years are necessary for chance mutations of DNA, the assumed engine of Neo-Darwinism, to work their accidental magic. A lovely scenario, but one whose hallowing of chance as the engine of all is easily seen as a rejection of the concept of a Creator, Judaism’s central credo.

It also begs the question of how the first living organism might have emerged from inert matter. Spontaneous generation is generally ridiculed by science, yet precisely that is presumed by the priests of Randomness to have occurred – by utter chance, yet – to jump-start the process of evolution.

What is more, the first creature’s ability to bring forth a next generation (and beyond), would have also had to have been among the first living thing’s talents. Without that, the organism would have amounted to nothing more than a hopeless dead-end. No DNA, after all, no future. And so, a package of complex genetic material, too, would have had to have been part of the unbelievably lucky alpha-amoeba.

And yet to so much as express doubts about such a scenario is to be branded a heretic by the scientific establishment, the Church of Chance.

The issue is not “Biblical literalism,” a decidedly non-Jewish approach. Many are the p’sukim that do not mean what a simple reading would yield; our mesorah is the key to the true meaning of the Torah’s words; and there are multiple levels of deeper meanings inaccessible to most of us. The words of Braishis hide infinitely more than they reveal – which is only that the universe was created as the willful act of G-d, and that the biosphere unfolded in stages. Details are not provided.

The issue is more stark: Are we products of chance, or of G-d?

Jewish belief, of course, is founded on the latter contention, and, as a result, on the conviction that there is a purpose to the universe we inhabit, and to the lives we live. That what we do makes a difference, that there is right and there is wrong.

Is the very notion of good and evil an illusion, an adaptive evolutionary strategy that provides human beings some cold biological advantage – or does our innate conviction that some human actions are proper and others not reflect a deeper reality?

If humanity’s roots lie in pure chance, there can be no more meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather; no more import to right and wrong than to right and left. The game is zero-sum. Either we are here by chance or by design. Either there is no meaningful mandate for human beings; or there is. And if there is, there must be a Mandator.

Opposing the promotion of a particular religion in American public schools is a worthy stance. But, at the same time, there is simply no philosophically sound way of holding simultaneously in one’s head both the conviction that we are nothing more than evolved animals and the conviction that we are something qualitatively different.

And no way to avoid the fact that when children are taught to embrace the one, they are being taught, ever so subtly, to shun the other.

(First published in 2006, edited slightly here.)

The Nazis Knew

A dear friend who had a secular upbringing and maintains an irreligious outlook took issue, gently, if a bit cynically, with something I had written for Aish.com, a website that reaches out to a broad swath of Jewish readers.

The article was about R’ Yosef Friedenson, a”h, the longtime editor of Dos Yiddishe Vort, the Yiddish-language periodical published for many years by Agudath Israel of America. “Mr.” Friedenson, as he preferred to be called, survived the Holocaust and was a keen historian, meticulous journalist, eloquent speaker – and one of the nicest people I have ever met. I had the pleasure of his company for some twenty years in the Agudah national offices in Manhattan.

In my tribute to R’ Yosef, I included a story from his recent, posthumously published collection of memories, “Faith Amid the Flames” (Artscroll/Mesorah).

At the start of World War II, when Poland had been overrun by the Nazis, ym”s, Mr. Friedenson was a 17-year-old living with his family in Lodz. One day, two German soldiers burst into the family’s apartment.

At one point, they demanded the teenager identify the stately tomes on the bookshelf.

He had no reason to lie. “The Talmud,” he answered.

“At the mention of that word, they became like mad dogs,” Mr. Friedenson recalled many decades later. “They threw the holy books on the floor and trampled them, ripping them to shreds with their heavy boots.”

And when they had left, the young Yosef asked his father why the Nazis had responded so viciously.

“They don’t hate us as a people,” was the response. “They hate us because of our holy books. What is written in them is a contradiction to all they stand for, to their outlook and corrupt mentality.”

My friend was suitably impressed with my description of Mr. Friedenson. “Nice memory,” he e-mailed me, “of what sounds like a remarkable man.”

But, he continued, “I’ll take a pass, out of respect, as to the assertion that the Nazis hated Jews because of the content of books the former almost certainly never read.”

My friend found it hard to imagine that the Nazis’ hatred was qualitatively different from the antipathy of various ethnic or national groups toward others. His materialistic outlook attributed no specialness to our mesorah and, hence, no rationale for how a movement based on power and paganism might find Torah a mortal threat to its success.

I can’t prove otherwise to him, but shared something to buttress Mr. Friedenson’s father’s observation, a memorandum discovered by the noted Holocaust historian Moshe Prager, a”h.

It was sent on October 25, 1940 by the chief of the German occupation power, I.A. Eckhardt, to the local Nazi district governors in occupied Poland. In it, he instructs German officials to refuse exit visas to “Ostjuden,” Jews from Eastern Europe.

Eckhardt explains that these Jews, as “Rabbiner un Talmudlehrer,” Rabbis and Talmud scholars, would, if allowed to emigrate, foster “die geistige erneuerung,” spiritual revival, of the Jewish people in other places.

So it seems that it wasn’t just Jews whom the Nazis hated, but Judaism. In fact, writing in 1930, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief ideologue, denounced “the honorless character of the Jew” – his take on the idea of personal conscience and devotion to the Creator – as “embodied in the Talmud and in Shulchan-Aruch.”

The “spiritual renewal” that the Nazi memo author so feared, baruch Hashem, despite the best evil efforts of the movement he championed, has in fact come to pass.

Torah-committed Jewish survivors helped rejuvenate Jewish life on these and other shores, rebuilding Jewish communal and educational institutions and fostering shemiras hamitzvos and, yes, Talmud study, in new lands. The scope and enthusiasm of the Siyum HaShas is powerful evidence of that.

Daf Yomi, of course, was introduced by Rav Meir Shapiro in 1923. It isn’t known how many attended the first or second Siyum HaShas. But, amazingly, right after the Holocaust, in 1945, thousands of Jews in Eretz Yisrael, the Feldafing Dispaced Persons camp and New York united to mark the third Siyum HaShas.

The 1968 Siyum at the Bais Yaakov of Borough Park drew 300 people; by 1975, at the 7^th Siyum, five thousand celebrants gathered at the Manhattan Center; and, at that gathering, the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah permanently dedicated the Siyum HaShas to the memory of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

The 1990 Siyum filled Madison Square Garden’s 20,000 seats. In 1997, the Siyum required both Madison Square Garden and the similar-sized Nassau Coliseum.

In 2012, the 12th Siyum Hashas filled MetLife Stadium with close to a hundred thousand Jews – joined at a distance in countless other locales by thousands of others.

The Talmud and its lehrers had emerged victorious.

Ironies abound on the path to that victory. Perhaps none, though, as astonishing as the format of a new publication of “Mein Kampf” in its original German, the first edition of Hitler’s rambling, anti-Semitic imaginings to be produced in Germany since the end of World War II.

Intended for scholars and libraries, it is heavily annotated to provide the elements of the screed with their necessary context.

The critical notes, however, are not presented in a traditional manner. The academic team that prepared the edition decided for some reason to instead “encircle” Hitler’s words with the deconstructing annotations.

Dan Michman, head of international research at Yad Vashem museum in Israel, described how, as a result, the pages would appear.

They will, he said, “look like the Talmud.”

A Lesson About Love

I used to pass the fellow each morning years ago as I walked up Broadway in lower Manhattan on my way to work. He would stand at the same spot and hold aloft, for the benefit of all passersby, one of several poster-board signs he had made. One read “I love you!” Another: “You are wonderful!”

He seemed fairly normal, well-groomed and decently dressed, and he smiled broadly as he offered his written expressions of ardor to each of us rushing to our respective workplaces. I never knew what had inspired his mission, but something about it bothered me.

Then, one day, I put my finger on it. It is ridiculously easy to profess true love for all the world, but a sincere such emotion simply isn’t possible. If one gushes good will at everyone, he offers it, in fact, to no one at all.

By definition, care must exist within boundaries, and our love for those close to us – our families, our close friends, our fellow Jews – is of a different nature than our empathy for others outside our personal lives.

What is more, and somewhat counterintuitive, is that only those who make the effort to love their immediate families, friends and other Jews have any chance of truly caring, on any level at all, about all of mankind.

The thought, it happens, is most appropriate for this time of Jewish year, as Sukkos gives way, without so much as a second’s pause, to Shemini Atzeres (in the Gemara’s words, “a Yom Tov unto itself.”)

While most Yamim Tovim tend to focus on Klal Yisrael and its particular historical narrative, Sukkos, interestingly, also includes something of a “universalist” element. In the times of the Beis Hamikdash, the seven days of Sukkos saw a total of seventy parim-korbanos offered on the mizbei’ach, the bulls corresponding, says the Gemara, to “the seventy nations of the world.”

Those nations – the various families of people on earth – are not written off by our mesorah. We Jews are here, the Navi exhorts, to be an example to them. A mere four days before Sukkos’s arrival, on Yom Kippur, Yidden the world over heard Sefer Yonah, the story of the Navi who was sent to warn a distant people to do teshuvah, and who, in the end, saved them from destruction.

Similarly, the korbanos in the Beis Hamikdash, the Gemara informs us, brought Divine brachos down upon all the world’s peoples. Had the ancient Romans known just how greatly they benefited from the merit of the avodah, Chazal teach, instead of destroying the structure, they would have placed protective guards around it.

And yet, curiously but pointedly, Sukkos’s recognition of the value of all humanity is made real by the Chag that directly follows it, Shemini Atzeres.

The word atzeres can mean “refraining” or “detaining,” and the Gemara (Sukkah, 55b) teaches that Shemini Atzeres (literally: “the eighth day [after the start of Sukkos], a detaining”) gives expression to Hashem’s special relationship with Klal Yisrael.

As the well-known Midrashic mashal has it:

A king invited his servants to a large feast that lasted a number of days. On the final day of the festivities, the king told the one most beloved to him, “Prepare a small repast for me so that I can enjoy your exclusive company.”

That is Shemini Atzeres, when Hashem “detains” the people He chose to be an example to the rest of mankind – when, after the seventy korbanos of the preceding seven days, a single par, corresponding to Klal Yisrael, is brought on the mizbei’ach on that eighth day.

We Jews are often assailed by others for our belief that Hashem chose us from among the nations to proclaim His existence and to call on all humankind to recognize our collective immeasurable debt to Him.

Those who are irritated by that message like to characterize the special bond Jews feel for one another as hubris, even as contempt for others.

The very contrary, however, is the truth. The special relationship we Jews have with each other (yielding ahavas Yisrael); and with Hakadosh Baruch Hu (yielding ahavas Hashem) – the relationships we acknowledge in particular on Shemini Atzeres – are what provide us the ability to truly care – with our hearts, not our mere lips or poster boards – about the rest of the world.

Those deep relationships are what allow us to hope – as we declare in Aleinu thrice daily – that, even as we reject the idolatries that have infected the human race over history, “all the peoples of the world” will one day come to join together with us and “pay homage to the glory of Your name.”

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life