Category Archives: Politics

A Halachic Query of Jordanian King Abdullah II

Dear King Abdullah,

I’m quite sure you don’t remember me.  I was part of a sizable group of Jewish leaders, clergy, politicians and organizational representatives whom you, along with the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution, invited to a gala lunch in a posh Manhattan hotel nine years ago.

To jog your memory, though, I was the fellow with the beard and black hat, and whose lips you may have noticed quietly moving when you entered the room.  I was reciting a Jewish blessing that is to be pronounced when one sees a king.  It goes “Blessed are You, G-d, Who has given of His glory to flesh and blood.”  It is, for obvious reasons, not a common blessing to make, and I was happy to have the occasion to invoke it.

I remember well your address to the crowd.  Its essence was your hope that Jews and Muslims might be able, despite political differences, to attain respect for each other’s religious beliefs.  Your message was a vision, of a human race unified by its members’ recognition of the worth and dignity of one another.  We, you may remember, applauded loudly and enthusiastically.

We learned, too, about how you had undertaken a brave and visionary mission: to marginalize Muslim extremism of the sort that continues to plague the civilized world.  You recounted how you had organized a conference of respected religious leaders from all the major schools of Islam to endorse a document that explicitly asserts the responsibility of Muslims to honor “every human being, without distinction of color, race or religion” and to “shun violence and cruelty.”  That last phrase particularly has stayed with me, and I recalled it recently.

It was when two Palestinian men, as you surely know, entered a synagogue in western Jerusalem where Jewish men were engrossed in prayer, and mercilessly hacked or shot four of them to death.  The attackers killed a police officer who rushed to the scene as well. And as they engaged in their slaughter of innocents, they shouted a declaration of Islamic faith, as so many murderers of Jews have done over recent years, months and weeks.  Eventually, police shot and killed the rampaging killers.

Your Parliament’s reaction to this rather striking example of religious “violence and cruelty,” to borrow your phrase, was to observe a moment of silence, in memory… not of the victims but of their murderers.  Verses from the Koran (“to glorify their pure souls,” a member of your Parliament helpfully explained) introduced the memorial moment.

Shortly thereafter, according to published reports, your Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour sent a condolence letter to the families of the murderers.

And then, in a broadcast interview, a member of your Parliament, Rudaina Ati, praised “the [Jerusalem synagogue] operation” for sending “a clear message to the Zionist entity…”; and called on Arabs to use violence to “liberate Palestine from the colonialist Jews,” the “filthy Jews [who live] on the land of Palestine.”

All of which leads me to my question.  According to Halacha, or Jewish religious law, the blessing that I pronounced when I saw you nine years ago is only proper and only permitted when the monarch one sees has true monarchial power over his subjects, when he is someone whose subjects would not dare stand up in violation of their king’s decrees or initiatives.

The utterance of a Jewish blessing, moreover, which includes G-d’s name, is considered by Halacha to be a very serious matter.  One may not pronounce a blessing unless it is truly required.  Otherwise it remains a bracha livatalah, a “pointless blessing.”

I have many sins to confess to my Maker, and indeed I recite a confessional prayer daily.  My question to you is whether I should include in my confession the sin, even if it was committed unintentionally, of having uttered a bracha livatalah when I saw you nine years ago.

Thank you in advance for your response.

A. Shafran

© 2014 Hamodia

Status (Quo) Update

ITEM: In the wake of the shooting in Jerusalem of political activist Yehuda Glick, allegedly by an Islamic Jihad member who was killed by police after he fired at them, and the subsequent closing of the mosque on Har HaBayis to Muslim worshippers for several hours, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to maintain the “status quo” at the site.

ITEM: Mr. Netanyahu insisted that Israel is indeed “determined to maintain the status quo” at the holy site.

Status Quo: A Latin phrase meaning the existing state of affairs.  The related phrase often intended by “status quo” is status quo ante, or, “the state of affairs that existed previously.”

It is unfortunate, in fact tragic, that a mosque occupies the site where the Beis Hamikdash stood and will one day stand again.  But the state of Israel respects the understandable 1967 decision of then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol after the Six Day War, when Yerushalayim was reunited, to cede control of access to Har HaBayis to Jerusalem’s Islamic Waqf, or religious trust. Even to the point of prohibiting Jewish prayer on the site, in seeming violation of at least the spirit of the state’s “Preservation of the Holy Places Law” enacted that same year.

All of which should be a pointed reminder that, the state of Israel notwithstanding, we clearly remain in galus.  But there is no practical issue here, as the recognized poskei hador have made clear that it is halachically forbidden for a Jew to ascend to the Har Habayis.

What’s interesting, however, is Mr. Netanyahu’s declared respect for the status quo.

Because he only recently succumbed to pressure brought to bear by ministers Tzipi Livni, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman and lent his support to the conversion bill passed by his cabinet.  That enactment will permit municipal rabbis to hold special conversion courts, allowing for multiple conversion standards and potentially creating a class of tens of thousands of Israelis who are recognized as Jewish by the state but whose conversions did not meet accepted halachic requirements.

Rabbi Seth Farber, a conversion liberalization activist, hailed the enactment as “the first major reform in religion and state that has the potential to fundamentally change the status quo in Israel.”  Indeed.

Then there is the “Equal Burden of Service” law, which, earlier this year, ended exemptions for charedi yeshiva students from military service, exploding another status quo that has existed since the founding of Israel.

More recently, a feminist group has insisted that it be permitted to publicly and vocally hold its “progressive” services, which greatly offend Orthodox Jews, at the Kosel plaza.  The group’s members were given an area in front of another part of the Kosel for their “non-traditional” services.  But they insist on changing the… status quo at the Kosel.

A few years ago I had the privilege of addressing the issue of “Jewish Pluralism” in Israel before general (mostly Jewish but decidedly non-Orthodox) audiences on two university campuses.  One point I made was that, contrary to many people’s assumption, none of the socioreligious conflicts in Israel have been engendered by the country’s religious populace.  All were initiated by people seeking to change the status quo that has served Israel well since its inception by maintaining a modus vivendi among its religious, traditional and secular citizens.

Some of the listeners seemed surprised to be confronted by that fact, despite its obvious truth.   They had been fed so steady a diet of rhetoric about “creeping haredization” and “religious coercion” that they hadn’t noticed that it was junk food.

Pretty much whatever the religious/secular crisis du jour may be – images on buses in Meah Shearim, the closure of streets in religious neighborhoods, allotment of government funding for the institutions of new “Judaisms” – the conflict has been produced by those intent on changing things, not those committed to preserving them.

There is nothing necessarily or inherently bad, of course, about change, at least responsible change.  But making changes in time-honored agreements and undertakings, especially at the expense of upsetting longstanding accommodations, offending in the process large numbers of heartfelt Jews and doing violence to amity and good will is, well, as Mr. Netanyahu intimated with regard to the Har HaBayis, deeply unwise.

And so, the question practically shouts itself from the rooftops of Yerushalayim: Why is the ideal of maintaining peace and harmony by preserving the status quo sufficiently sublime to apply to the Muslim world, but not to the Jewish one?

© 2014 Hamodia

Misplaced Zeal

The powerful swell of voices on Broadway, thirteen stories below Agudath Israel’s offices, did more than disturb my concentration.  A thousand people were blocking traffic and loudly chanting in unison, the roar less redolent of “Hashem hu ho’Elokim!” at Neila’s end than of what I imagine “Kill the Jews!” must have sounded like during pogroms. Which was ironic, considering that, in light of the cause and location, a large number of the shouters were likely Jewish.

The “Flood Wall Street” event was but a weak echo of what had taken place a day earlier, when an estimated 300,000 people (including members of close to 100 Jewish groups, parts of the “Jewish Climate Campaign”), participated in the “People’s Climate March” on the West Side of Manhattan.  But the smaller demonstration was large enough and loud enough for me.  I had to wonder what made the chanting seem so sinister

It may have had to do with something the late writer Michael Crichton famously asserted, that people “have to believe in something that gives meaning” to their lives, and that “environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.”  (And, I’d add, even for some who may believe in a Creator but just don’t fully trust Him.)

Environmentalism, Mr. Crichton elaborated, posits “an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature,” then “a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge”—i.e. technology and exploitation of natural resources—and that “as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.”

“We are all energy sinners,” he concluded, paraphrasing the new religion’s world-view, “doomed to die, unless we seek salvation.”

MIT Meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen similarly labeled environmentalism a religion, its devotees convinced “that they are in possession of a higher truth” and intolerant of “heretics, or ‘climate change deniers,’ to use green parlance.”

And so it may have been religious zeal that I heard in the din from below.  And while zeal is a good thing when sourced in commitment to the true religion, its emergence from a misguided one is cause for alarm.  (See: Medieval Christianity, Contemporary Islamism…)

To be sure, the earth’s climate is changing.  But it has changed many times over the millennia, even over recent centuries. Enviro-zealots are convinced that the current climate change signals the end of the world (or, at least, the destruction of the world as we know it), and that humanity is at fault for the impending doom (and has the power to head it off).

Some of us, though, feel that a passuk we recite daily – “Tremble before Him, all the earth; indeed, the world is fixed so that it cannot falter” (Divrei Hayomim 1 16:30) – reassures us that Hashem has built self-correcting mechanisms into nature, and that our zeal should be reserved for Torah-study and mitzvos.

For daring to challenge the contemporary party line, though, anyone in the least skeptical about the planet’s prognosis is vilified by those who believe that humans can break and, alone, make the earth.  The protesters were not just vocal and loud, they were angry.

A recent ScienceTimes section in the New York Times was dedicated largely to cris de coeur about climate change.  Hidden among the Chicken Little alarms, however, were some interesting tidbits.

Like the fact that polar bears on Hudson Bay, deprived of ice coverage, and thus seals, in the summer, are feasting instead on a windfall of snow geese, birds that, due to the same warming that caused the ice to recede, have migrated north from the American south and Midwest.  And that some varieties of soybeans “grow especially well in high carbon dioxide levels.”  And that in naturalist Diane Ackerman’s words, “A warmer world won’t be terrible for everyone and it’s bound to inspire new technologies and good surprises…”  And that Mongolian herders, deprived by drought of grasslands, have been moving to cities, where members of families of erstwhile nomads are now gainfully employed and enjoying the benefits of electricity and indoor plumbing for the first time.

None of which is to deny the possibility that we do well to explore alternate energy sources and pollute less.  It’s only to note the deep complexity and unpredictability of change in the natural world, and the great resourcefulness and creativity that Hashem has planted in human minds.

And to lead us to consider that environmentalism may be but the latest of the “isms” about which Rav Elchonon Wasserman, zt”l, warned.

© 2014 Hamodia

Enemies, Real and Imagined

1)      Hamas is evil.

2)      Israel has a responsibility to protect its citizens.

3)      Anti-Israel sentiment is usually simple Jew-hatred in (not very good) disguise.

4)      The United States needs to be fully supportive of Israel.

5)      It has been.

Some would take issue with that last sentence.  They are wrong.  And it behooves Klal Yisroel, which is meant to be imbued with the concept of hakaras hatov, to recognize that fact.

Over the past six years, some have come to imagine that the current occupant of the White House is some sort of adversary of Israel.

Anyone, of course, can disagree with President Obama on any or all issues, even, perhaps, to just dislike him for no good reason, as some apparently do. But for those of us who (even though we expected the worst, considering some of the baggage he brought to Pennsylvania Avenue) have carefully observed him, he has proven himself more than worthy of Jewish respect.

Yet he was pounced upon, after his famous 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world for, well, the simple decision to address that world; and for basing the state of Israel’s legitimacy on the Holocaust.  What seemed to be overlooked, though, was that he made a full-throated argument for Muslim acceptance of Israel and rejection of terrorism.  And he can hardly be faulted for not raising a Torah-based argument on behalf of the Jewish right to Eretz Yisroel.

In subsequent years, he had the US boycott the Durban Conference, rejected the Goldstone Report, strongly backed the Iron Shield and David’s Sling programs (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, beyond the $3 billion the US has given Israel annually) and bluntly, publicly reiterated that the entire Arab world needs to accept Israel as a Jewish state.  He wasted not a minute in the middle of the night to, by threatening Egypt, effect the rescue of endangered Israeli embassy guards in Cairo, and condemned the Palestinian Authority’s denial of the Kosel Ma’aravi’s connection to the Jewish people.

Under Mr. Obama’s watch, moreover, the US conducted the largest joint American-Israeli military exercise in history.  And he has demonstrated determination to neutralize Islamic terrorists, including with drones and targeted assassinations (like that of Mr. Bin Laden), gravely disappointing many of his left-wing long-time supporters.  They are not likely much heartened, either, by his recent decision to launch airstrikes against Islamists in Iraq.

When Hadar Goldin, Hy”d, was reported missing, an anti-Israel, or even Israel-neutral, leader would simply have considered him a prisoner of war.  Mr. Obama publicly demanded his return.  And in asking for a cease-fire, the president made any final truce unconditionally dependent on a demilitarization of Gaza.  To ignore any of that is to forfeit any claim, leave aside hakaras hatov, to fairness – or emes.

Nor is it fair to characterize the president’s words of concern for civilians in Gaza as somehow antithetical to his support for Israel’s right to defend herself; he explicitly reiterated the latter each time he voiced the former.  Nor is it justified to lambaste Secretary of State John Kerry, a stalwart defender of Israel for the nearly 30 years of his public service, for promoting a draft peace proposal that, in fact, he had never put forth.

Some Israeli media are not guiltless here.  They slurred Mr. Kerry and “reported” details of a purported private telephone call between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu; the transcript, it turned out, was a fabrication, according to both the White House and Mr. Netanyahu.

To be sure, there has been friction between the Israeli and American leaders over past years, but which of them is at fault for that is entirely arguable. In our zeal to defend Israel, we sometimes forget that Mr. Netanyahu, whatever good qualities he may possess, is neither a novi nor a godol.  He is not, we do well to realize, beyond either errors of judgment or faults of character.  The issue here isn’t the relationship between two men, but rather Mr. Obama’s support of the state of Israel’s needs.  And in that he has acquitted himself well.

Yes, the US State Department harshly condemned an apparent Israeli shelling of an area near a school filled with Gazan civilians that killed ten people, and urged Israel to do more to “avoid civilian casualties.”  Yet that entirely understandable reaction (who among us didn’t cringe at the news ourselves?) didn’t prevent President Obama from, the very next day, signing a bill to give Israel $225 million to restock its Iron Dome missile defense system, or from declaring as he did that his administration is determined “to make sure that Israel is able to protect its citizens.”

There is a reason that people like left-wing political activist Professor Cornel West have declared Mr. Obama a “war criminal” for his support of Israel.

We’re still in golus, of course; Tisha B’Av was only days ago.  And in golus, Klal Yisrael is supposed to be, and always has been, respectful of even less-than-friendly leaders of the lands in which we live.  The phrase “kal vachomer” is inadequate to convey how we should feel about the United States’ current leader.

As events distant and recent alike well attest, Klal Yisrael has enough true enemies out there. Why in the world would we want to treat a friend like one?

© 2014 Hamodia

Ugly Times

It could well be, as some have charged, that the New York Times’ choice of photographs to accompany its reportage from Israel and Gaza has been skewed to emphasize Hamas’ grievances; or it could be that the imbalance of photos is merely a manifestation of the old journalistic adage “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Despite my general satisfaction with the paper’s actual reportage on the conflict, I lean to the former judgment.  And I have similar misgivings about headlines that are created for dispatches.  It’s not widely known that media have “headline writers” over whom reporters have no control.  There have been several examples of headlines that didn’t truly reflect the articles beneath them, and in ways that led readers (of the headlines alone, at least – and that’s a lot of readers) to regard Israel negatively.

A recent Times report began with the following sentences: “Militant rockets can be seen launching from crowded neighborhoods, near apartment buildings, schools and hotels. Hamas fighters have set traps for Israeli soldiers in civilian homes and stored weapons in mosques and schools. Tunnels have been dug beneath private property.”  Its headline?  “Israel Says That Hamas Uses Civilian Shields, Reviving Debate,” as if the technical issue of the legal definition of a human shield under international law (and what “Israel Says” about it) were more compelling than the undisputed facts that open it.  The technical definition debate is part of the piece, to be sure.  But the more essential facts that the headline might well have synopsized were what the piece’s first sentences describe.

Another head of the hydra that is the Old Grey Lady is its business department, which recently demonstrated an astoundingly deficient judgment. In an advertisement in its July 20 travel section touting a New York Times tour package to Israel and the West Bank, the paper touts how participants in its offering will experience “a fascinating journey through the geographical, cultural, historical and political landscapes of the region.”  And the “featured expert” for, presumably, the latter landscape is… Hanan Ashrawi.

Ms. Ashwari, of course is a well-known Palestinian activist, legislator and member of the PLO’s Executive Committee; and her portrayals of Israel are little short of rabid.  Citing her denial (in Arabic, in an Arab periodical) that there were ever any Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris remarked that “Hanan Ashrawi is to truth what smoking is to health.”

The articulate but malign Ms. Ashwari regularly uses terms like “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” and “the premeditated killing of civilians” with regard to Israel.  “Israel’s calculated crimes” is one of her particularly cherished phrases.

Back in 2000, when two Israeli reservists, having mistakenly entered Ramallah, were captured, killed and grossly mutilated to the cheers of crowds (remember the fellow elatedly displaying his bloody hands for all to see?), Ms. Ashwari asserted, defensively and falsely, that the pair of soldiers (who were wearing army fatigues and whose car bore Israeli plates) were “undercover Israeli agents that had infiltrated” the town and were recognized by her fellow Palestinians “as members of the Death Squads that had been responsible for assassinations and provocations” (Jordan Times, Oct. 29, 2000).

Two years earlier, Ms. Ashrawi founded MIFTAH – the “Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy,” which was caught a number of times offering alleged quotes of Israeli leaders that turned out to be invented.  Last year it was forced to remove an article from its website that, in the context of attacking President Obama for hosting Pesach sedarim in the White House, accused Jews of using “the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.”  (The group, graciously, later offered its “sincerest regret” for the error.)

More recently, the Palestinian propagandist said that “Israel’s military assault on Gaza constitutes an act of state terror and a deliberate war crime” and that Israel’s building in the West Bank and Jerusalem “constitute another aspect of Israel’s aggression and impunity.”

So, to put it most mildly, Ms. Ashwari is about the least objective observer one might choose to feature as the “expert” to enlighten tourists seeking an objective and factual lesson about the region’s political situation.  But she was the Times’ choice.

One has to wonder if the newspaper would ever have dared offer, say, a right-wing member of the Knesset (whose most extreme member would pale in radicalism next to the choice the paper made) for the edification of American visitors partaking of one of its tourism packages.

Alerted to the advertisement by an Agudath Israel constituent, I immediately wrote the paper’s “public editor” or ombudsman, to ask about the wisdom of the choice of “expert” for the tour.  On July 21, her assistant, Jonah Bromwich, replied that although ads are not part of the public editor’s bailiwick he would pass on my note to an executive in the paper’s advertising department.

Despite several follow-up inquiries, Mr. Bromwich informed me that my communications had all been forwarded to the advertising department, but that “unfortunately,” he “cannot compel them to respond.”

 © 2014 Hamodia

Letter in the New York Times

To the Editor:

“A Damaging Distance” (news analysis, Sunday Review, July 13) may well be right that the reduced interaction between Arabs and Israelis is lamentable. But to attribute Israel’s erection of a barrier wall between Palestinian land and Israeli land to “the common wisdom that the two nations needed not greater intimacy but complete separation” ignores something rather important.

The wall was built for one reason: to prevent terrorism. In the three-year period after its erection, only a handful of murderous attacks were carried out in Israel. In the three-year period before it was built, 73 such attacks took place, and 293 Israelis were murdered as a result.

(Rabbi) AVI SHAFRAN
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
New York, July 13, 2014

Bias Vs. Backbone

A sports team owner’s base racism was all the talk of the world town last week.  But a more subtle – and thus more dangerous – prejudice has been on public display, too, of late.  It was largely ignored, however, likely because the bias revealed was against charedi  Jews.

The opportunity for expressing the bias was the situation in the Monsey-area East Ramapo school district, whose public schools service a largely minority population but where there are many yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs.  And a prominent salvo in the recent bias-barrage was fired by New York Times columnist Michael Powell, who pens a column in the paper highlighting people against whom the writer has rendered his personal judgment of guilt.

His villains in an April 7 offering titled “A School Board That Overlooks Its Obligation To Students” were the Orthodox Jewish members of that entity, which is charged with overseeing the workings and government funding of all schools in the district.  Of the approximately 30,000 school children in the district, roughly 22,000 are in yeshivos; the remaining 8,000 are in public schools.

Mr. Powell began his piece by lamenting the laying off of assistant principals, art teachers and a band leader at the district’s public schools, as well as the curtailing of athletics programs and the rise in some class sizes.

The problem, the writer informs us, began with the “migration” of “the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn – the Satmar, the Bobover and other sects” to the area.  Intent on “recreat[ing] the shtetls of Eastern Europe,” he explains, the newcomers have been “voting in disciplined blocs,” resulting in “an Orthodox-dominated board” that has “ensured that the community’s geometric expansion would be accompanied by copious tax dollars for textbooks and school buses.”  In case the bad guys’ black hats aren’t sufficiently evident, he takes pains to add his assertion that “public education became an afterthought” to the board.  The piece is accompanied by a photograph of a sad-looking black mother hugging her even sadder-looking son.

Then one Ari Hart, representing a Jewish social justice organization, Uri L’Tzedek, jumped aboard the bandwagon with an opinion piece in the New York Jewish Week.  Insinuating that the school board members are contemporary Shylocks, he righteously invokes Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, who forbade yeshivos from taking government funds for which they do not qualify.  The article was titled “East Ramapo’s Children Are Suffering.”

What is really suffering here, though, is truth.

State funding to all school districts, including East Ramapo, is based on a statutory formula involving property values, income levels and public school student numbers.  Wealthier districts, fairly, receive less government funding than poorer ones.

For most school districts, where the large majority of students attend public schools, the state aid formula accurately identifies districts that are poor and require more aid, and those that are wealthy and require less aid.

East Ramapo, however, because of its odd student demographic and relatively high property values, is funded, following the formula, as if it were one of the wealthiest school districts in the state – when it is in fact one of the poorest.

The critics seem unaware (or choose to ignore) that all schoolchildren, even Orthodox ones, need textbooks and a way to get to school, and are legally entitled to both. School boards are thus mandated to allocate the funds necessary to meet those needs for both public and nonpublic school students; they would be in violation of the law were they to neglect that obligation.  Unfortunately, because of the state allocation formula and substantial budget cuts over recent years, insufficient funds have remained to support public school programs in the district than had existed in years past.

The East Ramapo School Board’s members have disbursed the funds entrusted to them the only way they could – the only way any responsible school board could possibly do so.

Why, then, their vilification?  Good question.  There are, I believe, two answers.  One is that a common, if mindless, conclusion when members of ethnic minorities level charges of wrongdoing against others is that the latter are guilty until proven innocent – in some cases, as here, even afterward.  Secondly, while there are crass bigots like Donald Sterling there are also more “refined” ones, who take care to hide their bigotries behind a mask of high-mindedness.

Something, however, happened this past week that should give pause to those intent on assuming the worst about charedi Jews and on trumpeting their assumptions.

At a press conference in Monsey, some 75 people gathered to speak, hear or report on a new initiative, “Community United for Formula Change,” launched by a group of local charedi, black and Latino activists, who are working together to address the problem of the East Ramapo school district’s inadequate funding.  Among those involved in the initiative are Chassidic rabbis, pastors of Latino and Haitian churches, and American-born black community members.

I was privileged to be present at the conference, as a representative of Agudath Israel of America, which is concerned with the acrimony in East Ramapo and is backing a bill in Albany that would allow an alternative state educational funding formula to be used in Rockland County.  I was struck by the friendship, unified spirit and determination among the multi-ethnic backers of the initiative.

One black speaker at the press conference, Brendel Charles (a councilwoman for the town of Ramapo, but who attended as a parent of two public school children), told Tablet magazine that “she originally believed the problem was that the ultra-Orthodox members of the board were making decisions without regard to others in the community.”

“I thought that there could be a possibility that there was something wrong,” she said, “that there could be a prejudice of [their] thinking, ‘We don’t have to give them that [they felt], because it doesn’t really matter’.”

She recalled hearing another parent suggest that “Well, we want to send the Jews back to Israel.”  Worse things were in fact said openly at school board meetings. One speaker compared the board to “Pontius Pilate washing his hands, or the soldier who has committed war crimes who claims he was only following orders.”

But when Ms. Charles’ husband joined the East Ramapo school board, she recounted, he quickly “realized that… the school board members weren’t trying to hurt the public school kids,” but rather that “we don’t have the money” to provide the services needed.

Ms. Charles, according to Tablet, “criticized those in her community who have allowed the situation to deteriorate” and is quoted as saying, “It’s been a war.  It’s become religious against non-religious, black against white, them against us.  ‘Their children are getting everything, our children are not.’  And that’s the wrong energy.  The color is green.  We don’t have enough money.  That’s the problem.”

Michael Powell, Ari Hart and others like them would do well to hear those words well, and to realize that people of good will and intelligence, of different colors and creeds, understand what needs to be done in East Ramapo.  And, rather than rabble-rouse or prance around on bandwagons, they have chosen the constructive path, and set themselves to the task at hand.

© 2014 Hamodia

Social Injustice

It was Albert Camus’ insight that bad things often result from ignorance, and that “good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

He could have been writing of the good souls whose desire for social justice has impelled them to smear members of the East Ramapo School District board for increased public school class size and cuts in school programs and extracurricular activities like sports and music.

A Jewish group, Uri L’Tzedek, is among the critics of the board, and contends that the majority “fervently Orthodox” members of the school board have been unfair to the primarily African-American, Haitian and Hispanic public school student population.  In these pages, a founder of the group, Rabbi Ari Hart, amplified its objections in passionate terms (“East Ramapo’s Children Are Suffering”).  Unfortunately, passion is no replacement for understanding

Rabbi Hart claims to have conducted a “careful review of the facts” and to have spoken to “leaders from the Jewish and non-Jewish community.”  But he apparently didn’t speak to any of the members of the school board.  Had he done so, he would have encountered the critical fact that undermines the slander he has accepted and promoted

State funding to all school districts, including East Ramapo, is based on a statutory formula involving property values, income levels and public school student numbers.  Education funds are provided accordingly; wealthier districts, fairly, receive less government funding than poorer ones.

For most school districts, where the large majority of students attend public schools, the state aid formula accurately identifies districts that are poor and require more aid, and those that are wealthy and require less aid.

East Ramapo, however, has an odd demographic: approximately 20,000 students in nonpublic schools, only about half that number in public schools – and relatively high property values, resulting in a totally skewed picture of the public school population’s wealth.  The district is thus funded, pursuant to the statutory formula, as if it were one of the wealthiest school districts in the state – when it is in fact one of the poorest.

The bottom line result is that the state provides the district with insufficient funds for meeting anything beyond the bare-bone requirements of the law.

Some of those requirements, like per-student book allocations and bus transportation, apply not only to public school children but to their nonpublic school counterparts (who also need textbooks and a way to get to school).  The district would be in stark violation of the law were it to direct resources to the public schools that would entail neglecting its legal obligations to the nonpublic schools.

No evidence has been produced that the East Ramapo School Board’s members have disbursed the state and other funds entrusted to them in anything but a responsible manner, meeting the state’s mandated requirements before budgeting other programs.

East Ramapo Superintendent Joel M. Klein (who is not an Orthodox Jew) has noted that program cuts were due to $10 million worth of cuts in state funding and $960,000 worth of cuts to federal funding.

“You can blame it on Jews, you can blame it on yeshivas,” said Mr. Klein, but the flawed state aid formula and funding cutbacks are the real culprit.

“When you lose $10 million on a $200 million budget,” he explained, “you have to make cuts. One year it’s arts and music, the next year it’s full-day kindergarten. We had to cut over 400 staff positions. No matter who was on the board, they would have made the same decisions.”

To insinuate, as Rabbi Hart and other crusaders against imagined charedi villains have done here, that East Ramapo school board members have somehow favored yeshivos over public schools is unjustified, irresponsible and dangerous, as it fosters anti-Semitism, which in fact is reported to have increased in recent weeks.

A malodorous red herring thrown into the mix by Rabbi Hart involves a sale of an unused public school building to a yeshiva.  An appraiser was accused of having assigned a value to the structure less than its market value.

Superintendent Klein, however, notes that the school board was not aware of the undervaluation.  And, in any event, it was not part of any pattern, and has no pertinence to the board’s allocations of the funds entrusted to it, which have treated public and nonpublic school students equitably and responsibly.

In his quest to portray East Ramapo school board members as Shylocks, Rabbi Hart invokes the celebrated halachic decisor Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who unequivocally forbade yeshivos from taking government funds for which they do not qualify.

Rabbi Feinstein’s responsum is indeed important and binding – and irrelevant to the problems in the East Ramapo school district.  Be that as it may, using it to tar good people who are endeavoring to do exactly what it instructs is uncouth, indeed odious.  A more basic text that Uri L’tzedek would do better to ponder is Leviticus, specifically the verse “You shall not go around as a gossipmonger among your people.”

And all the vocal critics of the East Ramapo school board would do better to focus their passions on advocating for an intelligent state funding formula for the district – the lack of which is the real problem here.

 © 2014 New York Jewish Week

The Devil’s In The Daydreams

One would be forgiven, especially were one an optimist, for imagining that recent reports of the government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s donation of $400,000 to a Teheran Jewish hospital might signal something positive about Iran’s current leadership.  With Purim within sight, the idea of good news coming out of Persia is an enticing one.

Our theoretical optimist would also likely have been gratified by the words of the hospital’s director, Dr. Ciamak Morsadegh, who said the Iranian leader “is showing that we [Jews], as a religious minority, are part of this country, too.”

But the Iranian leader’s smiles, largesse and (to flashback several months) Rosh Hashana good wishes to the world’s Jews were lopsidedly outweighed by another recent report, this one provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

(MEMRI, the single most valuable news source for happenings in the Arab and Muslim worlds, does not profess or evidence any political stance; it simply translates and makes available speeches, media reports and other information, positive and negative alike, that aren’t otherwise accessible to the English-reading public.)

The report included a video clip and transcript of a broadcast aired on Iran television’s Channel 1 on February 6.  It is remarkable.

The video consists of a simulation – not quite up to the latest Hollywood special effects standards but which might hold its own against a 1980s disaster film – of Iranian planes and missiles attacking civilian and military targets in Israel.

Footage of ostensible missile-equipped “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or drones, in flight are accompanied by  voice-over comments like “Iranian UAVs entering stealth mode in order to evade enemy radar” and “Iranian UAVs passing over the Iron Dome systems of Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

The planes are shown bombing target after target (bulls-eyes all, of course): Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli “missile bases in Jericho,” an Israeli Defense Ministry “emergency meeting,” the Dimona nuclear reactor and Haifa’s airport and refineries.  Missiles streak forth, spectacular explosions ensue and, presumably, large numbers of people are incinerated. Actual news footage is interspersed here and there from what seem to be terrorist attacks in Israel, with wounded people staggering about and emergency personnel frantically trying to help.

Nor is America spared in the Iranian blood-lust fantasy.  Attacks on the mainland aren’t portrayed – the producers apparently wished to keep things within the realm of believability – but an American aircraft carrier stood in for the country.

“The USS Abraham Lincoln” is shown in the Straits of Hormuz and its commander is sternly warned by an Iranian official by radio.

“Commander of Abraham Lincoln, Navy,” he intones.  “You have entered the Islamic Republic of Iran’s marine borders. Immediately leave this zone. I say again: Immediately leave this zone. Otherwise, we will have to defend our territory.”

After which Iranian missiles are fired, and the American ship is destroyed in a succession of fireballs.

It’s all primitive and risible propaganda, to be sure, intended for internal Iranian consumption.  But what does it say, in the end, about the Rouhani regime if that is what it feeds the country’s populace, if it is seeking to prepare them not for détente but for war?

The current “Geneva Agreement” between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., consists of a short-term freeze of crucial portions of Iran’s nuclear program and its daily monitoring by international inspectors, in exchange for decreased economic sanctions; and it is intended as a time-buyer as the countries work toward forging a permanent agreement.

No one can know whether that strategy will bear fruit in the long term.  But what the world powers need to know, even as they pursue diplomatic solutions to the threat that is Iran, is that they are dealing with a government that may occasionally present a reasonable face but whose internal fantasies are dark and destructive, a leadership whose sociable smiles are belied by its devilish daydreams

A snake can seem to smile, too, and can even, with skill, be rendered docile, at least for a time.  But it’s always necessary to remember that, however quiescent and cooperative the creature might seem, it’s still, in the end, a snake.

© 2014 Rabbi Avi Shafran

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