The Eternal Jew (-Baiting)

The evolution of “traditional” lies used over the centuries to persecute, exile and murder Jews into new and, so to speak, improved forms would be amusing were it not so dangerous.

During the years of the Black Death in the late Middle Ages, when death tolls in some towns were as high as 50%, the famously favored scapegoat was “the Jews,” thousands of whom were murdered, many of them burned alive, in the 1300s. 

The conspiracy theory back then was that Jews had been poisoning wells in order to kill non-Jews. The theme of Jews as diabolical poisoners was updated in the 20th century by Joseph Stalin in his “Doctors Plot,” in which most of the medical professionals whom he falsely accused of plotting to poison government officials were Jewish. More recent years have seen sundry neo-Nazis accuse Jews of spreading new diseases; and even, more recently, genteel suggestions that polio outbreaks were caused by Jewish anti-vaxers.

Guess what’s back now… Poisoned wells!

“I’m very concerned about my water,” lamented Ms. Grace Clark, of Upper Saddle River, N.J., fearful of what a Jewish cemetery uphill from her home might do to her children. “My kids play” in a nearby brook, she explained, “all the time.”

“We are observing an environmental train wreck in slow motion,” was how Heather Federico of nearby Mahwah chose to characterize that planned final resting place for Orthodox Jews.

I don’t know if either lady was inspired by – or even aware of – the sordid history of blaming Jews for well-tampering. 

What I do know, though, thanks to the alacrity of Yeshiva University’s Dr. Moshe Krakowski, is that Ms. Federico and two other concerned citizens quoted in a May 11 story in The New York Times about the Har Shalom Cemetery in Rockland County, N.Y., are regulars on the website of Rise Up Ocean County, the infamous New Jersey group that has been repeatedly called out, even banned for “hate speech” by Facebook, for antisemitic postings. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy denounced the group for “racist and antisemitic statements” and “an explicit goal of preventing Orthodox Jews from moving to Ocean County.”

The Rockland County property at issue, the Times helpfully explains, is, at some 20 acres, “expected to become the largest cemetery in the country reserved solely for ultra-Orthodox Jews.”

Also upsetting some local residents is a mikvah under construction across the street from the cemetery.

Both developments were approved by zoning and planning boards. What they have in common is that they will make life (and death) easier for Orthodox Jews. And help attract them to settle in the area.

That’s not, of course, what the fearful New York and nearby New Jersey residents say is the source of their concern. Their health and wellbeing, they insist, is motivating  them.

And indeed, it’s true that cemeteries contribute to ground and groundwater contamination. 

Formaldehyde, menthol, phenol, and glycerin are just a few of the toxins that seep into cemetery grounds. Some 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are placed in the ground each year due to “conventional” burials.

What the word “conventional” refers to, though, are burials that take place after embalming. And that often use caskets made of metals like copper and bronze, which can also leach into the ground. Jewish burials, of course, involve no embalming chemicals and only a simple, safely degradable pine casket. That is what is referred to as “natural” burial, and is entirely kind to the environment.

In 1940, the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda released the film Der Ewige Jude, “The Eternal Jew,” which became wildly popular in Germany and throughout occupied Europe. In one famously notorious sequence, it showed hordes of rats, which, the narrator explains, spread disease. “Just,” he continues, “as the Jews do to mankind.”

Popular broadcaster Tucker Carlson, fired in April by Fox News, recently appeared on a social media platform to rail against U.S. support for Ukraine and, in particular, against its Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he called “a persecutor of Christians.” A weird charge, one not even Russian President Putin has made.

Mr. Carlson added his assertion that Mr. Zelenskyy is “rat-like.”

Well poisoning. Jews as rats. 

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

© 2023 Ami Magazine

Korach – Monkeys in the Crowd

The model for all subsequent demagogues in history, Korach told the people that his grievance was really their grievance, that he was standing up not for himself but for them. And he used snideness as a tool to ingratiate himself with his audience.

As Rashi, quoting the Midrash Tanchuma on the words “And Korah assembled the entire congregation” (Bamidbar 16:19), elaborates:

[Korach assembled them] with words of mockery. All that night, he went to the tribes and enticed them [saying,] “Do you think I care only for myself? I care for all of you. These [people] come and take all the high positions: the kingship for himself and the kehunah for his brother,” until they were all enticed.

“The entire congregation,” Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlop, the Mei Marom, points out, certainly did not succumb to the blandishments and deceptions of Korach. Most of the crowd surely perceived, at least logically, the essential self-centeredness of the rally speaker, and recognized the cynicism of his characterization of the Mitzrayim from which they fled as a “land flowing with milk and honey” (16:13).

Which, Rav Charlop explains, is why, when Moshe and Aharon pleaded with Hashem to not destroy the nation (16:22), they invoked Hashem’s knowledge of “the thoughts of every man” – the fact that there were true followers of Korach but also others who may have attended his rally and enjoyed his mockery but knew in their hearts that the populist inciter was evil (see Rashi).

Yet, in the moment of the rally itself, they nevertheless “were all enticed” by the agitator’s words. Why?

Explains the Mei Marom, because “it is one of human beings’ weaknesses” that they are pulled to conform to the behavior of those around them, to “act like monkeys” in imitation of the crowd. The Rambam (Hilchos Deios 6:1) calls such conformity part of “the way humans are formed.”

And so the warning here, as timely today as ever, is to beware not only of dangerous demagogues but also of falling prey to the pull of others’ embrace of them.

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Shelach – Memento Mitzvah

It might seem peculiar, even morbid, to suggest that looking at tzitzis evokes the specter of death. But, at least for me, it does.

That might be because of photographs I saw in a book many years ago of ancient but fully recognizable hair braids found during the excavation of Masada in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Tzitzis are tight braids themselves and, in fact, the word tzitzis itself is used to mean braids of hair, as Rashi points out in our parshah (Bamidbar 15:38), based on the pasuk “He took me bitzitis roshi” – “by a braid of my hair” (Yechezkel 8:3).

Hair’s chemical composition (and, ironically, its tightly coiled protein structure) makes it difficult for enzymes or microbes to break it down. Thus, hair is among remains that can, well, remain, for a long time – and remind us of the fact that a person once existed on earth but no longer does.

Magnifying the morbidity is the fact that the coils and knots of tzitzis are reminiscent, at least, again, to me, of bones, the other resistant-to-decay parts of a person and another reminder of mortality. And, as it happens, the word for the coils of tzitzis is chulyos, which is the word used as well in messechta Chullin to refer to a spine’s vertebrae. 

Might tzitzis be a sort of memento mori? Well, they are, after all, intended to spur thought. The Torah tells us not only to place tzitizis but to look at them. And to thus be reminded of “all the mitzvos of Hashem.”

The things, that is, that we take with us to the next world, when our physical remains, at least for the time being, are left behind.

As Rabi Levi bar Ḥama said, if all else fails in the quest to having one’s good inclination trump his evil one, one should “remind himself of the day of death” (Berachos 5a). 

Might tzitzis be a spur to such remembering?

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Maledictorian – CUNY speaker spews some spleen

For a great example of sheer, rabid hatred of Israel, lightly disguised antisemitism and the sort of imbecility sometimes born of youth, you couldn’t do better than CUNY School of Law student Fatima Mohammed’s vomitus of venom, in the form of her May 12 commencement speech.

Or, for an example of a well-earned misstep, any better than Palestinian activists’ ill-fated demand that Ms. Mohammed’s diatribe, which had been livestreamed on the school’s YouTube account but then removed, be reposted. Which it was, on the 25th. 

The overheated orator praised CUNY Law’s faculty and students for endorsing the BDS movement (that endorsement an ugliness of its own), and accused Israel of “indiscriminately rain[ing] bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old and young, attacking even funerals and graveyards, encouraging lynch mobs to target Palestinians, as it imprisons their children and continues the project of settler colonialism…” And so on. You know the litany of lies.

She also used the occasion of her graduation (as a future lawyer – the thought boggles) to lambaste the New York Police Department and the U.S. military as “fascists”; to allege that “daily, brown and black men are being murdered by the state”; and to defend five leaders of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation who are serving time for providing material support to Hamas.

“May we rejoice,” she righteously declared, “in the corners of our New York City bedroom apartments and dining tables, may it be fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world!”

On the 26th, a CUNY representative soberly explained that “Members of the Class of 2023 selected student speakers who offered congratulatory remarks and their own individual perspectives on advocating for social justice. As with all such commencement remarks, they reflect the voices of those individuals.” One had to wonder if the rep would have been as sanguine had the commencement speech attacked blacks or Arabs. 

Then came the richly deserved backlash. 

New York Congressman Ritchie Torres tweeted: “Imagine being so crazed by hatred for Israel as a Jewish State that you make it the subject of your commencement speech at a law school graduation. Anti-Israel derangement syndrome at work.”

Former New York Republican congressman Lee Zeldin called for CUNY’s taxpayer funding – its 2023 budget amounted to about $ 4.3 billion, most from the state, some from the city – to be revoked “until the administration is overhauled and all Jewish students and faculty are welcome again.”

World Jewish Congress head Ronald Lauder called for the law school’s dean, Sudha Setty, who applauded the ungracious graduate’s speech, to be fired.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams condemned the diatribe, as did New York governor Kathy Hochul and a host of other elected officials.

Eventually, CUNY Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez and the Board of Trustees issued a statement asserting that, while “free speech is precious…. but hate speech… should not be confused with free speech and has no place on our campuses or in our city, our state or our nation. The remarks by a student-selected speaker at the CUNY Law School graduation, unfortunately, fall into the category of hate speech, as they were a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race or political affiliation.”

To be sure, rushing predictably to Ms. Mohammed’s defense were anti-Israel groups, including, sadly, Jewish ones. CUNY Law’s Jewish Law Student Association called the reactions to the hater “pander[ing] to the most cynical reactionaries (ie. @NYCMayor).” 

“Jews for Racial & Economic Justice” tweeted that its heroine was being thrown to “the wolves. Utterly shameful.” Well, something was, anyway.

As it happens, with her commencement address, Ms. Mohammed was following in her own muddy footsteps. In a May, 2021 tweet, she expressed her wish that “every Zionist burn in the hottest pit of hell.” And the next day, she referenced the fact that she “pray[s] upon the death of the USA.”

In the wake of the uproar over her repulsive remarks, Ms. Mohammed was reached by a reporter at a relative’s home. She told the journalist, “I do not want to speak to anybody.”

It was a little late for reticence. She had already spoken more than enough, and revealed a thickly sullied soul.

© 2023 Ami Magazine

Biha’aloscha – Where There’s a Will, There is a Will

A reference to “The Seven Books of the Torah” might raise some eyebrows, but Rabi Yehudah HaNasi gives the two pesukim in our parsha (10, 35-46) that describe the movement of the aron, and the Jews, to a new location, the status of an “important book unto itself” (Shabbos, 116a). And so what we think of as Sefer Bamidbar is, in that opinion, three books of the Torah. 

And, following that idea, the mishneh in Yadayim, 3:5, noting the number of letters in those two pesukim, teaches that a faded Torah scroll that preserves 85 consecutive letters retains its holiness. 

Rav Hirsch points out the strange fact that the two psukim of that “important book” seem to say that it was after Hashem gave the signal for the aron to move and the movement had actually begun that Moshe “ordered” its movement. 

Rav Hirsch explains that what is taught us here is that Moshe so fully absorbed Hashem’s command that it became part of his own resolution – exemplifying the concept of “make His will your will” (Avos 2:4). Hashem’s will became Moshe’s.

Interesting is the fact that “85” in Hebrew spells peh, “mouth.” Perhaps that is the key to understanding the Torah’s description, later in our very parsha, of Hashem and Moshe speaking peh el peh, “mouth to mouth” (Bamidbar 12:8).

“Mouth to ear” would seem a more apt metaphor. Why “mouth to mouth”?

In consonance with Rav Hirsch’s observation, though, the phrase becomes poignant. What came from, so to speak, Hashem’s mouth – His will – came immediately, as a result, from Moshe’s ow mouth. It came to constitute his will, as he totally absorbed the Divine will as his own.

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran

No MAS! – Some nurture their young with hatred

As the school year winds down, parents and grandparents of Jewish elementary-age students are treated to… productions! 

Things like Siddur and Chumash presentations accompanied by song and verse. There are plays about historical events and uplifting stories. And depictions of Jewish concepts like tefillah or brachos. This grandparent enjoyed a wonderful one last year that was focused on Shmitta and bitachon. (You and your schoolmates were great, Hadassah!) 

And then there are the end-of-school-year “Ummah Day” productions at the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia, or “MAS.” They are somewhat different from their Jewish counterparts.

In 2017 and 2019, the children in MAS, as per videos posted on its Facebook page, sang “Chop off their heads!” about their perceived enemies, and expressed their eagerness to become “martyrs” in the cause of liberating “Palestine.” One little girl warbled, “I am a revolution that shakes the occupier. I am a wave on the calm sea. I hold my head high, and I will not be humiliated.”

The 2019 production, a joint venture between MAS Philadelphia and something called the “Leaders Academy,” received some 2 million views. After groups like the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and the ADL, along with some American lawmakers, called attention to the issue, Facebook shut down the school’s page.

Subsequently, MAS Philadelphia and Leaders Academy released a statement expressing sadness over its “mistake” and contending that “antisemitism or other forms of bigotry are foreign concepts to us and we are especially saddened that our beautiful children and community continue to face these accusations [of hating Jews].” The groups pledged to “pave a positive future for our community and increase our work with people from all walks of life.”

Somewhat nonreassuring was the groups’ proud announcement at the time that they had “enlisted CAIR-Philadelphia to help us with a number of [sensitivity] trainings.” CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, has publicly called Israel a “terrorist state” that targets innocent civilians and declared that Israel “is the biggest threat to world peace and security.”  

Which might explain why the sensitivity trainings didn’t work (or, perhaps, depending on the nature of the training, did). Because earlier this month, the little darlings at MAS were at it again.

This time, the children at the school weren’t chopping off heads. But – in a video posted  on May 6 by the Leaders Academy and exposed by MEMRI – they celebrated “One Ummah Day” with a song and performance praising “brave” Palestinian girls who support their “real men” as fighters against Israel. 

One song describes a girl sending her brother off to battle and telling him: “I will saddle up your horse, and I will tie a dagger to your belt – enhance your resolve.” The video was also posted to the Facebook page of the Alhidaya Islamic Center in Philadelphia, another name for MAS.

Last week, a bill to address the problem of endemic anti-Jewish incitement in Palestinian Authority textbooks was unanimously passed in the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee. 

California Democrat Brad Sherman, who introduced the bill, lamented the fact that the PA’s incitement contradicts American values of tolerance and peace, and noted that “For decades, the United States and the American people have been the top donor to the Palestinian people, including to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine] – but this is not a blank check.”

“Unfortunately,” he said, “instead of envisioning a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the current Palestinian curriculum erases Israel from maps, refers to Israel only as ‘the enemy,’ and asks children to sacrifice their lives to ‘liberate’ all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

In April 2021, the Biden administration defended its decision to restore financial aid to the UNRWA with the claim that the United Nations agency was committed to a “zero tolerance” policy regarding antisemitism. Unfortunately, that may have been pleasantly hopeful but it was patently false. 

As a report at the time released by the IMPACT-se research institute revealed, schools run by UNRWA continued to teach hatred against Israel.

Incitement against Israel and Jews in Palestinian textbooks is reprehensible. 

It’s even more reprehensible in an American school.

And irony is added to reprehensibility when such hatred sets down roots in the City of Brotherly Love. 

© 2023 Ami Magazine

Naso – Playing Favorites or Paying in Kind

Parshas Naso

Playing Favorites or Paying In Kind

The Divine answer seems to beg the angels’ question.

Hashem’s angelic entourage, Rav Avira recounts (Berachot 20b) asked Him: “Master of the Universe, it is written in Your Torah (Devarim 10:17) that You do not show favor or take bribes. And yet, You show Yisrael special consideration, as it is written, ‘May Hashem lift His countenance to you’! (Bamidbar 6:26).”

Hashem replied:”How can I not favor Israel? For I commanded them, ‘When you eat and are satisfied, you must bless Hashem’ (Devarim 8:10), and yet they are punctilious [to say birkas hamazon, the blessing after eating a meal] over even an olive-sized piece of bread.”

Imagine a mortal judge excusing his showing favoritism to his nephew by explaining “but he’s such a good nephew!”

I think the explanation of Rav Avira’s description of the heavenly interaction lies in the words “and are satisfied.” Hashem’s retort was not that Jews say birkas hamazon even when they are not satisfied (which, arguably, would be an unwarranted and thus illegitimate bracha) but rather that they are satisfied with even a paltry meal. 

Jews are called Yehudim, after Yehudah, whose name reflects his mother’s acknowledgement that, with a fourth son, she has received “more than my share” (Rashi, from Midrash Rabbah). The quintessential Jewish characteristic is the conviction that we are unworthy of the blessings we receive.

And so, we are always, inherently, “satisfied,” even if what we are apportioned is limited. 

Thus, as a middah keneged midah, a “measure for measure,” Hashem is “satisfied,” so to speak, with even our limited service to Him. 

His “special consideration” is but a payment in kind.

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran