Out of Step Jew

One of my objections to Habad over the years is their separateness. In the communities where I have witnessed their presence I have seen that they will never participate in the wider Jewish community, recognizing Habad as the only legitimate Jewish home. The JPost is publishing a JTA story on Habad in Germany with a contrast on two Habad styles: The cooperative Rabbi Diskin in Munich and the competitive Rabbi Teichtal.

"Whereas Teichtal has opened several new institutions in Berlin, Diskin and his wife, Chana, work within the existing Jewish community. Whereas Teichtal leads his own services and even used to send Habad yeshiva students to recruit congregants away from the city's other Orthodox rabbi, Diskin has only a youth minyan, not wanting to offer a competing service."

It is only when one views Israel's place in the family of nations through the prism of that historic distinction does everything make sense - that to be a nation that "dwells alone" is not a source of weakness, but of colossal resilience and eternal strength."

Read on.

I don't know how it works in other households but in ours we tend to split the cleaning. There are things I do and things my wife does. I cover more ground and she spends more time on the cleaning. I do the vast open spaces and she works on the details. This fits in well with our outlook on life and on our intellectual concerns.

She studied the minutiae of statistics and mathematics and sees the beauty in the details of mathematical certainty. I studied philosophy, politics and other cloudy disciplines and just want to make sure things go in a certain direction. I look at my post operative son and wonder when he can return to the ball field and she wonders why the incision above his eye is not quite straight enough.

And so it goes with Pesach cleaning. During the year my view is that dirt that is not visible is not there. Before Pesach I am 'machmir' (stringent) and agree to move the couch. The broom, the squeegee, the vacuum cleaner, a sponge or rag here and there – those are my key cleaning tools. For my wife, those are just the start. Scouring pads, thin little green sponge-like things are also key tools. But the most important Pesach cleaning tool is of course, the toothpick.

The toothpick ('kismei shinayim' in Hebrew, it took me years to learn that one) seems to be the most important part of Pesach preparations. Where I will take a yellow Scotch sponge and wipe the top of the refrigerator door, my wife carefully probes the crevices of the rubber. Where I wipe out the freezer, my wife takes it apart and uses toothpicks to get to the crumbs of frozen whatever.

I didn't want this to be one of those "Home Improvement" men-women, Venus-Mars kind of posts so I will end with these observations.

1.Our Pesach cleaning rituals relate closely to the way we treat life in general.

2. Contra some other comment I have seen we don't have it harder now than our grandparents had it, in spite of the newly treif water, strawberries etc, etc. (Hint: Ignoring rabbis and trusting grandma makes things more sane).

3. In the end, it's all about the family.

Either the seder is a time where we sit down to read, talk, sing, drink, eat, argue and smile – or it isn't. If it is, the toothpicks make it all the more worthwhile. If it isn't you might as well have not even moved the couch.

Chag Kosher v'Sameach.

"For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament."

A Jewish find of this sort would be interesting, but would it, could it have any Halakhic implications? Probably not. Theological implications? Quite possibly.

Our vacation from blogging has been spent at the Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petach Tikwa. Our redheaded youngest son, one of our twins, suffered a basketball injury during a passing drill at school as one overeager student failed to turn to the outside and instead implanted his skull into the freckled face of our son

We learned a new word, zygoma, learned how to read a CAT scan have now completed the trifecta: After 18 years of parenthood and no hospital visits, we have now had three children in the hospital in 18 months. We had pneumonia and appendicitis, both treated at our adequate local Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba. But a multiple fracture of the zygoma bone that rings the eye demanded a bit of a better institution.

The Tuesday afternoon accident led to a doctor's visit to confirm that there was no concussion. A numb right side of the nose on Wednesday morning led us to phone calls and eventually to the emergency room at Schneider. Initial neurological exams, a visit to ENT at next door Beilinson Hospital, x-ray's at Schneider, back to Beilinson to "peh va'leset" – mouth and jaw – a medical department we never heard of before – CAT scan and the final diagnosis of three fractures in the zygoma.

The CAT scan was so clear that even one as artistically challenged as me could see the floating piece of bone. Admitted Wednesday at 9pm, surgery Thursday morning with two incisions, one through the mouth and one above the right eyebrow. Two titanium plates of 1.5mm thickness inserted into his beautiful face (no they won't set off the detal detectors). Recovery room by 11:30. Back to the room by noon, grogginess, drinking and eating through a straw. Improvement by the hour. Eye swelled shut by Friday morning, it looked like we had a (losing) boxer on our hands. Steroids for the swelling (and to help his batting?) and before Shabbat we had a very partially opened eye. Shabbat morning we were looking better. The OOS father gave the mother who had slept over the previous two nights, a break for Shabbat and we made it to minyan in the morning.

While spending a Shabbat at Shaare Tzedek nearly two years ago with my father in the hospital the minyan on Shabbat morning was filled with new fathers and every aliya was followed by a "misheberach" for the new baby and mother. At a children's hospital it is different. One long "misheberach" at the end for all the ill children.

Schneider is an interesting place where you learn to count your blessings. It is a children's hospital and is a place full of teary eyed mothers and fathers as well as doctors and nurses who seem to be able to face them day after day. Our serious operation was dwarfed by too many cases of infants, toddlers and teenagers who will be released only to have to return.

Volunteers abound. An organization that helps parents of severely disabled children sent a few people to sleep next to a 14 year old boy with CP who will undergo a spinal chord operation next week. A group of first grade girls gave out little bags of candy and cute pictures. Retirees give out sandwiches to tired and hungry parents. And on and on.
So, we give special thanks to the nurses in "Surgery A" who not only do their work well but manage to have the time for parents and patients, both: And to the recovery room nurses who smile reassuredly when your post-operative son is so sensitive to the touch that you can't do what a parent needs to do when his child is in the middle of a trauma.

We give special thanks to the doctors in the emergency room who were modest enough to send us to the right place and to defer to the judgment of the specialists. And to the ENT and "Peh va'Leset" doctors who diagnosed, operated and visited daily, who asked the right questions and listened to and answered ours.

Thanks to the entire Schneider family for building such a sad but wonderful hospital.

Thanks to God for giving all the people involved, from volunteers to nurses, to cleaning staff to doctors, the strength to learn and do what they need to do.

Most of all, we thank God for our healthy children.

Our son was released yesterday and is getting his mouth in shape for a weak of hard, crunchy matza.

There are libels and there are libels. We try very hard to leave politics out of this blog, but, alas, this is Israel, where the only non-political event is …. Well even sporting events are political.

A new "novel" has been written called "Code Blue" by businessman turned "novelist" Zvika Amit which depicts a military coup in Israel. The reviewer calls it a "political thriller" but it is really a fantasy book where the religious are for once and for all laid out as the evil people we all know they are.

A novel is a novel. Or so we would think. Even the "author" doesn't have any literary pretensions. He was quoted as saying "Our reality is impossible and hallucinatory, and it led me to write a book in which our biggest nightmares come true, and in which we become a country of the kind we don't want to become… I hope my book will wake us up by putting a mirror up to our face that shows us where our society is headed."

But a libel is always a libel.

Labor Party MK Danny Yatom, former head of the Mossad was asked if he thought if a coup in Israel was a possibility:

" A political coup is no longer a fictional plot… I'm not saying it will happen tomorrow or that it has to happen, but I'm saying that if a year ago this kind of scenario seemed completely imaginary and such a book would have been considered pure fantasy, today it makes you shiver. There are rabbis and right-wing leaders calling [on soldiers] to refuse military orders and condoning desertion, which I see as an outright call for rebellion. If religious soldiers indeed follow the orders of their rabbis rather than their commanders, we will find ourselves in a very deep crisis that could certainly end with a military coup."

And they are the first people to be called on to refuse orders? Would Yatom not be pressured to resign had he libelled a different group?

It used to be libelous to suspect the loyalty of good officers just because of their religious or politicalbeliefs, let alone because of their ethnic origin. Throughout this whole "hitmatkut" ordeal there has yet to be a case of an officer (let alone a senior officer) who has refused an order. As a matter of fact the only time a coup was ever a possibility in Israel was before the Six-day was when allegedly generals Rabin, Sharon and company considered holding the cabinet hostage.

The ongoing libels against the religious-Zionist community know no bounds. For those of you who are regular readers of this blog you know that we have no patience for fanaticism of the political or religious kind. If a novelist wants to write a thriller or a fantasy, fine. But when, as the author admits, it was the very peaceful and very legal "human chain" demonstration against the hitnatkut that prompted him to write this novel you know that it is not the fanatics that he fears: "That is a show of such unusual organizational abilities… If they are capable of this, what else are they capable of doing faced with a silent majority that is content with complaining in front of the television?"

So, there is a straight line between a peaceful, legal demonstration and a coup by religious IDF officers who didn't even participate in it?

Martin Luther King, Jr. , beware.

There come a time in every Israeli boy's life when he gets that letter from the army "inviting" him to go to a nearby base and start the process whereby his fate for at least three years will be decided. Some boys hope to fail and be sent to a nice desk job and others fear the dreaded *jobnik* title more than anything else. Mine of course, fear it.

With one (decidedly non-jobnik) son in the army we have now received the literal and figurative "tzav rishon" (first order) for OOS son number two. I will soon join my good friend, fellow Kfar-Saba-ite and "avid reader" George who has two combat officers in the family.

The saga continues.

*jobnik* - a non-combat soldier, a derogatory and embarrasing term if there ever was one: Especially (apologies to the feminists) when the jobnik's girlfriend carries a gun and the jobnik does not.

From the JPost:

"For the first time in seven years, a train left Jerusalem on Saturday night in the inauguration of the new Jerusalem-Beit Shemesh line.

The line begins at a new station in Malha in the valley below the shopping mall and Teddy Stadium, with another station adjacent to the Biblical Zoo.

Also on Saturday night, Ashkelon will see passenger trains for the first time since the establishment of the State of Israel."

"… During the war, I saw life naked – plain and unadorned. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly- all these were revealed to me as strands of the same rope. Thank God it didn't turn me into a moralist. On the contrary, I learned how to respect human weakness and how to love it, for weakness is our essence and our humanity. A man who is aware of his weaknesses is far more likely to be able to overcome them. A moralist cannot face his own weaknesses; instead of criticizing himself, he criticizes his neighbor."

We have written often in the past of the terrible strain that the hitnatkut (disengagement from Gaza) is having on the religious –Zionist community in Israel. There has been talk of a "disengagement" from Zionism and the Sate of Israel for betraying the messianic vision and some rabbis and small groups of people have changed views and habits as a result. Some of the more extreme reactions though were a long time coming as a certain group of religious-Zionists have been drifting to the anti-Zionist haredi camp for a long while. This is just the excuse to make the break that would have come otherwise.

But no matter the group or the views (the very few and very young fanatics aside) in the back of everyone's mind is the knowledge that come what may, we still have to live here. The country must be defended, the land must be settled, Torah must be learned and a living must be made.

Lately, I have been hearing of and from groups of American religious-Zionists, or American haredi-Zionists and those from Chabad who have always supported Israel but whose eagerness to destroy the State of Israel as it is now constituted can only be described as neo-Satmarist. The neo-Satmarist ideologues seem to have adopted a scorched earth policy where any and every fact, article or myth that weakens Zionism and the infrastructure of the Jewish state must be circulated and believed. The American neo-Satmarists have decided that without a Jewish presence in Gaza the Jewish State has no justification.

Of course, the neo-Satmarists don't have to live here. They don't have to live with the consequences of soldiers who disobey orders or of young boys and girls who attack soldiers and policemen. They don't have to continue building their lives and raising their children on the rubble that they hope will come but can walk through thst rubble back to their homes in Teaneck, Beverly Hills, Skokie, Jamaica Estates and other hitnachluyot on the West Bank of the Atlantic.

You can criticize Israel and its government all you want. But that is no reason to de-legitimize the lives of nearly six million Jews who decided, for good and for bad, to live and build a Jewish State in the Land of Israel.

There was never room for the destructive Satmarist ideology in this Jewish world, this is not the time for a neo-Satmarist revival.

'With Pessah just ahead, we're gearing up our gleaning operation,' says Joseph Gitler, founder of Table to Table, Israel's leading food rescue organization. 'We're signing up new farms every day. Yesterday a farmer offered one tomato field now and said he'd have another in about a month, which is perfect timing, because during the holidays – and Pessah in particular – there's always a huge demand for donated food.'

The precept is spelled out clearly in Deuteronomy 24:19-22, where the Israelites are ordered to leave behind unharvested food and grain in the field for 'the stranger, the orphan and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings.' "

My first contact with a Catholic intellectual was in Baltimore in the early 80's when Father John Pawlikowski of the Catholic Theological Union of the University of Chicago was part of a Yom Hashoah program at the Hebrew College along with Raul Hilberg (Destruction of the European Jews).

I was a graduate student at the time and in addition to my studies I found myself reading all that I could on the Shoah. I read much of Emil Fackenheim, Hilberg, even George Steiner's "Language and Silence". Pawlikowski impressed my then by his clear understanding that both the Shoah and the State of Israel were issues that had to be dealt with before meaningful discussion between Jews and Catholics could go forward. I don't remember the exact topic of the discussion but I do remember thinking afterwards that if the Catholic Church really wanted to make amends and come to terms with the post Shoah reality of Judaism, the first thing they could do would be recognize that the new reality included Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel: They should recognize the State of Israel.

My feelings then, as now, are that in light of the Shoah, the refusal to recognize the rights of Jews to sovereignty was tantamount to the continuation of the policy of silence that plagued the western world during the Holocaust. This was, in the words of Fackenhiem, "to give Hitler a posthumous victory". All the talk and research on the Shoah by so many good Catholics could not make up for the refusal of the Vatican to recognize Israel.

In June of 1994, Pope John Paul II and the Vatican finally recognized the State of Israel. This was not something "momentous" and was not something "extraordinary" - rather it was just something that was long overdue. And it was in this attitude that I feel we see the greatness of the Pope. My own feeling was that for this Pope, recognizing the State of Israel was not something to be pondered and was not a concession to whomever, it was just that which ought to be done. (True enough, it took him nearly 15 years into his Papacy to recognize Israel, but we all know that even the Pope has his own Foreign Office.)

But Pope John Paul II contributed to Judaism in general and religious Judaism in particular in ways that are often overlooked. He was the most influential and the last in a group of superior religious thinkers and leaders that came to prominence after WWII. These thinkers and leaders faced the challenges that freedom and modernity brought to faith with courage, honesty and integrity. Jewish thinkers such as R. Yosef Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel, Protestants like Reinhold Niebuhr and Catholics like Pope John Paul II were able to identify not only the evils of totalitarianism but the nihilistic tendencies of materialistic ethics that developed from unfettered freedom.

These leaders and the Pope as the leader with the largest following paved the way for a life of faith in a free materialistic society. How much of the growth of Orthodox Judaism in the United States can be attributed to the moral and intellectual climate created by religious Christians, whose greatest and most eloquent spokesman was the Pope? Could acculturated Orthodox Judaism have really thrived in an atmosphere where the choices were an anti-modern fundamentalism or a radical secularism?

I felt that the Pope had had a similar effect on his visit to Israel. Here for the first time Israelis saw a public religious man acting religiously and who was not associated with the cynical politics of the country. (I don't mean to say that all religious leaders in Israel are cynical politicians just that that is how their every move is interpreted.) Israelis were amazed when the Pope returned to the Church of the Holy Seplechre a second time - after visiting the kotel - when he "didin't have to". In a letter to the editor of the journal "First Things" after the visit, I wrote:"In the ultimate irony, Pope John Paul II’s visit to Israel may be the signal event that ultimately rejuvenates Judaism and Jewish practice in this Jewish country."

Had the Pope given in to the liberation theology that was the intellectual "in thing" in the Catholic Church at the time or had he reverted to an unthinking conservatism and not dared to challenge communist totalitarianism on the one hand and ideological secularism on the other, it is difficult to imagine that a modern, rationalist Orthodox Judaism would have left the confines of Yeshiva University (if it was there at all) and a handful of neighborhoods in Jerusalem. His work in spreading Catholic teachings based on reason and faith (see Fides et Ratio) helped create a framework for Judaism to do the same.

For this alone we ought to mourn the death of Pope John Paul II.