Yaakov Menken

In a recent article in HaAretz, reprinted on Cross-Currents, Rabbi Avi Shafran offered several explanations why there seems to be an Orthodox “animus” against President Obama. He discounts theories like racism and Obama’s social liberalism before arriving at the one he prefers: a lack of hakaras hatov — gratitude.

I have always greatly respected Rabbi Shafran and his writing, and consider him a personal mentor. And I think it is unquestionably true that some people have made “over the top,” irrational criticisms — not that I feel that these reactions are unique to the Orthodox Jewish community, or unique to our current president. But on balance, I think Rabbi Shafran must revisit not only that social liberalism, but the very areas in which he feels our thanks are due, in order to understand why there is so much negativity about the Obama presidency from Orthodox Jews.

Here’s what I wrote about Obama’s election, in November 2008:

I believe that getting America to the point of electing a black President was one of America’s finest hours. — Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein, November 12.

He beat me to it, as I was going to make a similar comment. As a strong McCain supporter, I did not expect to have such positive feelings about the statement made by Americans about America today, through this election. Less than 50 years after whites had to be forced to share classrooms and bathrooms with black Americans, they elected one to be President of the United States. If I read the electoral college numbers correctly, then although it is true that over 90% of African-Americans voted for him, Obama would have won without the black vote.

Despite his selection of the very partisan Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff, Obama has begun with a number of overtures across the aisle. If he governs the way he campaigned — namely, in the center — then the next four years may be a pleasant surprise, and we should give him the chance to prove himself.

I said it, I believed it, I think we gave him that chance, and I think he disappointed us overwhelmingly.

Rabbi Shafran focuses upon foreign policy, and Israel in particular, as the area in which we owe the current administration “special good will.” He points to Obama’s Cairo speech, in which he mentioned the “unbreakable bond” between the US and Israel.

What he does not mention is that Obama visited Cairo immediately, and didn’t visit Jerusalem until his second term. Nor does Rabbi Shafran mention Obama’s declaration, among other troubling statements, that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” which includes new neighborhoods in Beit Shemesh, not just new outposts between Palestinian towns.

History shows that Ronald Reagan called new settlement activity legal if “ill-advised.” George H.W. Bush, a Republican widely regarded as unfriendly to Israel, said “we do not believe there should be new settlements in the West Bank or East Jerusalem,” permitting normal growth of existing towns. A Clinton-Era Assistant Secretary of State explicitly allowed for that natural growth. And George W. Bush said to Prime Minister Sharon that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome… will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”

And Rabbi Shafran would have us believe that Obama’s position is consistent with “the declared American position over several administrations?” If he meant the Carter administration, he’d be right. But I don’t think anyone regards Jimmy Carter as a friend of Israel.

Indeed, following the Cairo speech, Senior Israeli officials accused the President “of failing to acknowledge… clear understandings with the Bush administration” that allowed Israel to continue limited settlement construction even during the “freeze” during negotiations. Yet in 2011 UN Ambassador Susan Rice reiterated the administration’s new position, “reject[ing] in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity” of any kind.

Rice was one of three Obama appointees whom Rabbi Shafran jokingly called “a stealth bomb aimed at Israel,” as if, in reality, none of them were of concern. Let’s look at another of the three, Chuck Hagel.

In October 2000, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska was one of only 4 Senators who refused to sign a letter in support of Israel during Arafat’s renewed intifada. The next year, he was one of only 11 Senators who refused to sign a letter urging President Bush not to meet with Arafat until his forces ceased violence against Israel. And in August 2006, Hagel was one of only 12 Senators who refused to call upon the EU to call Hezbollah what it is: a terrorist organization.

The source of that information, by the way, is the National Jewish Democratic Council. You see, Hagel was a Republican Senator. Predictably, the NJDC reversed course, choosing to “trust” that “former Senator Chuck Hagel will follow the President’s lead of providing unrivaled support for Israel.” And somehow I doubt J-Street would have called Chuck “Jewish lobby” Hagel “pro-Israel” (not that J-Street terming a person “pro-Israel” is ever particularly comforting) when he was a Republican Senator. If some Jews are simply being knee-jerk partisans, it’s not the Orthodox, whose concern about Hagel is entirely consistent with how pro-Israel voters on both sides of the aisle regarded him prior to the appointment.

It remains true, for a variety of reasons, that the medina shel chesed, the kind nation in which we live, shares an “unbreakable bond” with Israel. But that is something that Obama inherited, not something which he has actively encouraged or strengthened.

Did the US refuse to participate in joint exercises with Turkey if Israel wasn’t invited? Yes. Turkey disinvited Israel because Turkey was blaming Israel for its soldiers having the audacity to defend themselves against the knife-wielding, bulletproof-vest-wearing flotilla “peace activists” who jumped them when they boarded to enforce the Israeli embargo on shipping to Gaza.

Without Israel’s participation, it is difficult to imagine the threat against which joint US-Turkey military exercises would help prepare. But Netanyahu’s ridiculous, demeaning apology for troops defending their lives, complete with “reparations” to the families of the terrorists, is widely attributed to pressure from Washington. Obama called Erdogan a “trusted friend,” while his relationship with Netanyahu is commonly described as “icy.”

Like most false gestures — and most of Obama’s foreign policies — the Netanyahu apology proved completely ineffective. Today Israeli-Turkish relations remain at an all-time low, the US (in another slap at Israel) has effectively blocked any credible effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities, the US reaction to Assad’s use of chemical weapons left Israeli leaders horrified and appalled, and the “Arab Spring” brought Hamas allies to power in the same Cairo (before the Egyptian military removed them, without American help).

The BBC, which like most of Europe adulated Obama prior to his election, said that US credibility is now “in tatters.” And that’s only foreign policy.

The president who made those “overtures across the aisle” has rarely been in evidence since taking office. The voters of very liberal Massachusetts elected a Republican State Senator, instead of the Democratic Attorney General, to take the remainder of the late, very popular, and very liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy’s term. The AG had led throughout the race, and the reversal was widely regarded as a last ditch attempt to stop ObamaCare. The Obama administration’s reaction was to strong-arm Democratic members of the House to make sure they could ram through this “key legislative achievement” without returning it to the Senate, which would, without a filibuster-proof Democratic majority, have required bipartisan support.

The result is a “non-tax” which is only Constitutional because it is, in fact, a tax, in which we can “keep our doctor” and “keep our plan” except that we really can’t. Those who said Bush “lied” for relying upon the unanimous opinion of every Western intelligence agency (with regards to Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD’s) needed a lesson in what it actually means to be lied to by a U.S. President.

I was advised to renew my insurance policy two months early, exchanging coverage for a new and relatively high deductible, in order to avert the much higher cost increase for policies renewed after the ACA took effect this month. My agent tells me he is unaware of a single person who has managed to navigate the “Maryland Health Connection” ObamaCare web site and come out with insurance. Similarly, the person with whom I spoke at BlueChoice told me that to her knowledge, no one has saved money. The greatest beneficiaries of the ACA thus far are the insurance companies. In fact, it is due to ObamaCare that Maryland’s oldest historically black college, Bowie State University, announced that it would drop health care coverage for students, instead allowing them to attend with no insurance.

As I mentioned, both Rabbi Adlerstein and myself found it extremely heartening that America had proven itself sufficiently race blind to elect a black president. Unfortunately, that president has proven himself not to be at all race blind. He has twice injected himself uninvited into racially-charged situations. Both times he has inflamed tensions, and both times he has been wrong.

And the list goes on. Obama’s “fiscal stimulus” has resulted in an unparalleled increase in federal debt, and one of the most anemic and prolonged economic recoveries in US history.

Yes, I’m a Republican. I certainly favored John McCain with his tremendous pro-Israel track record. But I was among those who shared the feelings of an Israeli political commentator who hoped “the Bush will burn” on the eve of the 1992 election, and in retrospect I believe Clinton proved to be a reasonably effective and pro-Israel president. I expressed hopes for our first black President, perhaps biased by the fact that I went to college with his wife, Michelle Robinson Obama.

So no, I don’t think it’s a lack of gratitude, hakaras hatov. I don’t think it’s racism. I don’t think it’s because he’s a liberal and Orthodox Jews tend to be conservatives. And I certainly don’t think it’s because “we humans don’t like to admit that we were wrong.”

After all, I’ve admitted error on Cross-Currents before. Both times I made one.

I hope you knew that I was kidding. But I do think that although Rabbi Shafran is always insightful and usually demonstrates a clear understanding of Jews both Orthodox and otherwise, this is one of those few times he has erred.

If you’ve been following the saga of the “Women of the Wall” and the “Women for the Wall,” you know that WOW is doing everything it can to bolster its numbers and coverage. W4W has made them into a non-story, by expressing with eloquent silence that far more Israeli women oppose them than stand with them (by a margin of hundreds, if not thousands, to one), and simultaneously completely getting rid of the rambunctious young men who previously did such a great job of playing into WOW’s hands and PR efforts.

Most recently, a group called “Moving Traditions” shipped three teenage American girls off to Israel to join WOW. Needless to say, they knew little of the issues — one of them had not even heard of WOW prior to the contest that earned her a ticket. They were also kept from any contact with women representing the other side of the story, which resulted in W4W leader Ronit Peskin writing an open letter to one participant.

Ms. Peskin posted a comment to the Facebook wall of Moving Traditions, indicating that she had written this letter. Moving Traditions basically laughed off the idea that she might be able to speak to one of the girls in the “pre-Messianic era” — at which time Anat Hoffman would also be invited into Haredi Yeshivot — and argued that the girls they sent took an “important stand for religious tolerance and respect.” The following is taken from my reply:

There are two major problems with your approach. (1) You are excusing failure to live up to your principles because someone else is keeping theirs, and (2) you sent teenage girls off to “change” something when they had no clue what it was they aim to change. In fact, “religious tolerance” and “respect” are precisely what was most sorely absent from your, and their, activity.

(1) You brought up “pluralism.” I don’t think anyone else did. The traditional women at the Wall, such as Ms. Peskin and her W4W group, have different values, like “G-d’s will” and “tradition” and “dignity.” They have no reason to invite Anat [Hoffman]. Anat Hoffman has nothing to tell us, she worked to stop Orthodox growth in Jerusalem back when she was on City Council. But Ronit Peskin has quite a bit to help these young women be Jewishly informed. You value “pluralism” — or claim to. The comparison [between Hoffman and Peskin] is apples and oranges — not only because of the speakers but because of the audience. You cannot claim to be pluralistic without welcoming other perspectives.

(2) The plaza at the Kotel is not, regardless of what you may have been told, the Wall. The outer retaining Wall of the Temple is 480 meters long. Due to its extreme significance to traditional Jews, they requested of the government that a plaza be built for traditional prayer. That plaza is less than 40 years old, has a mechitzah and a Rabbi… and is less than 1/6th of the length of the Wall.

The Orthodox are not disturbing anyone. They are objecting to being disturbed. Going there is no different than a Chassidic group wandering into a Reform Temple during services — and just as lacking in respect and religious tolerance.

Naftali Bennett built a special alternative plaza where the women could have done whatever they wanted — including read from a Torah. Therefore it is offensive and intrusive for the girls to go try to “change” Orthodox women without at least finding out why it is that they might not want to change. All that, and American colonialism as well.

Why is it that in order to get teenage support for WOW you must fly them in? W4W brought 15,000 girls to the Kotel a few months ago to express their adherence to tradition.

I will close with one other observation. The Pew Survey identified 110,000 adults who, like myself, adopted Orthodoxy as adults. The majority of them, btw, are women, which kind of bursts the whole “liberate the Orthodox women” narrative of WOW. But more to the point… the Reform movement, according to the Pew Survey, is about 1.85 million.

If current estimates hold, the 110,000 newly-Orthodox adults are going to have more Jewish grandchildren than the 1.85 million Reform Jews. The Reform movement should have much more important things to do with their time and money than try to change Orthodox women in Israel.

When the Rosh Yeshiva of Ner Yisrael, Rav Aharon Feldman shlit”a, called to offer me a review copy of the journal Dialogue, there could only be one answer, of course. But having read it, all I can say is — get it. All the rest is, as they say, commentary [no, no slight intended to the journal by that name]. Each article deserves to be called “required reading” in Jewish thought.

The introductory article is a speech given to Israeli generals by Rav Feldman, explaining in detail the Chareidi worldview, its view on Torah learning, and why the idea of a draft or other mandatory service outside yeshiva poses an existential threat. Then a section of five articles, entitled “A Call to Spiritual Arms,” discusses “the seeming dissonance between the external and internal manifestations of Yiddishkeit in our community and its members’ lives.” Rav Feldman discusses those who are “observant” without being truly religious on the inside, a phenomenon otherwise known as “Orthopraxy,” and how to escape it. Eytan Kobre, perhaps best known for his acerbic wit and dismantling of the heterodox in the pages of Mishpacha, here looks inwards at the trends towards Orthodox conspicuous consumption and otherwise living an easy, “American-style” life. Rav Yaakov Hillel, a teacher of Kabbalah himself, looks at the phenomenon of phony mekubalim and how easily some are duped. Rav J. David Bleich returns to the problem of Orthopraxy vs. Emunah, while Rav Zev Cohen, rounding out this section, discusses the impact of a Mussar Vaad on working bnei Torah.

A shorter, second section covers “sources of Jewish practice.” Have you ever wondered about the origin of the various prayers in the Siddur? Rav Aharon Lopiansky discusses his effort to compile a “Completely Accurate Siddur” and what he discovered along the way, and Rav Zev Kraines explains how Kabbalah finds its way into halachah, in this section.

This would be quite enough a trek over difficult intellectual ground for the average journal, but not for Dialogue. I think the third section, on Science and Torah, will draw the most attention. Dr. Lee Spetner is a well-known critic of the Theory of Evolution, and the writer of Not by Chance, published in 1997. An extended excerpt from his new book, The Limits of Evolution, begins this section.

In the previous issue of Dialogue, Isaac Betech and Obadia Maya discussed “The Identity of the Shafan and Arnevet,” and this leads to another three articles worth an issue in their own right. Rabbi Natan Slifkin writes in to rebut Betech and Maya, and this is followed by articles by Rabbi Dovid Kornreich and Dr. Jonathan Ostroff rebutting Slifkin, providing a reasonably comprehensive picture of this complex debate.

I’m not quite sure why an article on Addictions fits in this section, except that it would fit any of the others even less. Rabbi Yechezkel Spanglet discusses the challenges posed by new addictions to our community — but I will comment that I’m not sure all of them qualify as addictions. When we speak of an addiction, we think of a person unknowingly drawn by chemical and psychological factors into something harmful, be that alcohol, drugs, or incessant surfing of the Internet. Is browsing “missionary propaganda, slander, [or] impugning the honor of Gedolim and Rabbonim” truly in the same category as “unregulated exchange of images,” to which a person might become addicted? I don’t think we can fairly diminish the culpability of those who engage in the former activities by saying they are just “addicted” to destroying other Jews and Kavod HaTorah. Be that as it may, this article, as well, provides much food for thought and discussion.

There are two more sections as well. Rav Feldman’s previous article on “A Torah View on Homosexuality” drew a letter (with his response) as well as to additional articles discussing the extent to which the demands of political correctness have shoved aside scientific fact to elevate “being gay” from a manifestation of the Yetzer Hara to an identity.

Finally, besides an additional letter and response on the issue of dividing those who do and don’t wear Tefillin on Chol HaMoed in a single shul, there are a pair of historical articles — on the destruction of Jewish texts in Hungary, and (in Hebrew) on civil marriages within the Jewish community in Italy and France.

With most journals, you find a few articles that really attract your interest, and skip the rest. I can honestly say that in this case, I would like to finish reading almost every one of these articles in detail. It is truly an exceptional Dialogue.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how easy it now is to become a Reform or Conservative Rabbi, with the advent of $8000 online ordination. An enterprising woman from Detroit has managed to take things to the next level, serving as a Rabbi at a prominent Reform temple having “never trained as a rabbi,” much less receiving ordination.

But here’s the kicker: it took the congregation years to recognize that their “rabbi” had no training. She had become a “rabbinic associate” in 2008 and was expected to begin her studies, which she stated that she had completed last year — an ordination ceremony was held at the temple in May 2012. And they only found out because their board president contacted the institution she claimed to have attended in order to arrange for a second ordination ceremony there at the school — at which point he learned she had never even enrolled.

Perhaps it’s a nitpicking side point, but contrary to what the board president said to the press, the institution whose distance-learning course she was to take is not, in fact, affiliated with the Reform movement at all. ALEPH is the “Alliance for Jewish Renewal,” founded and led by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who, after “a transformational encounter with the late Lubavitcher Rebbe,” developed a “new paradigm” for Judaism that he called “Psycho-Halachah” — which, being predictably devoid of anything Judaism has called “Halachah,” serves as its own punchline.

Is it really any wonder that the congregants never figured out she’d never taken a class?

So the Jewish Federations of North America, the massive collected financial might of America’s leading Jewish donors, has left Jerusalem. Their General Assembly only meets in Jerusalem once every five years, so this was a major event. And what have we learned? Primarily, that the system has failed. As Michael Freund, the director of Shavei Israel, wrote: “this GA was reminiscent of the ill-fated RMS Titanic as it steamed straight for an iceberg in the northern Atlantic ocean in April 1912, oblivious to the impending doom.”

Rabbi Yisroel Mayer Kagan, zt”l, of Radin in Poland, is most often called by the name of his work, Chofetz Chaim, on the evil of gossip. Accompanying his tremendous knowledge of Torah, this leader of his generation was known for his profound insight. And with his keen vision, Rabbi Kagan condemned the idea of federated giving. He compared it to the advent of electric lighting in his city, when everyone stopped lighting candles (and backup generators weren’t yet available). As long as there were candles burning, even if one candle went out there was other light. But when the electricity went out, the entire city was plunged into darkness. Similarly, he said, if individuals make decisions, then the most needy charities will somehow get the support that they need. But if everything is handed to the Federations, he explained, then institutions will collapse and individuals will go hungry if the custodians of the coffers do not respond to those appeals.

There is one thing that he didn’t mention: the assumption that the curators would be good at what they do. He didn’t imagine a world in which federations had executives who sat in large executive offices and enjoyed all-expenses-paid executive trips to Israel, at which to demonstrate their collective executive incompetence. In actuality, the leadership of the Federations make the architects of the ObamaCare website look positively brilliant. At the GA, they pushed the wrong issues in the wrong place, and completely ignored the most important and pressing communal priorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

As everyone knows, the most important issue in Israel today is the “peace process,” and the fact that it’s leading nowhere towards peace simply makes discussion more urgent. But it was entirely absent from the GA agenda; JFNA president Jerry Silverman told reporters that since everyone agrees on a two-state solution, it wasn’t worth discussing. J.J. Goldberg dismantled this argument in The Forward:

In fact, this is one of the most fraught and divisive issues on the agenda of organized American Jewry. Beyond substantive questions like settlements and Jerusalem, Diaspora Jewish federations are constantly forced to reexamine the limits of permissible debate within their own walls. The debate over debate is bitter, nationwide and relentless. Jerusalem might have been just the place to discuss it, with the federation movement’s top leadership present and Israel’s leading diplomatic and military minds available.

But it was left out. The closest the assembly came to the topic was a series of how-to sessions on best techniques for defending Israel’s image.

And the most important issue in America? If you haven’t been sleeping for the past two months, you’ve probably heard of the Pew Report, and its devastating analysis of the future of non-Torah-observant Jewry — those best represented by the JFNA. And here I’ll quote Michael Freund again:

If the Jewish federations were serious about confronting this crisis, they should have taken the extraordinary step of reformatting the GA’s schedule in order to focus on the existential emergency at hand.

Instead, in an act of pathetic hubris, they had the gall to add a single session on Monday, with the self-aggrandizing title, “Responding to Pew: How Federations are Successfully Engaging the Next Generation.”

“Successfully”? Who are they kidding? Back in 1990, after the National Jewish Population Survey revealed an intermarriage rate of 52% (which was subsequently the subject of much debate), the Jewish world was stirred into action, vowing to do whatever was necessary to stem the tide of assimilation.

Here we are, more than two decades – and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on bolstering Jewish identity – later, and for all intents and purposes the situation has only worsened as growing numbers of Jews turn their backs on their heritage.

So if the Federations couldn’t be bothered with such trivial issues, to what did they devote their time?

Continue reading “Federated Blindness”