Torah...for the Nations? Part 6

When the dust settled after the Six Day War, and the absence of any type of help from the Christian community was painfully evident, the Jewish community demanded "where were you?" The Christians responded "our dialogue was supposed to be about religion, not politics". The Jews were incensed. "Politics?!?! Israel is at the very heart of our religion!" (This was especially true then, before many Jews began identifying with the Palestinian narrative.) Although one may argue with the details of this assessment, one needs to consider its deeper meaning. The time was only thirty two years after the Holocaust. Many Jewish leaders at that time were survivors. Even those who had lived in America during the war, bore the trauma of having looked on helplessly. Some bore guilt. Israel, like the name of its National Anthem, was "HaTikvah", "the Hope". It was the Phoenix rising from the ashes. For many of the Orthodox who did take part in Ecumenism, Israel was "the first sprouting of our Redemption". For the Conservative movement, Israel WAS the promised Redemption (an idea loosely based on RAMBAM). But it went further. The Christians had completely overlooked the idea of Jewish peoplehood and identity. When faced with the overwhelming accusation of betrayal, they responded "But you never told us!". They were right. The interfaith discussions had gone on against the backdrop of Christian ideology; "What is your concept of Salvation? Heaven and Hell? Law and Grace? Prophecy? Scripture vs Tradition?". No one had ever asked: "Hey, what do you guys believe?" And no Jews had volunteered this information, which might seem superfluous to the Christian theologians. There were deep hurts on both sides, and, as far as the Jews were concerned, the romance was over. To be sure, some dialogue, mostly between clergy, or the holding of an annual Interfaith Service (almost always boycotted by the Orthodox community), continues to this day. But suspicion, rather than openness, is always there. I ask myself the question posed to me by my friend, Masgr John Tutone "Jeff, given all the mistakes and atrocities of the past, what now? Where do we go from here?"

Torah...for the Nations? Part 5

The new ecumenical movement seemed to be changing everything. Negotiations between Rome and several Protestant denominations were underway towards reunification, after a four hundred year schism. (These would later fall apart over the issue of ordination of women). Conservative and Reform groups, both internationally and locally, jumped eagerly on the band wagon. Meetings of clergy, as wells as congregations, were happening everywhere. The talks were from a perspective of respect and acceptance. Orthodox leaders were concerned that the entire thing might be a trick; designed to catch us off guard. Right wing Orthodox leaders condemned the entire project as a sinister ruse. Perhaps Pope John intended not ecumenism, but evangelism? The head of Modern Orthodoxy (later redubbed "Centrist" Orthodoxy),  J.B. Soloveichik, was opposed to the new movement for other reasons. He said that the fundamental concepts of Judaism and Christianity only appear to be similar, but, in fact, have totally different ideas about the nature of G-d and Man, that are completely irreconcilable. There simply was nothing to talk about. Nevertheless, the facts on the ground were different. Many Orthodox communities were establishing lines of communication with their neighbors. Torah was, at both the clerical and communal level, at last being shared with our neighbors. The Prophetic ideals of peace, tolerance, and enlightenment seemed to be coming alive before our others. But, alas, those heady, euphoric days were not to last. In May of 1967, Egyptian President Gamal 'Abd el Nasser blockaded the Straights of Tiran, thus preventing vital goods from coming through the port of Eilat. The Syrians were mounting forces in the Golan Heights. King Hussein of Jordan equivocated, but was finally persuaded by Nasser to join the fight. It was clear to every thinking person that two and a half million Israelis were about to die. A new holocaust was imminent. Even the Jerusalem municipality prepared thousands of graves. Israel's Chief of Staff Yitzchak Rabin, informing the government of all the military preparations, concluded "None of this will work. We are all going to die" He spent the next three days in a drunken stupor. Retired General (and war hero) Moshe Dayan was called upon to lead the war effort. Jews everywhere prayed, and organized lobbying efforts. Sadly, the U.S. government took a wishy washy stance of favoring "territorial integrity" for all nations. Israel's greatest ally at the time, France (it was called the "special alliance"; it was as though the two countries were more like lovers than allies), announced that it would sever ties with whomever started hostilities. In the early morning hours of June fifth, Israel launched a preemptive raid on Egyptian and Syrian forces. Israel had accepted King Hussein's offer to do "just some token shelling", but Nasser convinced him that the Arabs were winning, and he needed to join in. Within hours, three great armies lay in ruins, weapons and boots strewn the desert, as frightened Arab soldiers fled for their lives. At the end of six days, Israel was in control of huge parts of all three countries. Many saw this as a miracle. But France had been lost as an ally. The U.S. stepped in; but with conditions. Territories that were captured needed to be returned. This has been U.S. policy since 1967 (Although President Trump has shown that he is not committed to that.). However, as the dust settled, it was discovered that another ally had abandoned us. None of the Christian denominations had lifted a finger in the lobbying efforts. Clergymen, who yesterday were enjoying Shabbat dinners at their local synagogues, were nowhere to be found. The Ecumenical movement had abandoned us in our hour of greatest need. I will describe in my next post the post mortem of what happened. Fault can be found on all sides. But the dream had come to an end. True, some contacts continue. But it is all half hearted. The Jewish community once again had to turn inward.

Torah...for the Nations? part 4

The rise of the State of Israel presented a theological problem for most Christians. The historical Churches had long maintained that the Jews were destined to wander and suffer as a result of our refusal to accept Christianity. Although Evangelicals eventually came to see Israel as a fulfillment of prophecy, the older Churches had long accepted the idea that the Biblical prophesies no longer applied to the Jewish people, who had been "substituted" and replaced by the Church. Once Israel was a fact on the ground, different groups expressed various ideas. They even began to demand of Israel to recognize THEM as the only real Church. Chief Rabbi Herzog records such a demand from the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. He writes that he considered this to be a historical joke. But Israel was not in the business of promoting Torah, except to the extent that it could be used to political advantage. A decade later, the Catholic Church was in need of a new Pope. No suitable candidate was evident. The Cardinals decided in 1958, after much deliberation, to choose an old and feeble man as Pope, giving a few years' respite before a better Pope might be chosen. Surprisingly, Pope John XXIII, managed to change the course of history during his five year reign. He challenged many ideas that had been held by the Church for centuries. When a Jewish delegation came to visit him, he said: "I am your brother, Joseph." He called upon Christians to do penance for their treatment of the Jews. He called for an Ecumenical Council to examine what Christianity is and isn't, how to relate to non-Catholic Christians, and, perhaps most importantly, how to relate to the Jews. This Council continued until 1965, two years after the Pope's death. One of its main conclusions was that the ancient charge of deicide ("killing G-d") was false and the Jews are therefore under no curse. Open dialogue, on the basis of mutual respect, was called for. The Jews now had the authority of the Catholic Church to teach our Truth to the world. What followed will be the subject of my next post.

Torah...for the Nations? part 3

The issue of whether or not we should be teaching Torah to our non-Jewish neighbors was a moot point in Medieval Europe. Jews were frequently murdered en masse. The worst perpetrators of all were the English. It was they who started the blood libel; the calumny that Jews use Christian blood in our religious ceremonies, especially on Passover, and Jews are born blind, until Christian blood was poured in their eyes. Entire communities were wiped out as a result. Often, the Jews were herded into the synagogue, which was set on fire, or thrown off a cliff. The Jews of England suffered great massacres in 1190, with the final annihilation of English Jewry in 1290. Jews were only readmitted to England three and a half centuries later. The blood libel spread rapidly through Europe, and still crops up from time to time, even in the Unites States. To this day, German Jews are careful to have at least one cup of white wine among the four cups at the Passover Seder, in order to demonstrate that we are not drinking blood. The Crusades saw massacres of Jews all over Europe and the Middle East, as enthusiastic Christian soldiers "practiced" on Jews, while on their way to kill Muslims. Fully one-third of the Jewish people was killed, proportionally identical to the Holocaust. One would think that the way to deal with the hate was to talk. But a series of disputations between Jewish and Christian clergy from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries proved not only fruitless, but actually disastrous. In most of these cases, an apostate Jew would level charges against Judaism with the civil authorities, often the King himself. A public debate would take place. Usually, the rules stated that the Jews could defend Judaism, but not criticize Christianity. Nearly always, the Jews won these debates, which generally brought about further persecution and expulsion. In the few cases where the Jews lost, they were often forcibly Baptized afterward. Perhaps the most famous of these disputations was that at Barcelona, in 1263, between RAMBAN and the apostate, Pablo Chistiani. Unlike other such debates, King James of Aragon gave RAMBAN full permission to make counter-arguments against Christianity. The debate was what we would today call a "knockout". (One can find a dramatization of this debate on YouTube, under the title "The Disputation"). However, RAMBAN was, despite royal assurances, forced to flee Spain because of his "blasphemy". Historians believe that these debates lead directly to the Inquisition. Yes, talking to the outside world about Torah, brought death and destruction upon our people. It was seen as far better to keep quiet...and even to maintain secrecy. In fact, I worry about all the ubiquitous rhetoric of online rabbis against Christianity. The arguments have changed little since the thirteenth century. I fear that these videos will bring an antisemitic backlash. In my opinion, a better approach is to teach Judaism, rather than attack others. In the mid Twentieth century, there appeared to be a glimmer of hope on the horizon for true dialogue, with the Jewish people free to tell our story to the world. But it lasted less than a decade. Next time.

Torah...for the Nations? part 2

In 1988, a famous Hasidic Rebbe had lost his wife. Among those paying condolences, was a Lithuanian Rosh Yeshiva. This particular Rosh Yeshiva was world renowned for his penetrating analyses of RAMBAM, both in halachah and philosophy. As could be expected, the conversation turned to topics of Torah. The Rebbe, in the course of their discussion, quoted a halachah in the name of RAMBAM. The Rosh Yeshiva stated emphatically "There is no such statement of RAMBAM". The Rebbe corrected him, pointing out that the statement is not found in RAMBAM's legal code, but rather in his commentary on the Mishnah. He went on to point out the numerous authorities who quoted that statement in their writings. The Rosh Yeshiva was humiliated. He was THE expert; or so he thought. This was like catching an error in Einstein's arithmetic. He left, visibly shaken. The Rebbe immediately sent some of his followers to ask the Rosh Yeshiva for forgiveness. They were rebuffed. (I have heard this story from followers of both men.) The point of this story is that the writings of RAMBAM are both subtle and complex. Issues raised and explained in one of his works, are often taken up again elsewhere, and given a different explanation. This "elsewhere" may be in a different book, or several paragraphs later in the same work. (This is one of my pet peeves about many online rabbis, who build an entire philosophy on a statement of RAMBAM, which is contradicted three paragraphs later.) A great deal of Jewish religious literature consists of works reconciling these differences. The same holds true of RAMBAM's uncharacteristic quote of the homiletic interpretation of "meorasa" (betrothed) for "morasha" (inheritance), apparently forbidding any transmission of Torah knowledge to non-Jews. This reticence is reinforced in his laws of conversion, where only bits and pieces of Jewish concepts and practices are told to the conversion candidate, and that only moments before his actual conversion ceremony. But we also find in RAMBAM that he considers both Jesus and Mohammed to be false prophets, he nevertheless sees them as tools for G-d, enabling even those living on "distant islands" where Jews never go, to learn of the G-d of Israel. But from here, we could infer that our spreading the Torah should be passive. We shouldn't teach. We"ll let G-d and history take care of that for us. But in another passage, he says that we should not teach Scripture to Muslims. Since they say that we have deliberately altered and distorted the Scriptures, in order to remove prophecies concerning Mohammed, our efforts to teach them Torah would only be met with derision. But since Christians do accept our Scriptures, it is a mitzvah to teach them, so as to show them their true meaning. Therefore, his approach is NOT to keep our Torah secret. On the contrary, we WANT them to come to Torah. We do not want to give them further ammunition for derision. Historically, however, this approach was also seen as a threat to other faiths. Very real, physical dangers, up to and including torture and death, manifested themselves in the attempt to elucidate verses in Scripture. We are about to enter a discussion of the Age of Disputations. The events that I shall describe, have largely brought about Jewish self-censorship, and, in my opinion, a reticence concerning the Prophets' charge to be a Light unto the Nations

Torah...for the Nations? part 1

The Talmud, along with several other ancient sources, both Jewish and non Jewish, records the following story:

King Ptolemy (of Egypt) once gathered 72 (others say 70) Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: "Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher". G-d put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.

Although many historians question the details of this narrative, there is no question that in the Third Century BCE, Jewish scholars translated the five books of Moses into Koine Greek, the language of the Hellenistic empire. Over the next century or two, the other Biblical books were also translated, along with material that is not in our Tanach. This is known as the Septuagint, the "Translation of the Seventy", which became standard Scripture in the assimilated communities of the Empire, especially in Egypt, and later became accepted Scripture for early Christians, from Paul on. (Earlier quotes from Tanach are direct translations from he Hebrew). To this day, the Septuagint is the only version of Tanach recognized as authoritative in the Greek Orthodox Church. The Talmud records that some deliberate changes were introduced by the translating rabbis, in places where a literal translation would be misleading. In some places, especially in the Book of Isaiah, the "translation" is little more than a paraphrase. By the Third Century CE, Jews had abandoned the Septuagint. Torah was studied and read in Hebrew. In those parts of the Eastern Roman Empire (whose language was Koine Greek, rather than Latin) where the Jews did not remember Hebrew, the far more literal translation of Aquila was substituted. Only fragments of the latter survive. We would expect the Septuagint to have been greatly celebrated by the rabbis. HaShem's Torah was, for the first time, made known to the Nations. But, on the contrary, this magnum opus was seen as a cause for mourning. "When the Torah was translated into Greek, three days of darkness fell on the world" (Talmud Megillah). A fast was instituted, which later was incorporated, together with other tragedies, into the fast of the Tenth of Tevet. But why? We had "made it"; Judaism was now "on the map". Several reasons were offered. One is that each word of the Hebrew original is pregnant with meaning. A translation...any translation... could, at best, convey only one of these meanings. The Italians have a saying "A Translator is a Traitor". Also, with Scripture in non Jewish hands, it could be easily distorted. The Book of Esther, in the Septuagint, is practically a different book! Haman is no longer an Agagite, but a Greek, seeking to undermine the Persian Kingdom in order to enable a Greek conquest. Worse still, the word "hanged" (applied to Haman and his sons), is the same word as "crucified" (σταυρώνω staurono), which infuriated Greek speaking Christians, who felt they were being mocked. This caused much antisemitism, and even violence, each year when Purim was celebrated. But beyond these reasons, many of the rabbis saw a more fundamental problem with a translation. We read in Deuteronomy 33:4 "Moses commanded us the Torah, The inheritance of the congregation of Jacob". The Torah was our gift from G-d! It was sacrilege to give it to others! The rabbis went on to homiletically say "Do not read "Morashah" (an inheritance), but "meorasah" (betrothed Bride). We are surrendering our Betrothed to every passerby. The latter homiletic interpretation converts the sharing of our heritage, into an act of depravity. Surprisingly, RAMBAM quoted this Drash as halachah. Or DOES HE? Next time.

Living in the Land of Israel part 6

I would like to go further into the words of my teacher, as well as present my conclusions on the topic as a whole. Rav Kiwak was, as I understand, teaching an important general lesson. There are commandments, both Biblical and Rabbinic, that are non-negotiable. One cannot simply say "well, this Saturday I would really like to go shopping. I'll just skip Shabbat this week". That is simply not an option for someone who takes Torah seriously. On the other hand, even most Torah laws provide for situations where they are to be violated. For instance, a person who is dangerously ill MAY NOT fast on Yom Kippur. Similarly, one who is dangerously ill on Shabbat, MUST violate the Shabbat in the course of medical treatment, This is not a dispensation. This itself is a requirement of the Torah. There is no reward for going beyond this by putting one's self in danger. But there are things that are very valuable, but not actual halachah. The Zohar, as well as many other holy books, puts a tremendous emphasis on the positive effects, both on the microcosm; man, as well as on the macrocosm: the Universe, of arising in the middle of the night to pray and meditate on the themes of alienation from G-d, as well as restoration. In the days when people retired soon after nightfall, this was not difficult. Today, this is a virtual impossibility for most people. Some, nevertheless, do it without fail. Others do it occasionally. For still others, this has gone by the wayside entirely.For example, older editions of the Chabad siddur feature it, newer ones do not. Rav Kiwak's comments about the "stomach ache" mean that one must weigh the risk/benefit ratio of staying in bed or getting up in the middle of the night. As it is not halachah, one may very well say "why bother?". But the tremendous spiritual journey of Tikkun Hatzot is beyond words. On the other hand, if being up at that time will mean being sleepy the next day, unable to pray, unable to study Torah, unable to perform one's duties to one's employer, let alone to G-d, his "merit has been lost in his loss". Some people will do it anyway. Others will think about prioritizing their spiritual life. The same is true when talking about the Land of Israel. There is clearly no requirement, according to most opinions, to live there. But the sanctity of the Land, besides its many holy places where one can be renewed, are beyond belief. Every moment is a treasure; for those who do not feel a "stomach ache". Those who say otherwise, base their statements on aggadah rather than halachah; or, even worse, political ideology, disguising as religion. I will illustrate with an unpleasant experience I had a few years ago. A woman who had been my neighbor in Beit El, found me on Facebook. She told me her tales of woe. Her husband had left her, going back to the States. (Fortunately, he did give her a "get"; a bill of divorce.) She had moved to Jerusalem with their children. Unscrupulous lawyers had convinced her to sue her ex for support and were draining her of the little sustenance she had. I told her that from my knowledge and experience, such international lawsuits rarely bore fruit. But she was convinced that if, in the midst of her poverty, she pursued the legal route, she would soon be rich. She met a man who wanted to marry her. But he had a wife back in the States, whom he did not divorce, and hence the Rabbinate would not allow her to marry this man. A rogue rabbi in Israel suggested she live as his concubine. They now have children together. For months, she wrote to me about her misery; bill collectors, neighbors prejudiced against her because of her living arrangements, government oppression, police oppression, constant anxiety over Israeli government policies. I wrote her many sympathetic emails. Then, about six years ago, she posted a comment about the upcoming American elections. (I do not wish to deal with the question whether her perceptions were correct. It is the attitude I am commenting upon). She wrote "I hope that Trump loses. American Jews would prosper under Trump, and never come on aliyah. But Hillary is an antisemite, and will persecute the Jews. Then they will have no choice but to come to Israel". I was stunned. Despite all of her misery, she wanted the American Jews to come at any cost. Let them be persecuted, rounded up in camps, perhaps with many to die...so long as the bulk came "home" to share in her misery. This attitude gives a whole new meaning to the term "cognitive dissonance". I immediately unfriended her and blocked her. For all those who say that it is a Torah requirement to live in the Land, which is largely fictitious, or who say, after an antisemitic incident "the writing is on the wall.  Time to come home" J'accuse. For those who are capable of focusing on the spirituality inherent in the Land, on the sense of closeness to G-d,  while being oblivious to everything happening around them,  happy are they! I, for one, am not sympathetic to that view.