CHAREDI LIKE ME

Back in 1961, a man named John Howard Griffin, a white native of Mansfield, Texas, published a remarkable book. "Black Like Me" was his account of six weeks of travel by bus across the deep south-as a black man, which he wasn't.

Two years earlier, Mr. Griffin, with the help of a dermatologist, took large doses of a drug that darkens skin and spent up to fifteen hours daily under an ultraviolet lamp to intensify the effect. He closely cut his hair and even shaved the backs of his hands before setting out to experience what it was like to be black in that era and place. He recounted the "hate stare" he regularly received from whites and the myriad indignities of black life at the time, like the difficulty of finding a public restroom to use.

Later, even as he enjoyed some celebrity for his gambit, he received so many threats to his life that he moved to Mexico.

In a somewhat less brave experiment, two secular Israeli television reporters recently video-documented something similar, beginning with their transformation-aided not by drugs but a professional make-up artist-from typical secular Israelis to bearded, kaftan-ed charedim. With the help of a charedi "consultant" to guide them in matters of mannerism, the two men metamorphosed into an entirely passable charedi pair-and sallied forth to see if, as some have charged-charedim suffer discrimination and worse from non-religious Israelis.

The two undercover reporters walked through and rode buses in secular neighborhoods; they made inquiries about renting a house and about joining a gym.

It wasn't exactly gripping documentary journalism, but it did have its moments of interest. While the pair, at least in the footage included (and, presumably, with a cameraman noticeably present), encountered only politeness from secular Israelis, one would-be landlord seemed to have no explanation for why the asking rent was considerably more that had been advertised. Another person answering the door of an apartment for rent claimed she is only the current tenant and promised to have the owner get back to the pair, which apparently never happened. On a bus, non-religious riders chose to stand rather than sit next to one of the "charedi" men.

None of which amounts to anything more than the softest of bigotry. Most likely just wariness in the face of the unfamiliar. The interactions were all entirely friendly and civil.

Which is what most of us would expect. Israelis can, to be sure, evidence a certain bluntness-often interpreted, at least by Americans, as gruffness. It is likely the product of the general tenor of the Middle-East coupled with the fact that Israelis live daily with the thought that millions of people near and far would like to erase their country-and them-from the face of the earth. But even that bluntness was not evident in the film. The ersatz charedim were stared at here and there, but largely ignored.

Does such a decidedly unscientific experiment indicate that charedim as a group are truly accepted as brothers and sisters by all other Israelis? That they in fact are not belittled, resented, and even hated? No. It just means, at most, that the belittlers, resenters, and haters are a minority, not readily in evidence "on the street." They tend to hang out elsewhere, like at the Knesset and the pages of Haaretz.

Still and all, it's heartening to imagine-and I think it is true-that charedim are not subject to abuse in daily life, even when they venture into other neighborhoods. Most Israelis, even if they have opinions that clash with their charedi co-citizens, are tolerant of those who choose to live more intensely traditional Jewish lives than they do.

And, of course, the same is true in the other direction. While there may be charedim who harbor ill will toward their secular fellow-Jews, they are the exception. In fact, the regularly heard canard that "the charedim" despise other Israelis might be a good topic for the intrepid reporters' next investigative journalism foray outside their studio. They could visit some religious neighborhoods or towns and try to interact with the locals there, to see if they experience any such animus.

And they won't even need any makeup.

OPEN SEASON ON CHAREDIM - AND TORAH

One hopes that readers here are not part of the population that peruses tabloids like the New York Post. If they were, though, they would have seen a recent opinion piece that called Jews "a small minority of the population… granted special privileges" who "wield power disproportionate to their numbers" and whose "behavior violates the law and infringes on the rights of others." Wielding "considerable political clout," and "flexing their political muscle," they represent "a dangerous trend that has been allowed to fester and grow for decades." Jews also receive "special treatment" by those in power and deny "the civil rights of [crime] victims." When criticized, the writer explains, Jews simply dismiss their critics as anti-Semites.

Moreover, the piece reports, Jews represent "a demographic tidal wave" and threaten to become "dominant" in the United States. Warning that it is time to head off the coming misfortune, the writer concludes that our "silence is acquiescence."

Oh, my mistake! It wasn't "Jews" to whom the writer, an "activist" named Ben Hirsch, was referring, but rather "strictly Orthodox Jews." Forgive me.

One wonders, though, how Mr. Hirsch manages to convince himself that there's some qualitative difference between a generic bigot who offers the public a hodgepodge of sinister insinuations, half-truths, and outright lies about Jews as a whole, and a hater like himself who does precisely the same about an identifiable subset of Jews. Does the dilemma even occur to him?

What provided Mr. Hirsch his latest opportunity to besmirch charedim and prejudice the public against them were the allegations several weeks ago of disgusting acts in Beit Shemesh. In classic bigot's style, he parlayed the bad behavior of a few into a tarring of an entire group. He knows his business.

As does another recent op-ed writer, this one in The New York Times. Rabbi Dov Linzer's business, however, is not bigotry but the promotion of a new vision of Judaism, one that many find redolent of the Conservative movement's early days. The dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in Riverdale in the Bronx, an institution championing "modern and open Orthodox values," Rabbi Linzer was once reported in the New York Jewish Week to have asserted that the Sages of the Talmud were unconcerned with a person's religious beliefs; that, in the article's words, "it was Maimonides who introduced the concept that Jews must adhere to basic dogmas, and even he was not consistent in his demands for such adherence."

Such theological novellae, however, were not the subject of the rabbi's recent offering. He, too, like Mr. Hirsch, was inspired by the reports from Beit Shemesh. (In addition to the sin of their behavior itself, the alleged Beit Shemesh spitters and cursers bear the iniquity-burden of having provided the Mr. Hirschs and Rabbi Linzers of the world with effective ammunition for promoting their agendas.) But the opportunity Rabbi Linzer saw was to sully not so much a group of Jews (although he does his share of that too) but rather a concept, that of tznius, or Jewish modesty.

He begins his piece, which ran under the lovely title "Lechery, Immodesty and the Talmud," with the following paragraph:

"Is it possible for a religious demand for modesty to be about anything other than men controlling women's bodies? From recent events in Israel, it would certainly seem that it is not."

He goes on to assert that "the responsibility for controlling men's licentious thoughts" lies "squarely on the men." The notion that women may have a tzenius responsibility regarding their manner of dress, he writes, reflects only "a blame-the-victim mentality." In fact, he informs us, it represents "a complete perversion" of the Talmud. Who knew?

The emergence of such… interesting writing by Jews in the secular media is, of course, disturbing. (Other adjectives occur as well.) It puts one in mind of what Rashi reminded us recently when we reviewed parshas Shemos, that Moshe Rabbeinu had puzzled over why the Jewish People had languished so long in Egypt-until he discovered the phenomenon of Jews acting contemptibly against other Jews. Then he understood.

If any of us are puzzling over why our current exile is so protracted, well, a glance at some op-ed pages can provide the tragic answer.

SCRAPBOOK WALLS

First time visitors to the Shafran home quickly notice how odd it is. Its walls, that is. Well, what graces them, anyway.

The dining room does sport a few normal things-a framed reproduction of a work of Hebrew micrography (a gift, many years ago, from some beloved students) and a small painting of a pensive man in a shtreimel studying Torah (likewise a gift, from some dear friends). And there is a photograph of Rav Avrohom Pam, zt"l, atop a bookcase.

But the remainder of the wall space, in that room and most of the others, is a hodgepodge of, well, oddball items.

There are photos of children and grandchildren (oddball only in that they are, for the most part, random snapshots from various decades and just taped to the walls in no particular pattern); "parsha pictures"-visual riddles about the weekly Torah portion (changed weekly and drawn by someone who is sometimes accused of being a writer but has never been mistaken for an artist); a framed ticket-stub from a trip to the top of one of the Twin Towers (from a visit my wife and three of our children made to the structure on August 30, 2001-a reminder of the world's unpredictability); and an assortment of inexplicable other oddities, like thank-you, mazel tov, and mishloach manos notes, first-grade writing assignments from small children who are now adults, homemade birthday and anniversary cards; various stick-figure artworks by einiklach, several colorful ones by a very artistically talented little girl who is expecting her third child, bisha'a tova, a photo of a gorilla (don't ask; I don't remember), a photocopy of a Chassidic rebbe's advice (to always remember that "when you are exasperated by interruptions… remember that their very frequency indicates the value of your life…") given to me by Rabbi Moshe Sherer, z"l; a list of phone numbers and another one of guests to invite for Shabbos meals; a tree leaf from each of the past 18 autumns. And much more.

One piece of paper taped to the wall over my desk is an elaborately crafted piece of cartoon art that graced a magazine cover many years ago. I honestly don't recall how it came to my possession, but I clearly felt at the time that it deserved a spot of honor, which it does.

It depicts an "antique shop" scene: a large heavy-lidded, bearded man in a t-shirt, a cigar in his mouth and a foam cup of coffee in his hand, sitting in a rocking chair before a table laden with items for sale. In the foreground, a nondescript couple is walking away beaming, having made the purchase of a wholly unremarkable plastic snow-globe with a snowman inside. On the table and mounted on a wall behind the large man are the $5 and $10 bric-a-brac in which the couple had no interest. Among the items: An ancient document bearing ornate script beginning "We the People"; a caged live dodo bird, a first-edition comic book, an old sled with "Rosebud" carved on it; a Ming vase, a photograph of the Loch Ness monster, a pair of ruby slippers… You get the idea.

The cartoon is really the key to all the eclectic, eccentric things gracing our walls. I've been in homes of wealthy people, where the walls were adorned with beautifully framed, expensive, works of art. But I would never consider mounting a Rembrandt in place of the then-seven-year-old boy's homemade "newspaper" reporting that: "A boy crossed the street and insded of him getting hit, he hit a car and the car dide." Or putting a Picasso where a faded homemade birthday card from a little girl (now mother of four) reads: "For a very good man that turns 33." The "newspaper" dispatch and card are priceless. "Real" works of art are, well, snowglobes.

Of course the cartoon's real lesson-perhaps intended by the artist, perhaps just channeled through him-is a powerful piece of mussar, about how easy it is for so many of us, like the clueless couple kvelling over their plastic metziah, to value silly things we have come to amass and remain oblivious to life's truly priceless treasures, there all around us.

PRAYING FOR CONTEMPORARY CAPTIVES

It was over a decade ago, in the wake of a spate of terrible terrorist attacks on Jews in Eretz Yisrael, that the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah called upon Jews to recite chapters of Tehillim (they suggested chapters 83, 130, and 142) in shul after davening, followed by the short prayer "Acheinu," a supplication to G-d to show mercy to His people. Many shuls, to their great credit, to this day still dutifully seize that special merit at the end of their services. None of us can know what dangers that collective credit may have averted, may be averting still.

It occurred to me, though, that recent events might well inspire us-not only those of us Jews who look to the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah for guidance, but all good-hearted Jews, charedi, "modern Orthodox," non-Orthodox, "traditional," and secular-minded alike-to consider reciting the holy words with special concentration, and the short prayer with an additional, somewhat different, intent.

For we have witnessed of late…

Reports of verbal and physical attacks on innocent Jews, even children, by other Jews who were, ostensibly, dissatisfied with their marks' level of modesty.

The exploitation of media to bring such outrages, and exaggerations of their scope, to the entire world's attention.

Verbal and physical attacks on religious Jews by secularists fired up over the reports.

Astoundingly tasteless demonstrations appropriating Nazi symbols, even the abuse of children by their inclusion in the sick spectacle.

The indiscriminate lumping together by pundits and self-appointed judgment-pronouncers of the irresponsible acts of would-be "zealots" with valid issues like the propriety of voluntarily sex-segregated buses for communities that want them, or of the refusal by Israeli soldiers who, out of religious conviction, do not wish to listen to women singing .

Editorials and opinion-mongering in the press smearing "the haredim" as a group for the alleged acts of a woefully misguided few; attacking Gedolim for not choosing to chastise people who have no regard for them or their rebukes; derogating the very concept of traditional Jewish modesty.

And so, a thought, about what we might consider having in mind during "Acheinu":

"Acheinu kol Bais Yisrael"-"Our brethren, the entire Jewish People"

Our brethren-Let all Jews always remember that we are all, in fact, brothers and sisters-

"Hanesunim bitzara u'bishivya"-"who are delivered into confinement and captivity"

Who are confined and imprisoned by personal attitudes, and blind to the feelings and convictions of others…

"Ha'omdim bein bayam u'vein bayabasha"-"whether they be on the sea or dry land"

Whether they are borne afloat in the world of Torah-study and observance or anchored in a world parched of both…

"HaMakom yiracheim aleihem viyotzi'eim mitzara li'rvacha"-"May the Omnipresent have mercy on them and remove them from distress to relief"

May the One Who is present in every Jewish heart release them from their close-mindedness to a state of openness to others and Jewish concern for other Jews

"U'mei'afela li'ora"-"and from darkness to light"

From the darkness of hatred and frustration that yields derision of others (and worse) to the enlightened recognition that fellow Jews, even those one may feel are misguided, deserve respect and care.

"U'mishibud lig'ula"-"and from subjugation to redemption"

From slavery to incivility to the freedom of open minds and hearts-leading to the ultimate redemption

"Hashta b'agala u'viz'man kariv"-"now, speedily, and close at hand"

Not next year, not next month, but today.

And let us say amein.

REB LAZER ELYA'S EYES

Reb Lazer Elya Der Melamed ("the cheder teacher") was born in the late 1850s, lived in Ostrolenka, Poland, and died shortly before the Germans invaded in 1939. I arrived in this world about a century after he did and on a continent he never saw, so I never met him. But I was introduced to him all the same, by my father, may he be well. Reb Lazer Elya was his grandfather.

My father lived for a time with his grandparents while attending a branch of the Novardhok yeshiva in Ostrolenka. He recalls his bar mitzvah there. His parents, living in a town called Ruzhan, had no money for the trip. My father read the Torah and his impoverished grandfather brought some kichel and a small bottle of schnapps to the shul to mark the occasion.

Recently, a Shabbos Sheva Brachos for my niece took place at Yeshivas Ner Yisrael in Baltimore, where the father of the bride, Reb Lazer Elya's great-grandson-my dear brother-is a rebbe. Our great-grandfather was present in a way, through a letter he had written, read by my father at one of the meals.

My father is the administrator of the Baltimore Bais Din and, having served a congregation for more than a half-century, he is the oldest rov in the city. (I like to imagine that health, vigor and mental acuity into one's 80s is in the family genes, although I suspect that my father's daily brisk 3-mile walk and responsible diet may have something to do with it.) He is also an incredibly loving grandfather and great-grandfather. And he has adopted a custom: when one of his grandchildren marries, he presents the new couple with a handwritten, framed blessing-poem, the first letters of whose lines spell out the names of the newlyweds.

His inspiration was a similar gift his grandfather sent in the 1930s to a newlywed grandson of his - my father's second cousin-in America,. On the other side of the poem-page was a letter, the one my father read aloud at the Sheva Brachos.

In it, Reb Lazer Elya acknowledges a gift that his American grandson had apparently sent him on the occasion of his 80th birthday. He then laments how he searched in vain for some meaningful physical gift to send his grandson and so is sending instead the gift of a poem.

(Unlike his grandfather, my father is able to, and does, send his newlywed grandchildren generous gifts. But his poems are the more cherished presents.)

Reb Lazer Elya also expresses his happy surprise that his grandson's wife had included with the couple's birthday gift a note in Hebrew. It made him happy and proud, he wrote, to know that his granddaughter-in-law-in America!-had retained that connection to her religious background.

When the letter was read, it felt as if my great-grandfather were somehow present. What would he think, I pondered, if he were in fact here, if he could survey America today.

To be sure, tragically many European-rooted Jews disappeared into American society, their Jewish identities crumbled into dust that wafted across the fruited plain. But Reb Lazer Elya would surely be wide-eyed at the sight of the "treifeh medina" today.

I imagined him surveying the land he had thought so hopeless a place for Jews that a Hebrew note from its shores gladdened his heart. Seeing Shabbos in the yeshiva, the beautiful children playing underfoot, boys with payos and yarmulkes, girls in modest dresses. The men "speaking in learning" on the lawn. The beis medrash filled with hundreds of others swaying over texts he would immediately recognize. The apartments and houses, and the women inside them tending to their young and saying Tehillim. And I imagined him able to gaze beyond Baltimore, to see not only similar scenes in yeshivos across the continent but other fantasies come to life, entire communities of dedicated, observant Jews in cities large and small across the continent.

We American Orthodox Jews tend to focus our attention, as well we should, on the many problems and challenges we face. Every so often, though, we do well to stop and take stock of all we have. Stop, that is, and try to see our collective community through Reb Lazer Elya's eyes.

BLIND FAITH AND PHYSICS

A recent essay by an award-winning scientist presents a remarkable, and remarkably revealing, picture of current scientific thought about the nature of the universe.

The delightfully named Alan P. Lightman, an MIT professor a major contributor to the understanding of astrophysical processes, titled his piece in last month's Harper's Magazine "The Accidental Universe: Science's crisis of faith." Reviewing the history of theoretical physics, he notes how, "until the past few years, physicists agreed that the entire universe… is generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry… [W]e were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood."

In the words of Professor Lightman's MIT colleague Alan Guth: "Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the feeling was that we were so smart, we almost had everything figured out," referring to the fundamental forces of nature. Professor Guth punctuated that recollection, Professor Lightman recounts, with "a bitter laugh."

The laugh is bitter because of something that "has unsettled some scientists for years"- careful calculations showing that if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe diverged even a smidgen from what they are, life could not exist. If the nuclear force (which binds protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei) were a few percentage points stronger, all hydrogen atoms would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium. No hydrogen, no water; no water, presumably, no life. Similarly, if the amount of something called "dark energy" (believed to fuel the observed expansion of the universe) in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, "matter… could never pull itself together" to form complex atoms.

"The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be 'fine-tuned'," Professor Lightman explains, "to allow the existence of life."

To avoid the conclusion, Science forbid, that our universe was somehow intentionally created for life, some scientists have come to rely on the "multiverse" model, the theory that there are any number of other "universes" parallel to ours, and that ours just happens to have the configurations necessary for the known elements to form, for life to exist, and for humans to ruminate about it all.

Professor Lightman notes that the multiverse approach undermines the very venture of physics as a description of reality, and summarizes the theory: "From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life." Of course, he admits, "we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence."

Nor, of course, disprove it. Thus the multiverse theory absolves its adherents of the need to ponder the fact of the cosmos' incredibly peculiar hospitability to life.

The contention that the complexity and utility of nature point to a Creator-the "argument from design"-has traditionally focused on the earth and its creatures. And has been dismissed by many as refuted by modern theories of biological development.

Now, though, faced with evidence from the cosmos itself that the very fundamentals of physics seem shockingly geared toward life, scientists committed to keeping science pure from metaphysical matters have had to bend over so far backwards that they are virtually snapping in half. Samson-like, they shout, in effect, "Let my physics perish with the Philistines!"

"If, in order to keep a Creator out of our thoughts," they declare, "it's necessary to undermine the entire enterprise of physics, well, then, by Whoever, it must be done! Long live the Multiverse!"

For many centuries no distinction was made between "natural science" and "moral science"-the latter concerning itself with teleology (design in nature), human purpose and a Creator. Both together comprised "science," from the Latin word for "knowledge."

Eventually, however, knowledge was compartmentalized. "Science" came to mean the physical sciences alone, with concerns about other parts of truth consigned to artificially crafted realms like "philosophy" or "theology."

Now, it seems, the physical sciences' very discoveries have pointed their discoverers precisely in the direction of a theological truth. Unfortunately, as George Orwell once observed, it can be a formidable struggle sometimes to see what is in front of one's nose.

PILLORIED WITH HILLARY

One of the many downsides of a world that moves as quickly as ours is that many of us feel we must react to events in "real time" rather than after some research and thought. Leon Wieseltier once wisely remarked that the concept of such immediate reaction (he was speaking of blogs) is predicated on the ridiculous idea that our first thoughts are our best thoughts. Reactions, in other words, are one animal; thoughtful judgments, an entirely different genus.

Enough time has passed-I hope-for a measured, non-knee-jerk, objective look at events of several weeks ago that were very quickly reacted to by many in the Jewish world. The events comprised a trifecta of sorts of alleged anti-Israel sentiment: a speech by the U.S. Secretary of State; remarks by an American ambassador; and the U.S. Secretary of Defense's response to a question.

It didn't help, of course, that a presidential election is looming. Republican candidates led the charge, claiming that the trio of (as they portrayed them) dastardly comments were just proof to their charge that the current administration hates Israel.

The remarks Hillary Clinton reportedly made at a private gathering in Washington were indeed offensive. Ms. Clinton seemed to portray Israel's by-any-standard vibrant democracy as something less. (Let us pause to be thankful that she lost the 2008 Democratic primary.) And she waxed critical of what she perceived as discriminatory attitudes among religious Jews in Israel, evidencing a woeful ignorance of the difference between voluntary separation of the sexes and base discrimination. Those alleged comments yielded a torrent of well-earned chastisement, including a statement from Agudath Israel of America expressing its "chagrin" and contending that Ms. Clinton "seems either unaware or unconcerned with the sincerely held and time-honored convictions of traditionally religious Jews."

The second of the lambasted, however, was a victim, not a violator. U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman had the unfortunate experience of being paraphrased by Yediot Achronot, a notoriously sloppy news organization. Speaking to the European Jewish Conference, Mr. Gutman, a proud Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor, noted that while classical anti-Semitism-the sort characterized by accusations of well-poisoning and economy-manipulation-is not noticeably on the rise, a new sort of anti-Semitism, expressed in anti-Israelism, is. Yediot implied that Mr. Gutman was engaging in apologetics for the latter. The ambassador did note how such modern Jew-hatred can be fueled by Israel's actions-something no one in his right mind would ever deny-but at no point did he do anything remotely to "justify" such animus, as he was accused of doing by a gaggle of Jewish organizations and writers (and Republican presidential candidates). They all relied on Yediot's report, and on reports based on its reports, rather than take the time to research what Mr. Gutman had actually said.

The condemnations of Mr. Gutman were succinctly summarized by Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, who knows a thing or two about anti-Semitism, as "an awful lot of nonsense."

Finally, there was the comment of U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. At the 2011 Saban Forum, an annual gathering of U.S. and Israeli officials, he was asked if he agreed with the contention that, for peace's sake, Israel should withdraw from territories claimed by the Palestinians. His response was: "No, just get to the [goldarned] table." (Mr. Panetta used a more explicit adjective.) He then repeated the sentence several times, making clear that his admonition was intended for both the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership alike.

Now one can easily make a case for the fact that Israel is entirely willing to sit down at the goldarned, or any, table, that the Palestinians are, as usual, the obstacle to negotiations. But no one has ever accused Mr. Panetta of being unsupportive of Israel. No one could. And his venting of frustration over stalemated peace talks doesn't change that a whit.

And yet, Mr. Panetta and Mr. Gutman were pilloried along with Hillary by talking heads and tapping fingers, the threesome cast as a Treacherous Trio, their strings pulled, of course, by an evil wizard in the White House.

It's easy to rush to judgment. What's less easy but more important is to recognize that factuality and fairness are high ideals, indeed deeply Jewish ones.

ISMS OF A MODERN AGE

I was honestly humbled by the participation of the speakers who preceded me at the Sunday morning session of Agudath Israel of America's most recent national convention.

They were: the venerable Malcolm Hoenlein (whose name, I noted, seems hinted at in the verse "Bnai Tziyon yagilu b'Malcolm"), and the likewise rightly celebrated Professor Aaron Twerski. The topic was "The Lamb Among Seventy Wolves"-the precarious position of the Jewish people among the nations.

Mr. Hoenlein provided a comprehensive overview of contemporary anti-Semitism and geopolitics; Professor Twerski focused on the dismaying import for Jews of the world economic situation.

My assignment was to address spiritual threats to our people.

I suggested that the distinction between spiritual and physical menaces may be illusionary, that the former in fact underlie the latter.

Fighting anti-Semitism, and its illegitimate offspring anti-Israel-ism, must be a priority. At the same time, though, a mesora-attuned mindset must always know that Jews' wellbeing is ultimately not a function of articles, activism or armaments. Those are tools. What empowers them is where we stand, as a community and as individuals, in matters of the spirit.

It should be obvious. Jews comprise 2/10ths of 1 percent of the world's population, a large chunk of which doesn't much like us. How does this sheep even stay alive among a world of wolves? The only answer is Divine protection. And it comes as the result of our merits.

So while evil people engage in physical and verbal attacks against Jews, spiritual forces are fueling the evil. Keeping those spiritual wolves at bay is the key to our safety.

Among the spiritual threats facing us are things like the coarsening of the surrounding culture, which is practically unavoidable, and its new invasion-vehicle called the Internet.

Other challenges pound at the door to our souls, too, like the astonishing sea-change in how society has come to view the idea of a marital relationship, capitulating in mere years to a movement that proudly and loudly rejects one of the fundamental merits of human society. This mindset, which has spread even to some ostensibly Orthodox Jews must be countered by each of us individually, as well as communally.

Then there's what calls itself the "Animal Rights" movement, whose true danger isn't limited to the threat it poses to legal shechita, but lies in its very credo, the idea that animals have rights. We have obligations toward animals, to be sure. But assigning them "rights" leads to obscenities like a book, "Eternal Treblinka," that compares factory farming to Nazi concentration camps.

The perverse overvaluing of animal lives swings in tandem with the devaluing of human life, both at its beginning and at its end. Standing firm on the issue of the value of every moment of human life is imperative.

There are other issues, too, I noted, that Torah-conscious Jews must confront, like the subtle redefinition of kashrus being attempted by the Conservative movement, cheered on by mendacious media; and the promotion of atheism under the banner of science.

These are not so much mere issues as they are full-fledged "ism"s, of a sort with those idolatries Rav Elchonon Wasserman fingered decades ago: Communism, Secular Zionism, and Nationalism. Today we add Scientism, AnimalRights-ism, a Woman'sRighttoChoose-ism, QualityofLife-ism.

Not to mention isms that have already infected the Orthodox world, like rampant Materialism, Feminism, and anti-Gedolim-ism.

And a final, uncomfortable one: Politicism-the pledge of fealty to an American, or Israeli, political party or movement.

Until the arrival of Moshiach, we Jews are charged with accepting the implications of Golus, which requires, as per Yaakov's meeting with Esav, our employment of a delicate combination of intimidation, reason, and submission. Ironically, it has always been Torah-rejecting Jews-Bundists, Communists, secular Zionists-who stood bold and unconcerned with the wider world's concerns, secure in their might and their right. In a strange contemporary reversal, haredim have become the hardliners, with secular Jews more concerned about "the nations."

There may be good reasons for backing the current Israeli administration and its policies. But truly thoughtful Jews, I suggested in conclusion, do well to employ caution here too, since Likudism can be an ism too.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

The latest hope for signs of possible life on other planets lies in the cargo bay of a spacecraft that blasted off from Cape Canaveral the morning of Shabbos parshas Toldos.

The Mars Science Laboratory will deliver a rover aptly named Curiosity to the surface of the Red Planet. Methane gas, which can be emitted by living organisms, has tentatively been detected in the Martian atmosphere, and instruments on Curiosity should be able to confirm the presence of the gas and of other carbon-based molecules likewise considered to be "building blocks of life."

Many scientists assume that life must exist on other worlds. Although science doesn't usually embrace beliefs that have not been supported by observations, the conviction that there is life elsewhere in the universe derives from the creed that chance pervades and governs the universe-that randomness lies at the root of reality.

If probability is the loom on which the universe's fabric is stretched, the creed's canon proclaims, what reason could there possibly be for only a single, unremarkable planet in a single, unremarkable solar system in a single, unremarkable galaxy to alone have spawned life?

This abiding scientific faith assumes something of a miracle, that terrestrial life somehow arose from inanimate matter here on earth. It reveres a trinity: a single-celled ancestor, random mutation, and natural selection. Their interplay, the belief goes, is responsible for the astounding diversity of life on earth.

And so, during the same eons over which time and chance on Earth allowed inert elements to slowly morph into iPods and their owners, countless other worlds should have done no worse. Indeed, may have done considerably better.

Creation, we believing Jews know, was in fact an act of Divine will, not the yield of randomness. Still and all, it isn't unthinkable that rudimentary life on other planets, like the kind Curiosity is looking for, exists. After all, G-d created life here on Earth that remained unseen for most of human history-whether in undersea volcanic vents or Amazonian jungle canopies. The discovery of life on other worlds would hardly challenge Jewish belief.

But intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos? Unlikely, I think. One thing is certain: all efforts thus far to detect it have come up empty.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, there was SETI, or the "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"; META, the "Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay"; and META II. In 1972 and 1973, plaques depicting the location of Earth in the galaxy and solar system and what humans look like were launched aboard the Pioneer and Voyager probes. In 1974, the Arecibo message, which carried coded information about chemistry and terrestrial life, was beamed into space. And in the 1990s, the "Billion-channel ExtraTerrestrial Assay" (BETA) was created, as well as a project harnessing the computing power of five million volunteers' computers to crunch numbers that might reveal patterns indicative of intelligent life beyond our planet. Tens of billions of hours of processing time have so far been consumed by the project.

So far, though, nothing.

The dearth of any sign of intelligent life beyond our own planet doesn't prove anything, of course. It's a big universe.

But I'm reminded of what Reb Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev had to say about a verse in the Torah (Devarim, 17:3) concerning a false prophet who will "prostrate himself to… the sun or the moon or to any host of heaven, which I have not commanded." Rashi explains that last phrase as meaning "which I have not commanded you to worship."

The Berditchever had a different approach. The reason one may not bow down to a heavenly body, he explained, is because G-d has not commanded it in any way. One may, however, bow down in respect to a human being-because humans are unique, sublime creatures, beings who have been commanded, who uniquely possess the free will to accept and execute G-d's will.

Intelligent extraterrestrials, I suppose, could have received their own Divine commandments. A planet revolving Alpha Centauri may have had its own Mt. Sinai revelation, or some alien equivalent.

One could, I imagine, "hear" such a thing.

Personally, I think the silence out there speaks louder.

ANNOYANCE AND OPPORTUNITY

The mosquitoes are gone, thank G-d.

Not only the determined one who pestered me one summer morning in shul during davening, but all of her friends and relatives too. Gone for the fall, winter and spring. And if they all decide to take a collective summer vacation somewhere far away next July, I'll pay their airfare. Count me among cold-weather aficionados; I'm averse to heat, humidity, and-especially-mosquitoes. Not only are their bite-sites unsightly and itchy, but some of the species carry dangerous diseases. Okay, maybe not those in these parts, but still.

About that one in shul. I imagined her sent by the soton to prevent my concentration. She hovered before me and I shooed her away. She returned and I shooed some more. I would happily have dispatched her to the big standing water pool in the sky but it somehow felt wrong to deliver a fatal blow, even to a mere insect, in my tallis and tefillin.

I don't claim to have the focus one is ideally supposed to have during prayer. My mind wanders and too much of what I recite evidences more rote than reflection. But I do try to concentrate, especially on the parts of the service that require special attention: Kri'as Sh'ma, the Amida, or silent prayer (especially its first bracha), and Ashrei. The Talmud singles out one verse in Ashrei for special concentration: Pose'ach es yadecha…"You open Your hands and provide the will (needs) of all living things." I always pause there to feel gratitude for having food on the table and walls and a roof to keep the elements out.

That morning, as I said that verse, I thought of how Hashem provides even the most rudimentary level of the life-pyramid, the plant kingdom, with its needs. Mere days earlier, on a hike with my wife in upstate New York, I had spied a truly strange plant. It was only two or three inches tall, and both its stem and the tulip-like flower at its head were entirely, strikingly white. How, I wondered when I stooped down to examine it, did it get the energy to fuel its little life? Plants generally rely on chlorophyll, which is green, to absorb energy from sunlight. Not this organism. Intrigued, when we returned home, I did some research and discovered that I had come across the rare monotropa uniflora, also known as the Ghost Plant, a perennial native to parts of Asia, North America and northern South America.

It apparently generates energy is a complex way, by hosting certain fungi that are, in turn, symbiotic with trees-meaning that the little white plant gets its fuel second-hand and "refined," from the fungi, which in turn received it from photosynthetic trees.

"Provide the needs of every living thing" indeed, I pondered that morning, marveling how fitting a niche-organism monotropa was to have in my mind when those words were on my lips.

But the soton wouldn't have it. While I tried to conjure the image of the strange white plant and think about the Divine blessing of its ability to absorb recycled sunlight, the posuk of Pose'ach was interrupted by the high pitched whine of the blood-sucker near my ear, heading west toward my nose. More shooing, more hovering, more shooing.

I realized that concentration in tefilla isn't necessarily supposed to be easy. Why should it be any less subject to obstacles than any other valuable endeavor? Still, though, I wished that this bug would just stop bugging me already, and let me focus on important words.

Somehow, and with no small amount of embarrassment, it was only after davening that it occurred to me that my aerial adversary, trying her best to find a place on me to land, puncture my skin with her thin proboscis, and relieve me of some of my blood was only trying herself to partake of what G-d had provided in the world for her sustenance-or, more biologically precise, the sustenance of the young she carried.

She had in fact been the perfect boon for contemplating the verse of "You open Your hands…" In my annoyance, I had missed an opportunity.

IS ANYBODY THERE?

Remember Terri Schiavo, the "vegetative" Florida woman who, as a result of her husband's insistence and a court order (over her parents' objections), was removed from life support and died in 2005?

"Vegetative" patients-people who, due to disease or accident, are unresponsive to stimuli-are considered by many to be less than truly alive.

Last year, though, a group of European scientists employed something called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows cellular activity across brain regions, to demonstrate that four patients in a group of 54 diagnosed as vegetative were in fact hearing and thinking-and could actually communicate-answering yes-or-no questions about their lives-through mental effort.

And now, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet has published a study demonstrating that three severely brain-injured people thought to be in an irreversible "vegetative" state showed signs of full consciousness when tested with a relatively inexpensive, widely available method of measuring brain waves. The researchers used a portable electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, which picks up electrical brain activity in the brain's cortex, or surface layer, through electrodes positioned on a person's head.

The research team gave 16 "vegetative" people simple instructions, to squeeze their right hands into a fist or wiggle their toes when they heard a beep. The tasks were repeated up to 200 times.

In healthy people processing those instructions, the EEG picked up a clear pattern in the premotor cortex, the area of the brain that plans and prepares movements; the electrical flare associated with the hand was distinct from that associated with the toes.

Although the three supposedly vegetative people could not move their fingers or toes, their brains showed precisely the same electrical patterns.

Of course, even in the absence of evidence of any brain activity detectable by machines we have now no one can know what degree of consciousness persists in a body unable to move. But a diagnosis of "permanent vegetative state" can make it lawful to withdraw assisted nutrition and hydration-in other words, to starve the patient to death.

A different issue is "brain death"-a diagnosis of irreversible cessation of all brain function, which modern medicine and secular law consider sufficient to permit the "harvesting" of organs before removal of life-support. In the eyes of halacha, can such a patient, whose heart is still beating, in fact be considered a warm corpse?

Some rabbis say yes. But many of the most prominent halachic authorities, including Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, zt"l, and yibodel lechaim, Rav Yosef Elyashiv, disagree. Leading halachic lights in the United States who concur with those poskim include Rabbi Herschel Schachter and Rabbi J. David Bleich.

(Halacha, to be sure, does not always insist that life be maintained; in some cases of seriously ill patients, even those with full brain function, it even forbids intercessions that will prolong suffering. But Judaism considers life precious, indeed holy, even when its "quality" is severely diminished. And so, halacha does not permit any action that might hasten the demise of a person in extremis. And, needless to say, it forbids removal of vital organs from a patient not deemed by halacha to be deceased.)

Back in 2005, Princeton University Professor of Bioethics Peter Singer was asked by The New York Times what today-taken-for-granted idea or value he thinks may disappear in the next 35 years. He responded: "the traditional view of the sanctity of human life." It will, he went on to explain, "collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments."

The professor, unfortunately, is likely right about society's regard for human life-particularly as life-spans increase, insurance costs rise, and demand for transplantable organs intensifies. Human beings run the risk of morphing from holy harborers of souls into… commodities.

Ironically, though, Singer may be wrong about technological developments. As events of late have shown, the creative use of technology can upend our assumptions about things like "vegetative" patients, and act as a brake on the "progress" of the commoditization of human life.

Would an EEG have yielded any sign of consciousness in Terri Schiavo's unresponsive body? Doctors say it is unlikely, that her brain was likely too deeply damaged.

But of course we'll never really know.

RUNNING, RACISM AND RESENTMENT

When I recounted seeing a small group of unusually dressed men in shul last Sunday in Staten Island and realizing that they were trying to catch a minyan before participating in the New York Marathon (which begins in that borough), my daughter asked me if any of them had a chance of winning the race.

"Nah," I said. "It'll be a Kenyan." Four of the New York race's past ten men's race winners, after all, hailed from that African country. Actually, make that five now. (Congratulations, Geoffery Mutai.) A fellow Kenyan came in second.

My daughter's face, I thought, evidenced some surprise, as if I had espoused some rank racism. So I explained that Kenyans seem particularly physically endowed for long-distance running. Kenyans, that is, and Ethiopians (another citizenry with disproportionate wins in marathons) who belong to the lithe and limber Kalenjin tribe.

If believing that different populations have different abilities constitutes racism, I guess I am a racist. But the word's pejorative meaning is more properly reserved for assigning negative human character traits-like dishonesty, laziness, drunkenness, or untrustworthiness-to particular racial or ethnic groups. People have free will, of course, and every individual should be judged on his own merits.

Recognizing that there are differences in aptitudes among different peoples, however, should be no more objectionable than noting physical differences, like the fact that Hutu tribesmen are stocky and relatively short while their Tutsi neighbors are lanky and taller. Or that one doesn't come across many Ashkenazi (or for that matter Sephardi) fullbacks.

Even excellence in mental attributes, like the commonly perceived abilities of Asians in mathematics, or of Jews in business or science, should not be seen as insulting others. Even if the perceptions are accurate, they are of limited import.

The Torah refers to the Jewish people as "a wise nation" but that doesn't mean we're all intellectually gifted. Even Jews who aren't the brightest candles in the menorah have a Divine mission on earth no less precious than the Rogachover down the block. And Chazal's honorifics customarily run not to words like "genius" or "brilliant" but to ones like "righteous" and "G-d-fearing." That's what counts.

It's plausible, of course, that Chinese or Jewish intellectual accomplishments-or Kalenjin dominance of marathon running-are due to something other than genes; cultural and environmental factors certainly play important roles. What's more, even fact-supported stereotypes are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as gene pools become more jumbled with each generation.

Still, some population-associated abilities remain, and some people seem to have a hard time with that. They waste precious time feeling bad for themselves and resentful of others, losing sight of a grand life-truth: It doesn't matter what abilities we possess; what matters is what we do with them.

Similarly, some people of modest means resent the more affluent. They may suspect (as do some affluent people themselves) that prosperity is the result of superior intelligence. (This, despite the ample and readily available evidence to the contrary.) As believing Jews, though, we should know that economic fortunes are determined wholly by Divine will; they ultimately remain beyond logic and inscrutable to us mortals.

Which thought leads, inevitably, to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Some among the crowds in lower Manhattan and their counterparts in other cities may well have worthy complaints and clear goals. But what one hears most loudly and most commonly (as even a few minutes at Zuccotti Park were more than enough to demonstrate to me) is simple resentment of the fact that wealthy people… are wealthy. Why, many protesters seem to be saying, and angrily, them and not us?

What a sad way to waste life. Instead of identifying one's own blessings and setting oneself to the task-the privilege-of utilizing them as fully as possible for as long as possible, those demonstrators self-immolate in the heat of their anger over not being someone else.

But they are a good spur for the rest of us to remember that what matters in this world is not what we have, physically or monetarily, but what we choose.

Most of us wouldn't waste a millisecond envying a Kenyan's speed or stamina. None of us should waste even half that time resenting what someone else has.

EXERCISING THE EMPATHY MUSCLE

Politicians are often subject to derision, often for good reason. Recently, though, a Catholic cleric hurled an unusual and creative insult at local politicos: They are like Jews.

Edward Gilbert, the leader of the Catholic Church in Port of Spain, the capital of the southern Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, made the comparison between elected officials and "the original Jewish people," explaining that Jews, at least in ancient times, cared only about their own.

"The Jews were compassionate and caring to the people of their nation, to the people of their race…," Archbishop Gilbert reportedly said during an October 24 religious ceremony commemorating the 225th anniversary of the Roman Catholic presence on Trinidad. Christianity, he proudly asserted, "universalized the concept of love."

Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League protested the sermon, calling Mr. Gilbert's statements "a disturbing repackaging of ancient anti-Jewish canards and supersessionist beliefs." The American Jewish Committee chimed in with chiding of its own, contending that "such prejudicial comments not only reflect personal ignorance, but also ignorance of the teaching of the Catholic Church since Nostra Aetate." That was a reference to the Vatican II declaration repudiating the centuries-old "deicide" charge against all Jews, stressing the religious bond shared by Jews and Catholics, and reaffirming the eternal covenant between G-d and the People of Israel (though it does not, of course, renounce the essential beliefs of Christianity).

Personally, I wasn't insulted by the Archbishop's characterization, even if he meant to include contemporary Jews. Because caring for one's own is eminently defensible. In fact, it's the only way to truly care for anyone.

Not much effort is needed to profess true love for all the world; but to actually feel such love just isn't possible. Gushing good will at everyone is offering it to no one.

That is because, by definition, care grows within boundaries; our empathy for those closest to us, to be real, must be of a different nature than our concern for others with whom we don't share our personal lives. Boundaries are what make those beloved to us… beloved to us.

Every person lives at the center of a series of concentric circles, the smallest one (in a healthy dynamic) encompassing parents, spouses, and children; the next circle out, other family members and friends; the one beyond that, members of their ethnic or religious groups. At a distance removed from that is a larger circle of human beings with similar values. And further out still, the circle containing the rest of humanity.

It is perfectly proper that we feel, and demonstrate, our deepest concern for the circle closest to us. More: it is the only way to achieve genuine care, providing us the ability to bestow it, if in a less intense form, upon those in the next circle out, and, in turn, on those beyond it.

Nothing demonstrates the danger of "universalizing the concept of love" better than the religion Mr. Gilbert represents. For all Christianity's claim to have expanded its affection to all of humanity, early Church history was characterized by the vicious intolerance demonstrated by early "fathers" and emperors; the Middle Ages' Crusades left swollen rivers of blood; and, a few centuries later, Reformation battles between Catholics and Protestants added millions of corpses to the body count.

Perceptive Jews and non-Jews alike understand how essential it is that ethnic or religious groups show special concern for other members of their "tribes." They sense what to some may seem counterintuitive: it is precisely the intense empathy we feel and express for our "inner circles" alone that enables us to feel genuine, if somewhat less acute, concern for those in more distant ones. People who focus their deepest feelings on those close to them are those most likely to truly care about their fellow citizens or wider circles still. Exercising the "empathy muscle," so to speak, provides the ability to feel-less intensely but more genuinely-concern for people who are not close to us.

So while the Trinidadian cleric may have been attempting an insult, he inadvertently provided his listeners-and all who were reached by media reports of his words-something else: a valuable opportunity to ponder how caring works.

BEWARE OF ORTHODOXY!

The latest Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded last month to Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman for his discovery of "quasicrystals."

In the 1980s, the Israeli chemist noticed something peculiar as he examined a glowing hot metal he had cooled. The diffraction pattern that formed in the metal, unexpectedly, indicated atomic order, as in a crystal. And yet the symmetry seemed different from that of any known crystal.

When Professor Shechtman brought his observation to the head of his research lab, he was directed to a basic textbook on crystallography and told to read up on the subject. When he insisted that he had seen something new, he was asked to leave his research group.

Undaunted, he submitted a paper on the topic to the Journal of Applied Physics. It was rejected. Celebrated chemist Linus Pauling said that Shechtman was "talking nonsense" and that "there is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."

What became apparent with time, though, was that the professor had indeed discovered a new type of crystal, one that forms regular patterns, but whose patterns, unlike in all other crystals then known, never repeat. Now the stubborn scientist has a Nobel to help assuage any residual bad feelings.

Even more stubborn than Professor Schechtman, though-and to considerably less happy ends-are scientific orthodoxies, like the one he challenged.

A world that progressed beyond idols of stone and wood has naturally sought new objects of veneration. Some have been political systems, the various "isms"-nationalism, Nazism, Communism-that have plagued societies in recent centuries; others are isms of a different ilk, like atheism or scientism, here defined as an unyielding reverence for currently regnant scientific dogmas.

Among the "Ani Ma'amins" of scientism today are big beliefs like "human-caused global warming" and "the evolution of all species from a single ancestor" and "the existence of extraterrestrial life"; and smaller ones like the inherent value of all medical screenings.

Actually, scratch that one. Last month also brought the news that The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the federally mandated independent panel of medical experts, had concluded that PSA testing, which screens for prostate cancer and whose importance has been an article of medical faith for years, does not in fact prolong life for the average American man; and that it "is associated with harms related to subsequent evaluation and treatments, some of which may be unnecessary."

In 2009, the same respected group stunned the nation by recommending against routine mammography screening for women under 50. A Journal of the American Medical Association article that year pointed out that a successful screening program should result in an increase in the number of early cancers, followed by a decrease in the number of late-stage cancers. That has not happened, however, in the case of mammography screening.

Even some big isms have taken some big hits. The widely embraced notion of an impending "population explosion," for instance, sensationalized by German scientist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," predicted worldwide famine within twenty years as a result of rising birth rates and limited resources. Hundreds of thousands, Dr. Ehrlich prophesied, would starve to death by 1988. (He advocated spiking the world water supply with sterilizing chemicals.)

Now, it may indeed turn out that the earth is warming dangerously as a result of human activity, that life thrives on other planets, and even, as Rav Shamshon Rafael Hirsch considers possible, that G-d created species through a process that began with a single cell.

And it is undeniable that science, in its pure, objective form, is a revelation of Divine wisdom, a most valuable means for understanding, appreciating, and exploiting nature.

But it is always worthwhile to remember that scientific orthodoxies have been toppled by new discoveries, that the endeavor of science progresses by replacing theories with better ones-in turn, subject to future revision. To realize, in other words, that skepticism of accepted notions is the very core of the scientific method.

Professor Shechtman himself put it well. "The main lesson I have learned over time," he said, "is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he reads in the textbooks."

A MODERN-DAY PATRIARCH

The first notice, shortly before Rosh Hashana, came from "Tehilla." The subject box of the e-mail read: "Baruch Dayan HaEmet/URGENT, YOSEF PASSED AWAY!" and the message began: "I can't believe this rabbi. I can't believe he has left us. He was so concerned for me and my family…."

Tehilla is not her real name. She is a non-Jewish resident of a Muslim country, and is married to a Hindu man. But she is a "Noahide," a person who has accepted the Torah's universal "Seven Commandments" for humankind. In fact, she studies the works of, among others, the Chofetz Chaim, and pines for the day for when her adult sons, who are following in her path, will find wives ready to do the same. And for Moshiach's arrival.

Yosef was Yosef ben Shlomo Hakohen, an American-born Jewish returnee to Judaism (his original family name was Oboler) who lived in Bayit Vegan, Jerusalem, and who made it his life's work to bring Jews closer to their heritage and to be a source of encouragement and direction to non-Jews who have found their way to realizing the Torah's truth.

And so the anguish at Yosef's unexpected passing was felt not only by Tehilla but by countless people around the world, in the strangest of places, who had benefitted from his writing-and, in many cases, his personal interaction with them.

I never had the honor of meeting Yosef in person but knew him from numerous electronic conversations we had. He was a remarkable man. In fact, I had begun asking him about his background and work, hoping one day to make him the subject of an Ami interview. Now, sadly, I can share only the few facts I came to garner; and, incomparably sadder still, not in an interview but an obituary.

Yosef, the child of leftist social activists, discovered Torah in his youth and was captivated by a deep desire to reach out to Jews who shared his parents' convictions, to help them better understand the true raison d'etre of the Jewish nation. "I wanted," he wrote me, "to help them to understand that it is through the study and fulfillment of the Torah that we make our contribution towards a better world."

In 1995, Feldheim published Yosef's "The Universal Jew: Letters To a Progressive Father From His Orthodox Son," telling the tale of his parents' dedication to the poor and underprivileged, and about his own personal journey, which led him to dedicate his own life to outreach. The following year, in a Jewish Observer article entitled "And He shall turn the Hearts of the Fathers to the Sons," Yosef reprised some of that story. And he established "Hazon-Renewing Our Universal Vision," a study program/Internet resource that touched untold numbers of hearts and minds.

In one of his many communications to his followers, Yosef quoted Rav Avrohom Yoffen, zt"l, the Rosh Yeshiva of Bais Yosef-Novardok, as noting the significance of the fact that our forefather Avrohom is the archetype of both kindness toward others and intolerance for idolatry. The latter, he explains, is based on a belief that various forces in nature are in competition with one another. That antagonism, he continued, is paralleled in, and connected to, human beings' alienation from one another. Avrohom Avinu embraced lovingkindness to counter that disaffection, and he fought idolatry to undermine its root cause.

That well describes Yosef's life-mission itself.

On Yom Kippur, "Tehilla" lit a yahrzeit candle for Yosef, who left no blood-relatives.

I remember how she expressed her feelings about meeting and corresponding with Yosef and other Jews who have offered her encouragement and guidance. "With all the sufferings [the world has] inflicted on you all," she once wrote, "I still cannot fathom how magnanimous you all are in being a light to all nations.

"After meeting your people [by e-mail], I cannot understand how such a warm, compassionate and humane people can be so persecuted and so misunderstood.

"All I can pray is when Hashem decides it's time for all your sufferings to be over, He will show us Gentiles the compassion we failed to show you all."

"Soon G-d is going to say 'enough' to your tears…"

And to hers as well, may the day come soon.

I Love THE U.N.

I love the United Nations. Yes, I know, the General Assembly was well and memorably described by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as a "theater of the absurd." Actually, a better metaphor might be a tribe of savages, or, perhaps, a zoo.

But that leads to the reason for my affinity for the world body, namely, how wonderfully the menagerie brings to life the metaphor of the Jewish People being the lone sheep among 70 wolves-the State of Israel serving as the contemporary stand-in for Klal Yisrael. Particularly evocative was how, recently, one of the wolves, bedecked in ill-fitting sheep's clothing (pleading victimization even while allied with a particularly bloodthirsty fellow beast), received thunderous applause for rejecting his Jewish neighbor's offer of peace. Mr. Abbas, of course, should have lost all credibility when he embraced Hamas. (Not that he dares set foot in Gaza; even wolves fear bigger wolves.) Instead, he gets ovations from fellow predators and the various vultures that keep their company.

Shortly before the Palestinian leader announced his opting for confrontation over negotiation, another creature-this one part loon-shared again his imaginative take on history, which lacks a Holocaust but includes the United States attacking itself in 2001. And, of course, Mr. Ahmadinejad reprised as well his view of Israel as the contemporary world's resident evil.

The perfect time for gaining perspective on such things is Sukkos; the perfect place, sitting in the sukkah, gazing up at the schach.

Avraham Reisen, a Yiddish poet who died in 1953, left a voluminous body of short stories and poems. Only one, though, is regularly recited these days-and mostly by observant Jews. It's sung to a plaintive, moving melody whose composer is unknown to me. The song is familiar to many from immigrant parents or grandparents. Remarkably, the strains of "A Sukkeleh," no matter how often we may have heard them, still tend to choke us up.

Based on Reisen's "In Sukkeh," the song concerns two sukkos, one literal, the other metaphorical.

Several years ago, I translated it into English; it's not a perfectly literal translation but I tried to remain faithful to the Yiddish original's rhyme scheme and meter. It has been published before, so my apologies to any Ami readers who may have already seen it. But I wanted to share it with those who may not have, since it's really about, well, Klal Yisrael and the United Nations:

A sukkaleh, quite small,
wooden planks for each wall,
lovingly I stood them upright;
laid thatch as a ceiling
and now, filled with deep feeling,
I sit in my sukkaleh at night.

A chill wind attacks,
whistling through the cracks;
the candles, they flicker and yearn.
It's so strange a thing
that, as the Kiddush I sing,
the flames, calmed, now quietly burn.

In comes my daughter,
bearing hot food and water;
worry shrouds her face like a pall.
She just stands there shaking
And, her voice nearly breaking,
says "Tattenyu, the sukkah's going to fall!"

Dear daughter, don't fret.
It hasn't fallen yet.
The sukkah's fine; go banish your fright.
There have been many such fears,
for nigh two thousand years;
yet the little sukkah still stands upright.

It was reassuring that, before the General Assembly, Mr. Netanyahu was so polished and blunt with the wolverine delegates. And that President Obama spoke so strongly about Arab violence and about the Jewish connection to Eretz Yisrael. (And it was nice to find out shortly afterward that our government has quietly sold Israel "bunker-busting bombs," which can really come in handy sometimes.). But we mustn't forget that Klal Yisrael's safety, in the end, doesn't hinge on world leaders or world-class ordnance. The less-than-substantial schach symbolizes both our vulnerability and our true Source of protection: Hakodosh Boruch Hu Himself, in the merit of our avos, and of our own emulation of their dedication to the Divine.

Let the wolves bay and the vultures circle. With our repentance, prayer and charity, the sukkeleh, as it has for millennia, will continue to stand.

G-D POSITIONING SYSTEM

I rode the brake and we descended the single-lane dirt path slowly, feeling the vibration of pebbles under our tires turn into the audible crunch of good-sized stones. My wife and I had embarked not long ago on our annual short summer vacation in search, as usual, of a hike in a forest to a waterfall. We were, we thought, close to our goal.

The particular falls on our agenda this year were clearly not going to be any match for the stunning double-drop Kaaterskill Falls (made all the more rewarding by the steep climb required to reach it) or Paterson, New Jersey's unexpectedly impressive Great Falls. But the difficulty of even finding Buttermilk Falls was inspiration of its own. We had spent most of an entire day driving through the southern foothills of the Catskill Mountains trying to locate our quarry, which, although immobile, had proven elusive.

We knew it wasn't the larger falls by that same name, nearly 200 miles to the northwest. But, somehow, neither our standard GPS nor my personal one (my wife's first name is Gita) had managed to guide us smoothly to our destination. Here we were, though, finally, on Buttermilk Falls Road, although it seemed a less than promising avenue.

We passed a rusted-out 1940s-era truck, which had been turned over the decades into a large planter for an impressive assortment of weeds. And then we watched a parade of ramshackle dwellings prominently displaying "No Trespassing" signs pass by outside our car windows. One notice read (honestly): "Trespassers Will Be Shot. Survivors Will Be Shot Again." It somehow captured the spirit of the surroundings.

The prospect of puncturing a tire on this clearly "residential" dead-end and finding ourselves at the hospitality of the locals was enough to convince us, with no evidence of any waterfall in sight, to do a slow, careful three-point turn (avoiding the deep, foot-wide running ditch on either side of the road) and head gingerly back to the paved road from which we had turned onto the unappealing artery.

It turned out that Buttermilk Falls Road, at least that one, did not in fact lead to Buttermilk Falls. (This was upstate New York; why would it?) The falls were fifty-odd miles' drive and a short forest hike away. Eventually, we reached our goal.

The roundabout way we got there, though, and the one-flat-tire-away-from-disaster situation we experienced, made me think about Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato.

Well, not about him, astounding a personage as he was, but rather about his most famous work, the Mesilas Yesharim, or "Path of the Just." Specifically, its first chapter, in which he introduces the idea, familiar to many but still counterintuitive to some, that human beings are created to receive pleasure.

He describes the world as a place filled with transient joys, to which we are attracted because of our pleasure-seeking natures. But many of those joys in fact distance us from the ultimate pleasure intended for us; our pursuit of them leads us away from our goal.

The ultimate pleasure for which our souls pine is closeness to G-d, and it is only fully obtainable in a world beyond this one. And while all sorts of paths here beckon us, holding out shiny diversions for our consideration and promising true gratification, they are barren roads, even dangerous ones. We need to navigate our lives around them, and trod tried, true paths, not those that may lead to places we may think we wish to go but really do not.

The truth is that all thinking people over time come to realize both that we are pleasure-seekers and that the satisfaction of our desires-no matter how we may feed, clothe, entertain or pamper ourselves-remains frustratingly out of reach. So many roads that seemed so very promising turn out to be such total disappointments.

While we are still fortunate to occupy this world of doing, though, we always have the ability to execute our personal three-point turns. As I recall the sound of the stones underneath our car on Buttermilk Falls Road that day, I imagine the vibration as the sound of Elul approaching.

PASSPORTS, PROVISOS AND PHOTO CAPTIONS

When you stop to think about it, the fact that so much of the world's attention-not to mention so much jealousy, anger and irrationality-has for so many years been so keenly focused on so small a piece of real estate as Yerushalayim is astounding.

Actually, in a certain way it's enthralling too, demonstrating as it so powerfully does how special the geographic epicenter of the Jewish People-the dynamo of holiness that sanctifies the rest of Eretz Yisrael-is, today no less than ever.

Over history, many empires claimed sovereignty over the quintessentially Jewish city, site of the batei mikdash, the central Jewish Holy Temples; and many marauders overran it. Now, to add to all the indignities visited upon the Holy City over the millennia, Jerusalem is being summoned to appear before the United States Supreme Court.

Well, okay, not exactly. What the High Court will be considering is the passport of a Jerusalem-born boy. Menachem Zivotofsky's parents, American citizens, requested of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv that "Israel" be listed as the country in which their son entered the world. Then-President George W. Bush had mere weeks earlier signed a bill directing the U.S. State Department to do just that upon parents' request.

But Mr. Bush made clear at the signing that the law "impermissibly interferes with the president's constitutional authority to conduct the nation's foreign affairs." That proviso, in which Mr. Bush essentially rejected the authority of the law he signed, was reminiscent of the executive orders issued by every sitting president since 1998 that, despite the 1995 "Jerusalem Embassy Act" mandating the relocation of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, the move would not actually happen. The justification for the orders is the need to "protect the national security interests of the United States." The guardedness, in other words, is seen as necessary to preserve the government's claim of objectivity with regard to any future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

And so the State Department maintains that U.S. passports of individuals born in Jerusalem list only the city's name, without anything appended.

In 2003, the Zivotofskys sued the State Department on behalf of their son, and that litigation-dismissed, and then resurrected on appeal-is what the Supreme Court will begin to consider next month. An alphabet soup of Jewish groups have jumped into the fray with "friend of the court" briefs, almost all in support of the Zivotovskys. An exception was the American Jewish Committee, whose representative contended that while it does consider "West Jerusalem" to be part of Israel, it believes that "all issues in the Israel-Palestinian conflict have to be settled at the negotiation table."

In the meantime, the Obama administration came in for some criticism on the issue. The New York Sun's website reported recently that photographs posted on the White House website that had carried captions referencing "Jerusalem, Israel" had been altered to read simply "Jerusalem." The changes were presumably an effort to avoid the captions being invoked in the upcoming Supreme Court case-although photo captions obviously have something less than legal import.

In response to an inquiry, a White House official said the "U.S. policy for more than 40 years has been that the status of Jerusalem should be decided in final-status negotiations between the parties. As in prior administrations, the White House photo captions should reflect that policy."

Indeed, the White House site's captions during the Bush years also omitted "Israel" in at least some Jerusalem-datelined photos. Former Bush administration official Elliot Abrams told the Washington Post that the White House during those years "did not have a hard-and-fast rule" for statements and press releases about identifying Jerusalem as being in Israel.

In the end, the Supreme Court will decide what it will. And Israel will negotiate what it will. And believing Jews everywhere will continue to know what we have always known: That, whatever any court or any country might contend, Yerushalayim, the city Jews have faced in prayer thrice daily for thousands of years, is the heart and home of Klal Yisrael.

In fact, maybe that phrase is what passports should put after Jerusalem's name.

THE "O"-WORD

The recent suggestion by the rabbi of a West Coast Orthodox congregation that one of the birchos hashachar (morning blessings) recited each day by Torah-observant Jews be eliminated-he sees it as insufficiently enlightened-is a reminder of an unpleasant but pressing task facing the Jewish community: To define the word "Orthodox."

Words are mangled with disturbing regularity in the Jewish world. Jewish "observance," once a clear and descriptive term, has become relegated to relativity. After all, isn't a Jew who faithfully follows his clergyman's prescription of social activism as the essential Jewish mandate… observant? He or she would certainly say so.

Adding the word "Torah" before "observance" doesn't help much either. A Reform leader, after all, once famously proclaimed his movement's wholehearted embrace of "Torah, Torah, Torah!"-undermining in six syllables more than 3000 years of a word's synonymity with the very concept of revealed law that Reform theology unabashedly renounces.

"Mitzvah" has been turned on its head too. The Hebrew word for "commandment" has degenerated in many circles to mean "good deed" or even "what any particular person happens to think is a good deed." The same aforementioned Reform rabbi once advised that every Jew "must examine each mitzvah [in the Torah] and ask the question: 'do I feel commanded in this instance…?'" Now, feeling commanded and being commanded may not be mutually exclusive, but they are hardly one and the same.

Rounding out the abuse of words are chimeras like Conservative "halacha" and a Reform "Kollel."

The word "Orthodox" has always been a lexical haven for Jews who affirm the divine origin of Torah and are committed to the entirety of our mesorah-traditional Jewish religious beliefs and practices-and the integrity of the halachic process as it has existed for millennia. Although the "O-Word" was originally imposed on believing Jews by others, we have worn the label proudly; it implies faithfulness to the past and willingness to stand against the winds of societal change. And it has allowed us to set ourselves apart from all the contemporary parallels to the Second Temple period's Sadducean movement-to borrow a comparison from Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, zt"l.

In recent years, though, even "Orthodox" has been subjected to the Silly Putty treatment. People with ordinations from Orthodox institutions have invoked the imagined power of their pieces of paper to render "kosher" whatever the Zeitgeist or their own overly open minds have inspired them to embrace. Thus we have an "Orthodox rabbi" who prides himself on exemplifying what the Torah forbids as toeiva ("repugnant"); another who deigns to "ordain" women; now one who self-righteously declares that he can no longer "take G-d's name in the context" of one of the birchos hashachar, and who "suspect[s], at this point in history, that it constitutes a Desecration of the Name."

There is desecration here, yes, but not where the rabbi sees it.

Many Orthodox Jews, understandably, are reluctant to focus on attention-seeking rabbis seeking to boldly go, so to speak, where no Orthodox rabbi has gone before. But we ignore such things at our peril. Or, better, at the peril of forfeiting the last adjective signifying commitment to the Jewish mesorah.

Laying precise boundaries between unorthodox and unOrthodox is not simple. There have been Jewish innovations that were endorsed, in fact impelled, by Gedolei Yisrael-the Bais Yaakov movement perhaps the most striking one.

But when a contemporary rabbi, particularly one who has not yet garnered the wisdom that comes with many years of living and learning, proposes to reject an element-any element-of the Jewish mandate, there can be no question about his having relinquished the right to call himself Orthodox.

And no question, either, that any Orthodox rabbinic group to which he may belong, and any Orthodox congregational body with which his synagogue is affiliated, has an obligation to defend the word Orthodox, and to summon the courage to do what it has to do.

COMPROMISING ON “PRINCIPLE”

“Those are my principles!” famously declared Groucho Marx. “And if you don’t like them, well… I have others.”

Principles are important, to be sure. But Groucho wasn’t entirely wrong. There are principles… and there are principles.

For a believing Jew, of course, religious principles are sacrosanct. And there are high principles, many in fact derived from Judaism, that have come to be embraced by much of humanity.

But there are also things that people, including religious Jews, may call principles but which are really just preferences, inclinations or stances. And it is important to keep that distinction, well, distinct.

What musters that thought is the language that flowed forth after the agreement between President Obama and Congressional leaders on a budget deal. Commentators pontificated about this politician “standing on principle,” that one “abandoning his principles,” a third being sent to the principal’s office (okay, maybe not).

That undeserved elevation of economic and political views to high principle yielded much rhetoric. Vice President Biden was reported to have said that tea party Republicans had “acted like terrorists,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) called the deal a “Satan sandwich”; and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) labeled those who disagreed with his position “arsonists.”

The New York Times editorialized that the deal represented “capitulation to… hostage-taking demands.” Columnist Tom Friedman called the tea party the GOP’s “Hezbollah faction.”

The vitriol was a bit much. But, of course, it was over matters of principle—at least in the eyes of the vitriolic.

The one word that was treated as an expletive was “compromise,” which, of course, in the end, well described the deal. It was the ninth word (the nine including “Good afternoon, everyone”) uttered by President Obama in his brief remarks announcing the agreement; and he repeated it several times.

To some, the compromise was lopsided, hence the anger at the president from within his own party. But a compromise it was, and it had to be.

In Judaism, compromise is no uncouth word; it is in fact something of a high principle itself.

The Shulchan Aruch, Jewish law’s mainstay-text, states: “It is a mitzvah to ask litigants at the start [of their case] ‘Do you wish [for the case to proceed through] strict law or compromise?’… Every court that regularly delivers compromises is praiseworthy.” (Choshen Mishpat, 12:2)

Thus, the coming together of two parties, each of which agrees to not stand on “principle” (i.e. position), is the Jewish ideal. Likewise when it comes to “principles” like one particular economic theory over another, or this political philosophy vs. that one: the praiseworthy path is compromise.

Every special day on the Jewish calendar is a “learning moment,” an opportunity to glean a keener appreciation of the concept that attends it. Tisha B’Av is past, but as we move on we should carry its message: The evil of baseless hatred, the sort of factionalism and infighting that preceded the destruction of the second Beis Hamikdosh, or Holy Temple.

Our Orthodox Jewish world today has its share of the same, of course, which is surely why the Temple has not been divinely rebuilt. And while true Jewish principles may never be compromised, many contemporary disputes are based on illusory “principles”—personal positions, not timeless truths.

We approach a happy day, Tu B’Av, the 15th day of the Jewish month. It is a day of rejoicing, the Talmud teaches, partly because of the breaking down of barriers between Jews. So many contemporary barriers masquerade as principles. Recognizing that they are not, and appreciating compromise, are worthy things to carry from the ninth of the month to the fifteenth. Not standing on personal “principle”—whether with our spouses, our friends, our business partners, our employers, or our employees—is key to reversing what we mourned on Tisha B’Av.

Because the willingness to compromise is a true Jewish principle.

THE HEAVENS ARE THE L-RD'S

Those of us old enough to remember July 20, 1969 - when human beings first walked on the moon - recall, too, our sense of amazement over the "one small step for man "that came to mark the day for posterity.

The technical accomplishment was formidable. The Apollo 11 spacecraft transported three men from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the moon, and two of them stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility, a dry bed on the lunar surface.

For some, it was wholly the technological feat that yielded the awe. The "giant step for mankind," to them, meant that now nothing could stand in the way of further space exploration, that further giant steps - which they assumed were inevitable - would soon enough include a permanent outpost on the moon, a human presence on Mars, even flesh and blood forays into realms beyond the solar system. Humans could, and would, conquer the heavens.

Today, more than forty years later, a considerably more modest mood has settled on would-be intergalactic conquistadores. No feet have disturbed lunar dust since 1972. Space travel disasters, dangers posed by radiation in space, and budgetary constraints born of wars and social needs have combined to effectively remove colonization of the moon from the United States' agenda. Men on Mars remains a mere science fiction trope. Even the space shuttle program has now been shelved.

Others in 1969, though, while they were duly impressed by what human minds and hands had built and accomplished, felt an awe of a deeper sort. It was essentially the same astonishment born of looking - truly looking - at any part of what the world calls nature, of seeing - truly seeing - the night sky even from here on earth, or the sun, or clouds shifting shape. It was the awe of watching a baby explore his own new world, or begin to talk or walk; of leaves turning in the fall; of a spider spinning a web; of a wound, miraculously, healing. To be sure, the awe that summer day in 1969 was newly writ large, in images of an alien landscape, of bootprints in ancient dust, of a brilliant blue earthrise. But the shiver it inspired was, to sensitive people, the same yir'as harome'mus - awe before creation's Creator - accessible everywhere. To those observers, the space program's subsequent deceleration was but a reminder of the limits placed upon us mortal creations.

Those two diametric responses evoked by the first moonwalk - human hubris and awe of the Divine - long predated that event, of course; and they persist today as well. There remain among us those who stand in astonishment at human intelligence, dexterity and imagination, and proudly imagine that man is master of all he surveys. And then there are those who recognize that man, no less than the rest of nature at whose pinnacle he stands, is but testimony to an infinitely greater object of veneration, to Whom, in the end, all truly belongs.

Interestingly, the mission of one of Apollo 11's precursors, Apollo 8 - the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon - yielded its own examples of both perspectives. The astronauts on the craft took turns reading a translation of the first verses of Genesis, broadcasting to all of the world's human beings the Torah's account of Creation.

And, as a result of that choice of message, a famous atheist of the time, Madalyn Murray O'Hair - who was responsible for the U.S. Supreme Court's outlawing of prayer in public schools (and who was murdered in 1995 by an employee of the American Atheists organization she founded; and who was denounced by her son as an 'evil and lawless' embezzler and tax cheat) - responded by filing a lawsuit over, as she saw it, that unconstitutional injection of religion into a governmental program.

The lawsuit, O'Hair v. Paine (1970) bounced around for a while but finally, in one of the more lasting and delightful legacies of the moon missions, it reached, and was dismissed, by the U.S. Supreme Court. "The motion to dismiss is granted and the appeal is dismissed," the decision read, "for want of jurisdiction."

WHERE LESS CAN BE MORE

“Can she have a cookie with a Pentagon-K on the box?” the voice on the phone asked and, after receiving my polite but negative response (a Pentagon-K?—now the Defense Department’s in the kashrus business? Who knew?), responded, “Fine, I’ll leave those in the cupboard.”

It was the sort of conversation (emphasis on “sort”) that my wife and I had more than occasionally during the 1980s and early 1990s, when we lived in a city with only a small Jewishly observant community, and our children’s friends included not only other frum (observant) kids but children from less-observant families. The parents of those children knew that our kosher standards—whether regarding food, activities or entertainment—were different from theirs. And when our kids visited their homes, our less-observant neighbors—no less than we did for their visiting children with food sensitivities or allergies—took pains to make sure all special needs were fully accommodated.

Some might consider that situation clumsy, uncomfortable, even dangerous. But to us it was invaluable. We are grateful to G-d that we were able to live “out of town” for so long and only moved to New York (compelled by circumstances) after most of our children’s formative years.

Admitting that fact tends to raise eyebrows—at least those of people who never actually lived in a small frum community. “Come on,” the eyebrows’ owners respond, “you don’t mean to say that an environment with fewer frum Jews and Jewish educational opportunities, with more challenges to observance and more “foreign” influences, is superior, do you?”

Well, put that way, I’m hesitant to respond. But still and all, there are advantages to precisely such an environment.

Yes, in a large observant community, there are like-minded people pretty much everywhere you look, synagogues of all manner of custom; Maariv, or evening-prayer services at any hour of the night, meat restaurants and pizza places and kosher bakeries galore. Men’s and women’s yeshivos and seminaries of varied stripes, ritual holiday objects available seasonally on street corners, choices of study partners and observant neighbors, study halls and Torah classes. There are wedding halls and, may their services not be needed, Jewish burial societies.

And yet, the other side of the scales holds treasures of its own, some of them even born of the lack of religious amenities.

Variety may be the spice of life, and religious customs are certainly important. But when the numbers of “shul Jews” in a community are only sufficient to populate one or two places of prayer, Jews of different stripes have no choice but to worship among others whom, were they all living in a big city, they might never have met, much less bonded with as friends. Dearths of eateries are offset by increases in invitations for celebrations and Sabbath meals.

Torah classes and study partners? Well, out-of-town does mean fewer opportunities. But more impetus, too, to take advantage of what is available (and less ability to lay low and think no one will notice). Being an integral part of a necessarily cohesive, small community, moreover, rather than a nameless member of a large one demands of a Jew that he or she not only write a check to the burial society or Eruv Committee but become an actual, active participant in such endeavors.

It is true that large observant communities can provide a measure of healthy insularity from the surrounding culture. But hard as the residents of religious neighborhoods may try to keep “the city” at bay, it will always have ways of infiltrating our enclaves. And metropolises tend to cook up the worst stews of challenges to Torah mores and proper behavior.

Smaller cities are hardly oases of healthy mores and manners. But the challenges they present are of a different order than those of New York or Los Angeles. Traditional values and civility are less rare, and more readily inform public discourse and behavior.

Out of town living isn’t for everyone. But Jews in the most heavily Jewish neighborhoods of frumdom could do worse than consider—if their work and family circumstances allow, and their spouses agree—the thought that leaving the plethora or shuls and bakeries behind and becoming important members of less endowed environments might just turn out to be the best decision they ever made.

SCIENCE, BLINDED

Rabbi Avi Shafran

"Just as ordinary, pig-headed and unreasonable as anybody else" was the eminent twentieth century psychologist H.J. Eysenck's judgment of scientists. "And their unusually high intelligence," he added, "only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous."

A recent example of scientific unreason stands out, both for the renown of the scientist involved and the irony of where his bias led him.

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, was one of the most celebrated, influential and widely-read scientists of his time. In his 1981 book "The Mismeasure of Man," about the measurement of intelligence, he presented the work of 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton as Exhibit A for how racial preconceptions can prejudice scientific research.

Morton, seeking evidence that the Supreme Being had created human races separately, used mustard seeds (at first, then buckshot) to meticulously calibrate the volumes of hundreds of skulls of Caucasians, Asians, American Indians and Africans. He indeed found a pattern of size differentials in the brain cavities of the various groups. Reanalyzing the data anew, however, Gould concluded that the earlier scientist had misrepresented his findings, and accused Morton of believing that the groups with the smaller cranial cavities were intellectually inferior.

This month, however, a study published in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal, Public Library of Science Biology, asserts not only that there is no evidence that Morton held any racial biases but that Gould, not Morton, had misrepresented the data. Researchers re-measured 308 of the skulls Morton had collected, and found that Morton had actually underreported the extent of the differences he found.

Gould's charge that Morton had "unconscious[ly] finagl[ed]" circled around to bite him in the back.

Of course, Morton's premise that races were created separately is not what the Torah teaches (although a tripartite humanity does emerge after the time of Noach, generated by his three sons). But his research was conducted honorably. It was Gould, propelled by his antipathy to the notion that there may be brain size differences among races-which might be used to support racist beliefs-who (consciously or otherwise) fudged the data.

Scientific hubris is of more than mere academic import. Had Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich had his way in 1968, the world would have seen compulsory birth control, in the form of spiking water supplies with sterilizing chemicals. That was the year Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb," in which his disdain for the number of babies being born led him to predict worldwide famine within twenty years without such measures.

Practiced as it should be, the endeavor of science is sublime. What it yields can not only increase understanding of the world and improve lives but deeply inspire. A science book evidencing an awe of Creation and a recognition of human limitations can be a veritable work of religious inspiration.

But, as more traditional Jewish texts explain, only someone who has overcome the preconceptions, desires and imperfections of character to which we all play host can truly perceive the world with clarity. The rest of us-even scientists-are subject to misjudgments, hampered as we are by our prejudices.

Nowhere in science, perhaps, does bias so blind as with regard to evolution.

Species, over time, retain traits that serve them well, and lose others that don't. The ill-adapted don't survive; the advantaged do. That's simple, and seen.

But the appearance of a new species from an existing one, or even of an entirely new limb or organ within a species-things contemporary science insists have happened literally millions of times-have never been witnessed or reproduced. Ditto doubly for an organism emerging from inert matter-a "spontaneous generation" that evolution proponents assume began the process.

The solemn conviction that life appeared by chance and new species evolved from other ones countless times remains a large leap of… well, faith. Which is why "evolution" is rightly called a theory-and might better be called a religion.

As a faith that hallows chance as the engine of all, Evolutionism may owe less to objectivity than to a subconscious desire to reject the concept of a Creator.

And all the militant insistence on its truth should remind us all of Professor Eysenck's words.

LUCKY LOSER

Contests aren't really my thing. I don't buy lottery tickets or wager on sports (or, for that matter, even know much about them; until recently I thought Miami Heat was, well, a straightforward description, with the upper-case "H" a nod to the humidity).

Once, though, nearly thirty years ago, I put my name into play for a truly special prize. It was a long shot, I knew, but the payoff was so unusual and so tempting, I figured (as regular gamblers must do regularly) that, hey, it was a minor investment and could bring a huge return.

All that the investment entailed was sharing some personal and medical information with a government agency. And writing an essay, about why I wanted to travel into space-the prize.

The contest, announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, was open only to teachers, and I hoped that my position teaching Talmud in a Providence, Rhode Island yeshiva high school qualified me. If not, I would invoke the Jewish History classes I taught too. (And I wondered if the administration might somehow know about my vote for Mr. Reagan in 1980.)

I have no clear recollection about what I wrote in my essay but I think it included something about the religious nature of my teaching, my desire to experience the wonders of the universe from a new perspective and relay the same to students, and an appropriate verse or two from Tehillim or Psalms.

Whatever. Amid over 11,000 other entries received for the Teacher in Space Program, mine wasn't likely to be the one selected. And it wasn't.

Despite the long odds, though, I was disappointed. "Was it my essay?" I thought, regretting not having secularized it. Maybe the few extra pounds I had confessed to carrying (and carry with me still)? Most likely I just didn't stand out in any meaningful way from the thousands of other would-be astronauts.

So I nursed my wound, such as it was, consoling myself with the words of the Tannaic-era personality Nachum Ish Gamzu, who would regard every travail with joy, verbalizing his reason with the words "This, too,"-the meaning of the words gam zu-"is for the good."

You may know the end of the story-at least the story of the Teacher in Space Program. (The end of my story, I thank Hashem daily, hasn't yet arrived.) The teacher chosen for the space flight was Christa McAuliffe, and she was one of the seven crew members who perished aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, when, 73 seconds into its flight, the craft broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean.

Arriving for an early afternoon class that day, a student told me the terrible news. Like all Americans, I was dumbfounded and deeply saddened. All I thought of at that point was the tragic loss of seven brave souls; I had long put aside the memory of my bid to be the first teacher in space. Only hours later did it dawn that that the ill-fated flight was the one that, two years earlier, I had so wanted to take. From there, it was a short mental hop to the realization that my disappointment at having "lost" my bid to be the first teacher in space had been not only silly and childish but, in retrospect, for the good, at least my good.

The truth of "this, too, is for the good" comes most clearly into focus when we come to see it play out in our lives-and if we're perceptive, we all can see it abundantly. But Nachum Ish Gamzu's credo applies even when we don't come to realize how what seemed disappointing or worse was actually for our benefit. We make brachos, blessings, not only on good news but on the opposite as well.

The recent final flight of the U.S. Space Shuttle Program is what recalled my quest to slip the surly bonds of earth, reminding me of Nachum Ish Gamzu's wise attitude. Now comes the harder task of internalizing the reality of its truth even when the "for the best" might never be perceived within those earthly bonds.

WHAT AMERICA GETS

Many people seemed happy to treat President Obama's speeches last month on the Middle East and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's before Congress as some sort of sports tournament, rooting and scoring and declaring winners and losers. There were even inspections of each player's stats, not the tallying of runs-batted-in or touchdowns but rather the parsing of subtle phrases and revisiting of other players' records.

Some in the stands saw in the innings of addresses an American president trying to restart negotiations in order to derail the potentially disastrous establishment of a Palestinian state in the United Nations planned for September; and an Israeli leader arrogantly misrepresenting what his American counterpart actually said, publicly and rudely chiding him. Others saw a cold American president all-too-ready to compromise Israel's security; and a triumphant Israeli leader speaking hard truth to haughty power.

Among those rooting for Mr. Netanyahu and booing at Mr. Obama was Walter Russell Mead, a Bard College professor of foreign affairs and humanities, and editor-at-large of The American Interest.

Whatever the merits of his cheers and jeers, though, a few paragraphs of Professor Mead's essay on the declamation competition, concerning the warm response Mr. Netanyahu received from Congress, bear quoting:

"Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that [G-d] favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that [G-d] favors and protects America.

"It means more. The existence of Israel means that the [G-d] of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted.

"Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don't 'get' Israel also don't 'get' America and don't 'get' [G-d]."

There's something embarrassing about the fact that declaring belief in the Divine is crucial for an American political candidate while for most Israeli leaders mere mention of Him seems off-limits. But Mr. Mead's observation is poignant. Even if many Israelis and Israeli leaders telegraph a kochi vi'otzem yadi ("My strength and the power of my hand") mindset, most Americans and their political representatives see a Higher Power at work in the world. And see Israel and the Jewish people as worthy of their concern and hope.

That should give us all pause. We are in galus, to be sure, in exile from our land-and, worst of all, from the relationship to the Creator we once merited. But as the stages and venues of our exile have unfolded, the way-station called the United States of America has proven itself unique. Yes, there are Jew-haters here too. But the overwhelming aggregates of both our country's political establishment and its populace are well-disposed, deeply so, to Jewish citizens and to a Jewish state halfway around the world.

And so, while we may be tempted at times to succumb to the coarseness of American political debate, allowing disagreement to devolve into derogation; or tempted to afford laws of the land less respect than they deserve (in the eyes not only of government but of halacha), it behooves us all to stop and control ourselves. And remind ourselves how fortunate we are, in a world where hatred of Jews is widespread and visceral, to live in a land that provides us not only freedom and protection but concern and respect.

Remembering that is not corny or jingoist. It's an expression of what may be the most fundamental Jewish high ideal, hakaras hatov-in its most literal sense: recognition of the good.

ANTI-MILAH ACTIVIST'S JEWISH PROBLEM

Two new twists emerged in the West Coast wars against bris milah, or circumcision, recently. The bid to outlaw the practice in the seaside city of Santa Monica, just north of Los Angeles, was dropped by its promoter, Jena Troutman. And the measure that would outlaw circumcision in San Francisco and fine violators up to $1000 was placed in a new and harsh light as the result of two deeply offensive comic books promoted by one of the proposal's main supporters.

The San Francisco proposal received the nearly 8000 signatures required to qualify it for the November ballot, despite the fact that, while it would exempt cases of medical necessity, it explicitly applies its prohibition to circumcisions performed for religious reasons.

That fact led some to charge from the start that an undercurrent of anti-Jewish and/or anti-Muslim sentiment ran swift and strong beneath the proposed law. The comic books, written by Matthew Hess, the founder of an anti-circumcision group in San Diego and a vocal backer of the San Francisco proposal, certainly lent graphic evidence to the suspicion-and drew broad public outrage.

Produced last year, the comics feature a square-jawed, blond, blue-eyed and grotesquely muscular "superhero" fighting forces of evil, in this case parents who wish to circumcise their sons-and, especially, mohelim, or ritual circumcisors. The latter and their cohorts are rendered in bizarre, garish fashion, with sinister multitudinous-toothed grimaces, knives at the ready, and sinister white space where their eyes should be. Scenes include depictions of terrified babies and brutal doctors covered in blood; and the evil protagonist of one of the publications is unambiguously labeled "Monster Mohel."

The imagery is more than passingly reminiscent of Nazi-era graphic publications that promoted ugly myths about Jews, like Der Stürmer, the product of the fevered and perverse imagination of Julius Streicher, who was tried at Nuremberg for his promotion of Jew-hatred and then hung for his crimes.

One of the comics in the series also conjures more subtly anti-Jewish themes, as when a character complains that the "pro-circumcision lobby" has "all of the well-connected doctors and lawyers" in its pocket.

Bay Area Jewish community leaders reacted with indignation to the comic books.

"The imagery in these cartoons is offensive and anti-Semitic," said Abby Michelson Porth, associate director of San Francisco's Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). "To imagine that the person who produced this is a principle organizer of the measure to criminalize and ban circumcision in San Francisco is alarming." The legal language of the San Francisco initiative is in fact reportedly based on text first published on Hess's website.

"This is an advocacy campaign taken to a new low," said Nancy Appel, associate regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

In fact, the attention garnered by the crude comics may have played a major role in the withdrawal of the proposed circumcision ban in Santa Monica. "It shouldn't have been about religion in the first place," Ms. Troutman, the force behind the erstwhile proposal, told the Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal, implying that charges of anti-Semitism, most loudly raised as a result of Hess' comics, had made her reconsider her quest.

Hess, who calls himself a "human rights activist," defended his graphic work as being "neither anti-Semitic nor anti-physician." But those "who cut innocent children," he said, "will be drawn like the villains that they are."

Even before the offensive comics were uncovered, though, there was much and widespread determination in the Jewish community to fight the anti-milah measures. Not only were strong statements issued by national Orthodox organizations like Agudath Israel of America and the Orthodox Union, but an organized initiative under the umbrella of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council was undertaken locally-and encompassed parties beyond the Orthodox.

Jewish individuals, moreover, who spoke out against the proposals, also hailed from different parts of the Jewish communal spectrum. Santa Monica's mayor, Richard Bloom, for instance, announced that he was staunchly opposed to the ban that had been proposed for his locality, and stated that he plans to work with other political leaders to challenge the ballot measure in San Francisco.

And a Los Angeles-based urologist, Dr. Samuel Kunin, who has taught at the (Reform) Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and the (Conservative) Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University, promised that, should the San Francisco ballot measure pass, he would make the trip up the coast to perform the first illegal San Francisco circumcision.

The broad defense of bris milah is intriguing. Non-Orthodox movements have abandoned many parts of the Jewish religious heritage and deeply changed others. One would expect something less than enthusiasm among non-Orthodox Jews for something as challenging to a contemporary mind as circumcision-the injuring, after all, as the anti-circumcision advocates never tire of shouting-of an innocent baby who is not making the choice of the procedure himself. To be sure, there may be health benefits and likewise, to be sure, an infant's nervous system has not likely developed full sensitivity to the pain of a cut. Most eight-day-old baby boys fall asleep shortly after their bris milah. But, all said and done, why would Jews affiliated with movements that have abandoned not only entire areas of halacha but entire verses of the Torah hesitate to jettison a Jewish practice that seems to a simple mind to be "barbaric" (as the early Reform movement in fact labeled it)?

There can be only one answer, and it represents the silver lining of the current assault on milah: The pinteleh Yid, the essential spark of the Jewish soul, even when clouded over by a rolling fog of contemporary mores and sensibilities, is not easily extinguished. It perseveres, it persists. It lays down a line in the San Francisco Bay sand and refuses to countenance its crossing.

FRENCH CONNECTION

The latest marchers in the long parade of horribles anxious to murder in the name of a religion of peace are two feckless young men, Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, natives of Algeria and Morocco, respectively. They were arraigned last week in New York on charges of plotting to blow up synagogues.

Mamdouh, according to prosecutors, is on tape saying he hated Jews; and Ferhani, according to the complaint, planned among other things to use hand grenades; and relished the thought of "pulling the pins and throwing them into the synagogue."

That image- now, thankfully, confined to harmless words in court papers-conjured in my mind a similar one, of another time, another synagogue, and other hand grenades.

It was in 1943. After more than three years of German control over France, the Great Synagogue of Lyon continued to function. That December 10, however, the Lyon Milice, the Vichy government's shock troops, decided to put an end to Jewish worship in the city.

The shul's rabbi survived the war to tell the tale, which is recorded in a book about Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon" (and the title, in fact, of the book, by Brendan Murphy - Empire/Harper & Row, 1983). A member of the Milice quietly entered the rear of the sanctuary that Friday night during services. Armed with three hand grenades, he intended to lob them into the crowd of worshippers from behind, and to escape before the explosions. After silently opening the door and entering the room unnoticed by anyone but the rabbi (who stood facing the congregation), he pulled the pins.

What he saw, though, at that moment, grenades armed and the crowd of Jewish men standing with their backs toward him, so shook him that he froze, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, for a crucial moment, managing only to toss the grenades a few feet before fleeing in shock. Several worshippers were injured by shrapnel but not one was killed.

What had so flabbergasted the Nazi was the sudden, unexpected sight of his intended victims' faces, as the congregation, as if on cue, turned as one on its heels to face him.

The would-be mass-murderer had entered the shul precisely at "bo'i b'shalom," the last stanza of Lecha Dodi, when worshippers traditionally turn toward the door to welcome Shabbos.

Talk about timing.

I'm not a fan of happy-ending or just-deserts stories. So many of them simply aren't true or, at very least, are not definitively sourced or corroborated. Even many of the most famous tales may be fictions. (Stories don't become more factual with repetition.) What's more, every story that doesn't seem to end happily or neatly testifies no less loudly to G-d's plan. Hashgacha, or Divine Providence, is every bit as operative in the missed plane that didn't end up crashing as in the one that did.

But when an account appears not in an inspirational speech but in a well-researched history book, duly detailed and dated, well, it can't help but draw our attention. Not as a "fortification of belief" but as special cause for us already-believers to feel keener gratitude to the Creator for His kindness.

The story of the Lyon shul often visits my mind on Friday nights in shul, as I myself turn to welcome Shabbos. Its ending is compelling reason to give thanks, even 68 years later, to the Shomer Yisrael, the Guardian of the Jewish People.

As is the nipping-in-the-bud of the plans of the North African terrorist wannabes currently sitting in detention. (And, if their guilt is established, may they remain there for many years to come.)

No mortal can identify the special merit of the Lyon worshippers. Maybe it was the fact that the city's Jewish community had provided sanctuary for Jewish refugees from other parts of France. Maybe it was the very fact of the synagogue stubbornly continuing to hold services during such trying times. Or something else, unknown. Or many things. But merits there were.

And no mortal can know where the next plot against Jews is currently being planned. What we can know, though, is that we have a Guardian. And that we must strive to merit His protection for the future.

THE HELICOPTER LEFT BEHIND

I think that now, weeks since the mortal remains of this generation's most reviled mass-murderer were offered to fish and crustaceans, it's safe to bring up an important Jewish thought that should have occurred to us all in the wake of the operation at Abbottabad.

No, nothing to do with its ethical merit or legality; formal procedures and qualms have no place when it comes to removing a clearly dangerous object, animal, or person from the world. Nor is it with regard to the jubilation seen in some places following Bin Laden's killing; there are moral grounds for celebrating the demise of evil.

What may not have received sufficient contemplation was something else: the helicopter left behind.

Two Black Hawks were reportedly employed in the raid on Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. One experienced some sort of trouble and made a hard, damaging, landing. The commandoes tried to destroy the damaged chopper before leaving the compound on the other helicopter, apparently concerned that the Pakistanis might learn some secrets from the cutting-edge technology of the now-abandoned aircraft.

But there is something valuable in the wreckage from which we might all learn-or, at least, be reminded of: Things can go wrong.

That was a thought that surely reverberated in the minds of President Obama and his advisors as they awaited word of how things had proceeded during the raid. After all, when Jimmy Carter sent helicopters to the Iranian desert in 1980 to rescue the Americans then held captive in Tehran, one crashed en route; one turned back; one malfunctioned; and, the mission aborted, yet another plowed into a transport plane, killing eight soldiers. The servicemen involved in the mission were from Delta Force, the Army's equivalent at the time of "Seal Team Six."

And in fact, in an interview last week, Mr. Obama admitted being struck with the fear of failure. "You think about Black Hawk Down," he said, referring to the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, in which eighteen U.S. Army soldiers lost their lives. "You think about what happened with the Iranian rescue. And I am very sympathetic to the situation for other Presidents where you make a decision, you're making your best call, your best shot, and something goes wrong…"

That fear, of course, dissipated when the report came in of the "double tap" (Seal slang for one bullet to the chest, another to the face) and the prominent EKIA (enemy killed in action). But recognition of what can go wrong shouldn't ever dissipate. Fear should unfold like a flower into gratitude.

Which, in turn, should be directed Heavenward. Yes, we owe the President kudos for not putting Bin Laden on the White House back burner, and for risking a confrontation with Pakistani forces to get him. (One hopes some of the more thoughtful Obama-bashers among us were able to summon a smidgen of good feeling for the commander in chief's determination and decision.) Ditto for CIA Director Leon Panetta. And we have to deeply appreciate the skills and, more importantly, the grit and bravery, of the Seal Team Six commandos.

But what we have to do above all is to remember that an errant gust of wind can wreak havoc on a low-flying aircraft's ability to generate lift; electrical and hydraulic systems can and do malfunction; rotor blades crack; and human error happens.

And then we have to realize that the fact that none of those things took place-and that Bin Laden hadn't booby-trapped his room and wasn't protected by a dozen bodyguards and wasn't wearing a suicide vest-are all the result of siyata diShmaya, Divine assistance.

It's a realization that should inform our every humdrum day, for any day can easily be interrupted by things that make us pine dearly for humdrumness. A realization that a Jew should feel in his or her heart and even verbalize, clearly and without embarrassment, at every large or small turn of life that goes the way we hoped it would: Baruch Hashem.

ROMAN RITE LEADS TO JEWISH THOUGHT

Roman Catholic rituals aren't usually even a small part of my family's Shabbat table discussions but a recent Sabbath meal was an exception, granted in the spirit of revisiting an ever-timely Jewish concept.

The late Pope John Paul II was recently beatified by his church. Beatification is a stage in the process by which the Church renders a person a "saint." For a candidate to attain that stage, a miracle performed by the candidate has to be documented and accepted by a special Vatican committee.

Many, it seems, are the miracles out there. John Paul himself beatified more than 1300 people and canonized 482 saints during his tenure; and the current pope has beatified 790 and canonized 34. (Of course, every breath we take and move we make are miracles, but that's not what the Church has in mind here.)

To advance the cause of John Paul's canonization, evidence was proffered that a French nun had been miraculously cured from Parkinson's disease after praying to the pontiff shortly after his death in 2005. (Yes, Catholics pray to dead people, as intermediaries; for a Jew, that would constitute a most grave halachic offense.) The testimony was notarized and the miracle certified, despite grumblings from some corners. ("Did the prayers for this nun exclude the invocation of any and all [other] recognized saints?" one conservative Catholic publication asked with suspicion.)

Supernatural interventions have played a great role in Jewish history, of course. But-although many Jews are not aware of the fact-Maimonides clearly that they do not, and cannot, prove anything at all.

He points out (Yad: Yesodei HaTorah, 8:1) that there is simply no true way to distinguish a Divinely-sanctioned miracle from trickery or sorcery; a wonder may be wondrous, but it might also be an illusion. And so, any belief founded on a supernatural sign is, in the end, inherently flawed.

(The requirement that a prophet establish himself or herself by, among other things, performing a miracle or making a miraculous prediction, Maimonides explains, is a purely technical requirement, and does not imply that inherent meaning lies in miracles. [ibid, 7:7])

The wonders recounted in the Torah-even the parting of the Red Sea we recently revisited on the Seder nights-are not, Maimonides explains, demonstrations of G-d's existence but rather expressions of His love for His people.

The sea split, he continues, so that the Jews leaving Egypt could escape from the pursuing Egyptians, not to prove G-d's existence. The manna fell from heaven not as a theological statement but so that the people would not starve. Even seemingly demonstrative miracles like the ten plagues are interpreted by the Talmud and Midrash as messages, not mere manifestations.

The distinction may seem subtle, but it's not. We know G-d not because of any miracle but rather because He communicated directly with our ancestors at Mt. Sinai, a carefully preserved historical fact we will soon celebrate on Shavuot. That was no mere miracle, but an actual interaction, a mass meeting of the human and Divine-the only such interaction in human history.

That, explains Maimonides, is why, when G-d tells Moses to lead the Jewish People from Egypt, He adds: "And this is your sign that I have sent you: When you take the people out of Egypt, you will serve [Me] on this mountain," referring to Mt. Sinai.

That mass revelation fifty days after the exodus from Egypt is what established, beyond all doubt and suspicion, that the miracles the people had witnessed had not been trickery or sorcery but expressions of the love and concern of the Creator, Who was now introducing Himself directly to their minds and souls, and gifting them with the Torah.

It's, admittedly, strange that a Catholic rite brought me to reflect anew on the difference between a religion that "proves" things by "miracles"-indeed is based on them-and the incontrovertible truth to which we Jews are heir. But the difference is well worth pondering as we continue our "count-up" to this year's commemoration of the day we met the Creator.

WHITE HORSE, RED RIBBON… YELLOW JOURNALISM?

Rabbi Avi Shafran

"Oy," said the fellow at afternoon services first of the "intermediate days" of Passover. "Did you see the front page New York Times story about Kiryas Joel?"

I had, I confessed. As Agudath Israel of America's director of public affairs, I'm supposed to keep tabs on the media, even during days when freedom from the wider world's machinations and mischief is the Jewish order of the day.

My interlocutor elaborated on his groan. "They did a real job on the place," he said. "Not good, not good…"

I understood how distrust of the media combined with a standard-issue dose of Jewish worry could easily yield such an assessment. After all, the article's headline called Kiryas Joel, the Satmar community about 50 miles northwest of New York City, "A Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place" in America. And the piece noted that "about half the residents receive food stamps and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs."

Moreover, it quoted an assemblywoman representing an adjacent district who has demanded an investigation into why Kiryas Joel received state and federal funds for a 60-bed postnatal maternal care center. Residents, she said "may be truly poor on paper [but] they are not truly poor in reality."

And then there was the sociology professor who generously admitted that he "cannot say as a group that they are cheating the system" but does think "that they have, no pun intended, unorthodox methods of getting financial support."

Still and all, the article acknowledged that crime is "virtually nonexistent in Kiryas Joel"; highlighted the assistance provided the needy by members of the community; noted that rates for stays at the postnatal center are not covered by Medicaid, and that "poorer women are typically subsidized by wealthier ones"; and described economic opportunities undertaken by locals. And it ended-the final lines of an article are the most important ones, as they "bring it all together" for the reader-with a quote from the village administrator, who pointed out that Kiryas Joel has "no drug-treatment programs, no juvenile delinquency program, we're not clogging the court system with criminal cases, you're not running programs for AIDS or teen pregnancy. I haven't run the numbers, but I think it's a wash."

The Talmud, in fact, teaches that poverty brings out the best in Jews, that it is "beautiful" for them, "like a red ribbon on a white horse" (Chagiga 9b). The article presented no evidence that Kiryas Joel's residents were anything but honest and needy, and deserving of what social largesse our wonderful country makes available to the materially deprived. In fact, it showed how poverty and beauty can dovetail.

Yet it wasn't only my shul friend who was unhappy with the report. So was someone far from the Orthodox world.

Ron Kuby is a well-known criminal defense and civil rights lawyer. New Yorkers with the questionable habit of listening to talk radio know him as a left-wing pundit who co-hosted a popular program for eight years. About 15 years ago, he contacted the Agudah about a legal issue of common concern and, after that interaction, over subsequent years I occasionally wrote to chide him about on-air comments he had made. We have carried on a lively conversation ever since. We often differ, but I have come to consider Ron a cherished fellow Jew and true friend. (For his part, he has called me his rabbi-although I'm not entirely sure what it means to be a self-declared atheist's clergyman.)

When he saw the Times article, he was chagrined by what he regarded as its tone, and wrote me. "The writer," he opined, "calls the poverty 'invisible' because no one appears to be suffering…" It's as if, he continued, the reporter was upset at Kiryas Joel's residents. "How dare these people devote their lives to Talmud (and producing children) and be happy while being broke! How dare they not have cars! How dare they receive charity from their co-religionists…!"

A better article, Ron continued, would have come from "a deeper meditation on the nature of a life well-lived."

We agree on that.

BLACK LIKE US

The Chasam Sofer (Rabbi Moshe Sofer, 1762-1839) probably never saw a black person. There weren't likely very many in 19th century central Europe. But he certainly knew they existed. After all, they are mentioned in a verse, the one that opens the haftarah of the Torah portion Kedoshim, which will be read this year on the first Shabbat after Pesach. There, Kushites-Kush is generally identified as a kingdom in central Africa-are a simile for the Jewish People.

"Behold, you are like the children of Kush to Me," the prophetAmos (9:7) quotes the Creator addressing His nation.

"Just as a Kushite differs [from others] in [the color of] his skin," comments the Talmud (Moed Katan, 16b), "so are the Jewish people different in their actions."

One might assume that the intention of that explanation is simply that, while most people often act thoughtlessly or selfishly, Jews, if they live as they should, do otherwise, planning their every action, concerned about their obligations to the Creator, and to others.

But the Chasam Sofer's interpretation of the Talmudic comment (he apparently had "the righteous" in place of "the Jewish people") goes in a different direction, and makes a point as fundamental as it is timely.

His words:

"It is well known that every Jew is required to observe all the mitzvos. But there is no single path for them all. One Jew may excel in Torah-study, another in avodah (service, or prayer), another in kindnesses to others; this one in one particular mitzvah, that one in another. Nevertheless, while they all differ from each other in their actions, they all have the same intention, to serve G-d with their entire hearts.

"Behold the Kushite. Inside, his organs, his blood and his appearance are all the same as other people's. Only in the superficiality of his skin is he different from others. This is the meaning of '[different] in his skin,' [meaning] only in his skin. Likewise, the righteous are different [from one another] only 'in their actions'; their inner conviction and intention, though, are [the same,] aimed at serving G-d in a good way."

There are two messages to glean here. One-which wasn't intended by the Chasam Sofer as a message at all, but as a truism-is that people of different colors are only superficially different from one another. What lies beneath our shells are the same veins, sinews and organs, no matter our shades.

The Chasam Sofer's novel message, though, is that there are different ways, no one of them any less essentially worthy than any other, of serving G-d.

All too often we fall into the trap of thinking that we, or our children, must follow a particular trajectory and land in a particular place in life. But when the rabbis of the Talmud teach that "just as people's faces all differ one from the other, so do their minds," they are informing us otherwise, that there are different, equally meritorious, trajectories, different, equally praiseworthy, landing places for different people. It's not just that people are dissimilar and will choose a variety of vocations, excel in a variety of fields, and establish individual priorities. It's that in all our diversity of vocations, fields and priorities, we can be entirely equal servants of the Divine.

Consider Rabbi Broka, who, the Talmud recounts (Ta'anit 22a), was often accompanied by Elijah the Prophet, and once asked him whether in a certain marketplace there were any people who merited the World-to-Come. The individuals Elijah pointed to turned out to be a prison guard who made special efforts to preserve prisoners' moral integrity and who interceded with the government on behalf of his fellow Jews; and a pair of comedians, who used their humor to cheer up the depressed and defuse disputes.

One wonders if the parents of those meritorious men felt disappointed at their sons' choices of professions. Or whether they realized that there are, in the end, many paths that can lead to the World-to-Come

SPRINGTIME FOR HAMAS

It wasn't reported in The New York Times or Washington Post for some reason, but on March 19 Hamas security agents raided the Gaza offices of Reuters, seized reporters' cameras, beat an employee with a metal bar, and announced their intention to throw another (employee, that is, not metal bar) out a window. What brought about the theft, assault, and threatened defenestration was the fact that a reporter in the building had filmed a demonstration taking place on the street below.

A demonstration, it should be noted, in favor of reuniting Hamas, which is pledged to Israel's destruction, with its current rival Fatah, which administers the West Bank and is, at least in principle, at peace with Israel.

Mere days later, the atmosphere had clouded-maybe cleared would be a better description. First, an advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that his boss considered unity with Hamas so important that even the withdrawal of American aid to the Palestinian Authority-currently hundreds of millions of dollars annually-would not derail a planned re-alliance of the two Palestinian parties. Then a prominent Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, visiting Egypt for the first time since its former President Hosni Mubarak's resignation, announced that Egypt is actively involved in forging a reconciliation between his group and Fatah. Shortly thereafter, the Arab League moved to endorse the effort, offering to host the necessary talks. It's springtime for Hamas. And the season has never smelled so bad. The end of March brought us something else too: Hamas' and Fatah's reaction to reports that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)-the UN arm that provides services to "Palestinian refugees"-was planning to include a short study of the Holocaust in its schools' human rights curricula. The notion that the 200,000 children in UN-funded Gazan schools and thousands more in other UNRWA-administered areas might be apprised about what happened to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s was apparently too much for the Palestinian parties to digest.

"Playing with the education of our children in the Gaza Strip is a red line," Hamas Education Minister Mohammed Asqoul declared, adding that that his group would block any such plan "regardless of the price."

Zakaria al-Agha, the leader of Fatah in Gaza and a member of Fatah's central committee, put it baldly: "Teaching the Holocaust to Palestinian students in U.N. schools is unacceptable." The Associated Press reported that approximately a dozen Gazan schoolteachers who were interviewed decried the plan too, and "warned of rebellion" were any attempt made to implement it.

None of them need worry. Holocaust education no longer seems to be on the UNRWA's plate, if ever it seriously was. The agency's representative in Jordan was quoted by a paper in that country as asserting that no curricular changes, in the end, were being planned.

Witnessing such unhidden contempt for history puts one in the mind of recalling part of President Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo. After declaring that America's "strong bonds with Israel" are "unbreakable," he took pains to remind the Islamic world about the Holocaust. Noting that he was headed the very next day to Buchenwald, "part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich," he pointedly pointed out that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was greater "than the entire Jewish population of Israel today."

And he continued, equally pointedly, that denying the Holocaust "is baseless, ignorant, and hateful," and that "threatening Israel with destruction-or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews-is deeply wrong."

Some observers criticized Mr. Obama for, as they chose to see it, eliding the inherent Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael. (Presumably he should have quoted the first Rashi in the Chumash.) But, to less jaundiced ears, his words were a worthy rebuke of Arabdom's willful ignorance and Jew-hatred. Not to mention, a worthy introduction to his main point: "Palestinians," he said, "must abandon violence."

Should Hamas' fetid springtime indeed bloom, and we become witness to the recreation of its unholy alliance with Fatah, one hopes Mr. Obama will well recall Hamas' foundational pledge to destroy Israel, the Palestinian non-narrative of the Holocaust-and his own trenchant words in Cairo.

A SONG FROM BEYOND

My dear mother, of blessed memory, has been gone for 22 years. Her yahrtzeit, the Jewish anniversary of her passing, 22 Adar I, fell on a Shabbos this year, several weeks ago. All who knew her will readily testify that she was one of the kindest, most caring people they had ever met. Despite her transplantation from Poland to the U.S. as a little girl, and then the loss of her grandmother, a brother and her father when she was a teen, no scars of those challenges were ever evident in her interactions with people-the moment she met you she began caring for you-and she was the most wonderful mother any child could ask for.

And she was present at our Shabbos table on her yahrtzeit this year. She even taught my grandson a song.

Two year old Shmuel, who was visiting with his parents and little brother, is an adorable, rambunctious little boy; to his good fortune, his propensity to display his impressive pitching arm and ability to break things have been divinely counterbalanced with preternaturally blue eyes and a smile that could melt Pharaoh's heart. He's a quick learner too.

At one point, someone at the meal claimed to be directionally challenged, needing to consciously think about which way was right and which was left. I smiled as I realized, and explained, how I came to have a split-second recognition of which way is right.

When I was a little boy, probably a bit older than Shmuel, I would accompany my mother on Shabbos afternoons to the shul in Baltimore's Lower Park Heights neighborhood where my father, may he be well, was rabbi. There, she would host a gathering of neighborhood children for snacks and songs and stories. One song has remained with me over the more than half-century since. It consisted of the verse "Kol rina viy'shua bi'oholei tzaddikim; yemin Hashem osoh choyil": "The sound of rejoicing and salvation is in the tents of the righteous; Hashem's right hand does valiantly" (Tehillim 118, 15). And, in the song, the word for "right hand"-"yemin"-was repeated with gusto thrice, each time with everyone thrusting a right fist into the air.

And so, I recounted, I need only think of the word yemin and my right arm starts automatically to move. I demonstrated the song and the motion, much to the amusement of Shmuel, who then shouted "Yemin!" three times, complete with hand motion. As we all laughed, I realized with a start that, my goodness!, my mother had just reached through the years-on her yahrtzeit no less!-and taught her great-grandson a song.

Of course, I think she is constantly teaching him, many other more important things as well. Every time I am moved to do something kind or considerate, I know it is her legacy (bequeathed to her no less by her parents) that I am, if imperfectly, embracing, and hopefully passing on to others. My wife and I, and our children-Shmuel's mother among them-along with their spouses are all links in a chain of generations, passing on the Jewish beliefs and values we have absorbed from our forebears to the young with whom we have been entrusted. In fact, being such links is arguably our most important role in life. And whether we're adequately filling it should be our constant concern.

More recently, my wife, perhaps in the spirit of chaos associated with the season, invited Shmuel's parents to leave him with us for the Shabbos before Purim, an offer they couldn't refuse. We had a wonderful time hosting our grandson. He managed to break only one child-proof gate, open only one child-proof cabinet (though several times) and drop just one book into the aquarium. (My wife's quick move prevented Shmuel's socks from following.)

That Friday night, when I returned from shul, the house was very quiet. Shmuel had been put to bed, but hadn't yet fallen asleep. To soothe him and ensure that he didn't climb out of his crib (something in which he has considerable expertise and experience) and wreak havoc, our daughter was sitting in the darkened room with him. He was babbling quietly, probably planning his mischief for the next day.

While we were waiting for the babble to fade to the peaceful slow breathing of well-deserved sleep, my wife excitedly motioned to me to come closer to the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar.

And then, bringing me a rush-and a smile leavened with a tear-I heard what she had: "Yemin!" Shmuel's little-boy voice was piping. "Yemin! Yemin!"

ICE STORM INSIGHT

There are surely many stories that can be told about the challenging winter from which we are (we hope!) emerging. Mine is about as mundane as they come. But it came with a lesson, at least for me.

It was the morning after a night that had layered a sheet of ice over much of twenty states, including New York. I arose earlier than usual, to allow extra time to get to shul for morning services. I bundled up, opened the door and stepped outside. After three steps, I turned on my heels and, slowly, gingerly, returned to the house.

During one of the season's previous eruptions of inclement weather, I had hurt my back shoveling snow. I was in excruciating pain for weeks thereafter, weeks that included the day of the ice-storm. I realized that were I to hazard even the block and a half walk to the closest shul, the chances of my slipping and falling-with repercussions to my back I preferred to not imagine-were considerable.

"Well, this, too, is for the good," I consoled myself, invoking the Talmudic personality Nachum Ish Gamzu's credo as I retreated defeated. And, in its way, it was.

The house was quiet and I took my time donning my tallit and tefillin at the dining room table. I took out my siddur and began to pray.

It was a deliberate, unhurried prayer. I was able to say every word distinctly, able to pay closer attention, to stop and think at every blessing and beseeching, to truly connect in a way that so often eludes me in the synagogue.

And yet, it was without a minyan, the required quorum. Which is not the way a Jewish man should ideally pray.

There are two seemingly unrelated things called "Yud Gimmel Middot"-literally, "13 Measures." One is a list of thirteen aspects (or, as commonly rendered, "attributes") of G-d's mercy, based on words in Exodus (34:6-7) that begin with G-d's name stated twice (with a pause signaled between them, representing, the Talmud says, one's different relationship to the Divine "before he has sinned and after he has sinned and repented").

The other "13 Middot" refers to a list recited daily in the prayer service. This list, cited in Rabbi Yishmael's name, enumerates the hermeneutical rules by which Jewish laws are derived from the Torah's verses. Some of that methodology, which is more descriptively known as the "13 Middot Through Which the Torah is Interpreted," is logical, some of it not obviously so; all of it, though, comprises a sacred part of the Oral Law itself.

Isn't it odd that both the expressions of G-d's mercy and the hermeneutical principles number thirteen, and both are described as "middot"?

Most of us have paused at the fact that, at least from our limited perspective, G-d seems to present two very different "faces": on the one hand, He is the Merciful Lifegiver, the Forgiver of sin and Bestower of blessings; on the other, the Lawgiver.

The Creator is both "avinu" and "malkeinu," our Father and our King-both merciful Parent and summoning Sovereign.

That may be the subtle implication of the "13 Middot" oddity-that the Source of mercy and forbearance is the very same Source of law and obligation. Divine mercy and Divine law are inseparable facets of the same Unity. The demands of Divine law are born of Divine love, inseparable from it; they reflect G-d's concern for our own ultimate wellbeing.

And so, while my minyanless morning brought me to a feeling of closeness to the Divine I too seldom manage, the requirement of praying with a quorum remains incumbent (even if, on occasion, it cannot be managed).

Were G-d only a father, then I would choose to worship Him at home. But He is a king, too, and has decreed otherwise.

So now what I have to strive toward-and analogies, I imagine, abound for us all in our individual daily lives-is to bring some of the specialness of my ice storm service into every prayer recited, less leisurely but more properly, with a minyan in shul.

MINDLESS PURITY

I'm hesitant to put my Mama Jean story in writing. There's so much improper imbibing on Purim, so much regarding of "lib'sumi" (to become tipsy) as license instead of mitzvah.

But the story's too good, and its message too meaningful, to leave unshared.

"Mama Jean," as she liked to be called, was the cook in a small yeshiva where I studied many, many years ago. She was a very large, very jovial, very middle-aged ethnic Italian from "the other side of the tracks." While she was serving us pasta with meat sauce, her son was serving a life sentence in San Quentin.

Her first year with the yeshiva brought revelations to both us and her. We learned about fresh oregano. And she learned about strange Jews. How they could feast so incessantly on Sabbaths and holidays, eating odd things like cholent, and how they suddenly ate nothing at all on fast days.

When Purim was imminent, we thought Mama Jean should be prepared for yet a new strangeness. Gingerly, we told her about breaking the fast after Taanit Esther, about the festivities of that night and the next day, about the festive meal, about how some might be drinking a bit more than they otherwise might. She wasn't fazed and not only prepared a royal spread (and special punch) for the yeshiva but watched the singing and dancing from the kitchen throughout the day.

It was a wonderful Purim, what I remember of it. What I clearly remember, though, was an early morning later that week. My mind is sharpest in pre-dawn hours, and I had entered the yeshiva's beis medrash, or study hall. well before morning services.

Expecting an empty room, I was startled to see a formidable form sitting on the floor before a bookcase at the back of the hall. Mama Jean was oblivious to my arrival, deeply engrossed in an English holy book that had been on a shelf.

When she sensed my presence, she was startled, and I apologized. "But Mama Jean," I said, "What are you doing here?"

She stood up and smiled sheepishly. "Avi," she said. "I'm thinking about becoming Jewish."

Mama Jean struck me as an unlikely convert (and, to the best of my knowledge, never became one).

"Why?" I asked, sincerely curious. "Purim" was her response.

Her elaboration has remained with me for decades since. "Over my years," she explained, "I've seen a lot of people plenty drunk. But I've never seen so many people so drunk… without a single fight." All that she had seen at the yeshiva, she explained, was friendship, joy, laughter, tears, and religious devotion.

Mama Jean, I realized, had sensed what the rabbis of the Talmud teach: that a person's true character is evident in "his cup"-in how he acts when intoxicated. She had perceived Klal Yisrael.

The Talmud (Shabbos, 88a) teaches that something was missing when our ancestors received the Torah at Mt. Sinai, something only supplied centuries later by the Jews in Persia at the time of Mordechai and Esther.

Because the revelation at Sinai involved an element of coercion: "G-d held the mountain over the Jews' heads like a gigis (a barrel)." Explains the Maharal: The powerful nature of the experience, the terrifying interaction of human and Divine, left no opportunity for true free choice.

And for years that "coercion" remained a moda'ah, a "remonstration," against the Jewish People. Until the Purim story. Then, the Jews chose, entirely of their own volition, to perceive G-d's presence where it was not obvious at all. Instead of seeing the threat against them in mundane terms, they recognized it as G-d's message, and responded with prayer, fasting, and repentance. And by choosing to see G-d's hand, they supplied what was missing at Sinai, confirming that the Jewish acceptance of the Torah was-and is-wholehearted, sincere and pure.

When I think of my early morning conversation with Mama Jean, I think of the Talmud's image of G-d "holding the mountain over their heads," and, especially, of the phrase "like a barrel." What's with that? Is a mountain overhead not frightening enough? Who ordered the barrel?

A gigis, however, throughout the Talmud, contains an intoxicating beverage.

In Pirkei Avos, we are taught not "to look at the container, but at what it holds." I suspect that advice may apply here. The Jewish nation's reaction to coercion may not reveal its truest nature; what does, though, is how we express our dedication in a state of mindless purity.

THE SILICON EMPEROR'S NEW SOUL

"A donkey loaded up with books." That's the term the Chovos Halevovos (Rabbeinu Bachya ibn Pekudah) uses to describe a scholar who has memorized much information but lacks the judgment, character and/or human insight to transform what he carries into wisdom.

Donkeys bray and smell bad. Computers whir (at least if they have fans or rotating hard drives) and are odorless (though some keyboards are redolent of coffee). But donkeys and computers share two things in common: Each can hold much, and neither approaches being human.

The media minions were gushing of late over the performance of an IBM computer that bested a pair of bright and well-versed human beings in a game show competition that tested knowledge in a broad array of areas. Christened "Watson," the computer brought to the podium a 15-terabyte data bank of facts. And it answered questions (or, better, supplied questions to proffered answers or hints, the conceit of the game show, Jeopardy!) with aplomb.

Just as it was programmed (by humans, of course) to do, "Watson" zeroed in on key words in the clue, combed its mega-memory for associations and, if its program rated the result sufficiently likely to be correct, sounded the game buzzer in a tiny fraction of a second. The flesh and blood contestants didn't really stand a chance.

Hosannas sounded from all directions. The accomplishment was hailed as a quantum leap toward Artificial Intelligence, the holy grail of some scientists who believe that a machine can be constructed that is indistinguishable in its cognitive abilities from a human being.

What Watson made me think of, oddly, was PETA, "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals."

The silicon scholar and the extreme animal rights group might not seem to have anything to do with each other. But both foster the same disturbing and deeply wrong notion: that human beings are not an utterly unique part of creation.

PETA morally equates animals with humans. Its "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign compared the killing of chickens and cows to the murder of men, women and children. Its president memorably lamented that "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses."

Watson's inventors and promoters exhibit no such mental aberration. For all I know, they may well enjoy a good steak. But all the same, a subtle offense lies in the Artificial Intelligence crowd's notion that a sufficiently advanced computer could achieve consciousness, sentience, self-awareness.

Because it, too, presupposes that humans are not qualitatively special beings, that, in our essences, we ourselves are just fantastically well-engineered pieces of software.

But we're not. We may share our basic biologies with the animal world; and elements of our information-processing abilities may be mimicked (even bested) by machines. But we are neither wallabies nor Watsons. We don't just feel; we emote. We don't just compute; we conceive. We don't just act; we choose. Our reflections in a mirror mimic us too. But they're not us.

There's a Purim thought here.

Because Amalek stands for meaninglessness. From an Amalekian point of view, the world is, as they say, what it is; nothing more. It offers no reason to imagine that we are something beyond animals who speak and wear clothes (and so what?) and analyze things (though not even as well as computers). No reason to consider that there is good and bad, right and wrong, or some plan for history.

Klal Yisrael stands for the very opposite, the conviction that human beings are the pinnacle of creation, that they can consider and communicate not just wants, like animals, but ideas, concepts, truths. And that a nation was chosen to be an example to the world of a human being's highest aspiration, holiness.

And so let's be wary of Watson, or at least of Watsonism. And, amid all the cheering of the silicon emperor, let's declare unabashedly that he has no soul.

THE CULTURAL JEW WITHIN

Rabbi Avi Shafran

It's a term often used for members of the tribe who see their membership as essentially ethnic in nature, informed by things like culinary choices, celebration of the Jewish calendar's holidays (though not, to them, holy days), and-at least for some-certain political leanings: "Cultural Jews."

They may attend synagogue on special occasions, in particular on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, on the anniversary of a parent's death-and even recite the Kaddish-not because they perceive spiritual power in those days or that Kaddish but mostly because… well, because that's what their parents or grandparents did. Because that's what Jews do. Tradition, so to speak, for the sake of tradition.

Another kind of cultural Jew, less commonly acknowledged but not altogether rare, is the cultural Orthodox Jew.

That would be one who doesn't limit his Jewish expression to gefilte fish and Chanukah but rather eats only foods graced with the best rabbinical supervision and drinks only Jewish-processed milk; who wears a black hat or fur one, and even a long coat; who prays with a quorum regularly and sends his children to yeshivot and may even attend Torah classes; but who does it all for much the same reason as his less Jewishly active counterparts: Because that's what Jews-in this case, Orthodox Jews-do. It's not that he doesn't believe in the Creator. It's just that he doesn't give Him much thought-even while living a seemingly intense Jewish life.

Of course, valuing our forebears' traditions, dressing like them, adopting Jewish family customs, are undeniably important. But when the trappings of observance are essentially all that there is, when they aren't accompanied by a consciousness of why they are important, what's left is mere mimicry, paraphernalia in place of principle.

That there are "Cultural" Orthodox Jews helps explain otherwise baffling things, like how an Orthodox Jew can engage in unethical business practices, cheat, steal or abuse. Or, more mundanely, how he can cut others off in traffic, act rudely, or blog maliciously. Or, for that matter, how he can address his Creator in prayer with words so garbled and hurried that, were he speaking to another mortal, they would elicit laughter-or pity, for the apparent impairment.

To be sure, desires, compulsions, selfishness and greed are always at work. But the check for such spiritual adversities is consciousness of G-d; and in some seemingly observant Jews it appears to have gone missing. Their observance is a Fiddler on the Roof sort of "Tradition!"-miles wide, perhaps, but mere millimeters deep.

The phenomenon of Cultural Orthodox Jews should discomfit us. After all, mitzvot, commandments, and Jewish customs are a Jew's spiritual nourishment; but awareness of the Divine is-or should be-the very air we breathe.

Which leads to something even more painful to ponder: Don't even we who think of our Jewish consciousnesses as healthy and vibrant lapse at times into our own sort of temporary "cultural Jewish" modes? Do we always think of what we're saying when we recite a blessing on food (or even take care to pronounce every word distinctly)? Are our observances truly religious, or do they sometimes devolve into rote? Do we stop to weigh our every daily action and interaction on the scales of Jewish propriety?

The celebrated thinker Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler (1892-1953) maintained that most of what we do, including our mitzvot, contain mixtures of motivations-including peer pressure, selfishness and the inertia of habit. When the rabbis of the Talmud observed that "from lo lish'ma [ulterior motives] comes lish'ma [pure, Divine-directed intent]," Rabbi Dessler maintains, they mean that we are charged with elevating the pure motivation in our actions above the other intentions, intensifying it, making it the prominent factor in all that we do.

In truth, all of us live on a continuum here, some more aware of the Divine, of reality, some less. The challenge-for us all-is to transcend whatever degree of "cultural Jewishness" we may harbor, and allow our lish'ma to come to the fore.

SCANDAL UPON SCANDAL

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The other day, a reporter contacted me at Agudath Israel of America-I serve as the Agudah's public affairs director-about the Conservative movement's planned offering of an "ethical seal" of approval for kosher foods, intended to assure consumers that labor, animal welfare, consumer rights, and environmental impact standards are being adhered to by the producer. Why, he asked, hasn't the seal been endorsed by the Agudah?

I politely explained that, while anyone can pursue whatever "seal of approval" they wish, there are government regulations regarding the things the ethical certification would cover, and agencies charged with enforcing the rules.

In any event, though, I added, labor, consumer and environmental concerns exist regarding all products and services. And since the seal at issue is being offered only for food (and only for kosher food), it misleads Jews by giving the false impression that kashrus is dependent on such social concerns. It has in fact been described by some of its advocates as a "redefinition of kashrus."

The reporter then asked how I could believe that governmental regulations are enough "even in light of the Agriprocessors scandal."

Maybe when a slaughterhouse is at issue "seeing red" isn't the best metaphor to use. But I had to make an effort to remain polite.

"The only 'Agriprocessors scandal'," I replied, "is the scandalous way the government prosecuted the company and its CEO"-how, after all sorts of wild accusations, including abuse of workers, cruelty to animals, and drug manufacturing, the only charges successfully brought against Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin in the end involved misstating his company's assets" in the process of obtaining loans (which he always repaid fully, at least until the government onslaught bankrupted his company). Similarly scandalous, I added, is the wildly excessive 27-year prison sentence he received.

I pointed the reporter in the direction of civil and legal rights organizations-including the American Civil Liberties Union-that have filed "friend of the court," briefs in support of Mr. Rubashkin and his demand for a new trial.

Whatever backers of the "ethical certification seal" may claim, I explained, the Rubashkin case provided it no warrant. Evidence failed to show that Mr. Rubashkin had knowledge that any of his workers were illegal immigrants, or that he knew that any of them who turned out to be underage were anything but what their documentation represented them to be (and what they physically seemed to be).

And so, invoking an "Agriprocessors scandal" to justify some need for an extra-governmental "ethical certification seal," I asserted, is cynical opportunism, a scandal upon a scandal.

The reporter had been treating allegations as facts, having swallowed whole what colleagues of his have served up over the course of the Agriprocessors saga-in particular, the journalist who in 2006 first shone a harsh light on the slaughterhouse. In a series of articles for a Jewish newspaper, his front-page stories cited shocking allegations of worker abuse. The reports were followed in 2008 by a federal raid on the plant, the deportation of hundreds of illegal aliens who had presented false documents, and the filing of criminal charges against Mr. Rubashkin and others.

In a 2009 Wall Street Journal column, that reporter righteously reveled in his "scoop," and, his cloak of ostensible objectivity falling to his ankles, revealed his antipathy for the "bearded Orthodox rabbis" who "buzzed around the Agriprocessors plant" making sure kashrus laws, but not ethical norms, were being observed.

He has since moved on, to a large West Coast newspaper. Reminded of all the misery his reportage brought in its wake, I wondered if, at this point, he has any regrets about the focus he brought on Mr. Rubashkin. And so I located his new e-mail address and posed the question.

The message didn't bounce back, so the address must be correct. So far, though, I've received no reply.

But maybe he's on vacation.

PUNDITS ON PLUTO

Nicholas Kristof was intoxicated.

That’s not a value judgment. It was The New York Times columnist’s own self-assessment in a February 1 column, his inebriation the result of having been amid a crowd of Egyptian protesters against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the end of January. No alcohol was involved, of course; the crowd was overwhelmingly Muslim. The contact high was, and remains, entirely political.

The square, Mr. Kristof recounted, which in the past had been a place of unruly behavior, had “lost its menace and suddenly become the most exhilarating place in the world.” And the reason was because of the hope he inhaled from “the brave men and women of Tahrir Square,” the “peaceful throngs pleading for democracy.” The participants, in other words, in the “Days of Rage” demonstrations that in subsequent days led to Mr. Mubarak’s resignation.

The Times columnist cited Egyptians he found “everywhere I go” insisting that “Americans shouldn’t perceive their [the Egyptian revolutionary] movement as a threat”; and found it “sad that Egyptians are lecturing Americans on the virtues of democracy.”

He does recount a modicum of menace in some of the sentiment he heard. A medical student tells him that “Egyptian people will not forget what Obama does today. If he supports the Egyptian dictator, the Egyptian people will never forget that. Not for 30 years.” (The student didn’t have long to wait; President Obama quickly endorsed an exit from power for Mr. Mubarak.)

Mr. Kristof thinks that “the protesters have a point” about initial American “equivocation” over the rebellion in Egypt, though he allows that “maybe I’m too caught up in the giddiness of Tahrir Square.” Yes, maybe.

On the same day, Kristof’s colleague at the Old Gray Lady, Roger Cohen, nursed some optimism of his own, citing “the immense distance traveled by Arabs over the past month” and seeing a harbinger of hope in the fact that “the one big subject [Arabs] are not talking about… [is] Israel.”

“For too long,” he writes, perceptively enough, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the great diversion, exploited by feckless Arab autocrats to distract impoverished populations.

“Now, Arabs are thinking about their own injustices. With great courage, they are saying ‘Enough!’”

Not one to allow an opportunity to criticize Israel fall through his hands, though, he notes that the “fast-growing economy and institution-building [in] the West Bank is an example to the dawning Arab world—and would be more so if Israel helped rather than blocked and hindered.”

But he sees hope all the same that a “representative Egyptian government” could emerge from the Cairene crowds, even if they turn out to be “less pliant to America’s will”; and that it might come to carry “a vital message for Arabs and Jews: Victimhood is self-defeating and paralyzing—and can be overcome.”

There must have been some sort of Stuxnet-like virus infecting the brains of the paper of record’s pundits. The giddiness born of the sight of hundreds of thousands of angry Egyptians seemed to have spread even to the page’s “conservative” columnist, David Brooks. In his own column that same day, he kvelled at the “surge of patriotism” expressed by the Egyptian demonstrators, part of a “remarkable democratic wave.”

“More than 100 nations have seen democratic uprisings over the past few decades,” Mr. Brooks asserted, something about which, he contended, “we should be glad.”

I am not sure to what nations he refers, but what I am sure of is that democracy, for all its wonderful potential, is not a guarantee of anything other than the concretization of a populace’s will.

And that, whatever the identities of those “more than 100 nations,” the most prominent mass expressions of collective will that come to mind are the 2006 Gaza elections that put Hamas in power there, the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979 and the rise, a mere 50 years earlier, of the Nazi party in Germany.

THANK YOU, DR. MURRAY

Writer and educator Dr. Erica Brown penned a thoughtful piece for the New York Jewish Week on January 25, in which she addressed the concept of Jewish peoplehood.

"The niggling tension of Judaism as a nationality, ethnicity and faith," she writes, "continues to stump many who have tried in vain to capture what it means to be Jewish."

She recalls Leon Wieseltier's charmingly nebulous take on the matter: "To be a Jew is to be a Jew. It is its own thing. Its own category; its own autonomous way of moving through the world…"

And the late Tony Judt's: "I participate in no Jewish community life, nor do I practice Jewish rituals… I am not a 'lapsed' Jew, having never conformed to requirements in the first place. I don't 'love Israel'… But whenever anyone asks me whether or not I am Jewish, I unhesitatingly respond in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise."

In the end, alas, Dr. Brown likewise offers no solution to the question of what Jewishness means.

Someone who did, though, at least tentatively, was political scientist and writer Charles Murray-who, as it happens, is not himself Jewish. Several years ago, in Commentary, he dared to raise one of the few issues still considered impolite these days for public discussion: Jewish intelligence.

Dr. Murray reports that "the average Jew is at the 75th percentile" of the IQ scale and that "the proportion of Jews with IQs of 140 or higher is somewhere around six times the proportion of everyone else." Others, moreover, have noticed that a number of world-changing ideas, both religious ones like monotheism and scientific ones like relativity, have their roots in a certain ethnicity.

After exploring a number of theories addressing the anomaly, Dr. Murray asks why "one particular tribe at the time of Moses, living in the same environment as other nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East, have already evolved elevated intelligence when the others did not?"

His conclusion, perhaps tongue somewhat in cheek:

"At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. The Jews are G-d's chosen people." [The hyphen is mine.]

I don't know, or much care, whether or not intelligence plays any role in Klal Yisrael's chosenness. In any event, anyone who has been around the block knows many members of the tribe who are far from brilliant, even some who might be a few tractates short of a Talmud, so to speak. But even if smarts are in fact evident in the Jewish aggregate, they are peripheral to the essence of our chosenness.

Because what we Jews are chosen for is, in the end, to serve the Creator-with our intellects, yes, but also with our hearts and our bodies-and, by doing so, to be examples for all humanity. And that is the secret that puzzles and discomfits those who wonder at their inexplicable feelings of Jewishness.

It's easy for those of us who well recognize that secret to lament the dearth of its recognition in the wider Jewish world. Easy to bemoan the obliviousness of so many Jews to the fact that the Jewish essence is the Jewish mandate to serve the Divine.

But the lamentation deserves to be tempered with some exultation, too, over the fact that Jews whose lives are so distant from our own, who live estranged from much, even all, of Jewish observance still feel the inchoate pull of their Jewish identity, even as they admit to having no understanding of it at all. The fact that a Tony Judt, despite consciously shunning Judaism, when asked about his Jewishness "unhesitatingly respond[s] in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise" should fill us with awe.

And with determination, to do all we can to fan the tiny flame that is the Jewish soul, flickering defiantly deep in the hearts of fellow Jews who may not look or live like us but who are parts of us all the same.

SWEARING OFF THE "U" WORD
- Time to Dump a Pejorative Prefix,

The word "ultra," one dictionary informs me, is Latin for "the far side." Well, there are certainly days when I feel I have wandered into a Gary Larson cartoon. But most of the time, my life, like the lives of most "Ultra-Orthodox" Jews, is pretty unremarkable,

So, isn't it time the media, which seem so often to focus on traditionally observant Jews, substituted another term like "haredi"-a nonjudgmental word denoting devotion-for the one they currently favor, which other lexicons define as "excessive," "immoderate" or "extremist"?

Okay, we do dress a little strangely by contemporary standards. Our men and boys wear hats or yarmulkes; our married women keep their hair covered (no veils, though!). Our clothing is modest in a way that tends to stand out, especially in the summer. Our men tend to favor black. But, hey, so do many chic dressers.

And we're fundamentalists too, I suppose, at least in the sense that we hold some strong fundamental beliefs: That there is a Creator with a plan for mankind; that He revealed Himself at Sinai, communicating the Torah's text and the keys to interpreting its meaning; and that ultimate reward and punishment await all human beings-although we tend to dwell less on the details of heaven and hell than on those of good and bad. (Not that all of us are always good. We may be haredim but we're still human.)

And yes, from the moment we wake up until we go to bed, our lives are governed (or should be) by the directives of Jewish religious law, or halacha. We pray, eat only kosher food, observe the laws of the Sabbath and holidays. And I'm pretty sure if the media knew what we pay for certain fruits and branches before Sukkot or for hard flatbread before Pesach, they might indeed consider us on the "far side"

Most reactionary of all, we tend to shun what passes for music, entertainment and popular culture these days. We even have the chutzpah to buck the contemporary assumption that witnessing thousands of enacted murders and other immorality on screens is benign.

But most haredim are familiar, some even conversant, with the larger society around them, not to mention technologically adept. Haredim are gainfully employed in high-tech fields and in the business world. Nor do we lack for doctors or lawyers, plumbers or electricians.

To be sure, many of our young men opt for full-time Torah study after marriage and most Orthodox men in the business and professional worlds devote at least part of their days to studying Torah. And all of us sacrifice much in the way of financial security for the sake of the Torah education of our sons and daughters.

But does that affirmation of the Jewish religious heritage, that following in the footsteps of Jews over the millennia, make us "extremist"? Considering the other candidates for that word today?

It's time we began registering our chagrin with public editors and ombudsmen of periodicals we come across that insist on our "Ultra-ness," and ask them to put the "U-word" out with the cat. The pejorative prefix not only unfairly marginalizes us but sends a subtle message: That way-the way of dedication to the Judaism of the ages-lies madness.

Any open-minded person of good will who has ever interacted with haredim knows otherwise. Our community is warm and caring, well-evidenced not only in the lives of countless of its individual members but by the sheer number of haredi community services and organizations that cater to the needs of the sick, bereaved, and destitute.

The haredi ideal-absorbed continuously through our Torah-study and encouraged regularly by our religious leaders-is to strive for perfection, with regard to our relationships both with the Creator and with His other creations.

There is, of course, that small matter of our holy war. But ours aims to vanquish only the inclinations that lead us to be selfish, snide and sinful. And our weapons are Torah, prayer and introspection.

Maybe that is radical these days. But calling it the "far side" of normalcy doesn't say much for the new normal.

MESSAGES IN THE MAYHEM

You'll log many a mile to find someone more disapproving than I am of the anger and vilification that characterize so much of American political discourse. But to lay the tragic January 8 shooting rampage in Tucson on the doorstep of politicians or pundits is silly, and no less incendiary itself than any firearms metaphor. To be sure, political opponents should not be compared to Nazis or have crosshairs superimposed on their faces. But because such things are ugly and sophomoric, not because they induce violence.

Yes, there have certainly been politically and ideologically motivated murders, but much mayhem has also been visited on public servants by actors impelled not by creed but craziness.

And delusions were clearly the demons prodding Jared Lee Loughner. Teachers and fellow students of the alleged Tucson killer at the community college he briefly attended were sufficiently concerned by his odd behavior, inexplicable bursts of laughter, non sequiturs and bizarre tirades to have raised alarms with the administration, which asked him to leave the school. His philosophy professor said that Loughner's "brains were scrambled" and that he had never once brought up politics in class. The shrine discovered in Loughner's backyard, complete with skull and candles, rounded out the picture of a deeply disturbed person, not some earnest observer of current events pushed over the edge by political ads.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't societal soul-searching to be done. There was a time, after all, when the disgruntled, disenfranchised and demented chose to express themselves by standing on soapboxes and ranting. Guns, knives and explosives were no less available to them than they were to the angry workers, teenage school-shooters and wild-eyed conspiracy theorists who have spilled so much innocent blood at workplaces, campuses and shopping centers in more recent years. Why have so many citizens, whatever their emotional state, turned these days to murder to make a point? More important: What does the turning say to America?

Any Jew who received a proper Torah education has internalized the subtle but sage concept that, although we are not prophets, we do well to seek in tragic events some message about how we might improve our behavior.

No, it isn't, as some simpletons assume, precise cause and effect that we seek, but some message, some pointing to where we might stand to improve. Our country would benefit these days from a similar searching of the national soul.

Even if the Tucson shooter is a nutcase, in other words, his horrible act can and should serve as an impetus for politicos, pundits and all Americans to more carefully consider our patterns of speech (and "our," dear Democrats and Republicans alike, means "our," not "their"). Political epithets may not yield violence, but incivility still coarsens society.

There may, though, be another introspection-ripe place pointed to by the disregard for human life that has woven its way into American society.

Because a subtle waning of respect for life, particularly at its beginning and end, has been evident in our society over recent years.

Well over one million abortions, for instance, take place each year nationwide. It was recently reported that fully 41% of all pregnancies in New York City this year were "terminated."

American ethicists have made pronouncements about what constitutes "quality of life," advising medical personnel when further care of patients is "futile." "Brain stem death," where activity in higher parts of a brain might still be present, has become an enthusiastically embraced criterion for the removal of vital organs.

Princeton Bioethics Professor Peter Singer considers "the life of a newborn" to be "of less value than the life of a pig" and advocates for the euthanasia of severely disabled infants.

Asked by The New York Times in 2005 what value he thinks may disappear in the next 35 years, he responded: "the traditional view of the sanctity of human life."

People like Jared Lee Loughner may already be ahead of that treacherous curve.

And America needs to begin blocking the road.

GETTING A SECOND OPINION

Back in the 1970s there was a one-of-a-kind, short-lived magazine called "Schism." It contained nothing but reprints of news articles from widely diverse sources. It was an eye-opening periodical, as it laid bare a plethora of perspectives well beyond those available in mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines of the time.

Some of the viewpoints - I recall in particular several emanating from Arab and Asian countries - were infuriating; the lenses through which the writers viewed the world were weirdly distorted. Others, though, made a reader think a bit, even question some assumptions. Whether the issue was the war in Vietnam or gun control, it was deeply educative to be exposed to different points of view. One was able to at least "hear" even opinions with which one, in the end, disagreed.

Today, of course, it is easy to find very different perspectives on any issue, if one is inclined to seek them out. Few, though, do. It's more common to hear people these days say "Oh, I don't read that" or "I never look at him" - simply because the "that" and the "him" represent points of view at odds with those of the speaker. And so political conservatives don't dare miss Rush Limbaugh; and liberals hold tight to their copies of The New York Times. They are all poorer for not realizing that greater gain is to be had from meeting another point of view than from exulting in having one's own opinions duly seconded.

Needless to say, there are ideas from which we, as observant Jews, rightly insulate ourselves. The focus here, though, isn't on things heretical or licentious, but rather on social and political issues.

Most of us have some opinion about, say, the death penalty. But thoughtful people, whatever their conclusions, realize that there are entirely legitimate arguments to be made on both sides of the issue.

Why should taxpayers be burdened with keeping horrible people fed and housed? Do such people even deserve to live? Executions deter other would-be criminals, and can provide victims' families a measure of solace.

Yet, killing any human being, no matter how dismal an example of the species, is a grave deed. And mistaken convictions have sent innocent people to their deaths.

Some dismiss the first set of points as callous and pandering to a lust for revenge. And some dismiss the second as weak-willed and overly sensitive.

Thoughtful people, however, don't dismiss either. They acknowledge the validity of all the points. And then they simply weigh them on the scale of their consciences and make, if they choose, their personal judgment.

What brings the thought to mind is the reaction some readers had to a column that appeared in this space several weeks ago. In it, I sought to stress the importance of having all the relevant information when taking political positions - using President Obama's record as an example, pointing out a number of laudable, but largely unrecognized, decisions he has made regarding Israel and religious rights.

Among the large number of responses to the essay I received were some from people (admirers and detractors of Mr. Obama alike) who related that they had indeed been unaware of the information I had cited, and who thanked me for the essay's message. Others seemed to miss the message but praised or berated me (depending on their personal feelings about the president) for "defending" Mr. Obama.

My intention, though, was not to judge the president one way or the other, only to point out that judgments require - and so often lack - all relevant information. The vehement negative responses, though, reminded me of a different, if related, imperative of reasoned discourse: the willingness to recognize that different people can have different perspectives.

The Gemara teaches that "just as people's faces all differ, so do their attitudes." The Kotzker is said to have commented on that truth with a question: "Can you imagine disdaining someone because his face doesn't resemble yours?"

One hopes no one could.