Daniel Boyarin's No-State Non-Solution

 

It is easy to dismiss most anti-Zionist Jewish activists as having little connection to Judaism. If your main involvement in Judaism comes when you say "as a Jew" before launching into a tirade against Israel, I feel perfectly comfortable in ignoring both the "as a Jew" and whatever follows about Israel. A notable exception among the anti-Zionists is Prof. Daniel Boyarin. Boyarin is a significant contemporary Jewish thinker, whose work on the Talmud and the origins of the Jewish-Christian split I take seriously. As such, there is reason not to simply dismiss his anti-Zionism, particularly as his anti-Zionism is clearly connected to his understanding of Judaism as a people that transcends politics. 

In reading Boyarin's No-State Solution, I find it fairly unobjectionable in terms of what it says. I agree with him that it is important for Judaism to transcend crude ethno-nationalism. Jews living outside the land of Israel have an important role to play within Judaism and it is deeply problematic to claim that Judaism can only function within the borders of a political state ruled by Jews. Judaism is not merely a religion in the Protestant sense of a collection of beliefs held by an individual nor is Judaism simply a national group bound by blood. A properly functioning Judaism is one that can deal with the complexity that goes into the various ways that people live out a Jewish identity. 

If I were reading Boyarin in 1924, I would have few disagreements with him. If I had lived back in the 1920s, political Zionism would not have been one of my goals. I would have been trying to strengthen Jewish life wherever Jews lived. Granted, recognizing the value of Israel as a spiritual center as well as a physical refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, I would have had a particular interest in promoting Jewish non-political life in Israel. In pursuit of this aim, I would have been attempting to cooperate with the British and the local Arab population. The deal I would have been trying to make with the Arabs would have been that they should allow mass immigration to Palestine along with some measure of local Jewish autonomy with the assurance that Palestine would eventually become part of a larger Arab federation. (I recommend Oren Kessler's Palestine 1936, which argues that this position was very much part of the mainline of Zionism during this period.) 

My main objection to Boyarin is what is left out in his book. We are not living in 1924 but in 2024. This means that the Holocaust has happened. We know that there are people who wield the power of modern states who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that Judaism is a menace that must be exterminated. Whether Israel should have been established in 1948, the fact is that nearly half of world Jewry currently lives in the State of Israel. This state is surrounded by hostile Arab armies and terrorist groups, who have been influenced by the Protocols and desire to murder Jews. Saying that this is the result of the actions of Zionists does not help as it only makes it easier to believe that our opponents are serious about carrying out the mass murder of Jews. Back in 1924, it was easy to dismiss European anti-Semites as being delusional; what did the Jews ever do to them? If the Nazis could carry out the Holocaust based on pure fantasy, what might Hamas be willing to do if ever given the chance. 

To be fair to Boyarin, his book was written before October 7th. That being said, I have no reason to assume that this past year has caused him to adapt his views. Far more problematic than anything he says is how he completely ignores what should be the primary question regarding the State of Israel as if it does not matter at all. Boyarin's unwillingness to even entertain the question of Jewish safety in the contemporary world, in Israel or anywhere else, collapses his entire argument. Once we begin to consider Jewish safety then one has to consider whether a Jewish willingness to break the limbs of Palestinian children throwing rocks is merely the manifestation of a macho fantasy of Jewish toughness or whether it is a pragmatic solution to save Jewish lives.  

It is almost as if the lives of regular people do not matter to Boyarin. Even Palestinian lives only matter to him in the abstract sense of being victims of Zionism. He gets to live as an academic using trite truths that one should have no need of saying to hide moral monstrosities that no one should have the gall to defend. All this while claiming to care about human lives.  

Joseph's Adventures in Communism and College

Previously, I talked about my great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Shapiro, and the late Prof. Louis Feldman of blessed memory as examples of antifragile Judaism, people who created Jewish lives for themselves under unplanned circumstances. In the world of antifragility, what looks good on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily what will work in the long run because what makes such systems look good is precisely what can bring it down in a once-in-a-generation disaster. I would like to return to this issue of antifragility and its implications for Judaism.

Critical to Jewish survival has been its ability to adapt to situations to which our faith, as envisioned by previous generations, was not designed to handle. The most extreme example of this was the rabbis after the destruction of the Second Temple, who reimagined Judaism without its central sacrificial cult and without the majority of the biblical commandments. This requires us to rethink who the heroes of Jewish history are from those who lived ideal religious lives under ideal circumstances to those who lived non-ideal lives precisely because their circumstances made such ideals impossible. 

The biblical Isaac is someone held up by the rabbis as a person who was able to live his life in Israel in purity without sin. As Rashi teaches, Jacob wanted to live that life but God sent him the calamity of Joseph. Joseph lived his life in Egypt as a slave, a prisoner, and finally as viceroy. Joseph had to carry on for all those years under the assumption that he had been cast out by his brothers and that there was no future for him as part of the Children of Israel. It is Joseph who not only physically saved his family but also made it possible for Israel to spiritually survive 210 years in Egypt. It is not for nothing that, every Friday night, Jews bless their sons to be like Joseph's children, Menashe and Ephraim, who grew up in the court of Egypt. Similarly, we have the later models of Daniel and Esther in the courts of Babylon and Persia, cut off from Israel and with no hope of being able to return. In Esther's case, she even intermarried.

Let us be clear as to what the challenge is here. Ignore the strawman argument that Egypt or Persia (or America) is different. This is easily countered by "we, the faithful, do not change." This strawman argument, though, covers an alternative utterly devasting attack of not that the world has changed but that you have changed. The moment a person wakes up and sees themselves as different and irreparably cut-off from their former selves with no hope of returning, then casting off one's former beliefs and practices becomes natural. One realizes that the hard act of changing has already happened and now it is only a matter of accepting the reality of the situation. In fact, the very tenacity that one held on beforehand, insisting that the new circumstances did not matter, will come to work in favor of giving in as it will make the break, once it happens, that much more obvious.  

Imagine trying to train a twentieth-century version of Joseph. It is the year 1900 and your newborn student lives in Czarist Russia. You have him until he is seventeen. In 1917 the Bolsheviks are going to take over and put an end to open Jewish observance. Your Joseph will have to live out his life without the support of a Jewish community and his observance will be compromised at best. What can you give him that will allow him to maintain a Jewish identity in his own mind and pass it along to his own Menashe and Ephraim to the extent that when he dies in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it will be as a Jew surrounded by a Jewish family?

The members of my family who came closest to living out this story were my maternal great-grandparents, Yitzchok Isaac and Feigy Schwartz. (Note that both my father’s father and my mother’s grandfather were named Yitzchok Isaac.) They survived the Holocaust only to go back home to a Soviet-controlled Hungary where they raised three daughters. As a teenager, my grandmother took advantage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution to flee to the United States because there weren't any good Jewish men to marry. My great-grandfather passed away when I was a kid. I only knew him as an old man sitting in a dark corner of my grandmother's house, who did not speak English. Frankly, he scared me. (I confessed this as an adult to my father and he laughed telling me that I had no idea what a kind man he was.) If I could talk to him now, I would want to ask him how he found it in himself to raise a Jewish family with no Jewish community to rely upon and offer hope for a future.  

The 20th century gave us Communism, the Holocaust, and ultimately the destruction of Eastern European Jewish life. Jews in 1900 could not have prepared for this but, at the end of the day, all of their efforts to build up Judaism that were not centered around the United States and Israel were going to be little better than futile. I have no idea what this century will bring. That being said, is it not unreasonable, for those in the United States to construct an educational system on the assumption (whether or not you are Haredi and oppose college on principle) that students are going to go college for four years without meaningful Jewish support. You have kids from the age of 5 until they are 18. What can you teach that will allow a student to go to college and, regardless of the compromises that they might make there, they will have a Jewish identity that will persevere to the extent that they will seek to rejoin the Jewish community afterward and raise a Jewish family? Anything that is not clearly focused on this goal needs to be cast aside as a waste of time and a distraction.  

Whether we are dealing with the extremes of Communism and the Holocaust or the mundane challenges of college, I assume that a successful pedagogical strategy will try to build a strong Jewish identity backed by theology and a deep emotional attachment to Judaism. Jewish identity here means a knowledge of ritual practice as well as a sense of Jewish history. Theology means having open and honest discussions about God and not simply assuming that kids believe in God just because they are ritually observant. Developing an emotional attachment to Judaism means getting away from threats of hellfire and, instead, making sure that Jewish practice is both joyful and meaningful. This is not to be confused with being fun and entertaining as that will have little staying power. A Passover Seder is not very entertaining but it can be effective if conducted by adults who understand what the Seder is about and are not simply going through the motions. Discussions about identity and theology should best be conducted over a Shabbos cholent or during shabbatons/summer camp along with plenty of singing. 

Take away a Jewish community and a person with a strong Jewish identity will continue as a Jew because, at a fundamental level, they see Judaism as essential to who they are and not merely a culture they grew up in or a set of practices they used to follow. To abandon Judaism would become unthinkable as almost a form of suicide. For all intents and purposes, it would be a different person living that non-Jewish lifestyle. A strong identity can allow a person a continuous sense of self that is not broken by anything that happens on the outside. Defending a Jewish identity requires a theology in the sense that our Joseph should be able to answer the Wicked Son's question of "what is this service to you." Having a theology is useful precisely when there is no community to give meaning to your identity. One thinks of the example of Maimonides, who lived for several years as a Muslim and developed the first list of Jewish doctrines. You could have a person living their entire lives without ever being able to practice Judaism. They are still Jewish because they are able to believe certain things even if it is only in their heads. Finally, all the arguments in the world are not going to keep an intelligent person Jewish if they do not already love Judaism. If a person sees Judaism as a burden to be carried in the hope of getting into heaven, a college campus will provide plenty of intellectual justifications for discarding that burden.  

If we accept this model of Jewish education then it raises some difficult questions about Haredi education. Frankly, Talmud, at least how it is conventionally taught, becomes a kind of "spork," in theory good for a lot of things but fails to do any one thing particularly well and is better replaced by alternatives. For example, there are better ways to teach halakha. It is even more difficult to use Talmud to teach theology. Talmud, with its jumping across generations, lacks a clear narrative in contrast to the Bible. The Talmud's strongest selling point would be that it can build Jewish identity by allowing students to develop a sense that they are a continuation of the rabbis with their discussions. Note, though, that while this form of Jewish identity, is well suited for people operating within a Yeshiva system, it is likely to crack precisely when that community is no more. Our Joseph, whether in college or under Communism, is not going to be a rabbi. That option is closed. If our Joseph is to remain Jewish it will be precisely because his sense of himself as a Jew transcends his being a rabbi. 

I readily acknowledge that the Haredi system is better at producing Jewishly knowledgable and fervent kids than the Modern Orthodox schools. Clearly, if the question was keeping kids religious tomorrow, Haredim would win easily. But the lesson of antifragility is that you have to prepare for the extreme. Breaking Haredi kids should be relatively easy. There is no need to argue with them. Take away their tzitzit and yarmulkas; clip their peyos and let them see themselves in the mirror. No need to force them to eat non-kosher, just let them feed themselves from a dining room not designed for kosher eating and make their own compromises. The fact that these compromises may be quite defensible will not change the fact that they are compromises. Once you create a break with their past selves, the rest should follow easily. 

Remember that Haredi kids have not been trained to imagine themselves living outside a Haredi community. On the contrary, they have been conditioned to make that imaginative leap impossible. Thus, the moment you take them away from their community, they will likely see themselves as different people. This is not the case with Modern Orthodox kids, who have identities distinct from their Judaism. This might make them less fervent and more likely to abandon the faith on a day-to-day basis. It also might allow them a stronger sense of continuity even under difficult circumstances. As long as mental continuity exists then Jewish identity stands a fighting chance. 

Balph Eubank and R. Eliyahu Dessler

This past Sabbath I found myself opening my copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and immediately finding myself getting pulled in. Despite the fact that I already read the book and had no immediate plans of rereading it, I ended up spending a large chunk of the day back in Rand's dystopian world. Despite Rand's very real flaws, this novel is even more important to civilization than Lord of the Rings. My wife, always concerned for the good of my soul, stopped me at one point in the afternoon and asked me to study an essay from R. Eliyahu Dessler's Strive for Truth. Maybe it was the leftover taste from my previous reading, but I could not help but feel that Dessler would have made a wonderful villain for the novel.

There is one particular scene I have in mind. It is a party attended by the leading establishment intellectuals. Rand goes back and forth between the various intellectuals as they regale their own little circle of fawning wealthy liberals with their philosophies. The novelist attacks the notion of plot and the composer attacks melody. These are meant as corollaries to the philosopher, who attacks reason. The conclusion they all take from this, which they offer their audience between mouthfuls of expensive foods and amidst all the glamor of the party, is that life is pointless, man is doomed to suffer and therefore the only thing he can do is submit to authority.

The intellectual scam they are pulling off is as follows. They start by claiming the moral high ground as spiritual men, who oppose greed and wish for everyone to work together for the common good. The fact that they can say this while enjoying the largess of a capitalist they despise fails to strike their audience as hypocritical. On the contrary, the fact that they present themselves as men of privilege, who attack their own class, demonstrates their sincerity. They then deny the existence of reason or any objective morality, denying any means by which they could be challenged. Next, they wash their hands of any responsibility to actually improve the world; their moral superiority resides solely upon the fact that they claim to desire to help people. Thus, not only have they removed any intellectual standards by which they can be judged, but they also have removed any objective empirical standard by which anyone could point out that their ideas fail. The end result is that humanity must not only physically submit to their authority, but must also spiritually do so, by acknowledging these intellectuals as the selfless morally superior heroes of mankind for agreeing to rule over them.

Dessler uses many of the same arguments. He attacks materiality and people's desire for physical goods. He makes no distinction between rich people and those struggling to make ends meet. In fact, it is critical for his argument, which denounces Jews as a nation, that this includes the vast majority of Jews not living in mansions or driving fancy cars. The next step is to declare that it is hopeless to pursue material things as it is man's lot to suffer. The only option, therefore, is to submit to the divine will and hope for the coming of the Messiah.

Forgive me for being cynical, but the same scam seems to be in play. Dessler grabs the moral high ground by denouncing material goods, all while having enjoyed modern conveniences such as a printing press to spread his writing. He then promises people nothing but disaster, removing any responsibility to actually produce a plan to improve anyone's lot in life. Finally, he has people submit to God, which for all intents and purposes means Dessler. Thus, he gets to rule over people and chastise them for failing to properly appreciate his moral superiority in doing this.

Just like Rand's liberals, Dessler attacks capitalism:        

There are some who take the maximum and give the minimum. These are the merchants and middlemen who take advantage of every opportunity for profit, without ever considering whether the effort and work they have invested really bear any relationship to the profits gained. When they bend their efforts to benefit from their neighbor's failures or take advantage of his ignorance, can this really be distinguished from plain, unvarnished deception? Not to speak of those who amass their fortune by usury, battening on other people's hard-won earnings, or who exploit their workers, paying them a pittance for hard and exacting toil, or who oppress whole nations, ruling them with a tyrant's hand (even though some incidental benefit may accrue to their people) - all these and their like are examples of "much taking and little giving." (Strive for Truth Vol. I, 121-22.)

Dessler's comments about usury really got to me. Was he not aware of the long history that the charge of excessive usury has played in anti-Semitism? Did he not know that while he lived in safety in England, the Nazis were slaughtering millions of those same "materialistic" Jews that he failed to save, using these same arguments? In truth, it is only through "greed" and "exploitation" by merchants and "middlemen" (in truth, everyone from the miner taking iron from the earth to the housewife buying that iron in the form of pins is a middleman) that we make any progress. Suffering is caused by people like Dessler who condemned capitalism.

One cannot treat him charitably as someone who took a rhetorical misstep; on the contrary, the continued suffering of millions of Jews was a necessary part of a self-serving ideology that gave him a position of honor, respect, and power over others. He may have meant well, but then again just about every great crime in human history was committed by people who claimed and likely even believed that they acted for the "public good."

Speaking at a Chabad House (About Messianism No Less)

In South Pasadena, where Miriam and I are living, there is not much in the way of Orthodox life. We have a Chabad house 3.5 miles away where we pray. It is a small, but very diverse group of people. They have been very good to Miriam in the past and are now very accepting of me. I am happy to be part of this family. While most of the people there became religious through Chabad, as with most Chabad places, beyond the two Chabad rabbis and their families it is not a Chabad community.

A few weeks ago someone put forth the idea to me that, as a Jewish historian, I should give a class on Jewish history possibly on what I am writing about. I am an academic historian, writing about messianism; how many sentences do you think it is going to take before the rabbi pulls the plug on me? Somehow this person managed to convince me to go for it and, even more surprisingly, convinced the rabbi to give me a platform. So this past Sabbath, I gave an "Introduction to Jewish Messianism." I guess the biggest shocker was that over twenty people stuck around in the afternoon to listen to me. It was the sort of lecture that I like giving. It went on for about an hour before tapering off into an informal question and answer session. I took a number of questions while I was speaking, which sent me off on lots of side tangents. The problem with this is that it sometimes makes me difficult to follow. I try to balance this with a sense of humor. If people have no idea what I am talking about they should at least think it is funny, whatever it is I am actually talking about. Well apparently everybody liked my presentation so it looks like we may do this again, perhaps make it a monthly event.

Believe it or not, I do have a plan as to how to keep myself from being too offensive. Keep everything theoretical. I am simply reporting on what is going on in my field. Phrase things in questions. I am simply explaining some of the major debates going on and offering points for consideration. Above all else, I should avoid talking about Chabad messianism. As a historian, I should have no problem keeping things in the eighteenth century or beforehand.

Ok, so I did talk about Chabad messianism. I raised the question of calamity based messianism; do messianic movements come about in response to major physical disasters? Isaac Abarbanel writing three books on messianism several years after the expulsion of 1492 and as the Jews of Portugal were being forcibly baptized sounds like calamity messianism. Jews in Poland responding to the Cossack attacks of 1648 by embracing Sabbatai Sevi in 1666 might be calamity messianism. (Of course, that would still not explain why Jews everywhere else did too.) Why did Chabad in the 1980s and 90s turn messianic? What great physical threat did Lubavitchers living in the United States at the end of the twentieth-century face? If you are going to say that this was in response to the Holocaust then why did the Lubavitcher Rebbe not come out in the 1950s with his "bring Moshiach" campaign? (The previous Rebbe, in the 1940s, started a messianic campaign, but it faded away for several decades.)

So no trouble yet. One of the attendees has asked me if, for my next lecture, I could talk about traditional Jewish claims that there will be no Messiah or that all messianic prophecies were already fulfilled with King Hezekiah and the Second Temple. What could possibly go wrong with this?         

In Support of Public Schools Teaching Intelligent Design and Other Nonsense II

Baruch Pelta has responded to my earlier post. I think it is important to note that he is unwilling to openly come out and support the legitimacy of public schools; essentially he is "agnostic" in regards to this issue. He does raise two arguments. One, allowing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design would violate the separation of Church and State. Two, it is possible to make a distinction between religion and other ideas as demonstrated by the fact that we have a separation of Church and State. Finally, Baruch asks that I define what I mean by "liberty."

If we are going to have public schools, I do not object to these schools teaching children, as a historical fact, that Jesus is their Savior as long as this directive does not come from the government itself and no public funds are specifically earmarked for this purpose. The reason for this is rooted in how, as a libertarian, I understand the role of government. Government only has a legitimate interest in protecting people from direct physical harm. A teacher, even one working in a government funded school, standing up and trying to convince students to accept Jesus causes no physical harm. Therefore it is of no interest to the government. (If the teacher were to hand out bonus points to those who accepted Jesus then that would be a different matter.) The fact that non-Christian students might be uncomfortable in such a situation and feel left out is irrelevant. This is what it means to live in a free society. You open yourself up to every manner of non-physical torment and you must learn to live with that and accept that the government cannot in any way be used to help you in this matter.

As to the issue of Church and State, it is important to keep in mind that it is not a legitimate legal concept, but a letter from Thomas Jefferson wrongfully brought into play in the twentieth century. Regardless of that matter, I understand the Constitution's establishment clause to apply to all ideas. Outside of a belief in the legitimacy of the legal system itself, the government has no businesses declaring any idea to be true or false. This goes for Jesus dying for the sins of the world, evolution and the Holocaust. I am even willing to go so far as to argue against tolerance education. The government may tell white supremacists that they need to follow the law and not murder blacks and Jews, but the government has no business telling these people that they should support a multicultural society as something positive.

As to the definition of liberty and how it might apply to children; I understand liberty as the ability to pursue your own good in your own way as long as you do not cause direct physical harm to others. As J. S. Mill pointed out, this concept does not apply to children as they are deemed as lacking the mental capacity to engage in the give and take of ideas. Children are placed under the control of guardians who therefore also take up the liberty that the child would have exercised if it were an adult. The only limit on this is that the guardian cannot cause direct physical harm to the child. That would bring the attention of the government which would have the right to step in and remove the child and place it in an environment where it would be less likely to suffer direct physical harm. (Think of the libertarian government as a deadly trip-wire alarm system. As long as no one is being physically harmed, the government is silent to the extent that you should not even realize that it is there. The moment that someone steps on the wire and causes direct physical harm to someone else, all of a sudden the government springs into existence and takes out the offender, with physical violence if necessary.) Part of the social contract we sign is that we allow people to come to harm through their ideas. This includes their children, whom they have the right to raise according to these ideas. If someone thinks that sweatshops or even brothels are good places for a child to receive an education then so be it.

This might sound funny coming from an Asperger, but I see Baruch as suffering from a lack of a theory of mind. (See Neurotypical Mental and Emotional Handicaps.) This goes back to our original discussion about parents raising their children. At a physiological level, Baruch simply does not get that there are other people out there who believe differently from him and are equally convinced of their beliefs as he is. Baruch thinks that it is so obvious that he is right that if he repeats his arguments or has the government step in and support him as being right, those other people will eventually come to their senses; Christians, Haredim, and white supremacists will suddenly realize that they are superstitious intolerant bigots, apologize to Baruch for being such naughty children and go home. Of course when those people follow this same line of thinking and try to use government to support their ideas against Baruch then that is them being intolerant and trying to impose their values. In the real world there are true and false beliefs (gravity being a good example) and those beliefs have consequences. In the politics of a free society there is no true and false. There are just people's opinions and a system designed so that these differing opinions do not turn into people killing each other over them.

On a final note, let me give a shout out to Baruch Spinoza, a fellow opponent of public schools, who has joined in on the debate.

Of Aspergers and Robots (They Just Might Both be Capable of Emotions)

I ended my previous post with a word in about the importance of emotions and a sense of humor even in seemingly strictly rational endeavors and I thought that the topic deserved some further discussion. As with most Aspergers, I struggle against a public perception that we are simply rational automatons, robots without emotions. Anyone who has ever spent time with Aspergers knows that this is false. Asperger syndrome is not the lack of emotions; it is the inability to effectively display emotion in a manner understandable to others. In other words, it is the "disability" of neurotypicals, who cannot understand our emotions to the same extent that we seem to be hopeless at deciphering their emotions. By emotions, I mean in the positive sense of being able to desire, hope and even find joy and in the negative sense to be able to have one's feelings hurt, to be afraid, and even at times to fall into despair. The hallmark of all of these things is that in of themselves they are not rational, not subject to rational control (in terms of feelings, not actions), and have no direct Utilitarian value.

There are a number of reasons why Aspergers come across as lacking emotions. The first is that we relate to the world primarily in terms of information and not social connections. So Aspergers have an affinity for strings of information, in my case primarily history, but also politics and even the lyrics of Broadway musicals (I can remember lyrics, I just cannot sing them). The obvious conclusion from seeing someone spouting information is that such a person is precisely that, just information without emotion; what a robot would do. This is only enhanced by the fact that most Aspergers do not convey facial expressions in the same way and to the same extent as neurotypicals. Just as Aspergers have trouble reading neurotypical body language, neurotypicals have trouble reading Asperger body language. (I will leave it as an open question as to whether Aspergers fail to read body language due to not having developed one of their own or whether they do not develop conventional body language due to their inability to read the body language of others.)

What should strike one as odd about this seemingly common-sense view of Aspergers as information-spewing robots is that it fails to explain why an Asperger would bother going through the effort of learning the information and passing it along? Might I suggest that the reason why Aspergers do this is that it makes them happy in the same irrational way that neurotypicals find happiness in the mere presence of friends and in having a relationship with them? The very act of being a "robot" it turns out is only possible for one with emotions.

One has to understand that the Asperger experience is profoundly one not of lacking emotions, but of having emotions and not having them being understood while at the same time being held hostage to the emotional demands of others. Is it any wonder that one might wish from time to time to cut away one's heart and be just pure reason? Aspergers learn from early on to attempt to distinguish between emotions and reason. Reason is that which you have some hope of being able to convey to others so that they will listen. Recently I was sitting in a lounge when I overheard a meeting for a planned student trip to Germany. What struck me was the leader's continuous emphasis on the need to distinguish between reason and emotions. It is well and good for these students to find Germany and setting foot on German soil to be emotionally trying. No one is asking them to ever become comfortable with Germany or ever wish to live there. That being said, it would not be appropriate to take these emotions out on Germans they meet, the vast majority of them being born after World War II and in no way responsible for the Holocaust. Possibly for the first time in their lives, these students were being asked to do what I do every day, recognize that their emotions have no validity outside of their own heads and cannot be used to gain moral leverage over others.

Probably the greatest proof that Aspergers have emotions is that, unfortunately, so many of us suffer from depression. It makes sense; you would also be depressed if you had to live your life cut off from other people in a world distinctively not made with you in mind. To be depressed means that you can be bothered by these things, something only possible with deep emotions. For this reason, I strongly relate to Marvin, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's depressed robot. With the exception of Arthur Dent, Marvin is the most poignantly human character in the series. If I am going to be stuck as a robot, I would hope to transcend my depressive existence by becoming Wall-E, a trash can robot, who says almost nothing but manages to be the fictional humanist hero of the decade.

Toward a Patriotic Celebration of Israel Independence Day

I am an American citizen and a Jew. I take both of these elements of myself very seriously. Not that this relationship is always perfectly smooth, but I strive to keep both of these parts in harmony and will even go so far as to say that each is enhanced by the other. As a Jew, I bring a minority outsider element to our culture. This goes above and beyond that of other minorities in that America was founded by Christians with a strong sense of themselves as being the heirs of the biblical Children of Israel. Other minority groups may have their legitimate complaints against the United States. As a Jew, I can be nothing but eternally grateful for what America has done for us. As an American, I bring to Judaism an experience and a comfort in living in a free society, peacefully with members of other creeds.

While I may be an American, I believe that the State of Israel has an important role to play for Jews. The State of Israel itself (to be differentiated from the land) may not have any religious significance to me, but I still support it on secular terms. Even Jews who do not live in Israel can hold their heads up and feel safer in their home countries knowing that there is a Jewish State to stand up for them. Furthermore, any Jewish spiritual renewal, whether Orthodox or otherwise, is likely to come from Israel. I do not live in Israel nor do I have Israeli citizenship, but it is something that I might consider in the future. This would in no way be a rejection of America. I would be following in the footsteps of Michael Oren, who had to be supported by friends as he gave up his American citizenship in order to become the Israeli ambassador to the United States. Ambassador Oren never stopped being a loyal American. He is loyal to the Jewish people and to the State of Israel as well and has acted to serve both the interests of the United States and Israel.

Even if the political State of Israel does not hold any religious significance, I still see the establishment of the State of Israel and its survival during the War of Independence to be of religious significance. After the Holocaust, the Jewish people needed something. Without Israel, I do not believe that any Jewish renewal, even in America, could have been possible and Judaism would have faded into oblivion. So Israel Independence Day should be celebrated by Jews as a secular community holiday and a religious one to thank God for being delivered.

I say all this to frame what I am about to say so I am not misunderstood. I do not wish to attack the notion of American Jews being attached to Israel and celebrating Israel Independence Day. That being said, there was something that happened yesterday at my school's Israel Independence Day celebration that bothered me. There was music and dancing in the gym. As can be expected the room was full of Israeli flags. There was, though, not a single American flag. If this would have been an informal thing with people bringing in flags, I would not have thought to make an issue of it, but the school had several representatives from the State of Israel, who came into the gym in their Israeli military uniforms and, with full ceremony, hoisted the Israeli flag, while everyone stood at attention.

According to article 7c of the American flag code:

No other flag or pennant should be placed above or, if on the same level, to the right of the flag of the United States of America, … No person shall display the flag of the United Nations or any other national or international flag equal, above, or in a position of superior prominence or honor to or in place of the flag of the United States or any Territory or possession thereof.


If it is considered a disgrace to the American flag to honor the flag of another country above it, it is certainly a disgrace to honor the flag of a foreign country, even to the extent of having foreign citizens dressed in the uniform of a foreign military standing on ceremony, without even having an American flag present.


I managed to pester a member of the administration to allow me to go over to the auditorium and bring over the American flag there so this event could be honored by the presence of an American flag as well.



For those of you who think that I am making a big deal out of nothing, I ask you: what line would you place for Israel Independence Day events? What would American Jews have to do in order for there to at least be the appearance of disloyalty to a country that they owe so much in gratitude to?

I was pleased to note the number of people who came over to me afterward to tell me that they also were not comfortable with what was going on and thanking for doing something.

C. S. Lewis On the Implications of the Nazi Holocaust

In his essay "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State," C. S. Lewis took a view that most people would associate with Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, as to the modern shift in regarding criminal punishment as no longer a debt paid to society as a matter of justice, but as a means of curing the patient of his pathological tendencies toward crime. Like Foucault, Lewis saw this shift in very negative terms as a direct assault on personal freedom, one that granted governments the power not only to enforce laws but to reshape man in whatever image best suited to the interests of the State. Lewis goes further, by arguing that the modern view of crime was a necessary component in allowing the Holocaust to happen:

I will mention the trainloads of Jews delivered at the German gas-chambers. It seems shocking to suggest a common element, but I think one exists. On the humanitarian view all crime is pathological; it demands not retributive punishment but cure. This separates the criminal's treatment from the concepts of justice and desert; a 'just cure' is meaningless.

On the old view public opinion might protest against a punishment (it protested against our old penal code) as excessive, more than the man 'deserved'; an ethical question on which anyone might have an opinion. But a remedial treatment can be judged only by the probability of its success; a technical question on which only experts can speak.

Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners. Observe how the 'humane' attitude to crime could operate. If crimes are diseases, why should diseases be treated differently from crimes? And who but the experts can define disease? One school of psychology regards my religion as a neurosis. If this neurosis ever becomes inconvenient to Government, what is to prevent my being subjected to a compulsory 'cure'? It may be painful; treatments sometimes are. But it will be no use asking, 'What have I done to deserve this?' The Straightener will reply: 'But, my dear fellow, no one's blaming you. We no longer believe in retributive justice. We're healing you.'

I take a similar attitude when teaching about the Nazis. The popular view of the Nazis as people motivated by hate, with the obvious liberal lesson of tolerance, misses the point. The Nazi leadership, by and large, particularly those directly involved in the Final Solution, was dominated by perfectly sane, reasonable, and rational people. They simply believed that the world would be a better place without any Jews in it. The Jew was suffering from a disease; since the disease, in practice, could not be cured, Jews themselves would have to go. From their perspective, those who planned the Final Solution were humanitarians, taking upon themselves the morally difficult task that other people would be too squeamish to carry out themselves. Reading up on Adolf Eichmann for example, I never got the sense that he hated Jews in any conventional sense. Can anyone conceive of Eichmann losing control and going on a Hitler-like rant about the evils of the Jews? Eichmann was a highly intelligent, rational person, committed to duty, whose reading of the modern situation, Kant, and Jewish literature led him to the conclusion that Jews needed to be removed, nothing personal.

Holocaust History Versus Holocaust Memorial

I must admit that I find Yom Ha-Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) to be very difficult. Obviously, this day is created for the benefit of those who have reason to find this day far more difficult and nothing that I say should be seen as a disparagement of them. God knows that they have certainly earned the right to have their day. I am the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and as a historian I have a greater appreciation than most as to the horrors of the Nazi regime. In truth, though, it is the historian in me that makes things difficult. For me, Holocaust Memorial Day, more than any other day of the year, serves to rub into my face the gap between history as I know it, study and love and the culture of memory that serves as history for most of the population. This gap is more than just an academic issue; it stands at the heart of much that is ill in the modern world. Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July would be obvious competition, but these, ironically enough, have been rendered so empty of historical content as to prove innocuous. True this has come about due to the de-historicization of our society, brought about by modern liberalism. That being said, I sometimes feel, perhaps naively, that better no history than the wrong history.

For me, history is the study of who, what, when, where, and, most intriguingly, why. If human history is irrational, the study of history is a redemptive exercise in reason, purified from any modern polemics or judgment values. History does not include should or even right or wrong. As I often tell my students, there is nothing in my class to stop them from concluding that Hitler was a great leader and that the United States should follow in his footsteps by invading Canada and seizing its natural resources. I might personally disagree with such a position (and do society the favor of shooting them on the spot), but it is for reasons completely unrelated to history. Thus I take it personally to see the Holocaust used to teach "lessons" or to inspire a sense of Jewish identity. Do not get me wrong, I do see the Holocaust as one of the great evils of the twentieth century and fully support private, communal, and religious memorials. I would willingly sign on for special prayers for the victims of the Holocaust and even for its own fast day. (Many Jewish communities in Europe maintained fast days, up until modern times for the Crusade massacres. Why should the Holocaust be any different?) Religious prayers, fasts, and even secular commemoration vigils are distinct enough from history as to be unobjectionable. It is only when there is some pretense to history, that I am offended; if history is going to be taught then it should be taught properly by professional historians.

Perhaps the thing that most encapsulates this divide is the attitude toward survivor testimony. Holocaust Memorial Days focus on survivors and holding onto their memories. More and more this is taking on a frantic quality as we recognize that there are fewer and fewer survivors left and we are soon approaching the day when there will be no survivors. The non-historian wonders how we will respond to Holocaust deniers without the eyewitness testimony of survivors. For the historian, though, the truth of the Holocaust has never rested on eyewitness testimony, but on documents. The documents have been preserved and are not going anywhere. There are no participants of the French Revolution or the Civil War left. The last known World War I veteran recently passed away. I am not worried about these events being forgotten. If there are people who deny the Holocaust, there are also flat-earthers, geocentrists, and moon-landing conspiracy theorists. These beliefs exist to the extent that we, as a society, fail to promote the systematic use of reason, underlying both the scientific and historical methods. As such, the failure to embrace the historical method at Holocaust Memorial Commemorations is itself furthering the cause of Holocaust denial.

There is no profession that makes one aware of one's own mortality as history. Historians every day are faced with the reality that not only will we be dead like those whom we study, but, like those whom we study, our culture will also die and this world will be left to those who will not even understand us and what we stood for. Worse, these people, out of their own self-righteous sanctimonious ignorance, will think to judge us for our failings to live up to their standards and label us as "primitive." So God willing, the Holocaust generation will pass on, followed, in a few decades, by my generation. It is only the historical method that will allow us to be understood as we understand ourselves and thus be truly remembered.

Rabbi Dovid Schwartz Responds

I emailed Rabbi Dovid Schwartz some questions regarding his letter to the Yated. Rabbi Schwartz was kind enough to respond.


Haredim are often in the habit of using the failures of Spanish Jewry in 1391 and 1492 to discredit Maimonidean rationalism. Why is this same logic not used to discredit Eastern European Jewry?

Apples and oranges. The primary failure of Spanish Jewry in  1492 was the advent of the conversos and their inability to flee (often equating to Mesiras Nefesh with sinking ships and communicable disease) rather than convert.  There's was a test of the willingness to die al kiddush Hashem.  The Holocaust and it's precursors OTOH were about genocidal racism.  They may have been outgrowths of a clash of faiths/civilizations but by the time Jews began defecting en masse from observance it a. was not to embrace Christianity and b. did not improve their coping or survival rates.

Could not your defense of Eastern European Jews be also used to apologize for Modern Orthodox Jews and even for Reform and Conservative Jews?

Which MOs , conservative and reform do you mean?  For those in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe it might (while there is still a big difference between defecting to the Bund or joining a Reform Temple).  But for those in America I don't see how it could as one can't begin to compare the poverty or discrimination levels of the old and new worlds.  TTBOMK Modern Orthodoxy is a distinctly American post-war phenomenon and had no models in interbellum EE Jewry.

How do we measure spirituality? Does this not simply turn into a defense of any group we wish to offer a positive outlook for?

While by it's non-material nature spirituality is not subject to the kind of qualitative analysis one accomplishes with a good centrifuge there are some relatively objective and quasi-empirical yardsticks.  The "efficiency" argument that I made in the letter i.e. that a smaller volume  Yeshiva World produced a higher number of higher quality Lamdanim and Talmiday Chachomim will not be denied by anyone familiar with both worlds.  If nothing else is convincing see the published works of the products of that world compared to the published works of our own.

But essentially I would not say that I can refute your assertion empirically.  What I can say is that if one believes in the truth of the "intangible" known as spirituality or kedushah at all then, like good art or music, it can be discerned and graded intuitively without resorting to metrics.  Which supreme justice famously opined "I can't write a legal definition for pornography but I know it when I see it?" [Justice Potter Stewart]    While I am certainly no world class expert I fancy myself qualified to voice some opinion on the relative tzidkus, chochmah, pikchus, lev tov and kedushah of the two Jewries.

How do we measure intellectual greatness between different generations particularly considering the major shift in pedagogy over the past few decades in regards to memory? Granted past generations, both Jewish and gentile, were superior in terms of memory. Memorization was a major part of traditional educational systems. We focus less today on memory because information is so easily accessible. In theory, at least, we are more devoted to developing analytical skills.

This point has some validity but more so in the secular sciences than in Torah scholarship in which vast bekius is indispensable. Yeshiva urban legend has it that Rav Chaim Brisker once bragged that his 15 year old Velevla (the eventual Brisker Rov) knew all of Shas Baal Peh. When the person hearing this boast remarked that he considers this insignificant and unbecoming for a son of the great Rav Chaim who would be a fitter son of his father it he excelled at severa and/or lomdus . Rav Chaim supposedly said that any sevara forwarded without complete awareness of all of Shas is by definition krum. Accessing a Talmud data base cannot replace this kind of internal, encyclopedic checks-and-balances on ones analytical skills.

More simply put we have the teaching of Chazal who said that divrei Torah aniyim hem b'mkomam v'ashirim hem m'mokom acher formalizing the symbiosis between bekius and sevara, between sinai v'oker Harim.

If you were put in charge of Artscroll what kind of changes would you make to the type of history books and biographies of gedolim they traditionally publish?

As I haven't read many it's hard to say.  But In general I feel that the culture of Godol hero worship today, while well-meaning, has backfired.  We have made such angels out of our gedolim that an impression of their being born rather than made prevails.  I think that this has nipped the career of many a late-blooming talmid chochom or tzadik in the bud.  Artscroll biographies in hand, the Yetzer Hora comes to such bochrim and claims "forget it.  You're too old already.  If you weren't a child prodigy, if you have already wasted many minutes of your childhood and adolescence then there is no way you will ever vaks ois to be another ______(fill in the blank with the name of a godol of your choosing)".  This is what I meant in my letter when I wrote that I found the surface honesty of the original article refreshing.  At least it wasn't another fluff-piece fairy-tale hagiography.  IMO these are not only untrue but they retard the growth of many a potential spiritual seeker.

Do you believe that we can build a stronger Judaism than that which existed in pre-Holocaust Europe? What would that stronger Judaism look like?

A.  Yes, but it will take a millennium and woe betide us if Moshiach isn't here by then.

B.  The shorthand answer?  Like that which existed in Lithuania and Poland before the war with all of the passion, self-sacrifice and intellectual ferment but with none of the disaffection, poverty and genocidal anti-Semitism.  However I'm not enough of a Sociologist to know if it's even possible to build one without the other.  As Nietzsche said "Whatever doesn't kill me only makes me stronger". (I referenced this maxim in my letter as well but did not attribute it for fear of scandalizing the readership.  They are probably furious that the editor left words such as Trotskyite and revisionist Zionist in!)

Rabbi Dovid Schwartz's Letter to the Yated

Rabbi Avrohom Birnbaum's article on the "Der Heim" Myth got a letter by Rabbi Dovid Schwartz of the Jewish Heritage Center published in the Yated. I would like to thank Bray for sending me a copy as it only appeared in the print edition, which I do not have regular access to.

Rabbi Schwartz responds as follows to the article:

Dear Readers Write/Editor,


No one could accuse an eyewitness to the twin births of Esav and Yaakov maintaining that Esav was the bechor of the family. And while this is biologically true it is metaphysically false. I read "The 'Der Heim' Myth" article in your most recent issue in much the same way. While finding it's surface honesty refreshing I feel that it missed the mark in discerning a deeper truth.

I think that most people who've done even a cursory review of interbellum Eastern European history are well aware of the awful place that ‘Der heim” was. Anyone growing up in the home of survivors and or who davened with them in their youth heard about how it was a place where Yidden were slaughtered in cold blood, that the majority of ehrliche Yidden lived in grinding poverty and where hunger and want were everywhere etc..

Nevertheless we are convinced that the heim is a place to idolize and grow nostalgic about and that the incredible nisyonos of poverty and discrimination that those amuhliga yiden were exposed to made spiritual giants out of those strong enough to withstand them.

Is it any accident that although the interbellum Yeshivisha velt was perhaps 5% the size numerically of the current aggregate of Israeli and American Yeshivas, that it's bochurim endured poverty far poorer than the population at large and the gloom of few marriage prospects and that kollelim were nearly nonexistent, that it still managed to produce geonim and lamdonim who were qualitatively light years ahead of today's products?

Is it a coincidence that lacking today's monumental Batei Midrash and the convenience of Chasidim living in close proximity year round the bygone Rebbes still had talmidim and Chasidim who were tzadikim in their own rights and that interbellum Chasidus produced seforim and works of sublime enduring value? Think the yoshvim in Belz, Rav Menachem Ziemba, Chovas haTalmidim, Modzitzer nigunim, The Eretz Tzvi, Rav Ahreleh (Toldos Ahron, Shomer Emunim et al) to name but a few.

And what of the emunah peshuta of those interbellum yidden and yiddenehs who did hang on to their faith? Which of us did not know a "greener" Yid or Yiddeneh who, despite being clean shaven, non-shaiteled and western clothed after the war, didn't have a vaicha Yiddish hartz and an organic fidelity to Torah values that puts the forced, dispassionate and antiseptic Yididshkeit that we practice to shame?

And even the much maligned hamon ahm should not be underestimated. While it may be true that many received no more than a cheder education ponder for a moment how vastly superior that system must have been to our own elementary chadorim in that it stood it's students in good stead to live ehrlicha upgeheetaneh lives for a lifetime. Is the fact that in our system having 20 plus years of schooling not being enough, such that anyone who didn't spend 8+ years in Kollel after the chasunah is tsorich bedeeka acharov supposed to be a compliment? That the ahava and yirah that we implant is so flimsy that it will fold like a cheap camera in the face of a few college courses or six months in an office environment?

And while to say any different than the author about the hemorrhaging disaffection of the youth in the interbellum period would;d be rank historical revisionism I think that saying ‘ein bayis asher yeish bo chai’ distorts by overstatement. Furthermore even the reaykh boigdov then had a sweeter aroma. Or are we to posit a moral equivalency between those who, spurred by the nearly unendurable nisyonos of poverty and anti-Semitism that we cannot begin to fathom, abandoned Yiddishkeit in order to build more just societies (Bundists, Leninists, Trotskyites) or a safe homeland for their people (Labor and revisionist Zionists) and the OTD kids of today who "drop it all" on account of a broken school system or sheer boredom in favor of vacuous, hedonistic lifestyles for the flimsiest and most narcissistic of motivations?

So while it's good that the younger generation read articles like this to achieve a more mature and nuanced understanding of pre-Holocaust Jewish history the article does a great disservice in processing the information to arrive at the conclusion that compared our elders we are not only better off materially but spiritually as well . One ought not avoid historical revisionism by perpetrating "current events" revisionism.

To put as fine a point as I can on it; How many of our own "Achshir dora" yidden would be ready to assert that they'd have survived 6 weeks, much less 6 years, of Holocaust, with our emunah intact? About how many of us do you think the Satmar Rebbe would say "Give a kvittel to him . He laigs Tefilin over his number tattoo!"?

Rabbi Dovid Schwartz
Associate Director- Jewish Heritage Center of Queens and Long Island

(Note this is the unedited/uncensored version of the letter and not the version published in the Yated.)


Despite all the yeshivish colloquialisms that was a remarkably touching letter. I think it even furthers my point, though. Here we have Rabbi Dovid Schwartz, a clearly historically literate person, who understands what a mess European life was and yet he still bends over backwards to defend that society. Why does he think it is so important that Jews have a positive view of European Judaism? Notice the sort of apologetics that he engages in. All of a sudden it becomes forgivable to wear Western clothing, go clean-shaven and even for women to not cover their hair. Such people would today be classified as Modern Orthodox. (I am reminded of a line that every Satmar Hasid is the grandchild of Modern Orthodox Jews.) These people were in some immeasurable sense "deeply spiritual" Jews. What would happen if we took this standard and applied it not to Eastern European Jews who are no longer living today, but to inconveniently alive and well modern day real life Modern Orthodox Jews? Rabbi Schwartz is willing to wink at the ignorance of regular Jews again by some mystical standard. I must say it is very convenient to go into an argument making claims outside of any objective standard beyond "their self evident truth." How do we score religiosity when we make the point of ignoring objective standards such as ritual observance and knowledge? Of course Rabbi Schwartz has no problem with backtracking and appealing to the learnedness of the rabbinic elites. Again, though, he offers no real standard for evaluating this claim beyond the fact that the Haredi readers of the Yated take it as self evidently so.

In the end I have no idea what it would even mean to say that one generation is better than another just as I would not know what it would mean to say that one person is "better" than another. Different people and different time periods come up against different issues and handle them in different ways. Some of these choices I approve of more than others. I have no wish to preach the greatness of this generation and at the same time I have no wish to create an idealized picture of the past. The past can be very difficult to compete with. People who are dead do not make rude bodily noises or fail to put down the toilet seat. Art Spiegelman, in Maus, talks about the difficulty of growing up under the picture of his dead brother, who perished in the Holocaust and whom he never met. How does a child compete with a sibling who is dead and cannot do any wrong? This sets up the trap of mediocrity. If you know that no matter what you do you will always be second best, why bother to compete? Even worse this becomes an excuse and an apology for one's mediocrity. You can now be comforted in your mediocrity that you are exactly where you would be if you had actually tried, in second place. Part of my job as a historian is to present past societies as having real strengths and real flaws, which are usually connected to each other. This is our generation, we have the benefit of their experience and we are going to try to make better decisions.  

Tony Judt Has a Uniquely Jewish State Problem

Today one of my students handed me an article from the Financial Times by Tony Judt. The student's father thought I would enjoy it as an example of leftist Israel bashing and was kind enough to have his son pass it along to me. The article is titled "Israel Must Unpick its Ethnic Myth." Judt takes as his starting point Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, which attacks the State of Israel and the Zionist enterprise as being based on the false notion of the existence of a Jewish ethnicity, and uses it to attack Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. Judt and Sand are a good example of the sort of selective anti-nationalism so effectively lambasted by Natan Sharansky in his book Defending Identity: its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy. Sharansky attacks Marxists and their ideological descendants in the modern left for being willing to accept nationalism when it served an ideologically expectable purpose such as fighting western capitalist imperialism and rejecting nationalism when it does not serve the cause. It is this sort of thinking that allows someone like Judt to ignore and even indulge Arab and Palestinian nationalism all while villainizing Israel for even the most moderate manifestations of the ideology.

To be clear I have no objection to anyone pointing out that Jewish ethnicity is an artificial construction. All ethnicities are artificial constructions. There is no such thing as a pure race, culture, nation or ethnic group. We are all of mixed stock. That being said this artificial construction of a nation exists, which gives it a political reality, and it is a major pillar of modern politics. It allows us to form the nation-state. Jews have a better claim than most to their nation construct. Jews did not forge their identity to benefit themselves, it was formed by others in order to isolate them and deny them the fruits of the Enlightenment and emancipation and finally to attempt to annihilate them in the Holocaust. Jews should only have to surrender their collective delusions of nationhood when everyone else, including the Palestinians, have done so as well.

What particularly caught my attention about Judt was his comment that "Egypt or Slovakia are not justified in international law by virtue of some theory of deep 'Egyptianness" or 'Slovakness.' Such states are recognized as international actors, with rights and status, simply by virtue of their existence and their capacity to maintain and protect themselves." For a historian Judt demonstrates a remarkable ignorance of history. Egypt existed as a province of the Ottoman Empire, before being a British protectorate and eventually given their independence. The history of Egypt for the past few hundred years does not make any sense unless one accepts the concept of an Egyptian national identity, even if it was an artificial construction of the Egyptians themselves. There were people living in Egypt who themselves as distinct from the people who ran the Ottoman and later the British Empire (I guess a language barrier, and in the case of Britain religion, helped) and wished to be independent. The situation in Slovakia is even better. From the end of World War I until 1992, with the interlude of Nazi rule, Slovakia was part of Czechoslovakia. In 1992 the people in Slovakia decided that, since they were "Slovaks," they wished to break away from the "Czechs" to the west of them and form their own country. The Czechs and the rest of the world went along with this and in 1993 there was the "Velvet Divorce" creating the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The legitimacy for all of this rests upon the willingness of everyone involved, particular the Czechs, to willingly participate in this collective delusion of nationhood and accept this artificial construct of a Slovakian people. So the existence of Egyptians or Slovakians is very relevant to the rights of these states to exist. The only difference between them and Israel is that no one is trying to destroy the states of Egypt and Slovakia and there are no academics like Judt to aid them in such a task by questioning the legitimacy of these states.

Howard Sachar – Current Israeli Myths and Realities: the Way to Peace

I was privileged to attend the closing of the DCJCC's Jewish literary festival to hear Dr. Howard Sachar speak. Here are my notes of the event and my comments. As usual, all mistakes are mine.

Before I was a historian I was prevailed upon not to be an academician, but to go to law school like a good Jewish boy. This lasted for about six weeks. I took several exams, but ended up the subject of a parody by a professor as to how not to take an exam.
Real Zionism is not just about funding lectures but in a willingness to allow one's children to go live there. Part of the challenge of living in Israel is the willingness to accept is that it is not perfect. The Orthodox are a heavy millstone around the neck of Israel. That being said, it should be noted that the first people to return to Israel were not the Zionists but Ultra-Orthodox messianists. We have the example of the followers of Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Hasid. (It should be noted that he was a Sabbatian so not exactly what you or I would consider Orthodox. Far better examples would be that of the Hasidim and followers of the Vilna Gaon who traveled to Palestine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.) They traveled by mules and wagons to a desert land. They were not productive. They suffered and lost hundreds of people every year to cholera. They were the "sleeping settlement." My grandmother was one of three out of eleven children in a family to grow up to adulthood. That was the culture in which she grew up in.
Haskalah, Jewish humanism, under the influence of European nationalism, would lead to further migration to Palestine, for better or for worse. These points were made at a center of a recent conference to argue for the legitimacy of Jews living in Palestine. This is not the whole truth. By World War I there were only 80,000 Jews in Palestine and over fifty thousand of them were these Orthodox messianists. As late as 1917, the majority of Jews in Russia were members of the Bund. Why did they not come to Palestine? Most Jews who left Russia went to America. More Jews went to racist South Africa than Palestine. What changed was something eccentric and tragic. The eccentric was the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which proved to provide a compelling increase. This was brought about by British self interest. That year was the worst for the Allies. The French army mutinied. The Italians nearly collapsed. Russia was tottering. It was important that America be brought in. Lloyd George believed that Jewish opinion could be rallied in the United States and Russia. No need to go into the tragic part. The new countries, fashioned in the wake of World War I, saw their Jewish minority as a threat to their new found freedom. This prefigured the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. Those Jews who survived the Holocaust were left homeless. No western country wanted to take them in so an alternative had to be given. Russia and France wanted to expel Britain from the Middle East. Truman did not want too many Jews in New York. This took the Zionists by surprise. They were content asking for 100,000 DPs.
Israel once again has to face how it will protect itself. They are in the dilemma of being a small state. Seven years ago Colin Powel said it was no interested in forcing a peace. More recently Secretary Clinton said she wished to encourage both sides to reach an agreement. If this is the case than we are at an impasse. No small state has managed to negotiate boundaries by itself without the interference of a great power. This goes for the Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of Paris. Do great powers have the celestial right to enforce their vision on to others? At the Paris conference many of the new countries protested and the borders they were being given. Lloyd George commented that had it not been for the battlefield casualties suffered by the major allied powers this whole issue would be mute. He also noted that their hatred threatened to suck Europe into another war.
I have given testimony on the matter before the Senate and have seen Israel activists, many in black kippot, and I knew that they would not be happy with what I am saying. It was the victorious allies that set forth the Arab mandates and created the State of Israel. Each Arab Israeli war threatens to expand into a larger conflict. Now there is the threat of weapons of mass destruction. There is a need for great powers today to not just serve as mediators but to actively enforce a solution, one that is supported by the silent majority of both sides. This conclusion was reached by Sharon when he pulled out. Ben-Gurion also understood this. After the sixty-seven war he said celebrate, take a few things needed for security, but from everything else we must pull out. We cannot put ourselves as an occupation. He was not listened to and we have seen the results. Fortunately Israel has pushed through and survived even with their bloated defense and settlement budgets. What is now needed is for the great powers to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians what is going to be the final decision about boundaries. This would allow the leaders on both sides to stand up to their own fanatics. Everyone will see that their hands are tied and that the leaders have no choice but to give in.


Despite the Orthodox bashing, I actually liked the speech and think that Dr. Sachar made some valuable points. I found it interesting that Dr. Sachar did not go into detail as to how a "great power," assumingly the United States, would force through some sort of decision. During the question and answer section I asked him how he would avoid turning his own argument into an apology for imperialism and how he would put such a policy into action without putting soldiers on the ground. He proceeded to give the examples of Northern Ireland, how they needed the threat of Great Britain to make peace, and the Czech Republic, how they allowed Slovakia to secede. While both of these things strengthen his original argument, he still completely ignored my question. I am willing to accept his argument, but the obvious implications are unsettling even for someone like me. Do we have no choice but to throw ourselves into another, Iraq, Afghanistan or a Lebanon? I suspect that the implications may be so unsettling for people of a more liberal disposition that they would simply block out the whole issue.

Rabbi Yissocher Frand on Shabbos and Repentance

This past evening Rabbi Yissocher Frand spoke in Silver Spring at one of the local congregations, Shomrei Emunah. I went, not expecting much, simply to fill in as a neighborly blogger, reporting on the important events of in the community. To my surprise, Rabbi Frand managed to exceed expectations (granted that is quite easy when you have expectations as low as mine). There was nothing seriously offensive and nothing particularly heretical in his speech. Rabbi Frand even brought down a story by Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik. Here are my notes. As usual, any mistakes are mine. Since this blog is read by a wide variety of people, I have taken the liberty of translating many of the Hebrew terms Rabbi Frand’s uses.

There is a tendency to relapse back to undesirable behavior. Even if we actually repent we slip back and our efforts go for not. This is one of the main impediments to repentance. Repentance is like dieting. We might lose a few pounds but we know that we will get it back. I speak from personal experience. In past years I have suggested numerous things. This year I would like to suggest a new approach. This does not involve taking on something new. My suggestion is to keep Shabbos. Most of you have kept Shabbos all of your lives without the intended result. What does Shabbos have to do with repentance? There is a story about a person who was involved in five accidents. It was shown that four were not his fault. The insurance company still wanted to drop him because of “bad karma.” Rabbi Weinberg advised this man that these accidents were a form of stoning because of violating Shabbos. This was a Shabbos observing family so what does it mean that they violated Shabbos. Rabbi Weinberg asked what the household looked like before Shabbos. It was chaotic and the man’s wife often lit candles less than eighteen minutes before Shabbos. This was changed and the policy was reinstated now that the “religious problem” was taken care of. (I have a problem with anything that implies that God is likely to directly interfere in the lives of lay individuals to punish them. It smacks too much of an arbitrary father in the sky, landlord deity. Insurance companies deal with odds. They of all people should understand that, statistically, you will get people who have five accidents and most of them not their fault. If the people who are supposed to understand statistics are failing in the defense of reason then we are in serious trouble.)

What does Shabbos have to do with repentance? We know the story of Cain and Abel. God curses Cain and Cain exclaims that he could not bear the punishment. God puts a mark so that no one would harm Cain. Cain goes out from God. According to the Midrash, Adam asked Cain what happened and Cain said that he repented and that God forgave him. Adam exclaimed how great repentance was and sang the song of Shabbos (Psalms 92). Adam did not know about repentance? Why is his reaction to sing about Shabbos? According to the Nesivos Shalom (Rabbi Sholom Noach Berezovsky, the previous Slonimer Rebbe), Cain was not just worried about his physical being, Cain was worried about his soul. Cain was being banished to a world of temptation and he knew that he could not survive that. God made a sign. That sign was Shabbos, which is called a sign. God was offering a solution to Cain, that he could keep Shabbos and save himself. This was what excited Adam. He knew about repentance but never connected Shabbos to repentance. (My father is a big fan of Nesivos Shalom as is my thesis advisor.) Sin does something to someone’s soul, just like a stroke affects a person’s mind, cutting off the connection between the brain and the rest of the body. Shabbos is the spiritual therapy that restores the damaged connection to God. We are constantly assaulted in this world. But as the Zohar says, Shabbos is the day the soul is restored.

Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, in one of his sermons on repentance, told over how, as a child, he used to go to a Modzitz shtiebel (small synagogue). The Hasidism would sing into the evening because they did not want Shabbos to end. There was a porter there whom he knew from his weekday work. Rabbi Soloveitchik could not recognize the man’s regal bearing on Shabbos. Rabbi Soloveitchik, as the Litvak (Lithuanian), asked when the evening services were. The man responded: “are you so impatient for Shabbos to end?”

Back in the old times, when it was still okay to go to movies, they would show newsreels. In 1933 the Munkatcher rebbe’s daughter got married and this got onto the newsreels. You can check this on Youtube. (There is a group of little boys and girls singing Hatikvah and a large group of older children engaged in mixed dancing.) It was a major event. The Rebbe got the chance to speak to Jews in America and he told them to keep Shabbos. The Rebbe, who did not like pictures, agreed to be in a movie so he could speak to American Jews and tell them about Shabbos.

I am not a Hasid; my parents were German Jews. I eat gabruchts (wet matza) on Passover and put tefillin on during Chol HaMoed with a bracha (blessing). There is one thing that I envy about Hasidim, Shabbos. Go to New Square for Shabbos, go to Belz. The better the Shabbos you have the better your soul will be and this will help repentance last. It will allow us to stave of what the world throws against us. If Shabbos is merely a day to crash it will not have the desired effect. There is a program called “Turn Friday Night Into Shabbos.” We need a program to turn Shabbos into Shabbos.

The problem with Shabbos is that it happens every week. We take it for granted. There was a rabbi who had a conversation with a Roman Catholic from Topeka Kansas on a plane. The Catholic asked the rabbi if he kept Shabbos like when the woman of the house, in her finest, lights candles and the family sits down to a meal with silverware and crystal. The Catholic had the advantage of only seeing one or two Shabbosim.

If you want to appreciate something invest in it; buy and read books on Shabbos. We need to stop doing certain things in regards to Shabbos. Try praying at a slower pace; try coming early and say Psalms. Limit your reading to things that are not secular, no newspaper, no sports, no business. The words “never mind Shabbos” should never cross our lips. You have to want Shabbos. Women have the advantage in that they already actively prepare for Shabbos. All they have to do is think about it. I have a letter from a woman who decided to accept Shabbos by midday on Friday. Is this woman crazy? She heard her daughter complain about it being Shabbos because Friday was such a tense time. Now her children come from school to a calm home. Now her children are used to her planning for Shabbos all week long because she cannot start planning Thursday at midnight. (I can easily see this only exacerbating the problem.)

Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon writes that there is no better way to install faith in children than Shabbos. We all know the temptations that our children are up against. I tell my wife that I am glad that we are out of the child raising business. Let our children deal with it.

I would like to close with an atypical Holocaust story. Judith Novack wrote a book called The Lilac Bush about her experiences. In her town they would speak Hungarian during the week but only Yiddish on Shabbos. In 1944 when the Jews were deported, she was the only one to survive. After liberation she and other survivors got on a train to go back home. They hatched a plot to throw rocks at the synagogue to show how angry they were at God. When she picked up the rock she remembered her Shabbos table. She thought how she could not bear to live her life without Shabbos.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller and the Neturei Karta

One of the issues that have come up with this discussion on Authentic Judaism is that of Rabbi Avigdor Miller and his role in influencing some of the more radical Haredi bloggers. I brought it up in passing and Parshablog has dealt with it in more detail. Whatever problems one may have with the late Rabbi Miller (and believe me I do) Rabbi Miller is of little value in of himself as a target. He is no longer alive and the Haredi world has by and large rejected his more radical views. Rabbi Miller is still useful for going after Haredim because, despite the fact that most would say that they disagree with him on specific points, they still revere him as a scholar. I see this as an intellectual dodge and a moral failure to treat certain issues with due responsibility. This was brought home to me when discussing the issue of Rabbi Miller with Not Brisk, who, while not wishing to defend Rabbi Miller outright, did not hesitate to try to interest me in some of Rabbi Miller’s less polemical work. According to Not Brisk, even I “who obviously can't swallow his [Rabbi Miller’s] world opinions, can still take the ‘good’”. I do not question Rabbi Miller’s intelligence and I have no problem acknowledging that he has written things that are better than his tapes and his books Rejoice O Youth and Awake My Glory. That being said, these things are the Rabbi Miller that I know and apparently this is the Rabbi Miller that bloggers like Authentic Judaism and Jewish Philosopher know. Nothing that Rabbi Miller said could change this.

Not Brisk would have me bifurcate between the populist Rabbi Miller and the scholarly Rabbi Miller. Do not get me wrong, I have no problem with having a disagreement with someone and taking what I like about them and discarding what I do not. There are two different types of opposition; there is the opposition where the opponent is still viewed as legitimate and then there is the opposition where the opponent is cast aside as something satanic without any legitimacy. For example, I accept that different people are going to have different views on the State of Israel. You may disagree with me about the army or about settlements but we can agree that we are all good Jews here. I will still give you an aliya in shul and agree to eat in your home. That being said, a Neturei Karta person, who believes that Israel should be destroyed, would not be legitimate. (The Neturei Karta are a small but highly visible group. You can often see them at Israel rallies in Hasidic garb and waving Palestinian flags. They also gained a lot of attention when members of their group attended the infamous Holocaust denial conference in Iran.) A member of the Neturei Karta could study Torah sixteen hours a day and be the nicest person you have ever met. All of that would mean nothing against the fact that this person has plotted with and aided those who wish to murder Jews. It is a moral stance for me precisely to not bifurcate between a Neturei Karta member’s actions as a member of the Neturei Karta and his actions when off duty. (Similarly, I would not say that someone is in the Ku Klux Klan but he is nice to his mother. A member of the Klan is a member of the Klan, no ands ifs or buts.) Anyone who simply says that they do not personally agree with the Neturei Karta but still wish to accept them as another Jewish opinion is taking a stance and is morally culpable in the continued existence of the Neturei Karta. (To their credit the Haredi community has been pretty good at expelling the Neturei Karta.)

Among the many repulsive things in Rabbi Miller’s writing, Rabbi Miller took certain Neturei Karta type stances in regards to Israel. For example, Rabbi Miller has this to say about Zionism:

346. Let us see what they [the Zionists] have accomplished. They have succeeded in gaining for Jews the hostility of the entire Arab world and of most of the “Third World” nations. They have fomented bad relations with Russ and to some extent with France and Mexico. They have created animosity in the United States and elsewhere.
347. These achievements are of small benefit to Jews, but the Israelis and their Zionist proponents are persistent, because they hope to make all lands untenable for Jews (as they did in all Moslem countries) so that Jews be forced to settle in the State of Israel which is losing the population race against the local Arabs (one million Jewish babies have been slain by abortion in the State of Israel from 1948 to 1976, equal to the number of Jewish children slain by Hitler). (Awake My Glory pg. 104)

So according to Rabbi Miller, it is the fault of Zionism, not Arab anti-Semitism, for Arab hostility. It is Israel’s fault and not the Arabs that Sephardic and Yemenite Jews had to flee their homes. This is the classic Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism line. Finally, because Israel has legal abortion, the Israeli government is as bad as Hitler. Not surprisingly the Neturei Karta has made use of Rabbi Miller. Because of this, Rabbi Miller should be about as kosher as a bacon sandwich; not just some of the things that he said but everything. It is not good enough that the Haredi world accepts some things of his and ignores others.

When I was in the Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, one of the rabbis there recommended to me that I read Rabbi Miller as a good source on Jewish thought. (Little did he know that I was already a fan of listening to his tapes and yelling at them.) I am willing to give this rabbi the benefit of the doubt and imagine that if I were to show him the above passage he would be quick to say that he did not agree with it. That being said, the fact that, of all the people he could have told me to read, he sent me to Rabbi Miller raises certain questions. In a more liberal environment, where one comes expecting to be exposed to many different ideas, this would not have been such a problem. For example, someone coming to this blog has to understand that I love and value ideas for their own sake. They should not assume that just because I link to something and say that it is worthwhile to read that I agree with it. The yeshiva system, though, prides itself on the tight control it maintains on its students. These rabbis were, in essence, guaranteeing my father that they would not expose me to any questionable material. As such they cannot play innocent in exposing me to radical anti-Zionism. (This is why you never want to operate an authoritarian system. No one can live up to the implicit responsibility.) So what does it mean when this Haredi rabbi showed significantly less diligence in not exposing me to radical anti-Zionism than he did in not exposing me to say the writings of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook? (I am still waiting for it to be a common Haredi position to say that Rav Kook was a great Jewish thinker who everyone should read even though we may not accept some of his political positions.) I can only conclude that people like this Haredi rabbi do not really oppose Rabbi Miller’s position on Zionism, not in a meaningful way. Of course, when engaging in apologetics with outsiders it is important to deny this position. But, when in private, it can be tossed around as a perfectly legitimate option; something to keep in the bag for when the situation calls for some selective self-serving outrage against the Israeli government.