Monthly Archives: January 2011

Is this Beit Midrash on a Razors Edge or in a Tower: Danny Landes in Tikkun

As a 25th anniversary special, Tikkun magazine asked several people about tikkun today. One of them Rabbi Danny Landes who was in the very first issue of Tikkun writing on halakhic tikkun. Landes is an advocate of an egalitarian non-denominational beit midrash. Now, 25 years later he views his approach as a corrective for Orthodoxy that “drives the Orthodox sane.” He wants the classic beit midrash to be saved “from systemic parochialism, chosen irrelevancy, and sought-after faux elitism.” Yet, the same beit midrash must avoid liberal thinking that would severe it from the tradition.

But is that true? Is an open beit midrash really just on a narrow ridge? It is severed from the Orthodox world of pesak and politics, and it is severed from the thinking of bestsellers such as Radical Judaism. Can one be non-denominational in Tikkun and quite denominational in Jewish Review of Books? Does this non-denominationalism have a location outside their walls?

Is it an escape from the outside real-world Orthodoxy without changing the outside world? Is it Jewish Week Orthodoxy? If it has no egalitarian minyan then is it non-denominational ? If you claim you are the real and the truth but don’t go outside does it do a tikkun?

Landes describes the process of learning as the exciting dynamic world of Chevruta study but doesn’t that approach fade as one spends years engaged in Talmud study. Landes describes how “the discussions get dizzier as firm ground vanishes, and funnier as study partners turn cartwheels in the air the closer their chavrutah comes to getting it.” But people trying to deal with contemporary issues memorize commentaries instead of doing argumentative cartwheels in thin air. Rather, they do CD-Rom searches of responsa. His vision of the hard-one argument is compelling if compared to “unapproachable and definitionally unassailable shmoos” but aren’t the Pardes videos commenting on world politics just that?

So where is “this tikkun of the Jews, of the world, of our sacred Torah?” If “It’s a far cry from an ex cathedra shtender (lectern)” does it actually engage to perform a tikkun for the imagined demagogue?

No real criticism here. Just some first thoughts and reactions.

Passionate Midrash by Daniel Landes
My tikkun practice is the care and feeding of, and participation in, an ever-changing yet eternal organism — the Pardes Beit Midrash. This noisy study hall for a diverse crowd of intense, wisecracking, basically brilliant Torah students is a threefold tikkun: it’s a traditional form that transforms students, allowing the secular to access the Tradition; the Reform to become literate; the Conservative, passionate; and the Neo-Hasidic to gain textual traction; and it drives the Orthodox sane. Yes, we drive them sane. Second, the Pardes Beit Midrash is transformational in that its participants quickly shed this silly, slimy lizard skin of denominationalism, being too busy learning to fill the time proclaiming. Finally, it transforms the classic Beit Midrash, saving it from systemic parochialism, chosen irrelevancy, and sought-after faux elitism.

At its center are text and method. Text is Torah, especially the hard stuff: commentaries, Mishnah, Talmud, and Codes — untranslated and uncensored. The method is straight-on attack in chavrutah (learning in pairs), utilizing classic and new-fangled approaches. Two to three students sweat the small stuff in the context of others doing the same, until peshat, the illusive “plain” meaning, is nailed. Easier said. Given the multilayered dynamics, a text within a text with infinite regress/progress, a variety of moral issues which are taken seriously, and the chavrutah relations, the discussions get dizzier as firm ground vanishes, and funnier as study partners turn cartwheels in the air the closer their chavrutah comes to getting it. Interesting things happen. One makes the argument presented in the text, offering a logical explanation. Soon white-hot heat is generated as the resistant chavrutah turns from pleasing partner into implacable foe, as he or she breaks the argument — it’s wrong; nonsensical! Then, suddenly, mid-fight you discover that your chavrutah is actually correct; indeed, as you explain: more right than they know! And you prove it triumphantly! Inevitably the startled partner silently rethinks, turns around and rejects his own line of argument and argues ferociously for your first line of reasoning. The Great Switcheroo has been effected. Sides swap, positions permeate each other, and students and teachers switch roles. The discussion moves magically from peshat to meaning. And this volatile meaning — subject to dialectical ascents to the heights and perilous drops into the abyss — is hard-won and enlightening. It’s a far cry from an ex cathedra shtender (lectern) delivered from unapproachable and definitionally unassailable shmoos or from a clever “I had a thought” derived really not at all from any verse or source as ironically delivered in a Shabbat minyan.
No, it’s hard-won, and I see it happen around me, every day. And then, once again, as a witness I believe that it’s not a slogan: this tikkun of the Jews, of the world, of our sacred Torah, is possible and actually present.

Rabbi Daniel Landes is Rosh HaYeshiva of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. He wrote on Halakhic Tikkun in Tikkun magazine’s inaugural issue.








Palliative Care Conversation

I recently met an Orthodox palliative care nurse working on the West Coast who discussed the implications of her work.

She discussed how various stages 4-5 cancers are already about choosing a good death rather than the power of doctors to keep one alive. Does one want to die from a narcotic shot after having lots of tubes inserted or does one want a non-invasive death? (We already discussed some of these issues here.)

She claimed that 20% 25% of all cases would not get into a brain stem death or heart death situation if there was more palliative care. On the other hand, she said that the organs of those who die from aggressive cancers are never used for organ transplants, they always inform those who do transplants of the deaths and they are never chosen. (These are her statistics; I cannot verify them. I am neither doctor nor medical ethicist).

She mentioned that Orthodox Jews are the biggest believers in the medical model that things can always be solved even when it is empirical that a stage 5 cancer cannot be helped. And that the Rabbis are playing doctor rather than chaplain.

I was surprised when she discussed a Chabad seminar in medical ethics that she attended and she said it was great. It was given by a Chabad rabbi who is in the forefront of knowledge of palliative care. The rabbi discussed palliative care cancer patients as terefah and had a real empirical based category of goses. She compared this with the NY orthodox rabbis who have a 1965 image of medicine based on Dr Kildare who can solve everything. (For those too young to remember, Dr Kildare was a TV show in which the doctor always knew best and more medical treatments were always good things.) Now we live in a world where people tell the joke “why do they seal the coffin? To stop the doctors from continuing to administer the profitable chemotherapy.”

The nurse compared the lack of knowledge of the Yeshivish and Centrist rabbis to this Chabad rabbi. She did not remember his name and I could not find it online in any combination of the words Chabad, medical, rabbi, seminar. I do want to know who it is and if Chabad is developing their own medical ethics. I had never heard that Chabad was getting into original medical ethics. If anyone knows, then let me know. She found this Chabad rabbi relevant with real categories of terefah and goses, which acknowledge that we all die.

She compared this with the local rabbis who when consulted on end life care insist on painful procedures that bring no benefit. She told a story of an Orthodox woman who said “her husband was good so he cannot die. He did everything right he cannot die.” When I asked her how does she explain it, at first she would not answer the question and then only answered it with my repeat of the question. She said that the Orthodox (in this case referring to a Engaged Yeshivish or Centrist Orthodoxy) are more irrational than other patients. They have a complete dependence on a certain life, and the woman with the dying husband was dependent on husband. No contingency, no sense of end of life.

Finally, she noted the increasing convergence with Catholics positions, for example that food and hydration is necessary. And both need more actual knowledge of the end process of each specific disease or end life situation. (See my prior post here on the convergence).

Philo-palin, Hillel Halkin and the phrase Blood Libel



Here is Halkin’s genealogy:




Daniel Landes responds to Arthur Green’s response.


Daniel Landes Responds:









Ramhal as expressing 18th century Enlightenment values


















The Brothers Ashkenazi, by Israel Joshua Singer reprinted

People tend to imagine Eastern European Hasidism as existing as some circle of modern new age spiirtualists sitting around discussing Kabbalah. A few years ago, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern wrote an excellent article arguing for a greater sense of history, folklore, and ordinary people in the study of Hasidism; he sharply argued that the star-struck study of Hasidism does not spend enough time in the study of earthly Hasidism.

Turning to Polish Hasidism, in the era of Kotzk, Izbica, and Gur, those who are not historians can gain a sense of the era by reading the newly-reissued The Brothers Ashkenazi, by Israel Joshua Singer. Poland modernized with trains and factories between 1840-1860, and then was subject to Russian taxation after 1860. The Jews were almost all immigrants from other regions, litvaks, galitzianers, daitchers and entering the new era of productivity. Over time Jews settled in the suburbs of larger cities, Kotzk, Tomoshav, Alexsander, Gur. Singer presents older Hasidim as cruel factory owners who went to Hasidic courts, the younger Hasidic generation as raised in the seemliness of modern urban life-gambling, brothels, and fighting. And then the 20th century generation leaving Hasidism. Singer was no longer religious but was stuck in that felt that neither secularism or Hasidism had solutions. If one can see beyond Singer’s pro-labor bias and know that he is no longer Hasidic, then one gets a window into the later part of the era not available elsewhere. He preserves many details of ordinary life even if his plot development is biased.

The book has a new introduction by ex-orthodox secularist Rebecca Goldstein, who notes the gender gap, the avarice, the regional differences and the fatalism.- available here and here.







The book was first reviewed in the NYT and The Nation in 1936. Adam Kirsch, who is unfamiliar with the material, still offered at the Tablet these insights such as “Singer’s method in The Brothers Ashkenazi is to drop his protagonists into this bubbling cauldron and document the changes that result.”

In 1936, two novels dominated the New York Times bestseller list. The first was Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, a panoramic, melodramatic historical novel that would shortly become a classic movie and that has never been out of print. The other was The Brothers Ashkenazi, by Israel Joshua Singer, which has never been made into a movie and has gone in and out of print periodically over the years.

The novel’s vantage point on this crisis is the city of Lodz, sometimes called the Manchester of Poland. In the late 19th century, Lodz was transformed from a small village to an international capital of the textile industry—an industry dominated by Jewish manufacturers, merchants, and laborers. Singer captures this reckless, explosive growth in a cinematic sequence in the novel’s first pages: “Seemingly overnight the houses already standing sprouted additional stories, annexes, wings, extensions, ells, attics, and garrets to accommodate the flow of newcomers … like a torrent overflowing its banks, the Jews smashed down all barriers set up to exclude them.” Singer’s method in The Brothers Ashkenazi is to drop his protagonists into this bubbling cauldron and document the changes that result.

The patriarch of the Ashkenazi dynasty, Abraham Hersh, gets rich as the chief salesman for the Gentile-owned manufacturing firm of Huntze. Just as he is an employee of capitalists rather than a capitalist himself, he seems to be in the new Lodz without being of it: He remains a traditional Hasid, spending as much time as possible at the court of his rebbe. He uses his wealth to do mitzvot like buying Passover supplies for the poor and ransoming Jewish prisoners.

Finally, here is the real historical account as read by few readers of Kotzk and Izbitz from Urbanization, Capitalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Four Novels and a Film on Jews in the Polish City of Lódz Delphine Bechtel. Prooftexts. Bloomington: 2006. Vol. 26, Iss. 1/2;

Lódz is a crossroad. The city was under the rule of the Russian Empire. At first, the cotton industry had been introduced there to serve the interests of the Russian market; production, however, was in the hands of Germans, Jews, and a number of Poles. The Jewish merchants mostly came from Russia. Remember the scene in the theater: when people hear that such and such has become bankrupt in Odessa, the breakdown is immediate in Lódz. The cotton itself was coming from Turkmenistan. But slowly, American cotton flooded the market, transiting through Hamburg. The situation of such a city has something fascinating. It is Metropolis, a cosmopolitan Metropolis.”

Urban multiethnicity in Central and Eastern Europe has been a highly distincative feature of this region, although the phenomenon has only been rediscovered by academic researchers in the last two decades. Nonetheless, cities such as Prague, L’viv (Lemberg, Lwów), Chernivitsi (Czernowitz), Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony), or Gdaðsk (Danzig) have formed living examples of shared history and crossa cultural fertilization for centuries, though this feature has often gone unnoticed. Nazi ethnic cleansing and genocide, followed by years of officially monoethnic, Communist controlled states behind the Iron Curtain, had seemingly driven their multifarious past existences into oblivion.

Lódz, located 120 km southwest of Warsaw and accurately dubbed “Polish Manchester,” was promoted by tsarist decree in 1820 from an obscure village with 767 inhabitants to a “factory city,” the center of the capitalist textile industry of the Polish Kingdom, soon to serve the vast Russian market. Most towns in east Central Europe developed in the Middle Ages through the combined skills of German craft workers and Jewish merchants, who often formed the core urban population while facing a predominantly Slavic peasantry. But in Lódz, this development was forced upon the city belatedly, in a programmatic and swift way that turned the city into an unquestionable symbol for hasty urbanization, rabid capitalism, and cosmopolitanism. German settlers, including skilled weavers and masters of cotton mills from Saxony or Bohemia, were encouraged to settle there, followed by Polish villagers as well as Jewish artisans and petty merchants. Each of these groups was lured into the “promised land” to provide mass, cheap labor. The town attracted newcomers like a magnet, and grew like a mushroom, on sand, swamp, and peat bog.

This hasty foundation resulted in a gigantic population boom: the total number of inhabitants rose to 314,000 in 1897, and again to 506,100 in 1913. At the same time, the Jewish population rose from 259 in 1820 (representing 33.8 percent of the total) to 92,400 in 1897 (29.4 percent) and 171,900 in 1913 (34 percent).

Joseph Weiler interviewed in NCR

Weiler is the Orthodox Jewish attorney who recently defended the displaying of crosses before the European Court of Human Rights. See my prior blog post on the trial. It is a great interview. In a forthcoming book, he claims that Jews did indeed put Jesus to death as a false prophet based on Deut 13, thereby showed their loyalty to their covenant. Jews should take responsibility but not guilt for the crucifixion. I more then leery about the entire approach, and do not like the social implications at all, but I will wait to read the book. As noted in the comments at the source, it seems his Orthodoxy allows him to speak entirely from a religious perspective and not be concerned about the contingencies of history- specifically those Jews killed as Christ -killers. Here are some selections:

Tackling taboos on Jews and Christians, the cross and deicide
By John L Allen Jr Created Jan 21, 2011
Fascinating characters have always populated the landscape of Jewish-Catholic relations, but even in that milieu it’s tough to find a more intriguing personality these days than Joseph Weiler. A South-African born legal scholar and the son of a Latvian rabbi, Weiler is considered a leading expert on European constitutional law. From his perch at the NYU Law School, of all places, he edits the ultra-prestigious European Journal of International Law, and it would be easier to list the elite European universities from which he doesn’t hold honorary doctorates.

We’re talking about a deeply faithful Orthodox Jew, the father of a large Jewish family in the Bronx which keeps kosher and strictly observes the Sabbath. Yet in 2003, Weiler published the best-selling book A Christian Europe, pleading for the European Union to embrace its Christian heritage. Sporting a kippah, Weiler also recently stood before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights to defend Italy’s right to display the crucifix in public school classrooms. He took the case pro bono — arguing that forcing Italy to take down the cross would be a blow not against Christianity, but against pluralism.

In a forthcoming book on the trial, he’ll try to persuade fellow Jews that their efforts over 2,000 years to reject the charge of deicide have been misplaced. In a sense that Weiler carefully unpacks, he says “the Jews” did indeed put Jesus to death, and they were doing exactly what the Lord expected. (His aim is to offer a reading of the trial that renders both Jewish and Christian responses consistent with Scripture — a project, he readily admits, destined to stir fierce reactions on both sides.)

* * *

When the original decision came out, I was shocked by the weakness and the perfunctory nature of the reasoning. I wrote an editorial in the European Journal of International Law, saying that no matter what position you take on the outcome, it’s an embarrassing decision. I was also contemptuous of the way the Italian government argued the case. They claimed that the cross is not a religious symbol, it’s a national symbol. Apart from being dishonest, that was bad strategy, because it was very easy for the chamber to say it’s obviously a religious symbol.


What was your pitch?
I said that one should go on the attack, arguing that removing the cross is actually illiberal. Allowing the cross is the liberal position, the pluralist position, because Europe has both a France and a Britain. France is an officially secular state, but in Britain the national anthem is “God Save the Queen” and the Queen is the head of the Church of England. Every picture of the Queen in a British classroom is both a national and a religious symbol.

What reaction have you received from the Jewish world?
I got an enormous amount of hate mail. I’ve had very harsh reactions, especially from the European Jewish community in Italy, France, Germany and elsewhere. How can the son of a “Lithuanian rabbi” do this? Very often they’ll say, you don’t know what the real church is like, let me tell you this story and that story. At bottom, the question was, ‘How can an observant Jew defend the cross?’
You don’t understand yourself to be defending Christianity but defending pluralism?

That’s it. In my book A Christian Europe, I said that if the preamble to the European constitution had only made reference to the Christian roots of Europe, and not to the traditions of Athens and the French Revolution, I would have written in defense of the latter. People have asked me a million times how a practicing Jew can defend a reference to Christian roots in the European constitution, and I’ve said that I’m not a practicing Jew in this context. I’m a practicing constitutionalist. I’m a practicing pluralist.


In the Biblical story, Jesus is defined as the most abject enemy of society. He’s the Osama bin Laden, the enemy who threatens the entire nation. Yet at the same time he’s the Son of God, he’s divinity. He is put on trial, and into our collective consciousness is written the imperative: ‘Nobody is so abject that he doesn’t deserve a trial, and nobody is so exalted that he can be excused from a trial.’

There’s a second element. For generations, people have protested the injustice of the trial.
Rule number two, therefore, is that the trial has to be fair. We don’t accept kangaroo trials, we don’t accept perjury, and we don’t accept tampering with witnesses.

What’s the second thesis?
In my research I discovered there’s actually no theology of the trial, and that’s the heart of the matter.

It’s an extraordinarily strange thing. The first verse says, ‘This is my law. You will not add to it and you will not detract from it, forever.’ Then it says that if one day a prophet or a dreamer should come to you giving ‘signs and wonders’ … that’s code in scripture for somebody sent by God. So, if a prophet giving signs and wonders comes along and says to stray away from God, not to follow his law, you have to know that I’m testing you. This is the theologically baffling part: I am putting you to the test, and you must resist. Even though it’s a prophet, even though it’s signs and wonders which means it comes from God, you must put this man to death.



In the trial, God achieves two things in one stroke. It’s a trial of the Jews, to remind the Jews that they have their covenant and their salvation lies in it. It’s also a trial of Jesus, in which he dies innocently because in that way he expiates the sins of everybody else. His death is the way of redemption for the world. At the end of the day, according to this vision, everybody is following the path of God.


What’s the third thesis?
Why the shift of responsibility from the cross to the trial? That’s what the culture has done. It’s shifted the responsibility for the death of Jesus away from an execution by the Romans to a finding of guilt by the Jews. The reason in my view is not directly deicide. It is the steadfast rejection of Christ by the Jews, before and after the Crucifixion. It’s not easy to condemn a people who faithfully stick to a covenant whom God himself proclaimed as eternal, so deicide comes in handy.

Basically it says that not everyone at the time of Jesus, and certainly nobody ever after, was complicit in what the Jewish leadership did. Therefore, because we don’t believe in collective punishment and collective guilt, “the Jews” should not be held responsible. The startling thing is that by absolving the Jews, [the bishops] were also absolving themselves. They also say, in the very same statement, that despite the fact we have held the Jews responsible for 2,000 years, and because of that so many Jews were put on the stake … hey guys, there’s no collective guilt, no collective responsibility, so don’t blame us either.

That is one reason why I believe that John Paul II was one of the most impressive moral persons of our epoch. He never took that position. He said, ‘I’ve got something to say I’m sorry for.’ Not personally, of course … the man saved Jews during the Second World War. There are moving, moving stories. But representing the church, he said I’m not going to just rely on ‘no collective responsibility.’ There is something here to apologize for.

In the book, I say that as a Jew I don’t want to be “absolved” either. We have to differentiate between guilt and responsibility. I want to be able to say, yes, we Jews put Christ to death, because that’s what the Lord required us to do.

A good Christian-Jewish dialogue should not involve one side having to deny its core identity, which for Jews is the eternal covenant — Chukat Olam. I would say, if you just open the Talmud to the Sanhedrin tractate, it’s clear. Jesus came along and we put him to death, as we were required to do. The Romans are not even mentioned. The only difference between the Talmud and me is that they said Jesus was guilty of incitement, which is a reference to Deuteronomy 13, verse six onwards. That tractate is written at a time when the Talmud is the enemy of the church, and they don’t want to give Jesus the dignity of being a prophet sent by God.


I will get it the most from that segment of the observant Jewish community where anything positive you have to say about Christianity is somehow anathema. Make no mistake — I am no ‘Jews for Christ.’ I abhor that. But even as an observant Jew, it is not for me to exclude any possible plan the Holy One, Blessed Be He, may have had for the rest of the nations.
I think Christians will be either dismissive or will take it very, very seriously… I beg the reader of this interview to wait for the full text — it is nuanced, careful, and respectful.
Read the Rest Here

Conference on Jewish Lamdanut

There is an annual conference at Van Leer on the philosophy of halakhah. This year they issued the call for papers earlier than usual. So far, they have had conferences on Yeshaya Leibowitz, Rav Soloveitchik, Philosophy of Halakhah, Ideology and Halakhah, Conservative Judaism an Halakhah, Halakhah as an Emotional Event, and now this one. It is an academic conference, so many of the papers from Centrists are not accepted. After one of the earlier conferences, a senior RIETS rabbi told said to me, in a somewhat relativist way, about why no one in NY cared about the conferences: “they talk to their friends and we talk to those we are comfortable to.” Before one of the early conferences, a known Centrist speaker wanted to determine who should speak based his list of acceptable Centrist speakers. Van Leer responded by saying “You make yourself stupid” and showed him the door.
Which of the proposed list of questions are great questions? Which questions should be there?

Joel Osteen will be in Israel- talks about Judaism

The LA Jewish Journal has an exclusive interview with Pastor Joel Osteen about his upcoming pro-Israel performance at the Jerusalem Theater. Joel Osteen is one of the leading American preachers on TV every night. He preaches that God cares about you and wants you to have wealth, a better self, your dreams fulfilled, and a good life. Jews should take note that even though Osteen is an Evangelical, his views are almost Unitarian for their lack of doctrine or dogma. In addition, Joel Osteen is very popular in my Centrist Orthodox neighborhood; people watch him on TV and know his sermons. He generally uses Hebrew scripture in a narrative reading. If God has made promises to Abraham, then they apply to all believers out there. You too have been promised to be numerous, blessed, wealth and to have everything. His religion is so light and his message of prosperity so in tune with suburban Orthodoxy that he is a model rabbi. I hear more discussion of Osteen’s sermons than those of the local Rabbis. On the hand, he is condemned by the more doctrinal Christians as a false prophet, a phony, and a disbeliever. And he has been interviewed on national TV to defend his view from charges of opportunism.

To show how far the current Evangelical gospel of prosperity has come, Osteen starts off his interview by saying that Jesus is basically a force within all of us, including Jews. He interprets God saves us as God has given us the potential to believe in ourselves and fulfill our goals. He likes the Jewish tradition and has given up eating pork, but not 100%. He even has respect for Hindu even thought they have different beliefs. He has a non-judgmental, non-patronizing, open and embracing attitude to other religions.

Osteen states that he presents his Christians principles at each show so all who want to can accept them. But his Christian messages is pretty universal and without a sense of missionary urgency.
The interview has his hallmark themes, including that God has a plan for everyone and if we trust in God he will help us with everything we ever wanted in life. When asked why Evangelicals are doing well, he answers that people do not want denominations or ideology; they want a hopeful positive life. “We all face difficulties in our health, our marriages, our finances, and our message is: God can help you in these areas. (I do think that certain parts of Orthodoxy are rapidly heading in this direction).

Joel Osteen, Israel and the Jews: an exclusive Q&A By






Rome’s Orthodox Chief Rabbi: Jews and Catholics Are Brothers

Interview With Riccardo Di Segni
By Giancarlo Giojelli

(For background on Rabbi di Segni and his positions, see this prior post- be sure to scroll down in the prior post.)

ROME, JAN. 18, 2011 The 22nd annual Jewish-Christian dialogue day was held in Italy on Monday. The religious leaders continued with a program that began in 2005 to focus on the Ten Commandments.
The annual Jan. 17 event began in 1990 sponsored by the Italian bishops’ conference and Jewish leaders.
This year, the discussion turned to the Commandment: Honor your father and your mother.

For the occasion, ZENIT is publishing an Italian Radio and Television (RAI) interview with the chief rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni.

Q: Then, what does it mean to be brothers? Do Christians and Jews have a common Father and Mother?

Di Segni: The whole of humanity has a father and a mother in common if there is meaning in the story of the Bible that the whole of humanity derives from Adam and then from Noah, all of us must acknowledge we have a common predecessor so no one can say — our texts say this — he is superior to another, because we have a common origin. In this sense, the whole of humanity is brotherhood. Then there are three human groups linked more closely and undoubtedly the link that exists between Jews and Christians is a link of particular closeness, which can be represented under the image of brotherhood, with all the ups and downs that can exist in brotherhood.

Q: The word dialogue can have a strong or weak meaning. There can be, let us say, a diplomatic dialogue, which does not affect life, and a dialogue that involves and changes the person. The relationship between man and God in the Bible is often a dramatic dialogue. Hence, what is the dialogue between Christians and Jews?

Di Segni: I would say that it is a necessity that we cannot avoid, even if, as experience shows, it is a difficult experience because it must overcome a whole series of obstacles placed by history, by theology and by everyday life. The fact that it is difficult, however, must not exempt one from addressing it, having also a minimum of hope and a minimum of serenity that something good will come out of it.

Q: You lived John Paul II’s visits to the synagogue and last year you received Benedict XVI. What do you make of those meetings?

Di Segni: They were different visits. Different because of the time and the personality. The first was an epochal event, which marked a turn in history, symbolically. The second was an event of confirmation of a line. It is in these events … but the last was not an event in which everything went peacefully, there was a whole backdrop of controversies and I insisted much that in any case it take place because I believe that what it leaves is the sensation that beyond that which divides there are common elements and common obligations, above all the common obligation to walk together, which we cannot shun. Arriving at the synagogue, Benedict XVI paused before the stone that remembers the deported Roman Jews.

Q: How do Italians who are in contact with other cultures, who live in other parts of the world, live the relationship between the great monotheistic religions?

Di Segni: To go around the world is a great lesson to understand the differences. Today, Italy is free from provincialism, the human landscape we see walking through the streets of any Italian city is very changed from what it was 20 years ago. It is essential to know the differences to understand that humanity does not stop with someone who has a face like mine but that we must understand, above all, that there are these differences, and then learn to live together.

Q: Is diversity a danger or a richness?

Di Segni: Difference must be a richness.

Q: The prophet Zechariah and also Isaiah, if I’m not mistaken, speaks of a day in which Jews and Gentiles will eat together on the feast of Sukkot, which recalls the pilgrimage in the desert. Is this common table only a utopia or a prophecy that in some way already operates in the present?

Di Segni: Judaism lives from utopia and hence the fact that it is a utopia does not mean that it won’t take place but that instead it must take place and in our prayers we confirm the concept that nothing that has been said by the mouth of the prophets has failed and therefore sooner or later it must be fulfilled. In some way some little thing is happening but it is still a long way away.

Q: The desert is still long?

Di Segni: Yes. However, the situation of the desert could be an ideal situation.

Full Version here.

Hasidism and the Natural World


Hasidism and “Nature”: Negation and Affirmation By Jay Michaelson








tzimtzum / or (uncontracted light)
gevurah / hesed
elohim / YHVH
hateva/immanent / transcendent
what seems to be yesh / what seems to be ayin
actually ayin / actually Yesh





The Song of the Grass: Simple Devotionalism as Ecological Foundation?







Read the rest here, I excerpted less than half.

Peter Berger discovers Contemporary Judaism

The famous sociologist Peter Berger is retired but still blogs about religious ideas that catch his eye. Berger, in his classic The Sacred Canopy (1967) explained how Eastern European immigrants to the US, lost their shtetl sacred canopy and thereby replaced their old faith with the pluralism of America. Now everyone as moderns is autonomous and makes decisions that create a personal functional sacred canopy. The major thing that one gets from the book is that we are all now conscious of our ability to choose and choose we must. Nothing is destiny or compelling us anymore.
In this blog post, it seems that Berger has just discovered that post 1967 Judaism with its emphasis on Holocaust and Zionism as well as the renewed vigor of Orthodoxy uses the language of destiny, compelled by community and God, and not choice.

I occasionally pick up The Jerusalem Post at the famous out-of-town newspaper kiosk on Harvard Square (for ongoing news about the Middle East I rely on its very informative sister publication The Jerusalem Report). In the current international edition my attention was immediately grabbed by a big advertisement on the very first page of the paper. The headline of the ad reads “Jews in America… Wake Up! Anti-Semitism is Raising its Ugly Head Once Again”

There is an intrinsic tension between destiny and choice in that definition. In traditional Judaism to be a Jew is a destiny grounded in God’s covenant with the people of Israel – the individual does not choose to enter into this covenant, but is bound to it by the fact of birth. The Jews have not chosen God; He has chosen them.

But as more and more Jews entered the mainstream of American society a world of choices opened up to them. Willy-nilly they became part of the turbulent pluralism of this society. Of course they could choose to belong to a traditional Jewish community that continued to affirm the destiny of belonging to the people of the Covenant – but, paradoxically, this affirmation of destiny is itself chosen, no longer to be taken for granted. The individual can certainly choose what kind of Judaism to affiliate with – America has produced the historically unparalleled phenomenon of a whole emporium of Jewish denominations (a profoundly American term). The individual can also choose to be a secular Jew, or choose any number of non-Jewish religious affiliations (not only Christian ones – a surprising number of American Buddhists are of Jewish origin), or for that matter choose to be religiously unaffiliated and ethnically vague. And all these choices are protected by law, understood as rights by the larger culture (“it’s a free country!”), and solemnly legitimated by the democratic ideology of the American republic.

Jewish identity as destiny is also affirmed by reference to the Holocaust and to the state of Israel. There are problems with both references. While remembrance of the Holocaust can be seen as a moral duty (I agree with this), the very horror of these events can have the opposite effect – namely, the effect of wanting to have nothing to do with it. Ruth Wisse, who teaches Yiddish literature at Harvard, expressed her uneasiness with the spread of Holocaust studies in American academia by questioning whether young people should relate to Jewish history by focusing on its most terrible period. As to grounding Jewish identity in solidarity with the state of Israel, the taken-for-granted character of this identity will be most plausibly maintained to the degree that Israel conforms to the idealistic aspirations of the Zionist vision. Many American Jews have had difficulties with this vision in the decades since the triumphant Israeli victory in the 1967 war.

It seems to me that the assertion, that anti-Semitism is inexorable and ubiquitous, occupies a strategic place in any effort to make Jewish identity a matter of destiny rather than choice. If even in America a recurrence of Nazi-like anti-Semitism is likely or unavoidable, Jewish identity is indeed a matter of destiny from which there is no escape.

It is always perilous to anchor an identity in a definition of the situation which goes against the empirical realities. It seems to me that Jewish identity, whether understood in religious or ethnic terms, should not deny the choices made possible by American pluralism – and indeed should affirm the value of freedom by which these choices are legitimated. The long history of Judaism and of Jewish culture provides ample resources for making plausible a choice for Jewish identity. To see America today through the lens of Germany in the 1930s is a delusion – a thoroughly counter-productive one.

Could this change? Of course it could. Every catastrophe is possible. But it would be extremely foolish to pretend that a possible catastrophe is now happening or is about to happen, and even more foolish to act on the pretense. Put differently, hypochondria is not a good method of health care.

Quite a few years ago I was on a panel with a prominent American rabbi. I don’t recall what the panel was about. All I recall is a brief exchange I had with the rabbi. He said that he was telling his children that the Holocaust could happen in America. He turned to me and asked whether I thought that he was paranoid. I replied that, on the contrary, he was not paranoid enough. He could only imagine being killed because he is a Jew. Depending on circumstances, he might be killed because he is an American, or a bourgeois, or white. I did not add that he might well be doing psychological damage to his children. I don’t remember whether or how he responded. Read his entire post here.

US Orthodoxy and fear of the arts


Guest Columnist: US Orthodoxy and fear of the arts
By JJ GROSS 14/01/2011















More Popular Culture, Two Books and SNL

I just submitted my overdue Maharal paper from the 2009 conference and now continue on my examination of popular culture. and rock and roll Orthodoxy.

1] Rodney Clapp’s ‘Border Crossings affirms that and that forays into other areas of public culture (across “borders”) should be undertaken first and foremost as Christians. Popular culture has gone mainstream in the US and religion has been swept up into popular culture American evangelicals have got to stop being so rational and seemingly intellectual, it wont reach anyone. It assumes people we disagree with are “benighted or ill-intentioned.” He says the plan of identifying with American culture leaves no alternative if it fails. Clapp instead wants greater emphasis on community and worship and less on individual belief or individual practice.
What about the future? Clapp wants greater involvement in culture but as religious people.What does a film or jazz piece teach? How does it help our journey?

Any thoughts on the application of this to orthodoxy? It seems higher education as in Mada is opposed to Torah, but popular culture seems to be synthesized well with Torah. Can we make any of Torah as counter popular culture?

Rodney Clapp’s ‘Border Crossings’ says that everything evangelicals think they know about American culture is wrong.
For this baby boomer, it’s jarring, and a little unsettling, to see Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child, Part II” being used to sell a truck. Wasn’t rock and roll–at least the good stuff–supposed to be about maintaining a critical distance from corruptive influences such as the marketplace?
American evangelicalism (specifically, the white suburban variety) is even more captive in this regard than is the music of Hendrix.
Christians should work at being an alternative to the “technologically-oriented” and “consumer-based” mainstream culture.

According to Clapp, evangelicals believe that Christian truths are “available to rationally able, well-intended individuals quite apart from any particular tradition or social context.” It may be hard to believe in our post-“Inherit the Wind” world, but evangelical faith is indeed dominated by a kind of rationalism, which says that the content of evangelical faith is expressed in propositions supposedly accessible to any “well-intended individual.” The Bible is a sort of instruction manual, albeit one sometimes more difficult to interpret than what comes with Ikea furniture.

Clapp is saying that almost everything American evangelicals know about relating to their non-evangelical contemporaries is wrong, or at least outdated. Other Americans share neither their spiritual aspirations nor their moral reasoning. Sticking to the “foundationalist” script is not only unproductive, it’s counterproductive. Why? Because in addition to assuming something about your interlocutor that isn’t true, it “inclines us towards believing that those who disagree are necessarily benighted or ill-intentioned.”

Evangelical faith places huge emphasis on the individual and the idea of a personal relationship with God. And the less said about liturgy, the better.
With no real sense of what it means to be the church–what Christians call an ecclesiology–evangelicals depend on being American–and Americans being Christian–as their sole source of a corporate identity. Little wonder so much of the “religious right’s” rhetoric is characterized by fear and sense of crisis. There’s no plan “B.”
Full review here.

2] Another Book on the topic- this one argues that youth leaders should strive for something deeper than entertainment.
In Growing Souls Mark Yaconelli reaches beyond the tendency for youth pastors to make ministry to adolescents an exercise in entertainment. He believes both adolescents and those who work with them are longing for “deeper, more authentic forms of … discipleship” but that traditional approaches don’t cultivate this

3] Finally, I wish to discuss the SNL sketch from last night.
The sketch opened and closed with a nice shot of Park East Synagogue. The sketch itself made fun of the 1980’s Bar Mizvah’s that were all Bar and no Torah. Garish Bar Mitzvah’s of entertainment, hiring Hollywood stars, sports figures, rock musicians, wild themes and high budgets. Nick Kroll, better known as the caveman of Geico commercials, helped produce a humorous documentary book on the topic a few years ago, Bar Mizvah Disco.

25 years later these bar mizvah’s seems not religious, garish and devoid of Torah and spirituality- everything that made people leave their suburban and predominately Conservative congregations. But at the same time, these events kept people in the synagogue, they served to show the relevance of Judaism.If people were into ostentatious wealth, then they found a way to keep it in the synagogue.

The NYT wrote about the book in 2005:

During this period, Mr. Neuman said, “the country clubs that used to not want to have us as members want us as members.” So the proud new members of the Cadillac-driving gentry began organizing religious ceremonies around “enduring American themes,” he continued..”

“Part of the move to the suburbs is seen as a step to being more integrated with your non-Jewish neighbors,” Dr. Shandler said. “It’s not just a family celebration. It becomes a kind of mega birthday party. Parents are using this as a social occasion, so their business associates and neighbors get invited to the celebration.

Now to what I really want to ask. Here is the SNL clip making fun of one of these Bar-Mitzvah. The father in the skit says that we do tis because we can afford it and to entertain the guests. Meaning that they see that Jews don’t have to be excluded, they can have everything in popular culture. How is this different than a Rock and Roll Shabbaton? In both there are rock performers instead of Torah. If you answer kiruv and getting people into shul, I can say the same thing about the 1980’s bar mitzvah. People wanted to be part of these suburban Jewish centers because it allowed to do the things that interested them. Both assumed that once in the door the rabbi would teach them more about Judaism. So what is the difference?