City of Light Becomes City of Darkness: Ultra-Orthodox Harassment and Intimidation in Bet Shemesh

Rabbi Neil A. Tow©

Bet Shemesh is the name of an ancient city and a modern city.  “House of the Sun”, a place where we might hope that everyone “sees the light”.  But of late there has been darkness in the city of the sun.  There has been rioting among the charedi, or ultra-orthodox residents of the city who wish to enforce a more global segregation of women and men in the public sphere.  One moment in the events of past days was the way male charedim spat on and harassed Naama Margolis, a grade school girl from an orthodox home, who attends an orthodox school for girls, who was not dressed modestly enough for their sensibilities. 

Bet Shemesh may be the flashpoint but these issues extend to other places in Israel.  A charedi man, joined by others, verbally harassed a female soldier on a Jerusalem bus because she refused to move to the back in order to sit separately from men.  Once again, one act, one moment that is symbolic of many more similar moments of mistreatment, of harassment.

The Israeli military has been caught up in a series of public debates about the ways that it separates men and women at events.  An Israeli soldier working in the communications branch could not even record videotaped messages of support to the Israeli army of random female citizens in their own voices – They either had to tell a male what to say or speak from behind a cloth.

Returning to the city of the sun…A long-time resident of Bet Shemesh said in an interview on camera that such harassment has been going on for a while, but did not receive any attention recently.  She said that harassment occurred in the past but no one did anything more than raise an eyebrow.

For us in the United States, a land with separation of church and state, acts such as the ones in Jerusalem and Bet Shemesh sound disturbingly similar to the way African-Americans suffered under segregation laws.  The female soldier on the bus transformed into my head into an Israeli Rosa Parks.

However, there is a critical difference.  In Israel there is no separation between synagogue and state, between religion and politics.  There are both religious and non-religious political parties.  It is a Jewish state – a state with many religions who live within its borders, but it is a Jewish state nonetheless.  Theodor Herzl did not project that Israel would be as tied up and roiled by the large presence of traditionalist Jews – the charedi group being a group that receives huge subsidies from the government and that largely receives exemption from service in the military.

Thousands of Israelis came out to Bet Shemesh to protest the move by the charedi community to further segregate, to further its strong stance on modesty in dress and segregation of public spaces.

All these stories have come to us across the airwaves and the internet?  What do they have to do with us as American Jews?

We must be aware of the potential for the divide between Israel and the Diaspora to grow even wider.  Life here and life there are so different, the structure of Jewish life here and there are so different that there is a real threat that Israel may become something other than a State that represents the varieties of all Jewish people of the world.  The Conservative-Masorti movement has made great strides to teach a traditional and egalitarian approach like the one we follow here (in Glen Rock and many other communities), but they receive little public money and orthodox groups dog their steps – When I lived in Jerusalem in 2004-2005 my wife and I davened with Mayanot, a Masorti community in Jerusalem, a community that wanted to finally build its own home after renting space for so long.  There was a piece of land designated for a synagogue in a nearby housing development and learned that the city of Jerusalem allowed the Shas Sephardic-orthodox group to cut in and overtake that land instead.

We want Israel to be a place where all types of Jews can find holiness and meaning, where men and women can realize the full potential of their Jewish spirits on the land that our people have called holy for thousands of years.  There is, for sure, enough holiness there for people of all faiths and all persuasions of Judaism to establish themselves in honor of God and our people.(Yes, even a place for the orthodox anti-Zionist Neturei Karta and others who do not believe there should be a Jewish State until the Messianic period since the ‘concept of a sovereign state’, they say, is ‘contrary to Jewish law.)

There is a place for everyone in Israel, and disagreements must be resolved in the spirit of unity rather than hatred and violence. 

And this week’s Torah portion Vayigash reminds us that in this discussion the voices of both men and women should be heard.  It was after all the immortal presence of Serach, daughter of Asher, one of only 2 women listed among the people who went down to Egypt with Jacob…It was Serach who the Rabbis taught was one of a very few Biblical characters who was immortal, and Serach who showed Moses where Joseph was buried so that Moses could bring Joseph back to the Holy Land to be buried.

Let us look to the eternal wisdom of Serach, the wisdom of a spiritual guide who still walks with us, to teach the charedi men in Israel about how to live, how to live out the mitzvoth – if they choose to harass police as they have and harass other citizens as they have, let them be the ones sent to the back of the bus, let them be the ones who must demonstrate ‘modesty’ in public, let them be the ones whom we denounce as violators of Torah law – for they have turned the city of sun into a city of darkness. 

And it is time for us to lend our voices and support so that all the citizens of Israel may once again turn on the light.

The Chanukah I'm hoping for...

The Chanukah I’m hoping for

Rabbi Neil A. Tow©

The Chanukah I’m hoping for this year is a Chanukah that speaks for itself, a Chanukah that requires little more than menorahs, candles, blessings and songs to communicate its message.  I’m hoping for a Chanukah with dreidel spinning and chocolate coins for the game.

Not to be the Grinch who stole Chanukah…

I advocate for a gift-less Chanukah.

The gift is the holiday itself, a chance to gather in the warmth of family and community during the cold months.

Do we not have sufficient opportunities to give gifts to children and to one another at birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, retirements, starting a new job, Bar Mitzvahs, Namings, Weddings, etc.?

If I had to choose a Jewish holiday for gift giving it would probably be Shavuot in the spring time.  After all, Shavuot has little of its own particular ritual and ceremony, but it is the celebration that God gave us the Torah at Sinai – the greatest, most timeless, gift to the People that we have received, next to our freedom from Egypt.  On the day that celebrates that gift, what an amazing message it would be to say to children and to each other that we give over gifts to remember and extend the happiness of that defining moment in the history of our people.

True, Chanukah is also a defining moment, a new holiday, in the history of our people, but one that Judah Maccabee devised on his own, something unprecedented in Jewish history.  A holiday that happens to coincide with the Christmas season and therefore applies social pressure to the kids, to everyone.

The Chanukah I’m hoping for is somewhat unrealistic though, and I feel it is only honest to admit that reality.  It is similar to the way that I do not think I will be able to rescind, even in my own community, the puzzling restrictions against legumes and rice for Passover, or the way that the high holidays have become more “important” than the weekly Shabbat that defines Jewish existence from the earliest days of Creation according to the Torah story.

Nonetheless, I will try to begin to translate the feelings, the hopes, the worldview that I feel about Chanukah into practice in an evolving way, a way that appreciates how our customs and practices do move in cycles, and wax and wane like the moon as it marks the time. 

Chanukah itself is the gift:  An eight day opportunity to appreciate courage and sacrifice, to re-enter the childhood world of wonder that we too often forget, and to share the best of our hearts, hopes, and dreams that may feel muted in the icy winds and early darkness of winter.

What is the Chanukah that you hope for this year?

On witnessing a pickup truck collide with a deer in Fair Lawn, NJ

Fair Lawn Avenue is the main drag through Fair Lawn, New Jersey.  Driving west from the intersection of Plaza Road FL Ave. crosses train tracks and then over Route 208.  Last evening, I was driving in the left-hand westbound lane when a deer jumped out an across the empty eastbound lanes and a silver pickup truck collided with the deer.  I slowed down and gently hit my brakes.  The deer was injured.  It let out a loud groan, managed to stand up, and hobbled away in the direction from which it had come.


I did not tell my daughter, sitting in the back seat, what had happened.  I was in shock.  The moment when the deer groaned, spitting steam into the cold early December evening air, I felt somehow that the truck had hit me, too.  That collision transformed in my mind into all the moments in my life when someone "injured" me by name-calling, or pushing me down, any time someone hurt my feelings or person.  Every time I have felt the sting of words or hands against me, I know my soul let out a painful groan similar to the one the deer let out last night.  On every occasion of this kind, I know also that, like the deer, I hobbled away wounded and it felt as though no one was there to help or comfort me.


I think that I also felt moved and pained since there was nothing I could do for the deer. 

This Shabbat, as we recite the Mi Sheberach prayer for healing, I will add a prayer for this deer that God may grant healing and wholeness.

Jacob the Liar - Parshat Vayetze

Parshat Vayetze 2011/5772

Rabbi Neil A. Tow©

“Jacob the Liar”

Jacob is the second son of Isaac, and he is also Israel, the man who has struggled with God.  They are both the same person, but not the same character.

Jacob is a liar and manipulator who forces his brother Esau to sell his birthright, who colludes with his mother Rebekah to deceive his father Isaac, who enriches himself off the flocks of Laban and leaves Laban the leftover weakling offspring of Laban’s own herds. 

The Torah never calls Jacob a liar.  That moniker is the title of a 1969 novel of the same name written by Jurek Becker, a Polish born Jewish writer who survived Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen and eventually reunited with his father in
East Germany.  In this novel, Jacob, a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto, reports something he heard in the German police station and suddenly the ghetto community believes he has access to a radio.  And so he must invent news since he has no access to real news reports. He has to continue to invent news in order to keep up peoples’ hopes.

The Wikipedia article on this book suggests the ethical dilemma at the heart of the novel, “Does he act responsibly by lying, even if he has only good intentions?"

Does our Jacob, the Jacob of the Torah act responsibly by lying?  Does Jacob have good intentions?

When he compels his brother Esau to buy soup in exchange for the birthright, he is, in effect, lying about the value of the soup.  The sale violates principles of Jewish business ethics.

When he and Rebekah work together to deceive Isaac, they violate the principle in Leviticus, “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind.”  The Torah tells us, after all, that Isaac is going blind in his old age.

In both these cases, Jacob appears to have negative intentions.  However, we cannot dismiss the argument that God causes the birthright and blessing to go to the “more worthy” of the two brothers.  The Torah teaches “Esau spurned the birthright”.

We find ourselves, then, in a struggle.  Jacob, and Rebekah’s methods, involve manipulation and lying, while at the same time the Torah wants us to see that God’s plan favors Jacob. 

Perhaps we should dismiss the manipulation and lying as relatively gentle methods of adjusting history to fit God’s prophecy.  In the end, we could say that Jacob and Esau will reunite, each well-off and at the head of his own kingdom.

In the moment of reading the text, though, there is an irksome feeling about Jacob’s behavior.  When he creatively breeds huge herds from Laban’s herds and when he dismisses the weaker animals to Laban while keeping the sturdiest for him, there is an element of fraud involved.  Of course, Laban defrauds Jacob by giving him Leah instead of Rachel and then demanding an additional seven years of work.  Does Jacob, then, operate on the principle of midah kneged midah, measure for measure?  Can we argue here that fraud is acceptable since Jacob’s intentions are “good”, that he wants to have enough to support his wife and family and become his own person?

We can resolve the problem of Jacob’s behavior in each episode if we allow the Torah to teach in its own way rather than examining the Torah through a purely ethical lens.  The Torah is the story of the way God unfolds God’s plan for the world through the lives of people and nations.  In some cases, the methods are brutal, e.g. fraud, lying, manipulation, plague, massacre.  We must excuse the methods in favor of the message since we see that later Jewish thinking rejected these methods but retained the message.

We can also teach that although the methods fit into the course of God’s prophecy, which they bring on their own consequences good and bad.  Jacob’s forcible purchase of the birthright, for instance, causes enmity between brothers.

We live in a world that in some ways puts us in the same situation as Jacob the Liar from the 1969 novel.  Events overtake us and compel us to rethink reality and reevaluate our priorities, needs, expectations, and plans.  A need arises to find new ways to communicate and to rationalize our choices.  A time of transition helps us negotiate these exciting and stressful moments until we can discover the blessings and challenges of the new reality and the path that leads into the future.

For the residents of the ghetto who hear Jacob’s “radio” reports, does not the radio exist for them even if there is in fact no such radio?

For the other Jacob, Ya’akov Avinu, does not his eventful early life bring him to the point where he will struggle with God and himself and become a new person?

From particular to universal, from present to future, the Torah demands much from us as readers and people of faith.  It demands that we see a larger plan behind the individual events and it demands patience as the plan unfolds.  We should never, though, eschew the feeling of impatience and loving criticism that we feel when we look at Jacob and his behavior.

 

Looking Back, Going Back

Vayera 2011/5772

Looking Back, Going Back

This past Wednesday evening, we had the privilege of hosting at the Jewish Center Col. Jack Jacobs, winner of the Medal of Honor for heroism on the battlefield in Vietnam. 

In the Question and Answer session, a member of the community, who himself had fought in Vietnam, asked Jacobs how could he have gone back to Vietnam, greeted and hugged the Brigadier General who had fought against him.  Jacobs in fact did shake hands, and spend time, talking, and remembering with the opposing general. 

The individual who asked the question found it morally problematic to shake hands with the person who was responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in the field. 

Jacobs responded that he was on a search for answers to questions he had been carrying with him for over 40 years.  And in the television coverage of that meeting, he said that he and the Vietnamese general were alike – They both were in command of soldiers, and responsible for the lives and actions of the soldiers, just on opposing sides.

Jacobs returned to Vietnam not only as a way to look back but as a way to look inward, inside the present, into feelings and memories that were, that are, real and present, persistent thoughts following a time of great trial.

Is there danger in looking back?  Is there danger that we will find empathy where there once was none?  Will we question ourselves and our actions?

The angels who save the Life of Lot and his family warn them not to turn around and look back at the city they are leaving.  Why do they offer this warning?

Rashi explains that Lot had been corrupted by living amongst the people of Sodom and only by Abram’s merit did he escape—therefore, he must not look back on the destruction while he escapes. 

Here, Rashi argues that the warning is meant to prevent Lot from thinking that he escaped because of his own merit, and perhaps even to prevent schadenfreude—a sense of relief we feel when we witness the suffering of others and realize that we are not touched by it.

Radak explains the warning as a measure to prevent Lot from waiting to leave.  Do not look back, they warn, lest you get caught up in the destruction.

Rashbam suggests that the warning is a timeless one, that people must not gaze upon the presence of Divine beings and their actions, just as Moses himself would not be able to actually ‘see’ God one day at Mt. Sinai despite an earnest desire to commune with the Holy One.

It is interesting that there appears to be no warning against basic sentimentality, no warning against the possibility of returning someday to revisit the place where Lot and his family experienced conflict and later great loss of their home and possessions.

After hearing Col. Jacobs respond to the question, I find myself wondering whether Lot might have similar feelings, a need to search for answers to his practical and existential questions.  I wonder if Abram himself wants to revisit the cities that he tried to protect and search for evidence that there had in fact been 10 righteous people.

As we gather this evening and as Veterans Day, 11/11/11 comes to an end, I feel compelled to look backwards, to try to envision the individual journeys of millions of veterans who left home and went to serve all over the world.  And I recall hearing from a veteran of the Israeli army how he only knew the war from what happened between himself and the soldier marching in front of him, and I quote from Remarque’s classic book on WWI All Quiet on the Western Front “We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by."(Ch. 2) It is up to the community to keep alive the stories and energy of our veterans, to appreciate the causes for which they fought and their individual experiences on the way to battle, out in the field, and back on the homefront.

Lot also was in a conflict, and got out, so he is a veteran, too – a veteran who suffered great loss but also kept marching, kept moving toward the future.