Rav Soloveitchik, Margaret Mead, and the Jewish Generation Gap

In March 1969, Margaret Mead gave a series of lectures at the American Museum of Natural History which focused on a problem she called “the generation gap.” She noted that since the end of World War II, the younger generation had been rebelling against governmental and educational systems. Mead argued that this was occurring because nowhere in the world are there elders who know what children know... In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up with a cultural system. Today there are none. Contemporary culture is constantly evolving, and it is the younger generation that now knows best. The longstanding paradigm of wisdom being the province of the elders has now evaporated, and instead, the older and younger generations struggle for dominance, each certain of their own rectitude. For Mead, generation gaps are inevitable, and part of an ever-quickening process of cultural evolution. Her view is that the only end to this conflict is if the older generation abdicates their vision and ceases to be trapped in the past; instead, they should seek to pursue the future alongside the younger generation.

At a Pidyon Haben in 1974, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik offered a dramatically different understanding of the generation gap; namely, that with a timeless tradition, there is none. The baby boy at the Pidyon Haben was both the child and grandchild of the Rav’s students, and the topic of his speech was “The First Jewish Grandfather.” The Rav explained that contemporary man is so proud of his technological achievements that he has contempt for the past. His pride in progress makes him reject introspection. Scientific progress is mistaken for human progress, and the average person loses his appreciation for age-old insights into the human soul. A generation gap arises due to a lack of respect for the past. But, in the house of Jacob, Rav Soloveitchik explains, there is no generation gap. We see in this week’s Torah reading, Yaakov connects directly to his grandchildren, and leaps over the gulf of generations. This is because all who study Torah -  old and young -  are part of the same fraternity - the Mesorah community. The first Jewish grandfather teaches us how revelation and tradition erase the bounds of time. Rav Soloveitchik then dramatically describes his own classroom, where he, a teacher in his 70s, sits with students a half a century younger than himself. But as they study together, they bring the text to life; and Rabbis from centuries ago, Rashi, Rambam, Rabbi Akiva and others, join them in the classroom. The tradition unites young and old into one timeless generation.

 

Rav Soloveitchik’s lecture teaches us how the tradition ought to function. But that is not how it actually does. The irony is that today, the idea of “generation gap” is no longer relevant; in 21st century America, younger and older generations seem to work extremely well together. But the Jewish community is different. The 2013 Pew Portrait of American Jews reported runaway rates of assimilation. The younger generation of Jews, who are less embracing of Judaism, Jewish identity and Israel, don’t see eye to eye with their elders. There still is a Jewish generation gap.

 

Yaakov’s interaction with Ephraim and Menasheh actually tells us a different story. It is not the timelessness of the tradition that bonds old and young together; rather, it is the love of family that bridges the generation gap. When Yoseph brings Ephraim and Menasheh to his father, Yaakov asks: “Who are these?” This might be explained by Yaakov’s dimmed vision, or perhaps because he didn’t get to know his grandchildren well. But metaphorically, as the Midrash points out, this is a statement that expresses spiritual distance. Even Yoseph’s response, They are my sons, whom God has given me here expresses distance: Yoseph is explaining that these are the grandchildren born far away from the family home, in Egypt. Yaakov is confronting grandchildren who are foreign both in birth and in manner.

 

Yet Yaakov uses this moment to connect with love; he offers kisses, hugs and blessings.  And then he blesses Ephraim and Menasheh, and declares, In them may my name be recalled, And the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac.  Yes, Yaakov is saying, these children were born far from home and have lived at a distance from our family. But they, too, will carry our legacy; even these children raised in the court of Pharaoh will be part of the Jewish future.

 

The key to understanding this section is the word “name.” It reminds us that Menasheh and Ephraim have names that celebrate breaking away from Yaakov’s home. Yoseph named them when he was disconnected from his family, and their names mean “God has made me forget completely my hardship and my parental home” and “God has made me fertile in the land of my affliction.”  Their names represent a breaking away, an attempt to let go of the past and begin a new future. In offering Menasheh and Ephraim his own name, Yaakov brings them back home; they are forgotten children no more.  In one embrace, a painful separation is healed.

 

There are two methods for overcoming the generation gap. One way is to bond together in a timeless tradition, where young and old live simultaneously in the past, present and future. But that is not always a possibility. Not everyone connects to the tradition of Moshe on Sinai. But there is another way. They can respond to the embrace of Aharon, which will bridge differences and bring the Jewish family back together again.

 

When faced for the first time with a Jewish generation gap, Yaakov hugs, kisses, and blesses. And in uncertain times for Jewish identity, we might want to consider doing the same.

Rosh Hashanah 2020: How Do I Get Through This?

 

I was counseling a friend, a stay-at-home mother with two children, who was going through the dual crisis of bankruptcy and divorce. The question she asked me is one that still reverberates in my mind: How do I get through this?

Rabbis hear this difficult question all too often. There’s the  couple whose young son got an ear infection on Friday and whose funeral was the next Tuesday, and the person who went for a regular checkup and found out that she has a frightening disease. Standing at the threshold of a crisis, these people wonder if they will be able to cope with what lays ahead.

In the past year so many of us have been wondering: “how do I get through this”. While the Torah is not a psychology textbook, it does help us wrestle with the existential questions of life; and the texts of the Jewish tradition offer a great deal of guidance on how to navigate a crisis.  Humanity confronts its first crisis right at the beginning of the Bible, in the second chapter of Genesis, when Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden of Eden; and from there on, the texts of the Jewish tradition tell of generations of strugglers, people who grappled with personal and communal challenges.

The spiritual response to crisis recognizes that our spiritual lives are organized around different relationships. The Maharal of Prague, in his commentary to the beginning of Pirkei Avot, explains that there are three such relationships: between man and God, between man and his fellow man, and between man and himself. Man must always look inward, outward, and upward for inspiration; and all three relationships can help us overcome challenges.

We must look inward to find courage.

One of the great Biblical lessons about courage comes from our ancestor Jacob. The Bible describes the moments before he is about to confront his brother Esau. The twin brothers have not seen each other for 20 years; and the last time they did see each other, Esau vowed that he would murder Jacob.

Jacob gets up in the middle of that night to move his family, and then an angel comes and wrestles with him. But this is puzzling:  why is Jacob moving his family in the middle of the night, and why is God sending an angel to wrestle with him?

The Rashbam offers a fascinating explanation. Jacob was afraid, and had planned on running away from Esau that night. But God did not want Jacob to run away; and to teach Jacob the lesson of courage, he sent the angel to keep Jacob from fleeing. After wrestling the entire night, Jacob vanquishes the angel, and the angel then offers Jacob a new name, Israel, because Jacob "has wrestled with God and with man and prevailed".

The Rashbam's explanation fits the text very well, but it poses a further question of its own. How is it that Jacob is praised for wrestling that night, when in actuality he was a coward who wanted to run away?

The answer to this question has to do with an understanding of where courage comes from. Many believe that courage is inborn; but it's not.

Courage is not natural. But when you are thrown into a situation that demands courage, you can find an inner strength you never knew that you possessed, much like Jacob. And that itself deserves to be highlighted. The lesson Jacob teaches us about life is that we need to just jump in and wrestle. We all have a lot more courage than we imagine.

When I was a child, we had a basement that was foreboding for me, particularly at night; I was afraid to go down there. But my mother constantly encouraged me to go down into the basement. She felt strongly that I needed to train myself to overcome my fears.

It was only when I became an adult that I realized that my mother's insistence was autobiographical. She was a survivor of the Holocaust. As a teenager she was deported from a privileged home, wearing a fur coat and fancy jewelry. From there she was thrust into the horrors of the Holocaust overnight. In an instant, my mother had to train herself how to be courageous. And she truly was.

My mother was trying to teach me a life lesson that she had learned with a great deal of pain: you can do it. You don't need to be born with courage. In fact you don't even need to be courageous to have courage. You just have to be ready to wrestle when that is what life demands.

If there is a lesson we all need this year, It is a lesson that Jacob/Israel is teaching us: You can do it.

But we can’t get through the crisis alone. Our relationship with others is critical.

The first two human beings don't get off till a good start. Adam and Eve eat forbidden fruit, and when confronted by God over this failure, end up playing the blame game. This isn't a great start to a relationship.

And yet after being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, confronting a cruel, cursed existence, they find comfort in each other, have children and build a family.

One can fully see the shift in their relationship when Adam gives his wife an admiring new name, Eve, reflecting the fact that she is the mother of all mankind. (Before that she was simply the generic "isha", which means "woman".) This shows Adam's deepening respect for the woman he previously had bad-mouthed to God.

Then Adam and Eve endure a second crisis, even more horrible than the first. One of their sons murders the other. And yet they continue to build a family, and have another child, Seth.

Man is a social animal, and cooperation is critical to the success of any significant project. But it is in times of defeat and difficulty that we need each other more, for companionship and compassion. It is with love that we find renewed strength, and the ability to face even the most horrible of circumstances.

Adam and Eve remind us  of the power of love and family. And I've seen this demonstrated in the lives of friends who were survivors of the Holocaust.

I have one friend who, as a teenager, saw his brother murdered, and then escaped into the woods alone. He would tell me over and over again, that the first thing he wanted to do after the war was to start a family; and he built a flourishing multi-generational family. Another person I knew spent the last two years of the Holocaust in a Hungarian labor camp. There, one of the other inmates showed him a picture of his sister. He looked at the picture, and then looked at his friend and said: she is beautiful. I want to marry her.

And he did.

Even at the worst moments of their lives, these men were thinking about family and love. And that is inspirational.

Iddo Landau has written a book entitled “Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World”. At one point in the book he explains why the subject of meaning is so important to him. He writes that:

"I was born in the late 1950s and spent most of my childhood and youth in Jerusalem. Many of my neighbors, and some relatives were Holocaust survivors. I remember being impressed as a teenager by the ability some of of them had to lead meaningful and sometimes even happy lives….many of them had gone on to create new families and new lives...

Meeting some of these people in my youth left on me a strong impression that has lasted to this day."

This is finding strength through love.

Finally, we must also look upward. It is during crises that our relationship with God becomes strained. But there is one aspect of our relationship with God that becomes particularly important during this time.

There is an element of faith that many Jewish thinkers refer to as "bitachon". According to Rav Avraham Yeshayah Karelitz, the Chazon Ish, it refers to a faith that God has a plan for each of us. But how does one understand God's plan for us? 

I believe that bitachon  is about recognizing that our existence has been endowed by God for a greater purpose, and that we all have a mission in life. And we sometimes find our mission at our most painful moments.

One of the more remarkable survivors of the Holocaust was the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam. The war had taken the lives of his wife and their eleven children, but the Rebbe continued to be a true spiritual leader, and after the war gave strength and encouragement to thousands of other survivors. During a death march, the Rebbe was shot in the shoulder, and he lost a considerable amount of blood. As he was losing his strength he made a vow to God: “If I merit to survive, I will garner all my energies to build a hospital in the Holy Land where every human being will receive the same dedicated medical care irrespective of nationality or creed.”

After the war he kept his vow. In 1955 he started to work on the project of building a hospital in Netanya. After nearly 20 years, his hospital, the Laniado Hospital in Netanya, opened in 1975.

Not all of us will end up building a hospital. But the mission we need to find is not necessarily one of decades or years. As the Baal Shem Tov once said, "a soul may descend to this world and live seventy or eighty years just in order to do one good deed."

Sometimes even one act of kindness is a transcendent mission; one care basket for a lonely neighbor, one phone call to a long lost friend. We all have a mission to fulfill, and it is in times of crisis that we need to embrace it firmly.

These are Jewish lessons about crisis: reach inward for courage, reach outward in love, and look upward in search of our destiny.

When we look back years and decades later, we can see how powerful these responses are.

Let me end with one example.

 On June 22, 2016, I officiated at a special wedding in Caesarea, Israel.

 The bride was the granddaughter of my late friend John from Montreal. He was a survivor of the Holocaust whose entire family, except for his mother, were murdered by the Nazis.

 When I arrived in Israel, John told me he had been up for a few nights thinking about the date June 22nd. Like all weddings, the couple had chosen the date for logistical reasons, but in the back of John’s mind he knew June 22nd was also a very important date; he just couldn’t remember why.

 Then 2 days before the wedding, John realized that on June 22nd, 1941, the Germans had invaded Russia. It was on that day that the Russians took him away for military service, and it was the last day John saw his father, brothers and sister. June 22, 1941 was a tragic day in Jewish history, and on that day John’s young life was torn apart.

 But then 75 years later, something else was happening on June 22. His granddaughter was getting married in Israel to a veteran of an elite IDF unit. John could barely imagine that he would survive, and now his granddaughter was getting married in the Jewish state.

 This is what the response to crisis looks like 75 years later.

 And right now, as we continue to struggle with this crisis, we should remember that with courage, love and a sense of purpose, we can transform the world. 

 Shanah Tovah!

What True Leadership Looks Like: 2 Minute Wisdom

Why This Tisha B'Av Must be Different: Short Remarks for Tisha B'Av Evening

This Tisha B'Av must be different.

There is a custom among some Chasidic Jews to play pranks on each other on Tisha B'Av. In many places to have the children throw berelach, little thistles during Kinot to lighten up the mood. Chasidic leaders felt that the Jews in Eastern Europe lived with too much difficulty and sadness, and a painful Tisha B'Av would do more harm than good.

These strange customs have a firm foundation in the themes of the day. Tisha B'Av has two sides to it. It is first and foremost, a day of mourning and grief. It is the day in which we remember not just the destruction of both Temples, but all of the catastrophes during the 2000 years of exile.

But aside from this, there is another side. Tisha B'Av is also a day of comfort. On the afternoon of Tisha B'Av, we recite a prayer, Nachem, to ask for comfort. We get up from our low chairs, put on our tallit and tefillin, and in these small comforts recall the Talmudic tradition that the Messiah will be born on Tisha B'Av.

Most years, it is more important to discuss the difficult side of Tisha B'Av. It is easy for us who are so comfortable to lose touch with the difficulties our ancestors endured. It is easy for us to become complacent and not search for a way to make the world better.

But this year, we must have a Chasidic Tisha B'Av. We have had enough difficulty and enough uncertainty. We do not need to be brought lower, to find greater sadness. Right now, we need to find as much comfort as we can, even on Tisha B'Av.

And the comfort that we have is in recognizing how far we have come. We need to recognize that the previous generations, whose tragedies we mourn, would have so much joy to see how far we have come. We have built a State of Israel, a miracle on the world stage. We have come so far.

Danny Gordis related an anecdote from the years of the intifada:

 But I’ll always remember what Siggy said to me one morning, in the midst of the intifada, as we were about to recite Yizkor.

It was a time in Jerusalem when life was sad, and often frightening…..That holiday morning, as I made my way out of shul for Yizkor (since my immediate family is all still living), Siggy, who sat not far from the door, grabbed my arm just as I was about to step outside.

“You’re going out for Yizkor?” he asked me. When I nodded, somewhat perplexed, he continued. “When we first got here, after the war, there wasn’t a single person who could go out for Yizkor.

Not a single one.” And then, he said, “Ba’u od milhamot venaflu od banim.”

“More wars followed, and more boys fell.  So for more years, no one could go out for Yizkor.”

He stopped for a moment, and I saw that his lips were trembling, ever so slightly. He pointed to the courtyard right outside our shul. “Ve’achshav, tistakel – kulam bahutz.” “And now, look!” he pressed me. “Everyone’s outside.” “Hamedina hazot nes.” “This country is a miracle.”

This year has so many of us feeling so low, after a 4-month battle with a horrible plague; but we can turn to Tisha B'Av for comfort. We can look at the arc of history, and recognize that we truly are the privileged ones. Even as we suffer, we are comforted by the fact that we already have overcome so much, and we will continue to do so in the future.

And we can be comforted that if the authors of the Kinot were here today, they would be smiling, even if it is Tisha B’Av.

Smiling on Yom HaShoah

Hi! I had an article published on the Times of Israel website on Yom HaShoah. you can access it by clicking here

(in case the Times of Israel website has any issues on April 6-7, I've also posted the article below)

Smiling on Yom HaShoah

Yom HaShoah is the saddest day on the calendar. It is not only the deaths of 6,000,000 that overwhelms us; it is the barbarity with which they were murdered. Each atrocity shocks the soul. Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground who was one of the first witnesses to report about the Holocaust, described an atrocity he witnessed in Izbica, Eastern Poland. There, multiple groups of 120-130 Jews were forced into train cars made to fit 40 people, and the doors were slammed shut. On the floor of the train was quicklime powder, a chemical that generates enormous heat when mixed with water. The human sweat dripping down to the floor caused the quicklime to bubble, and painfully and slowly, the inhabitants of the cars began to burn. These poor victims cried in agony for over a day until they met their inevitable deaths. Remembering the Holocaust forces us to recall some of the most barbaric massacres in the history of mankind.

It’s beyond painful to contemplate the Holocaust, but we do so out of a sense of obligation.  Remarkably, for many years the Holocaust was ignored. Peter Novick documents in The Holocaust in American Life the lack of interest American Jews showed in the Holocaust during the 50's and 60's. There were no communal commemorations, just small inconspicuous events organized by survivors, for survivors. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg describes the experience of being a young American attending an early Holocaust memorial service as similar to “crashing a funeral”. In the 50’s and 60’s, survivors felt pressured to remain silent about their experiences, and were urged by their American contemporaries to “stop dwelling on the past”. Novick points out that this phenomenon was due in part to the myth that the victims of the Holocaust were weak, docile sheep lead to slaughter. In a postwar atmosphere of confidence and self-reliance, the survivor was an “embarrassment” because he was considered an example of “cowardice”.

Today the Holocaust is no longer marginalized. Holocaust education is a staple of public school curriculums, and Yom  HaShoah is widely commemorated around the world. Holocaust survivors are no longer marginalized either.  Survivors have been able to bear witness. Tens of thousands of them have told their -stories, ensuring the history of Holocaust is neither denied nor forgotten.

But what is often overlooked is the remarkable achievements the survivors have had after the war. A full account of the impact Holocaust survivors have had on the postwar Jewish community has not yet been written; but their contributions are nothing short of heroic.

Yes, many survivors did not fully recover from their traumatic wartime experiences. Some could no longer function, and lived solitary lives supported by distant relatives. Others were dysfunctional and carried lifelong scars, scars that still affect the lives of their children and grandchildren. But contrary to stereotype, there were many Holocaust survivors who flourished after the war. A list of the of successful survivors would read like a Who’s Who, and would include the winners of the Nobel Prizes in Peace (Elie Weisel), Literature (Imre Kertesz) and Chemistry (Walter Kohn), a Brigadier General who commanded U.S. Army forces in Europe (Sidney Shachnow), technology innovators (including Andy Grove of Intel), corporate titans, real estate magnates, and the like. Even those who didn’t achieve fame and fortune have left powerful impressions. My late mother, a survivor of Auschwitz, was widowed at a young age and raised four children on her own, in a home filled with warmth and compassion.

What is remarkable is how the survivors succeeded after experiencing such profound trauma. William Helmreich, a sociologist, wrote a book based on a study of 170 survivors called Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America. He explains that he conducted this study in order to answer the following questions:

“How do people who have experienced such cataclysmic events pick up the threads of their lives?…what lessons can the rest of us learn from the survivors about coping with tragedy and adversity?”


Helmreich found that survivors were able to thrive because of a combination of personality traits, including flexibility, assertiveness, courage, optimism, tenacity, and the ability to find meaning.  Because of these attributes, survivors were able to overcome tragedy and rebuild their lives. Looking back, the slur that survivors were cowards has been more than disproven by the exemplary courage with which they lived after the war. And 68 years after the Holocaust, Jewish communities around the world are far stronger because of the contributions of survivors. They deserve our appreciation for all they have done.

Each year the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre conducts a Yom HaShoah service at our synagogue. In recent years, the format has included a section where six survivors tell their testimonies on video, and then each survivor stands up to light one of six memorial candles. The video testimonies break your heart; you hear about the horrific losses these survivors experienced, how their parents and brothers and sisters were torn away from them a tender age, while they were left alone to fend for themselves.  The survivors speak --with profound emotion, and while listening to their words, tears start to roll down my cheeks.

But then the survivor gets up to light the candle. At our service, each survivor lights the candle accompanied by a child and a grandchild. For me, that is when I both cry and smile. Despite all that these survivors have gone through, they still didn’t quit; and they’ve not only survived, they’ve thrived. Here they are, 68 years later, standing with their children and grandchildren. 68 years later, they have rebuilt their families and homes, and made profound contributions to our community. Even though it is Yom  HaShoah, I cannot stop myself from smiling as I watch them, with a little bit of joy and a lot of pride. Thanks to these survivors, we can still declare “Am Yisrael chai”, the Jewish people live on.

Eddie's Kaddish

There are no words.

Why Jews Fight, Why Your Kindly Uncle is a Racist, and Why Your Cousin is Volunteering in Senegal: The Mysteries of Love Explained, in 1000 Words

Montreal’s Orthodox Jewish community is situated alongside a five mile stretch of Van Horne Avenue-Fleet Road. On this road, ranging from west to east, is every philosophy of Orthodoxy from left to right. In the west is the “modern” Orthodox area; traveling east, you pass through the neighborhood of the Lubavitch Chassidim. Further east are the neighborhoods for “Litvishe”, and then “Chassidishe” Jews.

In June, communities in the west and east gathered for the sake of “pidyon shevuyim”, releasing captives who have been unjustly incarcerated. In the east, a communal meeting was held on behalf of Yaakov Grunwald, Yoel Goldstein and Yossi Bandau, three young Chassidic boys who were caught smuggling drugs and imprisoned in Japan. In the west, synagogues gathered to pray for Gilad Shalit, the 23 year old Israeli soldier who was kidnapped by Hamas on June 25th three years ago.

Of course, I worry about all of these young men. I worry for the prisoners in Japan, who naively thought they were making a delivery for a member of their community. I worry for Gilad Shalit, who is being held by violent, hate filled terrorists who want to torture and murder him. But I worry most about our community. How is it that on one side of Decarie barely a word is mentioned about Grunwald, Goldstein and Bandau, and on the other side, all are silent about Shalit? Each community seems to pursuing narrow interests, working to release the captives that are one of their “own”. It seems that despite physical proximity, the world of the “modern” Orthodox community in the west and the ultra-Orthodox community in the east couldn’t be further apart. And the divide within the Orthodox community in Montreal is a common one, found in communities around the world from Brooklyn to Beit Shemesh. And as disappointing as this inter-Orthodox divide is, it pales in comparison with the battles between secular and religious in Israel, and the split between Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews around the world. And of course, if we consider the divisions between Jew, Christian and Muslim, Black and White, ethnic rivalries, political rivalries, etc, etc., you begin to realize that the world can be a pretty divided place. Loving one’s fellow man is a challenging task indeed.

What makes love so difficult? There are two primary challenges. One is xenophobia, the fear of the stranger. Human nature is such that we meet people who are different than us with condescension and concern. The stranger is viewed as a threat or an inferior, either as someone who we fear may abuse us, or someone whom we desire to abuse. In some instances, both xenophobic images are combined. The biblical Egyptians, frightened at the increasing strength of the local Jewish population, decide to enslave the despicable, insect-like Jews. Later, the Nazis would also present a contradictory picture of the Jews, as both manipulative, omnipotent creatures, and as dirty and despicable vermin. The incoherence of this picture is irrelevant; xenophobia stirs up the irrational.

Ironically, xenophobia doesn’t discriminate in its pursuit of discrimination. Any difference, including skin color, religion, and even gender can inspire xenophobia. And xenophobia is a two way street; Christians can hate Jews because of their religion, but Jews can hate Christians just as intensely. The subtlest of differences can feed the paranoia xenophobia depends on.

The second challenge to love comes from closeness. Freud used the phrase “the narcissism of small differences” to describe the work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley. Crawley discovered that groups with greater degrees of similarity would often treat each other with greater degrees of enmity and aggression than strangers. Indeed, the people most similar to us upset us the most, because we expect them to be exactly like us, and are disappointed when they aren’t. (Which is why it shouldn’t be a surprise that in the Book of Genesis, sibling conflict is the virulent and frequent. Siblings are the ones most like ourselves, and therefore the people most capable of inspiring the narcissism of small differences).

The narcissism of small differences is why many Orthodox Jews spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the material and size of their kippot, and why the minutiae of Shabbat laws can inspire a synagogue battle royale over the use of frosted greetings on birthday cakes. Despite being only .02 percent of the world’s population, even Orthodox Jews find it hard to get along with each other.

Everyone wants to love someone, and so many choose to love some people and ignore others. Some people love those closest to them so intensely, they immediately disdain those who are different; xenophobia gets in the way of universal love. Others desire to embrace the exotic, and find it difficult to care for their boring and unenlightened kinfolk; here, the narcissism of small differences gets in the way truly universal love. This is why your uncle, who is deeply devoted to community, says the most despicably racist things at the dinner table; and this is why your cousin volunteers summers in Senegal, but completely ignores the people of Sderot.

The Torah requires that we open our hearts to both kinds of love. It commands us to love the neighbor, the people closest, and most annoying, to us; it also requires that we learn to love the stranger, the person who is suspiciously different. The genius of these two parallel commandments is that for some it is a challenge to love the stranger, while for others, it’s loving our neighbors that gets complicated.

God demands of us to love his children, all 6.6 Billion of them. That includes your irritating second cousin and the strange looking foreigner on the subway; and believe it or not, it even includes the Jews five miles down the road.

Michael Vick’s Reinstatement: One Rabbi’s Thoughts

I’m a serious football fan. (Football has contributed to my spiritual development by teaching me the virtue of patience; I’m a Jets fan). So I paid a great deal of attention to the NFL’s reinstatement of Michael Vick.

Michael Vick is a talented quarterback (drafted first overall in 2001), who by 2004 was one of the highest paid athletes in the world. In 2007 it was discovered that Vick was running an illegal dogfighting ring on a property he owned in Virginia. (This was just one incident in a pattern of troubling behavior that Vick had shown in his six years in the NFL). He was convicted of Federal and State charges, and served nearly a year and a half of jail time. He was suspended from the NFL, and had to declare personal bankruptcy.

On July 27th, Vick was reinstated to play in the NFL. This reinstatement is conditional, provided that Vick follows a set of conditions to ensure he improves his personal behavior.

Vick’s reinstatement is extremely controversial, as many feel that Vick should banned for life because of his crimes. Personally, I don’t agree. Let me explain.

No question, animal cruelty is a serious crime. Rules against animal cruelty are included in the Noahide laws, Judaism’s universal laws for humanity. There is no way to diminish the crime of animal cruelty by claiming “it’s just dogs”.

And without question, punishment must be meted out for crimes. This is true even in cases where the person has changed their ways. As I have pointed out elsewhere, human justice cannot constantly adjust to the spiritual status of the criminal. There needs to be consistent penalties for the justice system to function as a deterrent.

But Vick has been punished for his crimes. There is no need for the NFL to punish Vick a second time for his crimes.

However, the real question facing the NFL is this: does Michael Vick deserve forgiveness? The Talmud is clear that punishment alone doesn’t rehabilitate the criminal. The criminal must commit to act differently in the future, and regret his past actions; in short, the criminal must repent. There’s no reason for the NFL to treat Vick as a citizen in good standing, just because he was released from jail.

To offer Vick an unconditional reinstatement would have been a mistake, because a criminal remains a criminal until he has changed his ways. That is why the current conditional reinstatement is the right way to do things. Vick is not being given a free pass; he must commit to be a good citizen in the future. But if Vick is willing to change his ways, to repent, he should be given a second chance. The prophet Ezekiel (18:21-23) declares that God wants to offer second chances to those who repent: "Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? Says the Lord, God; and not rather that he should return from his ways and live?".

If God is ready to offer Michael Vick a second chance, we should offer him one as well.

Where Are The Jewish Susan Boyles?

On April 11th, a star was born.

On that day, a frumpy looking 47 year old woman named Susan Boyle, (who was single and unemployed), auditioned for the TV show “Britain’s Got Talent”. She took the stage to condescending glances and derisive smirks; however, by the time she finished singing, she got a standing ovation. Within hours Susan was a YouTube sensation, with the video of her performance totaling a hundred million hits in just a few days. This unknown Scottish woman was actually an exceptional singer whose talent had been overlooked for decades.

The Susan Boyle story reminds us how often we let talent get wasted. All too often, jobs and opportunities are awarded to people based on appearances, connections and relationships. A Harvard degree is now valued not for it’s superior education, but rather because it allows students to comfortably network with the corporate and political elite. All too often talented outsiders find it difficult to pursue their dreams, and the Susan Boyle’s of the world are often left in the cold.

The question the Jewish community has to ask itself is this: where are the Jewish Susan Boyles? How many Jews have been frozen out of our community because they have neither the connections nor resources to be welcomed in?

The culture of Torah scholarship was once profoundly anti-elitist; indeed, the Mishnah exhorts Rabbis to “raise up many students”. The Talmud is filled with tales of outsiders who become significant Rabbis. Shemaya and Avtalyon, the teachers of Hillel and Shamai, were converts. Rabbi Akiva was an ignorant shepherd. Most dramatically, Reish Lakish was a common criminal who got invited into the world of Torah study by the greatest Rabbi of his time, Rabbi Yochanan. The rabbis of the Talmud saw enormous potential in every human being, and insisted on opening the door to “non-traditional students”.

In one passage in the Talmud there is a cautionary tale about the dangers of elitism. The great scholar Hillel was a poor woodchopper who would save his last pennies to pay admission into the study hall. One cold winter day, he simply didn’t have the money to pay the admission fee, and Hillel was turned away by the guard at the door. Hillel decided to listen to the lecture though a window, and in the process nearly froze to death. Luckily, the Rabbis inside spied his image through the window, and saved his life.

This passage has a simple message: if you barricade the doors to the study hall, you’ll leave great Rabbis like Hillel out in the cold. Hillel, a poor, unknown woodchopper, ended up being the leader of the Jewish people.

Today unknown Jews without status or connections are often left out in the cold as well. They remain at the periphery, alienated by a country club atmosphere that pervades the Jewish community. Some are excluded because of money, finding it difficult to pay for day school tuitions and synagogue memberships while struggling to pay mortgages. Others feel excluded by Jewish institutions that are insular and unwelcoming. When an outsider wanders in, they are made to feel like an intruder, as both the layman and professionals show little interest in greeting new faces.

Sadly, our community pays dearly. Years ago, a friend (“Donna”) told me of an experience she had in a synagogue. “Donna” had gotten curious about Judaism, and decided one day to enter her local synagogue. There, she was completely ignored by the congregants, as if she were invisible. “Donna” left the synagogue alienated, and refused to go back to synagogue for years.

It’s important that we take Donna’s experience to heart. “Donna” is an outsider, a Jewish Susan Boyle. And as task force after task force ponders how to fix the problems of Jewish continuity, we need to think about the Jewish Susan Boyles. Oftentimes, these task forces issue exotic and expensive recommendations. In actuality, a critical element in solving the problem of Jewish continuity is free: we simply need to make our institutions more welcoming. We need to say hello to visitors, and include them in our community. We need to invite in the Susan Boyles of our community, and make them feel at home. Who know? Maybe we’ll be welcoming in the next generation’s Hillel.

If we want to find the Jewish Susan Boyles, the answer is simple: they are at the entrance of every Jewish institution, waiting for someone to smile and open the door.