Am Echad Resources: Information and Opinion from a Traditional Jewish Perspective

MUCH ADO ABOUT SHMITTAH

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Those "Ultra-Orthodox" in Israel are at it again, inventing new stringencies, coercing other Jews, trying to make a dishonest buck and generally making life unlivable for everybody else.

At least that is what seems to emerge from recent reportage about the "Agricultural Sabbatical Year," or Shmittah, ushered in on Rosh Hashana.

The New York Times contended that an Israeli Chief Rabbi, because he respected a revered elder rabbinical leader's judgment, is "considered" - by whom was not clarified - "a puppet" of the senior rabbi.

A New York Sun columnist insinuated that a religious legal decision was born of a desire to make money on the backs of the poor. "There are, after all, no farmers in the ultra-Orthodox community," wrote Hillel Halkin, wrongly, "and plenty of rabbis and kashrut supervisors who will find jobs making sure that Jewish-grown fruits and vegetables are not, G-d forbid, being smuggled into the diet of unsuspecting Israelis."

And a New York Jewish Week editorial both got its facts wrong (contending that the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, by setting a kashrut certification standard, had "disallowed" food of lower standards) and saw fit to invoke an unsubstantiated accusation of moral turpitude against one rabbi and the arrest of another's family member as indictments of the rabbis' religious legal opinions.

Some Israeli publications were shriller still. The Jerusalem Report characterized the granting of permission to local rabbis to set their communities' kashrut standards thus: "Confrontation looms as the increasingly powerful ultra-Orthodox camp flexes its muscles and attempts to impose strict observance of the Shmittah commandment on all Israelis."

Irresponsible media coverage of haredim is nothing new. But were such misinformation and provocation used against Jews rather than against some Jews, it would be roundly condemned as something worse than journalism-as-usual.

The facts:

The Torah enjoins Jews privileged to live in the Holy Land to not till or plant in Jewish-owned soil during each seventh year, known as Shmittah. What grows of its own is to be treated as ownerless and may not be sold. Shmittah-observance bespeaks our recognition that the land is the L-rd's, and its merit allows Jews to, in the words of Leviticus [25:19], "abide in the land, in safety." For Jews who believe that Israel perseveres only through miracles, Shmittah is no minor mitzvah.

When substantial numbers of Jews began to return to the Holy Land in the 19th century, some farmers among them endeavored to observe Shmittah; most, though, living in deep poverty, did not. As a result, in 1896, religious leaders, including haredi rabbis, approved a fall-back plan whereby land owned by Jews was technically transferred to the possession of an Arab for the duration of the Shmittah year. That way, Jewish farmers would be acting as sharecroppers rather than as tillers of their own Shmittah-qualifying soil.

During subsequent Shmittah years, many farmers continued to rely on that "sale loophole" or "heter mechira." And when the state of Israel was created, the official state Rabbinate endorsed it as well.

A few farmers, though, opted to observe Shmittah in its original way, allowing their fields to lie fallow and relying on other income or charity (ultimately, on G-d), to make it through the months when they could not farm and sell produce. As a result, in the 1950s and 1960s, about 250 acres of land "rested" as per the Biblical injunction.

Later Shmittah years saw increasing number of farmers follow suit. Seven years ago, the number of acres left untilled had risen more than 200-fold from the 60s, to 55,000. This year, 3000-3500 farmers will be observing Shmittah, and 100,000 acres are expected to be left fallow in accordance with the Torah's direction. Every major Orthodox kashrut-certification agency in North America approves only Israeli produce hewing to the highest Shmittah standard.

The reasons for the growth of Shmittah-observance are several, among them a general trend toward greater observance, recognition of the ad-hoc nature of the heter mechira, and the experience of farmers who not only did not suffer for their Shmittah observance but experienced unusual blessings.

So what's with all the negative press? Good question.

This year, Israel's Chief Rabbinate declared that while it still did not oppose reliance on the heter mechira, it was, for the first time, permitting municipal rabbis in Israel's towns and cities, when issuing kashrut certifications, to decide for their localities whether to rely on that fall-back standard or opt for the original one.

From the reaction, one might think that the Chief Rabbis had declared an extra year of Shmitta rather than simply taken a pluralistic stance on religious standards. Israel's agriculture minister, Shalom Simhon, thundered a threat to forbid imports from Arab-owned land (which meet the higher Shmittah standard). Media like the Jewish Week misleadingly described the new policy as some sort of prohibition. Even in cities where the municipal rabbi has not granted kosher certification for heter mechira produce, nothing prevents a vendor from selling such produce (sans a Rabbinate kashrut-sticker) - which will surely be less expensive than the rabbinically-sanctioned fruits and vegetables.

But, as the New York Times article admitted, about Jerusalem haredim: "The community is already among the poorest in Jerusalem, but the rulings of their rabbis matter far more to them than money."

And speaking of money, Jews outside Israel are putting theirs where their beliefs are.

A 35-year-old organization, Keren Hashvi'is, raises millions of dollars each Shmittah year to help support Shmittah-observant farmers. Most donations are relatively small, from people of limited means - testifying to the broad and deep connection tens of thousands of Jews worldwide feel to their Israeli brethren farming holy soil. (In the United States, Keren Hashvi'is operates from Agudath Israel of America's Manhattan offices.)

But jaundiced eyes see only haredi Jews poisoning Jewish wells. It is a truly strange panorama: Observers usually enamored of ecological and liberal ideals have somehow been transformed into fierce opponents of leaving nature alone, of providing Arabs with extra income and of permitting individual rabbis to rule in accordance with their consciences.

And in the background, religiously dedicated farmers are doing what they believe will merit security and peace for the Holy Land, with help from Jews across Israel and around the world.

Keren Hashvi'is, which accepts donations by credit card, can be reached at 1-888-9-SHMITTAH.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

STAR POWER

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The symbol commonly known as the Magen David ("Shield of David") or more colloquially as the "Jewish Star," is the subject of an unusual responsum written by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein in 1968 (Igrot Moshe, Orach Chaim 3, 15).

The familiar six-pointed polygon yielded by two superimposed triangles adorns countless synagogue ark-curtains and Torah-covers, containers for religious items and pieces of jewelry.

And, of course, the Israeli flag, set between two broad stripes meant to evoke a talit, or Jewish prayer-shawl. It was, in fact, that appropriation of the Jewish star symbol which formed the basis of the question posed to the famed decisor of Jewish law: Since the State of Israel is the fruition of an essentially secular, political dream - Herzl's Judenstaadt - is the Magen David symbol appropriate as an adornment for religious items?

Rabbi Feinstein replied that regardless of what service the symbol may have been pressed into, it remains an ancient Jewish emblem, and is therefore entirely properly displayed in synagogues and on religious objects.

What the Magen David signifies, however, the revered rabbi continued, is not entirely clear. Despite the hexagram's antiquity, there seems to be no authoritative Jewish source that addresses its significance.

All the same, Rabbi Feinstein suggests that the six-pointed form symbolizes G-d's dominion over all of space ("above and below and in all four directions").

We experience our universe in three spatial dimensions. To pinpoint the location of an object, in other words, one must identify its latitude, longitude and altitude with respect to some other fixed point. Things can be moved in two directions along each of those three axes, and so a six-pointed figure symbolizes all of space - and, in the case of the Magen David, reminds us how the universe is transcended by the Divine.

As to the Jewish Star's connection to King David, writes Rabbi Feinstein, "perhaps it signifies that David, during the wars he fought, relied on G-d, Who rules over [all of the universe], and thus, as the Torah commanded, never feared mortal kings and their armies."

G-d's hand, so apparent to King David, was evident as well to many Jews - even of secular bent - in 1948, when Jews living in the Jewish ancestral land repelled the attack of the Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese armies set on obliterating the nascent Jewish State and its inhabitants.

Similarly, in 1967, Israel's routing of the armies and air forces of its belligerent neighbors Egypt, Syria and Jordan (assisted by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Algeria) - what came to be known as the Six-Day War - was widely regarded as miraculous. The religious Jewish identities of untold numbers of Israeli and American Jews were forged by that summer's events.

Others, though, less willing to concede supernatural impact on earthly matters, chose to write off Israel's dazzling victories as the predictable yield of superior military intelligence and fighting forces. That attitude became increasingly common, particularly in the boasts of Israeli leaders.

In 1973, however, amid vocal Israeli confidence in early warning systems and air superiority, came the Yom Kippur War, exposing the limitations of such achievements. Israel - although she thankfully managed to prevail in the end - was not able to forestall - or even foresee - an attack launched against her by Egypt and Syria (again aided by other Arab states). The bubble of Israeli military invincibility was burst.

Two inconclusive wars in Lebanon later, the sobering only continues. Israel, despite its vaunted military might, has become politically precarious. Of late, calls for her destruction - from within, through an unfettered "right of return" for descendents of once-resident Arabs; and from without, in the form of blatant threats from points east - have alarmingly increased, both in frequency and intensity.

Still and all, miracles - of a sort easily overlooked by all but sensitive eyes - abound. Terrorist intentions are foiled, explosives detonate in the hands of their crafters and rockets fall harmlessly in fields. Improbable missions like the recent bombardment of a mysterious, but no doubt worthy, target in Syria succeed. Such small salvations elicit deep gratitude to G-d from religious Jews. And the usual expressions of hubris from others, including all too many Israeli leaders, who rarely speak of - and seem oblivious to - the Divine.

To those, though, who include in their daily prayers a plea for the safety and security of our fellow Jews in the Holy Land, who daily recite specially designated Psalms in their merit, the future of the Jewish presence in the Jewish land - the future of all Jews everywhere - remains not in our hands but in G-d's.

And, in the light of Rabbi Feinstein's nearly four-decade-old words, we perceive a subtle but striking irony: The true key to Israel's security, as unrecognized as it may be to some, has been hiding in plain sight since the Jewish State's founding, fluttering in the wind above every Israeli government building and military outpost.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE SUKKAH STILL STANDS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

There is simply no describing the plaintive, moving melody to which Yiddish writer Avraham Reisen's poem was set. As a song, it is familiar to many of us who were introduced to it by immigrant parents or grandparents. And, remarkably, the strains of "A Sukkeleh," no matter how often we may have heard them, still tend to choke us up.

Based on Reisen's "In Sukkeh," the song, whose popular title means "A Little Sukkah," really concerns two sukkot, one literal, the other metaphorical, and the poem, though it was written at the beginning of the last century, remains tender, profound and timely.

Several years ago, thinking about the song, as so many invariably do every year this season, it occurred to me to try to render it into English for readers unfamiliar with either the song or the language in which it was written. I'm not a professional translator, and my rendering, below, is not perfectly literal. But it's close, and is faithful to the rhyme scheme and meter of the original.

Here goes:

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

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

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

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

As we approach the holiday of Sukkot and celebrate the divine protection our ancestors were afforded during their forty years' wandering in the Sinai desert, we are supposed - indeed, commanded - to be happy. We refer to Sukkot, in our Amidah prayer, as "the time of our joy."

And yet, at least seen superficially, Jewish joy seems misplaced and elusive these days. Jews are brazenly and cruelly murdered in our ancestral homeland, hated and attacked on the streets of not only European cities but places like Canada and Australia as well - and here in the United States, our numbers are falling to the internal adversaries of intermarriage and assimilation.

The poet, however, well captured a transcendent Sukkot-truth. With temperatures dropping and winter's gloom not a great distance away, our sukkah-dwelling is indeed a quiet but powerful statement: We are secure, ultimately protected as a people, if not necessarily as individuals.

And the Jewish people's security is sourced in nothing so flimsy as a fortified edifice; it is protection provided us by G-d Himself, in the merit of our forefathers, and of our own emulation of their dedication to the Divine.

So, no matter how loudly the winds and the tyrants may howl, no matter how vulnerable our physical fortresses may be, we give harbor to neither despair nor insecurity. No, instead we redouble our recognition that, in the end, G-d is in charge, that all is in His hands.

And that, as it has for millennia, the sukkah continues to stand.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

MONEY MATTERS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

As I waited for a bus the other day, a car stopped in front of me at a traffic light. The teen-age boys inside stared at me and smiled - in a peculiar way that I, an identifiably Orthodox Jew, have come to recognize as something other than friendly. As the light changed, the boy riding shotgun flipped a coin at my feet as the car's occupants whooped with glee.

Ah, America. In the old country (my parents', that is; I was born and bred here), Jews had to endure things rather worse than being mocked as money-hungry. My father, may he be well, remembers being confined to his house in a Polish town during certain Christian holidays, when the locals, whipped into a frenzy by their spiritual guides, would devoutly attack any Jews they happened upon after church services. He remembers Siberia too, where Soviet authorities hosted him in a labor camp; and, of course, his parents and seven siblings, all but two of whom were murdered by the Nazis and their eager Polish allies.

Me, the American, I get quarters thrown at me. Persecution, at least in these blessed United States, isn't what it used to be - thank G-d.

I didn't pick up the coin, of course, as the teens had surely hoped I would. The others at the bus stop similarly ignored the offering, out of (I think) embarrassment over the boys' attempt at insult.

And yet the quarter, lying there idle, bothered me; I had to consciously resist retrieving it. No, not because I'm money-grubbing. But, yes, because I'm Jewish. Judaism teaches me that everything - even a coin - matters.

The kids' insinuation that Jews are slaves to lucre was hilariously ironic. If any life is lived in obsession over possessions and the means of acquiring them, it's that of the typical American youth. The car's occupants likely spend half of each day lusting after cars, music, jewelry, stylish clothing and high-tech toys - and the other half grabbing as much of it as they possibly can.

And if anyone is blessedly spared the torments of what passes in some parts these days for neediness, it is the typical observant Jew. I don't feel in the least deprived for wearing simple clothes, taking public transportation (why I was at a bus stop in the first place) or using a phone that doesn't take pictures, access the internet and poach eggs. My wife and I are happy to be able to pay our bills (particularly our tuition bills, the largest item in our budget). And our most valued possessions are things Amazon.com doesn't even carry.

The reason I wanted to pick up the quarter I'd been given was the example of the Jewish forefather Jacob.

The Torah recounts how Jacob, about to meet his estranged brother and would-be murderer Esau, after transporting his family and possessions across a river, took pains to cross back over again. The Talmud conveys a tradition that the reason Jacob returned (and came thereby to be injured in a struggle with Esau's spiritual manifestation), was to retrieve some "small jars."

"From here we see," the Rabbis went on to explain, "that the possessions of the righteous are as dear to them as their bodies."

That comment does not mean to counsel miserliness; Jacob is described as meticulously honest, a "simple man, a dweller in the tents [of Torah-study]"; he is the forefather emblematic of the ideal of "truth" or honesty. What the Talmud is conveying is a deep and quintessentially Jewish recognition: Physical currency has real worth, because it can be exchanged for truly meaningful things.

A dollar, for most people, is a dollar. It can buy a drink or a trinket or half a New York subway fare. But a dollar can also buy a thirsty friend a drink, or a get-well card for someone ailing, or half the fare for the ride to the hospital to deliver it in person. It can be put into the pushkeh - the charity box found in many Jewish homes and every synagogue - or given as a reward to a child who has performed a good deed.

Possessions are but tools, in their essence morally neutral; put to a holy purpose, sublime. And so, Judaism teaches, valuing a coin can be a sign not of avarice but of wisdom.

It's unfortunate - no, tragic - that some of us may have remembered the importance of valuing money but forgotten the reason for its value. And certainly, to acquire assets through less than honest methods is the very antithesis of the example set by the Jewish forefather associated with "truth." The righteous, continues the Talmudic comment cited above, "do not extend their hands toward theft." Truly Judaism-minded Jews, those aware of Jewish ideals and their implications, see money not as an end justified by dubious means but as a means toward a holy end.

I like to imagine that some truly needy person eventually picked up my quarter and used it to buy a fruit.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

Food for Rosh Hashana Thought

Rabbi Avi Shafran

An odd Rosh Hashana custom, duly recorded in the Talmud and halachic codes, is the lavishing of puns on holiday foods.

Most Jews know that on the first night of the new Jewish year, it is customary to eat a piece of apple dipped in honey, to symbolize our hope for a sweet year. Less known is the Rosh Hashana night custom of eating foods whose names augur well for the future. Though the Talmud's examples are, of course, in Hebrew or Aramaic, at least one halachic commentary directs us to find pun-foods in whatever language we may speak.

"Help us pare away our sins" before consuming a pear might thus be an appropriate example. Or an entreaty that G-d be our advocate, before eating a piece of avocado. "Lettuce have a wonderful year" might be pushing it a bit, but maybe not. One respected rabbi once smilingly suggested partaking of a raisin and stalk of celery after expressing the hope for a "raise in salary."

Such exercises might seem a bit out of place on the Jewish holy "day of judgment." But that is only because we regard the custom simplistically, as some quaint superstition. In truth, though, it is precisely Rosh Hashana's austere gravity that lies at the custom's source.

There are other telling Jewish customs regarding Rosh Hashana, like the recommendation that the Jewish new year be carefully utilized to the fullest for prayer, Torah-study and good deeds, that not a moment of its time be squandered. Mitzvot and good conduct, of course, are always "in season," but they seem to have particular power on Rosh Hashana. Similarly, Jewish sources caution against expressing anger on Rosh Hashana. The Jewish new year days are to reflect only the highest Jewish ideals.

The 16th century Jewish luminary Rabbi Yehudah Loewy, known as the Maharal, stresses the crucial nature of beginnings. He explains that the trajectory of a projectile - or, we might similarly note, the outcome of a mathematical computation - can be affected to an often astounding degree by a very small change at the start of the process. A diversion of a single degree of arc where the arrow leaves the bow - or an error of a single digit at the first step of a long calculation - can yield a surprisingly large difference in the end. Modern scientific terminology has given the concept both the unwieldy name "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and the playful one "the butterfly effect," an allusion to the influence the flapping of a butterfly's wings halfway around the world could presumably have on next week's local weather.

Rosh Hashana is thus much more than the start of the Jewish year. It is the day from which the balance of the year unfolds, a time of "initial conditions" exquisitely sensitive to our actions.

Perhaps the Rosh Hashana puns, too, reflect that sensitivity. After all, word-play is not suggested for any other day of the year.

Maybe by imbuing even things as seemingly inconsequential as our choice of foods with meaning on Rosh Hashana, we symbolically affirm the idea that beginnings have unusual potential. That there are times when the import of each of our actions is magnified. By seizing even the most wispy opportunities to try to bestow blessing on the Jewish new year aborning, we declare our determination to start the year as right as we possibly can.

While we are not explicitly informed by the Talmud about whether the puns actually have any direct effect on our year, they unarguably impress upon us the extraordinary degree to which our actions at the start of a Jewish year affect how we will live its balance.

And that is an invaluable lesson, one that should lead us to begin the new Jewish year working to make ourselves better Jews in our relations both to one another and to our Creator.

May all we Jews merit a Rosh Hashana with only sweetness and joy, devoid of sadness and anger. And may we seize every chance to make the start of 5768 as perfect as we can - ushering in a year in which the Jewish People's collective life and all of our individual lives take a distinct and substantial turnip for the better.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

Food for Rosh Hashana Thought

Rabbi Avi Shafran

An odd Rosh Hashana custom, duly recorded in the Talmud and halachic codes, is the lavishing of puns on holiday foods.

Rosh Hashana is thus much more than the start of the Jewish year. It is the day from which the balance of the year unfolds, a time of "initial conditions" exquisitely sensitive to our actions.

Perhaps the Rosh Hashana puns, too, reflect that sensitivity. After all, word-play is not suggested for any other day of the year.

And that is an invaluable lesson, one that should lead us to begin the new Jewish year working to make ourselves better Jews in our relations both to one another and to our Creator.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE JOY OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In mid-August, after complaints from local residents, a priest in Tilberg, the Netherlands, was fined several thousand dollars for ringing his church bells just after 7:00 in the morning.

Likewise in mid-August, synagogues around the world - many of them at just about that same time of morning - were sounding an alarm of their own. No complaints were reported about the shofar, or ram's horn, blasts sounded at the end of morning services. The shofar-soundings began on the first day of the Jewish month of Elul and are continuing every morning until the day before Rosh Hashana.

Maimonides famously described the blowing of the shofar on that holiday as a wake-up call - bearing the unspoken but urgent message "Awaken, sleepers, from your slumber." The slumber, he went on to explain, is our floundering in the "meaningless distractions of the temporal world" we occupy. The shofar throughout Elul calls on us to refocus on what alone is real in life: serving our Creator. And should we choose to hit the spiritual snooze-button, the alarm is sounded the next day, and the one after that.

It is so much easier to sleep, of course, through the alarm clock, both the literal one in the morning and the figurative one that rudely echoes in our hearts as we busy ourselves with the "important" diversions that so often fill our days.

What is more, just as, lost in our morning muddle, we may wish ill on our alarm clocks, we tend at times to resent our life-responsibilities.

How differently we would feel if only we realized the import of obligation - how accountability actually holds the seeds of joy.

The weekly Torah portion usually read near the start of Elul has G-d describing idolatry, the most severe of sins, as bowing down before "the sun, moon or other heavenly bodies that I have not commanded" [Deuteronomy 17:3].

That last phrase was clarified by the Jewish translators of the Torah into Greek, as "that I have not commanded you to serve" - removing any ambiguity from the text; the standard Torah commentary Rashi follows suit.

The Hassidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, however, revealed another layer of the phrase's meaning.

He noted that there is an exception to the prohibition of genuflecting before something physical: bowing down to a human being. We find, for instance, that the prophet Obadiah bowed before his master Elijah, who, while human, nevertheless embodied a degree of G-dliness. Explained Rabbi Levi Yitzchak: A human being, by virtue of his having chosen and forged a path of holiness in life, is worthy of veneration of a sort that is forbidden to show to any other creation.

What allows human beings to attain so lofty a status, "The Berditchiver" continues, is that we are commanded - creatures intended not just to exist, but to shoulder responsibility. That allows us to become partners in a way with the Divine. And so it is precisely our obligations that exalt us, that place us on a plane above everything else in the universe.

That thought, explained the Hassidic master, lies beneath the surface of the verse cited above. We are forbidden to bow to the sun and moon because "I have not commanded" them - because they are not themselves commanded. They are not charged to choose, instructed in any way to act against their natures.

We humans, however, with our many duties that may cause us to chafe or grumble, are elevated beings, infused with holiness. And our responsibilities are what make our lives potential wells of holiness, what make our existences deeply meaningful.

That idea might grant us some understanding of an oddity: Rosh Hashana is described both as a Day of Judgment and as a joyous holiday. Even as we tremble as we stand "like sheep" before the Judge of all, we are enjoined to partake in festive holiday meals and, as on other festivals, to derive happiness from them.

Perhaps the seeming paradox is solved by the recognition that the reason we can, indeed must, be judged derives directly from our accountability. Even - perhaps especially - when the alarm clock interrupts our reveries, our responsibilities should fill us with the deepest gratitude and joy.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

LOST IN SPACE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Like most religions, Scientism has its articles of faith.

Science, the study of nature, has a premise - the scientific method - but no required beliefs about the unseen.

Scientism, by contrast - the conviction that there is and can be nothing beyond the reach of our physical senses and instruments - possesses a dogma as sacrosanct as any religion's.

Among its unchallengeable doctrines is an abiding faith in the absence of a Creator, in the all-pervading rule of chance in the universe. Unfolding from that axiom is the conviction that life materialized naturally from inanimate matter; and that the diversity of life on earth emerged from the trinity of a common single-celled ancestor, random mutation and natural selection.

Which leads in turn to another of Scientism's creeds: that life must exist beyond our planet.

For if chance is the loom on which the universe's fabric lies stretched, there is no reason that only a single, unremarkable planet in a single, unremarkable solar system in a single, unremarkable galaxy - a solitary orb in a universe of billions of stars and their satellites - would alone have spawned life and, eventually, intelligent life.

During the same eons that allowed natural processes on Earth to progress from inert elements to iPods and their owners, countless other worlds should have done no worse. Indeed, should have done considerably better.

And yet, like the elusive laboratory experiment actually demonstrating the evolution of one species into another, the search for intelligent life beyond our planet has, thus far, come up empty.

Not, though, for lack of trying.

Back in 1960, the first SETI, or "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence," effort was made, utilizing a radio telescope to examine star systems. In the 1970s and 1980s other SETI efforts were launched; among them, the "Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay" (META) and META II, which searched the southern sky.

Plaques depicting the location of Earth in the galaxy and solar system and what humans look like were launched aboard the Pioneer probes in 1972 and 1973; and the Voyager probes in 1977 provided similar information on two golden records, which also included recordings of pictures and sounds of Earth. In 1974, the Arecibo message, which included simply coded information about chemistry and terrestrial life, was beamed into space.

In the 1990s, the "Billion-channel ExtraTerrestrial Assay" (BETA) was created, as well as a project sponsored by The Planetary Society that harnesses the computing power of five million volunteers' computers to crunch numbers that might reveal patterns indicative of intelligent life beyond our planet. Over 19 billion hours of processing time have so far been consumed by the project.

So far, though, nothing. Nary a peep nor a pattern.

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

But from the Jewish perspective, the absence of any reply to our shout-outs isn't surprising. The Torah refers to many peoples but all are presumably earthly. Man, in Judaism's view, was created by G-d here on earth. No mention is made, at least in exoteric texts, of any parallel production.

Not that there is anything in the Torah to conclusively preclude the existence of life on other worlds. Rudimentary life, after all, exists in earthly places unmentioned in the Torah - from undersea volcanic vents to Amazonian jungle canopies. The discovery of life on other worlds would be an unexpected development but hardly cause any believing Jew a crisis of conscience.

Even intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos, while it would be more surprising still, would no more challenge a Torah-centered worldview than the discovery of some previously unknown aboriginal population in an unexplored corner of earth. G-d created much that was discovered by man only with time.

For those, however, who desperately want to believe in humanity's mediocrity, the apparent biological silence of the universe should be troubling.

Perhaps, they explain reassuringly, life's development is contingent on a very specific chemical matrix. But that, of course, just begs the question, returning us to the uniqueness of earth, and of man.

Confessors of the creed of Scientism are anxiously awaiting the conclusion of a recent $420 million space mission. On August 4, the Phoenix Mars Lander lifted off from Cape Canaveral to search, when it lands ten months hence, for evidence of life on the Red Planet. Although two rovers have been sending data from Mars for years, the Phoenix Lander is to drill in the Martian equivalent of Earth's arctic, believed to be a relatively bio-friendly environment, and will chemically analyze its soil and ice, in the hope of finding signs of life, past or present.

Should the tests in fact yield evidence of even the most rudimentary life, it will help keep hope alive in the hearts of Scientism's high priests that other advanced civilizations might yet one day announce themselves. If, however, Phoenix comes up empty in its biology-quest, it will serve to further furrow the brows of those true believers. Or it should.

Either way, believers in a Creator will be untroubled. Whether there is biological life, simple or advanced, out there may be unknown to us. What we do know, though, is that we're not alone.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

RABBI FEINSTEIN SPEAKS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

A recent attack on Israel's Chief Rabbinate invoked the late and revered American Orthodox decisor of Jewish law, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.

The attacker was Professor Benjamin Ish-Shalom, the director of Israel's Institute for Jewish Studies, an agency charged with offering a course of Jewish study to non-Jewish immigrants interested in conversion. What provoked him was the set of standards employed by the Rabbinate for conversions.

In a flattering Jerusalem Post interview - the reporter took pains not only to cite the professor's scholarship, soft-spoken nature and religious piety but to describe for readers the "centuries-old Talmuds and well-worn works on Jewish philosophy and history" that line his office - Professor Ish-Shalom blasted what he calls the "humiliating" conversion process in Israel, dismissed religious court judges as insufficiently humble and declared that the Rabbinate is rendering Jewish religious law "irrelevant to the modern Jewish people and to the modern state of Israel."

Professor Ish-Shalom further described a judge who invalidated a years-old conversion as embodying (in the Post's paraphrase) "blindness and even halachic ignorance"; accused Israel's religious court judges of fostering desecration of G-d's name; and dismissed Israel's Chief Rabbis of just being "loyal to their haredi masters."

The purportedly soft-spoken professor's harsh words emerged from his concern over the estimated 300,000 non-Jews who arrived in Israel during the 1990s amid the massive immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Professor Ish-Shalom considers it imperative to convince as many of those non-Jews as possible to undergo a conversion process. He hopes to attract 100,000 of the younger immigrants.

The trenchant question, of course, is whether persuading non-Jews who have no intention of becoming Jewishly observant - like many, if not most, of those targeted by the professor's conversion plan - to undergo a conversion process in fact results in new Jews. Conversion, after all, is no simple matter of self-identification but a distinct religio-legal process; it is governed, no less than any area of religious law, by requirements, some of them essential and incontrovertible.

One is "kabbalat hamitzvot," or "acceptance of the commandments," the central element in a Jewish conversion. To the question of whether a seeming lack of such commandment-acceptance might render a conversion void, Professor Ish-Shalom responds by citing Rabbi Feinstein.

In a responsum, the venerated decisor deals with the case of a woman who converted through an Orthodox court but then married a non-observant Jew and fell into non-observance. Asked if the woman's conversion should be considered invalid, Rabbi Feinstein responded no.

The point of Rabbi Feinstein's reasoning upon which Professor Ish-Shalom seizes is that a convert need not know all that is entailed in accepting the mitzvot; he or she need only accept the Torah's commandments in a general sense. So even if the woman in question had not realized precisely what Jewish observance entails, her undefined acceptance sufficed to render her, at least post facto, a Jew.

What the professor chooses to not dwell upon, however, is the clear implication that where in fact there was no genuine kabbalat hamitzvot (and that would include the rejection, at the time of conversion, of any individual mitzvah) there is no conversion, even post facto. Thus, were a non-Jew to be convinced to undergo a conversion ceremony but is fully aware (as are most people living in Israel) that driving on Shabbat or eating shellfish is forbidden by Jewish religious law and has no intention of observing those strictures, his or her mouthing of a mitigated "kabbalat hamitzvot" does not result in a conversion.

Were such "conversions" to be performed en masse, it would result in a large group of people who might be considered Jewish by Professor Ish-Shalom, his interviewer and others, but who would be regarded as non-Jews by most other observant Jews. What is more (and perhaps worse), suspicion would be cast on the Jewishness of all converts in Israel.

As it happens, there is indeed a responsum of Rabbi Feinstein's that speaks directly to the professor's plans. It is in the first section of his collected responsa, Igrot Moshe. In number 157 he writes: "� it is obvious and clear that [a non-Jew who did not accept the mitzvot] is not a convert at all, even after the fact [of his conversion ceremony]� because kabbalat hamitzvot for a convert is essential ["me'akev"]. And even if he pronounces that he is accepting the mitzvot, if it is clear to us ["anan sa'hadi"] that he is not in truth accepting them, it is nothing."

And Rabbi Feinstein, poignantly, concludes:

"I altogether do not understand the reasoning of rabbis who err in this. Even according to [their mistaken notion], what gain are they bringing to the Jewish People by accepting such 'converts'? It is certainly not pleasing to G-d or to the Jewish people that such 'converts' should become mixed into [the Congregation of] Israel. As to the halacha, it is clear that they are not converts at all."

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

INVITATION TO INTERMARRIAGE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

One can't help but feel sad for Noah Feldman. In spite of his considerable professional accomplishments - a law professorship at Harvard, three books, a slew of well-received essays and a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few - the young Jew is clearly stewing. A bubble of his own imagining has burst in his face.

What he imagined was that, in its embrace of both Judaism and elements of contemporary culture, the "Modern Orthodoxy" of his youth granted Jews license to abandon as much of Jewish religious observance as they deem appropriate. Expressing his anger - coolly, to be sure, but the hurt seeps thickly through the poised prose - in a recent New York Times Magazine piece, "Orthodox Paradox," Professor Feldman describes how the Boston Jewish school he attended as a child and teenager went so far as to crop a class reunion photograph to omit him and his non-Jewish Korean-American fianc�e , whom he later married.

But the Photo-Shopped portrait is only the professor's anecdotal hook. What he really resents is that his erstwhile school, along with some of his mentors and friends, spurn him for his decision to marry outside his faith.

No one, he admits, is rude to him. None of his former teachers or friends, he writes, would refuse to shake his hand. But he knows that they deride him for the life-path he has chosen. And that offends and perplexes him.

Does not "Modern Orthodoxy," after all, embrace the "reconcil[iation of] Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere"? Should it not, therefore, regard his intermarriage as an expression, if somewhat extreme, of his effort at such reconciliation? Were he and his classmates not taught to see themselves as "reasonable, modern people, not fanatics or cult members"?

Leaving aside whether un-"Modern" Orthodox Jews are in fact disengaged from the public sphere (a visit to any of a number of financial firms, law offices and hi-tech retail businesses in New York or other places with large "ultra-Orthodox" populations might yield evidence to the contrary), much less whether they are fanatical or cultist, Professor Feldman's umbrage is misplaced. There is a reason why, to Orthodox Jews (and many non-Orthodox no less), no matter how embracing they may be of the larger world, intermarriage represents a deep betrayal. It is more than a violation of Jewish religious law. It is an abandonment of the Jewish past and an undermining of the Jewish future.

Because marriage, arguably the most important choice in a Jewish life, is not a partnership but rather a fusing - "and they shall be as one flesh," in Genesis' words. Since a spouse is part of oneself, the personal consequences of intermarriage are profound. As, in Professor Feldman's case, are the communal ones; his children are not Jewish.

Judaism views the Jewish People as a special and hallowed entity. Members of the nation are to care for all - "we are to support the poor of the nations along with the Jewish poor," as the Talmud directs. And the righteous among the other nations, the Talmud goes on to teach, will receive their eternal reward. But the Jewish faith is clear about the ultimate redemption of the world: It is dependent on the Jewish People's remaining a nation apart in fundamental ways. One way is in our basic beliefs - for instance, that G-d gave our ancestors His law, and never subsequently changed it. Another is in our commitment to the integrity of the Jewish people qua people. Our commitment, in other words, to marry other Jews.

A celebrated Orthodox television personality and pundit reacted to Professor Feldman's article in a Jerusalem Post opinion piece with words of welcome. While he considers intermarriage "a direct threat to the very continuity of the Jewish people," he nevertheless considers Professor Feldman "a prince of the Jewish nation"; and suggests that intermarrieds be treated no differently from the in-married, that they be offered our "love and respect."

His suggestion stems from his Jewish heart but his Jewish head should have been more carefully consulted.

Yes, there is ample reason to feel sympathy for Jews who intermarry. Transgressions performed from desire, Jewish tradition teaches, do not reach the level of those intended to be transgressive. And on a personal level, there are reasons to not cut off connections to intermarried friends or relatives. (It is not unheard of for non-Jews married to Jews to actually guide their spouses back to Judaism and to themselves convert; precisely such a couple is the subject of "Migrant Soul," a biography I was privileged to write.)

At the same time, though, there is simply no way - not in the real world - to warmly welcome intermarrieds without welcoming intermarriage. No way to make Professor Feldmans feel accepted for who they are without making potential Professor Feldmans view intermarriage as innocuous. No way to "devalue" the gravity of intermarriage without dulling the truth that every Jew is an invaluable link in the Jewish chain of generations.

If one begins with the premise that intermarriage is dangerous to the Jewish people and the Jewish mission, the intermarried cannot enjoy our acceptance. There may be quibbles about the means by which we express our rejection of their choice. But the absence of any communal expression of reproach is nothing less than an invitation to intermarriage.

To my lights, it doesn't seem extreme in the least for a Jewish school to make clear to an intermarried alumnus that, despite his secular accomplishments, it feels no pride in him for his choice to intermarry. I wouldn't expect an American Cancer Society gathering to smile politely at a chain smoking attendee either.

It is painful, no doubt, to be spurned by one's community. It is painful, too, for a community to feel compelled to express its censure. Sometimes, though, in personal and communal life no less than in weightlifting, only pain can offer - in the larger, longer picture - hope of gain.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

RETURNS WELCOME

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Married mere days, David found himself seated at the head of a table with his new wife, in-laws and a host of strangers, including some rabbis with long beards.

He wasn't nervous around rabbis; his personal journey from California teen-age martial-arts aficionado to 20-something Orthodox yeshiva student had been fueled by things he had learned over the years from just such rabbis, and by the inspiration he gleaned from the lives he saw them living.

But this Sheva Brachot - the term for the festive meals traditionally served during the week after a Jewish marriage - was different from the ones that had preceded or would follow it. He was in a city he had never visited before, his parents weren't able to be present and the only people he knew at the table were his new wife and in-laws.

The bride, seated to his right, had been looking for a young man with just David's combination of brights, calm, sincerity and religious commitment. Although Chana came from an observant Orthodox family and knew that it was not common for someone with her background to marry someone who had not grown up observant, she knew when she first met David that she had (if David agreed) found her husband. She in fact saw much of the sincerity and commitment that had so impressed her as directly related to the fact that David had had to make choices in his life that she had been spared.

She knew, too, that her parents - somewhat atypically for their circle - would not hesitate to consider an otherwise qualified "baal teshuva" - or "returnee" to Jewish tradition - as a potential marriage-partner for one of their children. David's dedication, reputation and character were what had mattered. To be sure, research into his Jewish genealogy, as in any such proposed match, would have to be done. Sadly, the proliferation of intermarriage and substandard conversions over recent decades have served to call into question the Jewish status of non-Orthodox families, at least from the perspective of halacha, or Jewish religious law. Once upon a time, observant Jews could take for granted that a family, by simple virtue of its affiliation with a Jewish congregation, was halachically Jewish. But those days, tragically, are gone.

David's ancestry, thankfully, was ascertained to contain no mixed marriages or conversions. His European forebears had in fact been religious Jews; and his parents, although they were not raised Orthodox, had grown deeply proud of David's and his siblings' adoption of Jewish observance.

David's new in-laws were enamored of both him and his parents, and overjoyed at their daughter's marriage. They hoped, moreover, that their example might perhaps, in a small way, inspire other traditional Orthodox Jews to entertain the possibility of such matches from outside their own community.

The importance of "family" - i.e. the "pedigree" of a current and well-established Orthodox background - is an understandable concern for many, to be sure; and there are other halacha-related issues that also come into play in such cases. To some, such concerns may even be paramount, and that stance is their prerogative.

At the same time, though, it cannot be denied that there is something real and valuable that is gained, too, when an observant Orthodox Jew from an Orthodox family marries an equally observant Orthodox Jew from a different background - gained by the latter, by the former and by the Jewish people as a whole.

David's father-in-law was thinking precisely those thoughts at the Sheva Brachot, as a rabbi sitting to his left, one of the respected heads of the local post-graduate yeshiva, turned to the newlywed and asked him about his Jewish educational background. David responded with the name of a well-known Jerusalem yeshiva that caters to the newly observant.

The rabbi's eyes lit up and he smiled. "I studied there, too!"

It took a minute for the response to register. "You?" David asked.

The rabbi happily confirmed the fact and related what a wonderful teacher he had been privileged to have there decades earlier. Wide-eyed, David replied that he had been taught by the same rabbi. And so the conversation continued.

Overhearing it all, David's father-in-law felt a deep sense of gratitude to Heaven for the unplanned encounter. That an alumnus of the very yeshiva David had attended had become a Torah-scholar to whom scores of students looked up and learned Torah from was a poignant thing for the young man to see.

And then David's father-in-law's smile broadened, as he remembered that the rabbi speaking with David was married to the daughter of a major American yeshiva dean. Chana's parents could take pride in that illustrious precedent. They had hardly been the first "ultra-Orthodox" Jews to welcome a baal teshuva and his family into their own.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

KIBBUTZ CONVERSATION

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Tisha B'Av - which falls this year on July 24 - always brings back the personal memory of a conversation between two teen-aged cousins more than thirty years ago. It took place on the outskirts of a non-religious kibbutz in the Galilee, on a hill overlooking a lush valley.

The two boys, one born and bred on the kibbutz, the other an American newcomer to the Holy Land visiting before the start of his Jerusalem yeshiva's academic term, had first met only days earlier.

They had been speaking about family, personal experiences, and sundry things their very different lives nevertheless had in common. And then, the observant boy mentioned, entirely in passing, the imminence of the Jewish fast day.

"We don't observe Tisha B'Av on the kibbutz," his cousin interjected. "The Temple's destruction isn't really relevant to our lives here."

The American boy hesitated a long moment before asking, "Do you observe any Jewish day of mourning?"

"Yes," came the reply. "Yom HaShoah."

Another pause, this one even longer. The yeshiva student knew that Tisha B'Av is the national day of Jewish mourning - that it encompasses many a tragedy - in a sense, every tragedy - in Jewish history. Not only was the first Jewish Holy Temple destroyed on that day (2429 years ago), and the second one, (1939 years ago), on the very same day, but the rebel Jewish forces at Betar were annihilated by the Romans, several decades later, on Tisha B'Av as well.

He knew, too, that the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 C.E., and from France in 1306 C.E. and from Spain in 1492 C.E. all took place on Tisha B'Av as well. He also knew that on Tisha B'Av 1914 Germany declared war on Russia, turning a regional European conflict into what came to be known as World War I, arguably the genesis of what would culminate, two and a half decades later, in Germany's "Final Solution." But somehow it didn't seem the right time for history lessons.

So, instead, he asked his cousin, "Is your commemoration of the Holocaust important to you?"

"Absolutely," came the reply. "The Holocaust underlies our very identity as Israelis and as Jews."

The American weighed the wisdom of saying what he wanted to, and then decided the blood-bond was strong enough to handle it.

"Will you expect your children to pay its memory the same respect that you do?"

"Of course."

"To feel the same sorrow, to have the same determination to remember that you feel?"

"Of course," the Israeli replied. "My generation will see to it that our children recognize the importance of the Holocaust, how it defines their identity, how important it must continue to be to all Jews."

"And will you expect them, in turn, to transmit the same conviction to their own children - and theirs to theirs?"

"Absolutely. Forever. It is that important."

The American swallowed hard, then spoke.

"Just like the earlier attempts to destroy our people and its faith were to our own ancestors - those we commemorate and mourn on Tisha B'Av."

Nothing else was said for the moment. The two young men walked back to the kibbutz in silence.

It could well be argued that a large part of what characterizes Jewish "Orthodoxy" is a heightened sense of history. Not only of its vicissitudes and tragedies for our people, but, most importantly, of the seminal Jewish moment, the singular event that bequeathed us our mandate to cherish, study and observe the Torah - the revelation of G-d to His people at Sinai.

That mass-experienced and painstakingly transmitted event, the meeting of G-d and man in the Sinai desert, lies at the very foundation of the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. It is the ultimate Jewish historical memory.

All Jews who aspire to the appellation "observant" are, in essence, the keepers of Jewish history, recent and ancient, and are entrusted with the mission of sharing the memory of the Jewish past - both its nadirs and its apogee - with all their fellow Jews.

Should the Messiah continue to tarry, G-d forbid, a day may well come when all testimony of the events of the 1930s and early 1940s will be indirect, arriving only through books and films, or third-hand accounts.

The facts, though, of what happened during those years, the horrible details of Jewish Europe's destruction, will endure, because there will always be Jews determined to hold fast to our history - its entirety. Jews determined to maintain the memory of what happened sixty-odd years ago.

And 1939 years ago.

And 2429 years ago.

And 3319 years ago, in the Sinai desert.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

CONVERSION CONFUSION

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Israel's Orthodox Rabbinate has been under siege of late, over the issue - once again - of conversion. And once again as well, the media abound with misinformation. This time, though, some of it is being supplied by Orthodox rabbis.

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, the retiring rabbi of an historic New York Orthodox synagogue assailed Israel's Rabbinate for "raising obstacles to prevent non-Jews from entering the Jewish fold." He accuses the religious authorities of having "adopted a haredi position that conversion is available only to those agreeing to observe Torah and mitzvot in full," asserting that the Talmud, Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch (the authoritative codification of halacha, or Jewish religious law) say otherwise.

In the same periodical, a second Orthodox rabbinic commentator, the director of an educational institute in Israel, vented similar displeasure with Israel's Rabbinate. The fact that Israel has become home to hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russian immigrants, he argues, "demands that the Rabbinate reach out to them in order to facilitate their beginning the process of conversion." That such has not happened, the rabbi went on, is proof that the Jewish State's rabbinic authorities "are more concerned with safeguarding halakhic authority than with welcoming Jews to embark on a spiritual process."

Or perhaps more concerned with halachic integrity than with pleasing a populace.

The image of masses of sincere neophytes yearning to join the Jewish people but being rebuffed by small-minded religious functionaries plays well in the press. As does the notion that commitment to Jewish religious observance is not a requirement for conversion. Both, though, are at odds with reality.

There are certainly non-Jews in Israel who sincerely wish to convert to Judaism, not merely to cement their status as citizens of Israel but to wholeheartedly join the Jewish People and its mission.

But there are many more non-Jews in Israel, among them many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who may wish to be considered Jews but who have no interest in undertaking Jewish observance.

And sincere acceptance of the responsibility to strive to observe all of the Torah's laws - or "kabbalat hamitzvot" - is the very sine qua non of Jewish conversion. A convert need not be conversant with all of the laws but must nevertheless embrace them in principle, as the Jewish People did at Sinai before receiving the Torah.

When a non-Jew seeks to convert solely for the purpose of marrying a Jew, pleasing a spouse or just feeling more Israeli, Jewish law is clear that the request should not be entertained. If a legitimate Jewish court is convinced that the non-Jewish partner in an intermarriage is in fact willing to shoulder kabbalat hamitzvot, respected Orthodox authorities have not considered the marriage factor to be a bar to conversion.

But should a non-Jew without any such willingness somehow manage to be accepted by a rabbinical court and go through the motions of conversion - a formal declaration of kabbalat hamitzvot, immersion in a mikva (ritual pool) and, in the case of a male, actual or symbolic circumcision - halacha is equally clear: the conversion is entirely invalid.

One of the rabbis quoted above has tried to insinuate otherwise, citing codified halachic sources to the effect that once a conversion is performed, no amount of backsliding can change the convert's status as a Jew.

That is indeed true. But only, the sources are clear, when the conversion was valid in the first place - i.e. there was an acceptance at the time, sincere and unmitigated, of the Torah's commandments. Should it become clear - and certainly in a case where it was always clear - that the professed embrace of the Torah's commandments was a sham, so was the conversion. The "convert" never was one.

Proponents of the "relaxation" of conversion standards in Israel often cite poignant, agonizing cases of non-Jews who were not accepted for conversion or whose conversions were not recognized by rabbinical authorities. There can be no denying that human pain can result from the application of Jewish law, no less than it can from the laws of physics, or from life itself.

But ignoring Jewish law is not an Orthodox option. And doing so can take its own human toll. Were Israel to "relax" its conversion standards, children of the beneficiaries of that change who might one day become observant would discover that they need to convert to be Jewish by the yardstick of their own beliefs. Young women engaged to cohanim would discover that they, as converts, cannot halachically marry their fianc�s. What is more, the Jewishness of every convert and convert's child would become questionable to all halacha-respecting Jews. Only a universally accepted halachic standard can ensure that observant Jews embrace converts as we should, and prevent the Jewish People from becoming, G-d forbid, a multitude of "Jewish peoples."

One of the rabbis mentioned above chided Israel's Rabbinate by reminding it that human beings are not "chess pieces." He is right. What is more, the Jewish People is not a club, and halacha is not a game.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

PRIDE AND PUISSANCE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In the end, despite pleas to spare Judaism's holiest city the shame of a spectacle celebrating the rejection of Judaism's moral code, the "Gay Pride" parade took place as planned in Jerusalem.

Had hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem and across the country flowed into the Holy City's streets, the event - which drew a mere 2000 participants - would have been quickly overwhelmed. The 7000 policemen assigned to keep order would not have had an easy time.

The Orthodox numbers, readiness and sense of outrage were certainly there. Tel Aviv has regularly played sponsor to such spectacles mocking the Torah, but Jerusalem is the focal point of Jewish prayers, and its population is heavily Orthodox to boot. Indeed, the Holy City was purposefully targeted by the parade organizers in order to assert their belief that no place on earth should be free from the promotion of licentiousness. (Well, almost no place; last year, one of the event's organizers was asked by a reporter why the parade would not enter Christian or Muslim areas of the city and explained "We don't want to offend them.")

So, in the face of such an unmistakable provocation, all it would have taken to summon a massive Orthodox protest would have been a mere call from a handful of Orthodox religious leaders.

But the call never came. On the contrary, the leading rabbinic figures in Israel asked their followers to ignore the parade. An announcement on the front page of the haredi daily providing the views of the non-Hassidic "Lithuanian" haredi rabbinic leadership, instructed that yeshiva students not take to the streets but should rather demonstrate in private, through prayer; it instructed every yeshiva dean, too, to ensure that his students did not protest publicly.

The head of the largest Hassidic group in Israel, the Gerer Rebbe, also made his will known, that the parade should be ignored by his followers. The implicit message from the religious leadership was that, as King Solomon famously taught, there is a time for everything; and their judgment was that the current time was one for profound sadness and prayer, not public confrontation.

A relative handful of individuals did try to disrupt the parade. But the vast majority of Jerusalem's haredim, although deeply anguished by what they considered a brazen invasion of immorality-pushers, heeded the calls to turn inward rather than out.

And so, in the end, the paraders - although fewer than the 10,000 that organizers expected - marched down a central Jerusalem street, heralding their message that "anything goes" in the realm of intimate human relations, celebrating the "diversity" of behaviors that Judaism condemns in no uncertain terms. The message was one of "freedom" - license to act without moral compunction.

Each Sabbath between Passover and Rosh Hashana, it is customary for Jews to study a chapter of the "Ethics of the Fathers" - a tractate of the Mishneh known as Avot. On the Sabbath preceding the march in Jerusalem, the week's chapter included the aphorism: "Who is a strong person [Hebrew: gibbor]? One who conquers his inclination."

It is an idea as simple as it is profound. While much of the world may measure strength and courage (both concepts inhere in the word gibbor) in the currency of musculature or risk-taking, the Jewish definition goes far deeper. The truly strong, truly courageous individual is the one able to face his or her desires and, in the interest of a higher purpose, deny them.

The dichotomy of the two definitions of strength was almost perfectly evident mere days later. Two groups showed their true colors, one by embracing and flaunting almost every imaginable "inclination," the other by squelching their own inclinations, in the service of a higher imperative.

It was a contrast nicely captured by an Israel Broadcasting Authority television news broadcast. For several minutes, a split screen on Channel One presented two images. One showed an exhibitionistic rejection of inhibitions; the other, a tearful prayer gathering held in another part of Jerusalem, where 3000 religious Jews recited Psalms and special prayers in the hope that G-d might spare His city further debasement.

And so, in the end, there was "pride" and there were prayers.

And there was frailty (in the guise of "freedom") and there was strength.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

NAME ABUSE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Much in our world desecrates the name of G-d - in Hebrew, that is called "chilul Hashem." Whether murder and mayhem in the name of religion or misbehavior on the part of religious individuals, actions that push holiness away from a world that so direly needs it are considered by Judaism to constitute a singular sin.

Recently, though, a quite literal desecration of G-d's name unexpectedly came to my attention. A cataloger at a law school library, Mrs. Elisheva Schwartz, called with a disturbing discovery. She had come across an online vendor seeking to make a few dollars off the marketing of clothing and kitsch bearing the holiest Hebrew name of G-d.

The Tetragrammaton, to use its Greek appellation, is a four-character word (tetra means four; grammat, letter) that Judaism considers so holy it is forbidden today to pronounce or ever to treat in anything but a deeply honorable manner. According to Jewish law, a piece of parchment, paper, cloth or pottery bearing the Name must be carefully preserved or solemnly buried. Religious Jews refer to the word simply as "the specified Name" and when it occurs in the Torah reading or prayer service, it is not read as written; a less holy Hebrew word meaning simply "my Lord" is substituted instead.

The vendor in question, for reasons unknown, had decided to print the holy Hebrew letters on an assortment of tee shirts, mugs, buttons and other articles, including underwear and dog sweaters.

We live in a free society, of course, and nothing prevents anyone from exercising his or her right to personal expression, even if it may be offensive to others. But nothing prevents anyone, either, from voicing pain born of such offense. And so I contacted Caf� Press - a sort of online flea-market that the vendor was using to sell his or her wares - to register Agudath Israel's chagrin at the commercialization and degradation of G-d's name. Please consider making a decision, I wrote, that is "respectful of Jews and Judaism."

Within hours, what seemed a stock reply arrived. Caf� Press, it informed, provides its services to "a rich and vibrant community of individuals across the globe who differ in their views about what is considered offensive."

Well, I'm sure it does and they do. All the same, though, I'm also pretty sure that the site isn't being used to peddle dog sweaters bearing, say, the Arabic word for Allah.

So I inquired about whether Caf� Press had any code of standards regarding offensiveness. Again, a reply arrived quickly, directing me to where I could find the company's standards. To its credit, the code is a responsible and comprehensive document. And one category of prohibited content was: "Material that is generally offensive or in bad taste, as determined by CafePress.com."

And so I wrote again, reiterating that "from the perspective of all religious (and many less-than-religious) Jews, the placement of G-d's holy Hebrew name on a piece of apparel, not to mention apparel like underwear or pet sweaters, is profoundly offensive."

"Which leaves us," I concluded, "with the 'as determined by CafePress.com' clause.

"And so I ask: What is your determination?"

That was many days and two more inquiries ago. Thus far, no reply. Perhaps the administrators of the site are in the process of informing the vendor that his or her merchandise doesn't meet their company's standards. Or perhaps they are not.

Either way, though, should any readers of these words happen to share Mrs. Schwartz's and my feeling of offense at the commercial debasing of something deeply holy to Judaism, please consider making an e-mail inquiry of your own to Caf� Press. The address for such communications is cup@cafepress.com . Needless to say, inquiries should be polite and reasoned. And if - as I hope - the company's response is that the merchandise at issue has been removed from the site, then a sincere expression of gratitude to the company is in order.

In that case, not only Caf� Press' decision but our expressions of thanks will constitute a kiddush Hashem, a "sanctification of G-d's name."

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

DEAR GRADUATES

Rabbi Avi Shafran

[I was recently privileged to address the commencement ceremony of Bais Yaakov of Baltimore, an Orthodox girls school founded in 1942. Below is an edited version of my remarks to the more than 100 high school graduates, their families and friends.]

Back in the day - the day when I was in grade school, that is - we were taught the "3 R's" - Reading, Writing and 'Rithmetic (that's math to you, and yes, we didn't spell so good back then). Of course, you've all learned those things and more. And as students of a school like Bais Yaakov, you have also learned the really important things for meaningful life.

Among them, I think, are another "3 R's." At this special moment in your lives, please permit me to briefly review them.

The first one is Recognizing - specifically, recognizing the good, the precise translation of the Hebrew phrase hakarat hatov. Its simple sense - gratitude - is something you graduates surely feel this evening - toward your parents, your teachers and your classmates, for all that they have given you. But the term's deeper meaning is to recognize - with a capital "R" - the good that is always present in our lives, all the things with which we are constantly blessed. Because everything we have is a Divine gift. We're called Jews after Judah - so named by our foremother Leah because of her gratitude - hoda'ah - that G-d had given her "more than her share" of sons. We Jews are always to see what we have - whatever it may be - as "more than our share."

The larger world has a rather different ethic. An advertisement recently asked me "Don't you deserve a new Lexus?" Well, no, I don't particularly. I'm not at all sure I even deserve my used Saturn with the manual roll-up windows either. In fact, every morning when I open its door, I thank G-d for granting it to me. There is a contemporary social disease one might call eskumptmir-itis - from the Yiddish phrase "It's coming to me." We have to try mightily not to contract it.

As it happens, there is a vaccine for the disease of entitlement: the blessings we say throughout every day. Each is an expression of hakarat hatov, a recognition of a gift, and of its Source. We do well to say them carefully, and think of what we are saying.

The second "R" is Relating - trying to feel what others are feeling, empathizing. Here, too, a very different atmosphere envelops the world around us. Maybe it's different in Baltimore, but in New York the roads teach much about empathy - about how things are when there isn't any. Obviously each of us cares most about himself - that's why "Love your neighbor like yourself" takes "yourself" as the given - but the law of the jungle is not our law. We are charged to try to see the world through the eyes of the other.

You've heard, no doubt, about the new father-to-be who paced the waiting room for hours while his wife was in labor, about how the process went very slowly and he became more and more agitated, until, an eternity later, the nurse finally came in to tell him his wife had delivered a little girl.

"Thank heaven!" he burst out. "A girl! She'll never have to go through what I just did!"

You will meet people like that, I assure you - although, with G-d's help, not your future husbands - and they exemplify the self-centeredness we have to strive mightily to shun.

The third "R" is perhaps the most important, since it touches on a Torah commandment and concept of singular status: Kiddush Hashem, or "Sanctifying G-d's Name." That imperative, of course, requires a Jew to die rather than commit certain sins, or any sin in certain circumstances. But we're charged not only with dying, if necessary, in sanctification of G-d's name but also with living in a state of such sanctification. This "R" is thus "Reflecting" - for, as observant Jews, our actions reflect not only on ourselves, our parents and teachers and schools, but on our Torah - in fact, on our Creator.

Today, perhaps, more than ever. Waiting at a bus stop once, I was approached by a young mother whose little boy was cowering behind her. She approached me and asked politely if I might assure the child that I was not Osama bin Laden. Turban, black hat, whatever, we do both have beards. I managed to convince the young man who I wasn't, but was struck by the realization that Mr. Bin Laden not only has the blood of countless innocents on his soul but the sin of desecrating G-d's name. We must counter with the opposite.

What an incredible obligation - and what an incredible opportunity.

Maimonides, in his laws about sanctification of G-d's name, adds that great Torah-scholars have a particular mandate to act in an exemplary way - for they are perceived as the most powerful reflections of the Torah. I don't think it's a stretch to understand those words to apply today to all who are perceived to be reflections of Torah. In a world like ours, all identifiably Jewish Jews are "great Torah scholars" regarding this law - and we must all endeavor to act the part.

The opportunities are ubiquitous. Receiving change from a cashier, a smile - not to mention a "thank you" - leaves an impression. On the road, where politeness is at a premium, driving politely leaves an impression. The way we speak, the way we interact with others, all leave an impression. We must leave the right one.

So, dear graduates, remember always, above all else, just who you are: reflections of G-d on earth.

Reflect well.

And may your reflections be clear and brilliant, and help merit a fourth "R" - the ultimate Redemption.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

AMERICAN IDOLS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

I already have a title: "Ferry Tales." Now all I need is the time to write the book in my head about the interesting things I've witnessed over the years on my daily commute aboard the Staten Island Ferry.

Not long ago on the boat, for instance, I was trying to concentrate on a page of Talmud. The din of nearby conversations doesn't disturb me; the voices commingle and provide a sort of white noise actually conducive to withdrawing into a difficult text. But when someone enamored of the right to free speech and animated by a cause undertakes to pace the aisles and loudly share his convictions, well, it's a little harder to focus.

Usually he is of a religious bent, orating about heaven and elsewhere. (One memorable fellow brandishing a New Testament was fond of referring to one of the ferry's termini as "Satan Island"). Not, though, this guy.

"The war in Iraq is about OIL!" he announced. Over and over. Louder and louder.

"Get our troops out NOW!" and "Bush is EVIL" came the next refrains, similarly repeated and amplified.

Of late, I realized, fewer of the maritime evangelists had been thumping bibles, and more of them proclaiming political and environmental beliefs, like opposition to the war, the President or Global Warming.

What struck me, though, was the similarity in tone of voice and body language. Whether the prophet was speaking in the name of the Lord or of George Soros, only the words were different. The eyes, the gait, the tone of voice, the air of certitude, were all indistinguishable.

Which observation led me to wonder if perhaps social or political causes have come, for some, to replace religion. Or, to muse further: Have they become religions themselves?

I was apparently not the first to think the thought. MIT Meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen has labeled environmentalism a religion (not intending a compliment), as its devotees are convinced "that they are in possession of a higher truth" and are intolerant of "heretics, or 'climate change deniers,' to use green parlance." Author Michael Crichton has asserted much the same, even paralleling environmentalist credos with Biblical accounts of the Garden of Eden, the fall of man and an eventual Day of Judgment. "Environmentalism," he told the Commonwealth Club in 2003, "seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists."

I don't know if anyone has made the case for a religion-parallel among those passionately opposed to the war in Iraq or those who label President Bush the scourge of humanity. But the fervor of some of the sentiment out there - like that of the politics-preacher on the ferry - would seem to lend the contention support.

None of which, of course, is in any way to implicate reasonable environmental concerns or political positions. By political "faiths" I mean the all-consuming elevation of a concern or position to the status of Ultimate Truth. It's the difference between enjoying an occasional glass of wine and alcoholism.

The morphing of social or political beliefs into quasi-religions was noted in the mid-1930s by a renowned, sainted Orthodox Jewish scholar (who, although he was in America shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, refused to abandon his students and returned to his yeshiva in Poland, where he and they perished at Nazi hands). Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman warned that "isms" - he mentioned, among others, socialism, communism and various forms of nationalism - are modern-day "idolatries." Although the primal urge to pay homage to wood and stone no longer exists in our world, a residue of idol-worship persists - in the form of such "isms." Were he alive today, Rabbi Wasserman might well add "liberalism," "conservatism," "feminism," "environmentalism" or "pacifism" to the roster.

Some say that contemporary "isms," unlike earlier ones, are innocuous. But one is given pause by things like a paper recently published by a British environmental group, Optimum Population Trust, which promotes the prevention of babies, positing that "the most effective personal climate-change strategy is limiting the number of children one has." Or by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which claims to have sunk ten whaling ships and whose leader has called human beings the "AIDS of the Earth." He explained further that "curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and, therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach." One can't help but wonder just what he has in mind.

The 18th century Jewish scholar and mystic Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato famously explained that human beings seek pleasure, even beyond our biological needs, because we are created for pleasure - not the ephemeral and elusive sort so many mistakenly pursue, but the ultimate, eternal one attainable only through closeness to the Divine.

Perhaps, similarly, what impels people to embrace idolatry, whether of the ancient sort or the modern, is the recognition, deep in their souls, that there is in fact something worthy of devotion.

What is ironic is that, in the eyes of Judaism, the first step out of any environmental or geopolitical morass is recognizing just what that Something really is.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

OF SLOPES AND HOPES

Rabbi Avi Shafran

"Oh, come on!" the e-mail read, "What's a few dead children on the altar of my liberal slippery-slope paranoia?"

Gruesome as the imagery was, I had to smile. The message was intended as a humorous "touch�!" from an academic who had originally contacted me in anger. He was not only honest enough to concede his error but perceptive enough to identify its origin.

What had motivated him to write in the first place was a letter published in The New York Times in which, on behalf of Agudath Israel of America, I welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court's upholding of the federal "partial-birth abortion ban" law.

"How in the world could you write such a letter�?" the professor fumed. "You know perfectly well that the so-called 'partial-birth abortions' are almost always only performed when there is a serious, potentially mortal danger to the birth-mother, and that Jewish law is clear and unambiguous in such cases: the life of the mother takes precedence over that of an unborn child�"

The professor is correct about Jewish religious law's placement of the life of a Jewish mother before that of her unborn child. The Jewish legal metaphor for the fetus is a "rodef," or "pursuer" - someone in the act of threatening a life, thereby forfeiting all rights to legal protection. But the professor, like many others who reacted with outrage to the High Court's ruling, had several facts about the particular case in question very wrong.

If a mother's health is endangered during labor, even a late-term fetus can be legally dispatched in utero; it need never be partially extracted alive and then killed. What is more, the partial-birth abortion law contains an explicit exception in a case (if any in fact exists) where a physician feels it necessary to kill a partially emerged baby to save its mother's life.

But beyond all that, my correspondent had simply not comprehended the most salient aspect of the procedure at issue: the baby has been born.

At least that is how Jewish religious law - which was what the professor invoked - views a baby whose "entire� head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother," in the federal law's words.

That being the case, the law, at least from a Jewish perspective, does not address abortion at all. It addresses homicide. Case closed.

Which fact yielded the professor's admirable, if crudely expressed, admission of error, and his further admission of its roots.

He had taken his cues, he realized, from a gaggle of groups, including several with "Jewish" in their names but judiciaries on their minds. Their members' nightmares are dominated by the frightening possibility that our nation might one day reconsider its current blanket enshrinement of a "right" to abort. They insist on viewing the world through a tunnel called "Roe," and are not beyond misrepresenting Judaism in the service of their myopia.

Hadassah Magazine, for one example, in its Summer 2003 issue, quotes unnamed "authorities" to maintain that Jewish law "implicitly assumes that a woman has the right to make her own reproductive choices." The supplement's "Jewish Law" section goes on to claim that "restricting access to reproductive services� undermines basic tenets of Judaism." None of which is true.

To be sure, as my correspondent noted, a right to abortion in certain cases is sacrosanct to observant Jews. Talmudic sources are clear that the life of a pregnancy-endangered Jewish mother takes precedence over that of her unborn child. But that is so only when there is no way to preserve both lives. Although the matter is hardly free of controversy, there are some respected rabbinic opinions that also permit abortion when a pregnancy seriously jeopardizes the mother's health. But those narrow exceptions in no way translate into some unlimited mother's "right" to make whatever "choice" she may see fit about the life of the child she carries.

Put simply: The abortion issue is not only about rights but about right - as in "right and wrong." While Judaism has little to say about rights - it speaks rather about duties and obligations - it has much to say about rightness. And preventing potential life from developing when there is no truly compelling reason to do so, according to the Torah, is wrong.

The laws of civilized societies reflect and shape those societies' values. And the devaluing of potential human life wrought by Roe has helped devalue all human life in America for over three decades. No, a straight line cannot be drawn between Columbine or Virginia Tech and the ready availability of abortion in the United States. But a society that shows respect for life at its earliest stages cannot but empower respect for life at every stage. The possibility that individual states might one day be permitted to place some limits on the current "no fault" abortion law of the land is not a threat; for some of us it represents a hope, the possible beginning of a more strongly life-affirming era in our land. An era in which we are all a little less concerned with slippery slopes, and a little more about ennobling ideals.

"Choice" is the motto of those who want the fates of fetuses consigned to the decisions of their mothers. Moving from the book of social liberalism to the book of Deuteronomy, though, we find the Torah's take on choice somewhat different.

"I have placed before you," the Creator informs us through Moses, "life and death, the blessing and the curse."

"Choose life," the verse continues, "so that you and your seed will live."

< P align="center">[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. This essay appeared in The Forward and is republished with its permission]

RECLAIMING ALEINU

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Whether to precarious geopolitical situations or challenges posed by personal adversity, the authentic Jewish response is to seek spiritual merits.

Such virtues might come in the form of more heartfelt prayers, more determined Torah-study, more frequent acts of kindness, greater empathy for one another. Or in the form of smaller, more specific, undertakings, like special care in the performance of particular mitzvot.

Because Jewish tradition teaches that the path to a goal entails utilizing all available means, the seemingly less significant no less than the more obvious.

In that spirit, I would like to offer a small idea for Jews seeking a spiritual merit: reclaiming "Aleinu."

Until one of my daughters shared her personal exasperation over the fact, I had thought that I was perhaps the only person who had found it nearly impossible to complete the "Aleinu" ("It is incumbent�") prayer in shul in the time allotted. Granted, one can always complete Aleinu after the Kaddish that generally follows it, but what most often happens instead is that, at least for most people, the prayer is mercilessly mangled or truncated.

Aleinu is no minor prayer. It was composed, according to early sources, by Joshua; its opening sentences, moreover, were the death-declaration of countless Jews throughout history, the words with which they defiantly refused to succumb to the tortures and threats of those bent on uprooting devotion to our ancestral faith. It is part of our Amidah for Mussaf on Rosh Hashana.

And the appended "Al Kein" ("Therefore�") paragraph is, according to our tradition, the expression of repentance composed by Achan (the first letter of each of its first three words spell his name), in the wake of his sin of misappropriating valuables from the spoils of the conquered city of Jericho, for which he expressed sincere regret.

Might it not be part of a truly Jewish response to adversity for us to better connect to such words?

And the words themselves are so powerfully pertinent to our times, when many feel "the footsteps of the Messiah" can be heard in the distance.

Once again, and perhaps more than ever, the small fraction of one percent of the world's population known as the Jewish People is, astoundingly, the focus of myriad forces of unbridled evil.

No Jew with any sense of history could possibly ignore the confluence of contemporary world events: The venomous hatred fueling Islamist movements, the acts of anti-Semitism that poke through the loam of humanity around the globe like toxic mushrooms, the decrepitude masquerading as the Palestinian Authority's "unity government," the smiling little would-be mass murderer in Iran. The footsteps grow louder. Is it not a time for Jewish merits, large and small?

The haters like to say that there is a Jewish Plot. They are essentially right. But it's more of a plan than a plot, since there's only one - or, better, One - Planner. And His plan is unfolding before our eyes.

We Jews have a role here: to be better Jews in every way we can, and to realize that, in the end, there is, as the Talmud tells us, "no one on whom to rely other than our Father in Heaven."

And when we do our part, our tradition teaches, we will merit the ultimate redemption, the era of global recognition of G-d and His truth that our Prophets have foretold. It is, at it happens, described in the words of "Al Kein":

"And therefore we put our hope in You, G-d, that we may soon see Your mighty splendor�to perfect the universe through the Almighty's sovereignty.

"Then all humanity will call upon Your Name, to turn all the earth's wicked toward You. All the world's inhabitants will recognize and know that to You every knee should bend� and to the glory of Your Name they will render homage, and they will all accept upon themselves the yoke of Your kingship� on that day G-d will be One and His name will be One."

< P align="center">[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

CHOSEN

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In the April issue of Commentary, a scholar dared to raise one of the few remaining issues still considered impolite these days for public discussion: Jewish intelligence.

In an essay entitled �Jewish Genius,� political scientist and writer Charles Murray � who is not Jewish � outlines the historical and statistical data suggesting Jewish intellectual acumen and accomplishment, as well as a variety of theories seeking to explain them.

While most of us Jews will readily admit that we personally know many members of the tribe who are not very smart at all, Dr. Murray insists that �the average Jew is at the 75th percentile� of the IQ scale and that �the proportion of Jews with IQs of 140 or higher is somewhere around six times the proportion of everyone else.� Some, moreover, have noticed that a number of world-changing ideas, both religious ones like monotheism and scientific ones like relativity, have their roots in a certain ethnicity.

After exploring a number of theories addressing the anomaly, Dr. Murray is less than satisfied. Recent historical circumstances might have genetically favored Jews of higher intellect, he allows; but he suspects that Jewish intellectual ability is ancient, that the Jews may �have had some degree of unusual verbal skills going back to the time of Moses.� And so, he writes, he remains �naked before the evolutionary psychologists� ultimate challenge: Why should one particular tribe at the time of Moses, living in the same environment as other nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East, have already evolved elevated intelligence when the others did not?�

Then, tongue � at least partially � in cheek, he concludes:

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

Well, the thought is certainly timely. We will soon be celebrating Shavuot, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the cementing of the Jewish people�s chosen status: the covenant forged at Sinai.

I don�t know, or much care, whether or not intelligence plays any role in the Jewish election. But if it does, it is peripheral to the essence of our chosenness.

Because what Jews are chosen for is to serve the Creator � with our intellects, yes, but also with our hearts and with our bodies.

To be sure, the Torah itself refers to the Jewish people as �a wise nation� � but also as a stubborn one, and sometimes even worse. The bottom line: It�s not our Intelligence Quotients that count but our Righteousness Quotients. What counts is the service, not the smarts. The Sages of the Talmud did not generally stress inherent abilities � mental or otherwise � but rather focused on how we utilize whatever blessings we have. Their greatest honorifics customarily ran not to words like �genius� or brilliant� but to ones like �righteous� and �G-d fearing.�

Even though the Jews� election was merited through the dedication of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and through another choice � that of their descendants, at Sinai, to accept the laws and teachings of the Torah; and even though the exclusive Jewish club is open to any sincere convert willing to undertake to observe the Torah, the idea of Jewish chosenness has perturbed some non-Jews since, well, since Sinai.

Of late, though, anti-Semites tend to feed at other troughs of hate-fodder, like Israel�s existence (and its imagined evildoing). These days, ironically, the idea of the Jewish people as divinely chosen is more likely to disturb� Jews.

That is because the truism that every human being has limitless value and potential has morphed into the notion that all people are interchangeable, if not identical. To suggest that different individuals or groups may have different functions or responsibilities has become uncouth, if not sexist or racist. Judaism, however, unapologetically assigns roles � to men and to women; to scholars and to laypeople; to descendants of the Biblical Aaron and to the rest of the Jewish people. And to the Jewish people qua people, too.

There�s no escaping it. A blessing all Jews are enjoined to pronounce each morning states the fact clearly: �Blessed are You� Who chose us from among all the nations and gave us His Torah��

I sometimes wonder if part of the reason Shavuot isn�t as widely celebrated by contemporary Jews as Sukkot or Passover might be the squirming induced in some Jewish circles by the idea of Jewish specialness. If so, I�d respectfully suggest that the squirmers just get over it already.

After all, there are many ethnicities and religions that lay claim to specialness � from the Japanese to the Mormons to the Black Muslims. And while history is littered with the deaths and destruction sown by self-proclaimed Ubermenschen, Jewish specialness is not a license but a gift; and its sole import is a responsibility to live lives of holiness and thereby inspire others � to be the proverbial light unto the nations.

This year Shavuot falls on May 23 and 24. While some have the custom to spend the entire first night of the holiday (and others, both nights) studying Torah, there is no Shavuot cognate-commandment to Passover�s seder or Sukkot�s huts. Shavuot is a time, it would seem, for turning inward and focusing on the giving of the Torah and how it defines who we are as Jews. A time to realize that our essence lies not in our talents and not in our intelligence, but in our mission.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

"LET MY SCIENTISTS GO!"

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Back on April 13, in the spirit, perhaps, of the Passover then just past, The New York Times editorialized about the need to "free" something from the "chains imposed" upon it. The sentence's subject was "American science" and the Pharaoh-figure, President Bush.

"One man," huffed the Old Gray Lady, "and a minority of his party, the religious and social conservatives, are once again trying to impose their moral code on the rest of the nation and stand in the way of scientific progress."

The editorial umbrage was the product of Mr. Bush's declared intention to veto a bill currently wending its way through Congress that would ease restrictions on providing federal funds for embryonic stem cell research.

Stem cells, of course, are biological entities with the remarkable ability to develop into many different types of specialized cells. They can theoretically divide and redivide without limit, and thus offer the hope that they might be harnessed to replenish damaged or diseased organs, tissues or blood.

Some stem cells can be harvested from umbilical cords, bone marrow and even from adult human tissue; but many medical researchers feel that stem cells taken from embryos present the greatest opportunities for potential therapy.

President Bush's view is that, regardless, embryos containing all the ingredients for growing into babies are deserving of protection. Or, at least, that the United States government should not fund experimentation that will destroy such entities.

One bioethics analyst, Carrie Gordon Earl, asserts that the inevitable result of the enactment of legislation like that currently being mulled by Congress will be to reduce funding available for non-embryonic, or "adult," stem cell research - research that, at present, is far more advanced than that being done on embryonic cells.

As it happens, just two days before The Times' demand that Mr. Bush "Let My scientists go," researchers announced a striking and promising stem cell therapy that might allow Type-1 diabetics to live healthy lives without taking insulin. Oddly, though, the announcement did not seem to generate any of the expansive celebration one might expect at news of a possible cure for a disease affecting millions of people and presenting tens of thousands of new cases each year.

Why the lack of hoopla? Maybe it was due to the fact that the therapy that had shown such promise involved not embryonic stem cells, but rather adult cells harvested from the patients themselves and then re-introduced into their bodies.

The Times of London' news story on the announcement disclosed that fact only in its sixteenth paragraph - well after informing readers that embryonic stem cell research "is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush."

Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the propriety of destroying embryos for potentially life-saving medical research, and likewise about whether federal funds should be used for the same. Indeed, while the issue is complex and still under review in respected rabbinic circles, some Jewish scholars and groups, even within the Orthodox community, have concluded that Judaism - which assigns value to potential life and, despite some Jewish groups' claims otherwise, does not consider abortion a "woman's right" - would nonetheless encourage embryonic stem cell research under certain conditions, and have expressed support for federal funding for such research.

One doesn't have to agree, though, with the President's position on embryonic stem cell research to appreciate his caution in the brave new bioethics-world.

The mark of true human civilization is the very concern for the "moral code" that The Times finds so quaint. And history teaches us how humankind has in fact taken gargantuan steps backward from the adjective "civilized" when it has not allowed moral concerns to "stand in the way," as The Times puts it, "of scientific progress."

At a time when cloning, the creation of hybrid-species-cells and the manipulation of genes have leapt from the realm of science fiction into that of emerging technologies, Mr. Bush's insistence on giving moral considerations a seat at the scientific public policy table is not only defensible, it is admirable. The President's position on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research may not endear him to millions of citizens who, for better or worse, have absorbed the mainstream media's messages on the issue. Yet he stands firm and refuses to jump onto the embryo-experimentation bandwagon, because of his conviction that terminating life, even its potential - even under the banner of scientific progress - is something that must be approached with great deliberation.

That may make Mr. Bush into Pharaoh in the eyes of some, but the identification is as ironic as it is unfair.

For Pharaoh and his sorcerers - the scientists of his day, one might say - were profoundly unconcerned with either the value of human life or moral imperatives.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

AMEN TO AHAVAT YISRAEL

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In a Jerusalem Post opinion piece, Dr. Jonathan Schorsch calls me a "clever fellow" whose "handwringing" over the hatred I've encountered aimed at Orthodox Jews is "somewhat posed, if not disingenuous."

Dr. Schorsch can be easily disabused of his first assertion by perusing my high school scholastic records, or by consulting my wife and children, who can regale him of all manner of dumb things I've said and done (but who love me, I hope, all the same).

As to the second charge, I assure him that I am sincerely pained by my observations.

Dr. Schorsch quickly moves to his real point, the contention that Orthodox Jews are themselves the cause of the hatred aimed at them, because they lack sufficient ahavat Yisrael, or love for fellow Jews. He cites personal experiences of Orthodox Jews insulting him and the Orthodox refusal to accept the Jewish legitimacy of non-Orthodox theologies.

The latter has nothing to do with ahavat Yisrael. Loving other Jews doesn't mean embracing everything they may embrace. The very essence of Orthodox conviction is the rejection of changes to the Jewish religious mandate, like those changes embraced, to one or another degree, by non-Orthodox movements. So there is no crime in, and hence no apology for, Orthodox belief. That, though, should not (and in the vast majority of Orthodox Jews does not) in any way affect how we Orthodox view non-Orthodox Jews. My love for an uncle who was a socialist was in no way compromised by my rejection of his world-view.

Dr. Schorsch, as a committed non-Orthodox Jew, does not likely consider the unabashedly atheistic "Humanistic Judaism" philosophy as a legitimate form of Judaism. And if not, it must trouble him that rabbis of that movement seek to redefine Judaism in atheistic terms. Does he, though, hate Jews who, out of unfamiliarity with the Jewish heritage, pay dues to that group? I would certainly hope not.

How, Dr. Schorsch asks, can anyone possibly not take it personally when his or her theological beliefs are rejected? Simple. All that is needed is good will, and respect for the deep-seated convictions of others.

But some of what Dr. Schorsch recounts is deeply disturbing. If, indeed, Orthodox Jews seized on the fact that his father is a chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary to berate Dr. Schorsch, that was uncouth, indeed downright rude. And if, indeed, one of his woman friends was assaulted by haredim for carrying a sefer Torah, all I can say is that haredi leaders have explicitly condemned and forbidden any such reactions to even intentionally provocative public displays of that sort.

Ahavat Yisrael, though, is very much an Orthodox ideal. It is a mandate my wife and I have instilled (thank G-d, successfully, I think) in our children, and one that I stressed, over nearly two decades in Jewish education, to the hundreds of students I was so fortunate to teach (and learn from).

Dr. Schorsch may think it lacking from the larger Orthodox world, but he is wrong.

For example, take Chai Lifeline, which cares for young Jewish cancer patients and their families, regardless of what prefix the beneficiaries may place before "Jew" in their self-description. Or the famed "Satmar Ladies," who minister to the needs of all Jewish patients in New York area hospitals. And those are but two of the better known of many such chesed organizations under Orthodox auspices.

Then there is the world of Jewish outreach. The very existence of dozens of groups helping Jews interact with their religious heritage should say it all. The concern of the "givers" in these programs transcends any and all denominational lines. A participant who remains a staunch member of a Reform or Conservative congregation is studied with, invited and cared about as much as any belonging to an Orthodox shul or to none at all. It would be exceedingly odd for Jews to be so determined to share what they treasure with other Jews they don't care for.

And then there are the many "community kollelim" that exist to engage in Torah study not only in the traditional kollel mode of internal study partnerships but which pointedly set aside considerable time for members and their wives to interact and study with men and women from the larger local community - again, without regard to denominational affiliations.

Then there are things like the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation, which has brought unprecedented focus to the importance of "between Jew and Jew" ideals, and the remarkable "Inspired" films, whose entire existence is born of a desire to encourage Orthodox Jews to care about their non-Orthodox brothers and sisters. That the films have drawn large Orthodox audiences in many cities clearly indicates a concern in the Orthodox community for Jews who are not part of it. As do the themes of ahavat Yisrael that are mainstays of lectures by popular Orthodox speakers like Rabbi Paysach Krohn and Rabbi Yissocher Frand, whose audiences sometimes number in the thousands.

Nor should anyone forget Partners in Torah, the celebrated project of Torah Umesorah that matches up Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish men and women to study Torah by phone. My wife's partner in Torah lives in Arizona, is intermarried and belongs to a Conservative temple. My Chassidic colleague's lives in Poughkeepsie and is of a similar background. At my daughter's recent wedding, her new mother-in-law, who is from Los Angeles and not Orthodox, got to see her own Partner in Torah, from Lakewood, New Jersey, a young woman who made a long trip just to be at the wedding and dance with the Jewish woman she has been studying with for years. It was a festive sight to behold. Scores of Orthodox Jews are studying with equal numbers of non-Orthodox Jews through this wonderful project.

Orthodox organizations, both in America and Israel, offer Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews alike the benefits of an array of projects, services and educational opportunities. On the local level, practically every Jewish community has an Orthodox chesed group, whose goal it is to assist Jews in need - any Jews in need; likewise a chevra kadisha, or burial society, which prepares the Jewish deceased - regardless of his or her affiliation during life - for Jewish burial.

Even a quick look at any of countless articles in the Orthodox media calling on readers to reach out to and care about all their fellow Jews - or a quick listen to Orthodox-produced audiotapes and CDs for children - readily evidences the prominence given to the promotion of good will toward fellow Jews.

So to Dr. Schorsch I say: I hope you will come to realize how embarrassed and pained most Orthodox Jews are by reports like yours of alleged boorish behavior by some Orthodox Jews. And that you will realize that ahavat Yisrael is in fact a deep conviction in the larger Orthodox world.

I hope, too, that you will consider an open invitation to, at your convenience, grace my family's Sabbath table with the presence of you and yours. I assure you that the experience will be filled only with smiles (and wholly sincere ones), song, friendly conversation, words of Torah and ahavat Yisrael.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

WHEN "ABORTION" ISN'T

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The U.S. Supreme Court's upholding of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has elicited the usual cries of protest from abortion rights advocates and, also as usual, they include an assortment of Jewish groups and The New York Times.

That latter institution characterized the term "partial-birth abortion" itself as a "provocative label" for the presumably more descriptive "intact dilation and extraction." As it happens, The Times (and the other advocates) are correct about the inaccuracy of the term "partial birth abortion," but not because it exaggerates the repugnance of the procedure in question.

Despite concerted efforts by some to misrepresent the law, its language is stark and clear. It prohibits any overt act, like the puncturing of the brain, "that the person knows will kill" a fetus whose "entire� head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother."

Thus, it is not abortion at all that the law at issue addresses, but rather the killing of a baby whose head or most of whose body has emerged into the world. Readers of The Times' editorial page, and much of the "mainstream" media, might be forgiven for not realizing what the procedure actually entails.

Nor have the media done a very good job explaining what exemptions the law does or does not contain. Since it does not contain an exemption for the mother's "health," there is wide assumption (at least from the evidence of calls and e-mails I have received) that even if the mother's life were somehow threatened by allowing the partially emerged infant to fully emerge, the federal prohibition would stand. In fact, though, the law contains an explicit exception for cases where the procedure is deemed necessary to preserve the mother's life. As to a "health" exemption, the Supreme Court's majority found, among other things, that if there is any threat to maternal health (a possibility about which no medical consensus exists), "safe alternatives to the prohibited procedure� are available."

Even more troubling to me, as a Jew, than the misunderstandings of the facts is that a number of rabbis and Jewish organizational spokespeople have asserted that Jewish religious tradition is somehow offended by the recently upheld law. The president of Hadassah, to take one example, has baldly stated that the law "undermines Jewish values."

She and others who have made similar claims are misinformed, and in turn misinform.

To be sure, the Talmudic sources are clear that the life of a Jewish woman whose pregnancy endangers her takes precedence over that of her unborn when there is no way to preserve both lives. (That is why Agudath Israel, while we oppose Roe v. Wade's effective "abortion on demand," has not and would never favor a wholesale ban on abortion.) And, while the matter is not free from controversy, there are rabbinic opinions that allow abortion when the pregnancy seriously jeopardizes the mother's health. But those narrow exceptions do not translate into some unlimited "mother's right" to "make her own reproductive choices" - the position Hadassah enthusiastically trumpets.

Moreover, in the specific context of "intact dilation and extraction" - to use The Times' preferred nomenclature - Jewish law certainly confers no right to kill a live baby whose head, or most of whose body, has already emerged. Indeed, once birth has already occurred, Jewish law makes clear, the newborn child has no less right to live than does the mother. Stated simply, what the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act prohibits is, in the eyes of Jewish law, little if anything short of murder.

Nothing, of course, prevents a Jew, or Jewish organization or rabbi, from ignoring the teachings of the Jewish religious tradition.

But intellectual integrity, if nothing else, should prevent anyone from misrepresenting the content of a law, or what Jewish tradition has to say about killing an unborn child, or a born one.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. The article above was written for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency]

JEWISH INFLUENCE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

It isn't likely that very many people exhaled at long last with relief at the news that three entertainment industry executives had compiled their pet list of "America's 50 most influential rabbis." But there was still something worthwhile, if not terribly comforting, to learn from the venture.

It was, to be sure, an odd bird, rendered stranger still by its prominent reportage in Newsweek magazine, a periodical that once actually reflected its name. The roster, in any event, became fodder for much mirth-making - jubilant press releases from groups boasting connections to one of the Fab 50, and snickers from more disinterested corners.

There were even some knitted eyebrows, since lists of "influential" Jews more commonly reside in the darker recesses of the blogosphere, where they are usually festooned with swastikas, SS bolts and the like.

And there was some puzzlement too. Why, even if for some reason one wished to identify paradigms of Jewish influence, would one limit the focus to clergypeople? What of Jewish teachers, activists, writers?

What I found thought-provoking, though, was what the trendy troika's choices say to us about the contemporary concept of influence.

To be sure, included on the list are some noteworthy people, including the one at its top, Rabbi Marvin Hier. But, at least to my lights, any lasting influence he will have derives from the educational impact on society of the Simon Wiesenthal Center he heads. The list-compilers, however, gave him their first-place nod because of � his association with "almost every world leader, journalist or Hollywood studio head." How silly of me.

Even closer to truly enduring influence are the accomplishments of another name on the roster, that of Rabbi Nosson Scherman (although, at #45, he was listed well after a "Kabbala" snake oil salesman and a radical political guru famous for cloaking extreme left-wing stances in Jewish garb). By conceiving and building the Jewish publishing and translating powerhouse called ArtScroll/Mesorah, Rabbi Scherman has helped render accessible to more Jews than ever before a wealth of Jewish textual sources - including the entire Babylonian Talmud.

But those men and a few others on the list - like Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of the National Jewish Outreach Program - are the exceptions. The bulk of the coronated received their crowns because of their connections to the rich and famous, or for their promotion of "progressive" positions at irreconcilable odds with Judaism. The point system the Hollywooders employed, moreover, gave particular weight to criteria like "Are the rabbis known nationally/internationally?" And: "Do they have a media presence?"

Well, being famous or photogenic must certainly be nice. But, as any of a large number of contemporary celebrities readily evidence, such attributes are superficial and fleeting - to put it mildly.

Surely the compilers of the list, with their credentials in the entertainment industry, must realize that. And yet still they seem to conflate influence with celebrity.

Judaism's understanding, I submit, is very different.

Influence in the Jewish view, particularly when rabbis are being considered, is measured in the energizing of authentic Jewish learning and ideals. Put simply, the coin of the Jewish realm is not trendiness but Torah. And what it purchases is not Jewish clout but the Jewish future.

Measured by that standard, to those sufficiently foresighted to separate the effective from the ephemeral, the 50 most influential rabbis are likely unknown to most American Jews. And, in fact, they would be scandalized to find their names on any "most" list. They are modest Jews who shun the limelight and whose momentous influence lies in their effect on their students, congregants and followers - to whom they impart timeless and authentic Jewish wisdom. Wisdom that is not just pondered but lived, determinedly and proudly, and passed on to future generations.

Some of those truly influential rabbis head yeshivot or seminaries, of which there are dozens in the United States - many of them having educated and inspired thousands of students. Others are Chassidic rebbes; others, respected congregational leaders. And others still are teachers or lecturers, some of them presenting Torah classes that draw large and enthusiastic crowds. One offering, in Brooklyn, attracts well over a thousand attendees each week - and is broadcast to other locales where at least as many Jewish men and women gather to participate at a distance.

Although the title "rabbi" in the Orthodox world is not used for women, thousands of students mourned like daughters of the deceased when an Orthodox woman teacher, lecturer and life guide passed on two years ago; she was eulogized at her funeral by Orthodox rabbis of remarkable stature. And, through personal memories of her wisdom and advice as well as tapes of her lectures, she continues to teach countless Jewish girls and women today - and surely will for many years to come.

Such, dear reader, is true Jewish influence.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE "B" WORD

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Over the course of his distinguished military career, it is unlikely that General Peter Pace ever encountered a barrage as unrelenting as the one lately lobbed by the media and punditsphere after he expressed his personal feelings about the practice of homosexuality. The offensive (in both the word's senses) weapons aimed at him were only words, but they were duly destructive all the same.

What General Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dared to voice was his conviction that homosexual acts - not inclination, not orientation - are immoral. Needless to say, anyone can choose to disagree; the general was opining, not seeking to impose his views on others. But some who disagree with him seem to feel that his point of view simply has no place in civilized discourse. That should trouble us all.

The volleys lobbed at General Pace included widespread characterizations of his remarks as evidence of odious prejudice. The New York Times called the general's beliefs "bigoted" and averred that he was "wrong in every way, and out of step." The New York Daily News headline about the matter read, simply: "General Bigot".

Similarly, several years ago, The American Civil Liberties Union ran an advertisement comparing people who object to homosexual practices on moral grounds as akin to vicious racists of yesteryear. Those espousing a traditional view of acceptable sexual behavior, the ACLU asserted, seek "to hide behind morality." But, the ad continues, "we all know a bigot when we see one."

One of the few categories of humankind universally and rightly reviled is the club of bigots - those who judge others negatively solely because of their ethnicity, color or faith. That the word is being expanded these days to encompass those who disapprove of certain activities is a development both dismaying and dangerous.

As a third Gotham daily, the independent-minded New York Sun, editorialized: "If everyone who holds that homosexual acts are immoral were a bigot, it would mean that most adherents of traditional religions� would be bigots."

A 2001 study indeed showed that a majority of Americans hold that "homosexual behavior is morally wrong" - precisely what General Pace said. If the general is "out of step," as The New York Times contends, the paper is picking its marchers.

Some might imagine that contorting the meaning of the word "bigotry" is innocuous. But a more realistic take is that it is a first step toward restricting free speech - indeed, toward stifling free thought.

We have already witnessed the treatment, in 2002, of a British Columbia public school teacher who was suspended for a month without pay and received a demerit on his professional record for writing letters to a local newspaper that were critical of the practice of homosexuality.

The Canadian Charter of Rights protects citizens' freedom of expression and religion. But that was apparently no bar, in the eyes of the British Columbia Supreme Court, which ruled on the matter last year, to punishing the teacher for his views. We Americans may not take our constitutional cues from our colder-air neighbor to the north, but we do well to remember what a celebrated bard once noted about weathermen and knowing which way the wind is blowin'.

If fact, the chill has already arrived. Even here in the United States, the Boy Scouts, for its barring of avowed homosexuals as leaders, has lost funding from dozens of United Ways and municipal government sources; and the group's policy has been publicly condemned by, among others, the American Federation of Teachers, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress and the Reform movement's Joint Commission on Social Action.

The issue is not benign and the game is zero-sum. Either the choice of a particular conduct is like being black, or there is a difference between who people are and what they do. To the degree that the first approach is advanced, proponents of the second one will be vilified, demonized and even penalized.

And if disapproving of homosexual behavior is bigotry, then not only religious folk but nonbelievers, too, who nevertheless accept the validity of the traditional moral code are, ipso facto, villains. And why should the label be any less apt for those who disapprove of other affronts to the traditional moral ideal - like multi-partner or incestuous relationships? Either morality has meaning and trumps what some people wish to do, or it does not.

We Americans cherish our constitutional right to live our lives freely, in accordance with our consciences and beliefs. What we need to stop and ponder is that sometimes erosions of that right can tiptoe in, whistling innocently, dressed in the shiny robes of progress.

Should the word "bigotry" be successfully devolved to include deeply-rooted, time-honored and sincere religious beliefs, it might not be long before morality becomes the conviction that dares not speak its name.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

WHEN LIES LURK IN LESSONS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

A major American publisher of educational texts recently showed impressive responsibility and resolve by pledging to destroy its inventory of a book because of its false characterization of Orthodox Jews' beliefs.

The problematic passage - in a volume of Scholastic Library's "Enchantment of the World" (second series, published under Scholastic's "Children's Press" imprint) - asserts that, in Israel, "some ultra-Orthodox Jews want to limit the definition of who actually qualifies [for automatic citizenship as a Jew, under the country's Law of Return]. They believe that Reform and Conservative Jews are not really Jews at all because they are not strict in their observance of all the religious laws."

When the passage was called to the attention of Agudath Israel of America by a school librarian in Brooklyn, we immediately contacted Scholastic to point out the falsity of the contention that Orthodox Jews reject any Jew's Jewishness because of a less strict level, or even complete lack, of observance.

Books like "Enchantment of the World," we noted, are intended as reference material for grade school libraries. They help mold young minds. And so, false and prejudicial assertions, unacceptable anywhere, are particularly objectionable in such works.

To its credit, Scholastic agreed. After researching the issue and recognizing that the controversy in Israel relates exclusively to conversions that do not satisfy traditional Jewish law, or halacha - not the Jewishness of any born or halachically converted Jew - the publisher rewrote the paragraph and pledged not only to rid itself of its current inventory of the books but to reprint a corrected volume in April and replace customer copies.

Where did the defamatory error originate? According to a Scholastic official, the publisher had relied on "a high-ranking member of American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprises" for the original formulation. AICE is, in its own words, "a leading content provider for students and organizations interested in Jewish history, culture and politics."

AICE probably does much good work and likely provides a good deal of accurate information. But that only makes the issue all the more troubling. How could a "high-ranking member" of the group have been so clueless (or, worse, malicious) as to have provided so egregious a misrepresentation of Orthodox Jews?

Equally troubling is the fact that, entirely under-the-radar, many Jews are being taught other fiendish fables about Orthodox Jews.

A number of such reports have come to my attention, but I recall one with a particular wince. It was several years ago, when a letter to the editor appeared in the magazine Reform Judaism. The letter had been written by a Jewish teen-ager in response to an article in an earlier issue of the periodical contending that Orthodox Jews have contempt for Jews who are not like themselves.

"Why," wrote the earnest young woman, "when there is so much anti-Semitism in the world, must fellow Jews hate us as well?"

I was greatly agitated by the letter and simply couldn't concentrate, so I picked up the phone and dialed information for the teen's New Jersey town, which had been identified beneath her name. There would probably be many listings for her surname, I told myself, too many to sift through.

There was only one; I wrote it down.

Taking a deep breath, I dialed the number and asked for Michelle (as I'll call her). She came to the phone and, after identifying myself and apologizing profusely for calling her out of the blue, I spoke my piece:

"G-d forbid! Orthodox Jews don't hate you! Our argument is with 'Reform Judaism', not Reform Jews. We have serious disagreements with the philosophy of the movement with which your family is affiliated. As you get older and learn more, you can evaluate those concerns for yourself. But you and your family are our precious Jewish brothers and sisters!"

A pause, and then she responded.

"You sound like a nice person," she said, "but I can't accept what you're saying."

I was stunned. "Why not?"

"Because I've been taught otherwise, for years."

"But it isn't true!"

"Maybe," responded Michelle, "but we've spent many classes in my Temple school discussing Orthodox attitudes and I can't just suddenly take your word against all that I've been taught."

Dumbfounded and deeply hurt, I realized that there was nothing to gain by pestering the clearly sincere but resolute young woman. I begged her to take down my number in case she ever wanted to talk further. She hasn't called yet.

Compelling a major publishing concern to correct a public mistake is relatively easy. How, though, to counter falsehoods quietly conveyed in classrooms?

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

BLOOD OF LIFE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

That a recent book's reported claim of Jewish ritual murder in the Middle Ages stirred considerably more commotion in the Jewish media than in the Muslim world may be a hopeful sign. Or it might just testify to the depth and breadth of the longstanding belief in Arab and Asian countries that, why, yes, of course Jews murder non-Jews to use their blood in Passover matzos and wine (although the extension of that belief to Purim's hamantaschen is of more recent vintage).

The Western media's unanimous condemnation and ridicule of the blood libel assertion in the Italian book "Bloody Passover" is certainly heartening. As many reports noted, the book's author, Professor Ariel Toaff, based his speculation on confessions extracted from victims of torture. Surely, many whose bodies were pierced, stretched or torn by the horrific devices employed by European authorities in the 1400s - or who were even merely confronted with the prospect of such technology - would have just as readily admitted to being demons or Martians too.

There is, of course, no basis of any sort to the contention that the Jewish faith includes, or ever included, the consumption, on Passover or anytime, of human or animal blood. Consuming either is in fact forbidden by Jewish religious law.

The concept of blood, though, is indeed central to Passover, which begins this year with the first Seder on the night of April 2.

The blood is that of the Paschal, or Pesach, sacrifice, which in the times of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem was slaughtered on the afternoon before the onset of the holiday. The meat of the lamb or goat comprised the final course of the Seder (the original "afikoman"), and some of its blood was placed on the Temple altar.

We don't have a clear comprehension of the Jewish laws of animal sacrifices; somehow, the ritual results in our own greater closeness to G-d ("korban," the Hebrew word for sacrifice, means "that which makes close"). But the spiritual mechanics, as is the case with so many of the Torah's commandments, are ultimately beyond mortal minds.

The Pesach sacrifice, though, seems to hearken back to the first Pesach, when the blood of the sheep or goat our ancestors were commanded to slaughter in Egypt, in preparation for their exodus from that land, was placed on "the doorposts and lintel" of each Jewish home.

In rabbinic literature, houses are symbols of the feminine, and so the blood on the doors of the Jewish homes in ancient Egypt might perhaps represent the blood of birth. From those homes in ancient Egypt, in other words, a new collective entity came forth into the world. A Jewish nation was born.

As the Shem MiShmuel, a classic Chassidic text, explains, before the exodus the Jews were all related to one another (as descendants of Jacob) but they were not a people. Any individual was still able to reject his or her connection to the others and the rejection had an effect. Indeed, our tradition teaches that many in fact did not merit to leave Egypt at all, dying instead during the plague of darkness. Their behavior precluded them from being part of the new, holiness-charged nation.

Once the nation-entity was forged, though, on our ancestors' very last night in Egypt, things changed radically. With blood on their doorways and satchels filled with (blood-free) matzoh, they readily followed Moses into the frightening desert on G-d's orders, knowing not what awaited them. As the prophet Jeremiah described it, in G-d's words: "I remember for you the kindness of your youth� your following Me in the desert, a land where nothing is planted." And thus the Jews began the process of becoming a living nation, an entity whose members, and descendants throughout history, are part of an organic whole, no matter what any of them may choose to do.

As the Talmud put it: "A Jew who sins is still a Jew," in every way. There is no longer any option of "opting out."

And so, blood in Judaism is a symbol not of suffering, not of torture, not even of death, but rather of: birth, life, meaning.

Which is likely why the prophet Ezekiel - in words the Seder-text presents as a reference to the Pesach sacrifice - has G-d telling His people that on "the day you were born� I passed by you wallowing in your blood, and I said to you, 'in your blood, live.' And I said to you, 'in your blood, live'."

How ironic that blood came to be the subject of the wild, hate-filled fantasies of our enemies. To the point, even, where halachic sources suggest using white, not red, wine for the Seder in places where there is fear of blood libels.

Anti-Semites, unfortunately, don't lack for fantasies. Whether it is casting American Jews as warmongers or Israel as a fascist state - even those who know that blood isn't an ingredient in the Jewish diet are adept at adopting new delusions.

For our part, we Jews do well to stay focused on the Pesach-blood, the symbol of our birth as a people. And from there, to turn our sights to discerning and embracing the mandate of our peoplehood, the Torah - the ultimate reason for our "blood of life."

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

THE MAN ON THE BIMA

Rabbi Avi Shafran

He ascended the steps to the bimah, the platform where the Torah is read, with the strangely hurried movements of someone who would rather be traveling the other way.

This middle-aged fellow, apparently something of a stranger to a shul, had just been "called up" from his seat in the back of the small shul to make the blessing on the Torah.

They get so nervous, I thought to my cynical, teen-age self that day several decades ago; they should really come more than just a few times a year, if only to get the feel of things. The blessings, after all, are not very long, the Hebrew not particularly tongue-twisting.

"Asher Bochar Banu Mikol Ho'amim (who has chosen us from among all nations)" - I prompted him in my mind - "V'nosan lonu es Toraso (and has given us His Torah)."

C'mon, man, you can do it.

His life was passing before his very eyes; you could tell. The occasion, for the man on the bima, was both momentous and terrifying.

Then he did something totally unexpected, something that made me smirk at first, but then made me think, - and made me realize something profound about our precious people.

He made a mistake.

Not entirely unexpected. Many a shul-goer, especially the occasional one, leaves out words here and there, reverses the order, or draws a traumatic blank when faced with sudden holiness of the Torah. That would have been unremarkable. But this congregant was different.

His mistake was fascinating. "Asher bochar bonu" he intoned, a bit unsure of himself, "mikol," slight hesitation, "�haleylos shebechol haleylos anu ochlim."

The poor fellow had jumped the track of the Torah blessing and was barreling along with the Four Questions a Jewish child asks at the Passover seder! "Who has chosen us from�all other nights, for on all other nights we eat�"!!

For the first second or two it was humorous. But then it struck me.

The hastily corrected and embarrassed man had just laid bare the scope of his Jewishness. He had revealed all the associations Judaism still held for him - all that was left of a long, illustrious rabbinic line, for all I knew.

My first thoughts were sad� I imagined a shtetl in Eastern Europe, an old observant Jew living in physical poverty but spiritual wealth. I saw him studying through the night, working all day to support his wife and children, one of whom later managed to survive Hitler's Final Solution to make it to America and gratefully sire a single heir, the man on the bimah.

We have so much to set right, I mused, so many souls to reach, just to get to where we were a mere 70 years ago.

But then it dawned on me. Here stood a man sadly inexperienced in things Jewish, virtually oblivious to rich experiences of his ancestral faith.

And yet, he knows the Four Questions.

By heart.

When he tries to recite the blessing over the Torah, the distance between him and his heritage cannot keep those Four Questions from tiptoeing in, unsummoned but determined. The seder is a part of his essence.

I recall a conversation I once had with a secular Jewish gentleman married to a non-Jewish woman and not affiliated with any Jewish institution. His en passant mention of Passover prompted me to ask him if he had any plans for the holiday.

He looked at me as if I were mad.

"Why, we're we planning an elaborate seder, as always."

Astonished at the sudden revelation of a vestige of religious custom in his life, I told him as much. He replied, matter of factly, he would never think of abolishing his Passover seder. I didn't challenge him.

When living in Northern California, I became acquainted with other Jewish families seemingly devoid of religious practice. I always made a point of asking whether a seder of any sort was celebrated on Passover. Almost invariably, the answer was... yes, of course.

It is striking. There are more types of haggadahs than other volume in the immense literary repertoire of the Jewish people. The Sixties saw a "civil-rights haggadah" and a "Soviet Jewry haggadah." Nuclear disarmament, vegetarian and feminist versions followed. At the core of each was the age-old recounting of the ancient story of the Jews leaving Egypt and receiving the Torah. It is as if Jews, wherever the circumstances may leave them, feel a strange compulsion to preserve the Passover seder and its lessons whatever the costs, and whatever the form most palatable to their momentary persuasions.

Events that took place millennia ago - pivotal events in the history of the Jewish nation - are regularly and openly commemorated by millions of Jews the world over, many of whom do so out of an inner motivation they themselves cannot explain.

They may not even realize what they are saying when they read their haggadahs, beyond the simplest of its ideas: a Force saved their forefathers from terrible enemies and entered into a covenant with them and their descendants.

But that is apparently enough.

A spiritual need that spawns an almost hypnotic observance of the seder by Jews the world over is satisfied. And even if, after the seder, mothers and fathers go back to decidedly less than Jewishly observant lives, their daughters and sons have received the message.

As did their parents when they were young, and their parents before them.

The seed is planted.

The seder is indisputably child-oriented. Recitations that can only be described as children's songs are part of the haggadah's text, and various doings at the seder are explained by the Talmud as intended for the sole purpose of stimulating the curiosity of the young ones.

For the children are the next generation of the Jewish nation; and the seder is the crucial act of entrusting the most important part of their history to them, for re-entrustment to their own young in due time.

And so, in the spring of each year, like the birds compelled to begin their own season of rebirth with song, Jews feel the urge to sing as well. They sing to their young ones, as their ancestors did on the banks of the Red Sea, and the song is a story. It tells of their people and how the Creator of all adopted them. And if, far along the line, a few - even many - of us fall from the nest, all is not lost. For we remember the song.

Just like the man on the bimah.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

A CALL TO ARMS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The thesis that is the Jewish Nation has an antithesis: Amalek. And just as the Jewish People is defined by its Torah, so is its polar opposite associated with a particular system of thought and attitude.

Amalek the nation is unknown to us today; the Biblical command to destroy it to avert the mortal threat it poses to all that is good and holy is thus moot.

Amalek the notion, though, is very much present - in the broader world, the Jewish one and perhaps, to a degree, within each of us as well. And its undermining remains an obligation both urgent and clear.

A hint to the attitude defining Amalek lies in the Torah's words immediately preceding that nation's first appearance. In Exodus (17:7), just before the words "And Amalek came," the Jews wonder "Is G-d in our midst or not?" The Hebrew word for "not" - "ayin" - literally means "nothing." That Amalek's attack comes on the heels of that word is fitting, because Amalekism stands for precisely that: nothing. Or, better: Nothing - the conviction that all, in the end, is without meaning or consequence.

In Hebrew, letters have numerical values. The number-value of the word "Amalek," Jewish sources note, equals that of "safek," or "doubt." Not "doubt" in the word's simplest sense, implying some lack of evidence, but rather doubt as a belief: the philosophical shunning of the very idea of surety - the embrace of cynicism, the championing of meaninglessness.

For there are two diametric ways to approach life, history and the universe. One approach perceives direction and purpose; the other regards all as the products of randomness - cold, indifferent chaos.

The latter approach is the essence of Amalekism. It is a worship of chance, reflected in things like the Purim story's Amalekite villain Haman's choice to cast lots - putting his trust in chance - in choosing a date to annihilate the Persian Kingdom's Jews.

The religion that is Amalekism is often regarded as a harmless agnosticism. But it is hardly benign. Because if nature is but a series of dice-rollings, its pinnacle, the human being, is just another pointless payoff. Man's actions do not make - indeed, cannot make - any difference at all. Yes, he may benefit or harm his fellows or his world, but so what? There is no ultimate import to either accomplishment.

In fact, asserts the chance-worshipper, he is no different from the animals whom he considers, through the lottery of natural selection, his ancestors. He may be more evolved, but in the end is no less an expression than they of purely random events.

Amalek's credo is proudly and publicly proclaimed today. From "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals" (PETA), which contends that "meat is murder"; to Princeton University's Professor Peter Singer, who asserts that "the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee"; to books like "Eternal Treblinka," which makes the loathsome comparison of animals slaughtered for food with (one winces to even repeat it) the victims of the Nazis.

And it lurks, more subtly but no less surely, in the contemporary insistence that chance-based evolutionary theory is the only explanation for the diversity of species.

One who sees only random forces as the engine of that diversity may be able to offer an explanation of the human belief in right and wrong - claiming, for instance, that such belief evolved through "natural selection" to confer some biological advantage to humans. But he cannot justify the belief itself as having any more import than any other utilitarian evolutionary adaptation.

And so, faced with the Jewish conviction that ultimate meaning exists, and that the human being is the pinnacle not of blind evolution but of purposeful Creation, Amalek mocks. Men, he sneers, are no different than the monkeys they so closely resemble, and the actions of both of no ultimate import.

Interestingly, our resemblance to apes may figure in the pivotal account of Amalek's attack on the Jews after the exodus from Egypt. When Moses lifted his hands, the Torah recounts, the tide of the fight turned in favor of the Jewish People; when he lowered them, the opposite occurred.

"And do the [lifted] arms of Moses wage war?" asks the Talmud. "Rather," it explains, "when the Jews lifted their eyes heavenward, they were victorious�" And so the lifting of Moses' hands signifies the Jews' beseeching G-d.

The etymology of the word Amalek is unclear. But one might consider it a contraction of the Hebrew word "amal" - "labor" - and the letter with a "k" sound: "kuf," whose letters spell the Hebrew word that means, of all things, "monkey."

It is intriguing and perhaps significant that among all the earth's creatures, only humans and primates can lift their arms above their heads. And little short of astounding that precisely that movement figures so pivotally in the context of a battle between the nation proclaiming that human life has no special meaning - that men are but smooth-skinned apes - and the nation that proclaims human life has unique meaning.

Because, while primates can also lift their arms, the gesture is an empty one; when humans do the same thing, it can be the most potent expression of relating to the Divine.

When Moses lifts his arms, indicating the Jews' turning to G-d, it can be seen as a declaration that our "amal," our labor, is not the action of a monkey but the meaningful expression of human beings.

"And his hands were belief" - says the verse there, strangely. Or not so strangely. Moses' hands declared belief in humanity's unique relationship to G-d.

The Jews thus prevailed in the battle by negating Amalekism - by demonstrating their conviction that G-d exists and that we are beholden to Him.

On Purim, Jews the world over commemorate the crucial, if not final, victory over Amalek that took place in Persia in the time of Mordechai and Esther, by publicly reading the Book of Esther. As has often been remarked, it is a unique scroll in the Jewish canon, the only one that makes no overt reference to G-d. Instead, it forces us to seek Him in the account's "chance" happenings, to perceive Him in seemingly "random" events.

By doing precisely that, our ancestors merited G-d's protection and emerged victorious. May our own rejection of the Amalek-idea in our time merit us the same.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. The above essay appears in a longer form in the current edition of The Jewish Observer and is offered with its permission.]

THE KING AND I

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Anyone who frequents the streets of lower Manhattan has seen him. He's not the sort of fellow who easily escapes eyes.

Like many who spend their days wandering big-city downtowns, he seems to carry all his possessions in the upright shopping cart he pushes along. It is a colorful and eclectic collection. Peeking out from within the wire grid are assorted pieces of clothing, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, empty cans, newspapers, the flag of some unknown country, and other assorted detritus of a life lived on the street.

Unlike many other unemployed homeless, though, he never panhandles or even seeks eye-contact with passers-by. He just pushes along proudly, a look of satisfaction on his face - and a large, green, foam-rubber Statue of Liberty crown atop his head.

It's the crown that really makes him stand out, and which, along with his piled-high pushcart and resolute gait, makes the security dogs at the Staten Island Ferry terminal go berserk with barking at the sight of him. To be sure, one sees the occasional tourist with a similar headdress; the hats are popular souvenirs from nearby Liberty Island. But tourists wear them as kitsch, for photographs; to King Liberty, as I call the proud cart-pusher of Wall Street, it is clearly a diadem, a mark of royalty.

It is easy to dismiss the king as someone suffering from a mental illness, although "suffering" may be too strong a word, considering how content he seems. But what occurred to me when I recently saw him is that he is, at least from what one can know from observing him, not all that different from the rest of us, only perhaps a bit more transparent. After all, he's busy collecting stuff and exulting in the status he imagines can be gleaned from flimsy things.

Our own stuff might seem more practical than King Liberty's, but that's just a function of our personal perspectives. His possessions are every bit as valued by their owner as ours are by us. And our own crowns - be they fancy watches, designer clothes, BMWs, the latest model cell-phone, or corner offices with nice views - are really no more meaningful in the end than gaudy foam-rubber garlands.

And the rest of us collect our stuff and our status, just as King Liberty does his, in an effort to achieve respect, mistaking the counterfeit for the real thing.

But it's not. True honor comes from accomplishment, not acquisitions. It's not what we have or wear or drive that counts, but what we are.

And the rabbis of the Mishneh point to a particular aspect of life that is a key to respect. "Who is honored?" they ask in Avot, 4:1, "He who honors [G-d's] creatures."

At first glance, one might interpret that statement as a simple good strategy: honor others and they will return the favor. But that's hardly always true, and it is particularly untrue in our crass times, when cynicism and insults, aimed even at people who deserve the respect they themselves show others, are the coins of all too many realms.

The Hebrew words for "Who is honored?", however, might better be rendered "Who is honorable?" - who, in other words, is inherently, meaningfully worthy of honor, honored, if not by his fellows, by his Creator.

And more food for thought lies in the Mishneh's answer, "He who honors [G-d's] creatures." A proof-verse is offered, and it is laden with meaning: "As the verse says, 'For those who honor Me I will honor�'" [Samuel I 2:30].

On a simple level, the verse is invoked to show that since G-d Himself honors those who honor Him, surely we mortals should act similarly. But something else clearly lies in the verse's words - namely, that honoring others is itself an honoring of G-d. For man, after all, is created in the Divine image, and every human being - the word "creatures" is used pointedly - carries a spark of holiness within. Thus the famed Talmudic leader Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, we are taught, would swiftly greet every person he met each day "even a Gentile on the street."

And so, the next time I spy King Liberty, who got me thinking about things in the first place, I will try to focus less on his hat than on what lies below it, and remember that he, no less than any of us, is worthy of honor. Because, royalty or not, he is the handiwork of the King of kings.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE KING AND I

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Anyone who frequents the streets of lower Manhattan has seen him. He's not the sort of fellow who easily escapes eyes.

And the rest of us collect our stuff and our status, just as King Liberty does his, in an effort to achieve respect, mistaking the counterfeit for the real thing.

But it's not. True honor comes from accomplishment, not acquisitions. It's not what we have or wear or drive that counts, but what we are.

And the rabbis of the Mishneh point to a particular aspect of life that is a key to respect. "Who is honored?" they ask in Avot, 4:1, "He who honors [G-d's] creatures."

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

BURNING ISSUE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

A crematorium recently opened for business in Israel, for the use of citizens who want their remains reduced to ashes.

A decade ago, just over 20% of Americans who died were cremated. In 2005, the rate had risen to 32%. The Cremation Association of North America confidently forecasts that by 2025 more than half of Americans will choose to have their remains burned rather than interred. While no one knows what percentage of American cremation-choosers are Jewish, there is little doubt that, at least among Jews with limited or no Jewish education, or who became estranged from Jewish observance, cremation has become acceptable, if not a vogue. And now, the Jewish State has it own facility for burning human bodies.

Yet the fact that the establishment is the first of its kind in Israel does bespeak an essential Jewish attitude toward the services it provides.

Some Jews recoil from the idea of cremation because the Third Reich incinerated so many of its Jewish victims.

Others, and many non-Jews, disdain the burning of human remains because of infamous cases where crematory owners, after accepting families' payments, presented them with urns of animal ashes, turning a further profit from the sale of the bodies entrusted them to brokers who then conducted brisk businesses of their own selling body parts.

Judaism's inherent abhorrence for cremation, however, predates and supersedes both Nazi evils and ghoulish crimes. The roots of the Torah's insistence on burial of human remains lie elsewhere.

Judaism's opposition to cremation is sourced, at least in part, in a fundamental Jewish belief: that there will come a time when the dead will live again. Although the idea of the resurrection of the righteous may be surprising to some, it is one of Judaism's most important teachings. And even though it is not explicitly expressed in the Written Torah, it is prominent in the Torah's other half, the Oral Tradition. The Mishna, the Oral Tradition's central text, confers such weightiness to the conviction that it places deniers of the eventual resurrection of the dead first among those who "forfeit their share in the world to come" (Sanhedrin, Chapter 11, Mishna 1). As the Talmud comments thereon: "He denied the resurrection of the dead, so will he be denied a portion in the resurrection of the dead."

That our bodies are invested with such importance should not be startling. Not only our souls but our physical selves, too, possess inherent holiness. Our bodies, after all, are the indispensable means of performing G-d's will. It is through employing them to do good deeds and denying their gravitations to sin that we achieve our purposes in this world.

And so, Jewish tradition teaches, even though we are to consign our bodies to the earth after death, there is a small "bone" (Hebrew: "etzem") that is not destroyed when a body decays and from which the entire person, if he or she so merits, will be rejuvenated at some point in the future.

The idea that a person might be recreated from something tiny - something, even, that can survive for millennia - should not shock anyone remotely familiar with contemporary science. Each of our cells contains a large and complex molecule, DNA, that is essentially a blueprint of our bodies; theoretically, one of those molecules from even our long-buried remains could be coaxed to reproduce each of our physical selves. (Intriguingly, the Hebrew word "etzem" can mean not only "bone" but also "essence" and "self.")

Burning, in Judaism, is a declaration of utter abandon and nullification. Jews burn leaven and bread before Passover, when the Torah insists no vestige of such material may be in their possession. The proper means of disposing of an idol is to pulverize or burn it.

Needless to say, G-d is capable of bringing even ashes to life again (as the ashes of the Nazis' crematoria victims will surely demonstrate one day, may it come soon). But actually choosing to have one's body incinerated is an act that, so intended or not, expresses denial of the fact that the body is still valuable, that it retains worth, indeed potential life.

The new Israeli crematorium's owner, in fact, describes himself as an atheist, as do most if not all of his customers. One, a teacher in Jerusalem, gave eloquent expression to her reasons for choosing cremation, telling The Jerusalem Post: "I was not sanctified in my lifetime so my grave won't be sanctified either� I believe that there is nothing after death�"

That is the philosophy underlying the choice of cremation.

It is the antithesis of the belief-system called Judaism.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

HEROIC MEASURES

Rabbi Avi Shafran

A recent report from Jenin got me thinking.

Residents of the West Bank city have hung a large picture of Saddam Hussein in the refugee-quarter's central square. A local commander of the Fatah-aligned Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades explained that the display was intended to show Palestinian appreciation of the late and (at least in the civilized world) unlamented Iraqi dictator. He pledged that Palestinians "will continue to honor his memory as a symbol of resistance until the American and Israeli occupation is driven out."

Much is revealed about a person by whom he considers worthy of honor. And much is similarly revealed about a people or a society. One's heroes reflect one's aspirations. And so the Jenin example, intended to draw eyes and hearts toward a depiction of someone for whom words like "ruthless," "cruel" and "murderous" fall pitifully short of the mark, is both telling and depressing, not to mention something vital for would-be international peacemakers to ponder.

It is also, though, nutritious food for broader thought. Who, we might well consider, are our own heroes? To whose examples do we aspire? While no sane and civilized person would ever respond with the names of bloodthirsty tyrants, more than a few of us might still come up with those of writers, entertainers, sports figures or other public personalities, people whose accomplishments, while noteworthy and in some cases perhaps even noble, reflect our limited horizons of hope for ourselves.

What is more, in their private lives, all too many of the figures idolized in contemporary society reveal character flaws that are more than minor. The clay often extends far north of their feet.

In much of the Orthodox Jewish world, those whose examples are aspired to are great rabbinic figures. Their portraits often grace the walls of our homes. And while the men depicted (there are also venerated women, of course, but in their modesty they would consider their visages' display to be unseemly) are renowned scholars, what makes them our heroes is their personal saintliness.

A good example is the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan), the famed Polish Jewish sage who died at the age of 105 in 1933, and whose image can be found in countless observant Jewish homes (particularly near telephones). Rabbi Kagan wrote seminal books on the prohibition of slanderous and otherwise improper speech and was an unquestionable exemplar of righteousness himself. The day after his passing, The New York Times noted how the venerated sage had "lived in poverty all his life." The long obituary also pointed out that "Despite his fame as 'the uncrowned spiritual king of Israel,' the Chofetz Chaim was a modest and humble man. His career as a merchant was of short duration. Because of his popularity, all the Jews of the town flocked to his store. The Chofetz Chaim thereupon closed the store on the ground he was depriving other Jewish merchants of a living."

The Orthodox community is hardly without its failures. Even some Jews who are punctiliously observant of the Torah's mandate in most areas of life have at times shown themselves not beyond violating their responsibilities in others - sometimes in quite serious ways. The Chofetz Chaim would not be proud.

And yet the thought remains, and remains significant: While greed and other evil inclinations may find marks even within what should be a rarified community, something more trenchant is said by that community's aspirations, no matter how elusive - by, in other words, who its heroes are.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

YES, BUBBA, IT'S A JEWISH PLOT

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In an unintentionally amusing video being e-mailed around, a large-boned, jowly man with a droopy mustache and hair parted down the middle sits at a desk and reveals a secret scam that Jews have been levying on unsuspecting Gentiles for years. Behind him hang an American flag and a banner featuring a large swastika.

The short "program" is billed as "White Nationalist News" and our trusty correspondent is identified as "Mich Bubba." Heavy metal guitar introduces and ends the spot; the refrain of the tune (so to speak) is "Tricky, Tricky Yid".

The conspiracy Mr. Bubba proudly exposes is the "Jewish tax" that hides in plain sight from unsuspecting non-Jews in secret code on food packaging. Long familiar to Hebrews of traditional bent, the various kosher symbols (the popular "u" inscribed in an "o" that is a trademark of the Orthodox Union - which Bubba calls the "United Rabbinical Council" - as well as myriad graphic riffs on the letter "k") are indications that the product so marked was produced under the supervision of a rabbi expert in the intricacies of both kosher law and food science. Bubba hews to the belief that such foods are simply "blessed by a rabbi" and identifies one product as carrying a second sinister rabbinical group's certification - "parve" - which he pronounces "parVEY" (French rabbis, probably).

In his essential point, of course, Bubba's right. Companies do indeed pay for kosher certification.

As they also do, of course, for the right to display, say, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval (for which manufacturers must purchase advertisement space in Good Housekeeping magazine). Or as they indirectly do through increased manufacturing costs for the right to call their products "organic" or "natural." To Bubba, however, the Jewish arrangement is singularly unkosher; it smacks, to his fuzzy lights, of a Jewish "shakedown." If companies pay for a rabbi's service, he unreasons, the cost must surely be passed on� secretly, of course� to "Gentile" consumers.

The risible accusation is nothing new; it resurfaces almost every time logic-challenged anti-Semites manage to catch their breath between rants on the Middle-East and "Jewish control of the media." As to inconvenient facts, The New York Times reported in 1975 that the cost to General Foods for rabbinical supervision of its "Bird's Eye" products worked out to .0000065 of a cent per item. A Heinz Company representative maintained that its own kosher labeling actually decreases the cost of items, by increasing the market for them - the only rational reason, of course, a company would choose to pay for such a service in the first place.

Nor is Bubba compelled to buy one brand of corndogs or beer over another. If the kosher item in fact proves more expensive, he can simply opt for one that hasn't been supervised by a rabbi (which, he makes quite clear, he prefers in any event).

If there is anything Jew-haters don't like, though (besides Jews), it is having to deal with pesky facts. There are more important things to do, like sowing hatred and suspicion.

Most folks even loosely connected to reality know that there are no Elders of Zion (at least none who aspire to world control), and no Jews who murder Christians to mix their blood into matzohs, that such things are (forgive me) Bubba-meisehs. And yet, millions keep even those myths alive (not to mention create new ones, like Jewish recruitment of Arab innocents to fly planes into buildings). So it should hardly be surprising that there are people accusing us Jews of less obvious, more insidious crimes� like kosher certification.

The persistence, ubiquity and sheer creativity of anti-Semitism rightfully concern us. But there is also something curiously invigorating about it all.

Because it points to what underlies Jew-hatred: the suspicion that the Jewish people are special.

However odd it might seem of G-d, He did indeed choose the Jews. In other words, yes, Bubba, there is a plot (though not exactly a conspiracy; there's only one Plotter).

But Bubba needn't panic. What anti-Semites like him don't realize is that the Jewish mission isn't to subjugate but to educate. Keep it under your hat, Bubba, but what we Jews are charged with is living lives of holiness and service to G-d and man.

That includes prayer, charity and acts of kindness, study of holy texts and meticulous honesty in all our dealings - as well as a multitude of ritual matters, including eating kosher food. But no, Bubba, undermining society and levying hidden taxes aren't on the list.

One day, G-d willing - likely when we Jews shoulder our mission with more passion and determination - those who labor so hard to hate us will suddenly be stopped cold in their tracks and made to meet a reality they never considered: that Jewish specialness was never a threat to them at all, but a gift.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

SHABBAT CHAUFFEURS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The setting sun doesn't panic most people. Most people, though, aren't Orthodox Jews stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike an hour before the onset of Shabbat, when Jewish religious law forbids driving a car.

I generally stay off highways - and try mightily to avoid cars altogether - several hours before sundown of a Shabbat or Jewish holiday. But this past October 6 was an exception. My 16-year-old son was stranded.

Dovie had accepted a ride that morning from Baltimore, where he attends yeshiva, and was to be dropped off at our home in Staten Island. But a later start than planned and unforeseen traffic (a turnpike oxymoron) forced the family bringing him (Orthodox Jews like us) to instead proceed directly to their own destination in New Jersey. They called me several hours before sunset to ask if I could meet them on the turnpike to pick my son up.

I readily, if nervously, agreed, and set out. The traffic was as formidable southward as it was headed north. But my paternal instinct propelled me on. Then my son's drivers called again. They had had to leave Dovie at a motel off the highway in order to reach their own destination before the Sabbath. My paternal instinct - and my car - went into overdrive.

Judaism is a religion of laws, and for those of us who consider those laws sacrosanct, a situation like the one I faced is harrowing. If the sun set before I reached my son, I would have to pull the car over and leave it wherever it was. It would likely get towed and I would likely be picked up by the police. If I reached my son before sunset but without enough time to get home, we would both be stranded, though thankfully together. As I watched the sun dropping closer to the horizon, I drove as� uh, efficiently as I could, knowing I was in trouble.

To make a long and sweaty palms, parched mouth and high blood pressure story blessedly short, I reached Dovie about a half-hour before sunset. I barely stopped the car, he threw his bags in the back, jumped inside and off we sped.

More traffic. The sun sinking fast. Finally, looming before us, the bridge to Staten Island. We made it across just as the sun began to set. We veered onto a residential street, ditched our possessions in the car (the Shabbat laws prohibit carrying anything in a public area) and got out.

We were ten miles from home, but elated. We had made it onto the island before the Sabbath began. I'm not in great physical shape but, thank G-d, can probably handle a few hours' walk.

After holding our private Mincha service (ideally recited before sunset), we crossed to the median of the highway and marched northward.

After about 45 minutes' walk - punctuated by the honks of drivers either amused or perturbed by the sight of a bearded man and a teenage boy walking where no one usually does - a car stopped on the median grass about 200 feet in front of us. A man emerged and began walking toward us.

He was a neatly-dressed and pleasant-looking young man, and asked if we needed help.

I explained our predicament and thanked him for his concern.

"Can I drive you home?" he asked.

I replied that on the Sabbath I couldn't as much as open the door of his car.

"If I open it for you, can you be driven?"

"Are you Jewish?" I asked. It would be wrong for me to even cause another Jew to violate the Jewish Sabbath.

"No," he said with a smile. "I'm a born-again Christian."

His offer couldn't be blithely refused. While Sabbath law didn't permit me to explicitly ask someone not bound by it to do something for me that I couldn't do for myself, I hadn't asked; he had offered. I tried to analyze other pertinent factors, including the slim but clear element of danger of walking on a dark highway. As the three of us walked together, I responded, "That is very kind of you. Where are you headed?"

At that point we had reached the man's car; a young woman whom he introduced as his fianc�e sat in the front passenger seat. If she had any concern about picking up two strangers, she certainly didn't show it.

"To the Staten Island Mall," he replied, as he opened the door for us. That would shave half our walk off, I thought, and my son and I got in the car. Anthony, as our benefactor identified himself, was all too happy to help. "But please," I said, "just to the mall."

Anthony and his future wife - their wedding was to take place in a few weeks, if I recall correctly - couldn't have been nicer. Part of me wondered if this Christian couple might see my son and me as marks to whom to preach religion, but our conversation was only about their upcoming marriage and world affairs, and they both made my son and me feel as if we were doing them a favor by allowing them to be our chauffeurs.

In any event, when we reached the mall, Anthony asked us where we lived. I told him and he insisted on taking us home. (Later I discovered that halacha might have required me to not allow him to go out of his way for me.) When we reached our driveway, Anthony opened the door for us again, and we thanked him from the bottom of our hearts. When my wife and family - who had last heard from me when I was on the turnpike and didn't know where Dovie and I would be spending Shabbat (and the next day, the second day of Sukkot) - saw us walk in the front door, they were shocked but overjoyed.

The gratitude we felt toward our benefactors was, and is, not only for their having cared about my son and me but also for demonstrating, in a world of so much evil unleashed in the name of religion, good will toward two strangers of another faith.

In the Jewish religious tradition, though, there is something that goes beyond simple gratitude; it is called hakarat hatov - literally: "recognition of the good." Gratitude is recognition of another person's choice, but hakarat hatov is something one must feel even toward an inanimate, unchoosing, object. "Into a well from which you drank," admonishes the Talmud, "do not throw a stone." Moses, similarly, was not permitted to strike the Nile or the earth for the Egyptian plagues that emerged from them; as a baby, he had been hidden from his would-be Egyptian murderers in the Nile, and as an adult had buried in the earth the Egyptian taskmaster he had killed.

Hakorat hatov, I think, can best be understood as something meant to benefit not the recipient but the giver. It is intended to make us - the "recognizers" - more sensitive, more aware of the ultimate Source of all goodness. Whether through the agency of a well, a river, the earth or the fortuitous arrival of someone able and ready to help us, our ultimate feelings of joy and appreciation are for the One who has provided.

Sukkot is called z'man simchateinu, "the time of our happiness." This past Sukkot in my home, the phrase resonated with particular power.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. The above is an edited version of an article that appeared in the Staten Island Advance, and is published with that paper's permission.]

MORE THAN FEAR ITSELF

Rabbi Avi Shafran

You suddenly begin noticing signs bearing Arabic script in buses. What do you do?

Well, what bus riders in Richmond, Virginia did was call the local Transit Authority to find out what it might know about the signs, which had been turning up on buses and the walls of local universities.

The Associated Press and other media outlets subtly scoffed at the concerned citizens, explaining that the Arabic phrases were in fact innocuous - translating as things like "paper or plastic?" or "paper, scissors, rock" or "I'm a little teapot." Those translations in fact appeared at the bottom of the signs, along with admonishments like "Misunderstanding can make anything scary" or "What did you think it said?"

The provocative ads were the work of the Virginia Interfaith Center, which placed them in public venues as part of an effort to change the fact that, as the center's executive director put it, "as soon as people see Arabic, they immediately make an association with terrorism."

Orthodox Jews like me have considerable experience with bias, and sympathy for good-willed, law abiding Muslims who are victims of religious prejudice. We know well what it is like to be targeted by bigots for harsh stares, ugly comments and worse. I always carry the realization that some subset of society will, when seeing my beard and headgear, associate me with Shakespeare's Shylock, Dickens' Fagin, the fictional poisoners of wells or the fantasized Elders of Zion.

And those are all, in the end, imagined characters. In this age of all-too-real and widespread Islamist terrorism - where the Muslim faith is regularly invoked by people around the world as directing murder and mayhem - innocent Muslims surely feel even more marginalized as a result of the hasty generalizations people tend to make, and bear the bitter fruit of the suspicions and fears born of their coreligionists' all-too-real words and actions.

But there are times, still, when suspicion and fears cannot be dismissed as the products of bias, and can even rightfully lead to the curtailment, at least temporarily, of the freedoms we Americans enjoy as our birthright.

Like the recent case of a group of imams who were removed from a flight about to leave Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for Phoenix.

That the Muslim religious leaders had reportedly prayed loudly in the airport before the flight was certainly no reason to consider anything amiss. But when passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials that the imams had switched from their assigned seats - to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist passengers: two in the front row first-class seats, two in the middle of the plane in aisle seats and two in the rear of the cabin - security officials' concern was not outlandish, as later was charged by a number of American Muslim groups.

And when three of the men then asked for seat-belt extenders, despite being of average build, and proceeded to place them, unused, on the floor before them, it was hardly religious bias - or, in the words of Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee (D., Texas), "racial profiling, harassment and discrimination" - that motivated police to detain the group for questioning.

No weapons in the end were found among the imams, but that happy fact does not mitigate the less-happy one that the authorities' actions were more than justified.

As a visibly Jewish man, whenever I am on a plane or train, I always consciously try to alleviate any discomfort others might have with my own appearance or actions. Even well before September, 2001 - even before a young lady at a bus stop asked me to please tell her cowering 5-year-old that, despite my in-need-of-a-trim beard, I wasn't Osama bin Ladin - I would always make sure to apprise seatmates, with a friendly smile and a pleasant demeanor, of the fact that I was about to say my prayers, and that my whispering was only part of the ritual. And Orthodox Jews, to the best of my knowledge, haven't ever hijacked airplanes.

It is unfortunate, but Muslims who disavow the hatred and violence preached by some of their coreligionists have to accept, with sadness but pragmatism, the burden of society's suspicion-by-association. It's a regrettable reality that actions they take in all innocence might be misconstrued at times as sinister - or that Arabic script suddenly appearing in public places might cause some alarm. But our world is, as they say, what it is.

Yes, sometimes things that seem frightening in fact turn out to be harmless. But fright can also save lives and limbs. "Fear itself," unfortunately, is no longer the only thing we have to fear.

The Virginia Interfaith Center would probably consider me in need of re-education. But, with all due respect to the group and its well-meaning efforts, for my part, I still think that when I see something, I'll say something.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

MY WHITE HOUSE CHANUKAH

Rabbi Avi Shafran

If you should ever happen to find yourself in an ornate, high-ceilinged room and a military-uniformed classical string ensemble is segueing from a flawless rendition of a Bach Concerto to an equally impressive (if considerably less inspiring) version of "I Have a Little Dreidel," you can only be one place: the White House Chanukah Party.

The annual event hosted by President and Mrs. Bush for a few score representatives of the American Jewish community is a tangible expression of the good will the First Couple have demonstrated to a multitude of the nation's religious groups, Jews among them. Whether one considers President Bush II's domestic or foreign policies principled (as I, for the most part, do) or preposterous, the President must be given high points for his reaching out to Americans of faith.

Among the Jewish groups to whom the White House extended invitations to this year's Chanukah celebration, which took place on December 18, the third day of the holiday, was Agudath Israel of America, and I was honored to attend as one of its representatives. It was a pleasure to meet and mingle with Jews from other parts of the American Jewish community, an opportunity that doesn't present itself as often as I'd like. And it was a privilege to meet, if briefly, President and Mrs. Bush. I chose to use my moment in their company to offer them my sincere and solemn blessings, thereby disappointing my 13-year-old son, who had wanted me to request a Presidential decree that the school week be reduced to three days.

The event, true to its Jewish nature, was awash in food, all of it under strict Orthodox supervision, produced in a White House kitchen fully "koshered" for the event. As another observant participant observed to me when I greeted him, "This is an amazing symbol of the malchus shel chesed [government of kindness] that is this great country." It was indeed hard to not be impressed.

But the high point of my White House visit was neither the Presidential receiving line nor the array of kosher victuals (not realizing that the catering would be adhering to the strictest standards, I had earlier in the day had the regrettable foresight to stop in a local kosher eatery, and was hardly hungry).

Nor was the best part of the event seeing a dear friend from my yeshiva days for the first time in three decades. Now an anesthesiologist in the Midwest, he explained that he had received his invitation to the White House gathering as the result of his wife's "open house" policy for students at a university near their home. A frequent Shabbat guest of theirs several years ago had eventually gone on to become a White House liaison to the Jewish community, and wanted to show his erstwhile Shabbat hosts that he hadn't forgotten them. My friend himself, he reminded me, had spent more than one Shabbat in my own parents' similarly open home thirty years earlier.

No, the highlight of my trip to Washington took place before I even entered the White House. I was sitting on a bench outside the East Entrance, enjoying the unseasonably warm December day, watching the line of invitees form, as they waited for the security personnel to open the gates and begin the process of examining identifications and scanning bags.

Sitting there in the descending darkness, I felt a twinge of melancholy at being away from home for even that one night of Chanukah. I had made the necessary arrangements from the perspective of Jewish religious law; the menorah in my home would be lit by my wife or one of my children on my behalf. But still I was troubled by being so far from them.

I have always been struck by the inescapable contrast between, on the one hand, the public, potent pageantry and glitter with which the surrounding culture celebrates its winter holiday and the quiet, home-bound nature of Chanukah, with tiny flames its truest symbol. And here I was, about to join in a boisterous, bustling celebration - albeit of Chanukah - while the small if potent points of fire created on my behalf were flickering 300 miles away, invisible to me.

It was then that my cellphone clamored for attention. Aroused from my gloomy reverie, I offered it my ear.

It was my wife. She and our children were about to light the menorah and thought I might want to be included, if at a distance. A more accurate thought could not have been had.

And so unfolded the truly transcendent moment of my White House Chanukah, on a park bench outside the grand Presidential residence. To anyone passing by, it would have looked like nothing more than a balding fellow with a graying beard and a broad smile, animatedly singing into a phone.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

FAMILY AFFAIR

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The speaker was a bit reluctant, unaccustomed to standing before an audience. Yet there she stood in Los Angeles, her hometown, at a dinner hosted by a Southern California Jewish campus outreach organization, the Jewish Awareness Movement. She was addressing supporters of the group and parents, like herself and her husband, whose children, as a result of JAM and their consciences, had come to Jewish religious observance.

Marsha Greenberg recounted how her grandparents had come to American shores from Romania, met in Chicago and sired nine children, the oldest of which was the speaker's mother. And she told of her own childhood, how her father had died when she was only four and how, ten years later, her older brother and only sibling perished in a freak, fierce blizzard while on a Boy Scout trip in the San Bernardino Mountains.

"My mom never recovered from the loss," she told the crowd. "I grew up overnight."

When she was sixteen, she went on, she met a "nice Jewish boy" two years her senior, "from a good home." They married and eventually had three children.

When their oldest, their daughter Shari, turned sixteen herself, "she had had enough of temple." She and her siblings had attended Sunday school and she had been "bat-mitzvahed." But she hadn't been inspired to continue her Jewish education, and her parents didn't pressure her.

Their second child, David, though, happened upon JAM, participating in some events, Shabbat dinners and eventually even a trip to New York. He became intrigued by Jewish thought, texts and traditions, and his enthusiasm proved contagious, spreading in time to his older sister.

"What was happening to my family?" the speaker confided she had wondered at the time.

Shari embarked on a three-week trip to Israel, and then called to ask if she could stay a little longer. Her parents said okay. A few weeks later they received another call from Shari, asking if she could stay for a few months more. Again she received an okay. Eight months later, Shari returned home, according to her mom, "a different person, more mature and focused."

"She brought Shabbat into our home� In her own way, she set an example for David and Michael," her youngest sibling.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Greenberg continued, "David was doing a lot of learning on his own. Having his older sister home, watching her in action, living what she had learned, made an impression. Now David wanted to go to a yeshiva!"

Both Shari and David left home - she for Israel, he for New York - on the very same day, an understandably emotional one for the Greenbergs. Soon enough, Shari called to say she was dating a yeshiva student. Not much later, the Greenbergs and their sons found themselves in Jerusalem at Shari's wedding, which "made quite an impression of all of us, especially� Michael. Now he had a sister, brother and brother-in-law all frum [traditionally observant]!"

David returned to Israel to attend a yeshiva there, and Michael soon followed.

"There are very few mothers in Los Angeles," Mrs. Greenberg told the rapt audience, "who can say that they have three children learning Torah in Israel. I take great pride in being one of those mothers."

The speaker concluded by warmly thanking Rabbi Moshe and Bracha Zaret, the directors of JAM, and by imagining her mother, father and brother watching out for her family. "I know my children are going to live beautiful lives," she said. "They are going to raise magnificent, intellectual, sensitive, thoughtful families. I could not be happier. This journey is only the beginning, and every step counts."

My wife and I have gotten to know Mrs. Greenberg and her equally endearing husband quite well. We have met their children, who insist that their journeys to Jewish observance were directly due to their upbringing; their parents, they explain, always advised and encouraged them to think for themselves, to be idealists and do what they felt was right. And that is what they did.

All of the Greenbergs were at our daughter's wedding mere weeks ago, dancing as happily and as filled with as much joy as were we. Which is entirely understandable, considering that David, we are happy and proud to say, is our newest son-in-law.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

EMBRACING DISCRIMINATION

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In the early 90s, when I served as a teacher and principal of the boys' division of a yeshiva high school in Providence, Rhode Island, I once called the local school board to arrange a board-sponsored driver's education class for a group of male students, and one for a group of students in our young women' division.

The official with whom I spoke was aghast. "A separate class for girls!" she exclaimed. "That's blatant discrimination, and against the law."

I tried to explain that my request no more discriminated against the girls than it did the boys, that the separation of the genders was part of our school's policy for religious reasons, and that religious freedom was also a concern of the law (not to mention a touchstone of Rhode Island's history). But the official was unyielding, and the classes never came to be.

I couldn't help but wonder how she might have reacted to the Bush administration's recent announcement of new rules allowing school districts to create single-gender classes, and even entire single-gender schools. And to the fact that the move was backed not only by political conservatives but by urban educators and legislators on both sides of the political aisle as well. To be sure, the usual amalgamation of civil rights and women's groups (and Senator Ted Kennedy) dutifully condemned the administration's decision and threatened to challenge the decision in the courts, but Education Department officials expressed confidence that the new rules will pass legal muster.

The impetus for the reassessment of what constitutes illegal discrimination under Title IX, a 1972 federal law, was research suggesting that at least some children learn better in single-gender environments.

However future studies may pan out, though, it is encouraging to see consideration at the highest levels of government of the possibility that boys and girls may be different in the ways they learn, and that the case for same-gender education cannot be waved away with unthinking accusations of immoral discrimination. It would be encouraging, too, to see some Jewish schools until now pledged to "co-education" give some further thought to the matter as well.

The administration's rationale for separate-gender public education may be pedagogical, while our own is essentially religious. But there is more than minor overlap between the two, born of the realities of human psychology. And, whatever the reasoning, that the issue is being addressed honestly and objectively is healthy and heartening.

It holds out the hope, moreover, that charges of discrimination in other areas might also be considered not through the muddled lens of the word's contemporary pejorative meaning but in its original, benign sense - as per the American Heritage Dictionary's first entry: "able to recognize or draw fine distinctions."

Some such distinctions, of course, inform observant Jewish life, and occasionally come into conflict with contemporary society's notions of "equality." We certainly do not - or at least should not -discriminate on the basis of race, national origin or disability, but we are most unabashedly discriminating about a number of other things.

Like, to take one example, the definition of marriage, an institution under relentless attack these days. A number of countries have radically redefined the term, one state in our own republic has already followed suit, and several others - most recently New Jersey, through a ruling by its highest court - seem headed in a similar direction. At issue is whether marriage defined as it has been since postdiluvian times is, in the eyes of state constitutions, inherently "discriminatory."

Well, yes, it is. It discriminates among a variety of arrangements, some of which violate one of the universal Noahide Commandments (not to mention the Torah's laws for the Jewish People) and the deep sensibilities of countless civilized (and even some less-than-fully-civilized) people around the world.

But it does not discriminate, in the word's negative connotation, against anyone - any more than defining apples as fruit somehow wrongs tractors.

Because words have meanings, and "marriage" is a word. And discriminating souls care about protecting it.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. The above essay appears in the current issue of The Jewish Observer and is offered with its permission.]

WINTER HARVEST

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In a forthcoming book, "Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality," Dr. Pauline W. Chen writes about the many operations she performed on brain-dead patients for the purpose of procuring, or "harvesting," their organs for transplantation. "They all," she writes, "seemed remarkably alive."

This past fall, the prestigious journal Science published a report on a young woman who, after a devastating car accident, was declared vegetative. For five months, she showed no signs of awareness whatsoever. Scientists, though, decided to put her in a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner, a machine that tracks blood flow to different parts of the brain and that was only developed a few years ago. When they asked her to imagine things like playing tennis and walking through her home, the scan lit up with telltale patterns of language, movement and navigation indistinguishable from those produced by the brains of healthy, conscious people. The report's authors, while stressing that the patient may still be classified as "unconscious," conclude nonetheless that she has a "rich mental life."

Ten years earlier, a patient like the young woman would have been assumed, for all practical intents, to be - effectively, if perhaps not legally - lifeless. Only the development of a new diagnostic technology has now rendered her more obviously alive. It's hard not to wonder what technologies might one day yet be developed - or what aspects of consciousness might forever elude scientific instrumentation.

The acronym DCD might be mistaken for some new medium of music reproduction but in fact refers to "donation after cardiac death" - the procurement of organs from people whose hearts have stopped, even if their brains may still be functioning. Such procedures have taken place in many countries, despite the fact that the cessation of heartbeat is not necessarily irreversible. Even some patients whose hearts did not respond to cardiac resuscitation, it is well documented, have "come back to life" - in one case after the lapse of a full seven minutes, certainly sufficient time for harvesting a vital organ or two.

The driving force behind the scramble to define death "to the instant" is clearly the worldwide shortage of organs for transplant. This past summer, doctors at the World Transplant Congress in Boston were told how the pool of available organs in the United States could increase by up to 20% if DCD were adopted more widely.

What does Judaism have to say about all this? Saving a life is a most weighty imperative, to be sure, but Jewish religious law, or halacha, does not permit one life to be taken to save the life of another - no matter how diminished the "quality" of the life of the former, no matter how great the potential of the life of the latter.

Halacha requires that death be clearly established, and does not permit any action that might hasten the death of a person in extremis. Harvesting organs after any cessation of heart function that might not be permanent would be forbidden.

Unrelated to DCD is "brain death" - a diagnosis of irreversible cessation of all brain function, which modern medicine and secular law consider sufficient to permit the "harvesting" of organs before removal of life-support. What does Jewish law have to say about "brain death"? Can a patient with no discernable brain activity but whose heart continues to beat be considered a corpse?

Some rabbis vote yea on that question. And a recent New York Times article about a conference organized by the "Halachic Organ Donor Society," an organization advocating increased organ donation from halacha-observant Jews, referred to "near unanimity among rabbis on the criteria for organ donation" - presumably referring to the next paragraph's citation of the chief Sephardic rabbi of the Israeli city of Tzfat, whose criterion is brain death.

But many, and considerably more prominent in the world of halachic discourse, are the rabbinical authorities who do not agree. They include the late Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, who was renowned as one of our generation's most authoritative halachic decisors, as well as Rabbi Yosef Elyashiv, considered by many Jews to be the most authoritative authority of Jewish law today. Some leading scholars at Yeshiva University too, like Rabbi Herschel Schachter and Rabbi J. David Bleich, concur with those decisors.

In her book, Dr. Chen writes about her "83rd procurement" when the brain-dead body she sliced open for its organs was that of a young Asian-American woman like herself, who reminded her vividly, so to speak, of herself. She found herself hesitating during the procedure, but managed to complete it, although as she cut the vena cava and watched the patient's blood drain into canisters, she felt "as if my own life force were draining away."

Dr. Chen may intend her account to be simply what the title of her book promises, a reflection on mortality. But perhaps another thought for consideration lay there on the operating table, the idea that despite the inevitability of its end, life is holy - and we do well to tread carefully and slowly before considering it gone.

That might explain the feeling she writes she had at the end of that 83rd procurement, an exhaustion born not only of "sleep deprivation [and] overwork" but of "an unbearable grief."

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

RECIDIVIST PARENTS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

A number of well-known international groups are very unhappy with my wife and me.

We are, you see, "multi-children" parents, violators of both the law of averages and the sensibilities of folks like those at Zero Population Growth and other such organizations. Yes, my wife and I helped contribute, even more than most American parents, to the world population's recent passing of the six billion mark.

Many of our friends, for the most part Orthodox Jews like us, have similarly chosen to raise large families, sometimes with six, seven, even ten or more children. To others, we must seem at best unbalanced, at worst irresponsible, for our choices - choices we regarded, and still regard, as entirely wise and proper.

The disapprovers are entitled to their opinion, of course. But it can become irksome when strangers, confronted with the sight of my beloved family, offer unsolicited judgments.

The smiles and even the pointing fingers don't bother me; I try to follow the Talmud's dictum to judge others favorably, to assume the best: here, that the smilers and pointers are happy for us. But commentators like the fellow in the airport who snidely query-editorialized, "Catholic or careless?" leave very little room for good will. ("Jewish and caring," I responded; it was all I could summon at the moment.)

And then there was what was probably my personal nadir of incivility, years ago in a California supermarket, when a severe-looking lady with an unmistakably Teutonic accent scolded a much younger and brasher me - wheeling a daughter-filled double stroller - with a humorless comment, something like, "Well YOU certainly don't believe in population control!"

On that occasion, I must admit, I was inexcusably rude. My Polish-born father and father-in-law each had siblings who never managed to make it out of young adulthood, thanks to some folks' efficient determination to starve, shoot, gas or burn them. Several of my children carry the names of those unmet great-aunts and great-uncles.

Maybe it was the matron's accent that sent me, relatively speaking, over the edge. "When I reach six million," I heard myself intone through clenched teeth, "I'll consider stopping."

Though I think that, over the years, I have become more understanding of others' dismay at large families, I haven't quite managed to bring myself to regret that particular retort, graceless though it was.

As it happens, though, the Fraulein was quite right. My wife and I are unrepentant infidels when it comes to the ZPG movement. The "expert" predictions in the 1960s about a world swarming with wall-to-wall humanity within a decade or two have proven silly. And although new claims have emerged about a future "population crisis", they, like their predecessors, are impelled more by ideology than by empirical evidence. One need do no more than take a drive across the vast empty spaces even within our own relatively crowded country to realize how lightly populated the planet really is.

And, if that doesn't do the trick, return across Canada.

A subsequent stroll, moreover, down any Manhattan, Chicago or Los Angeles restaurant-row, taking note of the prodigious amounts of food daily discarded in modern cities, would be an equally eye-opening experience. Human malnutrition, informed folk know, is the result not of new babies but of old problems. Humans still starve, tragically, at the turn of the millennium not because there is too little food but because of poor management, inefficient distribution and - perhaps primarily - because of the unconcern (or worse) of other humans.

In any event, much more than disbelief in doomsday scenarios or determination to re-establish truncated genealogies figures in my wife's and my choice of a large family. We would have endeavored no less even if Canada resembled Calcutta, even if the Holocaust had been only a bad horror film instead of history, even if we had needed to pull names for our children from the void.

For our faith-system, that of all Jews' ancestors over millennia, views procreation in and of itself as the holiest of endeavors, and children as the greatest of blessings. And when it comes to blessings, as most folk seem to naturally (though less aptly, to my lights) understand with regard to the monetary sort - the more, the merrier. How ironic, I often reflect: Were children shares of blue-chip stocks, my wife and I would be regarded with neither disapproval nor curiosity but envy.

Which is not to say that having children is, in the end, a self-serving vocation. It is true that life offers no joy remotely approaching the resplendent sight, at the end of a long, hard day, of a joyous, squeaking two-year-old face one has loved since its appearance on earth bobbing above a pair of little arms opened wide. But the challenges of raising children, especially several times the average number of children per family, are considerable. Barring a lottery-win, my family won't ever retain a housekeeper or own a boat - or, for that matter, a road vehicle that someone else hasn't driven for 50,000 or 60,000 miles first. And any disposable income we manage to amass is quickly absorbed by one or another worthy but costly educational institution.

At the same time, though, and above all else, we believe with our hearts and souls that our children are gifts beyond all earthly value. And my wife and I are doing all in our power to help ensure that our progeny will use their precious lives for the good of their fellow Jews and of humanity.

So if you should find yourself at a playground or highway rest stop and spy a group of Jewish kids of various ages who seem to resemble one another, please don't think their parents irresponsible. Try to remember that a profound commitment and deep love likely lie behind the striking sight.

And if it should happen to be any of my children or grandchildren, we'll all do our part, and try to interpret any smiles we elicit as expressions of delight.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

PARTIAL-BIRTH DISTORTION

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Listening to critics of the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003, one might conclude that the law, which was ruled unconstitutional by several courts whose rulings are now under appeal before the United States Supreme Court, 1) is erroneously named, 2) lacks an exception to protect the life of the mother and 3) is based on false assertions.

And listening to some Jewish groups, one might conclude as well that the law 4) is at acute odds with Jewish values.

One would be wrong on all four counts.

Thus, the removal of a fetus that has died or been killed inside its mother is clearly not prohibited by the embattled law. The procedure outlawed is the killing of a baby partially outside its mother's body. One is hard pressed to imagine a more accurate name for the law than the one it colloquially carries. Indeed, some prefer the starker term "infanticide."

Not, though, New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse. She rejects one brief's description of the procedure as "killing a child in the birth process," contending that every stage of gestation is perforce a part of the birth process. But Ms. Greenhouse, a truly gifted explicator of legal complexities, surely knows that the very point of laws is to draw lines, and that, to deal rationally with abortion, a line must be drawn between the concepts "unborn" and "born." It is not unreasonable to imagine that line lying in the vicinity of what is described in the law's language quoted above.

As to exceptions to the law's prohibition, contrary to wide public perception, the law contains an explicit exception for cases where the procedure is deemed necessary to preserve the mother's life. Whether the law needs a further exception for when a mother's "health" is at stake - the law's drafters found that there is no such situation - is one of the issues the Supreme Court will be weighing.

A piece of erroneous information was indeed found by critics in the law's preamble: the assertion that "no medical schools" teach the procedure being prohibited. In fact, several do. The error, however, hardly affects the logic of the law.

Most troubling from my vantage point, though, is the assertion that the Jewish religious tradition is somehow offended by the prohibition, an assertion that has been made by a number of rabbis and Jewish organizational spokespeople. The president of Hadassah, to take one example, who baldly stated that the law "undermines Jewish values."

She and others who have made similar claims are misinformed, and in turn misinform.

To be sure, the Talmudic sources are clear that the life of a Jewish woman whose pregnancy endangers her takes precedence over that of her unborn child when there is no way to preserve both lives. And, while the matter is not free from controversy, there are rabbinic opinions that allow abortion when the pregnancy seriously jeopardizes the mother's health. But those narrow exceptions do not translate into some unlimited mother's right to "make her own reproductive choices" - the position Hadassah enthusiastically trumpets - and most certainly not to any right to kill a live baby whose head, or most of whose body, has already emerged. What the Partial-Birth Abortion Act prohibits is, in the eyes of Jewish law, little if anything short of murder.

Nothing, of course, prevents a Jew, or Jewish organization or rabbi from ignoring the teachings of the Jewish religious tradition.

But intellectual integrity, if nothing else, should prevent anyone from misrepresenting what Jewish tradition has to say about killing a child who has effectively emerged into our world.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

PARADES AND PRINCIPLES

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In the end, it wasn't threatened violence from any haredi hotheads that did in the planned "gay pride" parade scheduled for the streets of Jerusalem, but an IDF strike in Gaza that brought about the deaths of 20 Palestinians and subsequent threats of retaliatory terror attacks against Israelis and Americans.

Fear of violence, though - of any sort - should not have been the impetus for the parade's cancellation. What should have made such an event unthinkable in the first place, and should do so in the future, is something stark and simple: respect - for Jerusalem, for her residents and, ultimately, for Judaism.

The word "parade" conjures images of music and festivity, gaudily bedecked marchers and perhaps an elephant or tiger or two. And indeed, in venues like San Francisco, "gay pride" parades have been exhibitions of exhibitionists, processions that featured, if not actual animals, people clearly in touch with their inner beasts.

But organizers of the ill-fated Jerusalem parade - originally part of "Jerusalem WorldPride 2006," an international call to homosexuals to descend upon the holy city "in a massive demonstration of LGBT dignity, pride and boundary-crossing celebration" -insisted that their event would be no such spectacle of bad taste. It would be, rather, a civil and principled attempt to advance the legitimacy of a homosexual lifestyle through changes to the traditional conception of the family.

To some of us, including a majority of Jerusalem's residents, that "principled" social agenda is considerably more objectionable than any bacchanalian display. Crassness and craziness, after all, are laughed (or gasped) at and soon forgotten. Social revolution, though, by its very definition, aims to effect societal change.

There are societies, of course, for better or worse, that welcome such change, and there are Israelis with similar feelings as well. But Israel also has many citizens, particularly in Jerusalem, who consider the radical redefinition of moral behavior and the concept of family to be a deliberate affront to their deepest convictions.

Israel has hardly adopted the Torah's laws as her own, as is readily evident from a visit to any of a number of neighborhoods or night spots in Tel Aviv (or even, sadly, in Jerusalem). Nor is there any religious effort afoot to pry into fellow citizens' private lives. But the Torah is very clear about what sort of personal intimate relationships are proper and what sorts are not. And all but a small proportion of the Israeli citizenship endorse the idea that the Jewish state owes a certain respect to the Jewish religious heritage.

Yes, in a free society, any group can promote any cause, no matter how ill-conceived or offensive it may be to others. But bounds, including limits to free speech and demonstration, exist even in the freest of societies. Is it really an unthinkable curb on legitimate self-expression for the authorities and judiciary of a self-described Jewish state to prevent an intentional affront to dedicated and faithful Jews - not to mention to the Jewish religious tradition?

The threats of violence against the would-be marchers that reportedly appeared in anonymous pamphlets and posters in Jerusalem are indefensible. But such ugliness - whatever its source might in fact have been - should not obscure the actual issue: Are the Jewish religion and the sensibilities of tens of thousands of Jerusalem's residents deserving of respect? Or is all that trumped, even in the Holy Land's Holiest City, by the social agenda of radical activists?

Over the course of history, Jews lived their lives - and all too often died their deaths - in dedication to the Jewish faith. Does that faith not deserve, at very least, the respect of the Jewish State?

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Part of my job as Agudath Israel of America's media liaison is to help ensure that traditional Orthodox Jewish beliefs and life are accurately represented in the press, and that the larger Jewish and non-Jewish worlds are informed about important happenings in the Orthodox community.

There are ample opportunities for both. Misconceptions about Orthodox Jews, especially haredim, are commonplace, not only in the general press but even in the Jewish. And there is no dearth of newsworthy occurrences in the haredi world. Orthodox educational institutions, moreover, do an impressive job of ensuring Jewish commitment and continuity; and the community yields singular events - like the "Siyum HaShas" Talmud-completion gathering last celebrated in 2005, which brought together more that 100,000 celebrants in major convention centers across the continent and around the world.

And yet I think that what are most revealing about Orthodox life are little things.

A revered yeshiva dean was once asked by the parents of a marriage-eligible young woman about the personal qualities of a young man studying at the institution. The rabbi's response was that the fellow struck him as a paragon of good traits. "But if you want to find out what he is really like," he added, "you'll have to ask the cook."

What he intended to convey was that while our public personae and actions may mean much, whatever meaning they hold pales beside the evidence to be culled from the mundane activities of our daily lives, from the testimony of our husbands, wives, children, friends - or, if we live in a dormitory, the cook.

The haredi world doesn't have a cook (well, actually, it has a good many excellent ones, but you get the point). What it has, though, are newspapers.

There are several, most notably Yated Neeman and Hamodia - the latter not only publishes, like the former, a large, multi-sectioned weekend paper but a smaller daily edition as well. The news coverage itself says much about the community. Since mimicking the larger world's media would violate a number of Jewish religious ideals, one won't find any reference at all in the haredi press to the celebrity obsessions that grace even the front pages of the general press, or any parallel to the sort of sleazy crime coverage favored by tabloids, or even any of the standard-issue scandal-mongering that saturates so much of the media. Basic international, national and local news are reported straightforwardly, with the intention of providing important or practical information.

But to me, the most intriguing - and telling - window onto the Orthodox world provided by its newspapers lies in the small print of its classified ads.

Those in a randomly selected edition of Hamodia include the expected job offerings, services and properties for sale or rent, of course. But then there is, in addition to a "lost" column, a sizable one labeled "found."

Therein, one ad-placer seeks the owner of a gold bracelet; another, the person who had lost a digital camera; yet another, the feet missing a pair of children's sneakers; another still, the holder of the partner of a single leather glove. Another bracelet and a blanket are offered by yet other ads, both found "a few years ago."

And then there are the "gemachs," more than five full-page columns of them. "Gemach" is the transliteration of a Hebrew acronym for the phrase "bestowal of kindness," and the word refers to a charitable effort that grants or lends goods, or provides services, to anyone in need of them, free of charge.

Many gemachs - understandably, considering the Orthodox commitment to large families - revolve around the needs of new parents. There are gemachs offering "multiples" baby equipment for new mothers of twins or triplets, others that prepare free meals for new mothers, yet others providing women to spend nights at new parents' homes, to help care for the young siblings of newborns. There are also offers of catering services for new parents celebrating their son's bris, portable playpens, and infant car seats.

And then, among the dozens of other gemachs listed are some offering professional makeup-application (for weddings and such), others still lending hospital gowns that provide more coverage than the standard fare, audiotapes of lectures on an assortment of topics, checklists for planning a wedding, custom hair pieces for men and children with chemotherapy hair-loss (most of Hamodia's women readers own wigs), rides to the park or the shore for Alzheimers sufferers, air-beds for sudden influx of overnight visitors, "shtick" - costumes, novelties and the like - to enliven weddings. There is even a gemach offering listings of gemachs.

This, from a community that, with the constant and formidable responsibilities of observant life, has precious little free time. But what time and effort it has, it seems, a good deal of it is channeled toward helping others.

That subtle message residing in newspapers like Yated and Hamodia rarely appears in the general or other Jewish media. There the spotlight is most commonly focused on the Orthodox community for one or another of its unusual religious or cultural practices, or when one of its members does something wrong. But Orthodox peculiarities or wrongdoers, though they certainly exist as they do in every society, do not reflect the essence of their community.

The classifieds do.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

ANGER OF THE ATHEISTS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Responses to an essay say much to a writer. Sometimes they reveal flaws in the essayist's assumptions or reasoning, provide a different perspective or are otherwise enlightening. Other times they reveal something more about the responders.

Back in May, I wrote an article about atheism. It was inspired by an earlier op-ed by philosopher Slavoj Zizek in The New York Times, extolling "the dignity of atheism." I titled my own essay "The Indignity of Atheism" and made one simple and obvious point: One who sees only random forces behind why we humans find ourselves here can have no reason to believe in objective categories of good and evil.

I took pains to stress that I was not contending that atheists are bad people, and certainly not that religious people are necessarily good. I was not judging anyone, rather stating a self-evident philosophical truism: If our perception that some deeds are good and others are not is but a quirk of natural selection, none of us need feel any commitment to morality or ethics.

The piece appeared in The Providence Journal and a number of Jewish weeklies. Soon enough, it was posted on a multitude of atheist weblogs, along with rebuttals - or screeds presented as such.

I had always imagined atheists as a misguided but relatively civil and intelligent bunch. But much of the reaction on the blogs was simple umbrage heavily laced with anger and even threats, born of my contention that atheists are bad people - although I had written no such thing, and indeed had clearly stated otherwise.

Perhaps the writers misinterpreted my invocation of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot as examples of non-religious sorts who were responsible for countless deaths of innocents. But that was only to counter Mr. Zizek's contention that the world's evils derive overwhelmingly from religion. (A few of the umbrage-takers insisted that Hitler was a religious Roman Catholic; I'm skeptical, but, just to keep the complainers on-topic, they can replace him with Caligula, Mao, Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jung Il.)

Other reactions (from the more careful readers, no doubt) consisted entirely of adolescent snideness over the idea of G-d, and harsh invective toward me, much of it of a strikingly personal nature and in language more suited to a locker room than an intellectual salon. Revealing, indeed.

As to the essence of my argument, though, there was no credible counter-argument whatsoever, no claim that right and wrong can somehow have inherent meaning without recourse to Something Higher than ourselves. That, too, was telling - of the truth that atheism, in the end, cannot assign any more meaning to right and wrong than to right and left.

What brings the edifying experience to mind is the pair of current best-sellers attempting to make the case for atheism. In one of them, Darwinist devotee Richard Dawkins declares that to be an atheist is a "brave and splendid" thing, and that to believe that there is Something to Whom we owe obeisance is a "pernicious" thought. Writer Sam Harris, meanwhile, in his own book, characterizes religion as "obscene" and "utterly repellent."

The two authors avoid the sailor-language favored by the bloggers and their blogophants, and they make a valiant effort to present what they claim is the case for atheism, but in their instances, too, more illuminating than their arguments is their anger.

Sure, it is easy to deny G-d. We can't see Him and can (at least some of us, with prodigious effort and illimitable imagination) imagine life evolving entirely on its own, and yes, there is evil in the world that seems to go unpunished. But belief in G-d has always gone hand in hand with belief in both His hiddenness, and his inscrutability. The "arguments" from invisibility, evolution and the existence of evil are, in the end, convincing only to those already convinced.

More informative is the atheists' anger. I think it derives from the realization of where their declared convictions perforce must lead. That would be - as per my original essay - a place where the very concepts of morality and ethics are rendered meaningless, a worldview in which a thieving, philandering, serial murdering cannibal is no less commendable a member of the species than a selfless, hard-working philanthropist. (In fact, from an evolutionist perspective, the former is probably better positioned to impart advantages to the gene pool.)

It is a thought so discomfiting to an honest atheist that all it can yield him is fury.

Some atheists, no doubt, are not infuriated at all by the implications of their denial of a human calling higher than nature. They revel in the knowledge that whatever they wish to do is fine, as long as they manage not to run afoul of the man-made (and themselves inherently meaningless) laws of society. If skillful enough, they can carefully lift items from the local store, surreptitiously violate others' rights or privacy, and covertly bring harm to those they dislike or who stand in the way of their wants.

Most atheists, though - and they, I contend, are the angry ones - would never dream of doing such things. Because they know that there is right and there is wrong.

Wrong?

Is it "wrong" when a dog steals a bone from his fellow canine, or when a mantis eats her mate? Of course not. But when a human being steals or hurts or kills another, it's qualitatively different. Deep down we know we are answerable to Something beyond our own natures.

That knowledge gives thoughtful atheists hives. Which is why, hopelessly conflicted by the irreconcilability of their unspeakable realization and their trumpeted posture, they can only fume.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

JIMINY CRICKET AND THE JEWS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Anyone familiar with contemporary talk-radio knows that the word "liberal" has become for some a slur, implying that holders of ideals like tolerance for other cultures or concern for the poor and disadvantaged are somehow inherently polluted by nonchalance toward national security, too little concern about crime and too much about the rights of terrorists.

But another word, "fundamentalist," has likewise been made into an insult of its own, something recently noted by David Klinghoffer, the erstwhile literary editor of National Review and current senior fellow at a public policy think-tank, the Discovery Institute. (Full disclosure: Mr. Klinghoffer was a Sabbath guest at the Shafran home several times seven or eight years ago, and I consider him a friend.)

Writing in the national Jewish weekly Forward, Klinghoffer points out that the "fundamentalist" label is regularly used to cast people who hew to foundational religious beliefs as "stupid," "obnoxious" or "backward."

Klinghoffer's context is the assertion by former New Republic editor and current Time Magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan that "fundamentalists" - i.e. people with deep religious beliefs - are inherently arrogant, because they believe they know what is right and what is wrong, and apply their convictions to political and social issues. Instead, Sullivan advocates "spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt" and champions "a faith that� picks and chooses between doctrines under the guidance of individual conscience."

Klinghoffer makes the obvious point: If one's conscience is one's only guide, then he is "his own ultimate authority," hardly a reflection of humility.

"That isn't to say," he hastens to add, "that the truth [for a religious person] is easily accessible." An Orthodox Jew for 15 years,. Klinghoffer openly and honestly admits that there is much he doesn't understand, and that certainty about applying Jewish wisdom to contemporary questions is not always available. It is, he explains, "in contemplating� complexities that Jews find a road to inspiration."

But in the end, as Klinghoffer has articulated in his writings over the years, we Jews "believe our religion is true, all of it." There are indeed Jewish verities, verities that speak loudly and clearly to Jews and to all humankind, verities that have implications for contemporary social issues, verities that Jews who claim to care about Judaism should not shy away from embracing, whether or not those verities comfortably coalesce with those Jews' own personal feelings. The bending of our imperfect human notions to the will of an omniscient G-d is, in the end - as both Abraham on Mount Moriah and his descendants at Mount Sinai came to know - the essence of the Jewish faith.

Abraham, as it happens, is David Klinghoffer's father, at least in a spiritual sense. The Biblical patriarch is considered the parent of all converts to Judaism. Klinghoffer lyrically and poignantly recounted his personal journey to the Jewish people and Jewish observance in his 1999 book "The Lord Will Gather Me In." His defense of the conviction that questions of right and wrong are not ultimately answered by our own subjective feelings - reminds me that he wasn't born into the Jewish people but rather chose to join it.

Because, although Jewish history is replete with illustrious men and women - from the Biblical Ruth to the Talmudic giants Shmaya and Avtalyon - who came to the Jewish people from other nations, there is a curious statement in the Talmud (Niddah, 13b) in which Rabbi Chalbo compares converts to "a sore."

One approach to that pronouncement is that it refers to converts who have not adequately prepared for Jewish life and who, after joining the Jewish people, come to violate religious strictures out of inexperience. Another approach, diametric to the first, is that converts, having freely and determinedly chosen their Jewishness, tend to be so meticulous in their adherence to Jewish law that their example reflects poorly on many born Jews' levels of observance.

A tangent to that latter approach occurs. The word for "sore" that Rabbi Chalbo uses actually refers to a sort of skin discoloration (often mistakenly identified as leprosy) spoken of at length in the Torah. Such sores, the rabbis of the Talmud taught, were divine signs - during periods of history when Jews' closeness to G-d merited them such signs - of any of an assortment of personal lapses.

Might some converts, too, in a way, be disturbing but luminous signs for the rest of us Jews? Might the clarity and honesty of people like Klinghoffer, who have come to Judaism entirely on their own through force of observation and reason, without the peer pressures and support systems that nurture born Jews from their childhoods, be reminders to the rest of us of things we might have somehow forgotten, or never confronted?

The "sores" suffered by Jews in Biblical times entailed an element of embarrassment, to be sure. In the end, though, they were a gift, a heavenly sign of guidance. Jews who might naturally assume, like Mr. Sullivan (and Jiminy Cricket before him), that our own consciences are our best guides would do well to listen closely to people like David Klinghoffer, and come to recognize that being a Jewish "fundamentalist" is no badge of shame but a deep and abiding privilege.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

IS G-D WITH US?

Rabbi Avi Shafran

At the recent large rally near the United Nations, it was encouraging to see the breadth of support for Israel and outrage at Iran's current leadership. Not only were Jews of very different stripes present - from the bare-headed to the black-hatted - but there was quite a representation of non-Jews as well, white and black, American, European and even Middle-Eastern.

The event's organizers deserve credit for all the work they put into it, and the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Jews who participated surely left with only good feelings. And yet, something - or, perhaps better said, Something - was missing: a clear expression of the Jewish people's faith in the Almighty.

The void was most starkly evident during the speech of famed lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz. After reading a lengthy indictment of the Iranian president and his policies, Mr. Dershowitz invoked a verse from the book of Isaiah that speaks of the ultimate futility of the plottings of the Jewish people's enemies.

"Utzu eitzah v'tufar; dabru davar v'lo yakum," the former yeshiva bochur eloquently intoned. "Plan a conspiracy, and it will be foiled; speak your piece and it will not stand."

Very inspiring, except that Mr. Dershowitz left out the final words of the verse, "ki imanu [K]el" - "for G-d is with us."

Whether he did so intentionally or not, the truncation seemed to symbolize an attitude that is sadly prevalent today.

The prophet Isaiah was not the only one whose words were edited. When a Jewish band called "Blue Fringe" struck up the Shlomo Carlebach classic "Am Yisrael Chai" - "The Nation of Israel Lives" - it used the title words for both parts of the song. In the Carlebach rendition, though, which became one of the signature songs of the Russian refuseniks during the dark years of Soviet Jewry's anguish, the words to the second part are "Od Avinu Chai" - "Our Father Still Lives." No room for Father, apparently, on the Fringe.

The Torah predicts how, amid affluence and security, it may happen that "your heart will become haughty and you will forget Hashem your G-d� and you will say 'my strength and the power of my hand has amassed for me this success'." (Deuteronomy, 8:14-17)

To be sure, the Jewish people will persevere and, at history's end, emerge triumphant. But Jews' trust must not be placed in military prowess, even that of a Jewish State. "Israel," we do well to remember, refers in the Torah not to a country but to a people.

And even our people, we know all too well, is not immune to the hatred and bloodlust of the rest of the world, at least not until the Messiah arrives.

No, not might, but right is the source of our protection. The only thing that can offer security to the Jewish nation - in our ancestral land or anywhere else - is the blessing of He Who chose us from among the nations.

And so when Jews gather together because of threats against their brothers and sisters, nothing belongs in the hearts of the gathered more than G-d. And nothing more than Him belongs on the lips of those standing before the microphones.

At the recent rally, shofars were blown. Against the disturbing background of the "my strength and the power of my hands" speeches at the rally, the sound seemed a call to arms - even, it seemed, to trust in arms. But the shofar on Rosh Hashana, of course, is a call to repentance, to thoughts of G-d.

Having passed the Days of Judgment, we Jews now approach the holiday of Sukkot, when we sit in supremely vulnerable structures, "temporary dwellings" that by definition are exposed to the elements.

Even had the Talmud not informed us that our sukkot are to remind us of the seemingly insubstantial "clouds of glory" with which G-d protected our ancestors from all harm and attack, could we have had any doubt that our fragile holiday abodes hold the message that our true protection comes not from things physical - or political, or military?

It is a fundamental Jewish message, and an eternal one. But it holds particular resonance, I think, for our own unfocused Jewish times.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

A "PROPHECY" SADLY FULFILLED

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Mindful of the Talmudic teaching that after the destruction of the First Holy Temple the only semblance of prophecy resides in children and fools, and well aware of my age, I should hesitate before claiming the mantle of a seer. But a prediction I made in an article for Moment Magazine more than five years ago - and for which, at the time, I was roundly pilloried - has been confirmed by recent events.

I entitled the piece "Time to Come Home," and it was addressed to Jews who belonged to Conservative movement congregations. That movement's claim of fealty to Jewish religious law, or halacha, I contended, is dishonest. Through citations of fact and the words of Conservative leaders, the essay demonstrated how the process of determining Conservative "halacha" differed qualitatively and radically from the halachic process of the millennia. Halacha, I wrote, has always been decided (as it still is by Orthodoxy) through the objective examination of verses, mediated through the Talmud, with determination only to discern the Torah's intention. By contrast, the Conservative process has often involved first deciding a desired result, and then manipulating the sources to yield that outcome.

That might not disturb some Conservative Jews, to be sure, but they likely belong in the Reform movement, which allows halacha a "vote but not a veto." Those Conservative Jews, however, who truly respect the concept of halacha and had always accepted as fact that their movement was committed to the traditional halachic process, the article contended, needed to realize that such was not the case, and that their true home (hence the title) was in the Orthodox community.

Whether because of that thesis itself or Moment's renaming of the piece (against my wishes) as "The Conservative Lie," the article met with loud and angry protest. There was much positive response, too, mostly from erstwhile Conservative Jews who had left the movement for Orthodoxy and from members of Conservative synagogues who had already come to suspect that things were as I had described them. But a small army of Conservative leaders angrily blasted what one called my "nasty diatribe" and accused me of hating Conservative Jews - even though my article had dealt with a theological process, not people, and was expressly aimed at engaging other Jews' minds.

In any event, time has a way of putting things into perspective. In my Moment piece, I identified the issue of same-sex relationships as a particularly telling topic, since the larger societal milieu had essentially embraced such relationships as morally acceptable and yet thousands of years of halachic literature (not to mention explicit verses in the Torah itself, in the case of males) declares them sinful. Hence my "prophecy": The Conservative movement would come in time to "halachically" sanction what the Torah forbids in no uncertain terms. My prediction, of course, required no supernatural powers, only the natural one of observation.

Fast-forward to September, 2006, when the media are reporting that Conservative leaders are proudly poised to effectively sanction unions that, by any objective measure, are halachically indefensible. A fig leaf of sorts is being planned, in the form of a contradictory "second opinion" that Conservative congregations (or, presumably, individuals) can choose to accept instead. But the abandonment of an uncontested Jewish moral verity - even as one of two or more "alternatives" - speaks piercingly for itself.

Conservative Rabbi David Lincoln, the spiritual leader of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, put it well: "Jewish law is flexible in many instances, but there are certain things that are very straightforward, like this."

Truth be told, Rabbi Lincoln's lament, like my prediction, has long been clear to others, even within the Conservative world. At the 1980 convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, influential Conservative rabbi Harold Kushner asked his audience "Is the Conservative movement halachic?" and then answered, honestly: "It obviously is not."

And so, what remains, still, is the thought with which I ended my Moment article.

The courage to recognize misjudgments is a laudable and inherently Jewish trait, one the Talmud sees in the very root of the name Judah (derived from the Hebrew "li'hodot," to admit), from which the word "Jew" derives. Such self-examination is what all Jews are to engage in at this time of year. And it is, moreover, why there are so many once-Conservative Jews who have already blazed a trail of return to a halachic lifestyle. In the wake of the upcoming Conservative decision, others, I hope, will come to follow.

And what I hope no less fervently is that that my own world, the Orthodox, will demonstrate its own self-improvement and commitment - to other Jews, welcoming them warmly into our shuls and into our lives. Here, too, there is a well-blazed trail-and much cause for optimism.

Because Ahavat Yisrael, love for fellow Jews, is not only a sublime concept and an underpinning of the Jewish people, it is as compelling and immutable as any halachah.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

MEDIA MANIPULATION FAR AND NEAR

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Much furor accompanied the exposing of a Reuters photographer's creative Photoshopping of images from the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon - and rightly so. A short film report on the deception, by turns amusing and infuriating, can be viewed at www.aish.com/movies/PhotoFraud.asp . Among other examples of the journalistic deceit it documents is a gentleman posing first as a rescuer and then as a corpse. And the apparent placement, for maximum emotional impact, of a pristine wedding dress and an assortment of equally dust-free stuffed animals into the midst of Beirut bombing rubble.

Media manipulate, though, in myriad ways. Sometimes even with good, if misguided, intentions, sometimes even unintentionally, and sometimes even in our own backyard.

Take a recent front-page story in the New York Jewish Week. The article heralded what it claimed may be the "charting [of] new territory in the terrain of religious practice" in the Jewish world. The Sabbath's move to Tuesday? The introduction of a new holiday? A set of laws governing e-mail? A time limit for sermons? No, no, something more radical: a woman was appointed to lead a congregation.

Now there have been women rabbis in the Reform and Conservative movements for decades. Although their salaries inexplicably lag behind those of their male counterparts, Conservative and Reform female rabbis have become commonplace over the years. So why the Jewish Week's breathlessness over "a decision that could be seen as fracturing the stained-glass ceiling" of a synagogue?

That's easy, says the paper. Because the congregation is Orthodox.

Only it isn't. Back in 2002, the same paper identified the same Manhattan congregation, Kehilat Orach Eliezer (KOE), as an "Orthodox Shul" on a similar front page story (one might be forgiven for wondering if there are any other congregations in New York). The recent story more modestly bills KOE as "largely Orthodox in practice." The synagogue, however, is pointedly - and significantly - unaffiliated.

KOE does not belong to any Orthodox umbrella congregational body - not Agudath Israel, not the National Council of Young Israel, not the Orthodox Union. It has no ties to any established Chassidic group. The strongest hint of its theological identity, in fact, lies in its name, which honors a late leader of the Conservative movement, Dr. Louis (Eliezer) Finkelstein. Indeed, KOE's leader until recently was Rabbi David Weiss-Halivni, a well-known scholar who was associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary before becoming one of the founders and leaders of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement that broke away from the Conservative but opted to reject Orthodoxy.

To be sure, KOE claims to be a "halachic" congregation. So, though, does the Conservative movement itself. And "largely Orthodox"? Now there's an interesting formulation. Can something be "largely kosher"? "Largely legal?"

Whether Conservative, "halachic" or "post-denominational" (we Orthodox, one imagines, must be "pre-denominational"), KOE's practices, halachically defensible or not, are of negligible concern to either the haredi or centrist segments of the Orthodox world - which comprise the vast majority of Orthodox Jews. Why, then, would the Jewish Week - or The New York Times, which followed with its own story touting the "milestone for advocates of an expanded role for women in Orthodox Judaism" - deem newsworthy the appointment of a woman as a "community head" of a congregation that is Orthodox neither in name nor practice?

The answer lies in the fact of journalism's dirty little secret: Those who manufacture the product have personal opinions and hopes that they are not always able to prevent from informing their reportage. That is manifestly true in the larger journalistic world and, it has become amply clear by now, in the Jewish one no less.

A reporter might be refined, sensitive and talented but if he or she has personal leanings toward, say, the place where the Conservative movement and "post-denominational" entities like KOE reside, or a particular affinity for "gender issues," he or she is simply not the right candidate to write objectively about such entities or issues. The risk is simply too great that the result will be not a story reported but a story created. No, photographs won't likely be doctored, but facts might well be bent subtly out of shape. As they were, once again, here.

Unfortunately, there is a pattern of precisely such carelessness in certain ostensibly neutral Anglo-Jewish publications (which, in turn provide fodder for far more widely read media like The New York Times). And it is both journalistically and Jewishly treif. There should be no room for agenda-driven "news" in either a profession that extols accuracy or an ethical system that hallows truth.

There is certainly no dearth of Orthodox women role-models who shoulder important responsibilities in bona fide Orthodox communities. They fill the fundamental, vital positions of homemakers (in the word's most literal and sublime sense), wives and mothers - and in the roles, too, of spiritual guides and lecturers (within the bounds of traditional halachic norms). Such women, to be sure, do not seek to be featured in the press - as King Solomon wrote, "the honor of the princess" is expressed "inward," not in public prominence. But those women, in fact, are the true crafters of the Jewish future. And the images of their accomplishments don't need airbrushing to be impressive.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

NEVER ABANDONED

Rabbi Avi Shafran

If the world seemed to dim somewhat last week, it was likely because a remarkable woman was called to her Maker, leaving her husband of 67 years, their sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and countless others like my wife and me fortunate enough to have known her, to carry on in what light was left.

For the past several years, Mrs. Ethel Leifer, peace upon her, faithfully attended a women's Torah class I hold in my home over the course of several summer Sabbaths. She was the senior member of the group but as attentive as any attendee a half-century or more younger. She would often nod her head in concurrence with something said, and I would wonder if perhaps she was just being polite. Then, though, she would offer a comment, and it would become entirely clear that she not only had entirely understood the point but had something worthy to add. Other times, she would look skeptical, and voice a worthy question. And always, agreeing or challenging, with a smile.

Her constant smile was the tip of a happiness iceberg, a mammoth mountain of gratitude to G-d for His blessings, prime among them her husband, may he be well and take solace in his wonderful family. Whenever she would be asked how long she and her husband had been married, she would respond "blessedly long but not long enough." It is a wrenching thought that those of us in their Orthodox neighborhood in Staten Island will no longer be blessed with the sight of the two of them walking to synagogue holding hands, looking like nothing so much as newlyweds.

At Mrs. Leifer's funeral, I remembered - as I often have of late - some words she uttered when I saw her alive for the last time, words that are worthy for all times but perhaps particularly timely for us all today. She had fallen ill and was in constant and excruciating pain. My wife and I asked if she was up to taking visitors and, assured that she was, went to see her. Mr. Leifer, a refined and gracious gentleman, greeted us at the door, and took us to where his wife sat, smiling as usual, full of love and appreciation, for her partner in life and for life itself.

We asked about her health and she responded that she was managing with the help of her mate, adding, as all who knew her know she regularly did in many contexts, that "G-d does not abandon us." She and her husband explained the various doctors' theories about the source of her pain, about this biological malfunction and that. At one point, I remarked - thinking back now, perhaps without sufficient forethought - about how when any of the myriad processes that keep us healthy go awry we come to realize how miraculous it truly is when they work as they should. "We so need to perceive the divine blessing," I said, "when things go right."

Our hostess then looked at me and, smiling but pointedly, responded: "No, not only then. When they go wrong too."

I was struck with her retention of wisdom despite her pain. She was reminding me of something the rabbis of the Talmud had said: "All that the Merciful One does, He does for good."

In other words, all of us who believe there is a G-d in heaven must appreciate the value to us of all that He does, whether His actions are confluent with our wishes or not. That idea is what lies behind the astounding Jewish law that "just as we pronounce a blessing on the good, so are we to pronounce a blessing on the 'bad'." That latter blessing, recited on the death of a close relative, is "Blessed are You� the true Judge" and the Talmud implies that it is ideally to be recited as an expression of the same love we naturally feel when acknowledging an obviously blessed occasion.

We may not understand why things we feel are bad happen, and there is, to be sure, as King Solomon wrote, "a time for mourning." But somewhere in our minds must lie the conviction that G-d knows best, and that His concern is, in the end, for our ultimate good

It is a thought to think in these perplexing, vexing Jewish times, when - once again - innocent Jewish lives are targeted (cease-fire "time out" or not) by murderous foes seemingly devoid of any sense of fairness - or human attributes like empathy and compassion. Times when much of the world seems bizarrely unable, or unwilling, to recognize the mortal threats facing it - and deaf to the distressing condition of the Jewish canary in the coal mine.

Understanding world events is a possibility in distant hindsight but seldom an option in the midst of a maelstrom. Life is full of mysteries and enigmas; and history - in particular, Jewish history - has no dearth of puzzling twists and turns.

And so, trying to make sense out of our world today is futile. What we can do, though, and must, from Judaism's perspective, is redouble our determination to serve our Father in heaven, and intensify our prayers for His deliverance.

And, finally, realize the truth of Mrs. Leifer's mantra, that no matter what may happen, He does not abandon us.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

ABOUT THEM 'O'S

Rabbi Avi Shafran

In 1970, a high school senior in Baltimore wrote a letter to an Agudath Israel of America publication, taking umbrage at the periodical's reference to the scope of the American Jewish experience "from Borough Park to Baltimore."

Tongue resolutely in cheek, the writer addressed the suggestion that the two places somehow represented diametric poles of the Orthodox world by expressing the "profound shock" he and his friends in Baltimore yeshivot had felt at the suggestion.

"When," the letter concluded, "did Borough Park go bad?"

A certain irony lies in the fact that now, more than 35 years later, the erstwhile teenage cynic works for Agudath Israel, indeed sits in my seat. But the more trenchant transition, I think, has been my home town Baltimore's.

The Orthodox Jewish community in that city was established through the efforts of a small number of exceptionally dedicated individuals in the years before, during and after World War II, heroes to whom Baltimore's Jews today are indebted. In fact, all Jews should be; Baltimore has proven a virtual Jewish nuclear energy plant, empowering communities across the country and around the world with yeshiva and kollel deans, Jewish educators at all levels, Torah scholars and supporters of Jewish education, not to mention good, simple, honest Jews.

Baltimore's formative years benefited from the presence of Torah giants like the founding dean of the Ner Israel Rabbinical College, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman and the illustrious Rabbi Shimon Schwab; and of an assortment of groundbreaking educators and communal activists. But critical elements no less in Baltimore's development as a thriving Orthodox community were a cadre of Jewishly devoted laymen and laywomen who laid the fortifications that empowered Jewish observance in an "out of town" (read: not New York) community.

And their collective legacy is Baltimore's growing, vibrant and inspiring community of Orthodox Jews. To me, the city's true treasure isn't its baseball team, but that community, Baltimore's real 'O's.

I am both proud and humbled by my own Baltimore roots. My maternal grandparents and my beloved mother, may their memories be a blessing, were among the early members of the traditionally observant Baltimore community. And my dear, esteemed father, may he be well, has served for more than a half-century as a rabbi in Baltimore (and in recent years, as the secretary of the respected local Jewish religious court), and continues, with the help of my dear stepmother, to teach Torah, do acts of kindness and bring Jews closer to their heritage.

The seeds they and others planted have since grown into towering trees. The city's Orthodox community still amazes those of us who grew up there in the 50s and 60s but then left for other places. Whether measured in boys' or girls' yeshivot, in communal endeavors, in families or even in eateries, the contemporary Orthodox community in Baltimore is a resplendent large-screen version of its former self. To be sure, every community has its share of problems. As our Sages teach, possessions bring worries; accomplishments, too, bring challenges. But problems of growth are but the accoutrements of blessings. And Orthodox Jewish Baltimore today is a powerful blessing.

My family and I don't live in Borough Park, or even in Brooklyn, but we're not too far from those larger, older Jewish communities that were bustling while the seeds of today's Jewish Baltimore were still being nurtured.

And so we have become fairly familiar with the New York borough that hosts more observant Jews than anywhere else in the hemisphere. And in many ways, we're fond of it. Although the population density presents some challenges (I've been known to grumble about "Borough Double-Park" at particular traffic moments), and although some of the less salubrious effects of the surrounding urban metropolis can take a toll, Jewish Brooklyn is an impressive place. That is evident not only in the borough's preponderance of synagogues, yeshivot and educational opportunities - and not only in its unparalleled shopping and culinary opportunities - but in things like the ethereal peace that descends on the streets like a holy cloud every Shabbat, obliterating the bustle and noise of the days in between.

Baltimore, though, has attained its own undeniable Jewish presence. Its own cars may still cruise Park Heights Avenue on Shabbat, but the sidewalks are filled with observant Jews on the way to or from synagogue or a class, or just taking a walk. And while there may not be a kosher restaurant and modest-clothing shop on every block, there is no lack of pizza or snoods in town.

What is more, even from my (hopefully) more mature perspective these days, I think Baltimore offers something more than a "big city" Jewish community. Maybe it's the fact that it lies below the Mason-Dixon Line. Maybe it's the suburban layout of so many of the Jewish neighborhoods (not to mention the relatively affordable housing!). Or maybe it's the merit of those who pioneered the community. Whatever it is, though, Baltimore has a special grace, a charm, what in Hebrew is called "chein."

It shows in the fact that Baltimore Jews of different stripes and affiliations and levels of observance (or lack of observance) see their commonality before their differences; in how smiles there seem to come naturally; in how Shabbat greetings are extended to strangers and friends alike; in community-wide projects like the annual "Completion of the Torah."

That is why I consider it a privilege that I was raised in "Balmer," as the natives say it. And why my wife and I take great pleasure in knowing that one of our married daughters and her husband and their children live there, and that two of our sons are studying in Ner Israel today.

And so, when locals here in the "big city" ask where I'm from, although I have no idea what the reply "Baltimore" elicits in their minds, I say the word loudly and clearly, letting the sound of my voice convey my pride.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. The above essay appeared in the Baltimore Jewish Times and is reprinted with permission.]

SOBERING UP A DRUNKEN WORLD

Rabbi Avi Shafran

It is easy and tempting to wax cynical about Mel Gibson, the once-famously outraged-for-being-called-an-anti-Semite Hollywood powerhouse who recently, under the revealing effects of alcohol, proved his erstwhile accusers to have if anything underestimated the depth of his animus for Jews. And, indeed, cynics abound.

I am not among them. Not that I am beyond cynicism, unfortunately. But Mr. Gibson's apology, in which he disowned his drunken diatribe and asked the Jewish community to help him in "the process of understanding where those vicious words came from," cannot be blithely ignored.

I am given to understand that the successful actor/director/producer is not a man in financial need. Even if he never works in Hollywood again, he won't be homeless. So it would be ungenerous if not unfair to assume his words less than heartfelt. If Mr. Gibson is honestly grappling with the infection in his soul, he deserves not only sympathy but credit. It is infinitely healthier to know there is a prejudice lurking in one's heart than to be oblivious to it.

Which brings us to another performer, this one on the international stage.

Unsurprisingly, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wasted no time, after word came in that Israeli forces had shelled a UN post in Lebanon, casting the Jewish State as a dastardly villain. Before any facts beyond the shelling itself came in, he publicly proclaimed Israel guilty of "apparent deliberate targeting" of the post.

Soon enough, it emerged that the shelling was a tragic mistake, and that one of the UN observers killed in the attack had e-mailed his former commander in the Canadian army to say that Hezbollah had positioned themselves in close proximity to the UN post - that, in the commander's words, they were "all over his position." The UN observer had gone on to write the commander that Israel's bombardments of the area had "not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity."

Even though if Mr. Annan had not known of that e-mail (or had entertained the obvious thought of removing the UN troops from harm's way), he might have waited until the facts were in. What impelled him to make so irresponsible, so� deliberate - to borrow a word - an accusation? Perhaps veritas is evident not only in vino but in venality.

Like soft drinks and poison, anti-Semitism comes in various flavors and strengths. There is religiously-based hatred for Jews - expressed by espousers of many faiths - and secularist animus for Jews (or things associated with Jews). There is nationalistic Jew-hatred and there are political varieties.

There is, moreover, subtle loathing of the sort that largely lies fallow, expressing itself, if ever, in tirades like the one some Malibu policemen recently witnessed - or in artistic or scholarly expression.

And then there is the more operational variety, like the recent rampage by an Arab-American at Seattle's Jewish federation building, which left one woman dead and five people wounded.

Ironically, though, while anti-Semitic rants and violence understandably capture the most attention, "anti-Semitism lite" of the sort routinely seen at the UN and even in its secretariat, should concern us no less. Not only is the subtle sometimes dangerous itself, but it is mother's milk for the more blatant kind.

And so, if we Hebrews might be so bold as to hope, our hope might be for the day when those whose Jew-hatred is unrecognized might come to recognize what their hearts harbor, and perhaps follow Mr. Gibson's admirable example.

Imagine Mr. Annan apologizing for his one-sidedness when it comes to Israel. Or words of contrition from the representatives of the various General Assembly blocs who routinely offer condemnation for Israeli defensive actions while maintaining stony silence on offensive acts against Jews.

Imagine the European Union - or even just France - asking for help in dealing with its own deep-seated irritation with Jews.

Or the Lebanese government admitting that its own neglect, or even accommodation, of Hezbollah terrorists lies at the root of the upheaval and destruction that has been visited on its land and citizens.

Or some of those citizens themselves owning up to permitting Jew-haters to use their homes, schools and hospitals to hide missiles and other implements of death. Or the man who, over many hours, posed for an assortment of media, holding the same dead Lebanese child as if he had just discovered the body, coming clean about his propagandistic exploitation of a tragedy and desecration of the dead. And those media themselves, for their complicity in the outrage (and more, like playing down the evidence that Hezbollah itself may have been behind the collapse of the building in which the child and others died) .

Or, for that matter, some folks at The New York Times, for, when it comes to the Middle East, editorially confusing evenhandedness with the equating of evil and good.

We wouldn't be wise to hold our collective breath. But history has in fact known some remarkable realizations, even in the realm of anti-Semitism, both regular and lite. So we can certainly hope.

Tisha B'Av has passed again. The day of Jewish mourning over our people's exile from its land nearly 2000 years ago gave way, six days later, to the festive day of Tu B'Av, a day associated by the Talmud with reconciliation, both among Jews and between Jews and G-d. The Talmud also teaches that it was Jews' "hatred for no reason" of other Jews that caused the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

How fitting that part of our lot in our exile - which continues today despite the existence of a Jewish state - should be the collective Jewish suffering of baseless hatred from so much of the world.

We now head toward the Jewish month of Elul, a word that can be read as an acronym for the phrase "I am to my beloved and my beloved is to me," from the Song of Songs. How timely to consider that only Jews' appreciation of one another and of the Torah that was and remains our ultimate unifier can ever lead a drunken world to grapple with where all its vicious words, and actions, come from.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

"THERE IS HOPE FOR YOUR FUTURE"

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Many wrenching images have arrived from the Middle East of late: dead and mourning Jews, dead and mourning Lebanese, the taunting "talking turban" of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah - the ultimate cause, with his followers, of all the death and destruction.

Civilized people the world over take heart in Israel's military expertise and determination, but there are, of course, no guarantees in geopolitics. Advanced weaponry can wreak advanced destruction; yet large and well-armed forces have not infrequently yielded to smaller ones less endowed. Military actions, moreover, are no more immune than any actions to the nettlesome law of unintended consequences. And when the enemy wears no uniform, is impervious to reason and has no regard for innocent lives - of either their targets or the civilians among whom they themselves hide - soldiers and ordnance are far from decisive.

Even the Jewish State's unspoken "trump card" - its unacknowledged but common-knowledge nuclear capability - may soon, G-d forbid, be equaled by an "Islamic bomb." And while one might imagine that the Cold War concept of "Mutually Assured Destruction" will dissuade Islamists (not a bet I'd make), can anyone truly be certain that Hezbollah does not have, as it claims, conventional missiles that can reach Tel Aviv or Jerusalem? Or that it cannot obtain them from their generous patrons to the east?

Confidence tastes good, but realism is healthier. We do well to remember that here are a billion Muslims, and millions of others, who would be happy - some of them wildly so - to live in a world without a Jewish State.

To be sure, military wisdom and experience, superior weaponry and strategic planning are all necessary and proper in the natural scheme of engaging an enemy. But Judaism requires Jews to recognize something more: that, as King Solomon wrote, the race is not necessarily "to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." Our ultimate prevailing derives from our having earned it with our spiritual commitment. It is that realization itself, in fact, that allows the military efforts to succeed.

Which brings us to the welcome fact that, along with the harrowing images of a nation at war, there were heartening images as well. Like the photographs of Israeli tank crews solemnly reciting the "Prayer for the Road" before embarking on their mission into crazed Hezbollah hornets' nests; of soldiers stealing time as the sun rises to don tefillin and say the morning prayers; of Jewish eyes in helmeted heads turned upward toward heaven. Indications, all, that there are Jews on Israel's dangerous borders who remember who they are.

Similarly encouraging was the speech Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert delivered to the Knesset on July 17, shortly after Israel began its attacks on the terrorist army that, unprovoked, had killed seven Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others. His explanation of why he had ordered the attack and his outlining of the military campaign's goals were expected. What was remarkable, however, was his quoting from an Israeli rabbinate prayer beseeching G-d to "cause the enemies who rise up against us to be struck down" and to "preserve and rescue our fighters" and "grant them salvation and crown them with victory."

The unfortunate norm among all too many Israeli leaders (Menachem Begin was a laudable exception) has been to play up the El Macho and play down the Almighty. Even today, many of us wince when we hear Israeli politicians or military men strut and boast of how superior weaponry or military skills will see them through. It is therefore encouraging to see the "Jewish" in the "Jewish State" no longer quite so missing in action.

Mr. Olmert not only offered a public prayer for Israel's soldiers, but concluded his address with the poignant but ultimately hopeful words of the prophet Jeremiah: "A voice is heard on high, wailing, bitter weeping, Rachel weeps for her children; she refuses to be consoled for her children, for they are gone."

"Thus says G-d: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears; for there is reward for your accomplishment� and they will return from the enemy's land. There is hope for your future� and your children will return to their land."

The future toward which the prophet directs our hearts is the messianic era, when, Jewish tradition has it, all the world's peoples will have come to recognize G-d, and the Jewish nation will live in peace and security in its ancestral land.

And the key to that future is the Jewish people's collective recognition that, in the end, Jews' true protection, in Israel and anywhere, is not of our making. It is, rather, of our Maker.

The soldiers must fight and the leaders must lead. But what will ensure their success is something more sublime. May Prime Minister Olmert's speech prove but the beginning of a new, truly Jewish attitude, in Israel and throughout the world.

A smile from heaven may have arrived in the form of an ancient manuscript of Psalms discovered in an Irish bog mere days after Mr. Olmert's speech. The survival and legibility of the book, which was dated as over 1000 years old, shocked archaeologists. What brightened countless religious Jews, though, was the chapter that it was reported to have been open to: Psalm 83. That would be the first of three Psalms that, at the behest of the Council of Torah Sages, have been recited by Jews worldwide over recent years as a prayer for the Jews in Israel. It speaks of how a conglomerate of nations aims to destroy the Jewish people and take over their land, and implores G-d to vanquish them, and bring them to "seek Your name."

In the merit of our knowing Who protects us, may the day arrive soon.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE MOST POTENT WEAPON

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Intended so or not, Israel's actions of late have echoed the biblical Jacob's. As noted by the commentary Rashi, quoting the Midrash, when the progenitor of the Jewish people prepared to meet his estranged brother Esav for the first time since receiving (to Esav's outrage) their father's blessing, he approached his murder-minded twin with three distinct strategies: a gift, prayer and war.

Employing the first two, Jacob averted the worst-case scenario, the need for the third. Modern-day Israel has been less fortunate; unlike Esav, the enemy it faces has shown no readiness for even a temporary peace.

Echoing the Jewish forefather's example, the Jewish State began with gifts, most recently last summer's evacuation of Jews from Gaza. Neither it, though, nor the withdrawal of Israeli military presence from southern Lebanon five years earlier, placated the global Islamist jihadis, whose respective representatives continued to kill and maim Israelis on both fronts. And so, the third strategy, war - intended to physically prevent the enemy from expressing its bloodlust in deed - has been the whirlwind reaped.

From a truly Jewish perspective, however, the most vital strategy is the second, and it has been employed with determination over the years by countless Jews who trust in G-d, and in their power, by force of heart, to merit His protection.

And so, over recent years in particular, Jews the world over have gathered on many occasions to pray for the safety and welfare of their brothers and sisters in Israel. Many, heeding the suggestion of the Council of Torah Sages, have adopted the practice of reciting particular chapters of Psalms on behalf of endangered Jews overseas each morning after daily prayers.

Not that we have ignored the importance of activism. Only last week, Agudath Israel of America convened the most recent of its missions to Washington, at which members of the organization from across the country traveled to the nation's capital to engage lawmakers and Administration officials. Israel's security, as always, was a prominent topic of interaction.

Prayer, though, is paramount. Mere days later, on the evening of July 19, a remarkable gathering took place in Brooklyn, New York. A major New York Jewish institution, Yeshiva Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin, opened its impressive edifice to an Agudath Israel -sponsored special prayer gathering on behalf of Israeli Jews.

It was no pep rally. The thousand or so Jewish men who crammed the yeshiva's cavernous study hall and flowed out into the large lobby and the street beyond, along with the hundreds of women who gathered in the spacious balcony surrounding and overlooking the hall, had not come to celebrate military actions, or to applaud the routing of terrorists. Those present saw beyond the immediate activity in Lebanon and Gaza; they were all too conscious of farther-reaching things.

Like the import of Hezbollah-supporting Iranian "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei's recent description of the Jewish State as a "cancerous tumor," and that country's president's threat to unleash an Islamic "explosion" to "burn all those who created [Israel] over the past 60 years." They were aware, too, of the jungle that calls itself the United Nations, and of the putrid gutter known as the "Arab street." They had gathered in the Brooklyn yeshiva not to cheer or to protest or to make declarations, but rather to hear what they needed to do to merit God's protection of His children, and to pray.

Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, the Novominsker Rebbe and rabbinic head of Agudath Israel, spoke briefly and emotionally.

His voice laden with pain, Rabbi Perlow emphasized the importance of "public prayer" at a "time of travail," and the importance of each Jew's taking account of his or her personal life - "in matters between man and G-d, and in matters between man and man." Especially, he stressed, the latter. And he extolled, above all, the power of Torah-study.

After reminding his listeners that "We in other lands can truly contribute to the safety of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel," he read the names of the Israeli soldiers being held by terrorist kidnappers. More than an hour of Psalms and supplications, led by respected rabbis, followed, cried out in unison by the swelling crowd.

Many hundreds more participated at a distance in the assembly by conference call, and the Orthodox Union held similar gatherings across the country that same evening. Thousands upon thousands of Jews were thus united in heart and hope.

And so we remain.

The children of Jacob, using his most potent weapon.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE CONVERSION VACCINE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

This July, like so many before it, New York City's oppressive summer weather is being accompanied by another perennially irritating mass of hot air. "Jews for Jesus" - this year along with "The Chosen People Ministries" and the "Christian Jew Foundation Ministries" - are out in force, trying to convince Jews that relinquishing their faith in favor of a contrary belief system (one, even, in whose name untold numbers of Jews over the centuries were made to suffer and die) is somehow not an abandonment of Judaism but its "fulfillment."

Boosted by a budget of millions, Jews for Jesus alone has mailed material to 400,000 Jewish homes in the area, and Yiddish DVDs to 80,000 Orthodox ones. It is also running radio spots (complete with a klezmer "Hava Nagila" in the background) and placing ads in subways and newspapers.

Although in the past the missionary organization focused on Manhattan, this year it is aiming at all five New York City boroughs and surrounding counties, with special campaigns aimed at Russian-speaking Jews and Israeli expatriates.

Many Orthodox recipients of the Yiddish DVDs, seeing their title and packaging, assumed that they contained inspirational Jewish material. When they popped the discs into their computers, though, their anticipation turned to disgust as they realized the deception (call it Ruse for Jesus). After filing the unwelcome gift in appropriate receptacles, many then telephoned Jewish organizations like Agudath Israel of America, and Jewish newspapers, to warn others about the high-tech wolf in sheep's clothing.

Even the group's name misleads. There must surely be some Jews within its ranks, but interviewing a random sampling of its clean-cut, fixed-smile minions quickly reveals that the organization is composed less of Jews who have embraced the Christian savior than of born and bred evangelical Christians trying to foist their faith on Jews.

For the most part, it is Christians whom they attract, too. As a recent New York Times article noted, most of those "who pray with Jews for Jesus missionaries� are, in fact, non-Jews, according to the organization's statistics." Still and all, for those of us Jews who consider every Jewish soul infinitely precious, the missionaries' pushy pushing of their "good news" among our brethren is bad news enough.

It is, of course, an exceedingly rare product of a traditional Jewish education who might fall prey to Christian proselytizing. Familiarity with Judaism's beliefs and Jewish history is a most effective inoculation against conversion-itis. Unfortunately, though, there is no lack of Jews with sorely limited knowledge of their own faith. To the missionaries, they are their keys to heaven; to us Jews, they are our brothers and sisters, whose own road to heaven lies in a connection to their people and their ancestral faith.

And so the current missionary onslaught should serve as yet another timely and trenchant reminder that we Jews, all of us, need to do more to empower Jewish education - and the Jewisher the better.

In the wake of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey's alarming statistics, there followed an increased awareness within the larger Jewish community of the importance, and dire underfunding, of Jewish day schools, high schools and yeshivos. In more recent years, though, according to Dr. Marvin Schick, who is intimately familiar with the landscape of American Jewish education, things have changed, and not for the better.

Indeed, while there have been laudable private initiatives and some communal restructuring of priorities, few if any Jewish federations place support of day schools high on their list of concerns. An informal survey of Jewish federations in several large American cities yields average allocations of 2% to 7% of federation funds for such schools, with most contributions, including in New York, well toward the lower end.

Is it unreasonable to expect more from our Jewish philanthropic structures?

True enough, most Jewish schools are Orthodox, and most contributors to Jewish federations are not. But is that reason to turn a blind eye - or, at best, a severely myopic one - to the need for, and needs of, schools that happily accept, nurture and educate all local Jewish children, regardless of their families' level of observance?

Particularly important (and particularly needy) are Jewish "immigrant schools," those that provide for the education of children from families who have come to our shores from former Soviet Union lands and elsewhere. Such families are considered high priority by missionaries. Should they not be of equally high priority to Jewish charitable institutions?

If the broader Jewish community truly wants to fight the missionary scourge, it needs to ponder hard the fact that, in the realm of spiritual health no less than physical, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound - here, a ton - of cure.

As no less an authority than televangelist preacher John Hagee recently said (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 7): "If rabbis would put more emphasis on putting Jewish kids into Jewish schools, young Jews would never want to become Christians."

From the mouths of missionaries.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

FROM THE MOUTHS OF MOTHERS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Anyone in the habit of reading letters to the editor in The New York Times or any of a number of periodicals is exposed to diametric perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He reads equally spirited defenses of both Israeli and Palestinian stances and actions: of the rationale for targeted killings, and of their outrageousness; of the reduction of terrorist attacks effected by Israel's security fence, and of the dire difficulties "the wall" poses for Arab farmers; of the wickedness of suicide bombers, and of the terrible frustration that leads to such desperate acts.

Simple minds (and some harboring darker things than simpleness) can all too easily come to conclude that the two sides to the conflict are moral equivalents. After all, Palestinians want land, and so do Israelis. Israelis say they want peace, and so do Palestinians. Palestinians kill, and ditto for Israel.

There are times, though, when plain people's plain words speak more eloquently than any letter writer's or spokesperson's, revealing more profound cultural truths than anything to be found in the massive morass of political punditry.

Like the words of an Israeli mother of 18-year-old yeshiva student Eliyahu Asheri, who was abducted and murdered by Palestinian "militants" at the end of June. After he was kidnapped, his abductors announced that unless their demands for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza were met their captive would be "butchered in front of TV cameras" - even though they had already killed the boy shortly after seizing him.

Hearing that her son had been killed, Mrs. Asheri, a woman with unmistakably Jewish sensibilities, had the following to say:

"At this time� the pain is so unbearable; I can barely find a way to hold it. But one thing I can say is that many times in the past years, because of the many disagreements between brothers we have in this country, many times I asked Hashem [G-d] to give me, first of all, love in my heart for everyone�

"What strengthens you is, first of all, knowing that to die al kiddush Hashem [in sanctification of G-d's name], as he did - that Hashem chose him� this is the thing that comforts us."

Just about the time Eliyahu Asheri was abducted, a funeral was taking place in Gaza for three Palestinian children unintentionally killed in an Israeli strike on a car carrying three terrorists. Hundreds of mourners angrily clamored for revenge, and Falestin al-Sharif, the mother of one of the children, had words of her own.

"If I get my hands on an explosive belt," she said, according to USA Today, "I would go and explode myself inside Israel to tear their hearts out for their children, like they did to me."

No mother's words cried out in grief over the loss of a child should be held against her. But they can nevertheless be telling.

Two mothers. Two griefs. Two reactions. Two cultures.

Two sides, too. Superficially similar. But, in truth, deeply different.

One final quote, this from a little Arab girl called Ruqaya. She called in to an Egyptian television program on which a Muslim cleric, one Sheikh Muhamad Sharaf Al-Din, told a story from Islamic tradition.

"Ruqaya, what did you learn from today's show?" he asked his little caller, according to a translation provided, along with video of the program, by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

"I learned that the Jews are the people of treachery and betrayal�"

Sheikh Al-Din then interrupted to praise Allah and to repeat the girl's words. "May Allah bless you, Ruqaya," he said. "That is the most beautiful thing I have heard - that the Jews are the people of treachery, betrayal and vileness."

At the beginning of July, according to Palestinian Media Watch, Palestinian television, after a three year hiatus, began to rebroadcast a film clip featuring a child actor playing Mohammed al-Dura, the boy who was claimed to have been killed by Israeli guns during a firefight at the start of the 2000 intifada but, as it turned out, was almost certainly killed by Palestinian bullets. He is portrayed as playing happily in heaven, calling to the children viewers to "follow me." A singer croons a song describing how the earth longs for the deaths of children, how its "thirst is quenched by blood pouring out of young bodies."

One needn't be a knee-jerk defender of every Israeli policy - I certainly am not - to recognize the essential quandary of a country facing an enemy sworn to its destruction, a country that is regularly subjected to terrorist and missile attacks and whose enemy inculcates its young with burning hatred of the other.

Any truly objective and informed observer should readily perceive how distinct are the two cultures in the Middle East today. Their respective ideals, aspirations and hopes are - despite the letters sections - not similar at all.

And pretending they are will only perpetuate the conflict, and help ensure that more innocent blood, G-d forbid, will be shed.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

CALL ME RABBI

Rabbi Avi Shafran

For a Jewish media constantly scouting for scandals, it was the perfect pluralistic storm. Israeli President Moshe Katsav declined to call Reform Rabbi Eric Yoffie "Rav," and the latter, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, took umbrage.

The Forward editorialized its ire, bemoaning Mr. Katsav's reluctance to summon "some measure of common courtesy." The New York Jewish Week weighed in with its own judgment of the perceived slight: a "profoundly disturbing" show of "derisive contempt" for "the largest religious body in American Jewry." Ha'aretz called on all American Jewish leaders to refuse to visit the Israeli president, a suggestion Rabbi Yoffie endorsed.

A posse of pundits pitched in too. The head of the Anti-Defamation League decried Mr. Katsav's policy; the executive vice president of the Orthodox Union called on him to change it; a past president of the Presidents' Conference called Mr. Katsav's position "a slander against all American Jewry." Several dozen Reform and Meretz-affiliated secularists held a protest outside the Israeli president's home.

The kerfuffle's roots lead back to shortly before Rosh Hashana, when an Israeli radio reporter prodded the Israeli president about Jewish religious pluralism and Mr. Katsav explained that his observant background predisposed him to consider only someone who represents the Jewish religious tradition of the ages to be a "Rav."

Word eventually got back to Rabbi Yoffie. Although the Reform leader admits that the Israeli president has always been "very gracious" and "very forthcoming" to him, he insisted that Mr. Katsav address him with the Hebrew honorific. Mr. Katsav explained that he would be willing to refer to the Reform rabbi as "Reform Rabbi Yoffie" or even with the English word "Rabbi," but politely declined to grant him the title "Rav," which, in Israel, is used exclusively to refer to an authority of traditional Jewish belief and practice. On a recent trip to Israel, Rabbi Yoffie chose to break with his personal tradition and not request a meeting with the Israeli president. And the rest was, well, if not history, at least media heaven.

In truth, even the English word "rabbi" presents a challenge to those of us who believe in the divine nature and immutability of the Torah's laws. Should the word be used to refer to clergy of Jewish movements espousing very different beliefs? And so we weigh the facts:

For 3000 years until fairly recently, a rabbi was someone who affirmed traditional Jewish theology and both practiced and was a scholar of Jewish religious law, or halacha.
Today there are institutions that award rabbinical degrees to men and women who do not fit that time-honored definition.
Recipients of such degrees consider it personally insulting if their labors are not recognized by the public's use of the title "Rabbi" for them.

Some contend that Fact #1 should trump all else. No one, they say, should have the right to redefine a word at will. How, after all, would vegans like it if a food company decided to label its smoked meats "vegetarian"? Would environmentalists countenance, say, a strip mining venture's claim to be a "green" company?

Even titles duly conferred by recognized institutions can be employed misleadingly. A Ph.D. in finance is rightly addressed as "doctor" but most of us would consider it presumptuous for him to hang out a shingle offering surgical services. And that's not even getting into witch doctors.

Yet, Facts #2 and #3 persist. I might not feel that a particular university's standards are sufficient to render meaningful the degrees it awards. But is it proper or polite to refuse to recognize the undeniable fact that the degree was awarded? Would a traditional orthopedist be correct to refuse to refer to a duly credentialed chiropractor - whose discipline of treatment he may feel is quackery - as a doctor?

What some Orthodox writers - myself included - choose to do is identify non-Orthodox clergy clearly (e.g. "Reform Rabbi Eric Yoffie") on first reference, and then yield to the unqualified word "rabbi" in subsequent references. That allows us to be true to our consciences - by making clear at the onset that the subject is something other than what Orthodox Jews consider a religious authority - while not waving a red flag in front of those who might choose to interpret our faithfulness to our beliefs as a personal slur.

And President Katsav offered no less. But Rabbi Yoffie insisted on being called "Rav." "The essential fact that we are rabbis along with all other rabbis in Israel," the Reform leader announced, "is a principle [Mr. Katsav] is still not prepared to accept."

Sometimes words have discrete, and even disparate, meanings. A rose, to be sure, is a rose. But a rabbi is not necessarily a rabbi, and surely not necessarily a Rav. Whatever one chooses to call them, teachers of the Torah's divinity and halacha's unchanging nature are in a different theological universe from those who teach rejection of those ideas.

At the end of the day, though, less important than the stance of a president of Israel is the underlying truth that has been brought to the fore here.

Rabbi Yoffie's umbrage captivated the press and public; conflict sells. But it also did something constructive, by bringing focus to that truth, to the essential and crucial theological gulf between the Jewish religious tradition and contemporary Jewish theologies that compromise it. It is a gulf exceedingly wide and immeasurably deep. When that fact is fully appreciated by all Jews, we will be on our way back to what unified us at Sinai.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

CHOOSING TO BE CHOSEN

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Their usual haunt is Times Square but this time the threatening threesome had set up shop - a makeshift stage and an impressive speaker system - near the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Manhattan, where I embark on my commute home each day. I was surprised to see that my old acquaintances hadn't changed at all since the last time I had come across them a few years ago in midtown.

The master of ceremonies, as then, was loudly inveighing against people of non-color. He was flanked by his two assistants dressed like he was, in colorful caps and robes adorned with Jewish symbols. Together, they angrily denounced Caucasians - with particular malice for "so-called Jews." Occasionally, the lead man would nudge one of his helpers who had missed a cue to read from the bible he held in his hand. The addled assistant, once (or several times) so reminded, would then find the place in his own book and, pointing with his finger, read a pre-designated verse, stiltedly but with enthusiasm.

Next to the stage was a large display board, inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. Opposite each was a novel identification: one of twelve African or Caribbean nationalities. Their citizens, the MC announced loudly, were the "real Jews."

When I first saw the performance a few years ago, my immediate reaction was amusement. But then I experienced something like pity for the triumphalist trio and their fans. How tragic, I thought, that beings created in the image of G-d, capable of truly meaningful accomplishments, can imagine themselves worthy of dignity only by belittling others, even stooping to adopt an identity not their own.

There would be no point, I realized, in engaging the pitiable prophets in conversation. Their beliefs were fueled by fantasy, not fact, impervious to reason. But I indulged all the same in a little fantasizing myself, imagining what I would tell them if only I might find some crack in the wall of their whimsy.

The revelation would no doubt disappoint them, but I would share with them a secret: Jewish chosenness isn't a trophy, a bed of laurels on which to proudly rest. It doesn't mean having made it - or, for that matter, having anything at all.

In the Jewish view of things, being chosen is less a badge than a charge. Yes, religious Jews do indeed consider our forefathers' and foremothers' merit as extending throughout the generations to encompass their descendants. But the bottom line of being chosen is that it is not a reward for any achievement - certainly not any of our own - but an obligation to achieve.

In fact, I would tell them, if they were still listening, that the special status we Jews possess - unlike the supremacy preached by racists of whatever hue - is in fact available to anyone who both recognizes what "chosen" truly means and is sincerely and utterly willing to join the Jewish people and its mission. Many are the biological ethnicities represented in the Jewish people - today as throughout the millennia. One can indeed choose to be chosen.

But the tickets of admission to the Jewish People are sincerity and commitment, not placards and loudspeakers. It's easy to strut about and shout, to brandish skullcaps and Stars of David. Undertaking the endeavor of Judaism - humbly assuming the yoke of the Torah's commandments and Jewish observance - is in a different realm entirely.

Then, though, something else dawned. The rabbis of the Talmud exhort us to "learn from every man." Might there be something to be learned from the fearsome threesome? Of course there is. For they are remarkable, if unintentional, testimony to how coveted the name "Jew" is, even at a time (have there been others?) when the real "real Jews" are hated by so many. The Times Square trio may have no clue about what being a Jew really means, but their desire to assume the mantle is still striking and worth pondering.

What it should teach us born or properly converted Jews is just how special we in fact are, how desired is our very identity. And what it should inspire us to do is more seriously set ourselves to the holy mission of being what Jews are meant to be.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

AS A JEW

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Among those opposing the - shelved for now but sure to return - constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is an interfaith umbrella organization.

"Clergy for Fairness" includes an assortment of groups, some affiliated with various Christian denominations, others with the Sikh religion and others still with the Jewish world's Reform, Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements. It asserts that the proposed "Marriage Protection Amendment" would "infringe on religious liberty."

Unexplained is how religious liberty managed to persevere for the first 230 years of the Republic, or, for that matter, how people thought themselves free since the dawn of creation, when the right to same-sex marriage went unrecognized, indeed unimagined.

More mystifying still, though, were the words of one member of the group, Reform Rabbi Craig Axler. He told The New York Times that, with the proposed amendment in the sphere of public discussion, "to remain silent as a Jew is unconscionable."

Indeed it is. Although not the way he imagines.

Which is probably that Jews, as a people perennially persecuted, should empathize with others who are marginalized, even marginally, by society. But, whether or not such empathy is appropriate, the inability to claim marital status for a relationship that has been rejected by civilized cultures throughout history, is hardly akin to being confined to a ghetto or condemned to a concentration camp. And, in any event and more to the point, the defining aspect of the Jew is not victimhood, but Judaism.

Thus, what the rabbi should instead find unconscionable "as a Jew" is misrepresentation of the Jewish religious tradition. What should impel him to break his silence are Jewish truths.

He might start with the book of Leviticus, where sexual relations between men is referred to as "to'eiva", not inaccurately translated as "an abomination."

The Jewish Oral Tradition is replete with similar sentiment. Homosexual acts are associated by the Midrash with the Canaanite peoples whose behavior defiled the Holy Land; and the rabbis of the Talmudic era taught that the formal sanctioning of homosexual unions was one of the causes of the biblical Flood. Trenchantly, a statement in the Talmud asserts that one of human society's redeeming qualities has been its refusal to "write marriage documents for males" - its maintenance, in other words, of marriage's definition as the union of a man and a woman.

The Torah does not command hatred of homosexuals. It does not label people who engage in homosexual activity, and certainly not those with homosexual tendencies, as inherently evil. Such people do not forfeit either their humanity or, if Jewish, their membership in the Jewish people; nor are they unworthy of others' care and compassion.

But Judaism, in no uncertain terms, forbids homosexual acts; and, in equally certain terms, sanctions only the union of a man and a woman in matrimony. Anyone seeking to address the issue "as a Jew" should be proclaiming those facts, not fudging them.

Rabbi Axler, as it happens, was taking his cue from his movement. The president of the Reform Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Rabbi David Ellenson, contended in The New York Jewish Week that not only does homosexual activity not violate the letter and spirit of the Torah, but embracing its propriety is a Jewish religious imperative.

"A tradition that demands 'You shall do that which is upright and good'," he explained, "can surely be construed in such a way that the ethos of Jewish tradition can be said to trump a single statement in Leviticus�"

But - as a Jew - Rabbi Ellenson needs to face the fact that the Torah indeed contains both verses, and should realize that the latter contradicts the former no more than does any of the Torah's laws that prohibit certain other sexual relationships. The definition of "upright and good" is not whatever a particular society or era embraces but rather, and precisely, to heed what God commands us to do, and to not do. That, in fact, is the very essence of the Jewish faith: to follow the divine, not our own lights.

When contemporary Jewish movements define Judaism down for their followers, that is objectionable enough. But when they seek to swathe political correctness in Jewish garb, it does violence to the integrity of all Jews' religious heritage. Whether the issue is "reproductive freedom" or assisted suicide or the redefinition of marriage, responding "as a Jew" must mean something more than just responding.

Abraham, Jewish tradition explains, was called the "Ivri" - the "other sider" - because "the entire world was on one side" of a conceptual river, and he "on the other." Nothing is more fundamentally Jewish than to willfully stand apart from an unbridled world and affirm timeless truths.

That is what one does, as a Jew.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

Dip Tinking about H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N

Rabbi Avi Shafran

My 13-year-old son Menachem is my valued chavruta, or study-partner; he has a keen and creative mind and I hope he will one day become a true talmid chochom, or religious scholar. We study Talmud together every evening and Sabbath; Menachem's mornings at yeshiva are also filled with the study of religious texts.

But he knows how to recreate too. Our family chooses not to own the ubiquitous appliance that a renowned if blunt-speaking rabbi once likened to having an open and flowing sewer pipe in one's living room.

And so Menachem reads.

Most of the standard fare of contemporary "teen lit" is as unwelcome in our home as are televisions. Many books, though, nonfiction and novels alike, have emerged from Orthodox publishing houses in recent years; the boy reads his share of those. With his well-developed sense of humor (and special appreciation of the imaginative and absurd), he has also consumed his share of Rowling and Handler (a.k.a. Snicket).

Not long ago, though, I found him engrossed in an old book that had somehow survived many years and several interstate moves intact. Four decades earlier, it had made me laugh out loud and, amazingly, it was having precisely the same effect on my son. More amazing still, the book was already decades old when I had read it as a boy.

The tome was "The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N," penned in the 1930s by Leo Rosten (under the nom de plume Leonard Q. Ross) for The New Yorker and then published as a book (followed by a sequel, "The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N").

For the unfortunate uninitiated, the Kaplan books are wonderfully droll accounts of the experiences of what we would today call an "English as a Second Language" instructor, as he strives to introduce new immigrants - Kaplan hails from Kiev - to the vagaries of American speech, grammar and idioms. The humor derives largely from the garbled yield of Mr. Kaplan's accent and his, shall we say, "alternative logic." He is a student who proudly announces the principal parts of "to die" as "die, dead, funeral" and who, after submitting the word "door" as an example of a noun and asked to provide another example, responds "another door." He bemoans his wife's "high blood pleasure" and, in a business letter, pens the memorable sentence "If your eye falls on a bargain please pick it up." Not much in the way of plot, but the dialogue is priceless.

It's always heartening for parents, especially those of middle-age (or, as some of their children undoubtedly think, of the Middle Ages) to witness their young relating to ideas, books or activities they themselves enjoyed when in their own formative years. But, for goodness' sake, "The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N" was written in 1937 and a youngster is audibly chuckling over it close to a decade into the Common Era's second millennium? What gives?

Sure, Rosten is funny, but so are Mark Twain and P.G. Wodehouse (himself, incidentally, a fan of the Hyman Kaplan books); you don't see many kids cracking up over them these days. And sure, anyone who appreciates the intriguing elements of language (as a toddler, on hearing a new word, Menachem would repeat it softly to himself several times, rolling it around on his tongue like a piece of candy) is easily captivated by the sort of things that ensue when Mr. Kaplan and his classmates engage in mouth-to-ear combat with that strangeness called English.

But I think there may be another, more subtle reason both my son and I connected so well with the books. It has to do with Kaplan himself.

For all his comical blunders and swollen self-regard (the asterisks - actually, green stars - are part of his flamboyant signature for a reason), Mr. Kaplan is endearing - and for a very Jewish reason: He is preternaturally determined, and undeterred by even his most spectacular failures.

He's in the class, in other words, to learn, and learn he will, come hell or high vowels. He is committed to using his mind - to what he calls "dip tinking." Although the Hyman Kaplan books are almost devoid of religious references, their protagonist hews unmistakably to a principle stated by the Rabbis of the Mishna (Avot, 2:6): "The bashful person cannot learn."

Of course, the rabbis were referring not to study of the sort that goes on at the "American Night Preparatory School for Adults." They were talking about the quintessential Jewish study, that of Torah. But Kaplan's enthusiasm and devotion are familiar to anyone who has ever entered a yeshiva classroom or study-hall. That the Talmud compares Torah to bread and water is not insignificant. The study of Jewish law and lore is meant to be the staple of the Jewish life of the mind.

Single-minded focus on the pedagogic goal, no matter what obstacles or failures may interject themselves, is arguably the essence of Jewish learning - and teaching. The Talmud speaks of the great merit of one Rabbi Preida whose pupil could not understand a lesson unless it was repeated 400 times. Both teacher and student had every reason to become frustrated, indeed to abandon the task. But neither did; the goal was too important. And they were in it together.

Mr. Kaplan's instructor, Mr. Parkhill (or "Pockheel," as Kaplan calls him), while regularly at wits' end over his student's pronouncements and advocacies, also shows great patience, even signs of appreciation. After the rest of the class excitedly attacks a condemned building of words and illogic erected by their tenacious classmate, and Parkhill joins in with a withering demolition of the Kaplanesque structure, something surprising happens:

"Even as he chastised his most intractable pupil, Mr. Parkhill felt nourishing juices course through his veins. For the priceless spark of life, the very heart of learning, had been revived in what, but half an hour ago, had been a dull and listless congregation."

Hyman Kaplan's creator was not a notably religious man, but Kaplan the character and his goal-focused monomania readily evidence Rosten's recognition - perhaps instilled by his parents, and certainly present in his genes - of a truly Jewish ideal: Learning matters, above all.

The story is told of two Jews in the 1930s discussing the renowned Lithuanian Talmudic genius Rabbi Yoseif Rosen, popularly known as "the Rogatchover."

"Why," mused the first fellow, "if only he had studied physics, he could have been an Einstein!"

"You've got it wrong," says the other. "If only Einstein had studied Talmud, he could have been a Rogatchover!"

And so what occurs is that part of what so resonated in me and my son about Leo Rosten's memorable creation - aside from the laughter and amusement he brought us - may have been our realization, conscious or not, that, if only Hyman Kaplan had studied Torah, he could have been a talmid chochom.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. The above article appeared in The Forward and is reprinted with permission.]

JEWISH STATE, JEWISH STANDARDS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

As a Jewish state, Israel has always incorporated elements of religious tradition into its workings. Kosher food, for example, is served in the armed forces and at government functions; the national calendar recognizes Jewish holidays. And personal status issues like conversion, marriage and divorce are determined by Jewish law, or halacha, overseen by an official state rabbinate.

That policy, part of the "religious status quo" initiated at Israel's birth, served her well and without protest for more than a half-century. Recent years, though, have seen Israel's conversion and marriage laws assailed by a coalition of largely American advocates - in order to advance the interests of non-Orthodox Jewish religious movements, which currently have only miniscule followings in Israel.

Israel's "personal Jewish status" policy resulted from a carefully considered decision of Israel's early leadership. No less a personage than David Ben Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister, wrote that it was the only way to prevent "G-d forbid, the splitting of the Jewish house into two."

A number of arguments have been put forward for jettisoning the longstanding policy, in particular regarding marriage: Some Jewish couples resent having to undergo religious marriage ceremonies and classes. Marriages involving Jews not permitted by Jewish religious law cannot be effected in Israel. Israelis can and do circumvent the law and marry outside Israel. Persuasion is preferable to coercion.

But Jews - of whatever affiliation - who are truly committed to the wellbeing of the larger Jewish community and not only to the advancement of a particular cause or movement should carefully and objectively examine each of those points.

The religious status quo policy does in fact require engaged Jewish couples to undergo a Jewish ceremony, complete with a rabbi, witnesses and the writing of a traditional marriage document, or ketuba. And couples are indeed asked to attend classes. But, in a state claiming a Jewish identity, do a Jewish ceremony and a cursory apprisal of Jewish law really, as some advocates have repeatedly charged, "deprive citizens of basic human rights"?

As to Israeli law's declining to recognize halachically forbidden marriages, it's a rare country that doesn't place legal limits on marriage. All of the states in our own country prohibit incestuous marriages; 24 forbid cousins to marry; six require blood tests. Those things, too, likely discomfit some individuals, but, significantly, one doesn't see those who are assailing Israel's halacha-based marriage laws campaigning against American consanguinity or health-concern statutes.

It is true that some Israelis circumvent Israel's laws by taking quick trips out of the country to get married. But the idea that laws or standards that can be evaded should be dismantled is not one generally embraced. Many Americans disregard speed limits and underreport their incomes; few suggest that, as a result, highway safety rules or the IRS should be abolished. What is more, the law, heeded or not, is a teacher, informing the public of ideals; there is considerable Jewish value in a Jewish State statutorily enshrining unarguably Jewish expectations.

Something more: It is hardly uncommon for children of non-Orthodox, even staunchly secular, backgrounds to come to adopt halachic observance. Some staunchly secularist Israelis may be miffed by their country's marriage laws, but imagine the pain of a newly observant young woman a generation hence who, because those laws were undermined by American activists, finds herself forbidden by her religious conscience from marrying the man she loves.

Finally, the issue in the end is not about coercion versus persuasion. It is, rather, about whether a Jewish standard belongs in the laws of the Jewish state.

Characterizing a time-honored and deeply Jewish standard as something malevolent is grossly unfair. Overheated and incendiary language about "human rights" and an Orthodox "marriage monopoly" only serves to turn Israeli Jews farther away from whatever connection they may have with their religious heritage and the broader community of Jews. Do we Americans speak of standard-setters like the Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Reserve Board as sinister "monopolies"? Do safety regulations or interest rate adjustments, inconvenient though they may be to some, constitute a curtailment of "human rights"? A Jewish State needs a Jewish standard for marriage and divorce, and halacha - the highest common Jewish denominator - is the logical, not to mention the most Jewishly authentic, choice.

If American proponents of civil marriage in Israel would spend a fraction of the energy and funds they expend deriding our mutual Jewish tradition instead explaining and acclaiming it, fewer Israelis would be alienated from their heritage, Jewish law would be more widely respected and the Jewish people would be headed toward a more unified future.

American Jews can certainly choose to advocate for a separation of religion and state in Israel. And Israel, too, can choose to deconstruct itself as a country that respects the Jewish religious tradition. But - particularly at a time when the Jewish State's existence is under siege by both murderers within and genocidal madmen at a distance (but within range of nuclear weapons) - should such goals really be on any sensitive Jew's agenda?

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

SHAVUOT

Custom-Made for American Jews?

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Shavuot, one of the trio of Jewish "pilgrimage" festivals that also includes Passover and Sukkot, tends to get short shrift from most American Jews. Coming mere weeks after the Passover seders, perhaps the "first-fruits festival" simply finds many folks "holidayed out". Or maybe it's because Shavuot lacks any unusual "mitzvah-food" of its own like matzoh, or ritual practice like building a sukkah. Whatever the reason, though, Judaism's summer-season holiday has come to be neglected by much of the American Jewish community.

And yet, the argument could convincingly be made that no other Jewish festival is more timely or urgent for unity-challenged American Jewry

Because Jewish tradition associates the day of Shavuot (two days, actually, at least for those of us who don't live in Israel) with the Jews' acceptance of the Torah, the seminal event of Jewish peoplehood and unity. Shavuot, the Talmud and Jewish liturgy teach, marks the anniversary of the day our ancestors stood at Mt. Sinai, in the Talmud's poignant words, "like one person, with one heart."

What unified our people at that time, Jewish sources make clear, was our forebears' unanimous stance vis-a-vis the essential Jewish mandate, the laws of the Torah - a stance embodied in their immortal words: "Na'aseh v'nishma", "We will do and we will hear."

That phrase captures the quintessential Jewish credo, the acceptance of G-d's will even amid a lack of "hearing," or understanding. "We will do Your will," they pledged in effect, "even if it is not our will, even if we are able to 'hear' it, even if it discomfits us."

Could anything be more antithetical to the American mindset? More diametric to the "What's in it for me?" mentality that we Americans, including we American Jews, take in with every breath?

Ours, after all, is a comfort-crazed society, fixated on having things, and on having them our way. And not only in the physical trappings of our lives but in our spiritual choices no less. How common it is these days to hear worshippers, Jewish ones as well, explaining their degree of observance, their choice of place of worship, even their religious affiliations, as born of something akin to coziness.

"I embrace this observance because it makes me feel good."

"I so enjoy the services there."

"That liturgy makes me feel involved, important."

"I'm most comfortable (or happy, or content, or fulfilled) as a (fill in the blank) Jew."

But Judaism has never been about comfort, enjoyment or even personal fulfillment (though, to be sure, the latter surely emerges from a G-d-centered life). It has, rather, been about listening to G-d, not only when His commands sit well with us but even - indeed, especially - when they don't. Jews, after all, have died, proudly and painfully, for their faith.

Thus, Shavuot, which this year falls out on June 2 and 3 (its second day coinciding with the Sabbath), really deserves to be a "front and center" holiday for us American Jews. Its central theme speaks to us, loudly, clearly and directly. The Jewish summer-festival reminds us about the engine of true Jewish unity, that it lies in the realization that Judaism is not about what we'd like G-d to do for us, but rather about what we are honored, exalted and sanctified to do for Him.

[Rabbi Shafran serves as director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE THIRD HEIR

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Quite a stir ensued at a recent American Jewish Committee symposium in Washington when Israeli novelist A.B.Yehoshua called the hosting organization's 100-year record "a great failure" and opined that Jews in the United States cannot live genuinely Jewish lives. Only in Israel, the celebrated writer asserted, can a truly Jewish life be expressed, and only the Jewish state can ensure the survival of the Jewish people.

Reaction was quick and spirited. Many of Yehoshua's American listeners were scandalized - New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier accused him of "insist[ing] on narrowing [Jewish religion, culture and literature] down to Israeliness." And Israeli commentators took Yehoshua to task as well for, what the Jerusalem Post's Uri Dan characterized as, "the stupidity" of the novelist's remarks.

Citing the work of Israel Democracy Institute's Professor Aryeh Carmon, Forward editor J.J. Goldberg perceptively framed the brouhaha as the yield of a conceptual divide. With the destruction of Jewish Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, asserts Carmon, Israeli Jews "inherited" the Jewish identity expressed through daily life in an identifiably Jewish environment; and American Jews, the experience of Jewishness as a "way of looking at things."

Writes Goldberg: "It ought to be obvious� that Israelis are not wrong in their way of being Jewish, any more than Americans are wrong in their way - joining organizations, attending events, giving to charities and trying to live by what they understand as Jewish values. The two ways are merely different."

Different, to be sure, but "merely" may not do justice to the yawning gulf between the two. More critical, though, the suggestion that either expression of Jewishness has lasting power is highly arguable.

Speaking Hebrew, having a Jewish army and living where the winter holiday is Chanuka and the spring one Passover are fine things, but to imagine they have the power to fuel Jewish continuity is to imagine that a shiny car without a motor can get you across town.

It doesn't take rocket science, only social science, to spy the implications of the large and increasing number of Israelis, mostly young, who have chosen in recent decades to emigrate. (New York and Los Angeles have particularly sizable Israeli expatriate communities, but most large American and European cities have their own healthy shares of once-Israeli residents.) Hebrew and army service are apparently insufficient to keep Israeli Jews in Israel; can they be expected to keep them vibrantly Jewish? And if Hebrew fluency is itself somehow the measure of Jewishness, the definition is as meaningless as it is tautological.

Nor is "American-style" Jewish cultural identity a bridge to our people's future. Not only is Hebrew Greek to most American Jews, but so are the most basic Jewish beliefs and concepts. Asked to name a Jewish tenet, the average American Jew is likely to respond "pluralism" or "repairing the world," even though his understandings of those concepts are bizarre expansions of how they are used in the Talmud. The true fundamentals of Jewish belief are books as closed to Joe Q. Jewish as the Talmud itself. Such obliviousness is hardly the stuff of generational continuity.

But continuity is attainable. The key is to recognize that there is a third heir to the Eastern European Jewish world that perished last century. It is neither Israel nor America, yet it resides, in fact thrives, in both countries - as it does on other continents. It is the world of Jews who live neither Israeliness nor liberal idealism but Judaism - in the word's original sense: Jewish belief and practice as prescribed by the Jewish religious tradition.

Not only is affirming and observing Torah and halacha the most authentic expression of Jewish nationhood, it is the one - and only one - proven to have empowered Jewish continuity in the past. And it is clearly poised to empower it in the future. The recent American Jewish Committee study showing a steep rise in the Orthodox percentage of young American Jews (and predicting a continuation of Orthodox growth) could not have come as a surprise to anyone remotely familiar with the multi-generational vibrancy of Jewish life in the many Orthodox Jewish enclaves across America.

The truism that Judaism underlies the Jews is often greeted with the blithe retort that observance simply "isn't for everyone." The Tel Avivian needs his nightlife, and the New York Jew his cultural relativism. How easily we turn wants into needs. And how easily we dismiss our past and forfeit our future out of fear that our styles may be cramped.

One need only enter almost any Orthodox synagogue to meet Jews from the most unusual backgrounds who, through force of determination and conviction, came to Jewish observance as adults. Every Jew stood at Mt. Sinai, and every Jew today can return to it. And all Jews - in Israel, America, Europe and elsewhere - who do so return, will, along with their children and descendents, become pulsating parts of the Jewish future.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE INDIGNITY OF ATHEISM

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Back on March 12, a paean to "the dignity of atheism" appeared on The New York Times op-ed page. It was penned by celebrated philosopher Slavoj Zizek who, had he consulted the same periodical's obituary page a mere three days earlier, would have come face to image with the late Richard Kuklinski.

Mr. Kuklinski, who was retired from life at the age of 70, claimed, utterly without remorse, to have killed more than 100 people as a Mafia enforcer; his favored methods included ice picks, crossbows, chain saws and a cyanide solution administered with a nasal-spray bottle.

The happy hit man's example might not have given pause to Professor Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. But it should have.

Because the notion that there is no higher authority than nature is precisely what enables people like Mr. Kuklinski - and the vast majority of the killers, rapists and thieves who populate the nightly news.

No, no, of course that is not to say that most atheists engage in amoral or unethical behavior. What it is to say, though, is that atheism qua atheism presents no compelling objection to such behavior - nor, for that matter, any convincing defense of the very concepts of ethics and morality themselves.

The reason is not abstruse. One who sees only random forces behind why we humans find ourselves here is ultimately bound only by his wants. With no imperative beyond the biological, a true atheist, pressed hard enough by circumstances toward unethical or immoral behavior, cannot feel compelled to resist. Why should he?

In his view, a purposeless process of evolution has brought us to where we stand, and our feeling that there are good deeds and evil ones is but a utilitarian quirk of natural selection - like our proclivity to eat more than we need when food is available. And so, just as we might choose to forego a second helping of pizza if we harbor an urge to lose weight, so may we choose, for personal gain (of desires, not pounds), to loosen our embrace of a moral, ethical life. Biological advantages, after all, are not moral imperatives.

Atheism, in the end, is a belief system in its own right, one in which there can be no claim that a thieving, philandering, serial murdering cannibal is any less commendable a member of the species than a selfless, hard-working philanthropist. In fact, from an evolutionist perspective, the former may well have the advantage.

To a true atheist, there can be no more ultimate meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather; no more import to right and wrong than to right and left. To be sure, rationales might be conceived for establishing societal norms, but social contracts are practical tools, not moral imperatives; they are, in the end, artificial. Only an acknowledgement of the Creator can impart true meaning to human life, placing it on a plane above that of mosquitoes.

Proponents of atheism bristle when confronted by the implications of their belief, that morality and ethics are mere figments of our evolutionary imagination. But, for all their umbrage, they cannot articulate any way there can really ever be, as one writer has put it, "good without G-d."

The bristlers are not liars, only inconsistent; some well-hidden part of their minds well recognizes that humans have a higher calling than hyenas. But while the cognitive dissonance shifts to overdrive, the stubborn logic remains: The game is zero-sum. Either there is no meaningful mandate for human beings; or there is. And if there is, there must be a Mandator.

What inspired Professor Zizek to celebrate atheism as "perhaps our only chance for peace" in the world was the unarguably dismal example set by some people who are motivated by religion. He is certainly correct that much modern mayhem is deeply rooted in claims of religious rectitude. What he forgets, though, is that the world has also seen unimaginable evil - perhaps its greatest share - from men who professed no belief in divinity at all, whose motivations were entirely secular in nature. Adolph Hitler was no believer in G-d. Nor was Joseph Stalin. Nor Pol Pot. Together, though, the trio was responsible for the murders of tens of millions of human beings. They pursued their dreams as atheists with no less relish than Osama Bin Laden pursues his as an Islamist. Evil is evil, whether expressed through faithlessness or misguided faith. But only a belief in a Higher Being has the potential - realized or not - of reining in the darker elements that haunt human souls.

Some of my best friends - okay, one or two - are atheists. Stranded on a desert island, I would prefer the company of any of them to Osama's.

But if my choice of island partner were between two strangers about whom I know only that one believes there is no higher reason for human life and the other that there is, I know which one I'd choose.

And I think Professor Zizek might make the same choice.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of

THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

Rabbi Avi Shafran

I made a quick trip the other day to my home town, Baltimore, to crash a party.

It was a celebration hosted by my brother, a rebbe, or "Talmud/ethics/philosophy teacher and counselor" in Ner Israel Rabbinical College's high school division. After many years' effort, he was marking his completion of the study of the entire Babylonian Talmud.

A small group of local relatives and esteemed rabbis were present; my brother (whom I taught everything he knows - about hitting a baseball) had purposefully not informed me of his accomplishment or its celebration; he hadn't wanted me to make the 200-plus-mile trip to join him. But I was tipped off by his wife, who thought, correctly, that I wouldn't have wanted to miss so festive an event in honor of so magnificent an accomplishment.

It was a wonderful experience, not only because I was able to participate in the event itself - the meal served in celebration of a siyum, or "completion ceremony," is considered religiously significant - but because I was able to break bread with my father, stepmother, brother, sons (students in Ner Israel), sister-in-law and her parents and siblings, to whom I feel very close as well.

I found myself thinking about my father's experiences as a youth in Poland at the outbreak of World War II. Although he rarely spoke about that era to his children when we were younger, I was able to learn much from the videotaped interview he granted Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation in 1998. And, at the siyum, between courses and the words of Torah and congratulation that were delivered, I found myself recalling pieces of my father's testimony.

After my brother expounded on the final words of the Talmudic tractate with which he was completing his course of study, I pictured my father as a 14-year-old, when Germany invaded Poland and he and his family, along with the rest of the residents of his shtetl, fled before the advancing Germans.

He experienced some hair-raising moments during that flight, including the murder of his uncle by German soldiers who overcame the refugees, and being packed, along with the rest of the townsfolk, into a synagogue that was then set ablaze. (The people were released at the last moment, through the intercession of a passing German general - who the villagers suspected had been the prophet Elijah in disguise.) Nevertheless, once the refugees reached another town and settled into some abandoned barracks, the boy who was my father made an announcement to his parents.

"I said � that I'm going to yeshiva now� to Bialystok yeshiva. I was supposed to go a month ago� They said� the war is not over, it's not settled�"

The war, in fact, had only begun, and it would come to take the lives of my father's parents and most of his siblings, not to mention countless other relatives. But he couldn't have known that then, and he was determined.

At the siyum, my brother recited the special prayer traditionally offered at such celebrations, putting "the Talmud" where the name of a single tractate would normally go. And I remembered, incongruously, how my father at 14, when he said his final goodbye to his parents, had never before been on a train.

"I [had] promised [myself] that I would go to Bialystok and something was telling me - maybe it was because I was stubborn -- I said I am going to yeshiva and I'm going to go."

Those gathered at the siyum offered my brother their hearty congratulations and broke into song.

"[It was] a promise to myself, a promise to myself� they thought I was so dead-set to go� so they let me go. My mother, peace be on her, brought me a few apples�"

Several rabbis spoke at the siyum, including my father, who expressed his pride in his son's accomplishment.

Sixty-seven years earlier, carrying his apples, his phylacteries and a prayer-book, he boarded a train to Bialystok - only to be told by a passenger that, due to the war, all the yeshivos in that city had relocated to Vilna. When the train arrived in Bialystok the boy asked how to get to Vilna.

"Someone comes over to me and says� there is a train that goes to Vilna. I said I have no ticket. He said don't worry about a ticket - go! People were hanging from the doors� I'm standing there � probably crying� something was telling me 'you must get onto the train.' And all of a sudden I see the train moving� so I grabbed the handle of the steps - people were standing on the steps and I couldn't get on the steps� as the train started to move faster and faster, people pushed themselves in and I got between two cars�"

I, too, am proud of my brother's accomplishment. He and his wife - whose own commitment and assistance made his achievement possible - deserve tremendous credit for the thousands of hours of hard work and sacrifice that underlie it. But at the siyum I couldn't help but think a thought that I know they would agree with, a thought that has occurred to me countless times about my own life.

All of us surely play a major role in whatever we may achieve. But in the end we can never really know just how much our achievements are due to our own will and determination, and how much to the merit of the choices, commitment and determination of those who arrived here before us.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

MIRACLE OF MIRACLES

Rabbi Avi Shafran

This year's Passover celebration was punctuated by the characteristically barbaric Palestinian attack on a Tel Aviv eatery that killed nine and wounded dozens. The bombing hung like a putrid cloud over Jews everywhere. But it was also likely at the fore of the minds of many who listened attentively to the haftarah, or reading from the Prophets, on the festival's final day.

That excerpt, read only in the Diaspora, where an eighth day of Passover is celebrated, is from Isaiah (10:32-12:6) and includes some well known verses from the prophet's vision of the end of history, when the "wolf will lie down with the lamb" and perfect peace will reign among the world's human inhabitants as well.

It was a marvelous but difficult future to imagine in 2006, as it has been throughout most of history. Not only did malevolent murderers strike again against Jewish men, women and children, but spokesmen for Hamas and the Palestinian Interior Ministry proudly embraced the attack as a "legitimate response" to "Israeli aggression" - Israeli attempts, that is, to thwart such attacks. Although the carnage was apparently the work of a rival terrorist group (the field is as crowded as its inhabitants are depraved), hatred of Jews can always be counted on to bring together the strangest of bedfellows.

Nor were Islamic extremists the only ones who treated murdered Jews with contempt. A state-controlled newspaper in Egypt praised the bombing as a heroic "act of sacrifice and martyrdom"; and the South African foreign ministry essentially equated the attack on unarmed civilians with Israeli air strikes against terrorist bases.

For its own ignominious part, The New York Times chided Hamas for its expression of gratification over new pools of Jewish blood, but only for thereby showing itself to be "cynical and dim-witted," leaving the question of the morality of murder oddly unexplored.

And, of course, the president of the new nation-aspirant to nuclear weaponry continued his own diatribes against the Jewish State, and predicted that it was on the verge of "being eliminated."

Back, though, to the final day of Passover's reading. Its backdrop is the massing outside Jerusalem of the Assyrian army, intoxicated with its successful conquest of much of the Holy Land. The prophet foretells how the Jews' enemy will be suddenly and miraculously smitten by G-d, which indeed it was. It is then that Isaiah moves to his vision of a more distant future, when the Messiah will appear, the Jews will be rescued from all who wish them harm and "the land will be filled with knowledge of G-d, like the waters cover the seabed." The nations of the world, the prophet foresees, will celebrate and consult the Messiah, "raising a banner" as they gather to present themselves to the Jewish leader.

Another of the Jewish prophets, Jeremiah, also speaks of that era, giving voice to G-d's promise that that the time will arrive when "No longer will it be said, 'By the living G-d Who brought the Jewish People up from the land of Egypt' but rather 'By the living G-d Who brought the Jewish People up from the land of the north and from all the lands to which He cast them and returned them onto their [own] land'." (16:14).

In other words, despite all the Egyptian exodus's own miracles and wonders, and despite the fact that it will always remain the germinal event in the Jewish people's formation, that redemption will pale beside the one yet to come.

Why, though, should that be? Did not our ancestors' enslavement in Egypt seem a hopeless sentence, and would its persistence not have spelled the very abortion of the Jewish nation? And was our grant of freedom then not accompanied by miracles and wonders, the ones we just recounted on the Seder nights?

Perhaps the reason the exodus will nevertheless take second place to the future ingathering may have something to do with the essential character of the two events' respective miracles. That the Egyptians were visited by plagues and that the sea split for the Jews were surely wondrous things, but those events were but temporary interruptions of the natural course of things. What Isaiah presages, though, is a wrenching, permanent transformation of nature itself.

In our experience, animals are both food and prey; it has always been so. A world where the wolf will lie down with the lamb is a world radically altered in its essence.

As is a world where the Jewish People have been gathered from the corners of the earth back to the place from which they were exiled millennia ago.

And then there is the even greater, almost unimaginable, metamorphosis of nature inherent in a world where, instead of vicious hatred of Jews, there is only humility and reverence for the instrument of G-d who brought them, finally, home.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

WHEN DOCUMENTARIES GO BAD

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The notion that the phrase "documentary film" implies a balanced, or even accurate, production is quickly exploded by reflecting on the fact that the category includes things like "Birth of a Nation" (which extolled the Ku Klux Klan) and "Triumph of the Will" (which paid homage to the Third Reich).

Considering those two famous examples, it is particularly painful to see Jews, of all people, offering mindless praise to a recent Israeli agitprop film vilifying Israel's rabbinical courts and Jewish religious law.

The documentary "Mekudeshet" - which means "betrothed" but whose English title is given as "Sentenced to Marriage" - has been awarded prizes by Israel's filmmaking community and, despite its mediocre artistry and blatant biases, has been hailed by remarkably uncritical critics across the United States where it has been screened.

Produced by Anat Zuria, whose previous work, tellingly, was an indictment of the Jewish "family purity" laws and the mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath, Mekudeshet tells the stories of three women in the midst of divorce proceedings - which, in Israel, are presided over by government-sanctioned rabbinical courts.

The women's stories are harrowing; each, by her telling, is the victim of a heartless husband who refuses to acquiesce to the divorce. (According to Jewish religious law, to effect a divorce, both a husband and a wife must agree to go their separate ways; under certain circumstances, a husband can be compelled to divorce his wife.)

Only one husband briefly appears; none of the men's advocates do. Only the women and theirs are prominently featured. Instead, the sounds of ostensible court proceedings are heard while the camera remains in the hallway outside the offices where the sessions are ostensibly being conducted. The film seems to suggest that the choice snippets heard in the closed sessions are genuine and not a creative re-enactment, although the claim is never explicitly made. The audio quality would seem to indicate a sound stage rather than a surreptitious tape recorder; and the judge's sonorous voice and occasionally malevolent tone also adds to the suspicion that the session proceedings, like other staged portions of the film, may have been "enhanced" for artistic - or political - reasons.

Even, though, if every scene - including one subject's calm and endearing refusal to abandon her faith in G-d despite the pain she has suffered; a husband's advocate defending his client's indefensible absence from court; and several bouts of shrill histrionics - is bona fide, the message of the film is a lie.

That is not to say that there may not be cases where individuals (both women and men) are inadvertently ill-treated by the divorce system in Israel - a bureaucracy (and an Israeli one) after all - or even that the three women in the film did not experience what they claim. The lie is the film's accusation that the Israeli rabbinical establishment is corrupt and uncaring about women and that Jewish religious law inherently mistreats them.

Rabbi Yaakov Berman, a resident of Lakewood, New Jersey, is deeply involved in divorce issues around the Jewish world, including cases in Israel. He heads the "Jewish Divorce Center," which facilitates divorce proceedings in failed marriages. He cites a number of false implications fostered by "Mekudeshet" - among them: that either Jewish law or the state of Israel allows a married Jewish man to take up with another woman before the procurement of a valid divorce document; that only a man can impede a divorce process; and that Israeli rabbinical courts are lax regarding husbands' responsibility to provide child support.

More egregious, though, than the slander against Israel's rabbinical courts is Ms. Zuria's indictment of Jewish law itself.

That agenda is transparent from the film's very opening, where the traditional breaking of the glass under the wedding canopy at a joyous celebration is punctuated by the sound of a prison cell door slamming shut; and by the words of a sacred Jewish text that then appear starkly on the screen.

Those words, from the Mishna, state the legal means by which a Jewish marriage can be effected. The translation provided reads: "A woman can be bought in three ways�"

Translations are meant to make a text intelligible, but sometimes they obscure. The misuse of language in the film's rendering of the Mishnaic statement is reminiscent of nothing so much as how some other manipulators of artistic media use words like "murder" to describe the elimination of deadly terrorists, or "occupation" to refer to Jews living in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

The Hebrew word rendered "bought" by "Mekudeshet" can indeed mean that or, better, "acquired." But it need not connote possession in the sense of control, and certainly not in the sense of some right to mistreat (the Talmud exhorts a man to "love his wife like himself, and honor her more than himself" - Yevamot, 62b). Consider that the very same word - in the very same form, gender and syntax - is used by another Mishna (Avot 6:6) to refer to how one "acquires" Torah.

One doesn't control Torah; one seeks a sublime relationship with it. One may not mistreat Torah; one must respect and cherish it. The analogy should be self-evident.

There are people, tragically, who do mistreat their wives (and others, their husbands).

And there are people who abuse Torah, too, who seek, for instance, to portray it as something it is not - like a license to cause harm or pain.

Ms. Zuria's production is ostensibly about the former. What its viewers may not realize, though, is that it is an equally ugly example of the latter.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

SILENCE OF THE DOGS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

A curious Midrash holds an idea worth bringing to the Seder.

"Midrash," although redefined of late by some to mean a fanciful, personal take on a Biblical account, in truth refers to a body of ancient traditions that for generations was transmitted only orally but later put into writing.

One such tradition focuses on the verse recounting how the dogs in Egypt did not utter a sound as they watched the Jewish people leave the land (Exodus, 11:7). The Talmud contends that, in keeping with the concept that "G-d does not withhold reward from any creature," dogs are the animals to whom certain non-kosher meat should be cast. The Midrash, however, notes another, more conceptual "reward" for the canine silence: The dung of dogs will be used to cure animal skins that will become tefillin, mezuzot and Torah scrolls.

It is certainly intriguing that the lowly refuse of a lowly creature - and dogs are viewed by many Middle-Eastern societies as particularly base - should play a part in the preparation of the most sublime and holy of objects. And that, it seems, is what the Midrash wishes us to ponder - along with the puzzling idea that silence is somehow key to that ability to sublimate the earthy and physical into the rarified and hallowed. The particular silence at issue may be canine, but its lesson is for us.

Providing even more support for that thought is a statement in the Mishna (the earliest part of the Talmud). "I have found nothing better for the body," Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel remarks in Pirkei Avot (1:17), "than silence." The phrase "for the body" (which can also be rendered "the physical") seems jarring. Unless it, too, hints at precisely what the Midrash seems to be saying - that in silence, somehow, lies the secret of how the physical can be transformed into the exalted.

But what provides for such transformation would seem to be speech. Judaism teaches that the specialness of the human being - the hope for creating holiness here on earth - lies in our aptitude for language, our ability to clothe subtle and complex ideas in meaningful words. That is why in Genesis, when life is breathed by G-d into the first man, the infusion is, in the words of the Targum Onkelos, a "speaking spirit." The highest expression of human speech, our tradition teaches, lies in our ability to recognize our Creator, and give voice to our gratitude (hakarat hatov). The first vegetation, the Talmud informs us, would not sprout until Adam appeared to "recognize the blessing of the rain." Hakarat hatov is why many Jews punctuate their recounting of happy recollections or tidings with the phrase "baruch Hashem," or "blessed is G-d" - and it is pivotal to elevating the mundane. So it would seem that speech, not silence, is the path to holiness.

Unless, though, silence is the most salient demonstration of the consequence of words.

After all, aren't the things we are careful not to waste the things we value most?. We don't hoard plastic shopping bags or old newspapers; but few - even few billionaires - would ever use a Renoir to wrap fish.

Words - along with our ability to use them meaningfully - are the most valuable things any of us possesses. To be sure, one can (and most of us do) squander them, just as one can employ a Rembrandt as a doormat. But someone who truly recognizes words' worth will use them only sparingly. The adage notwithstanding, talk isn't cheap; it is, quite the contrary, a priceless resource, the means, used properly, of coaxing holiness from the physical world.

And so silence - choosing to not speak when there is nothing worthwhile to say - is perhaps the deepest sign of reverence for the potential holiness that is speech.

Which brings us back to Passover. As noted, the highest expression of human speech is the articulation, like Adam's, of the idea of hakarat hatov - literally, "recognition of the good" - with which we have been blessed. The Kabbalistic texts refer to our ancestors' sojourn in Egypt as "the Speech-Exile," implying that in some sense the enslaved Jews had yet to gain full access to the power that provides human beings the potential of holiness.

With the Exodus, though, that exile ended and, at the far side of the sea that split to allow them but not their pursuers passage, our ancestors responded with an extraordinary vocal expression: the epic poem known in Jewish texts as "The Song" (Exodus, 15:1-18 ). Written in a unique graphic formation in the Torah scroll, it is a paean to G-d for the goodness He bestowed on those who marched out of Egypt - who went from what the Talmudic rabbis characterized as the penultimate level of baseness to, fifty days later, the heights of holiness at Mt. Sinai.

And so it should not be surprising that, whereas Jews are cautioned to use words only with great care and parsimony, on the Seder night we are not only enjoined to speak at length and into the wee hours about the kindness G-d granted our people, but are informed by the rabbis of the Talmud, that "the more one recounts, the more praiseworthy it is."

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

KNOWING WHAT WE DON�T

Rabbi Avi Shafran

I�m no great fan of �true stories,� too many of which, disappointingly, aren�t true. But I am deeply partial to good made-up stories, like � a favorite � the one about the shtetl showdown between the Jew and the priest.

As the tale goes, the local governor of a 19th century Polish village is prevailed upon by a learned non-Jewish cleric to humiliate the town�s Jewish populace by issuing it a challenge: �Have your greatest scholar meet me on the bridge over the raging river tomorrow at noon. Each of us will have a heavy weight tied to his foot, and the first one stumped by a question about the Torah, Talmud or commentaries will be cast by the other into the waters.�

The members of the Jewish community, in no position to refuse the ultimatum, anxiously huddle. �Whom can we send?� they ask. �Who can be assured of being able to answer any question the priest may pose?� �Who could possibly stump the non-Jew?� None of those present offers their services.

Until, that is, Shmiel the shneider (tailor) confidently steps forward to volunteer. Known as a decidedly unscholarly fellow, he would not have been anyone�s first, or eighty-first, choice. But he insists he can better the challenger and, well, he�s the only candidate.

And so, at the appointed time, Shmiel and his opponent take their positions on the bridge, ball and chain attached to each man�s foot, a crowd of supporters on each of the river�s banks.

Surveying the tailor, the non-Jew smiles benevolently and offers Shmiel the first shot. The Jew does not hesitate. �What does �aini yode�ah� mean?� he asks loudly.

The cleric, not even pausing to think, shouts out his entirely accurate answer: �I do not know!� The crowd gasps at the response and Shmiel, beaming triumphantly toward the townsfolk, unceremoniously pushes his momentarily confused opponent off the bridge, into the raging waters. The crowds disperse, one jubilant, the other perplexed.

Back at the shtetl town hall, Shmiel is roundly congratulated for his ploy. �How did you come up with so brilliant an idea?� they ask. Radiating modesty, Shmiel responds that it wasn�t hard at all. �I was reading the �teitch� (the popular Yiddish translation of the great scholar Rashi�s commentary on the Torah),� he explains, �and I saw the words �aini yode�ah� in Rashi�s commentary. I didn�t know what the phrase meant, and so I looked at the teitch and saw, in Yiddish, the words �I don�t know�.�

�So I figured,� Shmiel said, his face aglow with wisdom, �if the holy �teitch� didn�t know what the words meant, there was no way on earth some priest would!�

The story is good for more than a laugh, though. Because it raises the interesting and significant fact that Rashi � the �father of all commentaries� who wrote perfectly succinct yet brilliant glosses to not only the Five Books of Moses and Prophets and Writings but to the entire Babylonian Talmud � indeed informs the reader in several places that he �doesn�t know� the reason for one or another thing.

�I don�t know� is a phrase as deserved as it is rare these days, when self-assuredness seems all too often to stand in for self-respect, when opinions are routinely proffered as unassailable fact, when people are permitted � even expected � to state without doubt what they cannot possibly know to be true.

Whether in the political, scientific or social realms, opinions regularly take on the aura of convictions. There is, of course, nothing wrong with opinions (for some of us, our stock in trade), but Rashi�s modest example is one we would be wise to more often emulate. As the Talmud puts it: �Teach your tongue to say �I do not know�� (Berachot, 4b).

Some of us �know� that the Iraq war was a mistake. Others, that it was precisely the right decision. Some �know� that species evolved from other species. Others, that they didn�t. Some �know� that educational vouchers will be terrible for public schools. Others, that they would be wonderful. We think a lot of things, but know a good many less.

To be sure, there are verities. That we humans possess a spark of the Divinity that created us, for instance. That we have free will. That life is precious. That our actions have consequences.

For Jews, there are � or should be � other certainties, among them that we have been divinely chosen to set an example for the wider world, that our carefully-preserved history includes at its apogee G-d�s bequeathal of His Torah to us, that our mission and our peoplehood are sacred.

But there are many smaller things, no end of them, that we do not know, at least not with the certainty of those essential convictions. And so, as we consider wars and theories and causes, even if we think we have a pretty good idea of just what�s what, it�s always a good idea to stop and remember what Shmiel thought he knew � and what Rashi knew he didn�t.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

PRIDE AND PRINCIPLE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The Reform movement is proudly proclaiming its success in the recent elections for the American slate of the World Zionist Organization's "35th Congress of the Jewish People," having garnered the most delegates (although six fewer than in the previous election, in 2002). Reform Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, contends that the election result "demonstrates that our message� has become the dominant voice of American Zionism."

Well, that depends on how one defines Zionism. Which, in turn, turns on a question that likely puzzled thoughtful observers of the WZO's recent election: Where were American haredim?

Slates of candidates were fielded by a number of Jewish movements and organizations, including the Conservative movement, the Reconstructionist Federation and the Religious Zionist Slate.

But a slate representing the haredi community was nowhere to be found in the election results, and that was no accident. Although haredi events (prayer gatherings and major happenings like the Daf Yomi Siyum HaShas) have drawn tens of thousands of participants, and haredi voting blocs are a treasured prize to politicians in some of the largest Jewish communities in the United States, haredim chose, as always they have, to decline to participate in the WZO elections.

The reason might be hard for some to understand, but it's worth the effort.

In order to vote in the elections, one must affirm a set of ideas known as "The Jerusalem Program." It is the credo of the contemporary Zionist movement, and stresses the "centrality" of the "State of Israel" in "the life of the [Jewish] nation." (Ironically, the very idea of Jews returning to the Jewish ancestral homeland was once vehemently rejected by the Reform movement - and still is by the Reform group known as the American Council for Judaism. Mainstream Reform, however, changed direction in the 1940s.)

There are no greater "zionists" than haredim, who pray daily and fervently for the Jewish return to Zion; who are so disproportionately overrepresented in the rolls of both those who make aliyah and those who visit Israel regularly; and who are so strongly supportive of ensuring Israel's security. Yet, for haredim, Israel the state is one thing; Eretz Yisrael, the holy land promised by G-d to His people, another. And to a haredi, the "centrality" of the Jewish people can be only one thing: our Torah.

To a haredi, the laws and wisdom of the Jewish religious tradition are not only what defined our nation at its inception, and what allowed it (along, in fact, with its yearning for the Jewish ancestral land) to persevere for millennia in exile, but what alone can ensure its future.

Thus, while it might bring economic benefit to the haredi world in Israel and elsewhere were haredim to field and elect candidates for the World Zionist Congress, as a matter of honesty and conscience, haredim cannot in good faith subscribe to the credo on which such participation is contingent, a credo that subtly but objectionably places a country in the place of a divine mandate.

And so when, as a response to the broad pre-election Reform registration campaign, inquiries came in to Agudath Israel from its constituents, each caller was informed of what registering entailed, and advised to forego participation.

There's something worth pondering here. When haredi citizens of Israel exercise their democratic privileges to advocate for their needs, they are all too often portrayed as pursuing lucre even at the expense of principle - even though all they are doing is what every constituency in a democracy does: endeavor to access government assistance to which they have claim.

A truer proof of the principle pudding, though, lies in the WZO elections example. By participating, haredim stood only to gain (and gain they would have; just think of how the votes of the more than 100,000 Jews who participated in the Siyum HaShas - the majority of them haredim - would have changed the election's result). By not participating, not only was potential funding of projects forfeited but control of the World Zionist Congress' American division largely relinquished to a Reform movement openly intent on undermining the influence of halacha in Israel, hardly a comforting thought to Jews who value traditional Jewish standards. Principle, though, is principle.

A timely coincidental contrast to the haredi distancing from the WZO elections was presented by another recent development on the American scene. On the very day the election results were announced, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that universities accepting money from the federal government must, as per a 1994 law, permit military recruiters on campus. Some universities had objected to such presence on principle, since the Pentagon bars open homosexuals from serving in the military.

Perhaps it's too early to judge, but at least at this writing, none of the universities objecting to the presence of military recruiters has taken the step of announcing that it will forego its federal funding in order to maintain its commitment to what the schools have framed as a civil rights issue. Perhaps it's cynical to predict that few, if any, will ever actually do so. But betting men might well lay odds.

Because in most of contemporary life, ideals are often put on splendid but flimsy pedestals. As Groucho Marx famously said "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others."

Well, some don't.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

HAMAN, AHMADINEJAD AND US

Rabbi Avi Shafran

There's more than passing irony in the fact that the most infamous anti-Semite of antiquity, the hater whose downfall Jews celebrate on Purim, was a prominent official of an empire centered in modern-day Iran.

Like the Persian royal advisor Haman, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reeks with his own considerable animus for Jews, having not only endorsed the destruction of the Jewish State but called into question the murder of six million Jews not 70 years ago. And just as his evil antecedent is today recalled with mockery and laughter, so too is Mr. Ahmadinejad providing future rejoicers rich comedic material - like his recent blaming of the terrorist bombing by Sunni Muslims of a Shiite Muslim shrine on "a group of Zionists" who nevertheless "failed in the face of Islam's logic and justice."

Similarly creative anti-Semitic rants are no farther away than the nearest Arab newspaper.

At the end of January, for instance, the Middle East Media Research Institute informs us, a Syrian government daily suggested that Israel created the avian flu virus in order to damage "genes carried only by Arabs." That the virus first appeared in East Asia was carefully fit into the theory: the germ was planted far from where Arabs live in order to mislead the world about its true origin. Clever, those Jews.

And February saw newspapers in Mogilev, Belarus calling on citizens to boycott a new kosher bakery since, as the city's leading paper put it: "It is a well-known fact that Jewish bread is made kosher by using sacrificial blood."

Haman, more than 2000 years ago, was more subtle, preferring snide insinuations to outlandish conspiracy theories. And he focused on Jewish cohesiveness and dedication to Jewish law.

For instance, says the Talmud, he informed the king of the sinister fact that Jews marry their own. And, having discovered the rabbinical forbiddance of drinking wine that had been touched by a non-Jew (because of the possibility that he may have silently dedicated it to an idol), Haman told the Persian king: "If a fly should fall into their cup, they will discard the insect and drink the wine, but if your majesty should so much as touch the cup, they will cast it to the ground."

Even today, although most contemporary Jew-haters claim to have only respect for Judaism - objecting only to things like Jewish "influence" (read: intelligence) or the Jewish state's "mistreatment of Arabs" (read: acts of self-defense against terrorists) - common motifs in even the current arsenal of Jew-hatred include Jewish religious practices and religious Jews. A glance at the Arab media's cesspool of anti-Semitic (but Mohammed-free!) caricatures suffices to show that it disproportionately inspires images of black-hatted, black-cloaked and bespectacled men carrying oversized volumes of Talmud.

That fact, like the example of Haman, should serve to remind us how ugly is the derision of Jewish practices and ideals. It's something even we Jews may not always sufficiently realize.

Take a recent article in an Israeli newspaper. It reported how a mobile communications company has seen fit to offer a cellphone without Internet access, in order to capture a larger share of the haredi, or "ultra-Orthodox" market (which, out of concern for clear Jewish standards of propriety, prefers its phones to be just phones). The article's tagline reads in part: "Company succumbs to haredi pressure." Pushy, those haredim.

In a similarly ungenerous vein, a "progressive" advocacy organization in Israel not long ago issued a press release describing (with words like "scream," "yell," and "sneer") a scene on an Israeli bus, where a haredi passenger (the subject of the verbs) objects angrily to a woman who dared to sit toward the front of the vehicle. Comparing the scene - which, it turns out, is an entirely imaginary one - to Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, the release characterizes as "an affront to the basic principles of a democratic society" what in reality is a bus company program providing gender-separated buses in haredi neighborhoods. Many haredi men and women prefer such travel arrangements and, since they had been patronizing private bus companies that provide it, Israel's national bus company decided to compete for the haredi ridership.

At just about the same time, an Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics survey revealed that, among the country's Jewish volunteers, 36% were haredim; 27%, non-haredi religious; 14% traditional; and 13% secular. Nevertheless, Israel's Orthodox are routinely, and almost exclusively, depicted negatively.

Their shunning of much of contemporary society's materialistic desiderata, their dedication to full-time Torah-study (especially as it results in deferments from military service) and their insularity are regularly portrayed as backwardness, ingratitude and arrogance. Yet no one disparages the Dalai Lama for his asceticism; conscientious objectors and some artists also receive draft deferments; and the ubiquity of crudeness in popular culture leaves religious Jews little choice but to remain, to the degree they can, within their more rarified world.

On Purim (this year, March 14), Jews are exhorted to seek to strengthen what binds them. As a demonstration of unity and good will, they traditionally send packages of food items to one another.

Now there's a Jewish tradition it would be hard for anyone (except perhaps Haman) to disparage. And what a powerful opportunity it presents for disowning intra-Jewish negativity.

Those of us who are haredim should consider sending such mishloach manot to Jews who are not; and vice versa.

Not only will that help bring us all closer, it will help us merit that Mr. Ahmadinejad and company more quickly meet the fate of Haman and his.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE MINDLESS MAJORITY

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The parliamentary electoral victory of an unrepentant terrorist movement in the Palestinian Authority has created much chagrin.

The specter of a future Palestinian state's government pledged, as is Hamas, to the murder of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish State is obviously vexing to civilized observers.

But the Palestinian vote scandalized many for another reason, too. It created a crisis of conscience among people who had put their trust in the inherent virtue of democracy. Those trusting souls have now been rudely disabused of the noble but benighted notion that, given the opportunity to express its collective will, groups of human beings can be expected to do so responsibly, and with some semblance of civility.

Alas, that bubble has burst. The secret is out: What a large number of people may want to do needn't equate with what they should want to do. A majority of the murderous will vote for murder. Masses, as the saying goes, can be donkeys.

It is a truism, in fact, whose brutal brunt has been felt by Jews on many occasions in the past, when great masses of populations - whether Christians in the early Middle Ages, or Muslims a bit later, or modern European nations in later centuries still, or Communism until less than two decades ago - decided that members of the universal scapegoat-people deserved to be oppressed or killed. So the grand democratic expression of Palestinian will did not come as a great shock to anyone familiar with history (or, for that matter, Palestinian aspirations).

As it happens, the idea that a majority's will need not equal right, or even decency, is central to Jewish thought. Abraham was called the "Ivri" - from which our word "Hebrew" derives but which can be literally translated as "the man of the 'other side'." The "Ur-Jew" (pun entirely intended) was so called, explains the Midrash, because "the entire world stood on one side, and he on the other." The majority was wrong, and the minority - of one - right.

The people that would emerge from his son Isaac, and Isaac's son Jacob, came to occupy a similar place, standing in stark opposition to the "majority opinion" of a largely idolatrous and immoral ancient world.

That, it can well be argued, remains the mission of the Jew: To stand apart - and up - for an ideal: honoring and serving humanity's Creator.

It is a mission no less pressing today. Ours, after all, is a world that worships the material, idolizes the inane, scorns modesty and hallows gratification.

The Jewish mission is to be an example of holiness, to affirm eternal truths, unpopular though they may be to those who crowd bustling bandwagons.

Judaism declares that we are here to serve, not to get. That the true heros are the selfless, not the self-centered. That the human body is holy, not a billboard. And that principle should trump pleasure.

And it speaks as well to issues of the day - often, again, from the "other side" of where society has chosen to stand. Judaism teaches that, even if it may sometimes be justified, killing the unborn is an evil, not a right. That homosexuality is a challenge to be met, not an "alternative" to be celebrated. That marriage is the union of a man and a woman. That life, even compromised, is priceless. And that science is a means through which to gain awe for G-d's Creation, not a contrivance with which to try to deny Him.

Jews were chosen to champion such ideas. Unfortunately, though, some heirs to the Jewish religious tradition seem more attracted to the masses than committed to the mandate. Some of us even stand at the very forefront of contemporary efforts to embrace democratically-derived decadence. That does not do our collective mission well.

But even Jews who fully acknowledge what their heritage has to say about larger societal issues can be "majority fools" too when it comes to other matters. When, simply because "everybody does it," we treat synagogues like lounges, conversing when we should be praying or paying attention, we are doing anything but emulating Abraham. And when, with similar servility toward "the mainstream," we squander money on frills and status symbols instead of investing it in helping others, we are similarly falling prey to the mindless majority.

Judaism exhorts Jews to try to mine crises for clues about how we might better ourselves and thereby merit G-d's protection. The threat to Israel posed by the terrorist enterprise now embraced by a majority of Palestinians well demonstrates how majoritarianism can be malign. Perhaps that's something those of us - and, to one degree or another, it's all of us - who sometimes pursue what's popular instead of what's right might wish to quietly ponder.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

AMINO ACIDS AND US

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Like many 50-somethings, I remember being informed in grade school of the imminent solution to the mystery of life.

Triumphantly, teachers described an experiment conducted by two researchers, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, in which molecules believed to represent components of the early Earth's atmosphere were induced by electricity to form some of the amino acids that are components of proteins necessary for life.

Soon enough, we were told, scientists would coax further artificial formation of primordial materials, proteins themselves and even, eventually, actual life - some single-celled organism like the one from which we ourselves (our teachers dutifully explained) were surely descended.

A half-century later, however, we are left with nothing - not even a pitiful protein - beyond Miller-Urey's original results. And even that experiment is now discredited by scientists as having gotten the original atmospheric soup all wrong.

Whatever.

The Miller-Urey memory is an important reminder of how, with all of science's unarguable accomplishments, every generation's scientific establishment is convinced it has a handle as well on the Big Questions. And of how much more common hubris is than wisdom. It is a thought well worth thinking these days.

No one denies that species, over time, tend to retain traits that serve them well, and to lose others that don't.

But the appearance of a new species from an existing one, or even of an entirely new trait within a species - things contemporary science insists have happened literally millions of times - have never been witnessed. There isn't necessarily anything in the Jewish religious tradition that precludes them from happening, or being made to happen artificially. But the solemn conviction that they have occurred countless times and by chance remains a large leap of� well, faith. Which is why "evolution" is rightly called a theory (and might better still be called a religion).

Scientists, to be sure, protest that billions of years are necessary for chance mutations of DNA, the assumed engine of Neo-Darwinism, to work their accidental magic. A lovely scenario, but one whose hallowing of chance as the engine of all is easily seen as a rejection of the concept of a Creator, Judaism's central credo.

It also begs the question of how the first living organism might have emerged from inert matter. Spontaneous generation is generally ridiculed by science, yet precisely that is presumed by the priests of Randomness to have occurred - by utter chance, yet - to jump-start the process of evolution.

What is more, the first creature's ability to bring forth a next generation (and beyond), would have also had to have been among the first living thing's talents. Without that, the organism would have amounted to nothing more than a hopeless dead-end. No DNA, after all, no future. And so, a package of complex genetic material, too, would have had to have been part of the unbelievably lucky alpha-amoeba.

And yet to so much as express doubts about such a scenario is to be branded a heretic by the scientific establishment, the Church of Chance.

The issue is not "Biblical literalism" a decidedly non-Jewish approach. Many are the Torah verses that do not mean what a simple reading would yield; the Oral Tradition is the key to the true meaning of the Torah's words; and there are multiple levels of deeper meanings inaccessible to most of us. The words of Genesis hide infinitely more than they reveal - which is only that the universe was created as the willful act of G-d, and that the biosphere unfolded in stages. Details are not provided

The issue is more stark: Are we products of chance, or of G-d?

Jewish belief, of course, is founded on the latter contention, and, as a result, on the conviction that there is a purpose to the universe we inhabit, and to the lives we live. That what we do makes a difference, that there is right and there is wrong.

Is the very notion of good and evil an illusion, an adaptive evolutionary strategy that provides human beings some cold biological advantage - or does our innate conviction that some human actions are proper and others not reflect a deeper reality?

If humanity's roots lie in pure chance, there can be no more meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather; no more import to right and wrong than to right and left. The game is zero-sum. Either we are here by chance or by design. Either there is no meaningful mandate for human beings; or there is. And if there is, there must be a Mandator.

Opposing the promotion of a particular religion in American public schools is a worthy stance. But, at the same time, there is simply no philosophically sound way of holding simultaneously in one's head both the conviction that we are nothing but evolved animals and the conviction that we are something qualitatively different.

And no way to avoid the fact that when children are taught to embrace the one, they are being taught, ever so subtly, to shun the other.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

CARTOON VIOLENCE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Nearly as enlightening as watching people protest their portrayal as mindless, violent fanatics by engaging in mindless, violent fanaticism is watching them respond to tasteless insults with even more tasteless insults of their own.

First we witnessed a millions-strong collective temper-tantrum engulf large parts of the Muslim world - riots, torching of embassies, curses, threats and attacks on individuals - in response to some newspaper cartoons that mocked Islam, through its central figure, as a religion less than respectful of innocent lives.

And then we were graced with the telling reaction of some others who joined the jihad junket at a distance, like Farid Mortazavi, an editor at Iran's largest newspaper, who offered a prize of gold coins to readers who submit the best cartoons discrediting the Holocaust. And the "Arab European League" (one of whose "principals" [sic] is to "fight every form of racism"), which posted on its website a series of its own creative caricatures implying that the Holocaust is a Jewish fabrication (one of them, peculiarly, portraying Hitler sharing a bed with Anne Frank).

Iranian President Mahmoud ("Adolph") Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of Israel, wouldn't be left out of the fun either. He was quoted as saying: "If [Western] newspapers are free, why do not they publish anything about the innocence of the Palestinians and protest against the crimes committed by the Zionists?"

If you're wondering why Muslims angered by actions in largely Christian countries choose to vent their considerable spleen at� Jews, well, welcome to contemporary times - pungently reminiscent, of course, of earlier ones.

Leave aside, though, the oddity of Abdul, insulted by Chris, attacking Yankel. Leave aside, for that matter, even the fact that to deny the Holocaust is to lie, while to connect some Muslims' bad behavior with the faith they claim as their justification is to simply take them at their word. Consider only the truly astounding hypocrisy here: Societies whose media teem with patently libelous, venom-saturated, inflammatory words and images about Jews are expressing outrage at the idea of an impolite press.

To be sure, there are sane Islamic voices. Muhammad al-Hamadi, writing in the United Arab Emirates' Al Ittihad, contends that "We [Muslims] must be honest with ourselves and admit that we are the reason for these drawings. Any harm to� Islam is a result of Muslims who have come to reflect the worst image of Islam�"

And, in a letter to The New York Times, Saleem Ahmed, an author of books about Islamic teachings, suggests that "instead of torching Danish and other embassies, Muslims should torch the cause of European anger: extremist Muslim literature inciting suicide bombers and other terrorists."

We must appreciate words like those, and hope that they reflect a larger portion of the Islamic world than the crazed, wide-eyed images that scowl at us from the front pages these days. But neither can we ignore the Muslim in the street, like Mawli Abdul Qahar Abu Israra, who, interviewed on February 6 in Afghanistan, shared his sincere sentiments. "They want to test our feelings," he told the BBC. "They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers."

Or the Muslim in the pulpit. The very next day, Britain's most prominent Muslim cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri, was convicted of racial hatred and soliciting murder, by using his sermons to urge the killing of non-Muslims.

Jews don't preach violence against other religions. We would be overjoyed, in fact, if adherents of Islam followed its precepts as understood by many Muslims: tolerance and good will. What is more, we do not engage in public mockery of other faiths, and can well relate (if only from our own experience with much of the Arab press) to the sense of outrage felt at such things.

But neither do Jews riot when we are portrayed, as so often we are, as horrible monsters, nor even when the cold-blooded murder of a third of our people (the equivalent of 300-odd million Muslims today) is made into a sick joke or derided as a lie.

Some might surmise that the reason for our reticence is fear of consequences. After all, Jews comprise a mere fraction of one percent of the world's populace; if we were to go on a rampage, it would not likely be as long-lived as the recent Muslim one has proven.

Others might point to the proclivity in some Jewish circles for social liberalism, including the embrace of ideals like the "right" of free expression (scare quotes in deference to Jewish religious law, which in fact places clear limits on expression).

But there is something deeper, I think, that explains the lack of Jewish Sturm und Drang despite the abundance of anti-Semitic abuse.

It lies in a fundamental Jewish religious attitude, one articulated at the end of the mainstay of every Jewish prayer: the silent Amidah, or "standing"-service.

Its penultimate paragraph begins: "My G-d, guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking deceitfully. To those who curse me, let my soul be silent."

The sentiment is not one of resignation, but of faith - in the ultimate setting straight of things by a Power stronger than any mortal one. It is the utterance of one who does not feel the need to vent fury or to counter insult in kind, someone who has confidence in the final victory of truth and of justice. It is a prayer that has imbued the collective Jewish soul for centuries, and continues to today.

It continues: "As to all those who plot evil against me, quickly obliterate their plans and wreak havoc on their intentions."

And let us say Amen.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

WE'RE NOT ALONE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

"Google" and "National Security Agency" don't naturally come to mind as word-associations for "Talmudic blessing." But recent controversies regarding the successful Internet search engine and the secretive government entity do recall the final benediction of a great Talmudic sage.

Alarms were roundly sounded in the wake of reports that the U.S. Department of Justice, in the course of defending a federal law aimed at protecting children from child-inappropriate (actually, anyone-inappropriate) material on the Internet, had asked Google to share records pertaining to the Web searches of its patrons. Even though no information identifying individual users was requested, privacy advocates and skittish citizens saw the petition as the frightening shadow of an approaching Big Brother.

Similar nervousness ensued when it became apparent that the NSA (an entity so shadowy that, for a time, it was commonly referred to as the "No Such Agency") has been wiretapping conversations of suspected terrorists without benefit of court orders. The Bush administration argues that such measures are the legal privilege of the executive branch, in particular at times of war, and insists that innocent citizens' communications were never targeted. All the same, there was much hue and cry over the (real or perceived) erosion of that most cherished of American rights: privacy.

Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the degree to which a commercial venture might properly monitor its customers' purchases or tastes; or about the right balance a government should strike between protecting its citizens' privacy and ensuring their security.

But what cannot be argued is that our actions are, in fact, private anymore. Whether we wish it were so or not, our cell-phones and automatic toll-paying devices faithfully record our whereabouts, our computers are reliable repositories of information about us, and unseen cameras record our actions in public places. Private phone records of unsuspecting individuals are easily purloined, and regularly offered for purchase by anyone willing to part with a few dollars. And information about individuals' communications and Web use is in fact routinely, and legally, subpoenaed by law enforcement agencies when a crime is suspected.

Once upon a time, lives were considerably less transparent. Unless people chose to share information with others, or someone had his ear to the wall, most folks were safe from the sort of exposure to which we are so strikingly and increasingly vulnerable today.

There is a Jewish tradition of seeking lessons in societal and technological developments. When the telephone was invented, it is recounted, the famed Jewish sage the Chafetz Chaim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan) - who wrote seminal books on the prohibition of slanderous and otherwise improper speech - pointed out how concrete it made the Jewish idea that a word spoken in one place can have ramifications in another, far away. Similarly, advances in our ability to peer into the heavens drives home anew how tiny a part of the physical cosmos we remain despite all our progress; and our ability to glimpse events in the subatomic realm reminds us of how little we really know about the very matter of which we, and everything around us, are made

Perhaps the immense erosion of privacy we have undergone in recent years is meant, too, to remind us of something important.

Like, perhaps, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai's blessing.

On his deathbed, the Talmud recounts (Tractate Berachot, 28b), the famed rabbi was asked by his students for a benediction. He complied, with the curious wish: "May the fear of Heaven be to you as the fear of human beings."

"That's it?" the students asked, puzzled.

"If only!" the sage responded, implying that the blessing was a mighty one indeed. "Think!" he continued. "When a person commits a sin, he says 'I hope no one is watching me!'"

But Someone, of course, is - a thought as obvious as it is profound. As the rabbis put it elsewhere (Avot, 2:1): "An Eye sees and an Ear hears, and all your actions are duly recorded."

We may squirm at the idea, but it is fundamental to Judaism - central, in fact, to any world-view that acknowledges a personal G-d: Our every action is meaningful, and, therefore, of concern to our Creator.

And so, even as we chafe at what our credit card companies and Internet providers and government agencies know about us, or can find out if they choose, we might do well to pause a moment from our outrage and dwell on how insignificant those eyes and ears really are in the long run, how revealed we are, in action and even thought, before the only One who, in the end, really counts.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

OUTREACH AND OVERREACH

Rabbi Avi Shafran

One sign of the chasm separating the American Orthodox community and much of the larger Jewish world is how the term "outreach" is used by each. To us Orthodox, the word encompasses a broad range of efforts born of our deep concern for, and responsibility to, our fellow Jews. To many non-Orthodox leaders, though, it has come to mean something very different: the courting of non-Jews, especially those living with Jews, in an effort to include them, one way or another, in the Jewish community.

Some proponents of such reaching out aim to bring the reached to conversion, even if the hoped-for ritual does not meet the standards of halacha, or Jewish religious law. Others do not even seek any such end, and are content to accept non-Jews "as they are" into their temples and Jewish communal lives. Reform Rabbi Janet Marder, for instance, makes a point every Yom Kippur of asking non-Jewish spouses of her congregants to come to the bimah, the platform from which the Torah is read, where she blesses them with the words of the "priestly blessings" that the Torah prescribes be bestowed on the Jewish people.

Her example was lauded at a recent national Reform gathering, where the president of the Union for Reform Judaism made his own plea for "welcoming non-Jewish spouses and converts to Judaism."

The Reform leadership's inclusiveness-push was followed, even more quickly than usual, by the Conservative's. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism's executive vice president asserted that "if we don't do an effective campaign to inspire the children" of mixed-marriages, "we'll lose an entire generation" - leaving unclear whether he meant all such children or just the halachically Jewish ones.

The renewed push to further blur the increasingly smudged line between Jews and non-Jews may be fueled by both the mind-numbing numbers of intermarried American Jews and the dwindled numbers of American Jews as a whole projected by demographic studies for the not-terribly-distant future. There is some fear at work here, too - of an Orthodox demographic onslaught. Because, as Professor Jack Wertheimer of the Jewish Theological Seminary noted in the October, 2005 issue of Commentary: "If the Orthodox continue to retain the loyalties of their young people, as they have mostly done over the past 30 or 40 years, they will become an ever larger, more visible, and better represented part of the total community�"

The headlong rush toward inclusiveness, however, as Professor Wertheimer himself bravely notes, is a strategy both ill-conceived and futile. His words are brutally straightforward: "Faced with irrefutable evidence of demographic decline, communal leaders have worked to 'reframe' the discussion. The reframing goes like this: the Jewish population should be seen not as hemorrhaging, but rather as evolving new forms of expression�"

"The challenge of demographic decline, then," he goes on to summarize, "is to be met by inclusiveness, pluralism, and a welcoming atmosphere." And he observes: "The worse the decline has grown, the more fervently has this mantra been invoked - and not just invoked but acted upon."

Then, throwing all religio-political correctness to the wind, Professor Wertheimer declares that "the working assumption of Jewish officialdom" that "the acceptance and encouragement of every kind of 'family arrangement' will insure that Jewish life will thrive" is "not only a gross distortion of Judaism, it is palpably false."

There are other principled voices, too, in the non-Orthodox Jewish world. The "Jewish In-Marriage Initiative," an effort whose board of directors includes not only Professor Wertheimer but long-time Jewish communal leader Shoshana Cardin, Reform Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin and Conservative Rabbi Alan Silverstein, "is dedicated," says Ms. Cardin, its chair, "to educating and encouraging [Jewish] parents to counsel their children to look for Jewish mates." The Jewish community, she asserts, "must make endogamy the first choice."

But even those voices are all but drowned out by the "inclusionist" chorus, which includes not only Reform and Conservative leaders but independent efforts like the "Jewish Outreach Institute" (someone, please, rescue that poor word!), whose mission statement identifies it as an effort to create "a more inclusive Jewish community for intermarried families and unengaged Jews," and whose executive director says that "conversion� should not be an outreach strategy."

Similarly, Hillel, the Jewish campus initiative, recently unveiled a survey showing that Jewish college students are more likely than ever to be "part of an interfaith family,� have a non-Jewish boyfriend or girlfriend" and "identify as ethnically Jewish rather than religiously Jewish." As a result, the organization hopes "to double the number of students who have meaningful Jewish experiences." Note the pointed absence of the word "Jewish" before "students."

To us Orthodox, this is all tragic. And what it stirs the most caring among us to do is recommit ourselves� to outreach - the original kind.

Cynics, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike, mock the hope that American Jews estranged from their religious heritage can ever be brought back in appreciable numbers to traditional Jewish observance. "You can't even convince them to marry other Jews!" they scoff. "Do you really imagine them undertaking to keep the laws of the Torah?"

But cynicism is an easy dodge. Experience is more enlightening, and here it gives the lie to the assumption that a Jew can be spiritually budged only so much. For among the many thousands of once non-observant Jews who are today living Torah-observant lives are not only those who hailed from Jewishly-informed backgrounds and simply followed the trajectory set by their convictions, but many, too, who came from far, far afield.

Dr. David Lieberman, a Ph.D. and best-selling author of books on human psychology, currently of Lakewood, New Jersey, is one. Having been raised without a Jewish education, he describes himself as the last person anyone would have considered a candidate for observance.

And yet, beginning with an interaction with an Orthodox Jew, he came, as he puts it, to trade in "a life of insanity for a life of sanity, a life of unreality for one of reality."

Another is Rabbi Yom Tov Glaser, today of Jerusalem but once (as Johnny Glaser) of Southern California, where, as a hard-partying surfer-dude youth, he says, he had "tried everything" - only to discover, after being reached out to by Orthodox Jews during a short trip to Israel, that none of it meant anything. And his life was transformed.

Those two men, who today, with their wives, are raising Jewishly observant families, are among a number of "returnees" featured in a recent Aish HaTorah video, "Inspired," produced by New York psychotherapist Rabbi Yaakov Salomon.

Reaching out to non-Jews, in the hope that they may hold the key to the Jewish future is one approach. Realizing, and focusing on, the millions of David Liebermans and Johnny Glasers is another.

Radically changed Jewish lives like theirs are unshakeable testimony to the power of Judaism and the resilience of the Jewish soul. No one should underestimate either.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

SUICIDE WATCH

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law was really about whether a federal drug-control law provided a U.S. Attorney General the authority to punish a state's doctors for acting in accordance with a state statute. But by contending that physician-assisted suicide is a "legitimate medical purpose" for the prescription of a drug, there can be little doubt that the ruling helped bring the idea of abetting suicide a bit closer to mainstream thinking. That's a deeply unfortunate thing.

As it happened, the decision came exactly seven days after a New Jersey nurse who has confessed to killing 29 people decided to stop cooperating with investigators. Charles Cullen maintains that he has killed up to 40 people, many of them old and ailing hospital patients whom he injected with lethal doses of drugs - like those that Oregon doctors have used to end the lives of more than 200 people.

And that was less than two weeks after CNN reported that several medical professionals are under scrutiny in an investigation by Louisiana's attorney general into allegations that hospital workers resorted to unauthorized euthanasia in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One doctor was reported to have gone from patient to patient with a handful of syringes, telling them that "I'm going to give you something to make you feel better."

Last year, in The New England Journal of Medicine, two Dutch physicians published a set of guidelines for infant euthanasia; one of the doctors has admitted to presiding over the killing of at least four babies, by means of a lethal intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam (a sleeping agent). Although 12-year-olds in Holland already can, with their parents' approval, legally enlist doctors to kill them, the dispatching of sick babies remains illegal under Dutch law; the doctors hope that their proposed guidelines will provide a legal basis for such endeavors.

In the meanwhile, Belgium has enacted a euthanasia law similar to that of the Netherlands.

To some, this all is just the march of progress. In the eyes of Judaism, though, it is a descent into a deep moral morass.

Suicide is regarded by Jewish law as a sin, and helping a patient - even one who two doctors agree is likely to die within six months, whom Oregon's law permits abetting - to kill himself is acting as an accessory to the taking of a life. All the Torah's laws, in fact, with the exception only of three cardinal ones (idolatry, sexual immorality and murder), are put aside when life - even for a limited period - is in the balance. Contemporary society, unfortunately, has a very different take.

From the nearly non-stop portrayals of death and violence in what passes for contemporary "entertainment" to the all-too-real carnage on our cities' streets, the idea of human life as sacred has become increasingly unfashionable. In a world where youngsters regularly murder for a car, a pair of shoes or even just "for fun," or where women routinely decide to stop an unborn baby's heart to accommodate their own personal or professional goals, an elderly or infirm person's life just doesn't command the consequence it once did.

Nor have elements of the "intelligentsia" been hesitant to assist in human life's devaluation.

Peter Singer, for example, the famed Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, has proposed the termination (even without niceties like consent) of what he calls "miserable beings" - people whose lives he deems devoid of pleasure.

Asked by The New York Times recently what idea, value or institution the world takes for granted today he thinks may disappear in the next 35 years, Professor Singer responded: "the traditional view of the sanctity of human life," which, he maintained, "will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments."

On another occasion, he went further still, predicting that once society jettisons "doctrines about the sanctity of human life," it will be "the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, [will be seen as] horrific."

We're not there, yet. But even in the United States, where there remains considerable public aversion for assisted suicide and euthanasia, doctors report that both occur in hospitals much more frequently than most of us realize.

The elderly and diseased are rapidly increasing in number. Modern medicine has increased longevity and provided cures for many once-fatal illnesses. Add skyrocketing insurance costs and the resultant fiscal crisis in health care, and life runs the risk of becoming less a holy, divine gift than... a commodity.

And every businessman knows how important it is to turn over one's stock, to clear out the old and make way for the new.

Whatever the legal future of assisted suicide - the Supreme Court's recent decision may well move it into the chambers of Congress - one thing is certain: the issue belongs firmly, and loudly, in the sphere of public discourse.

And American Jews, in consonance with their religious heritage, should be at the forefront of "choosing life."

In ancient cultures that celebrated paganism and immorality, our ancestors stood up and apart.

In the midst of a culture that devalues human life, we should be doing no less.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

HEALING AN INJURED PHRASE

Rabbi Avi Shafran

"One of the 613 Mitzvot is 'Tikkun Olam,' to heal or repair the world," declares the Social Action Committee of a Massachusetts temple. The assertion is characteristic of the widespread ignorance these days about Jewish basics, not to mention the misrepresentation of the term tikkun olam.

There are indeed 613 mitzvot, or commandments, in the Torah, but none of them is tikkun olam - a phrase that, of late, is as frequently invoked (Google reports 226,000 references) as it is erroneously defined.

The term has its roots in the Mishna, the earliest Talmudic source-material, where it is employed as the philosophical principle behind a number of rabbinic enactments intended to avoid social problems. For example, the institution of a legal mechanism that can circumvent the sabbatical year's automatic cancellation of debts is justified by the concept of tikkun olam. As is the requirement that divorce documents include the signatures of the witnesses. Similarly, whenever tikkun olam is invoked by the Talmud, it refers to actions taken by rabbinic authorities to address communal concerns.

The phrase also has an eschatological meaning, as in "litakein olam bi'mal'chut Sha-dai" ("to repair the world through the kingdom of G-d") clause in the Aleinu declaration recited at the end of every Jewish prayer service. There it refers to the end-point of human history, when idolatries will disappear from earth and "every knee will bend to You" and all nations "will give honor to the glory of Your name."

And then there is tikkun olam's meaning in Jewish mystical literature, where it is used to refer to the cosmically redemptive power of personal actions, in particular the performance of mitzvot, both ethical and ritual.

In recent years, though, the term has been widely employed by a number of Jewish groups and individuals in a novel way, made to mean the embrace of any of a variety of social, political or environmental causes - including, as one, tikkunolam.com, asserts, arms control, reproductive rights and campaign reform. Gay and lesbian rights are another item on that group's list, although the only quote from Leviticus cited is "Love thy neighbor as yourself." (Other pertinent verses in that book seem to have been overlooked.)

Redefinition of time-honored Jewish words and concepts, unfortunately, is nothing new. "Torah" and "mitzvah" and "halacha" (Jewish religious law) and "observance" have all fallen victim to Jewish Newspeak. But there is a particular irony to the trendy twisting of tikkun olam to refer to the issue du jour of the politically progressive.

It stems from yet another legitimate employment of the term, as cited by Maimonides in his magnum opus the Mishneh Torah (or Yad Hachazaka).

Near the end of that 14-volume compendium of halacha, the revered 12th century Jewish luminary included several chapters of laws concerning Jewish kings. In the final law of the third chapter of that section, he writes:

"[In] any case where someone takes human lives without clear proof [of a capital offense] or the issuance of a warning, or even on the strength of a single witness [as two are required in a Jewish court], or where a person hates someone and kills him [seemingly] by accident, a king is permitted to execute [the unjustified taker of life] in order to repair the world ["li'taken ha'olam"] according to the needs of the time� to strike fear and shatter the strength [literally, "break the hand"] of the world's perpetrators of evil."

And so, Maimonides informs us, there is yet another meaning to tikkun olam, the authorization of a nation's leader to do whatever is necessary, "according to the needs of the time" - even suspend the ordinary rules of evidence in capital cases - to preserve the security of his society from those who seek to disrupt it.

No Jewish king exists today but, still - in the spirit of liberal-mindedness - we might engage in a little "expansion of definition" ourselves and consider how the Maimonidean concept of tikkun olam might pertain to our own society, leaders and times.

Reasonably, it would seem to advocate the right, in fact the responsibility, of the chief executive of a country threatened by murderous elements to take strong and unusual action to undermine those enemies of civilized society - even if some personal rights may be compromised in the process.

So, interestingly, the concept of tikkun olam would seem to argue most eloquently today for things like, say, the imprisonment of enemy combatants, secret wiretaps and surveillance of citizens.

It might not please those who enjoy waving tikkun olam like a flag, but the concept, accurately applied, would seem to more heartily support the Patriot Act than a ban on Alaskan oil drilling.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

WE�RE ALL TRAPPED MINERS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Even in tragedy � perhaps especially there � food for Jewish thought abounds.

It is wrenching to imagine the grief of the families of the 12 miners who were found dead on January 4 after an explosion two days earlier in a West Virginia coal mine. More wrenching still to imagine, though, are the emotions of the men themselves, 13,000 feet below the surface of the earth, during their final hours of life. They had built a �rough barricade structure,� according to the president of the mine company, and at some point donned breathing apparatuses that would have provided them one hour�s worth of oxygen.

They surely prayed, as did their families high above, for their rescue. They may also have hopefully recalled a mine collapse four years earlier in Pennsylvania, when nine miners were finally rescued after three days underground. Sadly, the West Virginia miners� fate, with the exception of a single man who was extricated alive, was not to be that happy one.

Painful as the imagining is, though, the miners� final hours� ordeal is worth pondering. Because it has the potential of providing us all a most valuable realization.

Picture yourself thousands of feet below the earth�s surface, surrounded by darkness and without nourishment, confined and cut off from loved ones � indeed, from the entire world.

And then imagine � as the miners surely hoped with all their might would happen to them � being rescued from the depths, hoisted to the surface once again into the light and fresh air, into the presence of family and friends. Imagine laying eyes on familiar things again, the sun, the sky, the faces. Imagine the gratitude that would swell any human heart at such a moment.

And then consider that each of us undergoes a similar experience each and every day.

We wake up in the morning.

It�s not only the fact that in sleep we are not conscious, not in control, or that people can and do die in their sleep; or even that sleep, like death, is insistent, and will only be postponed so long. The rabbis of the Talmud said something more; they considered sleep itself to be a virtual microcosm of death � �one sixtieth� of it, in their turn of phrase and thought.

The regularity with which we are granted new life each day dulls us, regrettably, to the import of the fact. That is only human nature, what Emerson alluded to when he wrote: �If the stars would appear but one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the City of G-d.�

But recognized or not, the import is there all the same, and demands every sensitive soul�s attention. Thus, while all too many of us awaken each day with grumbling about the speed with which morning arrived, Jewish tradition mandates that a Jew�s first words upon awakening in the morning are to be those of the short �Modeh Ani� prayer of gratitude. It is one of the first things observant Jewish parents teach their young children.

�I gratefully acknowledge You,� the prayer goes, �living and eternal King, for having returned my soul to me with compassion. Abundant is Your trustworthiness.�

Few of us, thankfully, will ever experience anything like what the trapped miners underwent. But all of us can benefit from relating it to what we do indeed undergo each and every day, as we pull ourselves from unconsciousness and dark into awareness and light. Our gratitude should be powerful and heartfelt.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

SHABBOS. HOLY SHABBOS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

On January 13, the 92nd Street Young Men and Young Women�s Hebrew Association � the celebrated New York City institution more commonly known as the �92nd Street Y� � is slated to end its policy of closing for the Jewish Sabbath.

Over the years, it seems, there has been much demand by gym-goers to keep the �Y� and its fitness center open on the Sabbath, known to many Jews as Shabbat or Shabbos. Most of the facility�s Jewish members are not observant of the Jewish religious tradition, which considers exercising to be a violation of the Sabbath�s spirit, and the use of electronically-enhanced equipment a breach of Sabbath law. And, although a spokesperson for the �Y� denies that there was any financial motivation for the abandonment of the 130-year-old Sabbath-respecting policy, the gym brings in more than $5 million a year.

Defending the decision to have the �Y� and its gym open on the Sabbath, its executive director, Sol Adler, stresses that the institution is �not a religious� one but rather �cultural,� and that �if someone feels that it�s inappropriate to work out or go swimming, they can choose not to work out or go swimming.�

Whether that approach dovetails or clashes with the �Y��s self-description as �a proudly Jewish institution� that promotes �Jewish values,� �promote[s] a public pride in the Jewish heritage� and �uphold[s] the historic Jewish emphasis on� sanctity of family [and] the cycle of Jewish times and seasons� is, perhaps, a judgment call.

What comes to my mind, though, is the story of a rabbi who once traveled to Miami Beach to speak on the anniversary of the death of the celebrated, revered Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan, more commonly known as �the Chofetz Chaim,� � or �the one who desires life� � a biblical phrase he used as the title of one of his major works, on the laws forbidding gossip and slander. The rabbi in Miami recounted in his address a tale that had been told to him by an elderly man who had witnessed it in the Chofetz Chaim�s yeshiva in pre-war Poland. A student there was once seen smoking on the Sabbath and it was decided that the young man had to be expelled.

The Chofetz Chaim, however, asked to see the student before he left. The boy entered the sage�s spartan quarters (the Chofetz Chaim never properly furnished his house, explaining that all of us are just �passing through this world�) and, moments later, emerged in tears and contrition; he remained in the yeshiva and never violated the Sabbath again.

The speaker told the story just to illustrate the Chofetz Chaim�s greatness; it bothered him, though, that he didn�t know what had transpired behind the Chofetz Chaim�s closed doors. Astoundingly, though, that was about to change.

After his speech, the auditorium emptied out and the speaker, bidding his hosts goodbye, saw one elderly man still in his seat, heaving with sobs. He went over to him to see if he could help. The old man said only �That boy was me.�

The speaker comforted the older man but couldn�t hold himself back from asking what the Chofetz Chaim had said to him that day. The man looked up and recounted: �The Chofetz Chaim took my hand and cried � I remember the hot tears falling on my hand. And then he said three words: �Shabbos. Holy Shabbos.� That is all he said.�

It was, apparently, all that was needed.

There may be no Chofetz Chaims today, no one whose pure tears can change lives. But those at the 92nd Street Y who made the decision to change the respect-for-the-Sabbath policy might want to consider the example of a similar institution that made a similar decision in Baltimore, in 1997.

In November of that year, the board of directors of Baltimore�s Jewish Community Center voted 37-6 to open its suburban branch on the Jewish Sabbath. Baltimore�s Orthodox community begged the local Jewish federation, whose imprimatur was needed for the plan to go forward, to recognize the inappropriateness of a Jewish institution, religious or cultural, treating the Sabbath as a regular day of business.

One particularly creative local rabbi�s wife � who happens to be my beloved stepmother � made the wise and hopeful suggestion that Jews who felt they needed exercise on the Sabbath consider undertaking a long walk to a distant synagogue for Sabbath services. A heartfelt gathering in defense of the Sabbath�s honor was held, and thousands of Jews attended. It was not a protest rally; the then-dean of the renowned Ner Israel Rabbinical College, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, of blessed memory, well captured the event�s spirit when he spoke. �We are crying out,� he said, his pain audible in his voice, �from our hearts that have been wounded.�

And then came a remarkable development. On December 16, the local federation, in a 43-30 vote, decided to keep the facility closed on the Sabbath.

By all accounts, the words of LeRoy E. Hoffberger, a federation board member and self-described �Reform Jew who is not Shomer Shabbos [Sabbath observant],� had a profound effect. In a letter to his colleagues, Mr. Hoffberger called it �hypocritical� for the Jewish federation to �lower its communal standards of observance of the Sabbath and at the same time claim that its highest priority is strengthening Jewish identity and enhancing Jewish education.�

Mr. Hoffberger also expressed the fear that opening the JCC on the Sabbath would set a precedent that would invite other Jewish institutions to act similarly.

What a powerful statement of pride in the Jewish heritage and it would be were the 92nd Street Y to similarly reconsider its decision, even at this late date, and not set a sad precedent of its own.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE BAR MITZVAH THEME TO END THEM ALL

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The Washington Post recently informed me that, if it is to qualify as "a state-of-the-art New York bar mitzvah," the celebration my wife and I are planning for our youngest son's upcoming entry into Jewish adulthood needs a considerable dose of "theater," including "like all theater� props."

The Post article, on the "glam makeover" that bar mitzvahs have reportedly undergone in recent years, stressed the importance of themes, highlighting a "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" bar mitzvah, a "guitar" bar mitzvah, a "casino" bar mitzvah, a "Yankees" bar mitzvah (complete with a film of the new Jewish adult joining the team during spring training), and other themes best left unmentioned here (actually, anywhere).

My goodness, I exclaimed to myself. Mere weeks from our dear son Menachem's assumption of the yoke of the Torah's commandments, we were utterly themeless. Whatever would we do? Sure, like other parents described in the article, I suppose we could (after taking out a third mortgage) hire some "motivators" to drag guests into dancing circles, some acrobats and even a bartender or two to oversee a "vodka slide" - a "massive block of ice with a groove down the middle" - for the adult guests. The bar mitzvah boy (thank G-d) would boycott his celebration if he saw any of those things, but at least we would have done something meaningful.

What, though, about the all-important theme?

As Orthodox Jews, we couldn't really go the route of the corporate CEO who recently flew in a number of rock and rap artists to regale the masses at his daughter's multi-million dollar bat mitzvah. But I know well that we Orthodox are hardly beyond our own acts of immature excess.

Think, I thought. But of course! The possibilities were endless! We could have a "tefillin bar mitzvah," with tables in the shape of the leather phylacteries worn by Orthodox Jewish men; or a "Talmud bar mitzvah" with tractate volumes made out of chopped-liver; or a "Mount Sinai bar mitzvah," with centerpieces rigged to erupt in simulated lightning after the bar mitzvah boy's speech; or a "manna from heaven bar mitzvah," where, in keeping with Jewish tradition's teaching about the miraculous nourishment's ability to taste like almost anything, each guest could order whatever food he or she wanted (we'd need both meat and dairy kitchens for that one, but hey, who said successful excess was easy?).

Then, though, it hit me. No, none of those themes was right - the perfect bar mitzvah theme was something else, and I had it: a "shtetl bar mitzvah."

We would recreate a pre-Holocaust Eastern European small town bar mitzvah, precisely like those my son's grandfathers experienced when they turned thirteen in 1930s Poland!

It wouldn't be easy, but we could do it. We'd have to find the appropriate venue, of course, something that captured the ambiance of a true shtetl synagogue. I'd seen old photos. It shouldn't be hard. There are a number of establishments in certain New York neighborhoods that would fit the bill; they might lack actual dirt floors - but their floors are certainly dirty.

The cuisine might be trickier, I thought, but after intensive historical research, I came up with just what the theme demanded: kichel (a primitive precursor of the cookie) and herring, with a shot of schnapps as an accompaniment for those of age (drinking, that is, not Jewish adulthood). No main course and no dessert - for authenticity's sake. A truly unique bar mitzvah, one not seen for sixty years!

I imagine there may be some strange looks from guests unaware of all the careful thought and planning that went into our son's chic, minimalist bar mitzvah theme. Even when I explain it, some may not realize how "state of the art" our celebration really is. It won't be their fault, of course. It takes a certain sophistication to recognize true style.

I even hope to start a trend. An avant-garde, deceptively low-key approach to bar mitzvahs! And aside from the sheer coolness of it all, the simplicity of the affairs may just make it easier for the bar mitzvah boy (or bat mitzvah girl) to remain focused on the true theme of the moment, their entry into the circle of Jews who are now responsible to humanity, to their fellow Jews, and above all, to G-d.

Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. For their son Menachem's bar mitzvah celebration, he and Mrs. Shafran plan to serve a modest chicken dinner for family, a handful of their closest friends and Menachem's yeshiva classmates. Menachem's grandparents will serve as motivators, in the deepest, most Jewish sense of the word.

SHEDDING LIGHT ON ANTI-SEMITISM

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Recent events - like the president of Iran's call for Israel's destruction (and then, apparently in a more kindly mood, for its relocation to Europe); the United Nations secretary-general's participation in a UN-sponsored "Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" next to a map showing "Palestine" in place of Israel; the sudden appearance of anti-Semitism in one country (Peru) and the refusal of another (Syria) to permit a Jewish journalist (WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein) entry because of his ethnicity - are timely things to ponder as we head toward Chanukah.

Nor should we leave out the ugly underbelly of even some recent "good news," the International Red Cross's vote (after years of haggling, and with only 27 nays and 10 abstentions) to add a new official symbol to the cross and the crescent, entitling Israel's volunteer emergency services to be protected from attack outside the borders of the Jewish State.

Good news, yes. But the new symbol is not the all-too-familiar-to-Israelis "Red Magen David" but rather a red square standing on one corner. A star may be added to the square, but so can a unicorn or a turnip; the stand-alone star of Israel's emergency responders will continue to afford no international protection to vehicles or personnel displaying it. Even, it seems, when Jews are let in the club, they must check their identities at the door.

To understand what all the above "spirit of the season" has to do with the Jewish time of year, one has to move beyond bemoaning anti-Semitism, toward understanding it.

It's not an easy task. Irrational Jew-hatred's astounding resiliency and its purveyors' impressive creativity are baffling. And anti-Semitism has been around for centuries, indeed millennia. So, too, though, has been Jewish tradition's take on the matter.

Classical Jewish thought's approach to the question of anti-Semitism may have been most pithily rendered by the renowned Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik of Brisk (1820-1892), who wrote: "Know that the more that Jews minimize the 'apartness' that the Torah mandates through Torah study and the observance of the commandments, the more G-d allows hatred [within others] to bring about the necessary outcome - that the Jewish people remain a people apart."

It says much about how far we Jews have drifted from the fundamentals of our spiritual heritage that such a thought strikes so many as outrageous. How, they ask, could our attempt to blend harmoniously into larger society and to jettison religious observances increase anti-Semitism?

Yet that is precisely what the Torah itself repeatedly and explicitly predicts (as in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28), what authentic Jewish religious leaders have always maintained, and what alone explains the reality around us. Once our initial umbrage at the idea subsides, what remains are the troubling but telling facts: Despite the Holocaust, and compulsory education in liberal values, and interfaith efforts, and Jews' hearty embrace of the cultures in which they live - we are as hated as ever. Perhaps more than ever.

That is the point. Much as we may squirm, we Jews are meant to be "a people apart." And if we try to be "just like all the nations," in the Torah's disapproving words, G-d allows others to remind us of our role.

Which brings us to Chanukah.

Some contemporary Jewish writers - even, sadly, some clergy - seem intent on minimizing the significance of the Jewish holiday of lights, claiming it is but a minor affair, artificially magnified by its proximity in the calendar to non-Jewish celebratory days. Nothing could be more misleading. Chanukah, to be sure, is not a Biblical holiday; it is based on an historical occurrence that took place after Biblical times. But it is the focus of a substantial amount of Jewish thought and lore, particularly in the mystical tradition.

What motivates the would-be Chanukah-diminishers, I suspect, is their discomfort with Chanukah's elemental message.

Because according to Jewish tradition, the victory celebrated on Chanukah was only superficially about the routing of the Greek-Syrian Seleucid Empire's forces from Judea. More essentially, it was about the routing of the Greek assimilationist inroads into Jewish life. To the rabbis who established the holiday, a greater enemy than the flesh-and-blood forces that had defiled the Holy Temple was the adoption by Jews of Hellenistic ideals.

For the Seleucids not only forbade observance of the Sabbath, circumcision, Jewish modesty and the study of Torah, they convinced some Jews to embrace their world-view. They installed not only a statue of Zeus in the Temple, but an assimilationist attitude in Jewish hearts. And Chanukah stands for the uprooting of that attitude, for the recognition that Jews are, and must be, different.

Which is why Chanukah's observance does not involve a special feast - as does Purim's, when the threat against us was physical - but rather only the lighting, and gazing at, the ethereal light of candles. The battle of Chanukah was, in its essence, a spiritual one. Light represents Torah. And Torah - its study and its observance - is the essence of the Jewish people. "A bit of light," as the rabbis of the Talmud put it, "banishes much darkness."

And so, as we light the Chanukah candles, watch their flames and consider events both ancient and current - "in those days, at this time" - we might give some thought, too, to both the spiritual state of the Jewish world today and to how widely, insanely we are hated.

And ponder the message of the lights that flicker before us.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

JEWISH INVESTMENT PLANNING

Rabbi Avi Shafran

One benefit of having a lot of money is being able to speak one's mind bluntly, which license philanthropist Michael Steinhardt has never been reluctant to employ.

Recently, the mega-giver to Jewish causes, whose claim to atheism is belied by his commitment to projects he feels will help ensure a vibrant Jewish future, shared some thoughts about the Orthodox community, specifically about what he calls its "myopic" attitude toward the larger American Jewish one.

Mr. Steinhardt, it seems, has two complaints. First, that the Orthodox community considers non-Orthodox Jews a "lost cause," since "it's just a matter of time before they assimilate" - a sentiment he claims to have heard from an Orthodox Jew several years ago. And second, that relatively few Orthodox dollars support non-Orthodox causes, like Jewish federations.

Regarding charge number one, while broad brushes don't paint very accurate pictures, I tend to share Mr. Steinfeld's chagrin over the possibility that any Orthodox Jew might write off a fellow Jew as beyond reach and growth. I have in fact written for and spoken to Orthodox audiences warning against precisely that, and have heard many Orthodox religious leaders do the same.

Charge number two, though, is thoroughly misguided. Whatever Mr. Steinhardt might think about Orthodox Jews' principles and beliefs, he presumably acknowledges their right to remain faithful to them. Particularly here, where the principles and beliefs at issue are the very ones that not only imbued the lives of earlier Jewish generations but are empowering the most vibrant growth and commitment anywhere in the contemporary Jewish world.

And, sadly, those timeless Jewish beliefs and principles make it difficult if not impossible for many Orthodox Jews to view Jewish federations and the like as proper investments for their charitable contributions.

Why? Because there are projects in the non-Orthodox American Jewish community that are patently, and deeply, objectionable to many Orthodox Jews. They may be efforts to promote "a woman's choice," or non-halachic conversion, or "outreach" to non-Jews. Some Jewish federations, including the national federation umbrella group, the United Jewish Communities, may try not to cross controversial Jewish lines, but nevertheless do, sending messages at irreconcilable odds with an Orthodox Jewish outlook.

Take, for instance, the UJC's "Pride in Israel Mission" this past summer, which brought "members of the American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community" to Israel to meet with, among others, "leading LGBT community figures and organizations" there. It was a mission whose national chair, the vice president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, proudly described as having "strengthened our identities as LGBT Jews." In fact, the mission had originally been timed to coincide with the beginning of a ten-day "Love Without Borders: Jerusalem WorldPride" festival (which ended up being cancelled because of security concerns during the Gaza withdrawal).

Whatever one's personal opinion about the "Pride in Israel Mission," it should be obvious that few Orthodox Jews would want any of their hard-earned income going to such projects - and understandable that many Orthodox Jews would not view an organization whose priorities include such projects as particularly worthy of their support.

One can, of course, choose to accept or reject Jewish religious tradition's attitude toward the propriety of "strengthening the identities" of "LGBT Jews." But to see any group of Jews "myopic" for refusing to jettison their essential convictions evidences a much more severe vision problem.

Orthodox Jews do support Jewish charitable causes - and as studies have shown, in considerably greater proportions than other segments of the Jewish community. That should not surprise; tithing one's income is a Jewish religious mandate. So, though, is the responsibility to give one's charity wisely. To an Orthodox Jew, that means donating to individuals in need (homes in Orthodox neighborhoods are regularly and frequently visited by the poor, Orthodox and otherwise, seeking assistance), to social services (of which there are a multitude in Orthodox community - ministering to all Jews, Orthodox or not, and even to non-Jews), and to what we Orthodox regard as the engines of the Jewish future - the day schools, yeshivot and Bais Yaakovs that educate Jewish children - most of which are in dire financial straits. There's no myopia there, only focusing limited resources where they are most urgently needed.

And then there's another entire area of Orthodox effort that benefits non-Orthodox Jews, one Mr. Steinhardt may not fully appreciate: outreach.

It exists in an organized fashion, though a multitude of "kiruv" organizations - like Aish HaTorah , Ohr Somayach and Torah.org, to name just three of many - and programs like "Partners In Torah," not to mention the dozens of community kollelim that have emerged in recent years across the country. And Orthodox outreach happens, too, in countless "one-on-one" interactions, whenever a Jewishly-uneducated and non-practicing Jew makes the happy choice of letting an Orthodox Jew know he or she is Jewish, and the Orthodox Jew extends an invitation to a Shabbat meal or class.

If Mr. Steinhardt finds such efforts somehow unimportant or condescending (as his pronouncement about Orthodox unconcern with other Jews would seem to imply), he might do well to consider in a new light something he already knows well: it's important to invest wisely.

There are investments, of course, of cash and property, but also investments of knowledge and effort. The Orthodox community doesn't have terribly much of the first kind. If we did, our schools and yeshivot would not be so severely strapped, and fewer Orthodox families would be suffering under crushing debt. What we do have, though, is the second sort, our learning and our love. That's what we have to invest in the non-Orthodox community. And we do.

So instead of berating the Orthodox community, Mr. Steinhardt might do better to extol it, not to mention support it. With its long history o strong performance, it would be a considerably wiser investment than a hedge fund, and it promises the highest of returns.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

TAKING TRADITION SERIOUSLY

Rabbi Avi Shafran

At the recent 68th General Assembly of the Union for Reform Judaism, in Houston, the group's president, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, said some important things.

He noted that the children of Reform parents, have been "told� again and again that Judaism is an all-embracing way of life," and that those youths "expect that their tradition will have something to say" about fundamental moral matters.

He also called on all movement's members to "give our young people love, clear direction and the guidance of our ancestors." Pointedly, he added: "And to show them that we are ready to sacrifice for our Jewish ideals."

They were wonderful words to hear, but they stood in disturbingly stark contrast to much of the rest of his speech. Like his admission that "we are not very good at saying 'no' in Reform Judaism," and that, "in the realm of personal behavior, we are reluctant to ever use the word 'forbidden'."

Similarly discordant with ideas like seeking the "guidance of our ancestors" and readiness "to sacrifice for Jewish ideals" were things like Rabbi Yoffie's statement that "we do not tell our kids that sex before marriage is forbidden" because, after all, it is "unreasonable to suggest that this traditional standard should be maintained for young people who are adults."

Well, which is it to be? Is Judaism an "all-embracing way of life" or are its standards not reasonable to maintain? Should Jews be prepared to "sacrifice for Jewish ideals" or throw in the towel to prevailing social norms? In one fell sermon, Rabbi Yoffie laid bare the inherent inconsistency of his movement. The words are there, the talk about "ancestors" and "tradition" and "sacrifice." Words are important, but when they're empty they're worthless.

Although it didn't receive much press coverage, another large Jewish gathering took place shortly after the Reform conclave. Agudath Israel of America held its 83rd National Convention, in Stamford, Connecticut.

At that four-day gathering, Orthodox Jews received direction for their lives from respected rabbinic leaders, and discussed a wide range of issues, including the challenge presented by the internet's invasion of families and homes, worrisome to observant Jews because of the Torah's stress on not only moral actions but moral thoughts as well.

Also addressed was the "tuition crisis" - the economic crunch that is squeezing Jews for whom large families and intensive Jewish educations are non-negotiables.

Rabbi Shmuel Bloom, Agudath Israel's executive vice president, pointed out, however, that a great deal was said by that problem itself.

While daunting and urgent, he explained, it is a "good problem" born of success, of the powerful growth in both numbers and commitment, of the Orthodox community.

That observation, too, presented a stark contrast to what was admitted from the podium at the Reform gathering, where Rabbi Yoffie bemoaned the fact that so many who join his movement's temples end up leaving, "usually in three to five years, often right after celebrating a child's bar or bat mitzvah."

Does it not occur to him that the reason for that hemorrhaging of members might have something to do with the inadequacy of mere words? That when young people in his movement come to their spiritual leaders seeking "the guidance of our ancestors" they are looking not for platitudes but for true direction?

Does it really not occur to him that there is another Jewish approach, the original one, not only faithful to the Jewish past but clearly pointing the way to the Jewish future?

The speakers at the final session of Agudath Israel's convention were two Jews raised non-observant but Orthodox today. One, a Ph.D., is a best-selling author of books on psychology; the other, a surfer/party animal turned chassid.

They - and thousands of "returnees" to Jewish tradition like them - were powerful examples of how, to again borrow Rabbi Yoffie's words, "Judaism is an all-embracing way of life," of what it means for a young Jew to accept the "clear direction and the guidance of our ancestors." Models of what it truly means to be "ready to sacrifice for our Jewish ideals."

The psychologist and surfer-turned-chassid were not there to reassure their listeners but to reproach them for their complacency, for basking in the joy, serenity and spiritual fulfillment of their own lives without sufficient concern for the vast numbers of American Jews who are simply unaware of what traditional Jewish belief and observance mean. Pulling no punches, they insisted that the depth and beauty of intensively Jewish lives - born of the timeless truths of the Torah - are the birthright of every Jew. And that if Orthodox Jews don't endeavor to share their spiritual wealth with their non-observant brothers and sisters, they are both abandoning their relatives and shunning their duty as Jews.

The audience, visibly moved, even shaken, gave the speakers standing ovations.

And at least one person present found himself thinking about Rabbi Yoffie and all the Jews who had heard the Reform president's words, wishing with all his heart that somehow they could be there, and see what it really means to take Jewish tradition seriously.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

WHAT DO JEWISH WOMEN WANT?

Rabbi Avi Shafran

It hardly comes as news that the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) has embarked on a drive to galvanize its constituents to oppose the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The NCJW, like some others, views judicial nominees through a tunnel called Roe, and has a track record of opposing any nominee - including, most recently Chief Justice John Roberts - they suspect might have the inclination to overturn the blanket enshrinement of a "right" to abort. That suspicion now attaches to Judge Alito, and so, in classic "been there, done that" fashion, the NCJW is publicly flogging him with coat hangers.

Agudath Israel of America, for its part, would be happy to see Roe v. Wade overturned. By devaluing potential human life, the decision has helped devalue all human life, which Judaism cherishes deeply. The concept that a woman has an unfettered "right" to terminate her pregnancy is entirely foreign to Jewish thought and law. If Judge Alito would in fact shift the balance of the Supreme Court toward a less hospitable attitude toward abortion on demand, we would consider that a positive development.

That the NCJW has a contrary view is disappointing to us, but by now hardly surprising. What is novel about this particular anti-Alito campaign, though, and most perplexing, is the extent to which a group purporting to represent Jewish women is exhibiting such a hostile attitude toward an institution that most Jewish women, I think, would agree needs strengthening: marriage.

Among the anti-Alito material NCJW offers its supporters is a boilerplate letter to send members of Congress. In it, Judge Alito is accused of having "ruled to severely restrict a woman's constitutional right to abortion..."

The reference is clearly to a 1991 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which Judge Alito, as a federal appellate judge, penned a dissent (the case eventually was appealed to, and decided, by the U.S. Supreme Court).

That case challenged a Pennsylvania law requiring a woman seeking an abortion to receive information about the fetus and the procedure, to wait 24 hours and, if married, to inform her husband of her decision.

The "severe restriction" to which the NCJW refers is apparently that latter condition, the subject of Judge Alito's dissent. The judge, basing his stance on earlier Supreme Court decisions, contended that a requirement to inform one's husband of a decision to terminate pregnancy, especially since the requirement did not apply in cases where there was fear of abuse, did not constitute an "undue burden" on a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy.

One can agree with Judge Alito's interpretation of the "undue burden" standard or disagree with it (as the Supreme Court eventually did), but no reasonable observer would characterize a spousal notification requirement as "severely restrict[ing]" a woman's right to abortion.

If any philosophy lies in the judge's dissent to Casey, it was not about "a woman's constitutional right" but about marriage - to wit, that it matters. That is an assertion every Jewish group, every women's group - and certainly every Jewish women's group - should be applauding. By arguing that a state may legislate the notification of a husband (not a boyfriend, and certainly not a rapist) that his wife has decided to abort her - their - child, Judge Alito was, in a small way, resisting the societal trend of devaluing not only potential life but the institution of marriage.

It is an institution certainly under assault, and the toll has been considerable - in the Jewish community no less than in broader society, and in some ways even more.

The fact that Jewish women are marrying later than ever, if at all, resulting in a birth rate that falls short of replacement level, has contributed to a Jewish demographic crisis, as Professor Jack Wertheimer recently wrote in a recent, much-discussed article in Commentary. Many Jewish women claim that they would wish to marry earlier, and have more children, if they could only find like-minded Jewish men. But if the NCJW's hyperbolic attack on Judge Alito accurately reflects the state of mind of American Jewish womanhood, and if the bonds of marriage are so weak in the eyes of Jewish women that they feel their husbands are not even entitled to information about a planned termination of their child's nascent life, then how truly committed are Jewish women to marriage, childbearing and the Jewish future?

I, for one, don't believe Jewish women are so cavalier about these matters. I think the NCJW is misreading and misrepresenting not only Judge Alito but the constituency it claims to represent.

The NCJW - although one suspects the "J" in its name will squirm - is certainly welcome, like any citizen or group, to favor an unfettered right to abortion, and even to defend the widely-discredited notion that such a right lies hidden somewhere between the lines of the U.S. Constitution.

But rather than blatantly misrepresent a man's record (and, subtly, a religious tradition's attitude), it might better advance the cause of women, and of Judaism, by recognizing and promoting the ideals of marriage and childbearing - ideals that clearly mean something to Samuel Alito.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT

Rabbi Avi Shafran

It�s pretty commonsensical: a culture�s ideals and spirit can be discerned in what its adults choose to nourish their progeny�s developing minds. One can know much about a world, in other words, by considering its children�s entertainment.

I have thought that thought, gratefully and proudly, on many a visit to a Judaica store. If they�re even modestly-sized, they are sure to have large children�s sections, featuring a broad assortment of books, cassettes and videos which, in a variety of novel, often funny and fascinating ways, teach about the Jewish heritage, religious observance, and the importance of refining one�s personal temperament and character � the latter theme particularly well-represented.

Recently, though, I had the opportunity to consider a very different sort of children�s entertainment, promoting a very different sort of lesson. It was an artistically sophisticated cartoon, made available, along with a translation of dialogue, by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Aired on television at the end of October, it is clearly aimed at youngsters; no adult graphic novel, this. Its target viewers were what, in American culture, might be termed the Sesame Street or Rugrats crowd � or, in Jewish culture, the Uncle Moishe demographic. But the cartoon was not designed to foster high ideals or elicit smiles.

The animated feature begins by depicting a Palestinian family being terrorized by a platoon of scowling Israeli soldiers, who, having just killed one of the family�s young men, are in the process of arresting another. When the Palestinian mother of the man runs toward a soldier, he strikes her viciously in the face with the butt of his rifle. Cartoon blood (surely a novelty in itself) flows copiously from her mouth, and the woman�s young daughter runs to her mother�s supine body and begs, seemingly, in vain, �Dear mother, open your eyes. Why isn�t our mother saying anything? Dear mother, for Allah�s sake, please don�t die!�

Then, when the father rushes the Israeli commander, the soldier turns and shoots the man, and then commands his charges to �finish him off,� which they gleefully do with roaring Uzis, laughing as the Palestinian�s blood splatters on a nearby tree�s oranges.

Oh, yes, there�s a plot too, wherein lies the cartoon�s message. A young man in the family, Abd Al-Rahman, watching all the carnage with tears welling in his eyes, declares that �I must take revenge upon these bloodthirsty aggressors who murdered my father, mother and brother.�

A friend comforts the teen, and, to make a long cartoon short, the two hook up with their friendly local terrorist cell, which trains and supplies the youths with weapons and grenades with which to attack an Israeli convoy.

Our hero climbs a high rock overlooking a road on which the Israeli patrol is soon to pass. But then, as the convoy approaches, instead of readying the hand grenades to be lobbed at the convoy, he strings them around his waist. And, when the Israeli vehicles pass beneath, he pulls the pins and jumps dramatically from his high perch onto one of the trucks. A great explosion ensues and the cartoon�s final scene shows the corpses of the Israeli soldiers and our noble avenger (his body remarkably intact, although the favored blood is, of course, amply present).

Then, the cartoon�s little viewers are provided their subliminal cue: a young Palestinian boy comes upon the scene, takes Al-Rahman�s bloody kaffiyeh, places it on his own shoulders and, in the best Western tradition, walks off into the sunset.

The cartoon was produced and broadcast in Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the very day before the children�s feature was aired, declared that �Israel must be wiped off the map.� Iran, that is, which, reliable intelligence sources say, is on the verge of nuclear weapon capability.

When American parents put their children in front of a television to watch Sesame Street, their hope is that the kids will absorb not only their ABCs but the values that inform the program. When Jewish parents put a �613 Torah Avenue� CD on the stereo, they hope, similarly, that their sons� and daughters� Jewish ideals will be strengthened.

What might we imagine is the hope of Iranian or Palestinian parents who �entertain� their children with messages of hatred and the glorification of suicide in the service of killing others?

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

A LETTER TO KING ABDULLAH II OF JORDAN

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Your Highness:

This was to have been a letter of concern and protest, over a Jordan-based satellite network�s planned airing during Ramadan of a virulently anti-Semitic television series.

Instead, having been informed of new and heartening developments, I write to express my gratitude and admiration for the cancellation of the series� broadcast.

As you surely know, the series, �Al-Shatat,� or �The Diaspora,� rivals the worst canards ever propagated by the Nazis. It includes wild fabrications intended to incite hatred for, and violence against, Jewish people. It depicts, for example, a rabbi overseeing the slitting of a Christian boy�s throat in order to obtain blood to bake in matzos; a Jewish leader taking �credit� for suggesting the destruction of Hiroshima; a �Secret Jewish World Government� assisting in the Holocaust in order to drive European Jews to the Holy Land � and other canards, both old and original.

I became aware of your government�s intervention to prevent the airing of the Syrian-produced poison through groups like the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the Middle East Media Research Institute; both had earlier drawn attention to the broadcast and have now promptly informed the public of Jordan�s principled action. Jewish and other media have since followed with reports of the good news, and well-deserved praise for your government has come from every corner of the civilized world..

As one of a number of Jewish religious representatives you invited to a luncheon in Washington last month, I heard you eloquently address the importance of building bridges between Jews and Muslims, and I, like all those gathered, deeply appreciated your words. You have now shown them to be more than mere words. I salute you for showing your willingness to back them with action.

With your indulgence, though, please allow me to share a further hope.

By preventing the broadcast of the vile and hateful propaganda, Jordan not only struck a blow for truth and good will here, it set an important example. For that example to have an effect, though, it must be placed squarely, boldly and proudly before your people and the entire Arab world.

Al-Jazeera reports that Jordanian officials have been �tight-lipped on the ban [of the television program], apparently to avoid agitating a public opinion frustrated with Israel�s policies.� In fact, while the statement of your embassy in Washington was laudable, it disturbingly characterized the Al-Shatat program only as �controversial,� and contended only that it �drew concerns for inciting hate.�

But Al-Shatat is an evil production, pure and carefully distilled lies and hatred. And condemning such anti-Jewish poison should have nothing to do with anyone�s political views. When you spoke to us in Washington, one of your themes was precisely that: the need to separate political matters from religious ones. You asked your listeners to put the question of Israel and the Palestinians aside and focus on fostering mutual respect between religions. Al-Shatat�s producer � Hezbollah � surely has its political views, but the production is, above all else, anti-Jewish in its every frame.

And so it is my hope that you will find the right opportunity to state, unequivocally and straightforwardly, as a descendant of Mohammed, the monarch of a great nation and a promoter of truth, that Al-Shatat is falsehood from beginning to end, that it was designed to foment hatred of Jews, and that no Muslim who respects truth or justice, ideals glorified by the Koran, should, for even the briefest moment, imagine otherwise.

Your Highness, if I thought you were a leader like all too many others, concerned only with maintaining his position and enjoying its perquisites, I would not express my hope; indeed, I would have no reason to harbor it.

But you have demonstrated unusual � in fact, unique � determination and courage in speaking up for the cause of true peace among religions and peoples. And so that is what emboldens me to share with you my prayer that you continue, and intensify, the work you have bravely begun.

May the Creator grant you long life, good health and His constant protection in that holy task.

[Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. The letter above was sent to King Abdulla via the Jordanian Embassy in Washington on November 1.]

MEET THE JEWISH PRESS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

The fact that you are reading this means that the newspaper you are holding or the website you are viewing cares to provide a traditional Orthodox Jewish point of view. But there are many Jewish media � including the largest-circulation Jewish weekly on the east coast and its counterpart on the west � that seem to not consider traditional Jewish writers� views worth even a handful of column-inches on any regular basis.

To be sure, they occasionally report on their respective haredi, or �ultra-Orthodox,� communities, although usually when something shameful � some shandeh, to use the Yiddish word � has happened. Or was rumored to have happened. But among those papers� potpourri of opinion columns, a haredi viewpoint is a rare bird indeed.

To be fair, most readers of those periodicals are not Orthodox. But if part of the publications� mandate is � as they all readily claim � to present the gamut of responsible Jewish viewpoints, what difference should that make?

What is more, and worse, shameless generalizations that would rightfully evoke charges of prejudice in other contexts are nonchalantly embraced by some regular writers in the mainstream Jewish press.

Earlier this year, for instance, a columnist in the New York Jewish Week dedicated her allotted space to a session at a conference.

�Some Orthodox,� she synopsized, �label secular Jews Amalek [the evil, would-be nemesis of the Jewish people, whose utter destruction is ordered by G-d in the Torah � AS] and some extreme Orthodox use the same term for the Modern Orthodox.�

The longstanding but absurd canard that �some Orthodox� do not recognize the Jewishness of less-observant Jews must no longer be working. The ante had to be upped. So now, it seems, we bad guys in black hats regard other Jews as deserving of annihilation.

Does the columnist really believe that? What could possibly fuel such fever dreams?

Certainly not reality. Unsavory epithets may well have been heard in the loud, unruly dialectic of Israeli politics, and uncouth individuals exist in every community � a shandeh, to be sure. But to imply that any definable subset of Orthodox Jews is wont to identify other Jews as evil incarnate not only ignores a thousand demonstrable facts (like the abundance of haredi-administered-and-funded outreach organizations, hospital services, free-loan efforts and study projects like Partners in Torah, which benefit Jews without regard to their observance-level), but is ugly, incendiary and irresponsible.

There may be any of a number of reasons for the ignoring (or worse) of haredim in the mainstream Jewish press these days. There is plain-vanilla prejudice, of course, and nervousness over statistics that show Orthodoxy � and in particular, the haredi community � on the ascendant. (The Orthodox share of the Jewish youth population in the United States is 38%, larger than both the Conservative (25%) and Reform (32%) � and the haredi sector is by far the most �youth-heavy.�)

But whatever the reasons behind the dearth of haredim in the larger Jewish newspapers, it is something that should change.

There may once have been a time when high-quality writers in English were a rarity in the haredi world. But that time is long gone. Not only are there many accomplished top-notch writers in the haredi world today (a few of my favorites are Jonathan Rosenblum, Shira Schmidt and Sarah Shapiro in Israel; and Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, Eytan Kobre, Rabbi Nosson Scherman, Dr. Marvin Schick, Rabbi Nisson Wolpin and David Zwiebel here in the U.S.), but there are many more who may not have been widely published but who have ample talent to be harnessed.

A haredi press thrives, to be sure. Here in the United States, there are several national weeklies servicing the haredi community, and even a respected haredi daily, Hamodia, that arrives on the lawns of thousands of Jews each morning. But those papers are a different breed from the general Jewish press. They do not attempt or claim to cover the breadth of the larger Jewish community, nor to provide anything but a Torah-based editorial stance; they are designed for Orthodox Jews who, already confronted regularly with the more widespread �general Jewish� papers and their attitudes, want to read news devoid of prurience and providing opinion based on Jewish tradition.

The Jews who are losing out are those who see only the general Jewish periodicals, those whose sources for Jewish information and ideas at best ignore what emerges from the vibrant, growing and unabashedly traditional Orthodox community; and, at worst, misrepresent it.

And that�s a true shandeh.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT

Rabbi Avi Shafran

I recently had the opportunity to recite a Jewish blessing not very often recited. It goes "Blessed are You, G-d, Who has given of His glory to flesh and blood." The blessing, which is noted in the Talmud and codified in Jewish law, is recited upon seeing a non-Jewish king - a true monarch with a monarch's powers.

I said it quietly as King Abdullah II of Jordan entered the room at a posh Washington hotel, where he had come to address a gathering of Jewish clergy present at his invitation and that of a group called the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the words and when I opened them again he had reached where I stood and seemed to be looking at me. I think he knew what I was saying; he is no stranger to Jews. In fact, in his remarks he showed a remarkable familiarity with Jewish sources and traditions; and the gist of his message, admirably, was to express his hope that Jews and Muslims might be able, despite political differences, to attain respect for each other's religious beliefs.

Although the blessing implies a relationship between earthly monarchs and the heavenly One, its text unmistakably stresses as well the contrast. Earthly kings rule only because G-d permits them to ("Who has given of His glory") and their power, substantial as it may be, is limited by, if nothing else, time ("to flesh and blood"). The king may live long, but not forever.

Awareness of royal mortality was all too evident at the gathering, in the careful inspection of each attendee's every briefcase and bag, in the "wanding" to which each of us had to submit, in the security personnel speaking quietly into their sleeves, in the bomb-detecting dog that paced the Ritz-Carlton's elegant carpet, sniffing away at the furniture.

And all for good reason, to be sure. King Abdullah II has undertaken a brave and - realistic or not - visionary mission: to marginalize Muslim extremism of the sort that continues to plague the civilized world. This summer he organized a conference of respected religious leaders from all the major schools of Islam to endorse a document that explicitly asserts the responsibility of Muslims to honor "every human being, without distinction of colour, race or religion" and to "shun violence and cruelty."

So the king has enemies, as do all moderate Muslims these days. And the limitations to the power he wields, even as a monarch, are all too painfully real.

For me - and I'm sure many of the rabbis present - the imminence of Rosh Hashana was poignant. For according to Jewish tradition, the Jewish new year, which falls out this time around on October 4 and 5, is the time for "coronating" the King of kings, the Monarch whose power is unlimited by time or space. A particular statement from Jewish tradition came to my mind: "There can be no king without a nation."

If the statement was intended to refer exclusively to kings of the mortal sort, I pondered, it is a rather self-evident observation. Were a flesh-and-blood king's subjects to suddenly disappear, or to reject his dominion, there is no meaning left to his rule. Could the statement, though, have some application to the ultimate King?

There can be no question that even if all the world's inhabitants chose to not recognize the Source of all existence, the Creator would be no less powerful. But what occurs is that the "kingship" of G-d alludes to a special relationship, one that is, indeed, dependent on the acceptance of the ruled - and is, in fact, the very goal of creation.

Before that relationship developed, the universe still stood; G-d was still its Creator. Before human beings recognized the astounding gift of the free will they were granted, and its concomitant potential for eternal life, the gift was there.

But until a nation developed that attained and embraced that recognition, G-d was not a King. Because a king needs a nation. And so does a King.

Ideally, and eventually, all of humanity will come to recognize G-d's reign. History has already seen the transformation of a world once steeped in idolatry into one that has increasingly embraced monotheism (although in some cases imperfectly, as evidenced by the security precautions noted earlier).

But the process was begun, G-d's monarchy inaugurated, by the Jews. That is what they were summoned to Sinai to do, the role they accepted with the words "We will do." The Jewish people, as the historian Paul Johnson put it, "stand right at the centre of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose." Or, to put it in a more pedestrian way, to coronate the Creator.

And the particular time of the Jewish year for focusing on that idea, on the fact that not only does a king need a nation, but a King does too, is Rosh Hashana, the year's first days. On those days, Jews the world over will include in their silent amidah prayer - the only time of year when such is done - the Aleinu declaration, which include the words "For the kingship is Yours, and forever will You reign in Your glory."

Traditionally appended to that declaration throughout the year is a verse from Zecharaiah (14:9): "G-d will [one day] be King over all the world; on that day G-d will be One and His name will be one."

May we see that - in more ways than one - crowning achievement in our time.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

SENSELESS IN GAZA

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Those nefarious Jews did it again. They had the gall to not destroy their 19 synagogues in Gaza, leaving them to silently stoke the passions of uncontrollable Arabs. It was a "political trap," in the words of Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian civil affairs minister.

"Civil" is not a word that comes easily to mind in the wake of the torching of several of those synagogues by Palestinians - people who would not likely be sanguine were their houses of worship in Jewish areas entered with shoes, much less set aflame.

Nor did civility shine very brightly from the words of Israeli Arab Knesset member Ahmed Tibi, who explained that the Palestinians should not have burned down the Jewish holy places but simply destroyed them as "their right."

Joining the abuse by the jubilant savages, tee-shirted and besuited alike, were the media.

Referring to the orgy of looting and mayhem that rushed like sewage from a drainage pipe into Israeli-abandoned Gaza - and ignoring the fact that the Israeli Gazan communities had been built on land where no Arabs lived - the BBC framed the scene with the words "Israelis stole 38 years from them; today, many were ready to take back anything they could."

The New York Times, for its part, didn't see fit to even mention the synagogue burnings in its print-edition headline, simply informing its readers that "Israel Lowers Its Flag in the Gaza Strip" and, in a sub-header, that "Palestinians Celebrate Departure With Fireworks and Gunshots," making mention of the arson only in a strangely passive-voice, en passant reference. Deep in the story, the paper noted how looting of window frames and ceiling fixtures from a Gaza synagogue took place "as fires burned inside the empty building." As if the flames had ignited themselves.

The primitives on the ground vandalized not only synagogues, but their own future. Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister futilely implored his fellow Arabs to at least leave alone the technologically sophisticated Israeli greenhouses purchased on their behalf (by American philanthropists, since the Palestinians, despite offers of capital for the purpose from the United Nations, refused to do business with Israel directly). The greenhouses were left standing to provide income for Palestinians. Taysir Haddad, a Palestinian Authority security guard assigned to one of those facilities expressed his frustration at his fellow citizens-of-a-Palestinian-state-to-be. "We've tried to stop as many people as we can," he told The Times. "But they're like locusts."

Shortly after the withdrawal of Jewish residents from Gaza, an op-ed piece by Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab appeared in the aforementioned New York daily. In it, he wrote of the "human cost on both sides of the conflict" and strove to assert an equivalence of good will among the Israeli and Palestinian populaces.

Even then, before the Israeli army had left the area, it was a difficult thesis to assert. Over years, we have repeatedly seen that when innocent Palestinians are harmed even accidentally, the vast majority of Israelis are sincerely pained; but when Jews are set upon and murdered, large numbers of Palestinians rejoice.

We have seen, too, that when the rare Israeli extremist commits violence, Israeli leaders and Jewish groups condemn him unconditionally; but when the Palestinian extremist acts, his or her act may be perfunctorily denounced as ''counterproductive to the Palestinian cause'' by some Palestinian leaders, but nothing more; and the perpetrator is lauded as a hero among the Palestinian masses.

And we have also seen (now, once again) how Palestinians and Jews treat one another's holy places. In 1967, when Israel captured all of Jerusalem, it was discovered how Arabs had utilized inscribed Jewish gravestones as path-paving and latrine walls; Israel made no move to evict the mosques from the Temple Mount, and explicitly guaranteed their protection as Muslim holy places.

Of late, even as rampaging Arabs were gleefully burning synagogues (and scrawling graffiti on the walls of others, like "Yes for freedom! No for Jews! - Hamas"), Israeli police added extra patrols to ensure that no one attempt to treat mosques in Israel in a similar manner. The Israeli Sephardi Chief Rabbi declared that any Jew who vandalized a mosque would be ostracized from the Jewish community.

It is hard not to wonder how so much of the world can still resist the truism that there are civilized peoples in our world and uncivilized ones - and that the political calculus in the Middle East make a compelling Exhibit A for the contention.

And yet some of us still hold to the hope that, somehow, the temperate elements that are claimed to exist in Palestinian society will emerge to control the others. Certainly, serene self-interest would lead in that direction. Alas, hatred and nihilism seem the dominant Palestinian products at present.

Imagine, though, what would have happened had the Palestinian populace decided neither to burn nor otherwise destroy synagogues. Had they demonstrated good will by respecting the sanctity of the buildings, and by preserving them for Jews to visit and pray in on better days in the future. Imagine how encouraged Israelis would have been by the thought that they might actually have a peace-partner in the Palestinians.

Alluding to the Jewish tradition that the ancient Holy Temple service in Jerusalem served to channel G-d's blessings to all of humanity, the Talmud contends that had those who destroyed the Temple understood what it was, "they would have mounted fortifications" to protect it instead.

Had the barbarians of contemporary Gaza understood what the synagogues they torched could have been, they would have fortified them as well.

To their eternal shame, they chose otherwise.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

MESSAGE IN THE MAELSTROM

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Even as much of New Orleans was still submerged, dead bodies yet floating on the putrid city-turned-lake, live ones yet waving from rooftops, the accusations flew fast and furious.

The loss of life and property during the Gulf Coast destruction was the fault of: President Bush, Louisiana officials, city planners, those who established a city where disaster was inevitable, those who chose to live there, racism, the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA. Choose your villain or combination of rogues and point fingers accordingly.

As it happens, there is a Jewish concept, too, of finger-pointing at times of catastrophe. But it is of a decidedly different sort. Jewish tradition counsels Jews to point their fingers at themselves.

Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast just before the arrival of the Jewish month of Elul, when religious Jews begin a period of particularly intense soul-searching that reaches its crescendo a month later, on the "Days of Judgment," Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

It might seem a bit proud or particularist, but the belief that G-d mandated a special mission for the Jewish people carries with it a responsibility not only to strive to live exemplary lives in service to the divine but also to see world events as messages. While Judaism considers all of humanity to possess potential holiness and while its prophetic tradition foretells the eventual movement of all of the world's inhabitants to service of G-d, it also casts the Jews as chosen. And so Jewishly-conscious Jews have always sought to plumb larger events for more personal meaning.

That was why the "Chafetz Chaim," the renowned early 20th century Polish Jewish scholar, who was 85 years old in 1923, reacted to the news of that year's Kanto earthquake in Japan by undertaking a partial fast and insisting that the news should spur all Jews to repentance. Similarly, after last year's Asian tsunami, a revered contemporary Jewish sage in Israel, Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman, was reported to have remarked: "Everyone sits in his own home and feels good - 'Where I am everything is fine, it's over there that people are dying' - we have to learn [from such tragedies] the extent of what sin causes, and it is up to us to analyze and learn [so that we will] repent."

The death and misery Hurricane Katrina brought touched every American, and every civilized human being world-wide. The ruin it caused should spur us to do whatever we can to help the displaced and the needy. Countless individuals in fact reacted with determination and generosity. And many groups, including Agudath Israel, established funds to channel assistance. And if there were preventable delays in assessing or addressing the situation, they need to be identified and rectified for any future challenges that may arrive.

In addition, though, to being an opportunity for helping others and fixing systems, Katrina should also be a spur, especially for Jews, to individual introspection.

Although the destruction wrought by Katrina affected a broad swath of the Gulf Coast, the city with which the hurricane has become inextricably coupled is New Orleans. Might the venue of the recent tragedy hold some meaning for us?

What occurs, at least to me, is that the "Big Easy" received its nickname from the lifestyle it exemplified, one of leisure and (in the word's most literal sense) carelessness. The city is probably best known - or was, at least, until now - for the unbridled partying and debauchery that yearly characterized its annual Mardi Gras celebrations.

I cannot and do not claim to know "why" the hurricane took the terrible toll it did; but our inability to understand should not preclude us - those of us who believe in a G-d Who wants us to reflect on, and grow from, events around us - from trying to respond to the wind-driven wake-up call by asking a "what": What can I do spiritually as a result? And one message we might well choose to perceive is the need to recognize how belittling to meaningful life is the contemporary culture of recreation and entertainment.

There is no need to go into the crass detail of what passes for pastime in our age. Even those of us who do not own televisions or frequent movie theaters cannot escape the artifacts of our culture's decadence; they are ubiquitous. The objectification of human beings, their debasement as mere animals, their reduction to skin and flesh saturate the visual arts and popular music, and have bled into other realms as well. Could we not all benefit from critically confronting that fact, from recognizing the toll such reductionism takes on the deepest meaning of our lives? Could we not benefit, in other words, from pointing our fingers at ourselves, the consumers of the crudeness?

There can be little doubt that we could. And that doing so would be - at least from a traditional Jewish perspective - a most fitting reaction to the maelstrom we have witnessed of late.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

INTELLIGIBLE DESIGN

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Among the unquestioned assertions that have entered public discourse through sheer force of repetition is that faith and science are utterly unrelated.

It is a mantra invoked often these days, in the context of the debate over whether "Intelligent Design," a presentation of vexing problems in contemporary biological theory, has a place in the public school classroom. The essence of "Intelligent Design," as its name implies, is that there are things about nature that are not easily, if at all, explainable by resort to random forces alone. Among such things are the emergence of life from inanimate matter; the development of reproductive capacity; and complex biological systems whose multiple components confer advantage only in tandem with one another. Noteworthy, too, are the facts that no scientist has ever succeeded in animating inanimate material, and that none has ever induced a mutation in a living organism that caused it to become a different organism - or even to demonstrate a new ability.

Although ID's proponents claim to have no� well� designs, on identifying the source of the plan they perceive in nature, they are viewed by some as theological Trojan horses, trying to sneak G-d into the study of science.

To be sure, design indeed implies a Designer, and so the critics are correct about the effect of including ID in science courses. But not necessarily about its inappropriateness. Does the possibility of a guiding force, beyond randomness, in fact have no place in the endeavor to understand the universe? One thing is certain: that wasn't the case for most of human intellectual history.

The word science derives from the Latin scientia, or knowledge. And once upon a time, no essential distinction was made between what was called "natural science" and "moral science" - the latter concerning itself with teleology, human purpose and, yes, G-d.

In more recent years, however, a compartmentalization has been imposed on knowledge. "Science" has come to mean the physical sciences alone, banishing areas of human thoughts about more fundamental, if ethereal, ideas to other, artificially created realms, like "philosophy" or "religion." It is interesting to note, as does Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, that in Biblical Hebrew, of all languages, there is no word for religion. Explains the famed 19th century German rabbinic luminary: Judaism provides no separate compartment for things spiritual; the holy imbues the entire sphere of human life, indeed the entire universe itself.

Is it unthinkable, even in our open-minded world, to consider Rabbi Hirsch's contention, and to consider, further, reinstating science's original meaning - the quest for knowledge of every sort?

As it happens, physical science itself has been increasingly compartmentalized. "Science" has become a plethora of sciences: biology, physics, chemistry, geology, genetics and many more. Nor are each of those categories the final splitting of the atom, as it were. Physics is no longer mere physics. It is mechanical physics and sub-atomic physics, cosmology and fluid mechanics - each a discrete discipline unto itself.

We would be terribly short-sighted to prevent the consideration of one subset of science in the course of studying another. Living things, for instance, are not only entities that undergo certain stages and display certain behaviors; they are chemical factories too. Would a teacher of biology be out of line to include elements of chemistry in the curriculum?

"Ah!" the secularist crusaders exclaim. "But one can observe a biological entity or process, and perform chemical experiments! Biology and chemistry are still physical, not speculative, sciences!"

Indeed they are. But what we cannot see or measure can still be entirely real. There are even contemporary sciences that are only quasi-physical. Psychology, for instance. Or pure mathematics. Or astrophysics, which, while it deals with physical entities, largely concerns theories about realms beyond our reach. Not to mention the counterintuitive world of subatomic physics.

"Okay," respond the secularists, with condescension. "But even in psychology and particle physics, observations can be made, and theories verified or disproven. G-d is not like that!"

Maybe, though, He is. That is precisely what ID proponents claim - that things inexplicable by resort to randomness are in fact evident in nature. One might even suggest something similar about history. My own study of Jewish history has led me to conclude that the evidence for the existence of G-d is every bit as convincing as the evidence for the existence of DNA.

What is more, all that modern science affirms is the result of the use of our senses. We see, we hear, we measure, we think. And so, does not our innate sense that our lives are meaningful, that there is Something beyond us, deserve some consideration in a curriculum covering what we know and perceive and theorize about the universe? Is the idea really so subversive?

The Orthodox Jewish community of which I am a part has no monkey in this race; we operate our own private schools, and recognition of G-d is very much a part of what our children are taught.

It is unfortunate, though, that the students in most of our nation's public schools are indoctrinated in the religion of Randomness and Meaninglessness. They, and American society as a whole, would benefit considerably were they exposed to the possibility of design, in our universe and in our lives. I don't know if the Constitution permits or forbids it, but intellectual integrity would seem to demand it.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

GAZA, INTERRUPTED

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Gaza will soon be empty of Jews. Whether the decision to render it so was wisdom or folly, whether it marked the beginning of a more stable Middle East or a more volatile one, whether it served to empower Palestinians considered moderate or to encourage those proven to be murderous, are questions now being addressed with passion. History will one day address them with hindsight.

But the human tragedy of the withdrawal is undeniable. Those of us who have never been compelled to leave our homes, the fields we planted and harvested, the synagogues in which we prayed and studied, the cemeteries in which our loved ones are buried, cannot claim to truly appreciate the agony of those who lived in Gaza, and now no longer do. Those displaced families, noble and loving of the land, deserve our deepest sympathy and concern.

Concern for the future, though, is called for, too. Relinquishing territory to at best an unproven entity trying to govern a populace that embraces wild-eyed killers is not an obviously healthy thing, to put it delicately. Yet, despite it all, what no believing Jew may feel in the wake of the Gaza withdrawal is despair. Traumas like that of the past weeks should never be permitted to obscure a larger picture, the true one. It is a picture well framed by its timing.

Events in Gaza reached their crescendo and denouement at an appropriate season of the Jewish year: the mournful days leading up to Tisha B'Av, and then, that sorrowful day itself. Equally apt, though, was - and is - the assurance of Jewish tradition that, in the dark damp of Tisha B'Av's tragedy, the seeds of Jewish redemption quietly sprout.

A believing Jew recognizes that unfortunate things, even tragic things, happen, that many are the prayers denied. Moses, as Jews the world over recently read in the Sabbath portion, was not granted his yearning to walk on the soil of the Holy Land; the "generation of the desert" was fated the same. Jewish history, even after the Temples' destructions and the Jewish exile from the Holy Land, has been replete with deep disappointments, and worse - crusades, pogroms, blood libels and expulsions. And here we sit, just over a half-century removed from the annihilation of Eastern European Jewry.

And yet where we sit, too, is amid an abundance of spiritual resurgence. Whatever problems may plague the contemporary Jewish world, the reestablishment, in Israel and worldwide, of the Jewish learning and life that once epitomized European Jewry is astounding - and a vital lesson about the permanence of G-d's love for His people.

Beating with that lesson, the hearts of believing Jews discern things beyond the nonce; here, beyond the the Gaza withdrawal. True, the State of Israel may be smaller than it was last month, but Eretz Yisrael, the land bequeathed the Jewish people, has not shrunk in the least. Part of it may be lonelier now, but it will be patient; its rightful residents will return one day. Yes, sworn enemies of the Jewish people are now closer to Jewish cities, but Jewish lives remain, as always, in the hands of our Protector; if we merit His protection, the only victims of suicide bombers will be themselves.

And while members of Hamas may chant and fire weapons to mark what they perceive as a victory, and recommit themselves to their gleeful blood-lust, a believing Jew knows that one day there will be another festivity, infinitely greater, a celebration of the utter downfall of those barbarians and all their supporters. And it then will be the Jewish people and the righteous among the nations who will exult, singing praises, not firing guns.

What will bring about that ultimate rejoicing, the return of all of the Holy Land to its rightful heirs and the banishment of evil from humanity, will not be, in the sardonic words of the prophet, "my strength and the power of my hand" - neither geopolitical machinations nor advanced weaponry. What will bring it about will be something else entirely, something that was ironically evident - the seeds in the darkness - amid the turmoil of the withdrawal itself.

The media were filled with the predictable images of confrontation - the ugliest, products of radical youths who arrived in Gaza from elsewhere. There were even some Jews, elsewhere, who, tragically, seemed to adopt the methods and madness of our enemies.

More telling, though, were many other scenes, poignant ones of soldiers and residents in heartfelt conversations, embracing each other, comforting one another, crying together. A local family offering a hot soldier a drink, a soldier kissing the Torah that a rabbi was evacuating from a synagogue. The images were of siblings on opposite ends of a difficult situation not of their making, not in their control.

Those images hold the keys to the Jewish future, to the redemption that believing Jews know will in time arrive. We cannot hasten it with some Jewish jihad, nor with trust in political or military leaders or tactics. We hurry it only with Jewish observance, Jewish study, Jewish tears, Jewish love.

The seven weeks that follow Tisha B'Av are known in Jewish tradition as the "Seven of Comforting." They are a time for remembering G-d's promise that although Jewish tragedy may seem overwhelming, redemption will in time arrive. And when it does, the Jewish land, all of it, will rejoice beyond imagining with its rightful inhabitants.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

FUNDAMENTAL FOOLISHNESS

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Are American and Israeli yeshivot incubators of dormant Jewish terrorists, Hebrew-chanting counterparts of Islamist madrassas?

Well, Queens College sociology professor Samuel C. Heilman, who has made a career of observing the haredi, or "ultra-Orthodox," world through a glass darkly, seems to think so. At least that is the unspoken but unmistakable message of a paper he penned this past spring for Jewish Political Studies Review.

For the bulk of his essay, which focuses on what he calls the "quiescent fundamentalism" of the yeshiva world, Professor Heilman avoids asserting an explicit parallel between violent Islamic extremists and those he chooses to view as Jewish ones.

But simply utilizing the word "fundamentalist" to describe the contemporary yeshiva world - at a time when the epithet is so readily associated with bloodthirsty Islamists bent on the conquest of western civilization - is something of a violent act in itself.

And by referring to the yeshiva world as a "stage" and a "phase" of something more sinister - the "active" form of "fundamentalism" that seeks to "liquidate those forces that oppose the truth" - the professor makes all too clear that he actually believes haredim pose a societal threat.

Indeed, at the end of his offering, he abandons all pretence to subtlety, and explicitly warns those who dare embrace a haredi worldview to consider "what has happened to the rich culture of Islam as it has devolved into Islamist fundamentalism."

The professor's evidence of haredi malignancy? Haredim's "fundamentalist view that there is a single truth."

Most faiths, of course, hold that their approach is the true one; that is, of course, the essential meaning of a "faith." And such a conviction most certainly underlies Judaism, which eschews religious relativism (even as it may look kindly upon other faiths as positive developments for their non-Jewish adherents). But does that way lie murder and mayhem?

If acceptance of the Torah as G-d's unparalleled revelation to mankind represents some aberrant, cancerous "fundamentalism," then Jewish luminaries from Rabbi Akiva to Maimonides to the Vilna Gaon to the Chafetz Chaim to Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein to Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik - not to mention every religious Jew throughout the ages and every Orthodox Jew today, must be consigned no less to the "fundamentalist" camp.

And come to think of it, if every conviction that truth lies along a particular path is what makes a jihadist, then we have as much to fear from ardent secularists who consider science sacrosanct as we do from Al Qaeda operatives.

What nonsense parades these days as scholarship.

It does not take a Ph.D. to know that it is not conviction - even total conviction - that creates dangerous mindsets, but rather particular convictions. If one believes that the Koran is divine, and that it commands its followers to wage holy war against all who believe otherwise, that is a dangerous conviction, indeed one to whose danger the civilized world has begun to awaken.

But if one believes that the Torah is divine, and that it enjoins Jews to study and observe its laws, that it guides them to better their interhuman relationships, that it requires them to forgo some of what the larger world might deem acceptable, that it asks Jews to remain apart from the nations even as it demands they be a light unto them, then, no, that conviction threatens no one.

What could possibly predispose Professor Heilman to regard a sublime world filled with Jewish purpose and values as a parallel to one filled with hatred and violence? The answer, it seems, is his befuddlement at the fact that the haredi world has not quietly passed on, as his scholarly predecessors regularly predicted it would, but instead has grown and developed, and continues to do so.

The professor pines for a time when Jewish observance in American Orthodox homes was compromised by social insecurity and the very newness of the experience, and when the larger cultural milieu had not devolved to its present prurient state and thus presented less of a problem to religiously committed Jews.

He bemoans what he labels "the professionalization of day school education" and Jewish day schools' employment of haredim as religious teachers. And he laments the popularity among American Jewish youth of post-high school study in Israeli yeshivot or seminaries - from which young people return, he asserts, at best to "create cultural enclaves where they can fashion a kind of quasi-yeshiva or where they identify with and support the activities of the messianists who seek to hasten the redemption."

The professor is certainly welcome, if he chooses, to lament the high state of contemporary Jewish observance. He is free to denounce Jewish day schools - even if they are widely, and rightly, regarded as the most effective insurer of Jewish-continuity on the American landscape. And no one can prevent him from characterizing as some sinister "identity transformation" what might more accurately be termed spiritual growth.

What he should not, though, permit himself to do - either as a Jew or an ostensibly objective academic - is demonize a part of the Jewish world simply because he is frustrated by its success.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

MOURNING IN AMERICA

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Tisha B'Av, which this year falls on August 14, always presents a challenge.

What makes Tisha B'Av particularly difficult is more than the trial of going without food and water for a long, usually hot, summer day. More, too, than the fact that the fast, like Yom Kippur, begins the previous night and includes other prohibitions, like washing - even one's hands - for pleasure. What makes it really hard is the mourning.

The Holy Temple in Jerusalem, after all, was destroyed (for the second time) nearly 2000 years ago. We American Jews are more than temporally removed from those days. Yet Judaism considers our collective recollection of that distant era, and our lamenting of its increasing distance, to constitute a vital part of Jewish life. Even many Jews who fully appreciate the importance of the Temple as the central locus of the Jewish nation and the engine of the Holy Land's sanctity find it a challenge to translate that intellectual recognition into heartfelt emotion - the essence, after all, of mourning.

A multitude of afternoon lectures and presentations about the meaning of the day and the need for personal repentance - the path, according to Jewish tradition, to national redemption - are readily available. In the New York area, even after morning services that include the recitation of Tisha B'Av-themed dirges composed over the years, some of the events draw fasting participants in the high hundreds, eager despite their discomfort to gain spiritual insights and to better themselves as Jews. Pre-recorded presentations on ethical themes are also widely offered, in synagogues and social halls across the country and around the world.

What I have personally often chosen to do for part of my Tisha B'Av afternoon is focus on events of the decade preceding my birth, a period when many Jews still blessedly with us witnessed a horrific example of a world where G-d's face, as the Talmud puts it, was hidden.

For one key to relating as moderns to the Jewish national tragedy of the Temples' loss is focusing on the painful vicissitudes of subsequent Jewish history - all the horrors that ensued after we proved unworthy of divine protection. In fact, as it happens, Tisha B'Av is the date not only of both Temples' destructions but of the fall of the Jewish rebel outpost at Betar to the Roman army in 135 C.E.; of the expulsion of England's Jews in 1290; and France's, in 1306; and Spain's, in 1492.

And then there's the Holocaust. World War II didn't begin on Tisha B'Av, although some claim that Hitler instituted his Final Solution on that Jewish date. One thing, though, is certain. The roots of Germany's anger and war-footing in 1938 clearly lay in the country's nationalistic angst over the terms of the treaty that ended World War I, which broke out on August 1, 1914 - Tisha B'Av.

In truth, even tragedies that befell our people that have no clear chronological connection to Tisha B'Av are part of its mourning. Among the day's poetic dirges are lamentations over the Crusades and the public burning of thousands of Talmuds in Paris' city square in 1242.

It would therefore be well within the spirit of Tisha B'Av to ponder even contemporary evils. Like the anti-Semitic threats spewed forth by Islamist preachers, or Al Qaeda's sinister pontifications about "Zionists and Crusaders," or anti-Israel university professors' rants, or rabid, Jew-hating websites, or Hamas summer camps where children are taught how praiseworthy it is to kill Jews.

And so it is really not so difficult after all to get into a "Tisha B'Av" mood. In fact, the greater accomplishment may well be in managing a festive mood when the happy month of Adar arrives.

For my part, I am still focused on the Holocaust. This Tisha B'Av, I intend to see and listen to some of the testimony my dear father and teacher, may he live and be well, offered the "Survivors of the Shoah Visual History" foundation, Steven Spielberg's laudable effort to preserve first-person accounts of the Holocaust years.

I have heard much of my father's story before, but it never ceases to seize my mind and heart. At the start of the war, when he was fourteen, he insisted on leaving his parents to study in yeshiva. His incomprehensible (even to him, now) determination would save his life; he never saw his parents again. It is wrenching to hear of the flights and fears and bullets and frigid Siberian nights that he experienced over the years that followed. Concentrating on the ordeals of even one young man, amid millions of other Jewish men, women and children, serves the cause of Tisha B'Av well.

And it does so on a level beyond sadness too. For, while millions of Jews, tragically, did not survive the onslaught of Hitler and his friends, some did, and my father, thank G-d, was among them. He came to this blessed country and married the wonderful daughter of an esteemed Baltimore rabbi and rebbitzen, my beloved mother and teacher; and they had children, who now have children, and some of them grandchildren, of their own. When my mother, may her memory be a blessing, passed away sixteen years ago, my father had the incredible fortune of meeting and then marrying a woman who is beloved to me like a second mother, and who is a grandmother in every sense to my own children.

Which is to say that my father's story is particularly well-suited for a Tisha B'Av afternoon. Because the Talmud teaches that Jewish sorrows are a means, not an end, that the Jewish people can merit redemption and the return of G-d's manifest involvement in our collective life. One day, it says, Tisha B'Av will be not a day of mourning but of rejoicing. May it come soon.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

EVOLUTION OF A THOUGHT

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Beneath the surface of the societal debate about whether the theory of evolution should be the only approach to biology in the American public school lies the real issue of contention: whether human beings are essentially different from the other occupants of the biosphere.

There are certainly enough unanswered questions about evolution and unknown details about the Biblical account of creation to permit the two to at least coexist, if not fully resolve themselves, in a single human mind. What truly animates those opposed to the way science is currently taught to most American schoolchildren is the notion - tirelessly promoted by adherents of the Church of Secularism - that humans are in essence mere apes, if singularly intelligent ones.

Science, of course, can never prove otherwise, limited as it is to the realm of the physical. And our bodies do, after all, function in a manner similar to those of gorillas and chimpanzees. But a purely "natural selection" approach to biology inexorably leads to the "animalization" of the human being, to the view that our sense of ourselves as special, as responsible creatures, is but an illusion and a folly.

And yet, all people who possess the conviction that it is wrong to steal, or to murder, or to mate with close relatives, or to cheat on one's spouse (or on one's taxes); all who see virtue in generosity, civility, altruism or kindness; all, for that matter, who choose to wear clothes, believe - against the dictates of Darwinism - that the human realm is qualitatively different from the animal (or, in secular-speak, the rest of the animal).

Either we humans are just another evolutionary development, leaving words like "right," "wrong," good" and "bad" without any real meaning, or we are answerable, as most of us feel deeply we are, to Something Higher.

The latter, of course, is the bedrock-principle of Judaism. And while there may be no way for the physical sciences to prove that humans are essentially different from all else, there are nevertheless some objective indications, subtle but powerful, that support the contention.

Language, of course, is one. G-d's infusion of spirit into the first human being, the Torah informs us, made him "a living soul." But Jewish tradition renders that phrase "a speaking soul." Communication, to be sure, exists among many life forms, but the conveying of abstract concepts - including the aforementioned "right," "wrong," "good" and "bad" - is something quintessentially human.

That we men and women generally care for our elders is another species-anomaly. Natural selection is myopically future-fixated. Progeny are what count in the evolutionary imperative; the elderly have already served their evolutionary purpose. And so animals care for their young, not their old. Most humans, though, feel an obligation to look not only ahead but behind.

And then there is a thought that had been percolating in my mind for a several days, growing slowly - evolving, if you will - until it emerged, fully-developed, only recently, at the end of a tiring hike, when, lying on a large flat rock, I caught my breath, watched an ant and remembered a Psalm.

My wife and I had spent a few days in the northeastern Catskill Mountains, and that morning had climbed up the steep rocky path leading from a winding country road to Kaaterskill Falls, a hidden and stunning double waterfall.

The trek was exhilarating but exhausting (at least to me; my wife waited patiently each time I paused to rest). When we reached the falls, nestled in a lush, verdant forest, we marveled at the beauty of the two cascading torrents, and at the loud yet soothing music provided by the rushing masses of water.

And there, on the rock, next to me, was the ant, meandering most likely in search of a meal (we had already eaten that morning). As I watched the insect, the Psalm - the 104th - came tiptoeing into my head. It is traditionally recited at the end of morning services on Rosh Chodesh, the first day of a new Jewish month; indeed, my thought had germinated when I had recited it the previous Rosh Chodesh, eleven days earlier.

It is a paean to the variety, interrelatedness, beauty and grandeur of nature. It speaks of the clouds and the wind, mountains and valleys, the food provided every creature according to its needs, nesting birds and sheltered rabbits. "How great are Your works, oh G-d!" the Psalmist interjects amid his observations, "All of them crafted with wisdom."

"I will sing to G-d while I live," he concludes. "May my words be sweet to Him� Let my soul bless G-d - praised be He."

King David's rush of appreciation and praise, born of nature's magnificence, seemed an appropriate accompaniment to both the falls in their glory and the ant in his search. Pondering that, I felt the thought congeal. The tiny creature and we lumbering interlopers on his turf had much in common; he needed his nourishment, just as we would soon be hunting lunch down ourselves. Yet there was stark evidence that morning of an essential difference between the ant and us. Between the ant and the Psalmist.

It was yet another, and significant, aspect of human uniqueness, another aptitude unknown in the animal world, and not easily related to any evolutionary advantage.

The bug, I realized, like all the other bugs - and bears and snakes - in the woods, was utterly oblivious to the beauty around him.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America]

Just Another Form of Intolerance?

Rabbi David Zwiebel

How should anti-Semitism be viewed?

As one example of a much larger group of social pathologies, a form of intolerance not unlike such other manifestations of group bias as racism, anti-Catholicism and xenophobia?

Or as something distinctive and unique, different from other forms of bigotry not only in degree but also in kind?

This was the burning question beneath the seemingly placid surface of the recent international conference on "Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Intolerance" in Cordoba, Spain, at which the 55 nation-members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) patted themselves on the back for their outstanding efforts in dealing with the haters in their midst. In the main conference center the delegates were busy exchanging carefully worded platitudes and pieties - while in the side rooms and corridors there was heated discussion and debate over whether anti-Semitism deserved its own special focus.

In one corner stood Governor George Pataki, head of the American delegation to the Cordoba conference - of which I was privileged to be a part - forcefully arguing that the long, tragic history and seemingly intractable nature of anti-Semitism demanded that it be treated as a subject unto itself. The governor pointed out that anti-Semitism, more so than any other ideology of hate, has shown itself to have a unique propensity to lead to acts of violence; and that the documented rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes in Europe and across the globe made it necessary for the nations of the world to devote special energy to combating this alarming development.

But in the other corner stood others who took a contrary view. They agreed, of course, that anti-Semitism is a deplorable phenomenon and must be combated vigorously. But, they cautioned, let us not confuse opposition to the State of Israel and its policies with anti-Semitism; it is not fair to label someone an anti-Semite simply because he objects to the way the Israelis are treating the Palestinians in the "occupied territories." And, they further argued, while anti-Semitism is surely a problem, it is no more of a problem in today's world than other forms of group hatred - indeed, probably less of a problem than, say, Islamaphobia - and should be addressed as part of the much larger phenomenon of intolerance and bigotry.

These two views wrestled with each other in a variety of contexts throughout the Cordoba conference. In fact, the very title of the gathering - "Conference on Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Intolerance" - reflected an attempt to accommodate both perspectives: the singularity of anti-Semitism on the one hand, and its place within the larger pantheon of intolerance on the other.

By the time the conference concluded, both sides were bloodied but could claim some measure of victory.

Those, led by the American delegation, who emphasized the unique nature of anti-Semitism could point most notably to an apparent commitment extracted from the Belgian Foreign Minister, who is slated to become the next chairman of the OSCE, that the existing position of the OSCE "Personal Representative" on anti-Semitism would be retained for the foreseeable future, and would not be consolidated with that of the Personal Representatives on anti-Christian and anti-Muslim activities. They could also celebrate the inclusion of a sentence in the "Cordoba Declaration" issued at the conclusion of the conference that declared "international developments or political issues, including in Israel or elsewhere in the Middle East, never justify anti-Semitism."

At the same time, proponents of the one-approach-fits-all philosophy of intolerance could point with pride to the potpourri provision in the Cordoba Declaration that "condemn[s] without reserve racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and other forms of intolerance and discrimination, including against Muslims and Christians, as well as harassment and incitement to hate crimes motivated, inter alia, by race, colour, sex, language, religion or belief, political or other opinion, national or social origin, birth or other status." (Yes, that's the way professional diplomats express themselves.)

Frankly, I was disappointed that the American delegation's perspective was not firmly embraced by the larger OSCE consensus. But perhaps my expectations were unrealistic.

After all, hatred of Jews, to the modern secular mind, is a bad thing because it violates the moral principle of egalitarianism, the notion that all human beings are inherently equal and entitled to equal rights under the law. Hatred of blacks, or Gypsies, or immigrants, or any other identifiable group, is also a bad thing because it violates the very same moral principle. Seen in this light, why indeed should anti-Semitism be singled out from all other forms of intolerance and bigotry?

Jews sensitive to the Jewish religious tradition, though, view anti-Semitism as something much deeper than a breach in egalitarianism. It is, above all else, and unlike anything else, a Message from Above.

The prophet Jeremiah wrote (Lamentations, 1:17) that the Jewish people are besieged by enemies because G-d has so commanded. The anti-Semite, said Isaiah, is merely "the rod of My anger" (10:5), the means by which G-d prods His nation to recognize that they are indeed His nation. As the renowned Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk makes clear in his classic Meshech Chochma (Leviticus 26:44), Jew-hatred is G-d's way of reminding us that we are a nation apart, a chosen people with a special mission on this earth.

Needless to say, the fact that G-d may allow those who hate us, and Him, to act on their hatred in no way absolves them of their evil. Even though our enslavement in Egypt was preordained and told by G-d to Abraham, Pharaoh and the Egyptians were rightly punished for their choices. Nor are we absolved from fighting anti-Semitism where