Category Archives: Jewish

Heicklen: “We would hope that the halacha would be strong enough to find a solution within halacha…”

Judy Heicklen, president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, … says a Jewish legal solution must be found to obviate the need for enforcement in civil court.

“The prenup is not foolproof,” she said. “And on a philosophical level, we would hope that the halacha would be strong enough to find a solution within halacha and not have to rely on secular authorities to solve a human suffering issue that we should be able to solve within our own legal system.”

Talia Lavin, “‘The Prenup is Not Foolproof’”, The Jewish Week (6 December 2013), 17.

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“Because they had keen moral sensitivities, the rabbis of the Talmud solved the problem of Jews killing innocent Amalekites or Canaanites…”

God proclaims, “I will utterly annihilate Amalek from under heaven.” We meet Amalek again later in the Torah, where God commands the Jewish people to kill the entire tribe of Amalek: “When the Lord your God grants you safety from your enemies around you… completely destroy the memory of Amalek from under heaven” [Deut. 25:19]. And the imperative to annihilate Amalek refers not only to the tribe’s male combatants, but also to innocent Amalekite women and children: “Attack Amalek and destroy all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and assess alike!” [I Samuel 15:3].

This biblical imperative became codified Jewish law, as did the commandment to exterminate all members of the seven Canaanite nations: “You shall not let a soul remain alive” [Deut. 20:16]. Not relegated to ancient history, these commandments apply in principle forever — even today.

The call to kill all members of the Amalekite and Canaanite nations violates the norms of a moral, just war, which dictate that innocent civilians cannot be legitimate targets. And as a people, we know tragic horror of genocide that seeks to exterminate all people of a group or the same genetic background.

Could the Jewish people ever become “a holy people” when obeying the commandments to commit genocide against the Amalekites and Canaanites?

This troubles us moderns, but it also vexed the Talmudic and medieval rabbinic authorities. None of them could live with the Torah commanding Jews to act immorally, and they showed remarkable creativity in shaping the correct way for us to understand these imperatives.

These rabbis believed that the entire Torah text was Divine, but they did not hesitate to engage in bold interpretation. Because they had keen moral sensitivities, the rabbis of the Talmud solved the problem of Jews killing innocent Amalekites or Canaanites by declaring that the ancient Assyrian ruler Sennacherib “co-mingled the nations that he vanquished” [Yadayim 4:4/Berachot 28a]. If so, it is impossible to identify anyone positively as a Canaanite or Amalekite. This effectively rendered the problematic commandments inoperative, telling Jews not to act according to their plain meaning.

Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn, “The Angst Over Annihilating Amalek”, The Jewish Week (10 January 2014), 45.

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“Young people need to have immersion in meaningful, joyful Jewish life as early as possible”

The Jewish community is doing remarkable work on campus. Jewish groups of the left, right and center are investing tremendous resources to bring a diversity of opinion and Israel education to campus. If students are still unengaged, uneducated and uncommitted Jewishly, it’s only because the college years are too late to start.
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The young people who are the Jewish leaders on campus did not emerge overnight. They come from homes that value formal and informal Jewish education. They share a common language and common experiences that strengthen their sense of belonging to a global community and a historical people. Young people need to have immersion in meaningful, joyful Jewish life as early as possible.

Jeff Rubin, “It’s Jewish Education, Stupid”, The Jewish Week (10 January 2014), 28.

“…today, the rabbi’s position as a consultant on halachic matters is not very relevant”

…today, the rabbi’s position as a consultant on halachic matters is not very relevant. How many people turn to rabbis with questions about kashrut? Today rabbis are being asked to solve totally different problems: husband-wife or parent-child relationships, and sometimes also issues of faith. As such, the rabbi, who is not a trained marriage counselor, psychologist or philosopher, is forced to answer them. Consequently, nowadays rabbis are, unfortunately, dealing mainly with issues for which they have not been properly trained, and rarely are they dealing with those areas for which they did receive the proper training.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, “The Rabbis of Today“, JPost.com (9 January 2014).

What Edgar Bronfman loved in the Babylonian Talmud

A devout non-believer, Edgar said his favorite book was the Babylonian Talmud, whose hero is not God but the argumentative and cunning human scholar. The paradigm of the Talmudic scholar requires a rigorous knowledge of foundational texts and a sharp wit, mixed with a healthy dose of competitiveness, a thirst for justice, an appreciation of one’s own fallibility… and a great sense of humor.

Rabbi Mishael Zion and Rebecca Voorwinde, “Edgar M. Bronfman: A Modern Talmudic Jew”, The Jewish Week (10 January 2014), 29.

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Ordained rabbis were rare in America before the mid-19th century

Ordained rabbis were rare before mid-century. The first arrived in Baltimore, in 1840, and even after they began to come over from Europe, congregations frequently used laymen or minimally trained leaders for the basic ritual services, such as reading the liturgy, providing music for worship, and chanting the Scriptures, as well as for running the synagogue or supervising the dietary regulations (especially for meat). When rabbis (or, as they were sometimes called, especially when they were not ordained, ministers or reverends) cantors (hazzanim), whether trained or not, were hired by these reforming congregations, they were usually given, in writing, the synagogue’s expectations about how they would lead (reading or singing or both) the liturgy, how frequently they would deliver sermons, in which language they would deliver them, their obligations with respect to life-cycle events such as confirmation ceremonies, weddings, and funerals (including compensation), their responsibilities with the choir, which ages they would teach, and even the precise order of the liturgy. At Rodeph Shalom, for example, the Ritual Committee instructed the service leader to begin the Friday-evening service with L’chu n’ran’na (Come let us sing) and then gave sentence-by-sentence orders. Shaarai Shomayim, a small synagogue in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (with an 1855 German constitution), hired its first ordained rabbi, Morris Ungerleider, in 1884 as “Chasan, Minister, Teacher, and Schochet.” Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, in 1857, hired the Reverend S. Berman as “chasan, Shochet, and Shammes,” and twelve years later it sought someone who “can perform the duties of Chasan, teacher, and Shochet,” is “capable of teaching in the Hebrew, German, and English languages,” and could deliver sermons. The larger the congregation, that is, the greater the budget, the more likely these roles would be divided up among a rabbi, a cantor, a ritual slaughterer, a teacher, and a sexton.

In Atlanta, Abraham Jaffa, shochet, mohel, and hazan – slaughtered chickens in the rear of his home. Washington Hebrew Congregation, in the district of Columbia, hired two salaried officials in 1867, one to serve as lecturer and the other to serve as hazan or reader and teacher. In 1871, the congregation replaced the two two with one man, Michael Goldberg, “reader and teacher,” and explained to him that it no longer wanted sermons. He was to “read” the service, “keep” the religious school (twice during the week and on Sunday), and “educate” a choir, but he was not to preach during the Sabbath worship service. At the same time as the congregation was steadily introducing reforms, it returned to a centuries-old European tradition of eschewing weekly sermons and, instead, hiring someone to preach on occasional festivals and holy days.

Marc Lee Raphael, The Synagogue in America: A Short History (New York & London: New York University Press, 2011), 35-36.

“If “remembering the Holocaust” is an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, then it follows that a substantial core of Jewish identity is primarily defined by heinous acts committed by Nazis upon Jews”

If “remembering the Holocaust” is an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, then it follows that a substantial core of Jewish identity is primarily defined by heinous acts committed by Nazis upon Jews. In a tragic twist of history, it is the enemy who now writes the story of Jewish identity and who determines its emphases.

Perhaps even more regrettably, this “essential” feature of being Jewish is characterized by gaping loss, appalling destruction, and unremitting sadness. Hence, according to the popular view, the most pivotal component of Jewishness actually emerged post-1933 in the form of a horrendous cataclysm that was fashioned by others; and Jewishness is devoted to recalling this nightmare so that nobody should forget what happened.
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Let there be no doubt: it is vitally important to remember the Holocaust and its lessons. But it is also vitally important to acknowledge that remembering the Holocaust is no more essential to being Jewish than remembering 9-11 is essential to being American. Both memories are of great consequence, but neither shapes the “essential meaning” of the nation.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Schiff, “Remembering Our Identity”, eJewish Philanthropy (2 January 2014).

“Neither the brief exegetical comment nor the longer midrashic proem are imaginable as actual sermons delivered in synagogues”

Rabbis would, of course, also occasionally address the public, whether on the street, in the market or synagogue. But it is unlikely that they did so by using the literary forms which are transmitted in the written documents. Neither the brief exegetical comment nor the longer midrashic proem are imaginable as actual sermons delivered in synagogues. Even the parables usually presuppose a certain amount of Biblical knowledge which the ordinary person is unlikely to have possessed. They may have served rabbis to clarify certain aspects of biblical verses during the oral instruction of their student rather than providing moral and theological instruction to the populace. Apophthegmata or pronouncement stories memorialized rabbis’ wit and wisdom. Again, later generations of students would have been most interested in transmitting and preserving such stories about their teachers to make these teachers immortal and to maintain the reputation of their “schools”.

Catherine Hezser, “Form-Criticism of Rabbinic Literature”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martinez, Didier Pollefeyt and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 108.

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The salaries of rabbis in America in the 1890s and 1900s depended upon denomination

While the status of women was quite similar from branch to branch, the salaries of rabbis were not. Generally, with very few exceptions, rabbis of Reform synagogues received salaries, paid monthly, which provided a reasonable standard of living for them and their families. In contrast, rabbis of Orthodox synagogues everywhere struggled to make ends meet. Many of these rabbis, in the 1890s and early 1900s, earned less than $1,000 a year in salary, and they were forced to sometimes collect the money themselves and to charge Jews for each rabbinical service. They frequently supplemented their small salary by overseeing kashruth (especially supervising animal slaughter); serving as an arbitrator in questions of Jewish law; performing marriages, divorces, and other life-cycle ceremonies; selling wine for ritual purposes (including later, during Prohibition, legally, because of provisions that allowed the sale of wine for religious use); and selling collections of their sermons. For example, Rabbi Gedaliah Silverstone, of Orthodox Tifereth Israel in Washington, D.C., claimed to have sold 4,000 copies total of three of his privately printed books. Rabbi Abraham Schapiro, of Portsmouth, Ohio’s Orthodox B’nai Abraham, was paid $600 annually in 1896 (he was offered $500 additional salary if he would close the bookshop he owned for supplemental income on Jewish holy days), while Rabbi Abraham S. Braude of Chicago, in 1916, received the same salary from his synagogue. Baltimore’s Chizuk Amuno hired Rabbi Henry W. Schneeberger in 1876 at $1,200 annually; when he sought a raise after nine years, his appeal was rejected (“no way of increasing revenue: he was told); after sixteen years of service, the trustees raised his salary to $1,600, but, when there were “not enough” funds, they reduced it to $1,500. In contrast, when Portland, Oregon’s Reform Beth Israel hired the newly minted rabbi Stephen S. Wise in 1899, they paid him $5,000 a year.

Marc Lee Raphael, The Synagogue in America: A Short History (New York & London: New York University Press, 2011), 54-55.