The Halakhic Spring - Jews Are Doin' It For Themselves

There was an interesting article in Haaretz this weekend about kosher restaurants that are abandoning their Kashrut licences due to their opposition to stringent rabbinic-authority standards, their high fees or simply kashrut inspectors who aren't qualified to do their jobs. These places remain loyal to kashrut but not to the rabbinic certification. Let me quote a few lines:

The Jerusalem Rabbinate requires restaurants that want a kashrut certificate to use only hydroponic produce, commonly known as "Gush Katif," because it's bug-free.
"You can't work with this lettuce," said restaurant owner Shai Gini. "It's not tasty, and you need three or four Gush Katif lettuces for every ordinary head of lettuce I'd buy in the [open-air] market." 

I have written in the past about the high price of increasingly stringent kashrut standards by which "kosher food is now more kosher than ever, and being eaten by fewer Jews!" One of the interesting observations in the article pointed out that ultimately, real kashrut in a restaurant relies on trust. Without the sense that the proprietor is genuinely committed to enforcing kashruth in his restaurant, anyone can betray the system when the supervisors back is turned!

Carousela's Vadai, who is Haredi, said he was disgusted that he was paying for supervision, but "no one ever came to check" his cafe. Many restaurant owners have said the same for years: A kashrut certificate is no guarantee that the restaurant is actually kosher, since at best, inspectors usually make only brief daily visits. Just last week, the Makor Rishon newspaper published a report detailing numerous cases in which the rabbinate declined to take away a restaurant's kashrut certificate - which, after all, provides it with income - even after blatantly nonkosher food was found...."Before there were certificates, kashrut was based on trust," said Topolino's Gini. "But the [rabbinate] system, like any bureaucratic system, always needs to invent more and more rules to strengthen its control over its community. There's a competition over who is stricter, and the customers lose."

Now, I do have worries about the kashrut in these eateries, beacuse, after all, vegetables do need to be properly checked and kashruth supervision does provide a certain impetus. But if we can move beyond the specific restaurant and kashruth issue, it was this paragraph that really caught my eye:

People familiar with the phenomenon say it is part of a more general trend: Israelis who care about observing Jewish law, including kashrut, but want nothing to do with the official rabbinate. Other aspects of this trend include weddings, funerals and even conversions in which the rabbinate is uninvolved.

This is quite a fascinating trend of a growing empowerment within the younger religious-zionist population in Israel, and around the world. It is happening in non-orthodox circles as well. Examples of this are independent minyanim, amongst them the Shira Chadasha movement, self-proclaimed as Orthodox, but unrecognised by most Orthodox rabbis! One finds non-rabbinic Jews making halakhic decisions for themselves without consulting with Rabbis - about birth control, hair covering and personal standards of dress, but also about communal issues that would have been under the purview of a Rabbi. Recently I have observed growing numbers of visitors to Israel for the chagim (holidays) confidently making their own decision of how many days yomtov to keep (1, 2, 1 and half) and many making their choice independently rather than under direct instruction of their Rabbi. We are talking about halakhic practices that are emerging from committed, educated young observant Jews. Journalist, Yair Ettinger wrote a series last summer about how religious Israelis are sidestepping the Rabbinate on marriage, divorce and burial, and any number of modern-orthodox weddings that I have attended recently  have included creative elements, especially as regards inclusion of women. 

I sense that this is a growing movement, and I think we can point to a few roots of this phenomenon. To start, today many young Jews find themselves highly educated and textually proficient. Today's generation are far more knowledgeable than in the past. In Israel many have spent five years or more in post high-school Yeshivot and Judaic university programs. From the US and UK, many have spent significant time in text learning environments. These people understand how the texts work and are confident that they can reach independent conclusions on the basis of those sacred texts. At times, their feeling is that mainstream halakhic practice fails to reflect their own values, and in search of greater authenticity, they decide, quite autonomously, to act independently.

In addition, this is reflective of a shift in the modern zeitgeist at large to a more empowered environment. I say this in regards to the Facebook, or social media revolution which has given greater leverage to rank and file individuals, from the "cottage-cheese protest" here in Israel last summer, to the Arab Spring.. The sense is that in today's world, the average citizen should exercise his or her voice. Furthermore, with the rise of the internet, expert information is merely a click away. In previous eras, expertise was rare, guarded, and out of reach. Nowadays, every person feels that they can become something of an expert, reading up on the topic at hand. This allows individuals to feel more informed and more capable of independent decision making.

But it goes deeper than that. Let me illustrate with a story. Some years ago, my son went to visit a lung specialist for a mild asthma problem. The doctor asked him a series of questions, like, "If you play football, are you short of breath?" or , "How many times a month do you need to take your inhaler?" At the end, he posed the question: "Well, do you think that you need to be taking your inhaler daily then?" And my son, hesitantly and rather bemused, responded, "um ... um ... that's what we've come to ask you?!"

I find that this pattern repeats itself in many fields. A generation ago, the investment manager would decide for his client which fund to invest in. Now he gives you a menu of options with the upside and downside of each , and you decide.

The school doesn't instruct a child what to matriculate in. They discuss the options, and expect the student together with his parents to make the final decision.

Expertise doesn't have the same authoritative veneer as it once did, and many questions are thrown back to the individual. Whether we have lost faith in a single correct answer in a post-modernist world, or whether the experts are simply afraid of getting it wrong, the average person makes his or her own life decisions.

And similarly in the religious sphere. The Israeli Religious-Zionist world, once a homogeneous identity, has refracted into a huge number of sub-groups, each with their particular nuance and emphasis, dress, songs and venerated leaders. Whether you are described as Rav Kook, Carlebach, a settler, an academic, whether your prime goal is professional success, if you are dati-lite, feminist, left-wing, gay, Breslev, and what have you, all these and more constitute the myriad strands that build what is now an individualized identity. Most Religious-Zionist people don't vote for religious parties today. People are defining themselves in new combinations, constructing their own unique identities, unafraid to practise an individualised lifestyle, and that includes all aspects of their Judaism. Let me stress, these people are not lax or disengaged from their Jewish observance; they are highly engaged, but precisely this new confidence means that frequently they are not looking for rabbinic supervision or approval. This is as true in Hampstead and on the Upper-West-Side as in Katamon and Baka.

And so we are facing a new reality. Rabbis wake up! This is where the people are. Do we know how to provide a Judaism that will be attractive to this generation? Is this a blessing, an opportunity, or a danger to Judaism? Where will this lead us?

Comments are welcome below....

A Book Library in a Digital Age

I love my book collection. We have books in almost every room of our home, and they give me never-ending pleasure. 

On a Shabbat visit of my yeshiva students, they began to discuss whether it was worth accumulating books in a digital age. After all, most of our music and our photographs, our documentation and correspondence, has all shifted to the computer or hand-held e-device. It is worth asking why we still hold on to books in this day and age. Will they become obsolete?

I have an exceptionally strong attachment to my library. My well-worn Mishna Kahati sits next to to my Mishna Berura with my carefully written notes and highlighting. My Shas (Talmud) was a gift from my grandfather z"l for my bar-mitzva. A shelf of Rav Kook's philosophy and letters sits adjacent to a similar shelf of the writings of Rav Soloveitchik. Israeli poetry, contemporary fiction, books of my mentors Rav Amital and Rav Lichtenstein, classic Responsa, Bible commentary, new and old. Interesting combinations: Scholem and Shagar; Mandela and Scharansky, the Rambam alongside the Kuzari, Louis Jacobs with Rabbi Jakobovitz, and so forth. My library is my world. Every volume is a friend. Some volumes have shared deep and touching moments with me, others continue to accompany me on a daily basis, some will always be distant acquaintances, and there are others that I have yet to converse with, but I am happy for the presence of each and every one of them. This one I bought at Book Week, that one has a great autograph, another I picked out of a Jerusalem recycling dumpster that lay open, this is the massekhet that I am currently learning, and my battered Tanakh has over twenty-five years of mileage behind it.

This paean to my library was stimulated by an eloquent piece by Leon Wieseltier that I read today (link h/t Bookjed) . It elegantly and accurately articulates the perennial need for the authentic, old fashioned books; the hold-in-your-hand, have-on-the-shelf type. I couldn't say it better. Enjoy! :

THE LIBRARY, like the book, is under assault by the new technologies, which propose to collect and to deliver texts differently, more efficiently, outside of space and in a rush of time. If ever I might find a kind word for the coming post-bibliographical world it would be this week, when I have to pack up the thousands of volumes in my office and reassemble them a short distance away—they are so heavy, they take up so much room, and so on; but even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. And a book is more than a text: even if every book in my library is on Google Books, my library is not on Google Books. A library has a personality, a temperament. (Sometimes a dull one.) Its books show the scars of use and the wear of need. They are defaced—no, ornamented—by markings and notes and private symbols of assent and dissent, and these vandalisms are traces of the excitations of thought and feeling, which is why they are delightful to discover in old books: they introduce a person. There is something inhuman about the pristinity of digital publication. It lacks fingerprints. But the copy of a book that is on my shelf is my copy. It is unlike any other copy, it has been individuated; and even those books that I have not yet opened—unread books are an essential element of a library—were acquired for the further cultivation of a particular admixture of interests and beliefs, and every one of them will have its hour. The knowledge that qualifies one to be one’s own librarian is partly self-knowledge. The richness, or the incoherence, of a library is the richness, or the incoherence, of the self.

Educating in Post-Moral World

I came across a recent sermon by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of KJ and Ramaz. (Hat-tip Kavannah blog). Here is the most sensational segment:

And lest you think that this phenomenon is out there and has nothing to do with your world and my world, I actually found this problem this September in my sex ethics class in the 10th Grade at Ramaz. I gave the students an assignment to read an article about something quite grotesque: it described a group of Jewish married couples who gather periodically and engage in what is popularly called swinging, that is, spouse swapping. A sort of round robin sexual orgy. I asked them how many of you think that this is wrong? And only a few students raised their hands. Astonished, I asked them how could they not think that this was wrong. I got answers like: “well, since it is all out in the open and everybody knows that everybody is doing it, there is nothing fundamentally wrong. No one is cheating on a spouse because the spouse was also swinging.”

I said to them: “what about the seventh commandment – do not commit adultery.” One student answered that these people are really not religious. What the students didn’t seem to understand was that whether they were religious or not, there is a moral code that is rooted in the Bible which defines for us what is right and what is wrong. The problem is that when pressed, many of the students simply said that if it feels good and if it feels right then who am I to judge? I told them I wasn’t suggesting that they go over to somebody who is engaged in swinging and chastise them, but that they had to have an opinion on this practice. They looked at me with some disbelief. Now, please understand, these are good kids. I don’t for one minute believe that they will engage in this kind of debauchery when they are married adults. This is not related to what they are doing or will do; this is simply an indication that these children are not thinking in moral categories and that they feel that it is somehow politically incorrect to judge another’s behavioral choices. They are picking up from society in general a reluctance to judge.

I confess that I was so disturbed about their reaction that I spent much of the course, which is actually ending next week, coming back to this subject again and again in order to show them how far they have wandered intellectually from the religious sources in which they believe. These are children who follow the Torah which tells them to keep Shabbat, Kashrut and Yom Tov and to pray. They all do these things. But they don’t seem to understand that the same Torah is the source of our moral values, and morality is not simply a matter of opinion. God gave the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai not the Ten Suggestions ! Morality is not personal; it is ultimately ordained by a higher authority. (See entire sermon here.)

Let me say at the outset that I share Rabbi Lookstein's concerns and his broad perspective. But this sermon made me think, both as an educator, and as an individual.

Are things as bad as Rabbi Lookstein thinks? In a post-modernist world, surely, the only categorical wrong is to harm another person, against his or her will, or worse, to coerce another individual. Murder and thievery are wrong because they hurt other people. But does this mean that we have absolutely surrendered our traditional sense of  a moral code? Have other educators experienced this helplessness in addressing ethical discussions? I meet many teenagers who are idealists, who are passionate about moral positions and know how to argue their case. How much has this reality penetrated?

It has made me wonder about the degree to which this mode of thinking has penetrated my moral sense. With the shifting moral sands of our contemporary world, both general and Jewish, a sometimes wonder about the changes that go on in my mind. As modern people we are also consumers of this ethical climate. When should we be judgmental and when is it wrong? In a wold which gives voice to all individuals to argue their case and to explain their motivations, do we lose a sense of  good and bad?

And is the Torah the sole source of moral values? What happens when Torah or Halakha seem to preach one way, and society sees things another way. And what happens when our instincts say that society has a good point. (An example might be, egalitarianism.)

So, feel free to read Rabbi Lookstein and to add your comments below.

Jerusalem Graffiti

Yesterday, I was in the centre of town (Jerusalem.) I saw this graffiti. Whereas I generally resent the defacement of the city, these were posted only on temporary barriers around building sites, and I do enjoy graffiti which imparts Talmudic wisdom. Certainly, many people could do with learning this lesson.

Beauty - A terrible basis for marriage!

I am currently teaching a course at Pardes entitled, "War and Peace." No! It isn't about Tolstoy. It is an examination of the morality of war in Sefer Devarim.

This is taught on the Community Education program at Pardes which means that the class is exceedingly heterogeneous. In my class of 20 students this week, we had two 20 year old WUJS students, a 40 year old tour guide, a retired president of a prestigious university, and two fully participating students who were over 90 years old! The beautiful thing about having mature adult students is the life-wisdom they they bring with them, and a perspective of experience that comes with a long life. As Devarim 32 tells us:

Remember the days of old;
consider the generations long past.
Ask your father and he will tell you,
your elders, and they will explain to you.

We were studying the case of the אשת יפת תואר - the beautiful captive woman. The Torah legislates an entire procedure for a man who sees a beautiful woman amongst the prisoners of war and wishes to marry her. There are serious questions of morality here that relate to human rights, to intermarriage, assimilation, and so forth. (Read more on the topic here.)

One elderly man - he must be at least 85 - raised his hand, quite agitated. He objected to the entire discussion:

"I am bothered by the Ramban," he said; "He keeps talking about beauty as the basis of attraction between this man and this woman. But doesn't he know - beauty is a terrible basis for a marriage. Beauty fades and is fleeting; marriage is based on so much more!"

Everyone in the class laughed. The wonderful thing about this man was the straightforward, almost naive, simple way in which he said it, with a "childish" innocence. Only after everyone laughed did he realise that what he had said could sound funny. It was if he was unaware that we live in a society that is youth-intoxicated, botox-injected and obsessed with external appearances. For him, it was most preposterous to base a relationship on good-looks, which, as this wrinkled, stooped, wonderfully cheerful and happy man knows, dissipate and diminish with the years. Love is based upon something deeper.

In Hebrew, the word "זקן" means "old" but also "wise." - How true that is!

Religious sensitivities and Israeli Media

I rarely watch TV. At home, we don't have cable/sattelite, and so we have to make do with internet and DVD's. The only live Israeli TV that I encounter is while I am running at the gym.

I have to say that it is makes rather dismal viewing. The morning shows are quite boring. and the evening shows tend to be a variety of news, shallow reality shows, and "talk shows" (read "shout shows.") I don't know how our TV fares on the world scale, but it is pretty mind numbing.

But worse than that, our TV truly represents only a fraction of the population. Generally the anchor people are secular Israelis, generally Ashkenazi, thin, good looking (the women). Where are the Russians, the Ethiopians, the Haredim, the Arabs. I figure that Israeli TV represents about 20% of the Israeli population! (Yes, I do see Sivan Rahab-Meir on the morning show, and I know that there is Rav Beni Lau on Friday afternoons but that hardly appeals to the mainstream... anyway, who watches ch.1 anyhow?)

So imagine my surprise while running on the treadmill (Thursday morning) to see two interesting surprises.

The first was Avri Gilad, who is a great guy. He is funny and ecologically sensitive, and I like his atttudes on Galei Tzahal. He was interviewing the producer of a reality show called "The race to the Million" where couples do all sorts of challenges all over the world, and I guess that there is a NIS million prize. Apparently one of the challenges, in China, was to eat a concoction of all sorts of rather disgustung creatures; lizards and bats etc. Avri Gilad - not a Kippa wearing Jew, but clearly a proud one - challenged her again and again: "But we are Jews! Jews subjected themselves to inquisition rather than succumb to eating Non-Kosher, how can you do this?" He was quite relentless. The producer on the other hand, seemed unfazed and totally didn't grasp his concern. Anyhow, it was heartwarming to see how some secular people have an unabashed and deep Jewish sensitivity.

The other piece on TV was this ad for the cellphone company Celcom.



It depicts a girl from a religious kibbutz/moshav who has clearly moved in a rebellious direction, coming home to join her family. Again, even the scripwriters are clearly acknowledging an understanding of the complexities of religious and traditional families and their place in mainstream Israeli society.

Jewish tradition is growing in the mainstream media. We are seeing more kippot, more head-covering on women. This year, numerous leading music artists have recorded tracks and even entire albums, based upon Jewish themes. To my mind, this is just the start of a revival both of religion, and also the openness to see religious Jews enter the mainstream.

About time.

Yom Atzmaut Sameach!

Can we Create a Tolerant Society in Israel?

Here is a topic that has been troubling me for a number of weeks. It started with this video.



It is pretty gruesome watching. It shows Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint taunting a kneeling bound and blindfolded Palestinian. They are doing it for fun. I watch the video and I am embarrassed. How can our soldiers humiliate and torture a fellow human being. These people have crossed a dangerous line.

So, I was watching this video and I showed it to my wife. I remarked, "look what happens when you have absolute power over another individual!" To which she replied: "It's not about power. These kids are just plain rascist."

My feeling was that when you put 19 yr olds in that powerful situation, there is bound to be abuse."The Occupation Corrupts!" - so goes the slogan, and I believe that it has great potential to do so. I know that i will be talking to my son as he nears enlistment age as to the respect to be given to any human being.

But my wife had a point. Is it just plain old Racism?

which brings me to the next point. Obama! I, like many others, was delighted when Obama won. I won't go into all the reasons but we all realised that this was Historic. After slavery, after seperate busses and park benches, a black man would be the President of the United States. what a victory for tolerance and equal rights. what a success for the civil rights movement! But it took years! It took over 100 years to get that process happening. It took marches and protests and legislation and lobbying, and positive discrimination and television to create black heroes (and presidents - see 24 for example which I imagine DID influence people that a black man could be president.)

Now, lets get back to Israel. we know that Israel is not an equal society. Arab schools are horribly underfunded. Some villages don't have running water. Arabs are not represented in government ministries and offices. It is certainly true that in Hospitals, Arab doctors and nurses are well represented and Arab patients get exactly the same treatment as Jews. We ARE an equal society! And yet, it is clear that Arabs have a way to go before we treat them on equal ground.

And now I am conflicted. Because on the one hand, I do have to be honest that I do NOT want to see the Arabs gaining absolute equality here. See this piece from Daniel Gordis in this week's Jpost (article link):

"...while Israel must absolutely strive to make race a non-issue (even among Jews, as with Ethiopians, for example) and to accord Israeli Arabs a significantly greater piece of the pie, we ought to be honest: If Israel one day were to have a Knesset in which a majority of the members were Arab, Israel will have failed in its purpose. ISRAEL WAS established as the sole country in which the Jews could flourish as only a majority culture..."

I will add more. If Israeli Arabs do make it to equality , the intermarriage rate will shoot up here. Is that what we want? Do we want a country in which Arab culture is absolutely equal to Jewish culture?

So can we really do both? Can we try to give genuine opportunity and equality to Arabs, stamp out Racism and bigotry and separation? Or, if we wish to remain a Jewish society will we only go so far? After all, the American model created genuine equality, embraced multi-ethnic marriage, dreamed of an American president. Do we? I think not! The American model took 100 years. (Did you hear Obama as he spoke in his victory speech about Ann Nixon-Cooper, the 106 yr old lady?) Do we have 50 years?

But if we don't do that, are we destined to a future of soldiers taunting Arabs?

How does an Israeli-Arab feel when we talk about the Arab birthrate as a "demographic threat" to the existence of the Jewish state. Would they be wrong to imply that we effectively resent every arab baby born! Is that Racism? - even left wing MK's talk that way.

Neither extremes are acceptable. Is the middle ground a possibility? A Jewish state which is still Jewish but absolutely tolerant?

Even European countries after 9/11 and after the bombings in London began to examine whether their Islamic minorities were a threat to the hegemony and tradition of their cultural heritages. On the one hand is equality, tolerance and multiculturalism. On the other hand is the right of a country to continue to exist - culturally - as its majority population wish it to exist. In many European countries, the very raising of the question was so controversial that it simply could not be discussed. But I feel that this is what we are facing.

The calls are growing to giving Arabs full representation in Israel, calls for equality and full acceptance; co-existence, it is called.

Can the Jewish State afford that?

But if we don't are we condemned to a continuation of ugly Racism?

Oy!

UPDATE
I would just like to add a comment here. after I posted this, I realised that despite giving this much thought, there may be some naieve thinking here. after all, I imagine that despite Obama's election, there are still many rascist pockets of American society. Likewise, many Israelis ARE respectful and tolerant, and isolated incidents cannot be brought to prove the rule. And yet despite that, there is a feeling here that Arabs sometimes get the thin end of the wedge.

Much of this has to do with the "conflict". Some say that Israeli arabs will never be able to feel part of Israel nor us Israelis trust them until there is a resolution of the Palestinian conflict. In the meantime we are torn between seeing them as full citizens and seeing them as a fifth column of sorts. They are torn between Israel where they want to live and their Palestinian cousins, and certainly, there is evidencxe of radicalisation amongst Israeli Arabs.

I am not looking to be simplistic here. Once again I reiterate... coming from a Western culture and mindset that celebrates tolerance and equality, the question of how to instill these values and actualise them here in Israel seems far more complex and fraught with difficulty. Sometimes its difficult to even know precisely what we wish to achieve.

Global Financial Crisi and Our Values

Everyone is talking about the Global Financial Crisis. But it didn't come from nowhere. It comes from a consumer credit culture, a materialistic have-it-all culture. But is anyone talking about that? After the bailout plan, and after the new regulatory system, we will go back to supersized executive slaries and the traders will get back into their Porsches on the way to the gold course! Is anyone looking to examine the core values here?

Well I found someone who is! This is in todays Times - a little preachy, but nonetheless good to hear a moral voice in the madness. (link)

Here is the article:



From The Times. October 30, 2008 .
Ben Okri

The crisis affecting the economy is a crisis of our civilisation. The values that we hold dear are the very same that got us to this point. The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. A house is on fire; we see flames coming through the windows on the second floor and we think that that is where the fire is raging. In fact it is raging elsewhere.

For decades poets and artists have been crying in the wilderness about the wasteland, the debacle, the apocalypse. But apparent economic triumph has deafened us to these warnings. Now it is necessary to look at this crisis as a symptom of things gone wrong in our culture.

Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. Success justifies greed, and greed justifies indifference to fellow human beings. We thought that our actions affected only our own sphere but the way that appalling decisions made in America have set off a domino effect makes it necessary to bring new ideas to the forefront of our civilisation. The most important is that we are more connected than we suspected. A visible and invisible mesh links economies and cultures around the globe to the great military and economic centres.

The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years. It wouldn't do just to improve the banking system - we need to redesign the whole edifice.

There ought to be great cries in the land, great anger. But there is a strange silence. Why? Because we are all implicated. We have drifted to this dark unacceptable place together. We took the success of our economy as proof of the rightness of its underlying philosophy. We are now at a crossroad. Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but on how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.

I strayed into the oldest church in Cheltenham not long ago and, with no intention in mind, opened the Bible. The passage that met my eyes was from Genesis, about Joseph and the seven lean years of famine. Something struck me in that passage. It was the tranquillity of its writing, the absence of hysteria.

They got through because someone had a vision before the event. What we need now more than ever is a vision beyond the event, a vision of renewal.

As one looks over the landscape of contemporary events, one thing becomes very striking. The people to whom we have delegated decision-making in economic matters cannot be unaware of the consequences. Those whose decisions have led to the economic collapse reveal to us how profoundly lacking in vision they were. This is not surprising. These were never people of vision. They are capable of making decisions in the economic sphere, but how these decisions relate to the wider world was never part of their mental make-up. This is a great flaw of our world.

To whom do we turn for guidance in our modern world? Teachers have had their scope limited by the prevailing fashions of education. Artists have become more appreciated for scandal than for important revelations about our lives. Writers are entertainers, provocateurs or- if truly serious - more or less ignored. The Church speaks with a broken voice. Politicians are more guided by polls than by vision. We have disembowelled our oracles. Anybody who claims to have something to say is immediately suspect.

So now that we have taken a blowtorch to the idea of sages, guides, bards, holy fools, seers, what is left in our cultural landscape? Scientific rationality has proved inadequate to the unpredictabilities of the times. It is enlightening that the Pharoah would not have saved Egypt from its seven lean years with the best economic advisers to hand.

This is where we step out into a new space. What is most missing in the landscape of our times is the sustaining power of myths that we can live by.

If we need a new vision for our times, what might it be? A vision that arises from necessity or one that orientates us towards a new future? I favour the latter. It is too late to react only from necessity. One of our much neglected qualities is our creative ability to reshape our world. Our planet is under threat. We need a new one-planet thinking.

We must bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living. The unhappiness in so many lives ought to tell us that success alone is not enough. Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy.

If we look at alcoholism rates, suicide rates and our sensation addiction, we must conclude that this banishment of higher things from the garden has not been a success. The more the society has succeeded, the more its heart has failed.

Everywhere parents are puzzled as to what to do with their children. Everywhere the children are puzzled as to what to do with themselves. The question everywhere is, you get your success and then what?

We need a new social consciousness. The poor and the hungry need to be the focus of our economic and social responsibility.

Every society has a legend about a treasure that is lost. The message of the Fisher King is as true now as ever. Find the grail that was lost. Find the values that were so crucial to the birth of our civilisation, but were lost in the intoxication of its triumphs.

We can enter a new future only by reconnecting what is best in us, and adapting it to our times. Education ought to be more global; we need to restore the pre-eminence of character over show, and wisdom over cleverness. We need to be more a people of the world.

All great cultures renew themselves by accepting the challenges of their times, and, like the biblical David, forge their vision and courage in the secret laboratory of the wild, wrestling with their demons, and perfecting their character. We must transform ourselves or perish.

Our Global Shrinking World

The other day, I took my students on a class trip. As we entered the Israel Supreme Court one of the student's cellphone's rang. It was her Mom calling from the U.S. And I was struck by a certain irony.

On the one hand we have become global. Worldwide travel has expanded as once "exotic" travel locations have become rather ordinary tourist destinations. We can reach other countries and continents at the click of our mouse. We can talk from any place in the universe. One would imagine that this would expand our horizons, widen our vision, give us the opportunity to explore and experience beyond our home upbringing, the community and lifestyle in which we were raised so that we might become truly global.

But in fact, the opposite has frequently become true. Globalisation has allowed people to closet themselves inside a small comfortable compartment and not to encounter anything new, challenging, different, "other". My student in Israel doesn't necessarily talk to Israelis. She walks down Emek Refaim listening to her iPod, talking to her circle of American friends on her cellphone. She barely sees the streets around her. She spends her evenings watching American TV shows that she downloads on the internet. One can keep up with the baseball at home. Why attend an Israeli Basketball game? One can have the music that one likes; Why get to know Israeli music? One can read the NYTimes; Why read Maariv or Yediot? And this is true all the way around the world. A Muslim child in Birmingham will grow up watching Al Jazeera instead of the BBC. People walk through the streets and ignore everyone around as they communicate on their cellphones. I can pick up my email anywhere in the Globe, can take comfort in my favourite websites! I never leave home; my parents are always at the other end of the phone line!

I cannot help but feel that this is horribly regrettable. We are supposed to interact with our surroundings. To integrate, to be challenged, to watch and learn, to experience that which is different as it challenges our assumptions about what is "normal" and "right," as we can connect with people who live around us, recognizing them as people, embracing the landscape - urban, human, natural, national - around us. We are supposed to leave home and express our independence and learn how to fend for ourselves. I have always hated walkmans etc. as they cut me off from the environment around me... I resent the virtual reality that earphones thrust me into. And that is without even stepping beyond my immediate environment. Of course this is far more extreme when we travel. How can someone reside in another country without truly engaging in the most basic cultural building block – a foreign language?

I intend to write a follow up to this email with specific attention to Israel Yeshiva Year-Programs. But this is enough for now.

I'll summarise. The selfsame technology that facilitates our ability to extend our global reach as we can see further a-field mysteriously allows us to cocoon ourselves inwards in a cosy familiar environment which eclipses challenge and self-expansion. That is very unfortunate indeed.

Lotto

The Israeli National Lottery (Mifal Hapayis) provides a tremendous number of services to the wider community. From Community centres to health clinics; from hospitals to special grants to soldiers, from school programs to funding day care centres for the elderly. Every city has many buildings that are dedicated by the Lottery. (Little Alon Shevut has at least three!)

All well and good. Many Thanks!

And yet, the media is swamped by advertising for the Lottery. Today my six-year-old was singing along: "Lotto, Lotto, Lotto, Mi Haba BaLotto!" as I listened to the enticing radio commercial telling me just how easily one can become a millionaire. (My 3 yr old sings it too!) The orange Payis booths are in every mall and every shopping street. The ads are on the radio and even on National TV which legally has no commercials will broadcast ads for the Lotto.

So where is my point? I think that in a country in which many people are rather impoverished, where gambling and casinos are illegal, I simply do not understand why I am being battered at all times by a slick advertising campaign aimed at getting me to gamble! Is gambling just fine when it goes to charity? No! gambling is a problem because poor people with a miserable present and dreams of a better future squander the money that they do not have and get into debt by risking their money on a whim. That is precisely what happens with Lotto, Totto, Chish-Gad and all the other products. I was in a taxi recently whose driver told me that he spends over 500 shekel weekly on the payis. i have educated friends who are subscribers to the weekly draw of lottto! I simply cannot fathom why we turn a blind eye to this legalised gambling?

And if you say: well it is a mild form, and it does so much public good, then, at least don't advertise it so regularly and so attractively. This hits precisely the poor sectors of the population. I resent the advertsising greatly and I think it should be seriously limited.

The Fate of the Ten Commandments

Sometimes in Western Societies, people like to think that morality is somehwat transcribed by the Ten Commandments. There is an impression that in broad terms civilised cultures accord with this classic of the Judeo-Christian tradition. (I have serious issues with that phrase, but for this argument, it works.)

So this week, as we read the Ten Commandments, I began to wonder which of the Ten Commandments is the least kept in contemporary society... and I am thinking in the broadest of senses.

So let us begin from the top. 1. Belief in God - At some level we could claim that society still believes in a God. Yes there is widespread atheism and skepticism, and yet "In God we trust" - polls during the '90s and '00s suggest that over 90% of Americans believe in God. So do a widespread majority of Israelis.

As for idolatry in the classic sense, it is all but absent in Western Society.
The topic of Blasphemy may have been raised with the Salman Rushdie scandal and also those Islamic cartoons in the Van Gogh incident. There is definitely a tension between free speech or artistic expression on the one hand, and religious views on the other. And yet good civilised society does attempt to be respectful to religion.

The Sabbath? well - Western society has embraced the notion of a weekend and it is encoded in many labour laws.

Parental Respect we shall return to.

Society subscribes to Thou shall not Kill , Steal, bear False Witness, in a broad sense.

And so now we come to the problem ones! I think that contemporary society has given 3 of the Ten Commandments a really raw deal. [Let me add that it is modern society in particular that has developed these problems. There were other problems 100 years ago, but these 3 were upkept in general society then.]

First, adultery. On the books we still accept fidelity in marriage. However, we all know that marriage has seriously been hit over the past fifty years. A student leader was recently telling me that amongst university and post-college age students it is a rarity to find a person who has not cheated on their boy/girlfriend. I am not talking about "hooking up" and random sexual partnerships but rather any sense of fidelity within a committed relationship. apparently it barely exists. Homosexuality is a legitimate life choice and a source of pride. Any Hollywood movie will assume that adultery is absolutely justified if one person is in a loveless marriage. All this amounts to a veritable obliteration of any sense of crime in association with adultery. In this dimension we have a contemporary ethic that is incredibly at varience with Torah values.

Maybe along with the breakdown of family in terms of the marital unit comes the lack of any sense of "honour your father and mother." Respect for, not to speak of obedience to parents has been seriously corroded over the past fifty years. Many factors are to be taken into account, way beyond my ability in this post. But no one can doubt that "honour" in the traditional sense, is almost lost in a modern concept. (Many have documented that contemporary parents seek to be their childrens' friends rather than their parents, moral guides or disciplinarians. It is not simply children who don't have "Respect" for parents. Parents do not anticipate that the parent-child relationship be a hierarchical relationship. They want it to be horizontal, casual, intimate - an association of equals, of friends.)

But one virtue that seems to be an unbelievable casualty of contemporary capitalistic consumer culture is the notion of "Lo Tachmod" - Thou Shalt Not Covet - the notion of envy, and desiring things that belong to others. In the '80s Gordon Gecko proclaimed that "Greed is Good" and we haven't looked back. We have an insatiable consumer appetite fueled by slick images and marketing strategies that help us to fell unsatisfied with our lives if they are without this product or that "look." We are victims of an enormous commercial machine that charges ferociously in order to ensure that we are always unsatisfied with what we own and that we covet something else. Our contemporary mood is the opposite of איזהו עשיר? השמח בחלקו. I fear that this value of not seeking the things that we do not own is almost lost to our society. "He who dares, wins" in todays world, and one is supposed to have drive, ambition in todays world. I am not saying that in today's world we condone a person who envies the next person. But yet, the underlying atmosphere runs, in a most deep manner, in a counter direction to the ethic of Torah. This problem pervades many "frum" communities too, and we should be watchful about rampant materialism as it is very much in contradiction to the spirit of Torah.

Feel free to add your comments.