Rabbi Eliyahu Stern: October 2007 Archives

Rabbi Jen, I wish you were right about your description of Jewry but the facts on the ground seem to say otherwise:

As many have noted there are two sides of Jewry. Rabbi Jen nicely described one side. But in virtually every city around the world, Orthodox Judaism is growing, not steadily, but by leaps and bounds. Virtually 20 percent of the Jewish population under the age of 18 defines itself as Orthodox. Whereas in 1975 there were 450 Chabads worldwide there are now a staggering 2,700!

The fact is that the ghettoized nature of these communities doesn’t (at least in their minds) hurt their pockets, minds or marriages one iota. How can one not envy the care, love, and support embodied in the Syrain community? (Again, yes they are digusting in there treatment of converts..that's obvious blah blah blah.)

What a pleasure it was to read Rabbi Jen Krause’s new book The Answer. Make no doubt about it this is not your regular self-help book. "The Answer" is more about realizing that ultimately life’s greatest challenge is coming to terms with the fact that sometimes we are so quick to find the answer that we forget what it is we are looking for and why it is we are looking so hard.

I agree with Rabbi Jen’s natural inclination towards embracing non-Jewish wisdom and culture. Her words remind me of a famous speech given by the late chancellor of JTS, Gerson Cohen, entitled the "Blessing of Assimilation" (the title says it all). Yet I think we all need to remember that contrary to popular opinion, people today can live healthy, wealthy, very enjoyable lives in cultural ghettos where they need not ever seriously come into contact with the rest of the world. Two weeks ago Zev Chefetz published a very interesting (albeit slightly biased) piece in the New York Times Magazine on the Syrian Jewish community and its ban against converts and intermarriage.

In Judaism we tend to think that God’s promise to Noah after the flood means that the world will never be destroyed. But all God says is that “He” will never destroy the world through rain. “We” on the other hand are a whole other story. As of now, our behavior of excess and rampant consumption has once again threatened the existence of the world.

One of my favorite literary characters is Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov (from War and Peace). Pierre has everything in life--actually he has too much. The only thing Pierre does not have is a sense of contentment and satisfaction. Its not until he sheds the excess of life that he is able to appreciate his surroundings and become able to get in touch with what is most important to him. Tolstoy’s point is that when you have too much you can never really be at your best. When someone has too many friends they don’t have time for the people they truly love, when people have too much knowledge they tend not to be able to be able to make sense of it all, and when people eat too much food they usually have a hard time digesting. Just like a track runner in life, the more excess we have the more we get slowed down.

John McCain 2000: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a few Washington leaders of the pro-life movement call me an unacceptable presidential candidate. They distort my pro-life positions and smear the reputations of my supporters. Why? Because I don't pander to them.

John McCain on Beliefnet 2008: I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn't say, “I only welcome Christians.” We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.

Hmmm…..

If there is one thing we have learned from the Iraq war it’s that the day after revolution is much harder to deal with than the revolution itself. What America is in the process of realizing is that teaching people how to live in freedom is a far greater undertaking than giving them that freedom in the first place. We are now faced with the question: how much responsibility do we have to take for the Iraqis? Is it our job to play God in the Middle East controlling the day-to-day lives of each citizen?