Rabbi Eliyahu Stern: January 2008 Archives

It has now been 35 years since the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade. By a margin of 7-2 the court ruled that abortion was a private matter and that privacy was a constitutionally protected right. The ruling sparked massive protests that to this day have not ceased. In recent years, many in the Jewish world have joined hands with certain Christian groups in an attempt to block women from having the right to an abortion. Rabbi Shafran and his organization, Agudath Israel, lament those in the Jewish world who have constantly defended a women’s right to choose:

“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 [Nancy Falchuk], 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 while Agudath Israel opposes Roe v. Wade’s effective "abortion on demand," it has not favored--and would never favor--a wholesale ban on abortion.

This past I week I attended a Tu B’Shevat environmental sedar/symposium led by my friend, Rabbi Charlie Buckholtz, at The Samuel Bronfman Foundation. Charlie suggested that more than anything else our treatment toward the environment stems from a certain attitude towards nature and the world. Specifically, he shared with us the Biblical story of the stubborn and rebellious son:

"If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them, 19 then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his home town. 20 "And they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 "Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death; so you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear of it and fear," (Deut.).

With the writers on strike, Hollywood has moved away from distorting our social relationships to our political ones.

We all know the typical Hollywood love story: boy pursues girl, girl pushes away boy, eventually girl falls for boy who by then has grown frustrated. Before girl is able to express her feeings boy moves on to a different girl engendering a big fallout between boy and girl #1. Eventually boy comes around, realizing girl #2 is not right for him and runs back to girl #1. Boy and girl now embrace, get married and live happily every after.

This past week the Israeli political party Yisrael Beiteinu once again tried to introduce legislation that would ease up the conversion process in Israel. The proposal, like all other such initiatives, will inevitably be shelved by the right wing religious establishment and their political proxies. Which means, roughly 300,000 Russian Jews will continue to be viewed as pariahs by Israel’s religious establishment. Or put another way, though 300,000 people are willing to serve in the army and give their lives for the Jewish people, these haredi and religious Zionist rabbis will not recognize them as Jews--go figure? So it's come down to this: the Russians versus the Chief Rabbiniate.