Rabbi Susan Grossman: August 2007 Archives

Honest Reporting gives Christiane Amanpour and CNN a C- for her reporting of the six-hour series "God’s Warriors," in which she looks at religious fundamentalism in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. However, I would give her and her producers an F.

As a former journalist myself, I am not sure what upset me more: Amanpour playing ominous “bad guy” music only under the interview with a pro-Israel fundamentalist minister and in reference to AIPAC. Or her equating the one Israeli fundamentalist who, in 1984, tried to bomb a Palestinian girl’s school (but was shadowed and arrested by the Israeli police before he could do any harm) with the popular and numerous terrorists who planned, participated in, and support the murder of innocent people around the globe--specifically in England, Israel, and the United States. Terrorists who are funded and protected both by our Arab allies and our enemies like Syria and Iran.

The kosher laws are supposed to raise an awareness of what we eat and a sensitivity to the needs of all living creatures--that is why the disconnect between kashrut and the humane treatment of animals is so discordant to Jewish values.

However, eco-kosher is not only an issue of demanding humane kosher slaughtering, as Rabbi Waxman raises, or even of prohibiting kosher veal where humane treatment is lacking, as was raised by the Conservative Movement this past year. Eco-kosher is really about drawing on our kosher consciousness to limit the negative impact our food and consumer choices have on the earth.

There are many reasons to be Jewish: religious reasons, family reasons, emotional reasons, communal and historic reasons. Rabbi Stern’s summary of a conference he co-hosted for the Bronfman Foundation came up with four good answers to the question “Why Be Jewish?” The only problem with his answers is the avoidance of one critical three-letter word: God.

Ask two Jews a question, you get three opinions. That is also true about the question "Who is God?" You don’t have to believe in a God who is personally involved in people’s lives to be a good Jew. One doesn't even have to believe in God to be, or want to be, Jewish. One of the great things about Judaism is our intellectual openness. However, belief in the God of Israel is one of the few central beliefs of Judaism. That is why Rabbi Stern’s choice of the Alcoholics Anonymous term Higher Power may be PC, and even appropriate in an interfaith or 12-Step setting, but it is too impersonal for my tastes when discussing why be Jewish.

According to our Holy Scripture, the Torah, Judaism began when God invited Abraham (and by extension Sarah) along on an incredible journey to introduce the world to ethical monotheism. The God of Abraham and Sarah is unique, not part of the world, but its Creator, who cares not just for Abraham and his kin but for all God’s creatures. This God is the Judge of the whole world who therefore demands that justice be done to all, even by God’s-self. This God has expectations of all God’s children, and especially of us, as the models for God’s light in the world.

“No one feels safe in their home anymore,” is how my husband’s cousin Nina explained the impact of last summer’s Lebanon War. She lives near Tel Aviv. Last summer she hosted her mother, her husband’s mother, his brother’s family, and several others as almost a dozen people camped out in her modest apartment all summer to escape the rockets raining down on their homes in Israel’s northern cities. The news reports Hezbollah is rearming with even longer range rockets. She worries how her daughter, who has twins and lives on the fifth floor in a Tel Aviv suburb, will get down to the bomb shelter if an attack comes and her husband is not home to help.

Nina did not need the Winograd Report to tell her the war in Lebanon was mishandled and left Israelis feeling much less secure than before the war. Among the lessons that stuck home was the need for more flexibility and the need to train its soldiers to fight a different kind of war now.

I recently returned from visiting Israel and all over the state I saw maneuvers taking place so that the IDF would be better prepared next time. One year later, there is a sense of inevitability that “next time” could occur any time, on any number of fronts.

All this said, claims that Israel lost the war in Lebanon are inaccurate. Here are some of the positive results from last summer’s war:

I feel sorry for Noah Feldman, but not for the reason he wants us to feel sorry for him.

Feldman is important: a Harvard law professor who helped shape the Iraqi Constitution. Nevertheless, the Orthodox community in which he was raised treats him as if he doesn’t exist. He recently wrote in the New York Times Magazine about how his high school yeshiva airbrushed him and his non-Jewish fiance out of a photo in their newsletter.