Kolel Book Reviews

AN ENJOYABLE, IF A BIT FACILE, TRIP THROUGH THIS "GOLDEN AGE OF JEWISH ACHIEVEMENT"

2010-01-31T09:34:00.006-05:00

Something rather surprising happened when I taught in a Freedom School in Mississippi in 1964, which I've never forgotten: in one evening class for adults, at one point an elderly woman cried out "IT'S ALMOST ON!" and within seconds, everyone vanished from under our favourite tree/classroom. I was stunned to soon discover that they all "just had to see" the Nat King Cole Show: the only national TV program which starred an African-American at that time. To this day, as I rejoice in seeing how second-nature it is to view blacks (and Hispanics and Asians) on TV, I ponder on what pleasure it brings every ethnic group to beam pridefully at "their own" being honoured: the Irish love acknowledging their Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Shaw and dozens of other literary giants; the Spanish, their Cervantes and Lorca; and every person of African heritage, their Michael Jordan, Stevie Wonder, Colin Powell, and now, their Obama.

A California-based, middle-aged entrepreneur--of Presbyterian background, please note--named Steven L. Pease, just authored an intriguing, often shocking, occasionally petty 622-page book with the unwieldy title, The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement: The Compendium of a Culture, a People, and Their Stunning Performance. There are dozens of surprises, of course (alas, Lenin did have a Jewish grandfather, but I shepped nachas (gained pleasure) from discovering that Shell Oil was founded by a Marcus Samuel in 1897, Ex-Lax was founded by Israel Matz a few years earlier (a Jew brought so many such relief!), and my heart beat faster to learn that, while my people were behind Haagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry and Sara Lee, we were still there to create Slim-Fast, Weight Watchers, NutriSystem, and yes, even Jenny Craig! (Some antisemites are probably screaming "Jewish hypocrites!" already--which is one of the risks of a book of this type, of course: that too-often-heard-of people seem to rule the world). (A personal highlight for me was a 6-person panel on CNN last year, in which every one of them was a Jew. I must note that this panel was not about Israel or the Holocaust or anything related to the Jews themselves, but about the American legal system and the Supreme Court. Wow.)

The author's purpose is warm, awe-filled and benign, of course, and not unlike those equal-opportunity-lovers, like myself, who are in awe of the African-American greatness in sports, jazz, rhythm and blues and rock--and haven't that people also been long abused, hated, enslaved, kept down? Pease can be embarrassing at times, as he recalls his many Jewish friends throughout his life, or when he hand-slaps his fellow Christians for their vicious Jew-hatred through the years: "I thought it illogical that a loving God would use a people who failed to accept Christ as an eternally impoverished example of the price his 'chosen' people would pay for disbelieving. It made no more sense than the charge that Jews killed infants for their blood or that they brought on the Black Plague."

Where this book becomes incredibly valuable is when it lists the many astonishing achievements of modern Jewry. (Its attempt to understand "WHY?"--the title of one chapter--the Jews have reached the top of so many fields since the Enlightenment and the related collapse of the ghetto walls across Europe, include their being "Second-Generation Immigrants," and having good "Genes"--well, it cannot be denied that the most literate Christians through the centuries were their celibate priests, who did not have 4, 7, or a dozen children as most Talmud-studying Jews usually did. But many other arguments attempting to explain "why" are far less successful.

But those numbers of Greats! (And no, Pease does not just list the usual unholy trinity of Marx, Freud and Einstein, the first two no real lovers of their people, and the father of Socialism, baptised at birth, wrote an essay on the Jews which would have won contests for "Why the Hebrews Must Die" in Nazi Germany): Jews have won 36% of all the Nobel Prizes for Economics, 31% of those for Physiology & Medicine, 27% of those for Physics, 26% for Science, 25% for Math--this, from an ethnic group which now numbers .002% of the world's present population (2 in every thousand souls!), and only 2% of the present U.S. population. Other sources of legitimate pride: that Jews made up 38% of Business Week's 50 Leading Philanthropists, 24% of Fortune Magazine's 25 Most Powerful People in Business, 37% of all Academy Award Winning Directors, 26% of the Greatest Photographers, 30% of the Best Stand Up Comedians, 33% of the conductors of Major U.S. Symphony Orchestras, and perhaps the most stunning of all (although all those Nobel Prizes aren't chopped liver): 51% of all Pulitzer Prizes presented for Non Fiction! (One can see the antisemites whispering, "well, Pulitzer himself was a Jew, ya know!")

The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement is no great work of scholarship nor of literary note, but it a lot of fun, and is probably the ideal Bar/Bat Mitzvah gift for a kid who takes no pride in his co-religionists' achievements. There is nothing wrong with the Jews admiring what our people have accomplished, if we don't go around bragging about it endlessly. But in the great tradition of my often amazing fellow Jews, I also respond with deep sadness: imagine what was lost when the world either murdered or ignored the murdering of millions of Jews between 1939 and 1945. Which one of them, or their never-to-be-born children or grandchildren could have cured cancer by now, or heart disease, or turned into another Heschel or Gershwin or Bellow or Sondheim. . . .

"START UP NATION" is as good a read as you've heard

2009-12-31T09:54:00.004-05:00

The modern State of Israel has been at the core of Jewish existence, concern, even obsession, since its founding in 1948, and, as we all know, Jerusalem and much of the former Canaan have been in our thoughts and prayers since the beginnings of the Jewish people over three millennia ago. Whatever your feelings about Israel--from "it can do no wrong" to "its leaders are so often deeply flawed" to "its treatment of its Arab citizens should be so much better"--there is no question that the nation is a kind of obsession for the rest of the world as well, whether due to outright Jew-hatred to sweet philo-semitism, to utter fascination. We all know that.

So, when START-UP NATION was published recently, written by Dan Senor (a former member of my synagogue in Toronto!) and Israeli journalist Saul Singer, my heart sank: would it be just another gung-ho "Israel is Great" book? Or just one more business book, this one about how Bright These Israelis Be? Well, I was both relieved and charmed to read it from cover-to-cover in just a few hours, and I've been eagerly reading my favourite parts to my wife of four decades, Merle. It is extremely well-written, it is honestly historical as well as critical, and it is a very solid study of just why Israel has risen to the top of entrepreneurial creativity in today's world. To quote from its cover blurb, "How is it that Israel--a country of 7.1 million, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war, with no natural resources--produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful nations like Canada, Japan, China, India, and the U.K.?" A great question, and answered beautifully in its too-brief but often thrilling 240 pages.

When I lecture on Israel, or the impact that Judaism has had on civilizing the world, partly through mothering both Christianity and Islam (as I love to joke, "I've given up waiting for a thank-you"), I have never fully understood before now its citizens' astonishing impact on modern industry, especially--but not limited to--technology and computers. As the authors say at the end of their opening note: "if there is one story that has been largely missed despite the extensive media coverage of Israel, it is that key economic metrics demonstrate that Israel represents the greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today." Wow. Who knew? Too often, we Jews love to brag that we are the people from which Einstein, Freud and Marx descended, when none of those three cared very much about their religious origins, and the latter actually hated all faiths, especially Judaism (and his writings on the Jews read like Hitler's private notes.)

So, we read and marvel at the Israeli billionaire Shai Agassi's determination to create the perfect electric car, and how he was prodded and assisted by the aging former PM of the Jewish State, Shimon Peres. We are stunned to read the brilliant Agassi's belief that "by isolating Israel, [its] adversaries had actually created the perfect laboratory to test ideas." We are charmed and awed to discover that "more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ [junior, often hi-tech stock] exchange than all companies from the entire European continent." And--this fact had this business-writer gasping, "in 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India."

What I also admire about authors Senor and Singer is that they avoid, and even mock, the petty and self-serving "Well, the Jews are so smart!" belief, which can be as racist and antisemitic as the "all blacks have rhythm" and "all Asians are great in math" prejudices. The greatest insight in this much-recommended book is their central theme: that the remarkable mix of Israel's sadly-necessary military--youth of both genders being forced to serve in their late teens, so they don't enter universities until they are far more mature and in their early or mid-20s, from every country, culture and colour in the world--"seems to foster entrepreneurship." The military! Where "chutzpah and assertion are the norm"! So, in the U.S., where managers and underlings most bow to, and often blindly obey, their Presidents and C.E.O.s of their companies, "it's more complicated to manage five Israelis than fifty Americans because [the Israelis]will challenge you all the time--starting with 'Why are you my manager; why am I not your manager?'" Who would have thought?

In other words, the authors show, the Israeli armed forces has few senior officers, and 23-year-olds (who in North America are still checking for pimples and rarely travel anywhere) are forced to come up with creative solutions and profound responsibilities--often in life-or-death situations in wartime or during acts of terrorism--and where no one leaps up or salutes their officers, makes for brilliant entrepreneurs (and why Intel and PayPal and countless other hi-tech companies from around the world have come to seek out "the typical Israeli entrepreneur."

There's more, of course. Immigrants are risk-takers by their very nature (to leave their native lands and languages to move to a dangerous, threatened nation!); over one million Russians who poured into Israel before and after the fall of the USSR "had to be the best" in their dreadful native land because of its inbred Jew-hatred; how Ben-Gurion essentially ordered Technion University to create an airplane industry; why the Arab economies lag, in spite of the great natural intelligence of that people. Yossi Vardi is quoted at the opening of a late chapter, "The two real fathers of Israeli hi-tech are the Arab boycott and Charles de Gaulle, because they forced on us the need to go and develop an industry." The mother of invention, indeed.

During the 1973 war, I recall a bitter joke which several Israeli friends shared with me: "they are trying to push us into the sea. Fine. So we'll learn how to live and breath underwater." This book is no joke, and its insights are far deeper than one may expect. It's not cheap--$32.99 in the McClelland & Stewart edition, but cheaper on the net--but it is a must read. And NOT because it is petty and self-aggrandizing; far from it. Because it clearly shows the world what outside pressure, unlimited immigration (recall the Ethiopian airlifts), and a universal draft (along with a lot of admittedly bright people) can produce. Great book!

AT LAST! A BEAUTIFUL, TRADITIONAL, BUT NOT PREACHY SIDDUR!

2009-11-23T17:09:00.005-05:00

What a joy and thrill it is to come across a brand new SIDDUR, or prayerbook! And one which is acceptable to the Orthodox, but filled with an awareness that Judaism includes women, as well as a deep love for the State of Israel, and the recognition that not everyone who approaches prayer is either a rabbi or a complete apikoros (from the Greek word epicure, or someone who knows a bit of our glorious faith, but has rejected its value or spiritual power).

I, personally, grew up using the old, rather stodgy, hard-to-handle and not particularly welcoming Silverman siddur of the Conservative movement, and later, the also not very attractive Birnbaum. And the Art Scroll Siddur of a quarter century ago, while physically attractive, always radiated a forbidding, ultra-Orthodox sensibility, warning us that "if you forget these particular lines, do not repeat the Amidah!" while never acknowledging that over half of the Jews in the congregation (and certainly in the Jewish communities of the world) are of the female persuasion, or that the State of Israel is central to modern Jewry, and its survival is at the very core of most of our being.

And so, for the first time in a generation, we are blessed with something called The Koren Sacks Siddur--Koren being the revered publisher; Sacks, the brilliant, spiritual and sensitive Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom who wrote that extraordinary To Heal a Fractured World which I reviewed in this space a few columns ago. What a thrill to see prayers which not only acknowledge the government of Israel, but its soldiers and its national holidays; that includes prayers for women after childbirth; which proudly includes, immediately under the classic prayers for a boy's bris, a Zeved HaBat--rejoicing over the birth of a daughter as well.

This new siddur is so exciting, I began to enjoy praying in ways which had long become stale for me. Imagine my deep satisfaction over reading the opening paragraph of Rabbi Sacks' exquisite and sensitive Preface:

"And their fear toward Me is as a commandment of men learned by rote" (Isaiah) laments the prophet, referring to those who turn prayer into routine habit. Even when they pray before the Lord, "With their mouth and with their lips do they honor Me, but have removed their heart far from me." This is precisely as our Sages cautioned, saying, "In prayer, do not look upon the prayer as an obligatory task, but as a privilege granted by mercy and grace before God." . . . This is the nature of ritual duties: when they become routine habit, their original meaning is diminished."

Wonderful. The line breaks of both the Hebrew and English texts are lovely; the text is laid out in ways which reinforce its deeper meaning; the paper is premium grade; the binding is perfection; its prose translations highly poetic and creative; its focus is on thoughtful study and love of Judaism, not fear of God and Doing Things The Wrong Way, You Fool, like a harsh preacher (which one gets ubiquitously in the Art Scroll Siddur). My very dear friend, Rabbi Martin Lockshin of Toronto, a perfect example of someone who has dedicated his life to Modern Orthodoxy along with making women both welcome and central in Jewish prayer, pointed out a keen example of the Koren Sacks Siddur's grandeur and value: that the blessing after eating (Birkat Hamazon) contains a line which upsets many: "I was a youth and have also aged, and I have not seen a righteous man forsaken, with his children begging for bread." (the latter being Art Scroll's confusing and unthinking translation). Here is Rabbi Sacks' inspired translation and commentary on this long-problematic phrase: the line should be interpreted as meaning, "I have never watched a righteous man forsaken or his children begging for bread," and in his notes, the remarkable religious leader declares that this "is a warning against being a mere bystander while other people suffer." So, Birkat Hamazon is now seen as coming full-circle: "It began by speaking of God's goodness in feeding the hungry and ends with an injunction for us to do likewise."

A magnificent, mitzvah-driven and mitzvah-inspiring thought. The Koren Sacks Siddur is a truly grand addition to every modern Jew's library, regardless of the kashrut of their kitchen or whether they 'davven' (Yiddish for pray) three times a day or a few times a year. Kol Ha'kavod, as we Jews say: All honour to you, publisher Koren and translator/commentator, Rabbi Sacks. What a blessing this book is--and the sooner the synagogues of English-speaking countries start choosing this prayer book as their chosen one, the stronger the Jewish people will be.

TWO FINE NON-FICTION JEWISH BOOKS

2009-10-26T16:30:00.005-04:00

In the past few weeks, I have come across two very different books, both non-fiction, which I think are worth tracking down and reading, whether you choose to purchase them or not. The first is on a topic which most non-Orthodox Jews do not find of great interest: the mikvah. Most Jews have a vague sense of what the mikvah is--the ritual bath. But even in the State of Israel, home of so many hareidim--ultra-religious Jews--the buildings which hold them, if not the religious act--have fallen into hard times. In early October of 2009, a long article in The Jerusalem Post entitled "Troubled Waters" declared "for many women who frequent more rundown mikvaot in other neighborhoods of Jerusalem, the experience makes it difficult for them to imagine that a monthly visit could have much spiritual significance."

A new hardcover book, The House of Secrets--The Hidden World of the Mikveh, by a secular but deeply respectful seventh generation Jerusalemite (Beacon Press, 248 pages), was surprisingly enlightening and moving. Varda Polak-Sahm researched the topic for a full decade, and, in translation from her Hebrew text, it is an extremely powerful document. In her Prologue, the author visits a mikvah, and the rambling orders of the keeper are fascinating: "In order to be clean and one hundred percent kosher for immersion, you must remove all jewelry, false teeth and contact lenses before bathing. Clean the gunk out of the corners of your eyes. Clean your nose inside and out. Clean the holes in your pierced ears. Comb every hair on your body...." Polak-Sahm is remarkably sensitive to the practice, even while admitting that "for me, the mikvah was also a symbol of religious coercion and the intrusion of the religious establishment into the private domain." Yet she quotes verbatim from young women who respond to the experience of the mikvah with warmth and even admiration: "After I immersed in the pure waters of the mikvah I became pure myself. The immersion makes it okay for me to have sex with my husband again. He's even obligated by the Torah to make love to me tonight when I return from the mikvah; otherwise he's committing a really big sin. You know what a burden is lifted from your soul when you leave here after bathing in the mikveh? It's just incredible! Unbelievable! No words can describe this amazing feeling."

What I like so much about this highly poetic, loving (yet occasionally critical) book about the mikvah is its scholarship and intelligence. She notes that "the mikvah is a place where one is stripped down on both the physical and spiritual levels, where women undergo a transformation from girl to woman, from virgin to bride, from impurity to purity." Then, she quotes from prominent, non-sexist rabbis in a fair and sensitive fashion. She teaches Torah, noting its obsession with blood ("between one kind of blood and another, between male blood and female blood"), warns us that "it would appear that the woman is a passive victim of a male conceptual system that torments her with a wide range of prohibitions and social exclusion," and then quickly admits, "so it would appear, yet this is not the case."

There is something irresistible about seeing a very thoughtful, secular woman grow in admiration for a religious ritual which she had long thought sexist and condescending. (And I was charmed by the arguments between Eastern European Jews and North African Jews on which community sees "great pleasure in immersion and sexuality" and which is "very ambivalent toward immersion." I'll let you guess.

I like this book very much, and was impressed with its nuance and research. And to get a rave from my favourite Orthodox feminist, Blu Greenberg ("Refreshingly, this writing is neither a Pollyanna version of the laws of family purity nor a cheap shot at them") says far more than I ever could. Very highly recommended.

And speaking of powerful and meaningful non-fiction, I must urge you to track down the paperback (Lester, Mason & Begg)by the superb Canadian historian Harold Troper (of "None is Too Many" fame, which he co-authored with Irving Abella), The Rescuer: The Amazing, True Story of How One woman Helped Save the Jews of Syria. It is a 2007 work about the extraordinary Torontonian Judy Feld Carr, who almost singlehandedly led the struggle to get the capture Jews of Syria out of that hell-hole of modern Jewish slavery, over three agonizing decades of dealing with smugglers, bribing officials, sneaking money to those who needed it (even in prisons), ultimately managing to get some 3,000 Syrian Jews into the State of Israel. I've met Ms. Feld Carr many times, and long supported her amazing work, and it was always an honour to know this modern Moses. She's a tough cookie--I was a bit disappointed to read that she and her husband were deeply involved with Rabbi Kahane and the Jewish Defense League, an individual and group which I have long found distasteful. But what an argument for how a single person, like a Schindler, can save so many lives through action, letter-writing, fund-raising, passion and sheer chutzpah. It's been a while since a book has made me feel guilty for not doing more to help our fellow souls. And as so many Jews know, arguably the single most important mitzvahs--commandments--of the Torah's 613, is to "ransom the captive." This, Ms. Feld Carr did, and those 3,000 will rapidly turn into tens of thousands over the coming years. What a story.

Jonathan Sacks' TO HEAL A FRACTURED WORLD is perfection

2009-09-21T08:24:00.004-04:00

Sir Jonathan Sacks has been the Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth for nearly two decades, and is well known for his broadcasting skills. But for me, from the first days of 5770 (and a joyous, healthy, meaningful New Year to all my readers), Rabbi Sacks will always be known as the gifted author of a very important book first published in 2005 by McGill-Queen's University Press: To Heal a Fractured World--The Ethics of Responsibility. Let me put this in a single, brief sentence: if I had a non-Jewish friend (or troubled Jewish one) who wanted to know why anyone should be a Jew after the past three thousand years of anguish and horrors (along with the parenting of Christianity and Islam, for which I have given up waiting for a thank-you), I would hand them a copy of this exquisitely written, moving, profound book. The essence of this work is captured well in the brief blurb on the back cover: that "one of Judaism's most distinctive and challenging ideas is its ethics of responsibility: having been given the gift of freedom, we must in turn honour and enhance the freedom of others." So, while "the individual is seen as the sole source of meaning" in today's world, Sacks insists that we must share our experience in this world, and that the goods we share exist only by virtue of their being shared. A beautiful thought, expressed magnificently in its 273 pages, and how many books have you read which fill you with the desire to go out and improve--yes, start to heal--this very flawed world our predecessors have left us to deal with?

I cannot think of anything which the author has ignored in his desire to teach us all our responsibilities to our fellow human beings: while he understandably frequently quotes from the Tanach some of its most ethical commandments at key points throughout this essential text ("Learn to do good,/Seek justice,/Aid the oppressed./Uphold the rights of the orphan,/Defend the cause of the widow."--Isaiah 1:17), he also takes on Marx and others who insisted wrongly that religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Not so, Dr. Sacks cries out--look at what the prophet Isaiah demanded over two millennia ago!

The good rabbi also fills this marvelous volume with memorable Midrashim and Hassidic tales, such as one with which I was unfamiliar: one great Rebbe had devoted an entire day to reciting Psalms, delaying his response to an urgent request of another rabbi who needed his assistance to collect money for a poor person in need. When they finally meet, the latter exclaims, "Psalms can be sung by angels, but only human beings can help the poor. Charity is greater than reciting Psalms, because angels cannot perform charity." Sacks describes with passion and insight that "charity" IS justice in the Jewish faith, and far more than merely handing over money or time to those who are in dire straits. Another striking rabbinical story notes that the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee are the two great bodies of water of the Holy Land, yet one has no life while the other is rich with fish, birds and vegetation. The difference? The Sea of Galilee receives water at one end and gives out water at the other, while the Dead Sea receives but never gives. "To receive without reciprocating is a kind of death. To live is to give." How is that for a story to be told and discussed over your Shabbat table?

The titles of some of the 20 memorable chapters in this extraordinary text suggest the topics covered: "Faith as protest." "Love as Deed." "Responsibility for Society." "Divine Initiative, Human Initiative." "Redeeming Evil." "Transforming Suffering." "The Kind of Person We Are." I have rarely read a book which moved me to tears so often; which made me wait impatiently for my wife to come home from work so I could read aloud from this page and that chapter; which I filled with countless little Post-it notes to recall paragraphs to share with my children and friends. Lines such as this one leapt off the pages (in this case, page 178) and directly into my heart: "Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope---[italics the author's]--precisely because there is no inexorable fate. Nor does hope stand alone. It belongs to a world in which not only God but also human beings, his image, are free, masters of their fate, responsible for their destiny." And later (on page 208): "The Judaism I know [is] a faith suffused with love and celebration, and a hope so resilient that it could survive any catastrophe. We do not redeem evil by hate. We redeem it by a faith in life so strong that it has the courage to bring children into a world that has known overwhelming suffering and yet is prepared to take the risk to begin again."

I have had the honour of reading, reviewing, and recommending several dozen books on this website over the past decade, but I can think of no other which is so wise, morally decent, and, yes, life-changing. As the rabbis tell us, "Tzay Ulmad"--go and study. I urge you to start with Dr. Sacks' To Heal a Fractured World, while always keeping in mind his amazing sub-title: The Ethics of Responsibility.

JUDAISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT A MARVELOUS, INSIGHTFUL BOOK

2009-08-17T13:47:00.003-04:00

Jewish Lights Publishing is one of the more remarkable success stories of the past decade-plus. Located in tiny Woodstock, Vermont of all places, it has published dozens and dozens of fine, often essential works, on subjects ranging from Biblical study to children's books, Jewish holidays to Kabbalah, ritual and spirituality, never falling for the cheap or vulgar, and often scholarly, as seen by the several excellent volumes of Rabbi Elyse Goldstein's anthologies of rabbinical comment. Its series, "The Way Into" has covered topics such as Torah and Jewish Prayer to Time, Zion, the Relationship between Jews and Non-Jews, and more. In 2006, Jewish Lights published this superior study, The Way Into Judaism and the Environment, by Jeremy Benstein, once of the U.S. but long the leader of the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in Tel Aviv. If one cares about the survival of our fragile planet--and recognizes that without humanity's existence, there will be none available to do mitzvot (good deeds) into the future, then this low-price paperback should be in every Jewish home.

Millions of Jews and non-Jews have been aware for centuries that Judaism has much admirable to say about charitable giving, life-long study--and for women as well as men--love of others, and so much more. But when it comes to the environment, I sense that most people, among them most Jews, first think of the unfortunate Creation story ordering the first couple to "have dominion" over God's planet and its animals, which appears to suggest the right to "chop down whatever you want and eat almost anything, because You Humans Are the Crown of Creation." But through the scholarship of Dr. Benstein, we are enriched through nearly 250 pages of quotations from the Tanach, Midrash, Talmud and more, only some of them familiar, which make us realize that our grand faith had much to say about "sustainability" which is far more satisfying than merely avoiding the mixing of milk and meat, or eating pork and shellfish. The deeply ethnical and moral Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (who enraged many of every faith when he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and publically challenged the Viet Nam War) wrote movingly over six decades ago, "As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. . . . We will not perish for want of information, but only for want of appreciation."

Sadly, there has been a three-millennium struggle between Judaism and paganism, since the latter worships Nature, while a strict monotheism is central to Jewish belief. But as the author wisely points out, "the natural world does not have to be worshiped in order to be nurtured or protected as God's creation." It is so helpful to know that Adam and Eve are never told to eat animals, but to "serve and preserve." So vegetarianism and the growth of eco-Kashrut is logical and not hippie-ish or alien to traditional Jewish thought. One third of the way into this lovely book, Dr. Benstein poetically points out his key message: that we can and must "overcome" the alienation we often feel from Nature, "strengthen the bridge in both directions, and deepen the relationship between Judaism and the world." (Please note, the Israeli-based author does not ignore the agonizing dilemma of his chosen State's having to often destroy fruit trees--breaking an important mitzvah--in its struggle against an enemy which often hides behind them.)

Several of the exquisite midrashim quoted throughout this superb text are worth the price of admission alone, but it is also good to see the author's awareness of hatzala--to not stand by idly when harmful acts are occurring (Lev. 19:16). "An essential Jewish teaching" he quotes from Rabbi Saul Berman, "is that the entire world belongs to God. If then we love God, we are duty-bound to protect and preserve God's property--this entire Earth." What a beautiful thought. And what a powerful argument for "Environmental Zionism." And how happy I was to come across one of my own favourite midrashim (from Kohelet Rabbah): God took the First Man throughout the Garden of Eden, warning him, "See My works, how lovely they are. All I have created, I created for you. Take care not to corrupt and destroy My world, for if you ruin it, there is no one to come after you to put it right." There is a quote which should be written on every blackboard of every religious classroom--Jewish and Gentile--around the world.
Buy and read this book; it is a very important document.

Year of Living Biblically: Funny, Smart-alecky, and occasionally suprisingly scholarly

2009-07-21T15:05:00.007-04:00

When I first saw an article about an upcoming book, The Year of Living Biblically, with the sub-title �One Man�s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,� by Esquire editor at large A.J. Jacobs, I sent it on to my dearest friend, an Orthodox rabbi, Martin Lockshin. He promptly emailed me back, �I think I�ll pass on reading this one,� and it�s not hard to see why. Who needs to be possibly offended?

Jacobs has been described as �a stunt journalist,� and he does it extremely well. His first book�also a best seller, was �The Know-It-All,� in which he read an entire encyclopedia to try to make himself sound brighter than his brother-in-law. On the surface, at least, this one is similarly smart-ass and occasionally off-putting: what religion does not look extreme, or silly, or even absurd, if one attempts to model one�s behaviour around it? We think of the unfortunate references to homosexuality as being an abomination in the Hebrew Testament, women being ordered to remain silent in the Christian one, and Jews who truly know their faith realize that if it were not for the Mishna and Talmud (or �Oral Law�) which expanded and made life more livable (how exactly does one �keep the Sabbath holy�? What does it mean to avoid boiling a calf in the milk of its mother?), we would be sitting in the dark each Saturday, unsure of what we could eat.

This book suggests endless mockery, insults and cheap gags, and there are certainly some of those in its 350-plus pages: I enjoyed a witty line such as the author describing himself as being �Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.� The many photos of the pleasant-looking young Jacobs growing a giant beard which makes him �resemble Moses. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Ted Kaczynski [the Unibomber]� are very funny. But Year of Living Biblically displays a good deal of scholarship, understanding, and even empathy for this kind of life. After all, as he points out early in his book, over one-third of Americans take the Bible literally, which must not thrill gays or women or Amalekites who often get short shrift in the Holy Book.

So, our smart-aleck best-selling stunt journalist decides to donate eight months to following the Jewish Bible literally (although he kills no witches or magicians, fortunately), followed by four months of the Christian one. Judaism being far more a religion of laws, it gets the majority of the pages and is by far the most interesting part. And I was relieved to see that Jacobs truly did his homework. As he states, �The Bible�known as the written law�was composed in shorthand. It�s so condensed, it�s almost in code. Which is where the oral law comes in.� Good for him.

I was often put-off by his write-anything-for-a-gag tendency, such as when he is troubled that he is guilty of �envy� as he checks how well his first book is selling on amazon.com. And I didn�t need Jacobs to track down an elderly man on the streets of Manhattan who gleefully admits to committing adultery frequently, and begs the right to stone him�promising that it will be with small pebbles. But it�s somehow touching that Jacobs recognizes the greatness of the first real commandment, P�roo Ur�voo�when he tries to get his wife pregnant. (She ends up with twins.) And when he has a rabbi come to his apartment to try to explain the hok�a commandment with no rational explanation�of mixing flax and wool�there is both thought and respect in his response. The visits to the Amish of Pennsylvania and the dancing with Hassidim in Brooklyn are well done; other visits (such as to a creationist museum in Kentucky), less so.

What I like most about this book is that Jacobs recognizes how one could easily spend a whole year focusing on �the strange parts� of the Bible while ignoring the endless cries for �goodness and justice.� That he wisely quotes the prophet Micah who urges his co-religionists to �do justice� more than worrying about sacrificing animals. And, as a freelance author and journalist of over three decades, I thrilled to seeing him pay his babysitter every night, by fulfilling my own favourite mitzvah of the 613: �Do not keep your servant�s wages until the morning.� Bravo.

Much of this is �slumming� in faith: inviting a Jehovah�s Witness over to study scripture is too cute; building a Sukkah is nice, if condescending; struggling to love an unpleasant neighbour is powerful (�it�s hard!�). And it is touching to see him stand up out of respect for the elderly. Many readers will rejoice to see his (honest? pandering?) declaration that he is �still agnostic but no longer dreading prayer� as he blesses food before he eats it. (At times, I recalled a rather idiotic yet still powerful best-seller of my youth, Black Like Me, in which the author dyed his face dark so he could live as �a Negro,� to experience and then write about the endless offences which blacks experienced just a few decades ago in the U.S.
I can think of plenty of black Americans who didn�t have to go through the trouble of darkening their skin, except they couldn�t find publishers who would print their stories.)

Should we believe the writings of this sit-down comedian, when he claims, late in his book, that he found �a newfound reverence for life� from his experiment? Perhaps. What makes this now low-priced paperback worth reading are the author�s scholarly comments about �an eye for an eye,� how slavery worked in ancient times and today, and Jewish attitudes toward abortion and circumcision. Jacobs really did do his homework. As he shaves off his very fluffy beard in its last pages, he claims that �there�s nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren�t bad per se. I�ve had some great meals at cafeterias. The key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones.� I know many Jews who will be offended by such praise for cafeteria Judaism, and others who will be relieved and pleased. Read this and decide yourself. It certainly is very funny.

Zornberg's Latest Biblical Study Complex, Poetic, Essential

2009-05-13T10:22:00.006-04:00

The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious

by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg�

Schocken (Hardcover: 480 pages)

ISBN-10: 0805242473

There are smart people and then there are exceedingly smart people. In the world of Biblical criticism, it is difficult to find anyone smarter�no, make that wiser, more thoughtful, more insightful�than the marvelous Jerusalem-based teacher and author Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Her earlier books, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (which deservedly won the National Jewish Book Award), and The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, were truly enriching, even enthralling, and written in remarkable intellectual fashion. Could it be her doctorate in English literature from Cambridge University in her native England? Or her profound understanding of psychology, as well as Hebrew and Jewish religious texts, which make her like a Jewish Northrop Frye in her astonishing brilliance? All this�and from an Orthodox religious standpoint, too!

Rather than continue her way through all five books of the Torah, she has now chosen to write lengthy chapters on key characters and events in the entire Tanach: the Garden of Eden, the Flood, Jonah, Esther from the Purim story, the Akedah (of course!), Ruth and Boaz, and a half-dozen others. The title of her latest volume may seem off-putting or at least daunting, and rightfully so; much of this book reads like a gleaming university level text: The Murmuring Deep�Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. It is indeed daunting, but oh, it�s worth it, and worth the $33 Canadian price tag, if you want your brain and Jewish knowledge to get a real work-out.

The examples I long to share with you are many. After Adam eats the forbidden fruit, Zornberg notes, he �replies to God in mixed genres: confession and rationalization. . . . How is the complexity to be read? Is Adam perhaps not as embarrassingly evasive as we had thought? . . . [Or does] his plea have some validity: he had regarded the woman given him by God as a reliable guide?�

Here is the gifted scholar on the Flood: �Between soliloquy and covenant, however, God blesses Noach and his children: �Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.� A virtual repetition of His blessing to Adam immediately after Creation, these words declare that the empty world needs to be filled. But this emptiness is different from that primal void. Now, in the devastated world after the Flood, God�s blessing resounds with a new poignancy.�

I told you that reading Zornberg isn�t easy! Quotations from Freud and many other giants of the mind, references to major scholars of every faith, snippets of novels and poems of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats abound, and that�s where much of the pleasure of reading this remarkable scholar comes from: she understands that insights can be found anywhere, not only in Rashi and Maimonides (although we get plenty from them, as well!) Sometimes her insights are drawn directly from the text, but because Zornberg is such a scholar of the holy tongue, the Torah, the Talmud and Midrash, every page has a mental jolt or two: did you ever notice that �God�s last word to Abraham is his command to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Never again will God address Abraham.� (I never thought before now of how terrifying that is.) She tracks down �a daring midrash� which has Satan accosting Abraham on his way to sacrificing his son, declaring that it was he�the devil�who had ordered the Akedah of Isaac, and not God! Zornberg notes with near trembling, �How is Abraham to know for sure which is God�s voice, which Satan�s?�

Reading Dr. Zornberg�and one cannot skim such a brilliant thinker!�I found myself frequently pulling my Chumash off the shelf and checking her out, shaken by what she had seen and I had not: for instance, that everyone around the suffering Jacob (mourning over the �death� of his beloved Joseph) knows the truth�that he is alive and was sold into slavery (his sons, his father Isaac, even God clearly know the truth), �but all are bonded in a pact of silence. Mysterious and absolute, this silence isolates Jacob for the next twenty-two years, until Joseph finally reveals himself in Egypt. (�His spiritual life went into limbo� she notes.) Wow.

Good teachers and writers enrich our appreciation of a text. Great teachers and writers inspire us with their insights, and drive us to greater study, understanding, wisdom. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is the latter.

Wrestling with God: A powerful, must-read on how Jews have confronted the Holocaust

2009-03-16T11:01:00.007-04:00

Can anything �new� be written and published about the Shoah? With hundreds of films, thousands of histories, seemingly countless memoirs, one may have thought that the subject is near exhaustible: as eternal and endless as the capital-E evil which led to its creation of horrors and mass murders.

Yet I have just finished Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocuast (Oxford University Press, 689 pages, $54 paperback), and I know that I shall return to it dozens of times in the years I have left on this earth.�What an astonishingly important collection of essays this is!��(Not to be confused with the similar-sounding title and worthwhile volume: Godwrestling by Arthur Waskow which �introduces and explores the Jewish renewal movement).�

What scholars Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman and Gershon Greenberg have done is extraordinary: nothing less than collect dozens of the most thoughtful minds of our time in Part III (�European and American responses during and following the War�), from Buber and Heschel to Fackenheim,� �Yitz� Greenberg to Eli Wiesel; and Part II�s �Israeli Responses during and following the War (Pinchas Peli, Alexander Donat, Yehuda Bauer and others); but something which still has me both chilled and deeply moved:� many precious, shocking, even devastating �Ultra-Orthodox Responses during and following the War� in Part I:� great rabbis and scholars in both Europe and Israel, many translated from the Yiddish and Hebrew for the first time, whose reactions range from classic theodicy (�we were being punished for our sins�) to sickening hatred of Zionism (�because we place the nation of Israel ahead of God, we deserved to be slaughtered�) to powerful changes of heart and mind (�these mass murders are different than all the Amaleks and Hamans and Crusades through history, and I have finally come to recognize this!�)� I have not wept so much, nor had my mind so shaken to its core, since I first read Wiesel�s Night or saw Alain Renais�s heartbreaking French documentary Night and Fog as a teenager. While the $50-plus cost of this 2007 anthology may frighten you, its $198 hardcover should not scare any librarian away, since the essays it contains come from texts (both famous and obscure and often previously unavailable) which would cost thousands of dollars.

The organized, technologically-astute, cold-blooded slaughter of nearly six million Jews�which included over a million children and over 80% of its Eastern European, most religious and scholarly of our people�has been the spiritual �elephant in the room� of modern thought:� how could a good and loving Creator give the Torah to this people (who, in turn, mothered both Christianity and Islam, changing the faith and focus of world civilization over the past three millennia), and then allow their descendants to be so mercilessly wiped out? Several of the essays (or well-chosen selections from classic books) should be known to most of us:� the Holocaust shows that the God who gave the Torah to us 3500 years ago must surely be dead (Richard Rubenstein).� Or �eclipsed� (Buber). No, quite the opposite: the Shoah provides a new �Commanding Voice,�� coming from the death camps this time, not Sinai, ordering the Jews �to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. They are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.�� (Toronto�s, and later Jerusalem�s, Emil Fackenheim.)

Book reviews on the internet must, by their very electronic nature, be brief. This profoundly important anthology makes me long to quote tens of thousands of words, because every thinking soul will be moved, inspired, horrified, even shattered by much of this. To read the (never-before-seen) sermons of deeply religious, scholarly rabbis�buried in burning ghettoes after they� had watched their own spouses and children killed, dug up decades later, sent to families in Israel, and finally translated and published�in which their thoughts change from �Hitler was sent by God because of our sins and the evil of Zionism� to �we need a Jewish State to never allow this to happen again� is emotionally, intellectually and spiritually stunning, like a taser to one�s soul

Yes, there have been many genocides, especially over the past century-plus: the Armenian, the Hutu and Tutsis, the Jews, the present one in Darfur. But as editor Katz showed in his powerful, brilliant The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1, back in 1994, the Turks never tracked down the hundreds of thousands of Armenians in California, as they had no desire nor plans to kill every Armenian on the face of the earth. We all know the nearly successful plans of Hitler and his henchmen, which went far beyond those of the Crusaders (which allowed Jews to convert to Christianity rather than be killed; what martyrdom was available to an infant with one Jewish grandparent in Eastern Europe in 1942?) The Holocaust has been endlessly cheapened and vulgarized by Hollywood (what a stupid, morally vacuous and meaningless movie The Reader is!), and it has rarely been confronted in a meaningfully religious sense, quoting generously from some of the finest Jewish minds�ranging from ultra-religious to secular�of the past half-century. Now, in a single, unwieldy volume, it has been.� Read this book, and, like the Sabbath day, keep it, for it is holy.

New Jewish Feminism

2009-01-21T14:21:00.005-05:00

New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
Published by and available from Jewish Lights, 439 pp., $24.99 U.S.

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Who doesn�t recall that devastating scene in Citizen Kane, so often chosen as the greatest film of all time, in which the title character, played by Orson Welles, finishes typing a scathingly negative review by his closest friend, in which he had eviscerated the operatic skills of Kane�s mistress?

I was saved from such horror by the sheer talent, guts and brains of Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, whose editing of her latest anthology, New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future, shows once again how a collection of essays on a once esoteric subject can be a joy and pleasure to read, if the authors which the rabbi has tracked down were up to the task. The vast majority were, and I am so very pleased�and relieved, recalling Citizen Kane�that this editing job was worthy of the very essential subject matter. The profound skills Goldstein showed in her excellent previous Jewish Lights anthologies (The Women's Haftarah Commentary; The Women's Torah Commentary) continue, and while not every page of this lengthy tome is bursting with insight (the fine author of the excellent feminist novel The Red Tent, Anita Diamant, writes a sweet but ultimately unprofound Foreword which concludes �Mazel tov to us and to our daughters and our sons. There has never been a better time to be a Jew. Can I hear a shehechiyanu?�) But through a goodly portion of the text, one�s mind is shaken, challenged, heartened, moved. As Rabbi Goldstein wisely states in her moving and deeply personal introduction, �This book looks back and ahead. When you are in the middle of the revolution you can�t really plan the next steps. But now we can. This book is meant to spur discussion. It is intended to open up a dialogue between the early Jewish pioneers and the young women shaping Judaism today. . . .� (By the way, this volume was just named as a finalist of the National Jewish Book Awards for this year; kudos to all the writers and editor.)

As a life-long feminist and proud father of a daughter, I was endlessly moved to tears by this book. Professor Judith Plaskow raised my consciousness when she refers to a work I did not know, by Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: �Her own contribution to Holocaust theology begins with women�s memoirs of internment and explores the ways in which women managed to be present to each other in acts of washing, holding, and covering bodies. . . .� I was shaken as well by Dr. Idana Goldberg, who writes in her essay �Orthodoxy and Feminism,� �The position of women in Orthodox Judaism today, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg has suggested, does not allow women to realize their potential as tzelem elohim [having moral sense, free will, and intellect]. Women are asked to sacrifice their uniqueness and individual worthiness as Jews for the good of the community.�

Many of the concepts in this book are fairly well known, but it is helpful to find the sources, as one does in Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg�s essay: �[T]he biblical prohibition against sexual relations with a menstruant carries a long textural history in which women are depicted as evil and polluting�the dark, corrupting force that must be controlled. . . . �if a menstruous woman passed between two men�if it is at the beginning of her menstruation, she will cause one to die (Pesachim 111a)�� But the book is also overflowing with hope, for which I shall conclude with a quotation from a marvelous, deeply affecting essay by Sara Hurwitz, �Orthodox Women in Rabbinic Roles.� This scholarly woman, who describes herself as a Madricha Ruchanit (Religious Mentor), admits that she is �not technically a rabbi, as I�m not yet officially ordained.� Our hearts break to read that the man who is arguably the greatest religious mind of our 3500-year history, Maimonides, wrote in the 12th century, �It is shameful for a woman to leave her home continually. . . .� But Hurwitz�s last paragraph fills one�s eyes with tears of joy, as the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States must have done to billions of men and women of colour in late January of this year:

As for becoming a rabbi de jure, I am certainly willing to accept the risks and responsibilities of ordination if it becomes available. Even if the majority of the Orthodox Jewish community is not entirely ready for a woman to assume a public role in the synagogue, despite halakhic sources permitting these roles, I am prepared and I am ready. . . . . I believe the barriers to women being accepted as rabbis will be removed. Then the community at large will benefit from a large untapped supply of talent, and will be able to turn to qualified professionals for comfort, advice, and halakhic guidance, regardless of gender.

Wonderful. I only wish I could quote dozens of other highlights of this important, indispensable work of scholarship. As we used to say back in grade school when concluding a �book report,� �if you want to know the ending, read the book.� Tzay Ulmad�go and study. Bravo, Rabbi Elyse.

Case for Israel

2008-12-21T09:38:00.004-05:00

A Good 'Case for Israel'
by Alan Dershowitz, (Wiley, 265 pp., $18.99 CA)

Alan Dershowitz�s 2003 book, The Case for Israel, now out in a slightly-updated paperback, is hardly new, but then there has hardly been much movement toward peace in the Middle East since it was written. It is well worth reading, even memorizing, because the endless, usually outrageously unfair attacks on the Jewish State can eat away at our own faith in the Israelis, like acid dripping on rock, and it�s always good to strengthen our arguments against our enemies through a better sense of history and the careful use of facts.

The book will hardly satisfy either side, since while it is a polemic, it strongly advocates �the two-state solution,� (a Palestinian state next to the Jewish one) which will never satisfy those Israelis and their supporters who feel that peace is utterly impossible, so why give even an inch of land to our enemies who are so determined to destroy the State of Israel? But at its best�and the vast majority of this often prosaic and didactic text reflects the thoughtful scholarship of a brilliant defense attorney and Harvard law professor�it can strengthen most of us in better arguing our �case.� As Dershowitz declares in his preface to the paperback edition, �I sensed declining support for the Jewish nation among many people of good will. Extremists on both the left and right. . .had long demonized Israel and its supporters, but the divestment campaign sought to mainstream this demonization by miseducating a generation of young Americans and feeding them one-sided, anti-Israel propaganda.�

This important book may appear dull, because it is little more than a collection of 32 brief essays in which its author ploddingly lists the kind of accusations against thrown at Israel (�Is Israel a Colonial, Imperialist State?� �Were the Jews Unwilling to Share Palestine?� �Have the Jews Exploited the Holocaust?� �Has Israel Made Serious Efforts at Peace?� �Are Critics of Israel Anti-Semitic?�) followed by paragraphs on �The Accusors,� �The Reality� and�longest and most historical and helpful of all��The Proof.� Dershowitz is best at showing the utter two-facedness of the nation�s enemies: the occupation of Palestine by Jordan and Egypt has never been the subject of U.N. condemnation; there is vicious apartheid openly practised against non-Muslims in most Arab lands; the Palestinians have been cruelly used by their �Arab brothers� by refusing to let them out of refugee camps to be integrated into their respective societies, and more).

What I most appreciated in this powerful book is that Dershowitz is not a cheap apologist for all Israeli actions: he lists such horrors as the killings of Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin and notes that�in a typically inspired statement��Like any other democracy, Israel and its leaders should be criticized whenever their actions fail to meet acceptable standards, but the criticism should be proportional, comparative, and contextual, as it should be with regard to other nations as well.� A simple example: China�s occupation of Tibet has been far more brutal, longer, and much less justified than Israel�s of the West Bank, yet the U.N. has never condemned Tibet�s oppressor, and certainly has never recognized Tibet�s right to self-determination. The hypocrisy of the world regarding Israel is usually breath-taking.

The Case for Israel is not a must for every home, but I urge all readers of this site to take it out of their local library and read sections aloud over their dinner table to their spouses and older children. The Jewish State is far from perfect, but its accusers and haters are far from honest.

Allan Gould is a long-time Kolel student and occasional Kolel teacher. (Visit his website: http://www.allangould.com)

Jewish Visions for Aging

2008-11-21T11:16:00.001-05:00

Jewish Visions for Aging
by Rabbi Dayle Friedman. Jewish Lights Publishing.

Reviewed by Allan Gould

A common advertisement for amusement parks and the occasional movie went like this: �FUN FOR ALL KIDS FROM 8 TO 80!� A rather ageist line, when you think about it (how dare anyone condescend to our elderly as �kids�?), so let me twist the phrase in the spirit of a lovely, meaningful, powerful new book by Rabbi Dayle Friedman, Jewish Visions for Aging (�A Professional Guide for Fostering Wholeness�):
�VITAL FOR ALL FAMILY MEMBERS AND LOVED ONES OF JEWISH MEN AND WOMEN BETWEEN 70 AND 120!�

We are all witnessing an extraordinary shift in world demographics: fewer childhood deaths, and men and women living longer than ever before. Perhaps surprisingly, the Jews are leading the way �[A]t least 19 percent of U.S. Jews are sixty-five years of age or older, compared with 12 percent of Americans in general. This growth of the Jewish aging population is seen even more vividly in the fact that 23 percent of American Jews (1.19 million) were already over sixty years of age even before the first baby boomers reached that milestone. Moreover, those seventy-five and older comprise half of Jews over sixty-five, and this is the fastest growing segment of the Jewish population.�

This is not a book about demographics, of course, but a profoundly insightful and deeply Jewish recognition that �The longevity revolution creates the possibility of both extended years of healthy living and prolonged periods of frailty and dependency at life�s end. These interrelated realities create unprecedented opportunities and challenges; they are both part of the new face of Jewish aging.�

Judaism, as we all know, has much to say about almost everything in our lives, from faith to food, from how to treat strangers to how to treat the elderly. This wonderful book is an essential look at both the scholarly (what did the rabbis say about growing older?) and the practical (�The proclamation of Jewish faith calls us to listen with reverence to the sacred stories of another person�s life, and to listen especially for the presence of Oneness��the latter the first point from a remarkable list, �Ten Jewish Tools for Responding to Caregivers� Spiritual Needs.�) Who of us has not seen a grandparent or a parent unhappily shipped off to a nursing home; sink into Alzheimer�s; suffer the daily, even hourly indignities of losing control of their bodies and minds? Our extraordinary religion has so much to say about this�and, because the author, Rabbi Friedman, worked with the elderly for years as a social worker and is the founding director of Hiddur: The Center for Aging and Judaism of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, she knows more than most the fundamentals for anyone in contact with our rapidly-aging Jews, from their nurses to family members.

Jewish Visions for Aging is not only filled with moving rabbinical stories and admonitions on treating the elderly with kavod (honour), but with dozens of exquisite anecdotes of how much our aging loved ones long for companionship, respect, and often spiritual connection with their community and God. (And this is not only relevant for Jews: how good to discover in a footnote that there is a website and blog called �forgetmemory.org� which reflects on the possibility for quality of life amid memory loss.)

Let the last words of this review be the last words of this indispensable book, which Rabbi Friedman calls �My Prayer�: �May we all work to realize these old and new visions of aging. May we both fulfill and experience the promise of the psalmist, �I will satisfy [you] with length of days; enable [you] to experience My salvation.��

The Jewish Condition

2008-10-21T11:15:00.001-04:00

The Jewish Condition: Essays on Contemporary Judaism Honoring Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, edited by Aron Hirt-Manheimer, URJ Press

Reviewed by Rabbi Goldstein

Perhaps no modern liberal Jewish thinker has challenged, enlightened, enlivened, infuriated, vexed, and loved the Jewish people more than Rabbi Alexander Schindler. For thirty four years Schindler guided the Reform movement, twenty-two of them as President of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the umbrella organization of millions of reform Jews and hundreds of Reform synagogues. Schindler initiated the controversial stand of patrilineal descent, whereby the child of a Jewish father (but not Jewish mother) is counted as a Jew in reform. He was the first to cry out for outreach to the unaffiliated and what he called "the unchurched"- non-Jews who may be drawn into conversion to Judaism. He championed for the religious equality of women and gays long before it was politically correct. He worked tirelessly for inter-religious dialogue, and inter-Jewish dialogue. When he died just recently, it was not only a shock but also a great loss to the Jewish people.

This book has dozens of insightful essays on the contemporary Jewish condition, its overarching issues, its future. The array of authors and topics is impressive. Julius Lester, author of Lovesong and the famous black son of a Baptist minister turned Jew, writes a wonderful piece on Blacks, Jews, and Farrakhan. Rabbi Jack Stern has a beautiful article on Jewish Ethics in the Daily Life of a Jew; Rachel Adler on Women and Tradition; and Rabbi Gunther Plaut on the Limits of Reform Judaism. These are just a few of my favorites in a book well worth reading, by people we ought to be listening to. This is not just a book for Reform Jews, or for people interested in Reform Judaism. This is a book for all Jews who live in the modern world and who care about the Jewish condition.

I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

2008-09-21T11:11:00.002-04:00

I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
by Bernice Eisenstein
McClelland & Stewart, 187 pp., $32.99

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Graphic novels have become extremely popular in today's society. Although they echo the comics of our youth (Superman; MAD, etc.) they are essentially serious books of drawings often on meaningful themes such as A History of Violence, (turned into a masterful film by Canada's David Cronenberg) or MAUS, with cats as Nazis and Jews as mice, (which won the Pulitzer Prize). But nothing would have prepared me for the brilliance, beauty and striking originality of Toronto-born illustrator Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors.

There must be some 50 partial-page drawings in this brief book, and one stunning chapter consisting of full-paged cartoons in the middle. But the remarkable cover gives its theme away: its title is drawn in a horror movie fashion, and below it, we see the author as a child, casting a frightening shadow of her two parents behind her. The meaning is clear: being born to parents who were told by the world You Must Die! casts a dark emotional and spiritual shadow over any child born to them. We are fortunate that at least one of those hundreds of thousands of children of survivors' children from the Holocaust was as gifted as Ms. Eisenstein, who has the artistic (and yes, poetic and intellectual) genius and honesty to capture their life-long dilemma.

Like any intelligent novel (this is non-fiction all the way), there is a beautiful symmetry to I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors: it begins with the death of the author's father, and ends, many dozens of heartfelt and often very witty drawings and pages of quality prose later, with the circumcision of the author's son. Life goes on exactly the opposite of what Hitler and his evil henchmen had wished for European Jewry.

Do not allow Ms. Eisenstein's deeply moving drawings to put you off, and assume that this memoir is frivolous; it is anything but. She lays out her theme in the first few pages: �While my father was alive, I searched to find his face among those documented photographs of survivors of Auschwitz actually photos from any camp would do. I thought that if I could see him staring out through barbed wire, I would then know how to remember him, know what he was made to become, and then possibly know what he might have been. All my life, I have looked for more in order to fill in the parts of my father that had gone missing....�

It's probably true that we ALL search for our parents' youths and lives: who were this man and woman who met one another, married, and mated like millions of couples before them, so that we might be born? But being the child of Holocaust survivors adds so much more weight to this search: "There is no Holocaust Anonymous to go to, she writes; �. . .no audience to stand before and state, Hello, everyone. I am addicted to the Holocaust. Today is my first day of being clean and I don't need the Holocaust anymore to feel like a worthy person.�

What's so admirable, even thrilling about this masterpiece is that the author carefully avoids all clich�s about survivors (and their families); all sentimentality is eschewed as well: �Is it funny enough, is it sad enough?� she writes, about a third-way through. �Am I too whiny, too angry, too petulant? Boo hoo, poor little survivors' child. . . . You see, I have this problem-- growing up in the household of my parents was not tragic, but their past was. My life was not cursed, theirs was. They were born under an unfavourable star and forced to sew it onto their clothing. Yet here I am, some Jewish Sisyphus, pushing history and memory uphill, wondering what I'm supposed to be, and what I really feel like is a rebellious child, wanting to stand before my parents and say, Here, take it, it's yours, I don't want it.� That's extraordinary writing; breathtakingly beautiful; heartbreakingly honest. And nearly the entire book is at that high level of artistry.

There are studies of Yiddish and its power, lovely memories of Kensington Market in Toronto (and countless other of Toronto's landmarks, which will entice many a Toronto Jewish, even Gentile, reader), and often uproarious cartoons which suddenly fill the reader's eyes with well-earned tears: on page 61, we see a drawing of the author as a child on a very frustrated-looking Santa's lap, thinking in a caption, �So, Santa, here's what I want: a dreydl that plays music when it spins. Have my parents stop arguing so much. . . . Santa, bring them all back. And if you can't do that, then make one snowfall turn into ash.� Wow.

I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is truly a great work of art, enriched (and not lessened) by the haunting beauty of its many cartoons. This book will now sit proudly in the Holocaust section of my library next to Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Emil Fackenheim, Raul Hilberg, and so many others. (It is a subject I have taught and am obsessed with, but then, what Jew is not obsessed with the subject?) Bravo to McClelland & Stewart; bravo to Bernice Eisenstein. This is a book for the ages.

The Great Escape

2008-06-21T11:10:00.001-04:00

The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
by Kati Marton
Simon & Schuster, 288 pp.

reviewed by Allan Gould

Countries are different. They really are. Everyone knows that Poland, where the Jews thrived for a thousand years, was not the friendliest of places for its Jewish citizens during the Nazi era and even after. Most are aware that Denmark saved 90% of its Jews (although fewer are aware of how good Bulgaria and Italy were to them). But Hungary? Hungary is so strange. I've just completed writing a book with two Hungarian Holocaust survivors, who were treated like royalty by all their neighbours, both before and after the mass murders, and I could hardly believe it. Why Hungary?

The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World is a beautifully-written, often moving book by Kati Marton, a Hungarian/American author, born Jewish but whose parents hid that fact from her for years. And what a story she tells! She traces the lives of these amazingly gifted Hungarian Jews--four scientists, two photographers, two major film directors/producers, and a writer--and the fact that you may not recognize all of them is our loss- and our gain, when you read about them. The brief Introduction to the book is worth the price of the book, alone: two young physicists, Eugene Wigner (a later Nobel Prize-winner) and Leo Szilard, are seeking out Albert Einstein on Long Island in the summer of 1939, when he was vacationing there. They finally track him down, prove to him that the U.S. government must act immediately on creating some kind of atomic bomb (because the Nazis were closing in on that goal; thank God they had thrown all their Jews out of the country and considered physics a Jewish science. Based on these three immigrants' actions, President Roosevelt soon created the Manhattan Project, which led to the bombs which were dropped on two Japanese cities, and the start of the atomic age.

Whew. If science is not your forte, you'll be thrilled to see how two Hungarian-Jewish photographers, Andre Kertesz and Robert Capa, changed and even molded that art forever; similarly, in motion pictures, Alexander Korda (who produced The Third Man and many other major films) and Michael Curtiz (who directed Casablanca, one of the most popular films of all time, along with other classics). And how can we ignore Arthur Koestler, the great lover and supporter of Zionism (like another secular Jew from Hungary named Theodore Herzl, a few decades earlier), and author of arguably the most important anti-Communist book of all time, which is also a marvelous novel, Darkness at Noon? (I am almost reluctant to claim Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb and the man whom Peter Sellers modeled the character of Dr. Strangelove after- but he is one of the greats profiled here. Well, how about von Neumann, who was truly the Father of the modern computer?)

Now, name-dropping and ethnic-self-love get irritatingly chauvinistic, but I don't deny African-Americans the nachas [joy and pride] they get from Michael Jordan or Ray Charles, or the Arabs the invention of the zero, and everyone in the world loves to point out the great minds or great souls who have been produced by their nation or religion. Fine. What makes this book so intriguing and even irresistible to me is the way Ms. Marton captures the glory of Budapest and much of Hungary during the golden years between 1867, when their Jews were emancipated, and the first World War. As the author puts it, almost heartbreakingly, Hungarian Jews thought they had already found their Promised Land on the banks of the Danube, and had no interest in going to Palestine or anywhere else. (That great river would run red with blood and be clogged with tens of thousands of Jewish bodies during the Second World War.)

Nothing lasts forever, but the way the glory days ended for the Jews of Hungary so suddenly is horrific to read. By the age of 11, Edward Teller had experienced war, communism, revolution, counterrevolution, antisemitism and fascism. The brilliant physicist later wrote, "Having seen the end of Hungary as I had known it, I could imagine the end of Western civilization." This critic immediately thinks of that great response by Gandhi to a reporter's question about what the great man thought of Western civilization. "They should try it," he replied.

The Great Escape is hardly a must-read, but it is a strong reminder of what was lost to Europe when they drove their Jews out--and, by implication, how much more was lost when over a half-million Hungarian Jews were slaughtered in just the last few months of the war by the Nazis--and, yes, with the help of many Hungarian fascists. (How many potential Gershwins were murdered? How many scientists who may have cured cancer by now? Or how many average human beings, like you reading this review, who never got the opportunity to grow up, have families, and lead their lives freely?) This fine book is filled with memorable anecdotes and a deep sense of sorrow at how we (so-called) humans keep destroying this world of ours. And how interesting to read that the author, Kati Marton, was the wife of the late Peter Jennings, that very competent (Canadian-born-and-bred) broadcaster and long-time anchor of World News Tonight and the mother of his two children. Oh, those Hungarians!

For the Sake of Heaven and Earth

2008-05-21T11:05:00.001-04:00

For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, by Irving (Yitz) Greenberg)
Jewish Publication Society

reviewed by Allan Gould

There are some books which I have the honour of reviewing for you that I long for every Jew to own: Emil Fackenheim�s brilliant yet accessible WHAT IS JUDAISM?, which I looked at last year as a Kaddish for that wonderful human being, Jew, and philosopher, is a good example.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg�known as "Yitz" to nearly anyone who has met this kind, good, wise Orthodox rabbi�has written several books which should, indeed, be in every Jewish library, such as his THE JEWISH WAY�THE JEWISH HOLIDAYS, a profound, exquisitely-written study of each of the major yom-tovim of our faith, which I find myself re-reading several times each year (and which can be purchased from various Internet book stores in used condition). (Get it!)

Only last year, the revered Yitz Greenberg gathered together several scholarly articles on a subject which has long vexed him, and which has long been [dangerously?] ignored by most Jews, especially the most "traditional" of our faith, and added a devastating opening essay of just under 50 pages. The book is called For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, and is subtitled �The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity,� and it was published in 2004 as a low-priced paperback by the Jewish Publication Society. This latest book by one of our faith�s most intriguing philosophers and thinkers is NOT one that need be in most private Jewish libraries; it is hard-going, and often maddeningly complex. But it raises so many serious, challenging questions about Jewish/Gentile relations�and from an Orthodox rabbi yet!�that it is impossible to ignore. Let me at least raise some of those questions for you, without urging you to rush out and buy a copy.

The opening paragraph of Rabbi Yitz�s first, most recent essay (�On the Road to a New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity: a Personal Journey�) really messed up my brain. But then, listening to Yitz�as I always do, when he comes and lectures in Toronto�and reading Yitz�as I often do, as noted above�has always been a kind of Cuisinart for my thinking. And what more can anyone ask of a serious philosopher? Here goes:

Almost 2000 years ago, Judaism and nascent Christianity separated from each other. The two communities set out on very different journeys through history, guided by the star of a parallel policy: hear no good, see no good, and speak no good of each other. Important Christian canonical texts portrayed Judaism as a religion that had no right to exist; Jewish faith was a once valid, now spiritually bankrupt creed, repudiated by God. Great Jewish rabbis defined Christianity as a faith founded on folly, whose dogmas violently twisted classical Jewish concepts into a not-to-be-recognized form of idolatry. The church was viewed as a bastard offspring (a medieval polemicist would say: the offspring of a bastard) that grew up and became big and violent enough to abuse its parent unmercifully.

Whew. That�s certainly "telling it like it is," isn't it? But then, Rabbi Yitz never minces words. Of course, then he lays out what will be his major purpose, and theme, of this collection of often difficult-to-follow essays: "Yet in the past century, both religions have begun a new encounter with each other. Every passing decade reveals that this process is offering both faiths a true historical rarity: a second chance to connect and thus an opportunity to re-revision themselves. I believe that by responding openly with honesty, both communities will discover that God has given them an opportunity to renew the purpose of their sacred existence on earth�."

Whew, again. What words to encounter�and from a halachic, 613-law-following Orthodox Jewish rabbi in the 21st century! And you can see what Yitz Greenberg has been up against: as more and more Christian Americans (especially) move to the "right" in religiosity and observance, more and more of them see Jews, Muslims, and everyone who does not "accept the divinity of Jesus as the Messiah" as being doomed to a fiery eternity. And the Jews? Those who count themselves among "the Torah-true," like my dear friend Yitz Greenberg, essentially "don�t give a damn what the Gentiles think," any more than most people on this earth lose any sleep over global warming, or the Newfoundland seal hunt, or anything else which does not seem to impact on their lives in any important, vital way.

Of course, there is a needle in this haystack; a fly in this ointment; a mosquito in this tent: and it is a very large needle/fly/mosquito: the cold-blooded, organized, deliberate murder of 85% of the Jews of Europe, or over a third of every Jew who was alive on this earth in 1940. How can one escape the centrality of the Holocaust; the Shoah? For most Jews, it destroyed their ability to ever trust their Christian brothers and sisters again (who were either murdering us by gas or gun, or ignoring the smell and sound of the latter); for most Christians, the image of their parents or friends dragging their Jewish neighbours to the death-camp-directed trains, when it comes to their minds at all, since the end of World War II, has been a source of deep guilt, only alleviated by trying to forget the whole thing, or smiling at the thought that there was the occasional Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg which somehow forgave millions of others for not responding humanely. For six decades now, Jews have turned to Eli Wiesel (when they turned in that painful direction at all); Christians have mainly turned away. (And who can blame them for that?)

And then, along comes an ordained Orthodox rabbi and Harvard Ph.D., Irving Greenberg, who has been struggling passionately, intellectually, RELIGIOUSLY, with the Big Questions about Jewish (as well as Christian) responses to the Holocaust, since 1961. (Yet, he admits in the extraordinary essay which opens his latest book, "while in college, I did not reflect on my attitude toward Christianity as a religion; on the whole, I remained mildly dismissive of the faith as practiced and remembered that its practitioners had not treated Jews well historically.") (There is an understatement for you!)

Then, Yitz truly began to wake up to the Holocaust. (And I use that phrase advisedly; I am forever quoting the amazing line which James Joyce gives Stephen Daedalus in his early novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.") Greenberg finally hears of his many aunts and uncles murdered in Eastern Europe; he reads many of the books that were being published in the late 1960s which showed how "the United States had abandoned and betrayed the European Jews," and he responded, as a young husband and father, in that deeply profound way which, one would think, most people should respond to that bleak period in human�not only Jewish�history:

Days of helpless despair sequenced into nights of joy. Hours of sitting, enveloped by consuming, all-pervasive anxiety and fear of what the next moment would bring, were followed by walks through the peaceful, secure, unafraid streets of Jerusalem. [How ironic this last sentence seems today, over four decades later, as bus bombings and pizzeria slaughters had become common over the past few years!] In the end, my wife�s loving presence preserved me from madness, and a living Israel saved me from death of the soul. Although I since have moved on to other stages of Holocaust consciousness and religious response, there is a piece of my soul that is permanently fixed in this relentless, locked embrace of the life force and the death force�.

What a response! And that�s where the agony begins, and never ends. Because Rabbi Irving Greenberg eventually came to see�as did his dear friend, the recently-deceased Emil Fackenheim�that the Shoah was NOT merely just "one more slaughter," but a murderous explosion which challenged Christian purpose and survival, and even shook (and possibly broke?) the actual covenant made between God and his people Israel in the Sinai desert, some three millennia ago.

To quote the good Rabbi, "I became convinced that dialogue was an absolute necessity�first to check Christian teaching of contempt and then to revise Jewish negative stereotypes toward Christianity." As one might joke (but won�t): good luck! And this obsession with a dialogue (with the enemy? With our younger, sister, murderous brethren?) led to a further conviction on the part of Rabbi Irving Greenberg: ". . .I was convinced that the Holocaust was a revelational event in at least two religions (Judaism and Christianity). Therefore, it was important to spell out its messages and teach them to be practitioners in both faiths. Can one event be a revelation in two religions?" A good question! And answered in a fascinating fashion.

Along the way, Yitz Greenberg found true, deep, supportive friends in the Christian community, such as Alice and Roy Eckardt, who recognized in the Holocaust a crippling failure in Christian goodness and acceptable response. But he often received reactions from the religious Jewish community which were passionately negative: it�s useless to try and have a dialogue with these people who murdered our parents, our families, our children! Why even attempt it? And, perhaps even more crushing was the refusal of most "frum" Jews to see the Shoah as a possible break in the eternal covenant between Ha-Shem and His People; had there not been so many other mass murders, slaughters, expulsions, crusades, pogroms, Chmelnitzkis, Stalins. . . ?

You can see why I find Yitz Greenberg such a haunting�and haunted�philosopher. He has spent most of his life trying to convince his fellow (religious) Jews that the Shoah was NOT merely "one more event" in Jewish history; and to convince his growing number of Christian philosopher friends that �the teaching of contempt goes straight back to the original Gospel accounts. The Holocaust had revealed that, at the very heart of Christianity, a shelter for evil existed that must be razed, since hatred was in fundamental contradiction to the gospel of love that is the New Testament�s true role and goal.�

What makes Yitz�s struggle all the more painful is, that a growing number of Christians (especially since the Six Day War) have seen the Israelis as "the new Nazis," whose actions in self-defense (and often more pro-active) against suicide bombers and Palestinians who felt displaced since 1967, have been excessive, cruel, and a too-simple way of forgiving their own fellow-practitioners of Christianity for their grotesque failure of morality and humanity during the 1940s.

Whew, indeed. I often think of Yitz Greenberg as a kind of modern John the Baptist, "a voice crying out in the wilderness"�although the good Rabbi might prefer to hear me compare him with the more classically-Jewish figure of Jeremiah, crying out against Jewish failings and demanding positive moral responses from everyone.

What I love about Yitz Greenberg�and this problematic, mind-boggling book (especially the opening 50 pages of "a philosopher�s autobiography")�is that he keeps raising the Big Questions�questions so big that few of us think of them, once we move past our teenage years, get married, have families, find jobs, pay our mortgages and taxes, etc. One example which echoes through the entire collection of essays: "The general Jewish position has been that Jesus was a false messiah. Why? Would it not be more precise to say that a false messiah is one who teaches the wrong values and who turns sin into holiness? A more accurate description, from a Jewish perspective, would be that Jesus was not a 'false' but a 'failed' messiah. He has not finished the job but his work is not in vain."

What a thought! But to a religious Jew, what could Jesus have been but false�well, if not Jesus, then assuredly what his followers made of him and his teachings. And to a religious Christian, even the term "failed messiah" can easily be taken as an insult, in spite of the obvious fact that Rabbi Greenberg means nothing of the sort.

Do I recommend this book? Certainly, the first 50 pages, in which Yitz Greenberg shares his growing obsession with the Shoah, with Christianity, and with what he thinks is the vital need for some kind of serious dialogue. It is heartbreaking, meaningful, tragic, possibly doomed work. Should this book be in your library? Well, maybe not; not all the essays are up to the level of the opening chapter, although each has the occasional mind-teaser which I was happy to have twig my brain.

I love Yitz Greenberg. Whether a modern John the Baptist or a modern Jeremiah, he is certainly an important thorn�in the sides of both Jews and Christians alike. I hope the above thoughts will stir in you a new longing to try and bridge that ferocious, terrifying gap between the Jewish people and our younger brothers and sisters (as the late Pope would say about Christians).

Of course, the need for such dialogue is ever changing, ever growing�and not only with our Christian friends and neighbours. I�ll conclude with one painful line (and a footnote to that line) in one of the essays reprinted in this book: "The reason we no longer have religious wars is not so much that modern people are so pluralist, but that they no longer care so passionately about religion." Then, just below, Yitz adds a footnote: "This was written in 1968. Since 9/11/2001, we have been taught that people who care passionately about religion are back and they are prepared to terrorize without limit and kill without mercy."

Oh, Lord; does it ever end?

Yentl's Revenge

2008-04-21T13:02:00.001-04:00

Yentl's Revenge
by Danya Ruttenberg (ed.), Seal Press, 230 pp.

Reviewed by Allan Gould

The word �essay� comes from the French �essai,� meaning �to try.� And what editor Danya Ruttenberg has done with her recent anthology of twenty essays by Jewish women in the wittily-named YENTL�S REVENGE (Seal Press, 230 pp., $27.50�but much cheaper from an Internet bookstore) is a noble attempt.

The sub-title makes it clear: this collection is about �The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism,� and it is certainly an eclectic, even dangerous wave, depending upon your religious background and leanings. So, we get Emily Wages writing about her insistance on wearing a kippah all over the world�except Israel (�Openly expressing my religious observance challenges others to reexamine their view of spirituality; wearing a kippah challenges me to translate my deepest beliefs into compassionate action.�)

Yet less than two hundred pages away, we get Jennifer Bleyer�s �From Riot Grrl to Yeshiva Girl, or How I Became My Own Damn Rabbi,� about a rather intriguing journey from punk rocker to ba�ale teshuvah in Israel, which is both vulgar and revolutionary. (In her concluding paragraph, she insists, �We are allowing ourselves to be Jewish in a way that riot grrls [sic] taught us to be feminist�explosively, boundlessly, beyond definition and with an almost erotic hunger for transcendence.�

As with any collection of essays, there is a wide range of opinions, styles and quality: women�and men�struggling to be serious Jews may be deeply moved and even inspired by Haviva Ner-David�s thoughtful �Parenting as a Religious Jewish Feminist� (�I do not want her [daughter] to grow up feeling, as a Jewish female, resentful of her religion, or marginalized and irrelevant, all of which I often felt as a child and young woman.�) The editor�s own study of menstruation in Jewish thought (�Blood Simple�) is scholarly and respectful. Karen Levy�s strangely named �Sexy Rabbi� appears shallow at first glance�she resents and is troubled by all the sexist comments of men who have trouble with her physical attractiveness�but then she tosses off a moving thought: �The job of a rabbi, while still new to women, is actually quite �feminine�: we care for people and nurture their growth; we reach out to them in times of change or pain and try to be good listeners.� Yet several other essays on intermarriage, marriage, and Zionism are infantile and lack much value.

Still, these are remarkable times for women in our ancient faith, as many doors open and others remain shut. As I re-read these uneven, but often powerful essays a second time (the magnificent one by Yiskah Rosenfeld, �You Take Lillith, I�ll Take Eve� is worthy of a Masters degree), I thought of how any collection of essays is like a buffet. And then I noticed the last paragraph of the editor�s introduction, and laughed, and agreed: �As this anthology will show you, there are about as many ways to see this stuff as there are blintzes at a bat mitzvah buffet. Nu, please. . .sit down, dig in. Taste the Jewish flavours of tomorrow.�

The Women's Torah Commentary

2008-03-21T12:59:00.002-04:00

The Women's Torah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions,
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein (Jewish Lights Publishing)

Reviewed by Rabbi Larry Raphael, (author of Mystery Midrash: An Anthology of Jewish Mystery and Detective Fiction)

A basic tenet of theories of creativity note that to see the old in a new way is fundamental to one's creative insight. This volume of commentaries to each and every parashah is a tool that can give every reader insights and stimulate their creative thinking. The Women's Torah Commentary is a terrific resource with essays from a wide range of women colleagues (Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist) including the first woman ordained by each of these movements.

There are many gems in the book, but the essay at the beginning on "What You Need to Know to Use This Book" and the excellent bibliography make it a priceless resource for any home or library.

Familiar as I am with many contemporary commentaries on the Torah, I recommend this book without reservation.

Read Jack Riemer's review in the San Francisco's Jewish Bulletin

Years of Extermination

2008-02-21T13:01:00.002-05:00

Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
by Saul Friedlander
Harper Collins, 663 pp.

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Can we ever get enough of the Holocaust? Has it been quite literally done to death in film, literature and scholarship? I have warned in other book reviews that our great faith cannot survive on mounds of bodies: it must be our extraordinary ethics and the Sabbath and rituals which must be stressed in our lives and to our children, and not victimhood.

Yet the second large volume by the excellent Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination is surely must reading, if only for its powerful and meaningful introduction, and the way it depends so much on diaries--most of their authors sadly murdered--which give us a real sense of the singular horror of that time. This 663-page volume (Harper Collins), which is followed by 128 pages of notes, is rarely poetic or even horrific--there are no photographs--but deeply moving in its often new theories of why, as well as how, this outrageous genocide took place.

I had real trouble with the very title, having always hated the term extermination. It is the word choice of the murderers, and echoes their belief that they were getting rid of vermin, lice, vile creatures, not humanity. As a student of and lecturer/author about this grotesque period in general and antisemitism in particular, I've always felt that that ugly word is a trap, not unlike African-Americans using the n-word: rather than take the pain from the term, it smears the user. Rats are exterminated; human beings are tortured, murdered, slaughtered en masse. But that's this excellent author's choice, and since I treasured Friedlander's poetic memoir, When Memory Comes, and his exquisite profile of the until-then unknown Kurt Gerstein (a deeply religious German Protestant soldier who found himself in charge of shipping the deadly poison Zyklon B to the murder camps, tried to notify others, and finally committed suicide), I must forgive and accept.

How can one review a book of such scholarhip in a necessarily brief web review? By partially quoting the author's introductory quotation from a diary written in 1943 in Warsaw, which states, "No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth. . . . Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth." One must (sadly) applaud the rarely-acknowledged reference to the estrangement between Western and Eastern Jews before the Shoah: the religious, Eastern ones finding the Westerners lacking Jewishness; the Westerners feeling the Easterners appeared backward and primitive. I have not seen the following put so clearly: No less blatant than their powerlessness was the inability of most European Jews to assess the seriousness of the threats that they faced. After all, during the first half-decade after Hitler rose to power, barely one-third of German Jewry emigrated, even with the persecution and the indignities that descended on it month after month, year after year. . . . But then, we in the 21st century, with 20/20 hindsight, know what horrors humans are capable of; could they possibly? I appreciate that Friedlander underlines a fact which too few historians have emphasized: that the different levels of anti-Jewish ideology could be formulated and summed up in the tersest way: The Jew was a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race and to the German Volk. (His italics). In other words, this wasn't a drunken Mel Gibson hissing infantile antisemitic slurs, or a flustered comedian rudely lashing out with the n-word; this was a society-- a nation, even a continent--which saw the Jews as cockroaches, spreading filth and destruction: it was either us or them. Extermination, indeed.

I could fill this entire review with lines and images which made me catch my breath: the euthanasia of the mentally ill and elderly, accepted by doctors, hospitals and German society itself, which had been going on for years, paving the way. The crazy rumours which were accepted by 100s of 1,000s of Jews, nearly always beliefs now clearly seen as pathetic but understandable optimism and absurd hope: Hitler was dead; German soldiers were abandoning the battlefields; liberation is imminent (the latter, believed by many in December, 1939, when there were only a million or so dead). The great Italian filmmaker Antonioni loving the despicable, vile, Jew-hating Nazi film Jud Suss, and awarding it the top award at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, admitting it was propaganda but welcoming it, and admiring how the despicable, absurd, fictional Jewish anti-hero violates the young girl. . . [which was] done with astonishing skill. And I appreciate, although pained by, the author's heartbreaking admission that [T]here is something at once profoundly disturbing yet rapidly numbing in the narration of the anti-Jewish campaign that developed in the territories newly occupied by the Germans or their allies. History seems to turn into a succession of mass killing operations and. . .little else. How true, how inevitable, how devastating. And, yes, Hitler used the word extermination five times during major speeches in the fall of 1941, alone.

It can't all be here, but much of it is: Anne Frank's own reaction in her diary of the rumours of mass gassing of Jews; the outrageous failure of religious Protestants and Catholics to try and save their neighbours who had given them their Messiah; the sick, perverted, scientifically worthless racial experiments on the bodies of the dead; the way even the tiniest Jewish communities on remote Greek islands were tracked down and shipped to death camps; how 250,000 Jews died on the death marches alone. And the too-few good people as well: Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Eastern Europe, handing out thousands of transit visas to doomed Jews, who later wrote that he just acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind. And the ways that both Bulgaria and Denmark rose above all other nations in saving their neighbours at the risks of their own, non-Jewish lives.

This is an important addition to the enormous library dedicated to this utterly outrageous, still-unbelievable mass slaughter, which occurred during the lifetimes of our own parents, even during some of our own. And we had thought the Dark Ages were long over? There are flaws, such as the favourable reference to Canada's lunatic, eternally-elected Prime Minister who deliberately kept Jews out of our glorious land, William Lyon Mackenzie King, but they are minor. And $49.95, plus GST, is a lot of money for a single volume. But each of us can learn much from merely reading and pondering the names of the three major sections of The Years of Extermenation alone: Part I: Terror (1939-1941); Part II: Mass Murder (1941-1942); Part III: Shoah (1942-1945). Read this, learn from it, weep, and vow to live the words never again.

Unsettled

2008-01-21T12:52:00.001-05:00

Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, by Melvin Konner

Reviewed by Allan Gould

History can be exciting, yet so many classic histories of the Jews are rather dry and dispassionate�surprising, when one considers how dynamic and passionate are the Jewish people, and the outrageously vicious (and often deeply-loving) response they draw out of others. I love recent books such as Paul Johnson�s A History of the Jews (written by a committed Catholic, and a right-winger, to boot), but the Jewish histories I once were enthralled by�such as Max Dimont�s Jews, God, and History, were later discovered to be often wrong-headed and factually flawed.

What a thrill then, to discover Unsettled (with the intriguing sub-title, An Anthropology of the Jews), by medical doctor and Professor of Anthropology at Emory University Melvin Konner. The book is both highly personal (he was a practising, Orthodox Jew until he was 17, and only recently has returned�at least culturally�to the faith) and dynamically, reliably historical.

And what an interesting concept, to begin with: to look at the Jews from an anthropological viewpoint, studying them from the mountains of Ethiopia to villages in Afghanistan, India and China. As he notes, a quarter-way through this 450-page book, although Jewish history "seems a trail of tears. . . .the real history is not that of wars and kings, slaughter and exile, but that of the moment-to-moment lives of ordinary people." Then, as he often does, he quotes a phrase from the TRUE basis of the Jewish people over the past two millennia�far more than the Torah�the Talmud: "Every place where Israel was exiled, the Divine Presence was with them/ They were exiled to Egypt, the Presence was with them/ They were exiled to Babylon, the Presence was with them. . . .and when they shall return, the Presence will be with them."

From his very introduction, Professor Konner grabs us by our intellectual and moral eyes, ears and throat with his beautiful prose. He lists "some of the main points" that he hopes to make in the book, and many will challenge even the most educated student of Jewish history: "Contrary to some claims�peoplehood�something quite different from religion�has been a part of Jewish identity from the beginning. . . . The notion of the Jews as a studious, mild, ethical people who do not fight is a myth. Ancient Israel was born in violence, as were both Temple and Torah Judaism. . . . The great Jewish gifts to the world�monotheism, the Ten Commandments, resistance against tyranny�were born in weakness in a group of tribes, then a kingdom, buffeted between great empires. . . . At least four times ancient Israel was devastated because of Jewish factionalism, splinter cults, extreme religious zealotry, and military overreach. This may happen again. . . ."

I was so enthralled by the book's daring, its insights, its strikingly New Way of approaching thirty-plus centuries of Jewish existence. The author is capable of great wit and irony, as he notes that, long before Rome, Greece, even Babylon, a Pharaoh by the name of Merneptah gave the world the very first archeological use of the word "Israel" in a list of nations which had been vanquished, and were no more. "The first mention of Israel is meant to be its last," Konner almost chuckles, referring to an Egyptian column which dates back to over 1200 years before the Common Era.

What makes Unsettled (what an inspired title!!) so special? The fact that the author has been "an insider" helps; the fact that he longs to see the Jews continue as a people, a nation, a religion also helps�even if many might be ware of such empathy and closeness to a scientist�s subject. While never chauvinistic, he makes claims which I�ve rarely seen before, but are probably irrefutable: "Why did Jewish thinkers play a strong role in laying the intellectual foundations of the modern world? [Einstein, Freud, Marx, etc.] First, their ancient tradition of creating and studying texts was one of the oldest on the planet. When other cultures� identities depended on territory, the Jews had to rely on texts. There were always Jews who restricted themselves to holy texts and Jews�Philo, Josephus, the Jewish thinkers of Islam, even Maimonides�who straddled Jewish and secular civilization. Renaissance Europe was no exception, and the Jewish printing presses spreading throughout the Continent and beyond mass-produced sacred texts as well as new secular ones. For centuries Jews had literacy rates several times as high as those of the people around them."

Konner sees the insanity, even absurdity, of Jew-hatred with a clearer eye than I have even encountered, such as this paragraph in his closing chapter: "The Jews were killed for keeping their own ways, and they were killed for trying to pass as Greek. They were killed for rejecting Christianity, and when they accepted it they were killed for not embracing it strongly enough. They were killed for being in charge of world capitalism, and they were killed for trying to overthrow it. . . . They were killed because they were weak, pathetic, and defenseless, and now they are killed because they are strong, proud, and protected. . . ."
Unsettled was first published in the last days of 2003, and recently came out in a reasonably-priced paperback, but it�s also easily available in remaindered hardcover in many Jewish bookstores or available online for less than ten dollars. It is money well-spent, and will give you strength to survive�and oodles of good cocktail conversation�for the next millennia, if they let us live that long. Bravo, Dr. Konner.

The Pity of it All

2008-01-21T11:26:00.001-05:00

The Pity of it All
by Amos Elon
Picador Publishing

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Sometimes just a title gives one a hint of the beauty and power of the style and subject of a book: The Pity of it All is the great Israeli historian Amos Elon's superlative work of five years ago, now in a reasonably-priced paperback. Its sub-title lays out its goal: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch. With his much earlier Israelis: Founders and Son, Elon showed that he could write and analyze with the best, but rarely has any book of history moved me to tears so often. Shaped like a great novel, the book opens with the teenaged Moses Mendelssohn entering Berlin in 1743 on foot, through the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass; 400 pages and two centuries later, another future German-Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, escapes by train from the Nazi-run city. In between, one meets an amazing array of Jewish men and women who molded German culture and history in an unforgettable flow of remarkable, world-changing history and eventual devastation.

It is so easy to name drop: to list Heine and Kafka in literature, Ehrlich, Einstein and Freud in the sciences, Mahler, Weill, Schoenberg and Mendelssohn's own grandson Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in music. The fine author cannot but admit in his introduction that "[g]iven the Jews' late entry into European civilization, the wealth and variety of their contribution to the arts and sciences was startling." But only a few paragraphs earlier, Elon also notes that, with less than 1% of the population by the eve of the Nazi takeover, it is just as stunning to note the vast enmity which the now-influential Jewish community had attracted. The astonishingly influential Franz Kafka (surely the Einstein of literature in terms of his impact on his field) noted, both Jews and Germans have a lot in common. They are ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others. Both are pariahs.

Of course, the Jews of Germany, even when numbering but a few thousand in the late 18th century, were much like their co-religionists across Europe at various times over the years: an economic resource to be tapped when needed and evicted when not. But the eventual rise of Hitler which hangs like a dark shadow over every page of this extraordinary book of history underlines the pity of the title: Mendelssohn translates the Bible into German and becomes the patron saint to his people; the Jews begin to assimilate, even convert in great numbers including the parents of Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine himself (whose popularity as arguably Germany's greatest poet was impossible for even the Nazis to uproot, so they described his most famous poem about the Lorelei as a folk song by an unknown author); the rise of a new kind of scientific Jew-hatred which even the great Mendelssohn sensed before his death; the name changes (Itziks changed their name to Hitzig, Cohens to Kahn, Levis to Lau); the Jews become Germany's greatest art collectors, film makers, music conductors, performers and composers. One is shaken, but somehow not surprised, to discover that Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine were actually distant cousins.

Inevitably, ironies abound like one's tears: Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of Reform Judaism, loved his German culture so deeply that he wrote, Jerusalem is a noble memory from the past and the cradle of our religion; but it holds no hope for the future. No new life can begin there. Let us not disturb its rest. Of course, irony is one thing, agony quite another: Geiger's son Ludwig, the leading scholar of Goethe in his beloved German homeland, objected to helping Russian Jews settle in Palestine, insisting that he felt no greater sympathy for them than for famished German day laborers. (Has there ever been a more horrific irony in history than the fact that it was a German-Jewish chemist, Fritz Haber, an associate of Einstein, who perfected the poison gas used during World War I, and, later, developed the killing gas used in the death camps, Zyklon B?)

The Pity of it All is not all about pain, as it is joyous to read that a Jew drafted the Weimar Constitution, and that Weimar Germany became the centre of a Hebrew revival (!) in the 1920s. But anyone with a drop of feeling for the Jewish people might find him/herself putting down this book countless times in horror, such as when the countless suicides of Jews who cannot cope with the rise of Nazi hatred in their beloved native land spread across the nation. How beloved was that country to its Jews over their two centuries of glory? Erich Maria Remarque, author of what is probably the greatest anti-war novel of all time and, naturally, banned and burned by the Nazis was asked, in his American exile, whether he missed Germany. "Why should I?" he answered. "I'm not Jewish."

This is a history book for the ages, and one which I highly recommend to all.

The Wicked Son

2007-01-21T12:57:00.002-05:00

The Wicked Son
by David Mamet
Schocken, 191 pp.

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Are you familiar with the hard-hitting, filthy-language, make-you-think-a-lot-deeper plays and novels of David Mamet of Chicago? Oleanna took on nothing less than male/female relationships in academia, and Glengarry Glen Ross is a truly devastating attack on, or is a description of rapacious capitalism, as shown in the back-stabbing actions of a group of desperate men trying to sell homes in a new development of that name. (The movie was a solid version of the play; check it out). His best plays have won Pulitzer Prizes, and he is inarguably one of the most exciting playwrights and screenwriters of our times, and far more interesting and talented than 95% of Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams.

Perhaps one should not be taken aback to discover that he recently came out with a thin, 191-paged volume called The Wicked Son, sporting a sub-title which could well cause shivers in the (bleeding?) hearts of a number of North American Jews: the 75% who have never visited the State of Israel, perhaps, and certainly the 50% or so who never studied their faith, much less attended a Sabbath meal. The opening essay, which is the Foreward, leaps in your face like a traffic accident, only partly because the juiciest part is reprinted on the back cover. (The title of the book refers to the four boys described in the Passover Haggadah, of course.) Here is that offending/shocking/undeniably thought-provoking paragraph in full; were only more of the essays as powerful and as focused:

To the wicked son, who asks 'What does all this mean to you?' To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who, in the nineties, envied the Palestinians; who weep at Exodus but jeer at the Israeli Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises tradition but fidget through the seder; who might take their curiosity to a dogfight, to a bordello or an opium den but find ludicrous the notion of a visit to a synagogue; whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second-favorite does not exist; who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of Tu Bi'Shvat; who dread endogamy more than incest; who bow the head reverently at a baptism and have never attended a bris, to you, who find your religion and race repulsive, your ignorance of your history a satisfaction, here is a book from your brother.

Wow. And whew. How can almost any Jew in the world today, except the close followers of Halacha and the most serious, scholarly members of the more liberal interpreters of Jewish practice, not feel queasy about at least a few of Mamet's damning descriptions?

Much of the undeniable power in the better essays in this book (I doubt if any are longer than eight or nine pages, and too many of their screeds quickly melt like snow in April) seems dated now: not all Jews are rushing about cutting off their noses to spite their race as the old joke goes; not all Jews are joining groups who applaud Hamas and accuse Israel of apartheid or choose to run toward Buddhism, Maharishis, and anything BUT the faith of their parents and ancestors. Those numbers are probably less than in 1 in 10 but then, a religion/people/nation who recently lost 85% of its adherents during genocidal slaughters in the 1940s cannot afford any self-hating number, no matter how small.

Yet it is true, and widely known, that the number of Jews in the world today who have ever visited the Jewish State at all, much less study its history, its people, its place in a very tense Middle East, is outrageously small, and that gets under Mamet's skin like a hot coal.

This inability to assign to the Israelis a basic humanity is, to me, more deeply disturbing than the reluctance to endorse or accept any of their national positions . Do, can, or could the Israelis delight in reprisals,' in retaliation'? The very words are revelatory, for such actions by the United States are known as defense-- a country defends itself; reprisals and retaliation are the actions of a mob. . . . The outright denunciation of Israel as acquisitionist, bloodthirsty, colonial, etc.' is to me simply a modern instance of the blood libel; that Jews delight in the blood of others.

I could quote two dozen more sections from this highly-uneven, often dated, but often mind-blowing group of nearly three dozen brief essays, but I lack the space. Yet buying and photocopying off a choice essay or two could certainly liven up your next Passover Seder, because it is inarguable that three millennia of being hated has led large numbers of Jews to be embarrassed by their history ("We went like sheep to the slaughter! I continue to hear about the Shoah, which utterly ignores the crafty evil which kept every European Jew off balance (you're just being shipped to farms in the East), and is unaware that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, led by a few thousand starving Jews most of them women and children lasted longer than the entire country of Poland, which had hundreds of thousands of well-fed soldiers, rather more than the ghetto's 87 pistols and single machine gun.")

This book often sickened me, because for all its ranting and raving, its sometimes-unearned rage, it still hit home. Did I, myself, not go to work in Civil Rights in Mississippi in 1964, because I inarguably felt closer to, and more worried about, my black American brothers than my Jewish family in Israel? Did I not often feel embarrassed by the Israeli response to those awful kidnappings last summer in Lebanon? No, I'm not a self-hating Jew; I revel in our culture, rejoice in our heritage and faith, and study, teach, and thrill to (and weep over) our blood-stained history. If anything, perhaps we Jews should congratulate ourselves on how little real self-hatred there is, in our people; the black-on-black crime we still see around the world today shows how easy it is to absorb that ultimate of all self-destructive thoughts: if all these people hate my skin/religion so much, there must be some truth in their feelings; I shall hate it too. Of course, the Jew can always escape through renouncing his synagogue and her people; the descendants of African slaves can also try to run, but never fully hide. Mamet is a brilliant playwright, and although I was completely satisfied with only a half-dozen or so of this thin collection, my head is still spinning, and throbbing, from the occasional Truth that hit too close to home. Far too close.

Why I am a Zionist

2007-01-21T12:56:00.001-05:00

Why I am a Zionist
by Gil Troy

Reviewed by Allan Gould

These are hard times for Jews around the world, as anyone who opens a daily newspaper knows only too well. Verbal attacks by world politicians on our religion and its sovereign state in the Middle East nearly every day; physical attacks on our co-religionists on the streets of France and Jerusalem nearly every week. And when the State of Israel is voted (this month) in a large European poll �the greatest threat to world peace today��ahead of North Korea and Iran (!), a lot of us are starting to think, with horror, that we are now experiencing The 1930s: THE SEQUEL. (Personally, I never liked the original.)

So we get books like WHY I AM A ZIONIST�Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today, by a New-York-born Professor of History at McGill named Gil Troy.

It is certainly welcome, and, alas, more needed than ever, especially by Jews who are not very knowledgeable about Jewish and Zionist history, which obviously means a great number of our people, as we edge into the new millennium. The fact that this very cheap (and cheap-looking, and amateurishly-illustrated) paperback (a mere $14.95) was published by the �Bronfman Jewish Education Centre� of Montreal suggests that it is really a vanity book. This fact may sadden us�they couldn�t land a real, quality Canadian publisher?�but this does not deny its inherent value. (Indeed, the note in its opening pages that �all of the author�s royalties. . .will be donated to the Israeli MIA families� individual efforts to free their children,� with all other profits donated to the Birthright Israel program is both touching and meaningful.)

The Prologue of this slim (under-200 page) volume has several little sections which make the author�s point very clearly. They are headed �I am a Zionist: A Twenty-First Century Manifesto�; �I am an Anti-Anti-Zionist�; �Anti-Zionism: Ugly Rhetoric with Lethal Consequences�; and, finally, �The Aims of this Book: Zionist and Jewish Renewal.�

In this short opening section, Professor Troy writes movingly and well about where he stands, and what he stands for: �During these challenging times, Jews should reaffirm their faith and pride in Zionism, while the world should marvel in its achievements. Zionists must not allow their enemies to define and slander the movement. No nationalism is pure, no movement is perfect, no state ideal, but today Zionism remains legitimate, inspiring, and relevant, to me and to most Jews. A century ago, Zionism revived pride in the label �Jew�; today, Jews must revive pride in the label �Zionist.� That�s very well put.

This book is most valuable when it talks of the past century and some of its ironies. My favourite: that a hundred years ago, religious Jews were overwhelmingly non- or anti-Zionist; its leaders were firmly secular. �By contrast, today, the religious community�except for the most extreme�is overwhelmingly Zionist, and it is secular Jews who are increasingly agnostic about Israel.� Touche.

There is certainly no question that many people of good will�even Jews�are shaken by the events of the past decade, certainly since Oslo: we more likely remember body parts flying and badly-reported news stories about the �massacre� in Jenin, rather than the grotesquely-generous land-and-peace offerings of Prime Minister Barak, and others, to the Palestinian Authority. And when the author reports that �parents at one day school in Brooklyn, New York, voted to send the school�s seniors to Disney World instead of Israel,� one wants to gag.

And even if you are not lucky enough (or wise enough) to get the regular emails of www.honestreporting.com, you will still not be surprised to read that recent polls have shown �nearly half of American Jews believed that �The Palestinians had their land taken away from them unfairly when Israel was created� and more than a third�thirty-seven percent�believed that �Israel is overreacting by shooting live bullets at Palestinian demonstrators who are throwing stones.�

Whether you are sickened, or horrified, by the above, author Troy knows he has the answer: we must �teach our students about the multidimensional nature of the Jewish people�s relationship with the land of Israel, and the State of Israel. Israel should not be thought of simply as the central headache of the Jewish people, but as the historical, ideological, intellectural, and emotional epicenter of our people. We must teach ahavat yisrael (love of Israel), not simply the Arab-Israeli conflict.� Here here. And good luck.

Much of this book, sadly, is either preaching to the converted�I sense it would convert few to his love of Zionism, who don�t already have a deep understanding of the centrality of the land to our religion, our culture, our history, our people. Indeed, much of WHY I AM A ZIONIST reads like a simplified study guide for counselors at a Jewish camp. He describes the beauty and power of experiencing Shabbat at a summer camp; he tries to teach us �how to fall in love with Israel�; he notes that �living in Israel leads to a Jewish connection�; and he gives us an extremely superficial history of the Jews and their relationship with the Promised Land, going back to before 70 of the Common Era, right to modern times. (I do appreciate the often extremely witty chapter headings, such as the one about the �crisis of emancipation and the rise of Zionism,� entitled �MUGGED BY MODERNITY.� How true that is.

So, we get the Arab view of the establishment of Israel (the �naqba��the catastrophe); the �six day miracle� of the �67 war; what Oslo offered and what was rejected by the other side; �the blessings and the curse� of power (good point, that). But his easy mocking of �exile Jews� such as Spielberg and Woody Allen doesn�t strengthen my Zionistic feelings at all; who looks to Hollywood for leadership or understanding of our people and our land?

Is there much of worth in this very low-priced volume? Maybe to a not-very-well-read 12-16 year old Jewish kid who has never been to Israel, and might be considering the Birthright programme; after all, the price is right. But I�m being a bit unfair: the appendix called �ADVOCACY 101: How to Talk About Israel on Campus and Elsewhere Without Apologizing, Cringing, Crying or Yelling� is certainly worth the price of the book, alone.

WHY I AM A ZIONIST is not a bad book; I just wish it were better. If you really want to strengthen and deepen your knowledge and understanding of the history of Zionism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict today, I think you�d do better with another very low-cost paperback (this one also low-cost, since it was sponsored by the late, great Israel Asper of Winnipeg): It�s called MYTHS AND FACTS: A GUIDE TO THE ARAB-ISRAEL CONFLICT, by Mitchell G. Bard. Every decent Jewish book store carries it. Heavily footnoted, with over a hundred pages of maps and historic documents, it�s got some of the most powerful, often shocking, proofs of just how right (and occasionally righteous) the Jewish/Zionist side is. Does Israel make mistakes? Of course. Personally, I still refuse to forgive Sharon for the disastrous invasion of Lebanon. But when 19- and 20-year-old Israeli soldiers went door-to-door through Jenin, searching carefully for terrorists (yes, CNN, they are terrorists, not militants), losing over a dozen young lives as they did so, rather than simply blasting the buildings and probably killing hundreds of innocent Arab men, women and children�and most of the world believes to this day that there was a horrific, Jew-caused massacre there, then, boy, do we need facts, and lots of them.

You�ll get a broader selection of those facts, and a deeper understanding of the many myths and how they arose�more easily codified and explained, in Bard�s little paperback, than in Professor Troy�s.

What is Judaism?

2007-01-21T12:54:00.001-05:00

What is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age.
by Emil Fackenheim, Syracuse University Press, 1987

Reviewed by Allan Gould

This month, as a kind of personal Kaddish, I have chosen to review one of the finest books by the late Emil Fackenheim, of Germany, Canada and Israel, who passed away in Jerusalem at the age of 87 just before last Rosh Hashana. My wife and I had the honour of considering him and his late wife Rose among our closest friends. Before they and their children moved to Israel in the early 1980s, we had dozens of Shabbat meals at their Briar Hill home, where we would often pass food plates to Raul Hilberg, the major Holocaust historian whose Destruction of European Jewry is the seminal book on that period, and to Yehuda Bauer (Bricha; A History of the Holocaust; Out of the Ashes), another giant of that era.

So, how to honour the dead? Especially when the deceased was one of the finest Jewish minds of the last century? (And one filled with Canadian content, too: after his birth and youth in Germany, and his arrest and brief internment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Fackenheim ended up in Canada before the war was over�imprisoned as an enemy alien!�where he became one of the most respected philosophy professors at the University of Toronto, before moving to his beloved Jerusalem).

Most look upon To Mend the World as Emil Fackenheim's greatest work, but I find another more accessible. Several of his books on Hegel and other German philosophers are heavy going, so I wish to examine What Is Judaism? (sub-titled An Interpretation for the Present Age). It was first published in 1987 in hardcover, and it is good to report that Syracuse University Press has kept it in print; it's now in paperback, and it is an admirable work, even if one never had the joy of knowing this passionate, witty, wise, delightful human being. Emil had the quite remarkable ability to make words dance off the page with humour and power, even when writing in a language which was his second, even his third.

When he began to develop this admirable book not long after he moved to Jerusalem, Emil told me that he wanted to "write an updated version of Milton Steinberg's Basic Judaism," a long-outdated but still valuable study of our faith. Fackenheim did far more, of course; what else could one expect from the world's greatest Hegelian scholar, who had been driven to rediscover his Judaism and brilliantly confront the Holocaust after the Six Day War? He had been horrified to see our people once again threatened with destruction, less than three decades after his own arrest on the first night of Kristallnacht, in early November, 1938.

Ever the scholar and philosopher (but never stuffy), he chose consciously not to write treatises or defenses of dietary laws or the Sabbath or the Reform faith in which he had earned his rarely-used rabbinical degree, back in his German homeland, but instead divided his book into three parts: Past ("Presupposed Components of Judaism"), Present ("The Life of Judaism Through the Ages"), and, of course, Future ("Judaism in an Age of Renewed Jewish Statehood.") The State of Israel, its creation and its survival, were all central to the way he saw his religion, and this profoundly-felt Zionism permeates this beautiful, essential book.

Fackenheim's writing style could be wordy, and even breathless. But just read aloud the following portion of a paragraph from an introductory section ("The Religious Situation of a Jew Today"), and see how profound, and yes, how witty, he could be about the "great product of modern Jewish secularism, Zionism":

. . .not much more than half a century after Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) the movement founded by him has produced results that no other modern nationalism can boast of, among them a state founded, maintained, developed, and defended by a people that�so it was once thought�had lost the arts of statecraft and self-defense forever; the replanting and reforestation of a land that�so it once seemed�was unredeemable swamp and desert; the ingathering of a people from all corners of the earth on a territory�so the experts once asserted�with not enough room left to swing a cat; the reviving of a language that�so even Herzl once feared�was dead beyond revival; and, last but not least, the physical rebuilding of the one city on earth, Jerusalem�so the consensus of mankind once held, Jews only excepted�that was meant to remain forever of the spirit only, i.e., holy ruins. Today only outright lies can dispose of the Jewish people as a chimerical nation. Every honest person, and certainly every Jew seeking to come to grips with his religious situation, must come to confront the fact of the State of Israel. He must do so for better or for worse.

What a stunning declaration, made all the more important by the recent outbursts of world-wide anti-semitism and Muslim Jew-hatred. Fackenheim had an uneven Jewish education�his modern Hebrew was never fluent, which made the final two decades of his long life, spent in Israel, more difficult than they had to be�but he knew that Midrash was often the key to the ineffable, even absurd aspects of Jewish existence and survival: how the people who were purportedly chosen by God as "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" could so often be brutalized, maimed, slaughtered. So, this wonderful text overflows with Midrash�those often profound rabbinic legends and fill-in-the-blanks, which attempted to explain the more mystifying aspects of our faith. The book is also filled with references to Fackenheim's own experiences�in Nazi Germany, meeting and studying (illegally) with refuseniks in the former Soviet Union, the saving of Ethiopian Jewry by Israel, his own personal aliyah, his daughter's experiences on a kibbutz, and more, making it all the more personal, meaningful, emotional.

Here, for example, is his "take" on how Judaism differs from most other faiths in history, in his section on "The Ethics of Judaism." After talking about doing "mitzvahs" and "being a mensch," he shoots for the heart of the matter: "God Himself behaves like a mensch when He loves widows and orphans. But who except Jews (and following them, Christians) has ever heard of a God loving widows and orphans? A God (or gods) loving heroes, sages, and martyrs one has heard of. All these, however�the martyrs included�are winners. Widows and orphans, in contrast, are losers. Perhaps Divinity can love even these, provided they are its own, much like a person who loves his widowed mother or his orphaned nephew or niece. That this is so with the "Old Testament" God has long been stock-in-trade propaganda of the kind of Christian who knows no other way of exalting his New Testament than by denigrating the Old. However, this particular canard�that the Jewish God loves Jews only�is disposed of by the fact that He loves the stranger as well: 'The Lord your God. . .executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger.'" (Deut. 10:17)

Early in What is Judaism?, Emil Fackenheim quotes a Midrash which he claims "could serve as a motto of this whole book": 'When was the Torah given? It is given whenever a person receives it."

Books such as this�and they are so rare, much like Emil Fackenheim was so rare, in his deep and abiding love of his people and the State of Israel, and the survival of both�can help us to continue to "receive" the Torah every day of our lives, and not merely in synagogue, or on Simchat Torah, when we quite literally celebrate the original moment of this amazing gift from God.

Not by chance, Fackenheim concludes this relatively brief volume (it is just under 300 pages) with an "Epilogue" consisting of one final Midrash, and it is a deeply moving one:

A Midrash asks why the Divine covenant with Abraham was required. The answer: "This may be compared to a house on fire. People ask, Does the house have no owner? Through the children of Abraham, God says, 'I am the owner of the house.'"

A Jew today still willing to convey this message has a question of his own: if the house has an owner, why does He not put the fire out? Perhaps He can and yet will. Perhaps He cannot or will not. But if He cannot or will not, a Jew today must do what he can to put the fire out himself. A kabbalistic saying is to the effect that the effort from below calls forth a response from above.

Emil Fackenheim's life was a gift to every Jew and every Gentile as well, even if most of the latter are not fully aware of it. (At one point in What is Judaism?, he expresses shock that the entire world�especially Christianity�does not rejoice in the rebirth of the Jewish people in their own land; how can they fail to see the importance, the glory, the proof of God's presence in history in that very fact?)

My loss of Emil Fackenheim is personal, as well as intellectual. But should you purchase this extraordinary book (and it is available on online book websites, as well as most of Toronto's Jewish bookstores), you will feel the loss of Emil Fackenheim as well. And you will feel, as well, the exquisite gain we all had, from his 87 years on this earth, and from the impressive body of writing he left us.

Turbulent Souls

2007-01-21T12:51:00.001-05:00

Turbulent Souls by Stephen Dubner.
The Hearst Book Group of Canada, 1999

Reviewed by Rabbi Goldstein

Kabbalah, the system of Jewish mysticism, teaches the concept called "gilgul", or return of souls. This teaching suggests that some Jewish souls "lose their way" and find themeslves in non-Jewish bodies for several generations, through forced conversions, pogroms, rape, and so on. But eventually, this theory says, the Jewish soul "comes home" to a Jewish body through conversion. Thus, a sincere "ger"- Jew-by-choice- is not really a new Jew. They are, in effect, simply returning the lost Jewish soul to its Jewish bodily container- this time, theirs.

Does this concept work in reverse? What happens when a Jew is drawn to another faith? Conversion out of Judaism is a painful topic, one dealt with powerfully and poetically in Turbulent Souls. Dubner traces the passionate conversion of both his parents to Catholicism during the war years, and then unwinds the story of his own "gilgul", his own trip back to Judaism as the son of observant, religious Catholics who had once been Jews. Needless to say, it is a complex and layered story, and Dubner is an excellent writer, well equipped to tell the tale as a personal journey. Along the way we meet the Jews who, through their own straight-forwardness, help him understand his roots. He replants those roots himself, from his own free will, and the result is the reuniting of two sides of a family who have not spoken to each other in thirty years.

Turbulent Souls is fine reading, and leads the reader to probe more deeply their own journey either away or back again to Judaism, and to ponder their own soul's manifestation of its Jewish roots.