WaPo sees no benefit to Kosher meat when it comes to protecting the environment. Oh well, that was never the reason we did it in the first place.  Still, as everyone becomes more  aware of how hazardous these meat packing plants are to the to the natural world around us, we might think of divulging the fact that there are different standards within the kosher industry and just because it is kosher does not necessarily mean much environmentally speaking.  Because people assume that if it’s kosher, it is better on many levels. There is the danger of  customers paying a premium price for meat under false pretenses.  Guess who gets the blame for that? In the short term it may be profitable, but it is profoundly shortsighted. It is much better to be perceived as policing ourselves than it is to be “caught redhanded”! Rubashkins, anyone?

If there would be a movement by poskim to raise the profile of those slaughterhouses that are more environmentally conscious and also suggest that meat consumption be limited to shabbat and yom tov, not only would the planet benefit, but our health as well.  I never liked the eco-kosher idea, but I might prefer the “Kosher and a Kiddush Hashem” label. Just a thought.

New Voices interviews the Tefillin Bomber. Chabad sees it as a bonanza! I feel it is appropriate to review how one reconciles safety and davening when 40,000 feet in the air. Hat tip to Gil Student at Hirhurim

Guidance from Poskim Regarding Prayers During the Flight

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ob”m:

While praying on a flight it is preferable to sit.

A person praying on his own during a flight: if there is a chance that this will bother others, it is preferable to sit (Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ob”m. Igros Moshe Orach Chaim, 4, 20.)Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ob”m:

Shemoneh Esrei should be recited in one’s seat.

In the sefer Halichos Shlomo, by Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ob”m, we found direct guidelines on the practical applications of prayers during the flight: “One praying on a flight should recite the Shemoneh Esrei while sitting in his seat and not standing in the aisles, where he can disturb those wishing to pass. In any case, the Rav was not supportive of conducting minyanim during a flight, because it disturbs the rest of the passengers around them” (Halichos Shlomo, p. 95)Response from Rabbi Shmuel Halevi Wosner, author of the Shevet Halevi:

One can pray Shemoneh Esrei while seated in his seat.

When the light goes on, one must sit down, even in the middle of his prayers I was asked regarding prayer arrangements in mid-flight. One should refrain from praying in large groups; it is preferable to pray in small groups in the seating area, as long as there is no problem of indecent exposure. The same is true for Shemoneh Esrei. If there is a possibility of standing beside one’s seat, not in the aisles. then that is preferable. If this is not possible, because the aisle is narrow or it bothers other passengers, the Shemoneh Esrei prayer can be recited while seated. In any case, if the “fasten seatbelts” sign goes on, one should immediately sit down in his place and continue Shemoneh Esrei while seated. If a group is praying when the seatbelts sign goes on, they should immediately obey with no delay, even if they are in the middle of the Shemoneh Esrei. (From a response to El Al.)Guidance from Rabbi Yitzchak Silberstein, rav of Ramat Elchanan, Bnei Brak:

A. When the captain of the flight decides that passengers must sit and fasten their seatbelts because of a risk of danger, one must obey and sit down, even if he is in the middle of Shemoneh Esrei.

B. If one refuses to obey these instructions, it seems that he does not fulfill the obligation of tefillah because it is considered a mitzvah haba b’aveirah (a mitzvah performed through a sin), about which Chazal teach that one does not fulfill his obligations. He also brings about derision of the Torah by others and effects a chillul Hashem.

C. There is no transgression in the act of sitting down. One must only refrain from talking, but he may sit down.

D. When one sits down, he should stop praying and wait several minutes until it is possible to return to where he was standing and continue praying. Even if the amount of time that passes exceeds toch kdei dibbur, there is no hefsek in the act of sitting, and after the break one can continue praying. (From a response to El Al; also published in the Kanfei Ruach booklet).

There you have it! Most Poskim argue that the comfort of others is more important than your Tefila experience when on an airplane.  It is always amazing to me when are the times when people can’t wait to invoke the Gedolim and when they don’t hesitate to ignore them. Not to mention how many women have to brush up against the minyanaires just to use the toilet.  The joys of confinement with the Klei Kodesh.

The Maharal of Prague seems not to be a fan of the temporal and material.  He opens Netivot Olam with very profound essays on the nature of Torah. Torah is synonymous with the supernal intellect. It has no beginning or end, and when one connects with Torah, he is connected to the Divine, and is transformed from the material to the ethereal.  The practitioner of Torah, the Talmid Chacham or one should say a real Talmid Chacham, is one who is of the world but not in it.  He observes others, he is aware of them, but he is not influenced by them.  He is in another place even when he is of this one.

The Maharal even uses mitzvot as an example of temporal activities that cannot compare with Torah study because they are so immersed with worldly activity.  One might assume that acts of lovingkindness would suffer the same fate, but one would be wrong.

The Maharal makes the case for the classic combination of Torah study combined with acts of lovingkindness.  He first defines an act of lovingkindness as going beyond what the law requires, the purpose of which is to benefit someone else at the expense of your time.  It is a non-material act because the performer does not consider himself when s/he is helping another.  The basest behavior is that which only benefits one’s self, and has no impact on others.  The highest behavior is the opposite, where self is the least consideration.  The Maharal says that such behavior actually accomplishes something that Torah study can’t. It purifies the body through the purity of the action.  Moreover, and more importantly, it is the only value where we can perfectly emulate God’s behavior.  We are not capable of emulating God when it comes to justice, because with the best intentions we are prone to error.  We are entirely capable, however, of performing perfect acts of lovingkindness, and so, therefore, acts of compassion are certainly the most Godly.

“And after the Lord your God you should walk.” (Deuteronomy 13:4)  Is it possible to cleave to God? Doesn’t it say, “Behold, I”m a consuming fire!” Rather it means that we should cleave to His example! Just as He clothed the naked, so should we…  Just as He visited the sick, so should we… (Sota 14a)

The Maharal has pointed out something extraordinary when he quotes this Talmudic passage.  He says that the quality of compassion is unique in that a human being is capable of doing it as perfectly as God would.  Everything else we try is but a shadow, a pale reflection of Divine activity. This is why it is comparable to Torah study because we are not only imitating the Divine, we are actually acting Divinely in the way that He would.  Torah study, according to the Maharal allows us to leave the world for a Divine reality.  Acts of compassion have Divine impact on the material world and through them, the individual is transformed Divinely.

I really think that’s cool! We learn the Maharal on Tuesday’s with webyeshiva.org.

Jeremy Dauber has written a wonderful appreciation of the great Yiddish poet, Avrom Sutzkever who so eloquently rendered the unthinkable in words in TNR.  When his one year old child was poisoned by the Germans in a Warsaw hospital, Dauber tells us that:

Less than a year later, Sutzkever would write a poem from a child’s viewpoint begging its mother to:

strangle me with your Mama fingers

That played
On my willow cradle.
It will mean:
Your love is stronger than death.
It will mean:
You trusted me with your love.

Nevertheless, Sutzkever never lost his sense of wonder:

Over a pile of steaming horse dung,
I warm my icy hands.
I warm my hands and regret:
Not enough have I known, have I listened
To the greatness of smallness.
Sometimes,
The warm breath of a pile of dung
May become a poem, a thing of beauty.

Read the whole thing–it’s worth it.

Art Sapper, is a great lover of Jewish music and is also soon to be related. He is on a mission to reintroduce the zemer Mah Yofis into zemiros canon. Mah Yofis was a victim of its own popularity and became well known outside of Jewish circles.  It was the song of choice for anti-Semites to use for the humiliation of Jews who were forced to sing it in a manner meant to bring ridicule.  Because of this unfortunate association, the beautiful zemer nearly became forgotten, but not if Art has his way.  Nowadays, the unfortunate association is virtually absent from Jewish memory, so it’s time to bring the zemer back.  You can hear the tune and read all about the rise and fall and hopeful rise again of Mah Yofis (click here). May it be heard at Shabbos tables from near and far.

Media and technology maven, Clay Shirky rants about women in a recent blog post. What they need, he surmises, is to learn how to over promote themselves by playing fast and loose with the facts because that’s how one gets ahead. The unbridled cynicism in his portrayal is stunning, and could be true, if we really want PT Barnum in charge of the media.

If one needs to fabricate skills in order to get in the door, then what will that person do when bribed with a promotion to reveal a confidential source?  Once deceit is a given, where does it end?  I’ll tell you, it ends with everyone Going Rogue where no one can be trusted.  If women stand for higher ideals then the answer is not for women to become more like men, but men to become more like women. People who stand for principle, honesty, decency and humility–a word that is not in Shirky’s lexicon–should not be criticized for those values, they should be praised.

Moses, the reluctant leader, was chosen precisely because he was not a self-promoter.  Shirky opens his gender bender with the following:

So I get email from a good former student, applying for a job and asking for a recommendation. “Sure”, I say, “Tell me what you think I should say.” I then get a draft letter back in which the student has described their work and fitness for the job in terms so superlative it would make an Assistant Brand Manager blush.

So I write my letter, looking over the student’s self-assessment and toning it down so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department, and send it off. And then, as I get over my annoyance, I realize that, by overstating their abilities, the student has probably gotten the best letter out of me they could have gotten.

Now, can you guess the gender of the student involved?

Well, if it was me writing that recommendation–and I have written scores if not hundreds– that student wouldn’t have fared as well.  What is the difference between misleading an employer, and plagiarism? So what, if I didn’t have time to write the paper, I could have written an excellent one, and if called upon, I could meet the task, so, you see, it’s not really cheating, because I could do it really well! I once had a student who, in passing, let it drop that he misrepresented something on an application because he thought it would help him be accepted to the program I was running.  Even twenty years later I would find it difficult to write him a letter of recommendation because of  his dishonesty.  The fact that people lie is bad enough, but the fact that they think there is nothing wrong with it marks the beginning of the end of civilization.

It is shocking to me that probably eighty per cent of all college students plagiarize, and do so with impunity and without remorse.  It is equally shocking that people think they cannot get a job without lying, that somehow they believe that everyone takes shortcuts.

Reading the comments on Shirky’s rant was also instructive.  The gender issue was the onlyone that seemed to concern the young media folk of the future.  They all indicated  that Shirky was at least correct about how the game should be played, even if his analysis regarding women and men may have been flawed.

Marketing ones self is like a first date. You put your best face forward, but it still should be recognizable as your face. The world according to Shirky now teaches that one should lie if one can get away with it.  One can extort money temporarily, if one can pay it back before anyone notices.  It doesn’t matter that you haven’t done it, can you learn how to do it before you have to.  This is the society that Shirky is promoting and presumably this is what he teaches. He should be ashamed of himself.

We’re in deep doodoo.

The reluctant Moses, that assimilated redeemer of Jews comes back to Egypt to rally his flock with promises of redemption,

But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage. (Exodus 6:9)

Even listening proved to be too much an effort for the Children of Israel.  Lest we think that their faith had strayed, or that somehow Moses was inadequate, the Ramban points out that these are not the reasons that the verse offers.  It is because מקוצר רוח (literally a truncated spirit) that they are incapable of hearing. They’re depressed, too despairing to heed anything other than their own weariness.

Recently, a friend and mentor after enduring an unspeakable tragedy, paraphrased the Hebrew poet Bialik saying that when a person is hammering a nail and accidentally hits his thumb, at that moment, the whole world consists of only he and his injury.  Even though he is aware that there is much more to the world than this, his pain does not allow him to see beyond his hands.  The Ramban on this verse says it this way:

It was not because they did not believe God or believe in God’s prophet (that they didn’t listen). Rather, they didn’t pay attention to his words, because (their) spirits were crushed, like a person whose soul is crushed because of his misery and he doesn’t want to live (another) moment in his pain even though he knows it will go away later. (Ramban on Exodus 6:9)

It is during these times that we must grant understanding to those whose suffering does not allow them to see a future, even though in saner moments, they, themselves, know better.  It is important to gently introduce the worlds outside their suffering, worlds waiting to fulfill them once they are capable of receiving what those worlds have to offer.  My mentor during the peak moments of his own anguish offered the words of Bialik as a balm to those present at an impromptu memorial service and presumably as a reminder to himself.  I watched him in amazement, putting aside his own grief to receive and comfort those indirectly affected by this tragedy. Even during these times he was capable of listening, and listen he did.

These are truly the teachable moments that remain with us wherever we go and whatever we do.

I have always been a fan of this speech.  It is just a masterful piece of rhetoric. Poignant, succinct and passionately rendered, one cannot help but notice the pervasive influence of the Hebrew Bible on Dr. King’s thinking.  I thought it would be interesting to create a “dialogue” between Dr. King’s Biblical quotations and rabbinic understandings of the same verses.  The final flourish was to layout the document in the format of a Talmud page.  In this case, however, Dr. King becomes the “Gemara” and the “Gemara” becomes the commentary. I put this together years ago for Hillel, but it still seems to have a shelf life in some circles.  Call it a postmodern Talmudic document. Voila

My father, of blessed memory, used to complain how adept he was at reading prayers that he didn’t understand.  It was a critique of how meaningless he found the enterprise of “praying” in a foreign language.  Even the notion of reading along in English while responding in Hebrew seemed to be a cumbersome layer that made little sense to him.

He was not alone.  Hence, in answer to the Hebrew illiteracy of those like him, and the compelling logic that prayer should be meaningful or it is worthless, accommodations in the form of American Judaisms were made.  I don’t argue with the critique or the capitulation to the throngs, but I do take issue with the premise that praying in an incomprehensible language  is totally worthless.  It certainly is better to know what one is saying, but it could be that a momentary meaningful experience is worth less than formal participation in a liturgy that is foreign in all respects.

Never has the threshold for boredom been lower than it is today. Blame it on the ubiquitous media that fires on all cylinders all the time, or the snappy 30 second vignettes of Sesame Street or whatever, but the need to be constantly stimulated is at an all time high.  There is a conflation between being stimulated, a somewhat primitive need, and seeking meaning, an ostensibly more noble pursuit.  It mirrors the conceptual difference between form and content.  Forms, things that are formal evoke a yawn from those who yearn for the spontaneous, the immediate, the unmeasured.  Formal equals stiff, but also has an aura of permanence.  Formality informs stability, predictability and longevity. Routines may not be exciting but they are dependable, year in and year out, whereas the memory of a powerful experience will not sustain one over the long haul.

In the long run, a meaningful experience may be rendered meaning-less, while participating in a formal environment that is not particularly meaningful for the individual at the moment, may be quite meaningful upon reflection. It is all a question of attitude.  Does the experience exist to sustain me, or do I exist to help sustain it?  Ideally, it should be both, but if one has to choose which is more important for the long haul?

I don’t recommend the meaningless patter of my father as a means toward a rich Jewish life, or a life of Jewish meaning, but his rendering of words he didn’t understand had value because he, however unwittingly, was supporting the experience more than it was supporting him. The proof of that is it laid the groundwork for me to be sustained from the experience and help sustain the experience as well.  It was his gift to me and I’m just realizing it now.

Ironically, that which was meaningful one moment may prove to be meaningless at best and false at worst while that which was dull, lackluster and deadly may prove to have resonance for many generations to follow.

It did for me. Thanks, Dad.