Mouths of Babes Department

Our youngest child, Petachya, aged 4 and a half, often has trouble getting himself downstairs in the morning. Rena will wake him up, make sure that he's awake, get his clothes set for him, and then move on to other things. I frequently arrive home from shul to find him slowly moving down the steps a half-hour later.
We're trying several remedies: a check system (not really working), taking away his DS time (working a little), positive encouragement (makes him feel good but also doesn't work).
Today we had the following conversation.
Me: Petachya, you can't read in the morning. You have to get dressed.
P: I'm not reading.
Me: Well, you can't just stand around looking at things.
P: I'm not looking at things.
Me: Then what are you doing for all this time?
P: I'm lying in bed.
Stupid, he's not.

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The Power of a Phone Call

The New York Times features a lovely piece on Alan Shlomo Veingrad, the former NFL player turned Chabad speaker, who travels the country using his NFL fame to promote living a Torah lifestyle. It's not a new story (I blogged about it here), but it's certainly a new angle to the ongoing Super Bowl media blitz.
Yet, something fascinating caught my attention. What brought Veingrad, a NFL lineman living in Wisconsin, closer to Judaism? A business card.
The article begins by telling the story of what connected him to Judaism.

After practice one late-summer day in 1986, Alan Veingrad strode into the Green Bay Packers’ locker room, feeling both spent and satisfied.
An undrafted player from an obscure college, he had made the team and then some. On the next Sunday, opening day of the N.F.L. season, he would be starting at offensive tackle.
In his locker, Mr. Veingrad found the usual stuff, his street clothes and sweat suit and playbook. On a small bench, though, lay a note from the Packers’ receptionist. It carried a name that Mr. Veingrad did not recognize, Lou Weinstein, and a local phone number.
Alone in a new town, too naïve to be wary, Mr. Veingrad called. This Lou Weinstein, it turned out, ran a shoe store in Green Bay, Wis. He had just read an article in the paper about a Jewish player on the Packers, and he wanted to meet and welcome that rarity.
A few days later, Mr. Veingrad joined Mr. Weinstein for lunch at the businessman’s golf club. There Mr. Weinstein invited the player to accompany his family to Rosh Hashana services at Cnesses Israel, a synagogue near the site of the Packers’ original home field, City Stadium.
It had been a long time since Mr. Veingrad had spent much time in shul, nearly a decade since his bar mitzvah. He knew the date of the Packers’ Monday night game against the Chicago Bears better than he did Yom Kippur. “But when I heard the Hebrew,” he recently recalled of that service in Green Bay, “I felt a pull.”

Lou Weinstein isn't a frum guy - at least that's not how it sounds. He was simply a Jew reaching out to another Jew. He took him to lunch, and then invited him to his Conservative shul for Yom Kippur. I doubt Weinstein intended that Veingrad should be frum. He just wanted to share some yiddishkeit with a fellow Jew.
It sounds so simple, and yet it's so intimidating. How many of us would leave our business card in just such a situation? There's a guy who runs a restaurant not ten minutes from my home. Each time I eat there I spend a few minutes chatting. I've thought about inviting him (and his family, if he has one) for a meal some time, and yet I haven't.
Why not? What am I afraid of? I'm not sure.
I guess I'm no Lew Weinstein.

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Individualism vs. Community Unity

Imagine that that you just moved to a new community - a one-shul town. Everything's great; the people are wonderful, the job is good, you like the shul and the community. But there's one problem: they daven shacharit too late. As much as you'd like to sugar-coat things, sunrise is really early and the daily and Shabbat tefillah begin late, and by the time the shul reaches Tefillah, the time for davening according to halachah has long passed. You spoke to the rabbi, but as much as he sympathizes with you, there's not much he can do. He has tried in the past to get people to come earlier, to no avail. (Not that surprising.)
So you're left with a choice: you can either daven at home, on time, by yourself, or you can daven with a minyan, but daven late, literally missing the appointed time for tefillah each and every day. What do you do: Daven alone, but on time, or with the community, but late?
It seems pretty clear to me that most halachically sensitive people would choose to daven on time, without a minyan. Then, if they wanted to participate in kedushah, hear the Torah reading, or answer a kaddish they could attend shul afterward. After all, no harm done - what's the difference if someone wants to pray on his own at home?
Truth be told, this is not a new question. It's actually a very old one, not about Shacharit, but about Ma'ariv. Throughout literally centuries, Jews faced a conundrum regarding the evening service. Most shuls gathered a minyan for minchah, before sunset, but were unable or unwilling to regather later for Ma'ariv. So they davenend Ma'ariv after sunset, which is technically fine to fulfill the Shemoneh Esreh obligation, but still too early to recite the Shema at night. What to do? On the one hand, people wanted to recite the Shema with the surrounding blessings at night. But they also wished to connect the blessing of גאל ישראל to the Shemoneh Esreh - an important value in davening.
Today, most people who daven Ma'ariv at a shul that davens "early" solve this problem by repeating the Shema after nightfall - when they remember. But that solution means that one is reciting the Shema later without its blessings - not perfect.
We find this well-known early-Ma'ariv problem extensively documented in the halachic literature. The Beit Yosef (Orech Haim 235) discusses several options, as does Rema in his commentary. While rabbinic authorities down through the ages decried to problem of davening Ma'ariv too early, Rema notes that, "Maharik and many spiritually meticulous people would not pray with the community, but [would wait until] nightfall." Yet, Rema concludes his comments by quoting his teacher, Rabbi Yisrael Isserlin who wrote that,

This custom spread through the weakness, hunger, desires and thirsts to eat and drink while still light outside - and for this reason they moved forward the time so that they could eat immediately afterward. Yet, even a Talmid Chacham (Torah scholar) should not separate himself from the community if he cannot admonish them not to pray so early, unless he has accustomed himself to other "separations" of piety - then he can pray at night.

How many of us would sacrifice our own spiritual goals for the sake of communal unity? In davening alone we think that we cause no harm - but we do cause harm - the separation of the individual from the larger community, and the subtle communal splintering that results.
In today's super-individualistic climate of self-fulfillment, could we imagine a pious person davening after the proper time each day simply to remain integrated in the community? I doubt it.
I noted that our imaginary davener had two options: davening late with the shul, or davening on time at home. I neglected to mention a third option that I think would be the most likely outcome in today's Jewish community.
He'd probably start his own shul.

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Audio Shiur: Parshat Yitro - A Nation of Individuals

Audio Shiur:
Parshat Yitro - A Nation of Individuals
Through careful examination of the language that describes the introduction of Matan Torah, we can learn a great deal about the underlying values of the Torah, the roles of men and women, and even Gilad Schalit.

Click here for the audio link, or listen in the handy audio player supplied below.

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Teaching to Technology: Good for the Students?

We live in a culture infatuated with technology. Last week, it seemed that more people cared about Steve Jobs' launch of the iPad than President Obama's State of the Union address. Truth be told, the iPad is certainly more exciting and garners more interest, but therein lies the problem: do people really think that a new tablet computer is more important than the future of the United States moving forward? Or is it just more entertaining and interesting?
I ask this after reading an article in which Israel's Minister of Education declared that,

The school system is not keeping up with breakthroughs in technology, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar said on Tuesday.He argued that schools must adopt new teaching practices for the 21st century. “Nowadays, graduates of the school system live in a completely different world than the one we grew up in,” Sa’ar said, adding that we must make sure to teach them “21st-century skills.”

He then called for more money for Israel's education system, which is of course legitimate and in my mind correct. (What do you cut? Not sure - but that's not Saar's problem.) But the infatuation with technology makes me wonder: what do we want our children learning in school? How does he want technology to enter the classroom? In the frenzy to digitize our classrooms, maybe we need to take a step back and ask: Are the computers really teaching our children anything? An example:
My son (seventh grade) was assigned a project on England. In the "old days", I would have had to write a report, which would include a trip to the library, reading old encyclopedias, a book or two, some magazine microfiche. (Remember scrolling through old newspapers in the library? Ah, those were the days!) But at some point, I'd have to combine those three sources together into a coherent "report" while avoiding blatant plagiarism. Wasn't easy. Took a little bit of thinking, learning research skills, some organizational work, and a tad of effort in the writing. Boy, I hated those reports. My son's project was to put together a Power Point presentation. I must say, he's an absolute whiz at Power Point. It was a great-looking presentation. He knows Power Point better than I do. But he spent far more time with the "look and feel" of the report - getting the transitions right, downloading pictures, inserting the music for the English National anthem - than he did researching or writing. I'm not blaming him at all. He completed the assignment. But did he learn anything about organizing his thoughts, researching (now reduced to a Google search), thinking or organizing? Or was he so distracted by the "bells and whistles" that he learned a lot about Power Point, but little about England, and almost no greater thinking skills at all? The article continues,

Gila Ben-Hor, general secretary of the Center for Educational technology, called on the state to implement educational reform policies to prepare pupils for the changing demands wrought by advances in technology, and to ensure that they can compete with students from elsewhere in the developed world.
Ben-Hor presented figures from a poll compiled by the Center for Educational Technology in January 2010 that found 52% of Israeli students think that schools are not preparing them for the future, and that 82% would prefer a curriculum in which they are required to carry a laptop to class in lieu of textbooks. Students also said that schools should provide laptops to all teachers and students, with wireless Internet access and completely digital classrooms.

Really? What, pray tell, do we think these students will be doing with their laptops in the classroom? Researching mathematical formulas? Writing term papers? Or will they be doing what most college students do during lectures: surf the web, IM their friends, and check Facebook. From what I've seen thus far, it seems to me that school tech serves more as a distraction than a boon to learning.
Yes, we have reached the 21st Century. The iPad might be an amazing device. But Israel won't have the educated population it need to create the next iPad unless it leaves the iPads out of the classroom and the students learn in the best possible way: by teaching critical thinking skills, developing intellectual curiosity, and forcing our children to learn core material instead of exciting digital bells and whistles.
And the ideal way to do that is still by sticking to books.

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Still Learning Lessons from the Disengagement, Five Years Later

To download a pdf version of this piece click here.

Disengagement? From Gush Katif? When was that – 2005? In our media-driven, twenty-four-seven culture, five years ago seems like ancient history. Do we have to keep talking about it? Can't we move on?
Not where I live.
In Yad Binyamin, the town where I settled with my family, you can't really allow yourself to forget the expulsion from Gush Katif, because the former residents of Gush Katif not only play a central role in the life of the yishuv. They literally live in the center of the yishuv.
While Yad Binyamin has experienced fantastic growth over the last four years, that growth was built around a ring of caravillot – caravan homes – that circle the center of the yishuv. Every day as I leave home for work; every time I jog near my house; every morning as my children ride their bikes to school - we pass by temporary homes, filled with residents waiting for permanent housing. Still. The gentleman with whom I share a row in shul and see every Shabbat just started to build his home last month. Really.
Whatever your position about the expulsion from Gush Katif – and it's safe to say that most people reading this piece were/are against – we must remember that political and government decisions affect real people. Whether abandoning Gaza was a good military and political decision or a bad one, real people lost their homes. Thousands of people lost their jobs. Thousands of children found themselves uprooted, unsure and confused. And whether we intended to harm those people or not, it was incumbent upon us to ask ourselves how the government's decisions would affect them, and then take steps to mitigate that harm to the greatest possible degree.
No less than Moshe Rabbeinu learned this lesson from Yitro is this week's Sedra.
After welcoming his father-in-law with a celebratory banquet and regaling him with tales of the miraculous Exodus from Egypt, Moshe had to get back to work. Imagine his "joy" when Yitro decided to accompany him. (Can you imagine bringing your in-law to work with you?) Yet, when Yitro witnesses Moshe in action, he offers valuable constructive criticism.

וַיֹּאמֶר חֹתֵן מֹשֶׁה, אֵלָיו: לֹא-טוֹב, הַדָּבָר, אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה, עֹשֶׂה. נָבֹל תִּבֹּל--גַּם-אַתָּה, גַּם-הָעָם הַזֶּה אֲשֶׁר עִמָּךְ: כִּי-כָבֵד מִמְּךָ הַדָּבָר, לֹא-תוּכַל עֲשֹׂהוּ לְבַדֶּךָ.

And Moshe's father-in-law said to him: 'The thing that you're doing is not good. You will surely wear away, both you, and this people that is with you; for the thing is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.

As we all know, Moshe tried to judge the people alone, attending individually to their needs. Yet, Yitro worried not only about Moshe's ability to perform the task, but also how his actions would affect the people. Explaining the words נבל תבול, Chizkuni writes,

This is a language of confusion, as in "and confound their language" (Bereishit 11:7) – meaning that in this matter both you and they will become confused. One person will yell, "Listen to me, my master!", and another will follow suit. You won't know whom to answer, for you won't know what they're saying, and they won't know what you're saying.

Undoubtedly Moshe was trying his best. He figured that as he served as the closest link to God, he would be the best person to guide the people and answer their questions. He was right. He would be the ideal person to speak to. But Yitro realized that you can't always have what's best. You also have to worry about what will work and how the decisions that you make affect not only yourself, but the people that are counting on you.
Writing about the "Disengagement"/"Expulsion" is tricky business. Here in Israel especially, it's a painful, highly charged political topic that has the power to instantly alienate and upset, understandably so.
Yet, whatever our political perspective on the Disengagement, we must take to heart the fact that we did not properly account for the fundamental upheaval that the residents of the Gush would soon undergo – both in the short term, and even now, years later. We must look back now and see the pain that they still feel, not just from the Disengagement, but from the feeling of abandonment both on the part of the government certainly, but even from us – the rest of the Jewish people, who have in a real way "moved on."
We might have "moved on" but they have not – still living in their caravillot, looking for jobs, managing their families. The Disengagement affected real people, causing real pain, struggle and difficulty, that continues to this day.
And that's a lesson that we must take to heart today, almost five years later.

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What Did Your Kids Eat for Breakfast? Thoughts on the Mon for Beshalach

Teaching seventh grade Gemara first thing in the morning at the Akiva Hebrew Day School back in Michigan, what was the greatest factor which would determine my success or failure in the classroom? Was it my ability as a teacher? Sure. But along with my ability to teach and control the classroom, it was also clear that the kids would need to be alert, attentive and ready to learn. And often they were not, even first thing in the morning. I would often find my pubescent, pre-teen charges vacillating between hyperactivity and listlessness, overdrive and lethargy. What caused these wild energy swings? Was it their moodiness and the challenging age-level? Partly. But I believe that it also had a lot to do with what they ate for breakfast.
Parshat Beshalach relates the story of the mythical Mon (מן - I never know how to transliterate that word into English), the mystical every-food that rained down on the Children of Israel in the desert. The Midrash relates that among the mystical Mon's magical qualities was its ability to taste like whatever the eater wished. Pizza? Sure. Roast beef? Why not. Roast beef on pizza. Why not - it's all pareve. (Kind of makes you think that the Mon had a lot in common with soy.) Yet, Kli Yakkar adds that the Mon allowed the Jewish people to focus on spiritual growth during their time in the desert, because the Mon alleviated two critical problems that detract from one's ability to grow closer to God.
The first problem with "normal" food is external: you have to work to produce it, whether you produce the food yourself or work to earn money to pay for that food. That time expended working for our "daily bread" detracts from the time we spend in spiritual pursuits. The Mon easily resolved this issue, as the Jews expended no time working to produce the food they needed to live. It arrived almost on their doorstep, neatly wrapped in a protective dew-like wrapping.
But food itself carries Kli Yakkar calls an "internal" aspect that prevent growth.

מבית הוא מצד מאכלים גסים המפסידים זכות וברירות השכל, עד אשר כח שכלו עובר בעמק עכור ואינו זך לעסוק במושכלות...והמן היה אוכל רוחני כל אוכליו ניצולו מן שני המונעים אלו...הן מבפנים כי היה מאכל זך ונקי מכל פסולת

Internally, this due to the fact that heavy foods detract from the clarity and purity of the intellect, until a person's intellectual ability passes through a valley of fog, lacking the [required] purity to engage in intellectual matters...and the Mon was spiritual food, so that those who ate it were saved from these two detractions...including the internal [detraction] for it was a pure food, clean from all impurities.

Kli Yakkar notes that the Mon's miraculousness emanated not only from its origin and its simple presence each and every day. God also created the Mon as the ideal food for spiritual growth. It didn't give you a sugar high, only to have you fall crashing down to exhaustion in the middle of your first-period Gemara class. It wasn't full of fat and refined grains, leaving you feeling bloated and unable to learn.
It was healthy, tasty, filling and lean, leaving you energized and ready for a long period of spiritual growth.
True, we can't give ourselves or our children Mon for breakfast. But if you wonder why you (or they) are so tired in the middle of the morning, ask yourself this: what did they have for breakfast? If the answer is either (a) Nothing (b) Sugar cereal - or most any breakfast cereal for that matter or (c) snack food - very common among kids - stop wondering.
And start eating - and feeding your children - a healthier, and more spiritually encouraging breakfast.

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Parshat Beshalach - Mon, Faith and the Choices We Make

Audio Shiur:
Parshat Beshalach - Mon, Faith and the Choices We Make

The description of the mon and the reaction of the people raises critical questions not only about them, but about us. How much faith must we have when we approach the issue of parnassah? And what are we supposed to give our kids for breakfast? Really.

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Tefillin on Airplanes

If I was Al Queda, I'm pretty sure of how I would next try to attack an American airplane.
I would do it with Tefillin.
If September 11th taught us anything, it taught us that the enemies of freedom would attack America at its point of greatest weakness: its desire for fairness, honesty and openness. Americans still refuse to profile people based on ethnicity and appearance, instead choosing to scan old ladies in wheelchairs with the same intensity and scrutiny as a Middle-Eastern man in his twenties purchasing a ticket for cash with no luggage. (Did the airlines learn nothing at all during the past eight years?)
The brilliance (if you can call it that) of September 11th was the knowledge that during a hijacking, Americans would herd in the back of the plane and hope for the best. That's no longer the case, which is good.
But Americans are still not only good-hearted, but naively so. It's easy for me to imagine that following the recent Tefillin scare, the TSA sent out a bulletin to its thousands of employees about Tefillin, explaining that they are items of a religious nature that pose no threat to fellow passengers.
Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein wrote on his blog,

Mark Weitzman of the New York office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (my employer) had the conversation with an official of Homeland Security three or four years ago. He spoke of the need of a manual about America’s different religious communities, and what they might be bringing on planes at different times of the year. We offered to provide the Jewish content. They were receptive, but there was no follow-up that we are aware of. (On a different occasion, I wrote such a piece for TSA, which has been more than cooperative each year in assuring that frum passengers will not be detonated for carrying their lulavim around Sukkos time.) At this point, Homeland Security will hopefully swing into action, and find a way to share the information with the airlines.

That's just the kind of thing that Al Queda is looking for. Can a TSA employee in Des Moines tell the difference between a Jewish Middle Eastern looking man carrying Tefillin, and a non-Jewish one? You or I could just by looking - but could they? Would they know the difference between a kosher pair of Tefillin filled with klaf, or a fake pair filled with C4?
I doubt it. Only now, with newly issued instructions, American openness, and a desire to avoid another international incident, I fear that the TSA might be all too happy to let the "Tefillin" through without the proper scrutiny.
Which is just what America's enemies are hoping.

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The Attack on Marriage

Marriage is an anachronism. It is a relic from a time when we needed an arrangement to manage property and reproduction and, crucially, to establish kinships for purposes of defense: safety in numbers. A web of families connected through marriage produced a clan of people who were less likely to kill you than everybody else was. Such was the life style in the Fertile Crescent, and, not coincidentally, the Old Testament is fixated on genealogy. Sexual reproduction within marriage was a way of creating more of God’s chosen people. Originally, Jewish holy men were required to be married.

This quote, taken from a review in the New Yorker of Elizabeth Gilbert's new novel (memoir), "Committed," caught me in the gut. I never knew just how foolish I've been for the past fourteen years, living in self-deluded marital bliss. I never knew how miserable I really was, stuck in my anachronistic ancient family model, unaware that I was chained to an old, irrelevant way of life. Oh, oops - sorry, that's my wife. She's the one that's chained to me, at least according to the New Yorker.
Marriage has been under attack for years now, if not in word, at least in practice. It's what you do when you've had your fun and now want to settle down, raise a family, have children (and live a boring life - that's the unspoken part). It's the irrelevant convention that religion and society have forced upon us without rhyme or reason. And then its no wonder why divorce serves as the logical outcome for most American marriages today.
What we need then, is a renewal of the Jewish ideal of marriage, and a good answer not to the question of "Why get married?" but "Why Stay Married?"
For Orthodox kids, the question of "why get married" usually answers itself. After all, as Orthodoxy forbids sexual activity before marriage, and actively encourages it following marriage, that's a pretty strong incentive. Marriage also seems fun: the presents, the parties, the setting up of a new home, the excitement. Few young people ever ask the question: why get married? I would love to think that young Orthodox kids marry for better, deeper reasons, and I'm sure that many do. But I'm also sure that many don't as well.
Even more important, though, is the question most young people don't ask when they're getting married, and the one many married people do ask sometime later: Why Stay Married? After a certain point, while sexuality always remains a critical element of a healthy relationship, the initial sexual frenzy wanes to a degree. The newness of the home dies down, and life descends into a rhythm; a pattern of the mundane that in good circumstances provides stability and focus, and in bad can seem like an endless loop, lacking meaning and purpose.
The answer to "why stay married" should really be the same as to "why get married". Marriage is a partnership through which each member improves - in personal qualities, in spirituality, in closeness to God - by giving to the other. It's about sacrificing the self for another - for a spouse or a child, or many children - in order to create a greater whole.
But, in today's society, consumed with self-fulfillment, sacrifice seems quaint, silly. It's hard to argue against an underlying value, especially one that's so culturally pervasive.
We need a greater sense of awareness about the subtle but ongoing onslaught against the institution of marriage. Without that awareness - and a willingness to continue to give to our spouses despite the challenges, it's all too easy to find ourselves caught in the title wave of American culture demeaning marriage and belittling those that defend it.
And then we might find ourselves asking the most frightening question of all: Why stay married?

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