The Cost of Kiruv: A Midrash I'm Struggling With

Would you want your daughter to marry this man?

Imagine that your beautiful daughter, having excelled at school, a model student, community leader, religous personality - basically a wonderful girl - called you from college to tell you that, "Guess what?! I'm engaged!" After the shock wears off, you start to inquire about the young man. Imagine your surprise when you learn that her "beloved" is not only nothing like you expected, but nothing like her at all. Or you. Actually, he's something of a brute - and that's being generous.
While the young man is technically "Jewish", he's not observant in any way. Far from it. He's more of a ruffian. Actually, he's a criminal, the chief of a gang of thugs in his city. He's vulgar, crude and violent as well.
When your blood pressure medication finally kicks in and you raise some of your concerns with your daughter, she understands immediately. "I know it's not what you were expecting. Actually, I don't really like him that much myself either. I'm only marrying him for kiruv. After all, isn't that a good reason to marry someone?"
Actually, it's not. And the seeming absurdity of my imaginary scenrio only makes a comment in Rashi from Parashat Vayishlach all the more puzzling.
Vayishlach chronciles the troubling story of the capture and torment of Ya'akov's daughter, Dinah, who is seduced/raped by Shechem, the prince of Shechem (his father named the city after him. How touching. Makes it pretty clear why he thought he could do anything he liked.). We are left to wonder why Ya'akov, who seemingly faithfully follows the word of God to the letter, is punished in such a brutal and vulgar manner. After all, while Dinah bears the brunt of the suffering, the defilement of a daughter was considered a criminal offense so severe, as Netziv points out, that people would regularly risk their lives (and kill) to prevent it.
Rashi (based on a Midrash) provides an answer that always puzzled me. Interestingly, we find his answer to this question not in his commentary to the story of Dinah and Shechem, but earlier in the Parashah, when Ya'akov brings his family into the Land of Canaan. There we read,

וַיָּקָם בַּלַּיְלָה הוּא, וַיִּקַּח אֶת-שְׁתֵּי נָשָׁיו וְאֶת-שְׁתֵּי שִׁפְחֹתָיו, וְאֶת-אַחַד עָשָׂר, יְלָדָיו; וַיַּעֲבֹר, אֵת מַעֲבַר יַבֹּק. 

And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two handmaids, and his eleven children, and passed over the ford of the Jabbok.  (Bereishit 32:23)

Rashi wonders: Eleven? True, Binyamin was not yet born, but what about Dinah? If we count her, Ya'akov had twelve children. Where was she?

ודינה היכן היתה? נתנה בתיבה ונעל בפניה שלא יתן בה עשו עיניו, ולכך נענש יעקב שמנעה מאחיו שמא תחזירנו למוטב, ונפלה ביד שכם

And where was Dinah? [Ya'akov] had placed her in a box and locked her inside, so that Eisav would not lay his eyes upon her. And for this Ya'akov was punished, for holding her back from his brother - for perhaps she would have returned him to the positive [path] - and therefore she fell into the hands of Shechem.

The langauge of the Midrash castigates Ya'akov even more sharply. According to the Midrash, God said to Ya'akov, "You withheld Dinah from a circumcised man (Eisav). I swear that she will fall into the hands of an uncircumcised man!" Ouch.
Why was Ya'akov punished so harshly? According to Rashi, God punished him for hiding his daughter from his brutish, murderous brother Eisav - the very same brother that caused his first wife, Leah, to cry her eyes out for fear of being married to him. This is also the same brother that Ya'akov goes to extraordinary lengths to get as far away from as possible - an effort that the Midrash soundly praises. And now the Midrash (and therefore Rashi) tell us that Ya'akov should have wanted his daughter to marry this man - share grandchildren with him - all for the sake of kiruv? Isn't that asking a bit much of him, and her?
I've always struggled with this lesson. Of course kiruv is important, and it's also equally true that a righteous wife can have a powerful spiritual influence on her family (while the opposite is less apparent). But asking Dinah to change Eisav seems excessive to me. Did God really expect that much of him? Isn't that asking to much?
If you've got a suggestion, please share in the comments.

A Video I'm Having Trouble Understanding

I've recently come to realize just how old I truly am:

1. I have a son in high school. Scary.
2. Forty rapidly approaches. 
3. A new cool internet Kiruv video makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

Someone on Facebook linked to a new Aish video called "Rosh Hashanah Rock Anthem" in which a clearly non-religious person complains that Rosh Hashanah is boring. "Jewish New Year? It's just going to be a bunch of guys praying, right? I mean, what's the fun in that?" To this, the frum person says, "It's the holiest time of the year. A time for introspection, appreciation..." At this point, the kiruv-candidate feigns snoring. So the frum guy says, "You know what, let me explain it to you a little bit differently."
At this point, a group of frum-dressed men begin dancing to what must be dance-party music. I must admit, the dancing - if that's what it is, is quite impressive. Something tells me that these guys didn't learn to dance this way at the recent Aish Melave Malka, if you know what I mean.
But I can't hear the words to the song at all, and if anything, the video seems to reinforce exactly what our not-yet-frum friend complained about: Rosh Hashanah really is boring, and it's much better to break dance on your head, jump around Jerusalem, and leap over people (during davening? I'd go to that shul!)
The video, while visually impressive and fun to watch, doesn't seem to have anything to do with Judaism, unless you count the miracle of keeping your kipah on while doing a triple-lutz while overlooking the Kotel.
Aish does incredible work, but I truly fail to see how this video has anything to do with Kiruv. It seems that in our bid to increase page views and attract eyeballs, we're now in a race to the bottom where anything remotely related to Judaism can somehow be considered kiruv.
The best proof? A comment on YouTube about the video:

WOW! This is coool! Especially that blond guy that balances/dances on one and both hands! I'm not Jewish, so whenever Rosh Hashana is, HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YA'LL! :->

Great. So now the non-Jewish world thinks that Rosh Hashanah is precisely like the American New Year. Parties. Dancing. Music.
How again is this supposed to be kiruv?

Update: 
I just got the video sent to me as a link with this email:

I wanted to share with you an amazing Rosh Hashanah video featuring one of Israel's top break dance teams.  We hope that you can post this video on your site, blog, Facebook or twitter accounts and hopefully we will get the entire Jewish nation excited about the upcoming Jewish New Year.

Wishing you a happy and healthy new year,

Ben Feferman
Executive Producer
Forbidden Fruit Media

Again - I have nothing against the break dancing per se. But what connection does it have to Aish HaTorah?

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.

The Kiruv Compromise

On the short drive from the men's mikveh to my home on Erev Yom Kippur, I happened to flip on the radio and heard a pre-Yom Kippur discussion between Rav Benny Lau, Rav of the Katamon neighborhood in Yerushalayim and of the Ramban Synagogue in Katamon and an Israeli author named Yochi Brandres (pictured), a well-known media personality and lecturer in Tanach, Jewish and Hebrew literature. (You can listen to the program online in Hebrew here.)
In the course of telling a story about getting along with your neighbors (about 24 minutes into the program), Rav Lau told about how each year, on Kol Nidrei night at the conclusion of the services, they have a program called חשבון נפש ישראלי - "Taking Stock of the Israeli Soul", which brings hundreds of people from the neighborhood for a talk about spirituality, introspection, and self-evaluation, both personally, but also communally and nationally. He told how he happily invited Professor Yaron Ezrachi, a resident in the neighborhood, to speak from the Bimah in his shul. Brandres literally could not contain herself, and toldthe following story. Hearing about the program, trying to catch Rav Lau when she heard about Ezrachi's appearance in the shul on Yom Kippur said to him, "But you'd never invite a woman to speak. You cannot be that open." To this Rav Lau responded, "Would you like to speak this year?" She would. So, on the eve of Kol Nidrei this year, Brandres spoke from the amud of the Ramban shul.
Listening to her, you could hear a sense of excitement and appreciation. She said, "Rav Lau, you know that I've given many different talks in many different shuls; but never in front of an Orthodox shul. I speak every week, and even on the evening of Yom Kippur; but it's always a more liberal synagogue; Conservative, reform, secular; but this is the first time that I will speak before male and female attendees on the evening of Yom Kippur, and I'm looking forward to a very powerful and inspiring experience, in the merit of your openness."
I must admit that I was rather taken aback by Rav Lau's openness. On the one hand, I understand precisely where he's coming from: without welcoming secular people into our communities, without giving them a forum to express themselves and listening to them like we want them to listen to us, there can never be unity in Israel. So I appreciate his program.
But then there's another side. I wonder - and I really don't know the answer to this question - if Rav Lau had his druthers, in his heart of hearts, would he really want to invite a woman or a secular professor to speak from the bimah of the shul on Kol Nidrei night? What I'm really asking is, is Rav Lau in some way watering down his own religious standards for the sake of unity? The answer to seems to clearly be "yes." Unity requires compromise. I have no doubt that Rav Lau adheres to the constraints of halachah. I get a sense listening to the program that the lecture took place at the conclusion of tefillah, and that there's no specific injunction in the Shulchan Aruch against a woman or secular Jew delivering a lecture in a shul on any night, much less Kol Nidrei. But in the words of a colleague, "pas nisht." Is that really necessary? Is it in the spirit of Kol Nidrei?
Rav Lau would undoubtedly say "yes." On the night that we're supposed to stand as a unified nation before God asking for forgiveness; on the night that we give ourselves "permission" to "pray for the transgressors" (which we do at the very beginning of Kol Nidrei), what better night could there be to invite an entire community together to speak about Teshuvah?
I have a different question: Does it work? Is Rav Lau by compromising, bringing Jews closer to classical Judaism, or in some twisted way, somehow pushing them farther away?

Rena has been reading a book called "Mekimi" in Hebrew written by a Ba'alat Teshuva who came from a secular background and eventually found her way back to traditional Jewish life. She didn't just become a Baalat Teshuvah. She went all the way to Breslov. She describes the holiness, simplicity and draw of the Breslov way of life. It seems that while some might find the complexities of a religious life that tries to find compromises to welcome outsiders (a la Rav Lau and his Kol Nidrei speakers' series) appealing, others - maybe even more - are turned away by those very compromises. In their search for spirituality, they're not looking for women speaking to a mixed audience in an Orthodox shul on Kol Nidrei night. They're in fact looking for just the opposite: a community with limits, clear lines, and defined terms. And those people would probably find Yochi Brandres' speech in Rav Lau's shul a reason to turn away from Orthodoxy, and not towards it.
Maybe we need both: the complexity and compromise of Rav Lau, and the simplicity and clear lines of Breslov.
After all, different strokes for different folks.