Some YouTube Videos I Feel Like Sharing

Davening over the Yamim Noraim were particularly meaningful for me, for one simple reason: I was blessed to daven between my sons (who are now both Bar Mitzvah). I cherish the quiet moments that we have together under my tallit during Bircat Kohanim. Somehow, we just share in a sense of blessing during the silence of the blessings in a close and intimate way that's not easily replicable any other time that I can think of. Of the many, many blessings inherent in living in Israel, daily birkat Kohanim (and sharing the ritual with my sons each Shabbat when they're with me) is one of the "smaller" perks that I really appreciate.
Also, the davening itself was quite powerful, with a lot of wonderful singing. This year, the rav who davens mussaf sent around a YouTube link to a wonderful niggun that appears during the repetition of the davening on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I've been humming it ever since, and now so has the family. I share it with you for your enjoyment and spirituality.

On a much, much lighter note, I've written before about Underdos, the group of young people who publish a short funny clip each week about some aspect of religious life. While the Hebrew is often way too fast for many to follow, they recently put out two videos that have no speaking at all, both of which I found not only quite funny, but very clever takes on different genres of video. Watch and enjoy! And Mo'adim L'simcha!
 

Here's the second one.

Does Shalom Auslander Tell the Truth on This American Life?

Recently, This American Life (a podcast that I reguarly enjoy) garnered a fair amount of press attention (OK, a huge amount. Just Google: This American Life Retraction) after it was forced to issue an hour-long mea-culpa for airing a "dramatization" about factory workers in China as facts. It was an impressive thing to listen to, as frustrated host Ira Glass grilled the performer about why he lied to them, telling them that his show was totally accurate, when in fact he had fabricated significant portions of the dramatization. (He made some crazy claims about a "larger truth", but his real motivation was clearly to get the incredible publicity of appearing for almost the full This American Life show.)
In any case, TAL has since made clear that it will not represent a story as non-fiction when it cannot fully verify the truth of that story. It's an admirable policy, especially for a show that essentially tells stories. Still, This American Life often attmepts to explore aspects of the news, sometimes exposing scandals in 60 Minutes-like fashion, so telling the truth seems to be an inherent, critical aspect of the show.
This morning, an article in the Washington Post wondered about other segments that frequently appear on TAL (and other NPR shows) from humorist and author David Sedaris. Sedaris tells semi-funny stories in a humorous way to get laughs. (Apparently, that's what comedians do.) Along the way, he makes up some things to give the stories a funnier edge. When the Post asked TAL host Ira Glass about all this,

In an interview, Glass said no one at his program was concerned about Sedaris before the Daisey episode. “We just assumed the audience was sophisticated enough to tell that this guy is making jokes and that there was a different level of journalistic scrutiny that we and they should apply,” he said.
But the Daisey debacle has brought about a reassessment. Glass said three responses are under discussion: fact-checking each of Sedaris’s stories to ensure their accuracy, labeling them to alert the audience that the stories contain “exaggerations” or doing nothing.

Personally, that seems fair enough. After all, Sedaris just wants find humor in unusual situations. He's not really targeting anyone. And, from the pieces of his that I've heard, the biggest target of his humor is himself, as he highlights the ridiculous situations ni which he finds himself.

Shalom Auslander

Not so Shalom Auslander.
Auslander, another fairly regular contributor to the show, regularly tells stories about his own childhood - and victimhood. As an Orthodox Jew, I find his pieces far less entertaining, as they target not Auslander himself, but Judaism - and specifically Orthodox Judaism. He ridicules and mocks the religiosity and piousness of the figures from his childhood, clearly still angry about an abusive father who mistreated him (as he tells it).
Take, for example, a story that was recently rerun on TAL about a teacher of Auslander's from grade school who told him that his name (Shalom) was in fact one of God's names, and therefore forced him to place any item with his name on it in the Shaimos box, designated for burial. As he tells it,

Life with God's name was more difficult than I imagined. I was annoyed with God for being so selfish with them all. He had 71 other names. I couldn't see why he'd mind so much if I used just one. I didn't want to tell God how to do his job, but I wondered if maybe there weren't bigger things for him to be worrying about than who was using one of his six dozen names without permission. Isn't this, I wondered, what led to holocausts?
The Shaimos Box in the prayer hall filled quickly: my homework, my test papers, my what-I-did-this-summer, even my Highlights For Children. And buried at the bottom of the box, a pair of underpants my mother had written my name on with permanent marker.

If this story is true, it is indeed fantastic: lunch bags and underpants in Shaimos? Any Orthodox Jew knows that we do indeed treat items of religious value with respect. We place matters with Torah writings in a special box designated for burial. But Jewish law limits these items to Torah articles, old books, worn Tefillin of significant religous value. To extend this practice to underpants would indeed be as ridiculous and foolish as Auslander implies that they were, making the Orthodoxy of his youth sound as silly and worthy of abandonment as he continues to demand that it was (and is).
And yet I wonder. Notice the nuance in the story, which begins with a subtle, but critical description of Rabbi Breyer, the villain of the tale:

Eli said that his big brother said that Rabbi Breyer once broke a student's nose by slapping the student's face. Dov said that his big brother said that Rabbi Breyer had once broken a student's arm when he was dragging the student from the room for talking during prayers. Rabbi Breyer was the scariest rabbi in the whole yeshiva.
He was a stocky man, wide as the doorway, with a long, rough beard and thick, angry hands, and everyone trembled that first day of third grade when he stomped heavily into the classroom, wrote his name on the blackboard, and shouted at Akiva for slouching in his seat. Nobody spoke during class. Nobody doodled in the margins of their prayer books. And when, at the end of the first test at the end of the first week, Rabbi Breyer shouted, "Pencils down," it was as if the commandment had come from God himself.

Auslander doesn't verify hat the rebbe broke the students' arms. The kids "said" that he had. Yet, he dangles these rumors as facts. Did the kids ever really say that, or did Auslander make it up? What does it mean for a rabbi to have "angry" hands? Of course his beard was "rough". Has Auslander ever met a rabbi with a "smooth beard" and "Gentle hands"?
Listening to his story, I had a difficult time believing that it was actually, factually true. It seemed much more like a composite story, gathering facts from different stories and characters from different parts of his life, to weave a unique tapestry worthy of publication. Was there a rebbe in his school who slapped students? I'm sure there was. But did he really make Auslander put everything with his name in it in Shaimos? I highly, highly doubt it.
I wonder whether Glass or the many producers of This American Life ever thought to verify the details in Auslander's stories. Because, unlike Sedaris, whose lighthearted stories are pointed squarely at himself, Auslander still clearly has his former faith in his sights.
And he shoots to kill.

The Jerusalem Post is Out of Control

Thank God that the Jerusalem Post finally concluded its long-awaited conference last week. (Truthfuly, the paper crossed the line between "news" and "self-promotion" ages ago, and self-congratulatory editorial doesn't help matter.) No, I didn't go, and truth be told, it doesn't really seem like anything especially interesting happened at the NY Marriott Marquis. Why then am I happy that the conference is over? Because the paper's site has been bombarding viewers with crazy ads for months, framing the entire page with distracting banners, popups, and animations making the site almost impossible to read. Just as an experiment, I took a snapshot of the JPost homepage this morning, and blocked out the ads. How much space is left for actual content? See for yourself:

Not so much. For comparison, I did the same for a new Israel news website called the Times of Israel, which thusfar seems to have some quite compelling content. This is what I found:

Just for comparisons, what about the Old Grey Lady, the NY Times herself? How many ads does she run? Here you go:

Not nearly as much as the Jerusalem Post - not by a longshot. (Makes you wonder why the Jewish sites don't go wider like the Times.)
Now, I certainly don't begrudge JPost the need for revenue. They're in business for a reason. Yet, one gets the sense that Jpost needs to squeeze as much revenue as possible to support a bloated and expensive print operation, which is undoubtedly dwindling due to the proliferation of digital media. Yet, legacy print publications are learning, perhaps the hard way, that there's a limit to the number of ads a reader will suffer through. Eventually, a leaners, more economically viable competitor will emerge (See Huffington Post, and now the Times of Israel) which probably pays writers very little (if anything at all), and organizes the information in a far more readible, accessible fashion.
Personally, I've got nothing against Jpost. I can't say that I buy their paper every Friday, but I have been a pretty loyal web surfer, until now. It's just getting too hard to find the news amid all the clutter.

Shebechol Dor Va'dor - The Modern Day Blood Libel

Thoughts on the Hagadah

One of the most compelling parts of the Seder night is the emotional paragraph of vehi she'amdah - "This is what has stood." In the midst of the hagadah we raise our cups of wine and say:

This is what has stood by our ancestors and us! For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One blessed be He, saves us from their hand!"

On the night of the Seder we don't simply remember an event from our history. We reenact the past, but apply it to today. We affirm the understanding that persecution and hatred of the Jewish people has remained a constant across the spectrum of time. Pharaoh did not just hate us then; he hates us today. Except that today's Pharaohs don't carry scepters; they write articles. They don't wear their hatred and derision on their sleeves; they hide it in their smug elitism and humanism.
The Torah tells us that Pharaoh used delegitimization as the first step in the enslavement of the Jewish people. You cannot perpetrate terrible acts on an entire people before you have reduced them in your mind to less than human. Once they no longer share the same status; once they have been reduced to inhuman, anything and everything goes, including enslavement, oppression, even infanticide. The Torah clearly communicates this campaign of hate through its choice of language describing the growth of the Israelites in Egypt.

וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, פָּרוּ וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ וַיִּרְבּוּ וַיַּעַצְמוּ--בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד; וַתִּמָּלֵא הָאָרֶץ, אֹתָם.

And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them.

The most important word in this verse is the word vayishretzu - "and increased abundantly," because it must be understood in context. The root of the verb is lesharetz - literally meaning "to swarm." In the context of the Torah, a sheretz is an impure, defiled organism; a low, degraded life-form. In essence the Egyptians, watching the rapid growth of the Israelites within their country, saw them not as an engine of growth for the Egyptian economy but rather as a "swarm" of locusts that had descended on Egypt and which, if left unchecked, would one day destroy the country.
Kli Yakkar (on Shemot 1:7) makes precisely this point.

And we can also explain the language of vayishretzu, that after the death of Joseph and his brothers and that entire righteous generation that was protecting them, from then on they became degraded like vermin crawling in the dirt in the eyes of the Egyptians. That is why [the verse] says vayishretzu.

"The land was filled with them." Not something you'd say about citizens. But this is precisely how you'd describe a plague of cicadas, begging for extermination. From that point forward the path seems relatively clear: degradation leads to oppression; oppression to enslavement.

She'bechol dor v'dor. In every generation. When we think about the world we live in today and wonder who hates us and wants to destroy us, the answers seem to come easily: radical Islamists; murderous terrorists; most member-states in the United Nations. But in the United States, Jews enjoy an unprecedented level of freedom, prominence, status - precisely the opposite of oppression. True enough. But when you look a little deeper, the signs do not seem promising.

Christopher Hitchins recently authored an article called "An Army of Extremists" published in Slate Magazine. (For those of you who might not know, Slate is an online venture owned by the Washington Post Company, which also publishes Newsweek. It's considered very "fresh" and "hip", and has an important voice in the news media.) Spurred on by the recent flurry of allegations against religous soldiers in the Israeli Army, and citing this article that appeared recently in the New York Times, Hitchins took the evidence to its logical conclusion.

Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties that has immediately resulted, it's fairly easy to see where this is going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs.

So, anyone religous is the following:

• Violent in the extreme, and obvoiusly guity of creating the "horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties" (is it just me, or do you also see the "Holocaust" imagery in his description?)
• Zealots
• Murderers, willing to kill not only Arabs, but secular Jews who dare to contradict their view of Israel, Judaism and the world
  

I wish I were making this up. But this is the underlying attitude that has fueled the furor over when the IDF is really moral after all. (Obvious message: it's not.) There's really no point in trying to rebut any of the allegations. Truth, facts, substance, nuance - none of that matters.

In the old days, they used to say that we killed Christian children to bake our matzah for Pesach. It really does sound crazy. Had anyone ever looked at a matzah? How in the world would such a charge make any sense at all? But sense never really mattered, when the true agenda was deligimization. Nowadays, they don't claim that we murder Christian children - just Palestinian ones. And Arabs. And even secular Jews. All in the name of the Torah.

In every generation. Indeed.