Paul Shaviv (father of blogger Miriam Shaviv and director of the Hebrew Academy of Toronto) writes about Noah Feldman’s New York Times article:
7. The question of how to handle an embarrassing ‘b’dieved” situation – as happened at the now infamous reunion – is a matter of school management and decision-making process. It is not clear where the ‘edit them out’ decision was made. But a school should have a culture where everyone recognizes problems when they arise, and instead of deciding on the spot, refers them to a wider decision-making body who can work out a strategy for resolving them. Making arbitrary and deeply insulting decisions to airbrush a grad out of the reunion photo is guaranteed to cause deep hurt and offense. The action was breathtakingly insensitive, and the lasting hurt – the complete depersonalization – seems to have been the catalyst for the public action. Not to publicly humiliate your fellow is a Jewish value. Where was it in this situation? The penalty for one who is ‘Malbin et pnei chavero b’rabbim’ is more severe than for one who intermarries….
8. The question that transcends the school is, of course, the overall question of how the Jewish community, and in this case the ‘Modern Orthodox" community, relates personally, communally and institutionally to our fellow Jews who marry non-Jewish partners, or otherwise are clearly ‘crossing red lines’ in their public lives. Many commentators on Prof. Feldman point out that the "community" is much more tolerant of individuals who transgress halachah in other ways. I can only give one observation here: I come from the UK, where the Orthodox community, even the ‘mainstream’ Orthodox community, has from time immemorial maintained the most stringent boycotts and ostracism of non-Orthodox Jewish movements, the ‘outmarried’, the heretics (real or imagined) and every other non-conformist, to a degree undreamed of by the most rigourously Orthodox in North America, and all but the most rigourously Orthodox in Israel. It hasn’t worked. It hasn’t deterred anyone from marrying non-Jewish partners; it hasn’t inhibited the growth of non-orthodox movements (it may have stimulated them). It has resulted in schism, divisiveness and ‘sinat chinam’. On this issue I am wholeheartedly with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. In our age, we should reach out to every single Jew with kindness, tact, courtesy, understanding and love.
