March 20, 2012 Does A Jew Need To Earn His Beard? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Does A Jew Need To Earn His Beard?

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Luke Ford

I was taken aback a few years ago when I had a beard when an old woman told me I had to earn the right to have a beard and I clearly had not.

I thought it was clearly the Jewish ideal for a man to have a beard.

In his first lecture on the Steipler for Torah in Motion, professor Marc B. Shapiro says: “Novardok [yeshiva] students wore beards.”

“If you’ve seen pictures of the great yeshivas in Europe, none of them wore black and none of them had beards. The rosh yeshivas wore beards. The bocherim (students) were not supposed to wear beards. It was haughtiness. Who heard of a 20-year old who doesn’t know anything wearing a beard? Maybe when you know 25 masechtas and you’ve been in yeshiva for 20 years.”

“This has changed in America. I was in Lakewood in six years ago. A good three-quarters did not have beards. It is disputed, but Rav Ahron Kotler did not believe that you could use shavers.”

“Maybe some women did not want a guy with a beard?”

“If you wanted to grow a beard [in a yeshiva traditionally], you had to get permission from the rosh yeshiva to grow a beard.”

“Black [clothes] only becomes yeshivish in the 1970s as a result of Hasidic influence. Until then it was, who do you think you are to wear black? It became rabbinic garb to wear black, even in the religious Zionist world.”

“Black means modesty but you [traditionally] needed a reason to be modest [so ostentatiously]. The yeshiva world today does not wear black for modesty. They wear it because it is their uniform.”

“People complain that YU is so frum today because a lot of the guys wear the uniform. Penguins, they call it. Black and white with a hat. They just want that yeshivish mode. In Israel, they would never dress that way because black means haredi.”

“In Lithuania, they did not put their tzitzit out.”

“In the Sephardic world, of course you don’t wear the tzitzit out. The Ari ruled that you wear tzitzit in.”

“In Morocco, no one wore tzitzit out.”

“R. Ovadiah Yosef has a long responsa that you should keep it in.”

“No one has done a history, a sociology, of the American yeshivas the way I would do it. We have Samuel Heilman. William B. Helmreich. I’m not interested in the things they’re interested in.

“I’m interested in when did the black clothing coming in. When did they start wearing tzitzit out?”

“The Steipler is the only gadol who was in a non-Jewish army.”

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Why the NAACP Went to Geneva

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, has gone to the United Nations — specifically the U.N. Human Rights Council — for, in the words of USA Today, “help battling what the organization views as forces attempting to push back voting rights.”
Those “forces” are laws being passed by various states that require a photo ID for voting.
The NAACP move is so absurd and so self-destructive that one has to wonder why the organization has done this. According to the Freedom House 2011 assessment of freedom in the world, of the 41 members of the U.N. Human Rights Council, fewer than half are free countries. Ten are ranked “Not Free,” and 12 “Partly Free.” Among the “Not Free” members are Angola, China, Congo, Cuba, Jordan, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Those countries’ elections, if they have them, are rigged, and prominent opponents are jailed, tortured and killed.
To bring a human rights complaint before countries in which there are almost no human rights is truly absurd. That the alleged human rights violation takes place in the freest country in the world further elevates the level of absurdity. And when the alleged violation is a law that requires all voters, irrespective of race, creed or color, to show photo identification before voting, we have gone beyond the absurd and entered a modern Twilight Zone.
The absurdity explains why what the NAACP doing is also self-destructive. It’s one thing for a prominent individual or organization to make a mistake. But it is quite another to seem ludicrous, which is how the NAACP appears to everyone who is not on the left — and perhaps even to thoughtful leftists.
Why, then, would the NAACP open itself to ridicule?
According to NAACP President Ben Jealous, the reason is that “We are here today because in the past 12 months, more U.S. states have passed more laws pushing more U.S. citizens out of the ballot box than in any year in the past century.”
One can only say that if in the past 100 years, fewer blacks were disenfranchised than in the past 12 months, all the claims about Jim Crow laws disenfranchising blacks must have been wildly exaggerated. But, of course, this, too, is absurd.

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Jews Rarely Have Open Casket Funerals

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Luke Ford

I grew up a goy, a Seventh-Day Adventist. It was not until I came to America at age 11 that I went to funerals with open caskets.

In a 2010 lecture titled “R. Avraham Shapiro” for Torah in Motion, professor Marc B. Shapiro says: “Many of R. Joseph Messas’s decisions (psakim) are incomprehensible today because of the meta-halachic concerns that make us look like Christians.

“It’s clear that Jews have to be buried in a separate cemetery. R. Joseph Messas’s says it is permitted to bury Jews in a cemetery with other religions so long as the Jewish graves are at least four cubits apart from the rest.”

“In Christian countries, you could never have decisions like this. Jewish graves near Christian graves with crosses? It wouldn’t work.”

“R. Joseph Messas’s was asked if it was permitted to view the dead and to put flowers on the coffin? A posek (decider of Jewish law) in Europe would never agree. It’s obvious that these are non-Jewish practices. Most of us have never seen a dead body because we do not have open caskets.”

“R. Joseph Messas’s says this is permitted. It is the original Jewish approach. He’s dealing with societies in the Muslim world where no one had open caskets.”

“He sees no problem with flowers on caskets.”

“Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t one essay on R. Joseph Messas’s. Now there are loads.”

“R. Joseph Messas’s shows us that traditional Judaism can encompass a wide variety of thought.”

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Can You Ask A Question Of A Haredi Rabbi?

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Luke Ford

In a 2010 lecture on R. Avraham Shapiro for Torah in Motion, professor Marc B. Shapiro says: From a journal published in Sivan, 2009. Here’s something I disagree with. I think it is a negative approach. It’s a recording of a lecture by R. Zvi Yehuda Kook. Somebody asked him, what about asking a halachic (Jewish law) question of a haredi rabbi (such as the Steipler). Can you ask a haredi rav a question of kashrut? Tzvi Yehuda bangs on the table and says, Haredi ideology means a lack of faith, a lack of appreciation of the era we’re in and it means a lack of wisdom and you look out for them.

“Tzvi Yehuda is saying that when it comes to ideology, we obviously can’t be led by the haredim but in even purely halachic matters, you can’t ask them any questions. Their halachic decisions will be based on faulty logic. They’re not intellectually honest.”

“It was the haredim who started this shtick. It’s ahistorical. In a traditional Jewish community, say in Europe, when you had a halachic question, you asked the rav of your community. If you had a different hashkafa (worldview) from him, that was irrelevant.

“The hasidim acted that way also. In almost every city the hasidim lived, the rebbe was not in charge. There was a rav. If they had a halachic question, they went to the rav. They didn’t regard the rav as their spiritual leader. The rav was a technician and could answer these questions.

“The haredim in Israel after WWII, they started this. If you don’t share their outlook, then you are invalid in all areas.”

“This was started by Samson Raphael Hirsch. He declared that for ideological reasons, a rabbi is declared invalid. That took place in Frankfurt. Because the rav disagreed with Hirsch’s separatism, his decisions are invalid.”

Posted in Haredi, Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off

Torah Talk! Parashat Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26)

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Luke Ford

I discuss the weekly Torah portion with Rabbi Rabbs Mondays at 7:00 pm PDT on the rabbi’s cam and on YouTube. Facebook Fan Page.

This week we study Parashat Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26).

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New Documentary About Sexual Abuse In Baltimore’s Orthodox Community

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Luke Ford

The Washington Post reports:

The story took over [Phil] Jacobs’s career in a way that surprised him. Tall and lanky with a softspoken manner, Jacobs, 58, still lives in Baltimore and is still married to his high school sweetheart. The Baltimore native and University of Maryland alumnus had worked for the Jewish Times company for 30 years, and while he “never wanted to cover Bubbie and Zaidy at the Gefilte Fish Ball,” he says from his new Rockville office at Washington Jewish Week, where he became editor in chief last summer, “I also didn’t expect this.”

“Standing Silent” depicts a community struggling to come to terms with a problem that, Jacobs says, has remained underreported for years and seems only recently to have attracted the attention of advocates and lawmakers.

There are no hard numbers to document the extent of the problem, but Elaine Witman, director of the Shofar Coalition, a nonprofit agency that provides services for victims of sexual and other abuse in the Baltimore area’s Jewish community, says the center is seeing an increase in the number of Jews coming forward to report abuse. In 2010, 67 people requested help for childhood sexual abuse from the coalition. That number nearly doubled in 2011, to 132 people, said Witman, who attributes the increase to Jacobs’s articles and the coalition’s efforts toreduce the shame that has kept the issue quiet for so long.

Posted in Abuse | Tagged childhood sexual abuse, fish ball, gefilte fish, high school sweetheart, maryland alumnus, phil jacobs | Comments Off

Jewish Sexual Abuse Victims Make Websites

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Luke Ford

The Washington Post reports:

In November, Debbie Teller, a 40-year-old Brooklyn-based blogger, launched a Web site called “AD-KAN,” a Hebrew phrase used to make the point “enough is enough.”

“I wanted to reach out to people for so long, but [the sex-abuse scandal at] Penn State was what gave me the push to come forward,” said Teller, who said she was a victim of sexual abuse. Her site and others such as Jewish Community Watch — formerly Crown Heights Watch, which was launched in July 2011— are important resources for the Orthodox community, she said. Teller’s site is modeled on earlier Jewish watchdog sites, such as failedmessiah.com and theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com. She hopes that together the sites will serve the same purpose as BishopAccountability.org, which listed accused abusers within the Catholic Church.

“We are breaking the silence in the frum [religious] community, and more people are getting online to tell their stories every day,” said Chaim Levin, 22, who was raised in the Chabad-Lubavitch community, an ultra-orthodox branch of Hasidic Judaism. Levin recently began blogging about the sexual abuse that he says he experienced at age 19 at an Orthodox Jewish counseling center in Jersey City. (The center — JONAH, or Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality — did not return calls or e-mail requests for comment.) Levin, who is now openly gay and no longer religious, still lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which is the Hasidic movement’s headquarters.

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Baby Alexander Technique

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Luke Ford

Let’s hope that little Hazel’s setback with Baby Alexander Technique doesn’t impact her chances for the 2014 Olympics. A gold medal in Curling will look great on a pre-school resume.

Season 2, Episode 3: “Primary Care Giver” from The Slope on Vimeo.

Posted in Alexander Technique, Satire | Comments Off

What If There’s Not A Goy Around When You Need One?

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Luke Ford

In his third lecture for Torah in Motion on the R. Eliezer Berkovitz, professor Marc B. Shapiro says in 2010: “Berkovitz claims that Jewish law changes but the values stay the same. He believes in Biblical values that in prior eras were not able to be realized. But now we can. This is not reform, this is returning to the original intent of the Bible. We’re not updating Torah law to fit society. Only in modern times can we realize these values.”

“Chapter four of Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halakha is called Halachah in Exile. Jewish law has developed for the diaspora. An example is the Sabbath. There’s always an assumption that there’s a goy around who can help out. What do you do if you’re in a village and there’s no non-Jew? Yeshaya Leibowitz says that all the Sabbath laws need to be rewritten. How do you run a Jewish country? Laws on the book are not adequate for a completely Jewish society. Rav Herzog, Rav Goren did not go this far but Berkovitz sees the problem.”

Posted in Marc B. Shapiro, Orthodoxy | Comments Off

This Week’s Torah Portion – Parashat Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26)

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Luke Ford

I discuss the weekly Torah portion with Rabbi Rabbs Mondays at 7:00 pm PDT on the rabbi’s cam and on YouTube. Facebook Fan Page.

This week we study Parashat Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26).

* Ancient Israel divided power between the king, the prophet and the priest. There’s no special role for the king in the sacrificial system.

* Reading this week’s Torah portion, I just want to throw up my hands and say, “What the hell?” It’s far removed from our modern sensibility.

* God runs the universe. He wants us to emulate him by making order out of chaos.

* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “The details of kodshim as written in the Torah and, as expounded and expanded in the Mishna and Talmud, are like the mysterious formulae and equations used by physicists and chemistry professors that are unintelligible to the ordinary man on the street but nevertheless work and accomplish their stated functions and goals.”

I used to need reasons and explanations for everything. In my old age, I’m not as curious. I have more trust in Torah.

* It’s easy to talk about ethics and right and wrong and social policy with secularists, but it is usually hard to talk to them about holiness, the subject of this book of the Torah.

* You get close to that which you sacrifice for. How do you get close to God? I feel close to God at Yosemite and when I’m around holy people and studying Torah.

* It was easier to get close to God when you had the temple and the sacrifices.

* The sacrifices atone for sins against God, not for sins against man. You can’t buy God off for the rotten things you did to your neighbor.

* The Talmud states a couple of reasons for why Roman civilization should be praised. One of the reasons was that they did not marry men to men.

* Rabbi Wein writes: “The Talmud explicitly teaches us that only if a Kohain somehow resembles an angel of God in his behavior and deportment, would people come to study Torah from his mouth and sense the true holiness of the Temple. The task that was placed on the Kohanim was not one of mere rote service in the Temple. It was rather the challenge to be exemplary in behavior, a role model for others, and a teacher of Torah to Israel by deed as well as by word, which would define the true Kohain.”

The Jews are to be priests to the world just as the Cohenim are to be priests to the Jews.

When a Gentile priest walks by in distinctive religious garb, it does have an affect on the world. People speak differently and act differently when a priest is around.

* Do animals have rights? Not in a Torah view. Animals don’t have moral obligations. Animals are here to serve man. The Torah cares about how animals are treated (4th commandment that animals must rest on the Sabbath).

* A great Jewish novel is Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. The protagonist’s job is as the human right’s commissioner for New York City. The novel is mainly about the guy’s sex life, but despite his constant plooking of shiksas, he’s preoccupied with moral issues. Even this horny hebe still tries to do good.

From Wikipedia: On the first page of the novel, one finds this clinical definition of “Portnoy’s Complaint”, as if taken from a manual on sexual dysfunction:
Portnoy’s Complaint: A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature…

The publication of the novel caused a major controversy in American public discourse. The two aspects that evoked such outrage were its explicit and candid treatment about sexuality and obscenities, including detailed depiction of masturbation, which was revolutionary in the late 1960s; and the irreverent portrait of Jewish identity. It sparked an uproar in the Jewish community, even among New York intellectuals such as Irving Howe and Diana Trilling.

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