Some people in Los Angeles who have already converted to Orthodox Judaism are converting again. This time they’re doing it through the auspices of the Rabbinical Council of California.
Why are they doing another conversion? Because the RCC’s conversion is accepted throughout the Jewish world. Other Orthodox conversions are not universally accepted, particularly in Israel.
I hear the RCC is pretty nice about it. They say, “We believe you’re Jewish, but we understand that some people may not, and so to make your life easier, and to make the lives of your children easier, you may want to convert through us.”
The process will usually take a couple of years. It will include weekly Torah classes and the same rigors of their regular conversion (where 99% of applicants are rejected at some point, including me in my youth).
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* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “It seems that the breaches of the covenant do not occasion immediate and sudden punishment and tragedy. Jewish history has very few incidents of instantaneous punishment or reward. It is always part of a long process of events…”
This is true in our personal lives as well. You can take up Torah and it won’t necessarily have instantaneous results. I’m on a good path that should lead to marriage and children, but there have been no quick results, no massive immediate pay-offs to my hard work.
* Many of the great things that Judaism has done, we’re not aware of because we take them for granted.
Rabbi Wein writes: “Much of our world has outgrown these forms of idolatry and this is due greatly to the unremitting struggle of Judaism against such practices.”
For most of us, sins such as incest and homo-sex are unthinkable. When people start considering them as normal, society will crash.
* Rabbi Wein writes: “God’s wisdom and judgments are inscrutable and are beyond even elementary comprehension by us mortals. As such we are left wondering as to the tragedies that descended upon the Jewish people and that continue to plague us today. Though there are those amongst us that are prepared to give and accept glib answers to the causes of tragedy, the wise men of Israel warned us against such an approach. Observance of commandments is enormously difficult to fulfill completely and accurately.”
When I meet someone who links bad times in Jewish history to the specific failings of specific Jews (such as that a terror attack on an Israeli town was the result of failing to check mezuzos, or that Reform Judaism caused the Holocaust), I know I’ve met a fool. To speak for God in these instances of extreme Jewish suffering is foolish.
If you want to interpret your own suffering as God’s message to your life, that is beautiful, but if I tell someone in pain, this is because you have not fulfilled such-and-such a mitzva, that’s foolish. It’s not for me reprove someone suffering.
* Rabbi Wein writes: “Though we pray regularly for health and serenity, we must always be cognizant of how precarious situations truly are.”
Judaism is a great recipe for a good life and it is also great preparation for when times turn terrible. On the other hand, meeting hot chicks is great fun but it is not a form of sustenance when your life falls apart. Someone you’ve picked up in a club for a night is not likely to stand by you when you lose your job or your legs or your mommy dearest.
* I don’t think most non-Orthodox Jews understand how little tochachah (reproof) Orthodox Jews give to each other. If you go to shul, you’re not likely to get called on the carpet for your sins. You’re not going to get a going over as to your beliefs. There are no beliefometer operators. Most shuls and most shul rabbis are glad when Jews show up and the amount of reproving they do is small. It’s not the Orthodox way to constantly reprove people for their sins. Orthodox Judaism is not focused on sin in the way that Christians obsess over sin and their sinful human condition.
Where you will get blowback at shul is if you advocate behavior and belief incompatible with Orthodox Judaism or if you are doing things publicly that violate Torah.
* Rabbi Wein writes: “Warning people about what will happen to them centuries later down the road of history rarely affects their current behavior. People do all sorts of things when they are younger that they know will be injurious to their health and even eventually shorten their lifespan.”
Do you know why I did some things risky to my health and to my soul? Because they were exciting (or because I was in thrall to my addictions rather than to God).
*Rabbi Wein writes: “There are two prophecies recorded [in the Bible] regarding the future of the Jewish people. One predicted that a fox would emerge from the ruins of the Temple. The other prediction was that Jewish old men and women would sit in joy and contentment in the streets of Jerusalem and watch children at play.”
When you go to most Orthodox shuls in the world, they are filled with children at play. It’s heartening. I remember when my parents met some Jewish kids for the first time, they said, “They’re very rambunctious, aren’t they?”
The goyish kids I’ve known were generally more restrained and polite than the Jewish ones I’ve known.
* There are many benefits to obeying God’s commandments but that’s not why we observe them. We do it because God said so and God is in a better position than us to know what is best.
Rabbi Wein writes: The opening commandment in this week’s parsha deals with shemitta – the sabbatical year for the Land of Israel when the ground was to be allowed to lie fallow and the farmer abstained from his regular routine of work. The traditional commentators to the Torah emphasized that even though the ground and farmer would benefit in the long run from the year’s inactivity this was not the reason for the commandment.
There are always side benefits from obeying the commandments of the Torah but these are never the reason or the basis for the commandment itself. The underlying lesson of the sabbatical year is its obvious kinship to the weekly Sabbath. Just as every seven days brings with it a holy day of rest, so too does a holy sabbatical year bring with it a rest for the earth itself.
* Torah commandments can be very difficult. Sometimes they can just be an ideal that we can’t reach yet, such as shemitah (Sabbatical year of rest), which Jews have never fully observed. I notice that a lot of people have an all-or-nothing approach. If you can’t fulfill every commandment in every detail then there is no point in keeping anything. I had a secular girlfriend who used this argument to express her contempt for my flawed religiosity. This is stupid.
Rabbi Wein writes: “Shemitta has always been a difficult test of faith for the Jewish people. Even in Temple times it appears that the commandment was never fully fulfilled. There are many reasons for this apparent laxity in observance, the most obvious one being the seeming impracticality of its observance.”
* I understand suicide bombers and arsonists. I understand their despair and their desire for importance. They want to create in the wider world the disharmony they feel inside every day.
* Did the Kings game Sunday night provide Rabbi Rabbs some temporary relief from the misery of his existence?
Rabbs, there’s no need to feel down
I said Rabbs, pick yourself off the ground
I said Rabbs, ’cause your in a new town
There’s no need to be unhappy
Rabbs, there’s a place you can go
I said Rabbs, when you’re short on your dough
You can stay there and I’m sure you will find
Many ways to have a good time
Is a Jew allowed to stay at the YMCA? They have everything for young men to enjoy. You can hang out with all the boys.
* How do you run a modern state according to Torah law? How do you run a modern Jewish community in a Gentile nation according to Torah law?
In his sixth lecture on R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinksi for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: According to Rav Nissim of Girona (aka The RaN) says that in our Jewish system, there are two types of governance — Torah law and the law of the king. Take a look at how difficult it is to convict people in Jewish law. You have to have two witnesses. The perpetrator needs to be warned. How do you run a state like this? How do you put people in jail? Every single person in jail would not be in jail by Torah law. First, there’s no jail in Torah law. None of these people were warned before committing their crime.
According to Wikipedia: “Nissim ben Reuven (1320–1376, Hebrew: נסים בן ראובן) of Girona, Catalonia was an influential talmudist and authority on Jewish law. He was one of the last of the great Spanish medieval talmudic scholars. He is also known as the RaN (ר”ן, the Hebrew acronym of his name).”
Marc: The standard view is that the Beit Din has the authority to do whatever they want to do as an emergency measure. There’s a famous case in the Talmud where the rabbis executed someone for riding a horse on Shabbos even though that’s only a rabbinic prohibition. To establish Torah law, the rabbis are allowed to break with Torah law and to do extra-judicial measures. The Beit Din can do what it needs to do. That’s the way Jewish society worked in medieval time. All sorts of punishments were given to people that were forbidden by Torah law.
The RaN said that Torah law and real law (law of the king) operate in different spheres. According to Torah law, you need two witnesses to convict someone but the law of the king can set up any proof it wants. The king sets up a parallel legal system.
You could conclude that Torah law is only meant as some theoretical law. It is clearly impossible to run any sort of society based on Torah law. It’s almost law for a messianic society and not meant for the real world.
The RaN is not talking about emergency measures. He’s talking about a complete parallel legal system. Many people aren’t aware of this. They think that if you don’t have at least two witnesses warning someone, you can never convict. I think this is a disgrace to the Torah because it makes people think that Jewish law can not function in the real world.
If someone has half a brain and they’re in yeshiva and learning all the laws and that’s all they’re told about how a Jewish system will function, they will have to conclude that Jewish law is not suitable for a real society. How can you have a society where you can’t send criminals to jail?
Obviously Jewish law can function in a real society. It has functioned in a real society. If you want to know how Jewish law has functioned in a real society, look at the responsa literature. There you see what Jewish societies did with criminals. They did what they needed to do. Some punishments were quite barbaric. Cutting off noses. Yitzhak Baer discusses this in his book A history of the Jews in Christian Spain. The Tzitz Eliezer has a great teshuva on how Jewish law functioned and how the courts were able to punish people. Simha Assaf has an entire book, Punishments after the close of the Talmud.
Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog naively believed that Israel’s criminal law could be run according to Jewish law.
If I were to go in to most shuls and to talk to people, even learned Torah scholars, and say that Jewish law was not practical and that if we had a state, we’d have to punish people in non-Torah ways, they’d say I’m a heretic. The amount of ignorance on this issue about how Jewish society has functioned and how leading rabbis have said it should function. I don’t know any area where there is such ignorance.
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The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has never been a nice place for Jewish employees (observant Jews are almost always denied employment there). All the Jewish attorneys on the DA’s staff are sharp but they rarely get promoted while bottom-of-the-barrel attorneys get promoted.
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Many of the kids in the yeshiva (in the Fairfax-La Brea area) knew about the boy who was regularly raping his younger sisters. Eventually adults found out. The boy is now in juvenile hall.
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The Jewish Press reports: Driving through Israel on a packed bus heading for Meron on Lag B’Omer. Along the way I see small fires lit everywhere, the radio talks about the holiday, the police are directing the public transportation system to bring a million Jews to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.
Many, however, do not know what this celebration is all about. Why do we put so much emphasis on one great rabbi? Why do we make fires all over the country and Jewish world? Why do we go up on mass to Meron, while Jerusalem is emptied?
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Rashbi, was a rebel. He rebelled against the Romans, and repudiated their culture. He saw nothing positive about the Roman physical and cultural occupation and was vocal and active against them. The Romans, ever vigilant, closed in on Rashbi and he was forced to flee. His flight was marked by a prolonged period of hiding, and while in a cave, Rashi and his son began writing down the Kabbalah, Jewish esoteric wisdom.
The Romans won. They put down the uprising led by Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon. They killed millions of Jews and exiled millions to Rome, selling them as slaves. They destroyed the Temple and sacked Jerusalem.
Judaism, now bereft of land and Temple, with millions dead and dispossessed, seemed to be on the brink of utter destruction.
But Rashbi and his colleagues put into place a system of surviving the exile. For the next 15 centuries, Judaism would become portable and just as Rashbi went into hiding, so did the Kabbalah, the internal life spirit of Judaism. For fifteen-hundred years did the Kabbala hide, passed secretly amongst the sages. This transmission kept the Kabbala alive through the persecution and the darkness of the exile.
But around 1550 CE a man came to the land of Israel who saw that the era of the exile had come to an end and that the spirit of the Kabbala could now be resurrected. The man was the Ari HaKadosh, Rabbi Yitchak Luria, and from the holy city of Tzfat, he called on the Jewish people to do two things, to return to the land of Israel and to study the Kabbala – the two things the Romans had taken away from the Jewish people.
The Ari began teaching the Zohar, the Kabbalistic legacy of Rashbi, and he instituted Lag B’Omer, the day that marks the passing of Rashbi as a day of celebration, celebrating the victory of Rabbi Shimon’s war against the Romans 1500 years later. The Holy Ari saw that victory was at hand — the Jews will return to the land and the true Torah will be studied once again.
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Spring is here and summer is on it’s way, are you and your closet prepared? The hottest trends are just around the corner and I’m here to tell you about a few trends that are already hot and are sure to last throughout the rest of the year. Have you checked out bodycon dresses yet? There is a huge selection of them amoung stores’ cheap summer dresses sections. If you want to look super hot this summer (and I don’t mean from the weather), you should get some of these dresses into your closet as soon as possible. They are all beautifully made and come in a great variety of colors and styles. Don’t worry if you think you think clothes that no one else does, dresses come in all different kinds and there will surely be some that fit your stylish needs. Make sure to go shopping with a friend! Everything is more fun when you can take turns trying on different clothes and seeing someone else’s individual style (or maybe just get matching dresses!). When it come to finding an awesome clothing outlet, there are tons of different places that you can look. If you don’t like the stores at malls around you, try online! If you’ve never shopped online before, you are surely missing out. Personally, I do almost all my clothes shopping online since I can not only usually find thing much cheaper than in stores, but also find unique clothes so that I never have to worry about matching with some random stranger. If you have a party coming up, make sure to try your best at shopping online since a unique dress is imperative to showing up at a party. No girl wants to be wearing the same dress when they go out unless they are best friends. There are tons of designer out there and I’m sure that you will find one with a style similar to yours. I dont really like any designer labels, I go more for a “genre” kind of look. Dressing alternative has kind of always been my thing, but maybe it’s yours too! In that case I suggest searching on a search engine for cool online shopping stores to sort through and find your next treasure!
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I was born as Israel’s War of Independence raged, just weeks after the state’s miraculous birth. As I lay in the hospital room with my mother, the windows shattered with the relentless attacks of those who sought, once again, to destroy us – this time not on their bloodstained soil but on our own sacred land. Once again, by God’s hand, we prevailed. The few against the many. The weak against the so-called strong.
My parents arrived in Palestine on the very last boat to sail from Romania. They were broken, demeaned and degraded but they were determined to find renewal in the holy land. For my family, galut and geulah are not chapters in a history book. They are real life experiences.
For us, Yom HaShoah and Yom Ha’Atzmaut were not mere dates on the calendar but days filled with piercing memories that called for reflection, remembrance, and, ultimately, celebration.
For many years, my family was not alone in fervently claiming these dates, these searing modern commemorations, as our own. Growing up in Forest Hills, New York, I remember the crowds of Jews – all Jews, of every age and background – that came together in synagogues and sanctuaries to remember, to pray, and to promise.
I remember the power those long-ago days held for those of us who gathered to commemorate and to celebrate them. But now? Many progressive Jewish communities continue to celebrate Israel, but in the majority of today’s major Orthodox communities it’s rare to find recognition – let alone active celebration – of these most sacred days.
How do we explain this Orthodox response, or lack of it, to the state of Israel? Can any of us deny the miracle Israel represents? For the first time in two thousand years the ingathering of exiles is realized as Jews have returned home to the land promised by God. The city of Jerusalem is rebuilt. The desert once again blooms.
All this on the heels of the greatest churban in Jewish history, the Holocaust.
The Jewish Press writes: Rabbi Hanan Herbst, a Chabad emissary and resident of Ma’ale Levona in the Binyamin region who returned with his wife and children Thursday morning from half a year of outreach work in India, was arrested at Ben-Gurion airport in Lod. After negotiations between the police and a Honenu attorney the emissary was released.
Honenu is a not-for-profit legal aid organization
According to Honenu’s report, Hanan Herbst and his family spent the past six months operating a Chabad House – teaching and also running a kosher restaurant for the benefit of Jews traveling in the area, the city of Dharamsala, India, a spiritual and mystical center which attracts a large number of travelers from all over the world, among them many Jews.
On Thursday morning, the family landed at the Ben-Gurion airport where an unpleasant surprise awaited them. Airport police informed Harbest that the National Unit for Serious and International Crime Investigations had declared him “wanted for an interrogation” which is why he was being detained. After a short discussion, Herbst learned that the investigation concerned the publication of articles supposedly calling for violence, in “HaKol HaYehudi” (“The Jewish Voice”) more than a year ago.
“HaKol HaYehudi” is a right wing publication focusing on providing an alternative to Israel’s mainstream media for news and opinion. The publication has been under widespread investigation for about a year, including raids on its offices, confiscation of equipment and arrests of staff members.
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
