{"id":42526,"date":"2012-03-28T10:05:56","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T18:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=42526"},"modified":"2012-03-29T00:46:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-29T08:46:30","slug":"yisroel-pensack-none-dare-call-it-conservadox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=42526","title":{"rendered":"Yisroel Pensack: None Dare Call It Conservadox"},"content":{"rendered":"
Practically around the corner from where I live\u00a0is a big old synagogue called Congregation Chevra Thilim that\u00a0describes itself<\/a> as “San Francisco’s oldest Orthodox congregation.”<\/div>\n

Chevra Thilim is currently undergoing a $1.6-million,\u00a0months-long renovation, upgrade and expansion<\/a> of\u00a0its\u00a0social hall building, which is immediately behind,\u00a0contiguous with and\u00a0connected to\u00a0the congregation’s sanctuary building. The two structures are virtually, if not literally, under one roof.\u00a0There is also a\u00a0separate\u00a0classroom building on the congregation’s property that is\u00a0presently\u00a0being used\u00a0as a non-Jewish school which\u00a0is located some distance\u00a0behind the\u00a0sanctuary-social hall structure and\u00a0not contiguous with it. That school building is not part of the upgrade project.<\/p>\n

Plans to renovate, partially redesign and\u00a0upgrade both Chevra Thilim’s\u00a0sanctuary and social hall were first announced<\/a> during\u00a0Yom Kippur services in September, 2009.\u00a0The work now underway\u00a0on the social hall is the first\u00a0stage of that project.<\/p>\n

Primarily for personal health reasons, I had stayed away from Chevra Thilim since last November when the partial demolition and construction work\u00a0began, but I did\u00a0drop in briefly on Purim night and I attended services there\u00a0the Shabbat\u00a0morning before last,\u00a0March 17.\u00a0\u00a0That day happened to be\u00a0the 23rd of Adar on the Jewish calendar, the day Moses and the Children of Israel first erected the Tabernacle, or portable Temple, \u00a0in the wildnerness after the exodus from Egypt.\u00a0The Torah reading for that morning\u00a0was portions Vayakhel and Pekudei. We learn from\u00a0portion Vayakhel\u00a0that in general, even work on the\u00a0Tabernacle was not to be done on Shabbos, despite the sanctity and importance of that structure.<\/p>\n

I was\u00a0surprised to see from the sidewalk as I\u00a0approached\u00a0Chevra Thilim that Shabbat morning that workers were\u00a0working on the\u00a0building.\u00a0From inside the sanctuary, workers in hard hats\u00a0could be seen\u00a0and heard through “frosted” windows walking alongside the shul to and from the\u00a0work area\u00a0located toward the rear of the building. That night after Shabbos, I sent this email to the rabbi’s email address with\u00a0“UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line:<\/div>\n
\n
Please remove me from Chevra Thilim’s email and regular mailing lists. In addition to other serious religious issues at Chevra Thilim, I saw today that, contrary to this morning’s Torah portion<\/em><\/span>, you are building your shul building’s social hall, etc. on Shabbos, despite your previous announcement that the shul building’s social hall, etc. would not be being built on Shabbos because that is prohibited by Jewish law.<\/div>\n

I do not wish to have any direct personal connection to or with any non-Orthodox shul as an institution, nor have I had any such connection for almost 30 years.\u00a0 I have absolutely no interest in Reform, Conservative or Conservadox “Judaism” or their “Temples”\u00a0— with or without a mechitzah<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, Chevra Thilim is 100 percent Conservadox, and so are you personally.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Jewish law\u00a0prohibits<\/a> Jews\u00a0from building on the Sabbath. The issue in this instance is whether gentiles working for a gentile contractor can work and build\u00a0on Jewish-owned property on the Sabbath, and,\u00a0in particular, whether gentiles can build a synagogue’s social hall on the Sabbath.<\/p>\n

In a 2008 article<\/a> titled “Building on Shabbos,” Gil Student<\/a>, a Yeshiva University-trained\u00a0Orthodox rabbi and blogger has written that<\/div>\n

A Jew is not allowed to ask a gentile to perform forbidden labor on Shabbos. If a Jew can’t do it, he can’t have a gentile do it for him. However, if the Jew pays the gentile for a project rather than by the day, then the gentile can choose whether he wants to do it on Shabbos. For example, if a dry-cleaner cleans your clothes on Shabbos, it doesn’t matter because it is his choice to do that work on Shabbos and you are only paying by the suit and not hourly or daily wages.<\/p>\n

An exception to this is property work. Because people know who owns property, a gentile cannot do work on a Jew’s property on Shabbos even if he is being paid by the project. People will not know about the payment arrangement and might assume the worst. Because of this potential for suspicion and confusion — chashad<\/em>, the law is very strict about gentiles working on Jewish property on Shabbos. This is all explained in Shulchan Arukh<\/em>, Orach Chaim<\/em> 242.<\/p>\n

When the prevalent practice in a community is to pay workers by the project, then there would seemingly be no concern of chashad<\/em> because everyone would assume that the workers on someone’s property are being paid by the project, which is permissible. The Mishnah Berurah<\/em> (242:7) quotes the Taz<\/em> who prohibits this, R. Akiva Eiger and the Peri Megadim<\/em> who permit it, and concludes that you should be strict regarding a house. In other words, you may not hire gentile workers to work on your house on Shabbos.<\/p>\n

However, R. Moshe Feinstein (Iggeros Moshe<\/em>, Orach Chaim<\/em> 3:35) argues strongly against the Mishnah Berurah<\/em> and claims that, in theory, this should be entirely permissible. He is not even concerned with guests from out of town who might not be faimilar with the community’s practice of paying workers by the project because today it is so common throughout the country, if not the world. However, for explicit public policy reasons he does not allow this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s important to note that\u00a0the Gil Student article and the opinions cited in it are addressing the general issue\u00a0of gentiles doing work on a Jew’s\u00a0property on the Sabbath but apparently are not specifically addressing the situation at Chevra Thilim where workers\u00a0are\u00a0building a synagogue social hall <\/em>on the Sabbath which\u00a0in my non-expert, layman’s opinion,\u00a0should\u00a0call for even greater halachic strictness than ordinary Jewish-owned property such as a home or business.\u00a0Apart from purely halachic considerations, das passt nisht<\/em> (it is unseemly); it simply doesn’t jibe\u00a0with the concept of Shabbos and is entirely inappropriate, in my view.<\/p>\n

Student in his article cites\u00a0exigent\u00a0circumstances which elicited a lenient ruling from the halachic authority known as the Chasam\u00a0Sofer\u00a0on the question of hiring gentiles to work on Jewish houses\u00a0in war-torn Pressburg in the mid-1800s in Europe. According to Student, “Houses had been destroyed during war and there was ample work for builders. However, when Jews would insist that the builders cease work on Shabbos, they would find another house to work on and not return to finish the Jewish house. This was causing a severe housing crisis in the Jewish community.”<\/p>\n

That\u00a0is not the situation Congregation Chevra Thilim is facing, however.\u00a0Nor is Chevra Thilim grappling with the problem of “hiring of a gentile contractor who uses gentile workers to build houses on Shabbos in Israel so as not to cede land into Arab hands,” another situation which Student also writes about.<\/p>\n

Although I am\u00a0speculating, it seems to me the more likely “exigent” circumstance\u00a0that Chevra Thilim and its longtime rabbi, Lubavitcher chassid\u00a0Shlomo Zarchi, may now be facing, if any, is that contrary to previously reported expectations<\/a> (see also here<\/a>),\u00a0the social hall\u00a0building may not be mostly completed by next September in time for Rosh Hashanah unless\u00a0work on the project is performed\u00a0on the Sabbath. Work was being done there last Shabbos, too, but I saw no workers there this past Sunday afternoon —\u00a0their<\/em> day of rest.<\/div>\n

When I was in Chevra Thilim on\u00a0March \u00a017, a congregant told me\u00a0work\u00a0was being done\u00a0there for approximately\u00a0the previous four Sabbaths. “It’s against Jewish law!” he said.\u00a0I was wondering why two other Lubavitcher rabbis who regularly worship in Chevra Thilim\u00a0on Sabbath mornings — Yosef Langer, the senior official Chabad-Lubavitch shaliach (representaive) in San Francisco, and Shimon Margolin, a Russian-speaking rabbi — had apparently not objected to the Sabbath work and put a stop to it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Shlomo Zarchi has some other unusual\u00a0halachic views and practices for a chassidic rabbi.\u00a0He routinely officiates in the cemetery at funerals, even though he is a kohen and the Torah generally\u00a0forbids<\/a> male kohanim from coming in contact with a corpse.\u00a0When I asked him about that years ago he\u00a0cited “meis mitzvah<\/a>” (a kohen, even the high priest, can bury a\u00a0human corpse if no one else can perform the burial).\u00a0When I replied\u00a0that meis mitzvah <\/em>was not applicable to a kohen in a city\u00a0like San Francisco where many\u00a0Jews, including several\u00a0non-kohen Orthodox rabbis are available to\u00a0bury the dead, he said, “There’s a\u00a0way to do it [the funeral\/burial] so you don’t become tamei (ritually impure).” My guess is he’s incorrectly applying a lesson he may have “learned” by figuratively tiptoeing through the tulips to visit the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, which is set up to accommodate visits from kohanim\u00a0(see footnote 9 here<\/a>). I further suspect there may have been an exigent circumstance of a financial, contractual, or employment-condition nature motivating the rabbi\u00a0to do funerals\/burials, for most\u00a0people do not have a yetzer hara (evil inclination,\u00a0desire or temptation) to officiate at burials.<\/p>\n

I’ve never\u00a0heard of any other supposedly Orthodox kohen rabbi who regularly officiates at\u00a0funerals and burials, although the Conservative rabbi of the Conservative\u00a0congregation my family belonged to in my youth was a kohen who did cemetery funerals and burials. He ultimately died — from lung cancer, I believe — at a relatively young age, leaving a widow and children, and not long after that one of his two young adult\u00a0sons was killed in a car crash.<\/p>\n

Chevra Thilim’s regular or\u00a0frequent lay prayer leader\u00a0apparently does not say the\u00a0three\u00a0politically incorrect blessings in the morning service: “…Who has not made me a gentile;\u00a0…Who has not made me a slave; …Who has not made me a woman.”\u00a0Rabbi Zarchi was\u00a0aware of this, but the man\u00a0continued to serve frequently or regularly as congregation’s\u00a0prayer leader nevertheless.<\/p>\n

Several\u00a0of Chevra Thilim’s\u00a0most influential lay leaders and supporters are from Conservative Congregation Beth Sholom<\/a>, and some apparently maintain connections there<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I reported\u00a0last November 13 that Chevra Thilim’s president\u00a0David\u00a0Kimel said the\u00a0money needed to fund the\u00a0work\u00a0on the social hall building had already been raised. Subsequently, however, I was surprised to find that the congregation was still appealing for funds for the social hall project.\u00a0When I then asked Rabbi\u00a0Zarchi about that apparent contradiction,\u00a0he told me it was not true that all the requisite money had already been raised for this phase of the project.<\/p>\n

A local Lubavitcher rabbi recently told me Rabbi Zarchi told him I could contact or\u00a0see him if I want his explanation of why work was being done on Chevra Thilim’s building on Shabbos, but in light of Gil Student’s article and\u00a0other factors there is no explanation\u00a0Rabbi Zarchi\u00a0could possibly give me that would alter my conclusion that Chevra Thilim is essentially a Conservadox outfit operating under the mantle of supposedly chassidic (a term which normally implies ultra-religious) rabbinic leadership. Zarchi, who was born into a Lubavitch family,\u00a0is the son-in-law of\u00a0Orange County, California, Chabad shaliach Rabbi David Eliezrie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Practically around the corner from where I live\u00a0is a big old synagogue called Congregation Chevra Thilim that\u00a0describes itself as “San Francisco’s oldest Orthodox congregation.” Chevra Thilim is currently undergoing a $1.6-million,\u00a0months-long renovation, upgrade and expansion of\u00a0its\u00a0social hall building, which is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165,40,201,4836,31,214,18,1029,209,590,18818],"tags":[29233,28209,29228,29242,6452,15430,28207,29227,29239,945,29241,29232,29238,29235,29236,29237,28208,17501],"class_list":["post-42526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chabad","category-conservative-judaism","category-conservatives","category-dovid-eliezrie","category-judaism","category-modern-orthodox","category-orthodoxy","category-san-francisco","category-synagogue","category-torah","category-yisroel-pensack","tag-politically-incorrect-blessings","tag-1-6-million","tag-building-on-shabbos","tag-burials","tag-chabad-lubavitch","tag-congregation-beth-sholom","tag-congregation-chevra-thilim","tag-conservadox","tag-david-kimel","tag-gil-student","tag-kohanim","tag-meis-mitzvah","tag-r-david-eliezrie","tag-r-shimon-margolin","tag-r-shlomo-zarchi","tag-r-yosef-langer","tag-social-hall","tag-yetzer-hara"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t