By PATRICIA COHEN
Dressed in a white straw hat, tan chinos and a blue shirt, Samuel Heilman, the co-author of a new book about Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, stood at the rebbe’s grave site among scores of pilgrims — a vanguard of the thousands expected to visit on Tuesday, in the Jewish calendar the 16th anniversary of his death — who arrived at a Queens cemetery a few days early to commune with their beloved leader.
“It is very holy,” Mr. Heilman said outside the open-air mausoleum, or ohel, that contains the graves of the rebbe and his father-in-law and predecessor, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. Hasidim believe that the spirit of a great sage remains after death, and many Lubavitchers think the rebbe is not only a sage, but also the messiah.
The biography’s look at Schneerson’s personal life is already causing a stir in the continuing discussion about his legacy.
Mr. Heilman pointed to a headstone facing the ohel that refers in Hebrew to the rebbe as “the Messiah of God.”
“It’s etched in stone,” he said. Rabbi Schneerson, the seventh and at this point the last leader of the Chabad Lubavitchers, remains as powerful a presence in death as in life.
Over the course of his more than 40 years as grand rebbe, he transformed this tiny Hasidic sect, with its headquarters in Brooklyn, into an influential global network of Jewish followers and emissaries and turned it into one of the most important religious movements within American Jewry. His life and philosophy are essential to understanding contemporary Jewish life.
Mr. Heilman, a sociologist at Queens College, and Menachem Friedman, a professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, offer a view into his world in their new biography, “The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson” (Princeton University Press). But they have provoked a growing chorus of complaints from people inside and outside Chabad with their characterization of the rebbe.
Controversy is perhaps inevitable. “Any attempt to humanize the rebbe is going to provoke this reaction.” said Elliot R. Wolfson, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University and the author of “Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision.”
What some early readers have found most disturbing is the authors’ description of the rebbe as a not especially pious young Hasid. They argue that Rabbi Schneerson’s initial dream was to be an engineer and that he mostly absented himself from Lubavitcher affairs before World War II, living in Berlin and Paris outside of a religious Hasidic community.
Only after he escaped from Europe and arrived in the United States in 1941, when he was a childless refugee with little English and few job prospects, and millions of his people had been massacred did he see he himself as having a different mission, the book contends.
Rabbi Schneerson was a man who “must be feeling desperate in his anxiety, loneliness, confusion and survivor guilt, whose prospects are unclear, looking for a way out, an answer from God,” the authors write.
Sitting outside the ohel visitor center as a large brown tour bus pulled up, Mr. Heilman, a modern Orthodox Jew, spoke of his “profound respect” for the Lubavitchers but noted that his responsibility as a scholar was not simply to celebrate the rebbe’s accomplishments. “They just can’t accept that he transformed himself, that he was not always going to be the rebbe,” he said.
Mr. Heilman and Mr. Friedman did not have access to Chabad’s private archives, though there is already a monumental amount of published material from and about the rebbe, with a new collection of 1,200 documents soon to be released. The scholars did speak with many movement members, some of whom are now critical of the biography.
Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a Lubavitch spokesman who is thanked in the book, labeled their speculations “psychobabble” and disdained their attempt to put “themselves in the rebbe’s head while ignoring his deeply expressive correspondence and his scholarly approach.”
Other critics take the authors to task for not relying more on published material. Steven I. Weiss, the head of news at the Jewish Channel, a cable television network, criticized the book for presenting what he called lurid details and ignoring a vast amount of “primary material which would frequently contradict its assertions.” He also chastised the authors for not noting outright that Mr. Friedman served as an expert witness against the rebbe during a lawsuit in the 1980s over ownership of the Chabad library. Mr. Heilman said, “We have no ax to grind.”
And Mr. Wolfson of N.Y.U. argued that bypassing the rebbe’s religious writings was a mistake. “There is no question that Menachem Mendel and his wife were spreading their wings” during their sojourn in Paris and Berlin, he said. But the diaries from those years show that he was also completely absorbed in Hasidic thought and Jewish learning. “The world he lived in was completely structured around his ideas,” he said.
Mr. Heilman maintained that Lubavitcher accounts can’t be trusted because they are hagiographies and said that he and Mr. Friedman did not examine the rebbe’s extensive writings on scripture because they were interested in his personal history, not his scholarship.
The American and Israeli professors are colleagues and friends who have independently studied the Lubavitchers for nearly 20 years. It was their wives, though, who suggested in 2007 that the two collaborate on a book while they were all vacationing together in Croatia.
In Mr. Heilman’s eyes, the key to the movement’s success was Rabbi Schneerson’s global vision. He figured out how to permit younger followers to engage with the modern world while remaining true to their Hasidic beliefs. By becoming shluchim, or missionaries, they could spread Lubavitch practices, thereby hastening the arrival of the messiah and redemption.
Rabbi Schneerson told his shluchim not to limit their efforts to the most religious but to every Jew. “They take everyone,” Mr. Heilman said.
More books and biographies are on the way, insuring that the Talmudic-like debate about Rabbi Schneerson’s life will continue.
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
New bios of Lubavitcher rebbe dig for the man behind the myth
By Sue Fishkoff · May 17, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- Sixteen years after the death of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a flurry of new publications indicates not only how enduring the interest is in his life and legacy, but how potent the minefield is surrounding his mythology.
Writing a biography of a larger-than-life figure is never easy. And when that figure is the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, the charismatic leader of the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the usual challenges of sifting through sources and evaluating mountains of research material are complicated by internal politics, religious sensibilities, personal loyalties and a lack of reliable first-person information.
Then there’s the Messiah business.
Until now, the only recountings of Schneerson's life have been hagiographies written by Chabad followers. Now there are two new biographies by academics outside Chabad circles, with a third in the works.
New York University Professor Elliot Wolfson came out last fall with “Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson,” an examination of Schneerson’s leadership within the context of Jewish esoteric tradition.
Next month will see the publication of “The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson,” by Samuel Heilman of City University of New York and Menachem Friedman of Bar-Ilan University, an examination of Schneerson’s early life and what the authors describe as his growing Messianic pretensions.
And Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of several best-selling books on Jewish life and thought, is in the early stages of a book focusing on the source of Schneerson’s charisma and the influence he continues to exert on people’s lives.
The Heilman-Friedman book is generating the most controversy. Written for a lay audience, it frames Schneerson’s mission, and that of the Chabad movement he led, as motivated by Messianism, here defined as the attempt to hasten the Messianic era through human actions. The Messianic mission was so much at the heart of the late rebbe’s leadership, the authors argue, that one cannot be a follower of the rebbe without full commitment to that goal.
The authors take a psycho-bio approach to Schneerson’s life, trying to get inside the man’s head to uncover his motivation -- always a tricky business.
They focus on Schneerson’s 14 years in Berlin and Paris -- the so-called “lost years” between his 1927 marriage to Chaya Mushka, the daughter of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, and 1941, when the couple escaped Nazi Europe and arrived in New York to rejoin the Lubavitch court.
Left to his own devices, they write, Schneerson would have preferred to “settle in Paris, become a French citizen, and live as a Jew of Hasidic background pursuing a career in engineering.”
While not explicitly claiming that Schneerson and his young wife fell away from their Chasidic roots, the authors return again and again to the short beard and secular dress Schneerson favored until his arrival in New York, along with other similar details, as evidence of an Orthodox but not haredi lifestyle.
“There is no question he was an observant Jew, but he lived in places where Chasidim didn’t live, and he did things they wouldn’t do,” Heilman told JTA.
It was, the authors write, a combination of survivor’s guilt -- Schneerson was the only member of his close family to escape the Holocaust -- and the improbability of his becoming an engineer in America that led him by the late 1940s to set his sights on a new career goal: succeeding his father-in-law to become the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe.
“Mendel’s whole world had collapsed,” they write. “Now he was a childless refugee in America nearly forty years old with little or no English facility, with no job prospects in what had been his chosen field … a man who must be feeling desperate in his anxiety, loneliness, confusion, and survivor guilt, whose prospects are unclear, looking for a way out, an answer from God.”
When Schneerson assumed leadership of Chabad, the authors continue, he was able to use this worldly experience to push a hitherto small Chasidic movement onto the world stage, launching the global outreach campaign that was to become its hallmark.
Eventually, they assert, Schneerson believed he was “the prophet of his generation,” the man destined to bring on the Messianic era. And because the rebbe was so alone, with no peers to contradict him, they ask rhetorically: Was he “getting lost in a culture of messianic delusion”?
This version of Schneerson’s life contradicts the official Lubavitch version of an unbroken journey toward the mantle of movement leadership and suggests a more nuanced life whose twists and turns might easily have led to a different outcome.
Even before its publication, the book has engendered considerable objections in Chabad circles. One female emissary said some of her colleagues "have been briefed by headquarters" to steer their people away from it.
Lubavitchers are ripping into it, disputing its details as well as its overall thesis, claiming it shows a lack of familiarity with readily available primary sources. According to these critics, the rebbe never trimmed his beard in Europe, he rolled it, and the rebbe attended synagogue regularly in Berlin -- videotaped interviews with Jews who saw him in shul prove it.
And the suggestion that Schneerson spent his European years divorced from Chabad activities?
Rubbish, they charge.
Rabbi Chaim Rapoport, a Lubavitch scholar and dean of Britain’s Machon Mayim Chayin, points to a wealth of correspondence that exists between Schneerson and his father showing the two engaging in deep Talmudic and kabbalistic discourse.
“All this is a far cry from" the claim by Heilman and Friedman "that the father was guiding a son who had but an elementary or, worse still, a cursory interest in a Chasidic lifestyle,” he says.
In response, Heilman said in an e-mail to JTA, "We do not deny and indeed suggest that Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson was a primary religious and Chasidic guide for his son. Indeed, we quote from the letters they exchanged. We particularly note the exchanges around the time of the wedding of the son to the daughter of the Sixth Rebbe."
On the question of the rebbe's beard, Heilman said readers will be able to judge for themselves by looking at photographs of Schneerson, reading comments from his father-in-law and thinking about when those comments were made.
In general, Heilman says, it should come as no surprise that some Chasidim "see things differently from the way we do. But we have presented our viewpoint based on the facts we have gathered."
"Our book documents what we have learned about the years in Europe," Heilman said. "We explain that most of the activities of those years were focused around the primary activity that brought the young Schneersons to Berlin and Paris. That activity was pursuit of education, career, and a life distant from Lubavitcher areas of settlement. When they wanted more of the Lubavitcher life, they either returned to the Sixth Rebbe's court or visited with him when he came to where they were.
"We never question the future Rebbe's knowledge of Chabad or even his interest in it. But as we document, that interest was not always the center of his concerns while he pursued his engineering studies."
Chabad itself, through Jewish Educational Media, is about to release more than 1,200 documents related to Schneerson’s life and work, in English and Hebrew, including his own diaries and important correspondence between him, his father and his father-in-law, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe.
One volume will come out in late June, followed later by others, both in print at online at chabad.org. Chabad sources say this information will “clear up many misunderstandings.”
Wolfson, a philosopher, presents a much different take on Schneerson’s Messianism than sociologists Heilman and Friedman.
The NYU professor portrays Schneerson as having a very deep and radical understanding of Jewish esoterica.
“In his prime, his teaching was very dense, very laden with kabbalistic terminology," Wolfson said. "I don’t know how many really understood him; most were simply mesmerized by his style of presentation.”
Schneerson’s teachings are rife with internal contradictions, Wolfson says, including the subverting of Judaism’s gender hierarchy and the boundaries between the permissible and the non-permissible. But most of this was destined for the realm of theory. Schneerson never intended for them to be actualized -- not in this world.
“What the implications would be sociologically, what a Jewish community would look like if the Torah were superseded by the ‘new Torah’ he spoke about, a kind of law beyond the law, I don’t think he thought that through,” Wolfson said.
Wolfson agrees with Heilman and Friedman that Schneerson’s Messianic vision “was there from the beginning.”
“I feel he is using the rhetoric of a personal Messiah to mark not so much a political change but a change in consciousness that … involves reaching a state of personal perfection that exceeds the need for the Torah as we have it,” he said. “I don’t think he understood the impossibility of his own vision. And he took no steps to remedy that. He took no steps to name a successor. The whole history of Chabad from the Alter Rebbe [18th-century founder of Chabad-Lubavitch] to [Schneerson] is a Messianic line that comes to a close with him.”
Neither book will satisfy Chabad’s strongest critics, nor its closest friends. It remains to be seen whether the deluge of new material about to be published by JEM will cast further light on the most elusive aspects of Schneerson’s life and leadership.
“Like many mythic figures, he was a combination of opposites,” Heilman muses. “But you can’t really be sure what was inside his head. Who was he really?”
This article was made possible by the support of readers like you. Donate to JTA now.
SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- Sixteen years after the death of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a flurry of new publications indicates not only how enduring the interest is in his life and legacy, but how potent the minefield is surrounding his mythology.
Writing a biography of a larger-than-life figure is never easy. And when that figure is the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, the charismatic leader of the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the usual challenges of sifting through sources and evaluating mountains of research material are complicated by internal politics, religious sensibilities, personal loyalties and a lack of reliable first-person information.
Then there’s the Messiah business.
Until now, the only recountings of Schneerson's life have been hagiographies written by Chabad followers. Now there are two new biographies by academics outside Chabad circles, with a third in the works.
New York University Professor Elliot Wolfson came out last fall with “Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson,” an examination of Schneerson’s leadership within the context of Jewish esoteric tradition.
Next month will see the publication of “The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson,” by Samuel Heilman of City University of New York and Menachem Friedman of Bar-Ilan University, an examination of Schneerson’s early life and what the authors describe as his growing Messianic pretensions.
And Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of several best-selling books on Jewish life and thought, is in the early stages of a book focusing on the source of Schneerson’s charisma and the influence he continues to exert on people’s lives.
The Heilman-Friedman book is generating the most controversy. Written for a lay audience, it frames Schneerson’s mission, and that of the Chabad movement he led, as motivated by Messianism, here defined as the attempt to hasten the Messianic era through human actions. The Messianic mission was so much at the heart of the late rebbe’s leadership, the authors argue, that one cannot be a follower of the rebbe without full commitment to that goal.
The authors take a psycho-bio approach to Schneerson’s life, trying to get inside the man’s head to uncover his motivation -- always a tricky business.
They focus on Schneerson’s 14 years in Berlin and Paris -- the so-called “lost years” between his 1927 marriage to Chaya Mushka, the daughter of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, and 1941, when the couple escaped Nazi Europe and arrived in New York to rejoin the Lubavitch court.
Left to his own devices, they write, Schneerson would have preferred to “settle in Paris, become a French citizen, and live as a Jew of Hasidic background pursuing a career in engineering.”
While not explicitly claiming that Schneerson and his young wife fell away from their Chasidic roots, the authors return again and again to the short beard and secular dress Schneerson favored until his arrival in New York, along with other similar details, as evidence of an Orthodox but not haredi lifestyle.
“There is no question he was an observant Jew, but he lived in places where Chasidim didn’t live, and he did things they wouldn’t do,” Heilman told JTA.
It was, the authors write, a combination of survivor’s guilt -- Schneerson was the only member of his close family to escape the Holocaust -- and the improbability of his becoming an engineer in America that led him by the late 1940s to set his sights on a new career goal: succeeding his father-in-law to become the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe.
“Mendel’s whole world had collapsed,” they write. “Now he was a childless refugee in America nearly forty years old with little or no English facility, with no job prospects in what had been his chosen field … a man who must be feeling desperate in his anxiety, loneliness, confusion, and survivor guilt, whose prospects are unclear, looking for a way out, an answer from God.”
When Schneerson assumed leadership of Chabad, the authors continue, he was able to use this worldly experience to push a hitherto small Chasidic movement onto the world stage, launching the global outreach campaign that was to become its hallmark.
Eventually, they assert, Schneerson believed he was “the prophet of his generation,” the man destined to bring on the Messianic era. And because the rebbe was so alone, with no peers to contradict him, they ask rhetorically: Was he “getting lost in a culture of messianic delusion”?
This version of Schneerson’s life contradicts the official Lubavitch version of an unbroken journey toward the mantle of movement leadership and suggests a more nuanced life whose twists and turns might easily have led to a different outcome.
Even before its publication, the book has engendered considerable objections in Chabad circles. One female emissary said some of her colleagues "have been briefed by headquarters" to steer their people away from it.
Lubavitchers are ripping into it, disputing its details as well as its overall thesis, claiming it shows a lack of familiarity with readily available primary sources. According to these critics, the rebbe never trimmed his beard in Europe, he rolled it, and the rebbe attended synagogue regularly in Berlin -- videotaped interviews with Jews who saw him in shul prove it.
And the suggestion that Schneerson spent his European years divorced from Chabad activities?
Rubbish, they charge.
Rabbi Chaim Rapoport, a Lubavitch scholar and dean of Britain’s Machon Mayim Chayin, points to a wealth of correspondence that exists between Schneerson and his father showing the two engaging in deep Talmudic and kabbalistic discourse.
“All this is a far cry from" the claim by Heilman and Friedman "that the father was guiding a son who had but an elementary or, worse still, a cursory interest in a Chasidic lifestyle,” he says.
In response, Heilman said in an e-mail to JTA, "We do not deny and indeed suggest that Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson was a primary religious and Chasidic guide for his son. Indeed, we quote from the letters they exchanged. We particularly note the exchanges around the time of the wedding of the son to the daughter of the Sixth Rebbe."
On the question of the rebbe's beard, Heilman said readers will be able to judge for themselves by looking at photographs of Schneerson, reading comments from his father-in-law and thinking about when those comments were made.
In general, Heilman says, it should come as no surprise that some Chasidim "see things differently from the way we do. But we have presented our viewpoint based on the facts we have gathered."
"Our book documents what we have learned about the years in Europe," Heilman said. "We explain that most of the activities of those years were focused around the primary activity that brought the young Schneersons to Berlin and Paris. That activity was pursuit of education, career, and a life distant from Lubavitcher areas of settlement. When they wanted more of the Lubavitcher life, they either returned to the Sixth Rebbe's court or visited with him when he came to where they were.
"We never question the future Rebbe's knowledge of Chabad or even his interest in it. But as we document, that interest was not always the center of his concerns while he pursued his engineering studies."
Chabad itself, through Jewish Educational Media, is about to release more than 1,200 documents related to Schneerson’s life and work, in English and Hebrew, including his own diaries and important correspondence between him, his father and his father-in-law, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe.
One volume will come out in late June, followed later by others, both in print at online at chabad.org. Chabad sources say this information will “clear up many misunderstandings.”
Wolfson, a philosopher, presents a much different take on Schneerson’s Messianism than sociologists Heilman and Friedman.
The NYU professor portrays Schneerson as having a very deep and radical understanding of Jewish esoterica.
“In his prime, his teaching was very dense, very laden with kabbalistic terminology," Wolfson said. "I don’t know how many really understood him; most were simply mesmerized by his style of presentation.”
Schneerson’s teachings are rife with internal contradictions, Wolfson says, including the subverting of Judaism’s gender hierarchy and the boundaries between the permissible and the non-permissible. But most of this was destined for the realm of theory. Schneerson never intended for them to be actualized -- not in this world.
“What the implications would be sociologically, what a Jewish community would look like if the Torah were superseded by the ‘new Torah’ he spoke about, a kind of law beyond the law, I don’t think he thought that through,” Wolfson said.
Wolfson agrees with Heilman and Friedman that Schneerson’s Messianic vision “was there from the beginning.”
“I feel he is using the rhetoric of a personal Messiah to mark not so much a political change but a change in consciousness that … involves reaching a state of personal perfection that exceeds the need for the Torah as we have it,” he said. “I don’t think he understood the impossibility of his own vision. And he took no steps to remedy that. He took no steps to name a successor. The whole history of Chabad from the Alter Rebbe [18th-century founder of Chabad-Lubavitch] to [Schneerson] is a Messianic line that comes to a close with him.”
Neither book will satisfy Chabad’s strongest critics, nor its closest friends. It remains to be seen whether the deluge of new material about to be published by JEM will cast further light on the most elusive aspects of Schneerson’s life and leadership.
“Like many mythic figures, he was a combination of opposites,” Heilman muses. “But you can’t really be sure what was inside his head. Who was he really?”
This article was made possible by the support of readers like you. Donate to JTA now.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Jerry Weintraub talks about faith, lessons learned
The Desert Sun Profile
Bruce Fessier • The Desert Sun • May 16, 2010
Jerry Weintraub doesn't consider himself religious.
But, after making millions of dollars as a concert
promoter for the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra,
Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan, and as a producer of
films such as “Diner,” “Oh, God!” and the “Karate
Kid” franchise, Weintraub began paying attention to
what he calls a higher power.
“I've had this turmoil about religion my whole life —
not just Judaism but Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism,”
he says from his walled, two-story estate in Beverly
Hills. “It seems like every war is fought over
religion. That's why I like to say I'm spiritual, not
religious. I believe in a higher power. I don't know
what that higher power is, but I believe in it.”
Weintraub, who also owns a modern marvel in the
Palm Desert foothills, recounts many of his show biz
stories in his new book, “When I Stop Talking, You'll
Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories From A Persuasive
Man.”
But he tells them from the perspective of a man who
has gained a new level of wisdom after 72 years on
this planet. He tries to pass along lessons he's
learned from his mistakes as well as his successes.
“One of those lessons is that, from the age of 20 to
40, I could have been a much better father,”
Weintraub says. “I didn't go to ballet recitals and
Little League games. I was so involved with what I
was doing and the life I was making for my family
and myself that I didn't realize how much I was
missing. I had a lot of trouble for not being there all
the time. On the other hand, I was able to give my
family a lot of things they never would have had. I'm
still learning about this.”
Weintraub said he has had many rather mystical
experiences in his life. Some might seem like
coincidences — like the day before his Desert Sun
interview when a Paramount Pictures executive told
him over lunch that he was seeking a script for a
team of older A-list actors for a project like “Ocean's
Eleven.”
Weintraub said his “Ocean's Eleven” screenwriters
had written just such a film, titled “The Belmont
Boys.” He told the studio head he'd contact them
ASAP. Then he called his secretary to tell her to find
the New York-based writers because a development
deal was on the line.
The next day, he said, he was having breakfast with
another studio head at the Four Seasons Hotel in
Beverly Hills when he looked around and, sitting in
the next booth, were those very “Ocean's Eleven”
writers.
“I cannot tell you how many hundreds and
hundreds of times this has happened to me,”
Weintraub said just hours after telling those writers
of their stroke of luck. “I don't know if it happens to
everybody, but it happens to me. That's not a talent.
That's a situation I'm put into.
“I'm not saying I don't work at it. I do. But somehow,
it's always there for me. It gets there. That's why I
believe there's something else.”
One of his most remarkable mystical experiences
prompted him to post a photograph over his bed in
Beverly Hills of the kind of religious figure he was
always conflicted about.
It isn't accompanied by pictures of his wife or kids
or celebrity friends such as Sinatra, George Clooney
Bruce Fessier • The Desert Sun • May 16, 2010
Jerry Weintraub doesn't consider himself religious.
But, after making millions of dollars as a concert
promoter for the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra,
Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan, and as a producer of
films such as “Diner,” “Oh, God!” and the “Karate
Kid” franchise, Weintraub began paying attention to
what he calls a higher power.
“I've had this turmoil about religion my whole life —
not just Judaism but Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism,”
he says from his walled, two-story estate in Beverly
Hills. “It seems like every war is fought over
religion. That's why I like to say I'm spiritual, not
religious. I believe in a higher power. I don't know
what that higher power is, but I believe in it.”
Weintraub, who also owns a modern marvel in the
Palm Desert foothills, recounts many of his show biz
stories in his new book, “When I Stop Talking, You'll
Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories From A Persuasive
Man.”
But he tells them from the perspective of a man who
has gained a new level of wisdom after 72 years on
this planet. He tries to pass along lessons he's
learned from his mistakes as well as his successes.
“One of those lessons is that, from the age of 20 to
40, I could have been a much better father,”
Weintraub says. “I didn't go to ballet recitals and
Little League games. I was so involved with what I
was doing and the life I was making for my family
and myself that I didn't realize how much I was
missing. I had a lot of trouble for not being there all
the time. On the other hand, I was able to give my
family a lot of things they never would have had. I'm
still learning about this.”
Weintraub said he has had many rather mystical
experiences in his life. Some might seem like
coincidences — like the day before his Desert Sun
interview when a Paramount Pictures executive told
him over lunch that he was seeking a script for a
team of older A-list actors for a project like “Ocean's
Eleven.”
Weintraub said his “Ocean's Eleven” screenwriters
had written just such a film, titled “The Belmont
Boys.” He told the studio head he'd contact them
ASAP. Then he called his secretary to tell her to find
the New York-based writers because a development
deal was on the line.
The next day, he said, he was having breakfast with
another studio head at the Four Seasons Hotel in
Beverly Hills when he looked around and, sitting in
the next booth, were those very “Ocean's Eleven”
writers.
“I cannot tell you how many hundreds and
hundreds of times this has happened to me,”
Weintraub said just hours after telling those writers
of their stroke of luck. “I don't know if it happens to
everybody, but it happens to me. That's not a talent.
That's a situation I'm put into.
“I'm not saying I don't work at it. I do. But somehow,
it's always there for me. It gets there. That's why I
believe there's something else.”
One of his most remarkable mystical experiences
prompted him to post a photograph over his bed in
Beverly Hills of the kind of religious figure he was
always conflicted about.
It isn't accompanied by pictures of his wife or kids
or celebrity friends such as Sinatra, George Clooney
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Jews, God, and Videotape
How media have molded modern Jewish religion
Jews, God, and Videotape
Religion and Media in America
By Jeffrey Shandler
New York University Press.
340 pp. $23
Reviewed by Glenn C. Altschuler
Videotaping bar and bat mitzvahs, many observant Jews maintain, violates Talmudic prohibitions against work on the Sabbath, distracts the worshiper from worship, and transforms tranquil and dignified ceremonies into spectacles.
And yet, as Jeffrey Shandler reminds us, more and more parents - and teenagers - insist on documenting their families' coming-of-age rituals.
In Jews, God, and Videotape, Shandler, a professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, provides a fresh and fascinating account of the impact of technology on the religious life of American Jews during the last one hundred years.
The "new media," he argues, have helped shape a popular Jewish religion, more concerned with consumerism, celebrity, and community than with theology or rabbinical authority. Reorganizing emotion and experience, this "religion in the making" is struggling to identify strategies through which "the People of the Book" can accommodate and/or confront how Jews can (or should) fit in and stand out.
In a richly detailed chapter on The Eternal Light, a long-running radio broadcast, created in the 1940s by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Shandler shows how the medium can affect the message.
Aimed primarily at a non-Jewish audience, the overarching goal of the show, which reached about five million Americans by the end of the decade, was to combat anti-Semitism by demonstrating (through historical dramas and literary adaptations) that Jewish "particularism" was incidental to its "fundamental universalism" and that Jews were anything but anti-American radicals or communist sympathizers.
Populated by actors whose voices were ethnically "unmarked," The Eternal Light, Shandler speculates, allowed Jews, sight unseen, to invite themselves into the homes of their non-Jewish neighbors, confident that they were subjects of "respectful attention."
More often than not, Shandler implies, modern media have marked - but have not made - changes in Jewish attitudes and behavior. The themes of The Eternal Light, for example, reflected the "powerful integrationist impact" of the post-World War II suburban migration of American Jewish culture. When, in the 1960s, concern about anti-Semitism gave way to fears of the "erosion" of a distinctly Jewish culture, the ecumenical, assimilationist Eternal Light dimmed.
Frequently, according to Shandler, modern media provide an arena for contests over appropriate conduct. E-cards, he points out, reflect a range of responses to the "December dilemma" of Jews. Some postulate parity between Christmas and Hanukkah, pairing Santa Claus with Tevye. Others, however, are more hostile to "interfaith" sentiments.
In 1989, Shandler writes, the American Jewish Committee, in conjunction with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, denounced greeting cards that combined the religious and cultural symbols of the two holidays as "an affront to the integrity of distinct faiths."
With respect to religion, Shandler writes, provocatively and persuasively, the notion of "separate but equal" lives on.
Recently, Shandler reveals, ultra-orthodox Jews have overcome an aversion to technology as a corrupting distraction - and begun to use television, video, and the Internet to spread their messianic vision. Under the leadership of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who almost never left his neighborhood in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, the Lubavitcher hasidim have raised millions of dollars through telethons, even as they make sure that the arms, legs, and breasts of the female celebrities who appear on the small screen are covered.
DVDs and Chabad.org allow Schneerson to communicate with his disciples long after his death.
Technology, Shandler concludes, hasn't changed everything. It can - and does - facilitate traditional communal rites, including synagogue worship, as well as more secular practices.
For many, it may be less helpful in forging new links than in renewing, in the virtual world, a sense of belonging to links already established in the "real" one.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
Jews, God, and Videotape
Religion and Media in America
By Jeffrey Shandler
New York University Press.
340 pp. $23
Reviewed by Glenn C. Altschuler
Videotaping bar and bat mitzvahs, many observant Jews maintain, violates Talmudic prohibitions against work on the Sabbath, distracts the worshiper from worship, and transforms tranquil and dignified ceremonies into spectacles.
And yet, as Jeffrey Shandler reminds us, more and more parents - and teenagers - insist on documenting their families' coming-of-age rituals.
In Jews, God, and Videotape, Shandler, a professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, provides a fresh and fascinating account of the impact of technology on the religious life of American Jews during the last one hundred years.
The "new media," he argues, have helped shape a popular Jewish religion, more concerned with consumerism, celebrity, and community than with theology or rabbinical authority. Reorganizing emotion and experience, this "religion in the making" is struggling to identify strategies through which "the People of the Book" can accommodate and/or confront how Jews can (or should) fit in and stand out.
In a richly detailed chapter on The Eternal Light, a long-running radio broadcast, created in the 1940s by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Shandler shows how the medium can affect the message.
Aimed primarily at a non-Jewish audience, the overarching goal of the show, which reached about five million Americans by the end of the decade, was to combat anti-Semitism by demonstrating (through historical dramas and literary adaptations) that Jewish "particularism" was incidental to its "fundamental universalism" and that Jews were anything but anti-American radicals or communist sympathizers.
Populated by actors whose voices were ethnically "unmarked," The Eternal Light, Shandler speculates, allowed Jews, sight unseen, to invite themselves into the homes of their non-Jewish neighbors, confident that they were subjects of "respectful attention."
More often than not, Shandler implies, modern media have marked - but have not made - changes in Jewish attitudes and behavior. The themes of The Eternal Light, for example, reflected the "powerful integrationist impact" of the post-World War II suburban migration of American Jewish culture. When, in the 1960s, concern about anti-Semitism gave way to fears of the "erosion" of a distinctly Jewish culture, the ecumenical, assimilationist Eternal Light dimmed.
Frequently, according to Shandler, modern media provide an arena for contests over appropriate conduct. E-cards, he points out, reflect a range of responses to the "December dilemma" of Jews. Some postulate parity between Christmas and Hanukkah, pairing Santa Claus with Tevye. Others, however, are more hostile to "interfaith" sentiments.
In 1989, Shandler writes, the American Jewish Committee, in conjunction with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, denounced greeting cards that combined the religious and cultural symbols of the two holidays as "an affront to the integrity of distinct faiths."
With respect to religion, Shandler writes, provocatively and persuasively, the notion of "separate but equal" lives on.
Recently, Shandler reveals, ultra-orthodox Jews have overcome an aversion to technology as a corrupting distraction - and begun to use television, video, and the Internet to spread their messianic vision. Under the leadership of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who almost never left his neighborhood in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, the Lubavitcher hasidim have raised millions of dollars through telethons, even as they make sure that the arms, legs, and breasts of the female celebrities who appear on the small screen are covered.
DVDs and Chabad.org allow Schneerson to communicate with his disciples long after his death.
Technology, Shandler concludes, hasn't changed everything. It can - and does - facilitate traditional communal rites, including synagogue worship, as well as more secular practices.
For many, it may be less helpful in forging new links than in renewing, in the virtual world, a sense of belonging to links already established in the "real" one.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Rabbi: Traveling Jewish RV 'an unbelievable miracle'
By MARK HARPER
Education writer
"And behold, the Lord . . . said, 'I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you, and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth; and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves.' "
-- Genesis 28:13-14
ORMOND BEACH -- During Volusia County pilgrimages to auto races, bike rallies and beach retreats, most everyone, it seems, checks out everyone else's wheels.
If they haven't noticed already, they'll soon start seeing something resembling a new city bus, bathed in bright blues, purple and orange, with slick slogans and images that could just as easily be advertising a law firm or pest-control service.
But telltale sayings -- such as "We Want Moshiach (the messiah) Now!" -- reveal this 34-foot-long Coachmen Mirada 310ds Class A motor home as something completely different. The RV is a Mitzvah Tank, an outreach to Jews.
This is the way Rabbi Pinchas Ezagui rolls.
The 43-year-old head of Esfmores Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Center of Greater Daytona Beach, an orthodox Ormond Beach synagogue, said the Mitzvah Tank is a way to reconnect with the flock. If Ezagui runs into a man, he might offer a chance to pray while wearing tefillin, an arm wrap. Or he might offer a woman a candle. In essence, it provides him a mobile living room to welcome people to the faith a couple of times a week.
"We give people the feeling they are a part of the community," he said. "Regardless of whether they live in Edgewater or Palm Coast or DeLand or DeBary or Deltona, they are at home. . . . There's no such thing as a lost Jew. You're always part of the family."
Mitzvah in Hebrew essentially means good deeds in God's name.
Ezagui, who arrived in Daytona Beach 17 years ago, had long talked of his camper calling. Last year, one of his synagogue members, Yehuda Morali, an Israeli immigrant, brought him to an RV dealership and instructed Ezagui to pick something out. Something new. Something big.
Morali and his business partner, Nissim Shoaff, shared in the expenses, Ezagui said.
Ezagui is only aware of one other Chabad in Florida with a Mitzvah Tank. And he doubts there's another in the country that can compare to his -- which includes a $15,000 graphics job.
"To have this luxury, to have a traveling Jewish Center, to us this is an unbelievable miracle," he said.
It's understandable that Ezagui -- who built the Ormond Chabad from scratch -- might wish to kvell a bit about the Mitzvah Tank, but to author and journalist Lisa Alcalay Klug, a trend has emerged in this age of multicultural America.
She calls it Hebesterism. Other examples: In San Francisco, the Chabad temple has a Mitzvah Cable Car and the rabbi rides a Mitzvah Bike. People are wearing T-shirts celebrating their Jewishness with phrases such as "Grateful Yid" and "Drink He'Brew: The Chosen Beer." And Hollywood is producing films like "Don't Mess With the Zohan," in which an Israeli counterterrorism hero fakes his own death to pursue a career as a New York hairstylist.
In her recent book "Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe," Klug -- the daughter of a Holocaust survivor -- describes a wider expression of Jewish identity, an embrace of kitsch and what she terms a "reverent irreverence."
"It's a freer way of celebrating (Judaism), based on a love of Jewish community and culture," she said. "Jewish people around the world are enjoying that in a way that is unprecedented."
Even in the land of NASCAR, Bike Week and Spring Break.
Education writer
"And behold, the Lord . . . said, 'I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you, and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth; and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves.' "
-- Genesis 28:13-14
ORMOND BEACH -- During Volusia County pilgrimages to auto races, bike rallies and beach retreats, most everyone, it seems, checks out everyone else's wheels.
If they haven't noticed already, they'll soon start seeing something resembling a new city bus, bathed in bright blues, purple and orange, with slick slogans and images that could just as easily be advertising a law firm or pest-control service.
But telltale sayings -- such as "We Want Moshiach (the messiah) Now!" -- reveal this 34-foot-long Coachmen Mirada 310ds Class A motor home as something completely different. The RV is a Mitzvah Tank, an outreach to Jews.
This is the way Rabbi Pinchas Ezagui rolls.
The 43-year-old head of Esfmores Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Center of Greater Daytona Beach, an orthodox Ormond Beach synagogue, said the Mitzvah Tank is a way to reconnect with the flock. If Ezagui runs into a man, he might offer a chance to pray while wearing tefillin, an arm wrap. Or he might offer a woman a candle. In essence, it provides him a mobile living room to welcome people to the faith a couple of times a week.
"We give people the feeling they are a part of the community," he said. "Regardless of whether they live in Edgewater or Palm Coast or DeLand or DeBary or Deltona, they are at home. . . . There's no such thing as a lost Jew. You're always part of the family."
Mitzvah in Hebrew essentially means good deeds in God's name.
Ezagui, who arrived in Daytona Beach 17 years ago, had long talked of his camper calling. Last year, one of his synagogue members, Yehuda Morali, an Israeli immigrant, brought him to an RV dealership and instructed Ezagui to pick something out. Something new. Something big.
Morali and his business partner, Nissim Shoaff, shared in the expenses, Ezagui said.
Ezagui is only aware of one other Chabad in Florida with a Mitzvah Tank. And he doubts there's another in the country that can compare to his -- which includes a $15,000 graphics job.
"To have this luxury, to have a traveling Jewish Center, to us this is an unbelievable miracle," he said.
It's understandable that Ezagui -- who built the Ormond Chabad from scratch -- might wish to kvell a bit about the Mitzvah Tank, but to author and journalist Lisa Alcalay Klug, a trend has emerged in this age of multicultural America.
She calls it Hebesterism. Other examples: In San Francisco, the Chabad temple has a Mitzvah Cable Car and the rabbi rides a Mitzvah Bike. People are wearing T-shirts celebrating their Jewishness with phrases such as "Grateful Yid" and "Drink He'Brew: The Chosen Beer." And Hollywood is producing films like "Don't Mess With the Zohan," in which an Israeli counterterrorism hero fakes his own death to pursue a career as a New York hairstylist.
In her recent book "Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe," Klug -- the daughter of a Holocaust survivor -- describes a wider expression of Jewish identity, an embrace of kitsch and what she terms a "reverent irreverence."
"It's a freer way of celebrating (Judaism), based on a love of Jewish community and culture," she said. "Jewish people around the world are enjoying that in a way that is unprecedented."
Even in the land of NASCAR, Bike Week and Spring Break.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
A conversation with Alison Buckholtz
The wife of a U.S. Navy flyer has written a memoir about raising two young children in a Jewish home in a remote corner of Washington state while her husband is off fighting a war
Alison Buckholtz never imagined growing up that she might marry into the military; in fact, raised as the daughter of two middle-class Jewish professionals in suburban Washington, D.C., in the decades after Vietnam, she didn't even know anyone who'd been in the service. But shortly before 9/11 she met Scott, an active-duty U.S. Navy pilot. The couple married at the end of 2001, and were determined to lead a Jewish life together despite the obstacles they expected to face in the military, a commitment that only became stronger when they had children. By late 2006, Scott had been posted to Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, in the northwest corner of Washington state, and they moved with Ethan and Esther, who are today 6 and 4, to nearby Anacortes, a town of 16,000.
Buckholtz, 39, suffered something of a culture shock, not just from being in a tiny town 75 miles from the nearest synagogue, but also from being left alone with her children when Scott, who flies an EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare aircraft, deployed to an aircraft carrier based in the Persian Gulf for seven months. This experience led her to discover the mutual support network that military spouses create to get through what are often very difficult periods.
As a freelance journalist and someone who'd been writing since childhood, it seemed natural to her to write about her experiences. After an essay she wrote about the Flat Daddy program, in which children of deployed servicemen are given a meter-high cutout photo of dad in uniform to help them through his absence, appeared in The New York Times, several literary agents suggested she write a book about her experiences as a military spouse. The result is "Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War" (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 289 pages, $23.95).
In researching her memoir, Buckholtz read a number of books written over the centuries by or about U.S. military wives, going back to Martha Washington. These included a very practical primer from 1942 called "The Navy Wife" and an 1885 memoir by Elizabeth Bacon Custer, written nine years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Alison Buckholtz spoke with Haaretz by phone from Anacortes, Washington.
???
? At what point did you decide to write a book about your experiences?
? I grew up in a non-military family. I really had no concept of what the military was like, or of military family life. It was like a new culture with its own lingo, traditions, and accepted social mores. I felt like an outsider. But year by year, as I became more assimilated into this new world, I found that my civilian friends started asking me what it was like. Over and over again, they said, "How do you do it?" I knew they were also asking, "Why do you do it," because the sacrifices that military families make can seem incomprehensible to others.
I came to understand that somewhere along the way, I had become an insider. I started writing essays about life as a military family to introduce this world to others. I saw my role as a translator between two Americas. When the Flat Daddy essay ran in the Modern Love section of The New York Times, everything changed for me as a writer. Imagine that the day after you've published something, agents are leaving messages on your voice mail, urging you to write a book. For a writer, it was a dream come true. Over the next couple of months I chose an agent, wrote a proposal and sold the book.
? You write that Scott is a very private person. Did he have difficulty agreeing to the book idea?
? We talked about it all along, and he was encouraging and supportive from the beginning. We both realize that we are an unusual military family, though we suspect that our perspectives on the difficulties we encountered during deployment are shared by many, many others. Countless other parents and kids have experienced the same stress of separation after 9/11. Since then, especially among Army, Marine and National Guard families, deployment requirements increased significantly when compared to historical norms of the past few decades. So we know we are not the only ones to question the effect of this lifestyle on family relationships. I certainly know that I am not the only wife who mourns her husband's long absences. I hope that military wives reading this account of our experience feel a little less alone.
Even more than that, though, he and I both hope that we can help bridge a gap in understanding between civilians and military personnel in America. Since the abolition of the draft in the U.S., in 1973, the gulf between two groups - civilians and military - has deepened dramatically. It's hard for one side to reach out to the other. I'm now the "ultimate insider," and it made me want to speak directly to all of those people who don't know anyone in the military. I used to be one of those people, so I understand some faulty assumptions that are often made.
? And what about being a Jew in the military?
? When Scott worked at the Pentagon and we lived in suburban Maryland, having a Jewish life wasn't an issue; we were within walking distance of three shuls and took our children to Jewish activities frequently. Giving them a Jewish education was easy. Here, though, there are no synagogue preschools, no "Tot Shabbat" services. When I was a kid, my entire social and religious life centered around Jewish institutions: I went to Friday night services with my dad, I learned about the Holocaust in the JCC courtyard during Jewish book month, I attended Jewish camp. My kids have the opposite experience. They depend on me, and me alone, to teach them. That was terrifying initially.
After the panic subsided, I remembered that I did have the grounding I needed, both from growing up Jewish and from my time in Israel. [Buckholtz was a Dorot fellow in Jerusalem in 1997-'98, and spent part of that year studying at the Pardes Institute.] In addition, the leadership skills I gained on the Dorot fellowship gave me confidence to take on the role as base lay leader, with my husband. After all, when we first got to this base and I asked someone in the chaplain's office where the nearest synagogue was, they referred me to a center run by Messianic Jews. I knew I could do better than that for the other Jews stationed here.
? What does being a lay leader in a military community entail?
? It depends on what you want, and what the community wants. In our case, we have a core group of about 10-12 families, both military and retired military, as well as civilians who live in the community. We have no reason to be exclusive! This community didn't want services or a havurah model, which is what I had in mind early on. They wanted more of a social outlet, to get together for Jewish events and holidays, and to teach their children about Jewish traditions. So that's what we do. And it's worked really well.
Being a lay leader has facilitated some unexpected alliances. I work with a Mormon chaplain and with a Protestant chaplain on the base. They've been wonderful, and have opened up the chapel to us on numerous occasions. The other unexpected alliance has been with Chabad. They have continually reached out to us, which of course is their job. Our first Purim here, the Chabad rabbi from Everett, which is one and a half hours away, came up with his family to lead a megillah reading and bring hamantaschen. The Aleph Institute, a Lubavitch organization whose mission is to reach out to Jews in isolated communities, has also provided for our needs throughout our time here. They send holiday packages and a weekly dvar Torah to Jews in the military.
Though we have not become more religiously observant during our time here, and don't intend to change our level of practice, we have grown to think of Chabad as our extended community. After the Mumbai tragedy [the terror attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, among other sites, in November], when as Jews we felt so devastated, we really wanted to be with people who understood. The Chabad rabbi in Bellingham knew the couple who'd been killed in Mumbai, and he and his wife put together a service and dinner to celebrate their lives. Bellingham is 60 miles away, the night was cold and rainy, and it went way past our kids' bedtimes, but we had to be there. At a moment we really needed a spiritual outlet, they provided that for us, no questions asked.
? You describe a culturally and intellectually rich upbringing, and a strongly identifying Jewish family. With all the respect and friendship you feel for your peers in Anacortes, don't you get lonely there?
? Everything you say is true. Being a military spouse is about rootlessness, and I value rootedness: geographical, cultural, social. I've been very lonely at times. But I say to myself: Our situation with Scott's job - the deployments, the relocations, and the other challenges - is temporary in the grand scheme of things. But he and I and our family are forever. Looking at it that way helps, when I find myself wishing for something different. Beyond that, though, learning about the military community and the way that military wives work together to overcome difficulties has taught me a lot about America. I say in the book that our military experience has been an ongoing civics lesson for me, an intense education in what it means to be an American citizen. That's been important to my intellectual growth, too. The questioning and challenging has strengthened my loyalty to this country. I've had to examine beliefs and assumptions I took for granted in the past. I've done it out loud, which may be different from my colleagues, but it's my way of staying engaged.
? So what comes next? Do you know what Scott's next assignment will be?
? Scott returned last June from his seven-month deployment on the carrier. His tour here is over in late May, as is his assignment as his squadron's commanding officer. Unfortunately, he has been tapped for a year-long assignment in Baghdad. So we'll move back to Potomac, Maryland, together, so the kids and I can be close to family, but he will leave us after a few weeks. He'll be gone for a total of 14 months. He has several months of training at bases in the U.S. and the Middle East before assuming his job in the Green Zone.
David B. Green
Alison Buckholtz never imagined growing up that she might marry into the military; in fact, raised as the daughter of two middle-class Jewish professionals in suburban Washington, D.C., in the decades after Vietnam, she didn't even know anyone who'd been in the service. But shortly before 9/11 she met Scott, an active-duty U.S. Navy pilot. The couple married at the end of 2001, and were determined to lead a Jewish life together despite the obstacles they expected to face in the military, a commitment that only became stronger when they had children. By late 2006, Scott had been posted to Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, in the northwest corner of Washington state, and they moved with Ethan and Esther, who are today 6 and 4, to nearby Anacortes, a town of 16,000.
Buckholtz, 39, suffered something of a culture shock, not just from being in a tiny town 75 miles from the nearest synagogue, but also from being left alone with her children when Scott, who flies an EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare aircraft, deployed to an aircraft carrier based in the Persian Gulf for seven months. This experience led her to discover the mutual support network that military spouses create to get through what are often very difficult periods.
As a freelance journalist and someone who'd been writing since childhood, it seemed natural to her to write about her experiences. After an essay she wrote about the Flat Daddy program, in which children of deployed servicemen are given a meter-high cutout photo of dad in uniform to help them through his absence, appeared in The New York Times, several literary agents suggested she write a book about her experiences as a military spouse. The result is "Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War" (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 289 pages, $23.95).
In researching her memoir, Buckholtz read a number of books written over the centuries by or about U.S. military wives, going back to Martha Washington. These included a very practical primer from 1942 called "The Navy Wife" and an 1885 memoir by Elizabeth Bacon Custer, written nine years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Alison Buckholtz spoke with Haaretz by phone from Anacortes, Washington.
???
? At what point did you decide to write a book about your experiences?
? I grew up in a non-military family. I really had no concept of what the military was like, or of military family life. It was like a new culture with its own lingo, traditions, and accepted social mores. I felt like an outsider. But year by year, as I became more assimilated into this new world, I found that my civilian friends started asking me what it was like. Over and over again, they said, "How do you do it?" I knew they were also asking, "Why do you do it," because the sacrifices that military families make can seem incomprehensible to others.
I came to understand that somewhere along the way, I had become an insider. I started writing essays about life as a military family to introduce this world to others. I saw my role as a translator between two Americas. When the Flat Daddy essay ran in the Modern Love section of The New York Times, everything changed for me as a writer. Imagine that the day after you've published something, agents are leaving messages on your voice mail, urging you to write a book. For a writer, it was a dream come true. Over the next couple of months I chose an agent, wrote a proposal and sold the book.
? You write that Scott is a very private person. Did he have difficulty agreeing to the book idea?
? We talked about it all along, and he was encouraging and supportive from the beginning. We both realize that we are an unusual military family, though we suspect that our perspectives on the difficulties we encountered during deployment are shared by many, many others. Countless other parents and kids have experienced the same stress of separation after 9/11. Since then, especially among Army, Marine and National Guard families, deployment requirements increased significantly when compared to historical norms of the past few decades. So we know we are not the only ones to question the effect of this lifestyle on family relationships. I certainly know that I am not the only wife who mourns her husband's long absences. I hope that military wives reading this account of our experience feel a little less alone.
Even more than that, though, he and I both hope that we can help bridge a gap in understanding between civilians and military personnel in America. Since the abolition of the draft in the U.S., in 1973, the gulf between two groups - civilians and military - has deepened dramatically. It's hard for one side to reach out to the other. I'm now the "ultimate insider," and it made me want to speak directly to all of those people who don't know anyone in the military. I used to be one of those people, so I understand some faulty assumptions that are often made.
? And what about being a Jew in the military?
? When Scott worked at the Pentagon and we lived in suburban Maryland, having a Jewish life wasn't an issue; we were within walking distance of three shuls and took our children to Jewish activities frequently. Giving them a Jewish education was easy. Here, though, there are no synagogue preschools, no "Tot Shabbat" services. When I was a kid, my entire social and religious life centered around Jewish institutions: I went to Friday night services with my dad, I learned about the Holocaust in the JCC courtyard during Jewish book month, I attended Jewish camp. My kids have the opposite experience. They depend on me, and me alone, to teach them. That was terrifying initially.
After the panic subsided, I remembered that I did have the grounding I needed, both from growing up Jewish and from my time in Israel. [Buckholtz was a Dorot fellow in Jerusalem in 1997-'98, and spent part of that year studying at the Pardes Institute.] In addition, the leadership skills I gained on the Dorot fellowship gave me confidence to take on the role as base lay leader, with my husband. After all, when we first got to this base and I asked someone in the chaplain's office where the nearest synagogue was, they referred me to a center run by Messianic Jews. I knew I could do better than that for the other Jews stationed here.
? What does being a lay leader in a military community entail?
? It depends on what you want, and what the community wants. In our case, we have a core group of about 10-12 families, both military and retired military, as well as civilians who live in the community. We have no reason to be exclusive! This community didn't want services or a havurah model, which is what I had in mind early on. They wanted more of a social outlet, to get together for Jewish events and holidays, and to teach their children about Jewish traditions. So that's what we do. And it's worked really well.
Being a lay leader has facilitated some unexpected alliances. I work with a Mormon chaplain and with a Protestant chaplain on the base. They've been wonderful, and have opened up the chapel to us on numerous occasions. The other unexpected alliance has been with Chabad. They have continually reached out to us, which of course is their job. Our first Purim here, the Chabad rabbi from Everett, which is one and a half hours away, came up with his family to lead a megillah reading and bring hamantaschen. The Aleph Institute, a Lubavitch organization whose mission is to reach out to Jews in isolated communities, has also provided for our needs throughout our time here. They send holiday packages and a weekly dvar Torah to Jews in the military.
Though we have not become more religiously observant during our time here, and don't intend to change our level of practice, we have grown to think of Chabad as our extended community. After the Mumbai tragedy [the terror attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, among other sites, in November], when as Jews we felt so devastated, we really wanted to be with people who understood. The Chabad rabbi in Bellingham knew the couple who'd been killed in Mumbai, and he and his wife put together a service and dinner to celebrate their lives. Bellingham is 60 miles away, the night was cold and rainy, and it went way past our kids' bedtimes, but we had to be there. At a moment we really needed a spiritual outlet, they provided that for us, no questions asked.
? You describe a culturally and intellectually rich upbringing, and a strongly identifying Jewish family. With all the respect and friendship you feel for your peers in Anacortes, don't you get lonely there?
? Everything you say is true. Being a military spouse is about rootlessness, and I value rootedness: geographical, cultural, social. I've been very lonely at times. But I say to myself: Our situation with Scott's job - the deployments, the relocations, and the other challenges - is temporary in the grand scheme of things. But he and I and our family are forever. Looking at it that way helps, when I find myself wishing for something different. Beyond that, though, learning about the military community and the way that military wives work together to overcome difficulties has taught me a lot about America. I say in the book that our military experience has been an ongoing civics lesson for me, an intense education in what it means to be an American citizen. That's been important to my intellectual growth, too. The questioning and challenging has strengthened my loyalty to this country. I've had to examine beliefs and assumptions I took for granted in the past. I've done it out loud, which may be different from my colleagues, but it's my way of staying engaged.
? So what comes next? Do you know what Scott's next assignment will be?
? Scott returned last June from his seven-month deployment on the carrier. His tour here is over in late May, as is his assignment as his squadron's commanding officer. Unfortunately, he has been tapped for a year-long assignment in Baghdad. So we'll move back to Potomac, Maryland, together, so the kids and I can be close to family, but he will leave us after a few weeks. He'll be gone for a total of 14 months. He has several months of training at bases in the U.S. and the Middle East before assuming his job in the Green Zone.
David B. Green
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Slain Mumbai rabbi was reading terror manual
A RABBI murdered in Mumbai by Islamic militants who stormed his home was reading a manual on what to do in case of a terrorist attack, the friend who identified his body says.
A Hebrew book entitled How to Protect Yourself if Terrorists Come to Your House was found on Gavriel Holtzberg's bedside table after the siege of the Jewish prayer centre he ran, Dov Goldberg said.
"He wasn't a man interested in martial arts or fighting," Mr Goldberg, 28, said of his friend and fellow rabbi.
"If he had this book it was for one reason - he was aware of the danger," he said.
"It wasn't among the many books in his library, it was on his night table, he was reading it with his wife."
Mr Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were among six Jews killed when heavily-armed Islamist extremists stormed into the Nariman House complex in the Colaba Market area where they lived and worked.
Mr Goldberg, who had already been appointed as the next leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox prayer centre run by Mr Holtzberg, was the first to enter the building after the 48-hour seige ended.
A close friend of Mr Holtzberg - they shared accommodation while at rabbinical college in Israel - Mr Goldberg said his friend, who he refers to as "Gavy", asked him earlier this year to join him in India.
He said Mr Holtzberg's wife was five-and-a-half months pregnant and the couple had planned to return to the US for the birth of their third child.
Nariman House was one of three locations where the militants linked to Pakistan-based extremist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba took hostages during an assault that lasted a total of 60 hours.
Officials put the death toll at 172, including nine of the ten gunmen, with around 300 injured.
A Hebrew book entitled How to Protect Yourself if Terrorists Come to Your House was found on Gavriel Holtzberg's bedside table after the siege of the Jewish prayer centre he ran, Dov Goldberg said.
"He wasn't a man interested in martial arts or fighting," Mr Goldberg, 28, said of his friend and fellow rabbi.
"If he had this book it was for one reason - he was aware of the danger," he said.
"It wasn't among the many books in his library, it was on his night table, he was reading it with his wife."
Mr Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were among six Jews killed when heavily-armed Islamist extremists stormed into the Nariman House complex in the Colaba Market area where they lived and worked.
Mr Goldberg, who had already been appointed as the next leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox prayer centre run by Mr Holtzberg, was the first to enter the building after the 48-hour seige ended.
A close friend of Mr Holtzberg - they shared accommodation while at rabbinical college in Israel - Mr Goldberg said his friend, who he refers to as "Gavy", asked him earlier this year to join him in India.
He said Mr Holtzberg's wife was five-and-a-half months pregnant and the couple had planned to return to the US for the birth of their third child.
Nariman House was one of three locations where the militants linked to Pakistan-based extremist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba took hostages during an assault that lasted a total of 60 hours.
Officials put the death toll at 172, including nine of the ten gunmen, with around 300 injured.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Blog post: What a Chabad principal can acheive
The Last Amazon blogs:
(click through to his blog for live links)
Long time readers of this blog know that I am in midst of writing a book. It should have been done by now but my hard drive fried about a year and a bit ago and the book went up in a puff of cyber smoke. Of course, I hadn’t done anything practical like back up my hard drive or print out hard copies (of even my notes) - so I have had to start from scratch. The pace has been more ebb then flows as I keeping getting bogged down in researching background material for my story. The background material has lead to some truly fascinating reading and I have had a tendency to get a mite carried away with one idea after another.
What many of you don’t know is that my story centers around one of Mal’akh Ha’maret or Angels of Death. I got the idea for the story in a bookstore after a chance encounter with an obviously mentally ill homeless woman who was presumably begging outside the bookstore the children and I were entering.
I say presumably because she didn’t ask me for money although she did ask everyone before me. What she did ask me was whether I knew I was walking with Angels. She appeared to be quite taken back by the idea. At the time, I answered quite smugly that I did know - as I had one of my children on either side of me. Thinking about her comment in the bookstore brought back a slight remembrance of a Talmudic story my grandfather once told me. The memory of it is somewhat elusive even now. It had something to do with two of Mal’akh being sent to follow you home after davening in a shul. One was to strength your good intentions while the other sought to encourage your bad intentions. I only remember it because I remember thinking it hardly seemed fair or just. Anyway, the woman’s comment triggered this vague memory which got me thinking about guardian angels and wondering if they ever get distracted. Don’t ask how logically walking with angels lead to a distracted guardian angel which leads to an angel of death but just know one idea inevitably flows into another in my mind.
My grandfather had an early association with Breslovers, and then with Chabad at the end of his life. Until recently, I never really did much reading concerning the Chassidic movement in general, but researching this book has lead me down some strange paths. Currently, I am in the midst of reading Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson’s discourses on Heaven on Earth and Forces of Creation. It is a little hard to avoid learning anything about the Chabad movement without learning a great deal about the last Lubavitch Rebbe as well. Now I am not ready to name him the Moshiach but I am beginning to think of him as one of the truly inspired of our time.
Normally, a Chassidic Jew would live very separate and apart from the secular community surrounding his religious community - as in - not even in death shall the twain shall meet. Rabbi Schneerson changed all that with his Chabad movement or his own particular brand of Jewish outreach. Rebbe Schneerson sent out specially trained rabbis to act as Shulichim (his personal embassaries) with the goal of establishing Chabad Houses literally all over the world with the express purpose of bringing back secular Jews to a more religious life one mitzvah at a time.
In the Lubavitch tradition a ‘tish’ (or table meal) with a Rebbe or Chabad Shaliach is often referred to a farbrengen. I found this video courtesy of a commenter at Joe Settler’s blog and decided maybe the next time Toronto School Board Trustees need to go recruiting for principals for secondary schools in Toronto - they start by wangling an invitation for the next Chabad farbrengen.
(click through to his blog for live links)
Long time readers of this blog know that I am in midst of writing a book. It should have been done by now but my hard drive fried about a year and a bit ago and the book went up in a puff of cyber smoke. Of course, I hadn’t done anything practical like back up my hard drive or print out hard copies (of even my notes) - so I have had to start from scratch. The pace has been more ebb then flows as I keeping getting bogged down in researching background material for my story. The background material has lead to some truly fascinating reading and I have had a tendency to get a mite carried away with one idea after another.
What many of you don’t know is that my story centers around one of Mal’akh Ha’maret or Angels of Death. I got the idea for the story in a bookstore after a chance encounter with an obviously mentally ill homeless woman who was presumably begging outside the bookstore the children and I were entering.
I say presumably because she didn’t ask me for money although she did ask everyone before me. What she did ask me was whether I knew I was walking with Angels. She appeared to be quite taken back by the idea. At the time, I answered quite smugly that I did know - as I had one of my children on either side of me. Thinking about her comment in the bookstore brought back a slight remembrance of a Talmudic story my grandfather once told me. The memory of it is somewhat elusive even now. It had something to do with two of Mal’akh being sent to follow you home after davening in a shul. One was to strength your good intentions while the other sought to encourage your bad intentions. I only remember it because I remember thinking it hardly seemed fair or just. Anyway, the woman’s comment triggered this vague memory which got me thinking about guardian angels and wondering if they ever get distracted. Don’t ask how logically walking with angels lead to a distracted guardian angel which leads to an angel of death but just know one idea inevitably flows into another in my mind.
My grandfather had an early association with Breslovers, and then with Chabad at the end of his life. Until recently, I never really did much reading concerning the Chassidic movement in general, but researching this book has lead me down some strange paths. Currently, I am in the midst of reading Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson’s discourses on Heaven on Earth and Forces of Creation. It is a little hard to avoid learning anything about the Chabad movement without learning a great deal about the last Lubavitch Rebbe as well. Now I am not ready to name him the Moshiach but I am beginning to think of him as one of the truly inspired of our time.
Normally, a Chassidic Jew would live very separate and apart from the secular community surrounding his religious community - as in - not even in death shall the twain shall meet. Rabbi Schneerson changed all that with his Chabad movement or his own particular brand of Jewish outreach. Rebbe Schneerson sent out specially trained rabbis to act as Shulichim (his personal embassaries) with the goal of establishing Chabad Houses literally all over the world with the express purpose of bringing back secular Jews to a more religious life one mitzvah at a time.
In the Lubavitch tradition a ‘tish’ (or table meal) with a Rebbe or Chabad Shaliach is often referred to a farbrengen. I found this video courtesy of a commenter at Joe Settler’s blog and decided maybe the next time Toronto School Board Trustees need to go recruiting for principals for secondary schools in Toronto - they start by wangling an invitation for the next Chabad farbrengen.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Another Haggadah On The Market, But This One Is Special
A Review of the Kol Menachem Haggadah
By: The Commentator
Posted: 4/7/08
With over 3,000 editions on record, the Pesach Haggadah stands as the most printed Jewish text of all time. Practically all the great Rishonim and Akharonim published their own commentary to the Haggadah. And if they didn't, then Artscroll has likely put something together based on other assorted writings within the last twenty years.
Rabbi Soloveitchik has a Haggadah and Shlomo Carlebach has one, too. So, then, why shouldn't the Lubavitcher Rebbe have one, also?
In fact, before he took his place as Grand Rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn printed Likutei Ta'amim u'Minhagim, a commentary of the Haggadah that, aside from serving as a standard running commentary on passages of the text, aims to articulate the halakhic positions and customs of Chabad for the seder night. Although there have been several reprints of the Rebbe's first printed work - including a more esthetically pleasing retyped version in 1991 by Kehot - Rabbi Chaim Miller, author of the popular Kol Menachem/Gutnick Library series featuring the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, felt the need to bring to light a new commentary.
The new book is in English, ensuring that newcomers to Judaism, many of whom are in that position due to Chabad, will be able to appreciate the work. A mixed blessing, the Rebbe's vast writings for the most part remain in Hebrew and Yiddish. While many of us are comfortable with Hebrew, later generations are powerless against Yiddish while many struggle with the Hebrew texts. Moreover, many of the Rebbe's texts are "collections" without much of an order, making it difficult for readers to study the Rebbe's thoughts on subjects that may be found sporadically throughout the Rebbe's printed volumes.
Thankfully, Rabbi Miller's recently published Kol Menachem Haggadah solves these two problems. With great elegance, Rabbi Miller presents a dual commentary below the standard Haggadah text. In one section entitled Classic Questions, the reader will find, as he will in all books within the Kol Menachem series, thoughts and comments of over one hundred rabbinic scholars who lived throughout the ages. Most familiar with the Haggadah will quickly realize that this section offers an interesting selection of commentaries to very standard and often-asked seder night questions. Although this part of the book offers some halakhic insights as well, it serves mostly as a raid of rabbinic commentaries so that those who use the Kol Menachem Haggadah won't feel left out of the conversation.
The novel section of the work is most certainly the Toras Menachem section found at the bottom of every page. In this skillfully edited portion, Rabbi Miller utilizes writings found in Likutei Ta'amim u'Minhagim, the Rebbe's commentary of Rashi, and other writings and testimonies by Chabad's deceased leader and those who were close to him. Moreover, while it is certainly too limited in space to serve as an update for Likutei Ta'amim u-Minhagim, Rabbi Miller takes advantage of including an array of the Rebbe's teachings in lamdus, mysticism, halakhah, and of course, p'shat.
The only criticism one can reasonably hold over the beautifully laid out volume is that it incorporates very little memories and narratives about the Rebbe's seder table. Indeed, while Rabbi Miller writes in his foreword that he used Otzer Minhagei Chabad, a previously published account of the Rebbe's seder customs as observed by his students, and information culled from discussions with others close to the Rebbe, he elected not to be a storyteller. As a major figure of twentieth century American Judaism, it seems critical for the historical record that such narratives are produced. Owing to the breadth of this text's interests, it would seem fitting that stories of the Rebbe's seder be included along with his halakhic and exegetic commentaries.
But it would be unfair to say that we will merely "settle" for this important and monumental Haggadah worthy to be used at any seder table this Pesach.
© Copyright 2008 The Commentator
By: The Commentator
Posted: 4/7/08
With over 3,000 editions on record, the Pesach Haggadah stands as the most printed Jewish text of all time. Practically all the great Rishonim and Akharonim published their own commentary to the Haggadah. And if they didn't, then Artscroll has likely put something together based on other assorted writings within the last twenty years.
Rabbi Soloveitchik has a Haggadah and Shlomo Carlebach has one, too. So, then, why shouldn't the Lubavitcher Rebbe have one, also?
In fact, before he took his place as Grand Rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn printed Likutei Ta'amim u'Minhagim, a commentary of the Haggadah that, aside from serving as a standard running commentary on passages of the text, aims to articulate the halakhic positions and customs of Chabad for the seder night. Although there have been several reprints of the Rebbe's first printed work - including a more esthetically pleasing retyped version in 1991 by Kehot - Rabbi Chaim Miller, author of the popular Kol Menachem/Gutnick Library series featuring the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, felt the need to bring to light a new commentary.
The new book is in English, ensuring that newcomers to Judaism, many of whom are in that position due to Chabad, will be able to appreciate the work. A mixed blessing, the Rebbe's vast writings for the most part remain in Hebrew and Yiddish. While many of us are comfortable with Hebrew, later generations are powerless against Yiddish while many struggle with the Hebrew texts. Moreover, many of the Rebbe's texts are "collections" without much of an order, making it difficult for readers to study the Rebbe's thoughts on subjects that may be found sporadically throughout the Rebbe's printed volumes.
Thankfully, Rabbi Miller's recently published Kol Menachem Haggadah solves these two problems. With great elegance, Rabbi Miller presents a dual commentary below the standard Haggadah text. In one section entitled Classic Questions, the reader will find, as he will in all books within the Kol Menachem series, thoughts and comments of over one hundred rabbinic scholars who lived throughout the ages. Most familiar with the Haggadah will quickly realize that this section offers an interesting selection of commentaries to very standard and often-asked seder night questions. Although this part of the book offers some halakhic insights as well, it serves mostly as a raid of rabbinic commentaries so that those who use the Kol Menachem Haggadah won't feel left out of the conversation.
The novel section of the work is most certainly the Toras Menachem section found at the bottom of every page. In this skillfully edited portion, Rabbi Miller utilizes writings found in Likutei Ta'amim u'Minhagim, the Rebbe's commentary of Rashi, and other writings and testimonies by Chabad's deceased leader and those who were close to him. Moreover, while it is certainly too limited in space to serve as an update for Likutei Ta'amim u-Minhagim, Rabbi Miller takes advantage of including an array of the Rebbe's teachings in lamdus, mysticism, halakhah, and of course, p'shat.
The only criticism one can reasonably hold over the beautifully laid out volume is that it incorporates very little memories and narratives about the Rebbe's seder table. Indeed, while Rabbi Miller writes in his foreword that he used Otzer Minhagei Chabad, a previously published account of the Rebbe's seder customs as observed by his students, and information culled from discussions with others close to the Rebbe, he elected not to be a storyteller. As a major figure of twentieth century American Judaism, it seems critical for the historical record that such narratives are produced. Owing to the breadth of this text's interests, it would seem fitting that stories of the Rebbe's seder be included along with his halakhic and exegetic commentaries.
But it would be unfair to say that we will merely "settle" for this important and monumental Haggadah worthy to be used at any seder table this Pesach.
© Copyright 2008 The Commentator
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
A Shameful Appointment
The appointment of Dr. David Berger as head of the Yeshiva College Jewish Studies Department was addressed in Joel Shteir's article and Dr. David Berger's response in a previous issue of The Commentator. Dr. Berger, as we know, is the author of The Rebbe, The Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, a screed against Lubavitch Chassidim. Shteir wrote that Dr. Berger's appointment was in conflict with "cultural open-mindedness" and "acceptance."
This is not an issue of closed or open-mindedness. The real issue is that Dr. Berger is a promoter of division whose radical views should not be legitimized by our university. Yeshiva University has brought upon itself shame and disgrace by appointing an advocate of baseless hatred.
Dr. Berger begins by claiming we are trying to "intimidate and silence him." That he should attempt to paint himself as a victim is absurd. As an academic, he is free to express his opinions, but that does not mean that those opinions deserve respect or that Yeshiva University should reward an advocate of such views with a department chairmanship. Freedom of speech is a two-way street. When you voice your offensive vision, don't call it "intimidation" when people respond to it. Dr. Berger was even given the last word in The Commentator a few weeks ago.
I have been to Chabad Houses in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Israel and China and never once met anyone who says the Rebbe is "pure divinity." That is pure poppycock. I have furthermore been to many Chabad Houses where the Rebbe is not thought to be the Messiah. Undoubtedly there are those who espouse that view, but to vilify an entire Chassidic sect with roots to the Ba'al Shem Tov is nothing less than abhorrent. No organization has done more good for Judaism around the world, literally bringing Torah and Mitzvot to Jews no matter where they are physically or religiously. Chabad is not "hijacking [our] religion." It is driving Judaism around the world and inviting so many to return to it. Dr. Berger ignores the unparalleled and multi-faceted good done by Chabad; to see in Chabad an "existential threat to the Jewish religion" not only ignores the obvious opposite reality, but enters Dr. Berger into the realm of fringe fanaticism that he himself decries.
Dr. Berger argues that there is a need to ask questions of a Lubavitch Chassid who serves as a "rabbi, a dayyan, a Jewish Studies principal, and, in the context of avodah zorah, a shochet, a sofer, and a wine producer." In the context of avodah zorah? No such context exists! His own article is written in the context of unsubstantiated mistruths about a "very substantial number" of phantom Chassidim who view the Rebbe as the equivalent of Jesus.
The interrogation of Lubavitchers is unwarranted. Implementing this policy would accomplish nothing but harm many innocent people and devastate the unity of the Observant Jewish Community at a time when we desperately need to work together.
Dr. Berger has no right to demand that so many Lubavitch Chassidim be denied "automatic Orthodox legitimacy," when Lubavitchers are far more stringent than many of us in many facets of halacha and they include scholars in Jewish law and philosophy every bit as accomplished as Dr. Berger.
Bringing the issue closer to home, he further states in his article that he does not see "the need to ask questions of Lubavitch students" at YU, but only because we don't ask questions of those not "fully committed" to Orthodoxy. His condescending comparison between Lubavitch and nonobservant students is both naive and offensive. He further equates Lubavitch Chassidim to Conservative Jewry when he says that he does not advocate anything "more draconian than the policies maintained by moderate Modern Orthodox Jews toward traditional Conservative Jews," as if the two groups are remotely comparable. Ignoring semantics for all practical purposes, this proposal is very close to a threat of excommunication. Dr. Berger's words are a profound personal insult to those committed Orthodox Jewish students affiliated with Chabad Lubavitch - an insult that demands an apology.
In light of the comments made by Dr. Berger in his article, one can only imagine the "analytical and non-polemical" classroom discussion in his messianism course at the Revel Graduate School. It is beyond imagination to think that his extremist analysis of Chabad does not make its way into the classroom, and is not accorded special deference, as the professor's point of view.
As members of the "orphaned generation," we students of Yeshiva University should applaud "all those who have thus far been silent"- those who have refused to join Dr. Berger's foolish anti-Lubavitch crusade, and who refuse to recognize him as the arbiter of Orthodox legitimacy.
This is not an issue of closed or open-mindedness. The real issue is that Dr. Berger is a promoter of division whose radical views should not be legitimized by our university. Yeshiva University has brought upon itself shame and disgrace by appointing an advocate of baseless hatred.
Dr. Berger begins by claiming we are trying to "intimidate and silence him." That he should attempt to paint himself as a victim is absurd. As an academic, he is free to express his opinions, but that does not mean that those opinions deserve respect or that Yeshiva University should reward an advocate of such views with a department chairmanship. Freedom of speech is a two-way street. When you voice your offensive vision, don't call it "intimidation" when people respond to it. Dr. Berger was even given the last word in The Commentator a few weeks ago.
I have been to Chabad Houses in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Israel and China and never once met anyone who says the Rebbe is "pure divinity." That is pure poppycock. I have furthermore been to many Chabad Houses where the Rebbe is not thought to be the Messiah. Undoubtedly there are those who espouse that view, but to vilify an entire Chassidic sect with roots to the Ba'al Shem Tov is nothing less than abhorrent. No organization has done more good for Judaism around the world, literally bringing Torah and Mitzvot to Jews no matter where they are physically or religiously. Chabad is not "hijacking [our] religion." It is driving Judaism around the world and inviting so many to return to it. Dr. Berger ignores the unparalleled and multi-faceted good done by Chabad; to see in Chabad an "existential threat to the Jewish religion" not only ignores the obvious opposite reality, but enters Dr. Berger into the realm of fringe fanaticism that he himself decries.
Dr. Berger argues that there is a need to ask questions of a Lubavitch Chassid who serves as a "rabbi, a dayyan, a Jewish Studies principal, and, in the context of avodah zorah, a shochet, a sofer, and a wine producer." In the context of avodah zorah? No such context exists! His own article is written in the context of unsubstantiated mistruths about a "very substantial number" of phantom Chassidim who view the Rebbe as the equivalent of Jesus.
The interrogation of Lubavitchers is unwarranted. Implementing this policy would accomplish nothing but harm many innocent people and devastate the unity of the Observant Jewish Community at a time when we desperately need to work together.
Dr. Berger has no right to demand that so many Lubavitch Chassidim be denied "automatic Orthodox legitimacy," when Lubavitchers are far more stringent than many of us in many facets of halacha and they include scholars in Jewish law and philosophy every bit as accomplished as Dr. Berger.
Bringing the issue closer to home, he further states in his article that he does not see "the need to ask questions of Lubavitch students" at YU, but only because we don't ask questions of those not "fully committed" to Orthodoxy. His condescending comparison between Lubavitch and nonobservant students is both naive and offensive. He further equates Lubavitch Chassidim to Conservative Jewry when he says that he does not advocate anything "more draconian than the policies maintained by moderate Modern Orthodox Jews toward traditional Conservative Jews," as if the two groups are remotely comparable. Ignoring semantics for all practical purposes, this proposal is very close to a threat of excommunication. Dr. Berger's words are a profound personal insult to those committed Orthodox Jewish students affiliated with Chabad Lubavitch - an insult that demands an apology.
In light of the comments made by Dr. Berger in his article, one can only imagine the "analytical and non-polemical" classroom discussion in his messianism course at the Revel Graduate School. It is beyond imagination to think that his extremist analysis of Chabad does not make its way into the classroom, and is not accorded special deference, as the professor's point of view.
As members of the "orphaned generation," we students of Yeshiva University should applaud "all those who have thus far been silent"- those who have refused to join Dr. Berger's foolish anti-Lubavitch crusade, and who refuse to recognize him as the arbiter of Orthodox legitimacy.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Tzvee's Take
I have recast the Forward's headline for one of this week's stories in accord with my more accurate view of what is transpiring.Professor David Berger published an attack on Lubavitch in a full blown religious polemic. Instead of reconsidering, recalling and retracting his vitriol, he now is republishing his book as a paperback. And he now is receiving full support from Yeshiva University as head of Jewish Studies at the school.My case against Berger simply put is -- who appointed him head of the holy office of the grand inquisition? His book is stage one of a true Jihad. Who asked him to issue a fatwa against Lubavitch messianists?The answer now appears to be - Yeshiva University promotes and supports his outrageous crusade.Berger calls for the removal of the LMs from all Jewish communal positions worldwide. What is next Dr. Berger? Indeed.
Yeshiva U. Brings On Critic of ChabadMarissa Brostoff Wed. Oct 24, 2007Rabbi David Berger, a historian who is a sharp critic of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, has been appointed head of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University’s undergraduate college in a move that has ruffled some feathers on the campus.Writing in the college’s student paper, the Commentator, Josh Shteir, a senior at the school and a co-president of the Chabad Club on campus, argued that Berger’s “intolerance” of Chabad is unacceptable at Y.U. The university is affiliated with the Modern Orthodox movement but welcomes Orthodox Jews who practice differently.“How am I, a student at Y.U., as well as someone with a strong connection to the Lubavitch movement, supposed to understand this appointment and its apparent conflict with the cultural open-mindedness espoused by the University?” he wrote in a missive directed at university administrators.Y.U. announced last fall that it would hire Berger, who had been a history professor at Brooklyn College for 37 years and had taught part time at Y.U. for almost as long, as a full-time faculty member. He was appointed to the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and later to the Jewish studies department at Yeshiva College, Y.U.’s undergraduate division. Then, as now, some students publicly objected.Yosef Levine, alumni president of Y.U.’s Chabad group and a 1999 graduate of its business school, said that he campaigned against Berger’s appointment last year because Berger was inappropriately hostile regarding the subject of Chabad.According to Levine, the trouble began about two years ago when Berger, who occasionally led Sabbath services at Y.U., “dove into ruthless soliloquizing against Chabad” at a post-service “shmooze,” disturbing even non-Chabad students and leading several to walk out.The debate is centered on Berger’s well-known critiques of the block of Chabad adherents who believe that Menachem Schneerson, the late Chabad leader, is the messiah. Berger, who is Modern Orthodox himself, claims that this belief is tantamount to heresy. In his 2001 book, “The Rebbe, The Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference,” Berger argued that Judaism rejects the idea that the messiah can be a deceased person. That belief, he wrote, has differentiated Judaism from Christianity for 2,000 years. He censures the Chabad movement and the Orthodox establishment at large for what he sees as their lack of outrage in response to the messianic elements in the Lubavitch community.Berger responded to Shteir’s article with an opinion piece of his own, in which he claimed that Shteir was taking part in a Chabad campaign to silence critics. “[My position on Chabad] is not closed-minded, unless Mr. Shteir believes that open-mindedness requires the abolition of all theological boundaries defining the Jewish religion,” Berger wrote.Both articles delve into complex hermeneutics, as do many of the dozens of reader responses posted on the Commentator Web site.In an interview with the Forward, Berger said he was unconcerned about the controversy, which he called “a tempest in a teapot.” He suggested that Y.U. is big enough for both Chabad students and their critics.“Yeshiva College [does not ask student applicants] about personal beliefs, and I don’t think Lubavitcher students should be asked either,” he said.Chabad officials agreed with Berger that the controversy should not be overplayed.“While we don’t agree with Berger, this is not a Lubavitcher issue — it’s a Y.U. issue,” a spokesman for the group said.
Yeshiva U. Brings On Critic of ChabadMarissa Brostoff Wed. Oct 24, 2007Rabbi David Berger, a historian who is a sharp critic of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, has been appointed head of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University’s undergraduate college in a move that has ruffled some feathers on the campus.Writing in the college’s student paper, the Commentator, Josh Shteir, a senior at the school and a co-president of the Chabad Club on campus, argued that Berger’s “intolerance” of Chabad is unacceptable at Y.U. The university is affiliated with the Modern Orthodox movement but welcomes Orthodox Jews who practice differently.“How am I, a student at Y.U., as well as someone with a strong connection to the Lubavitch movement, supposed to understand this appointment and its apparent conflict with the cultural open-mindedness espoused by the University?” he wrote in a missive directed at university administrators.Y.U. announced last fall that it would hire Berger, who had been a history professor at Brooklyn College for 37 years and had taught part time at Y.U. for almost as long, as a full-time faculty member. He was appointed to the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and later to the Jewish studies department at Yeshiva College, Y.U.’s undergraduate division. Then, as now, some students publicly objected.Yosef Levine, alumni president of Y.U.’s Chabad group and a 1999 graduate of its business school, said that he campaigned against Berger’s appointment last year because Berger was inappropriately hostile regarding the subject of Chabad.According to Levine, the trouble began about two years ago when Berger, who occasionally led Sabbath services at Y.U., “dove into ruthless soliloquizing against Chabad” at a post-service “shmooze,” disturbing even non-Chabad students and leading several to walk out.The debate is centered on Berger’s well-known critiques of the block of Chabad adherents who believe that Menachem Schneerson, the late Chabad leader, is the messiah. Berger, who is Modern Orthodox himself, claims that this belief is tantamount to heresy. In his 2001 book, “The Rebbe, The Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference,” Berger argued that Judaism rejects the idea that the messiah can be a deceased person. That belief, he wrote, has differentiated Judaism from Christianity for 2,000 years. He censures the Chabad movement and the Orthodox establishment at large for what he sees as their lack of outrage in response to the messianic elements in the Lubavitch community.Berger responded to Shteir’s article with an opinion piece of his own, in which he claimed that Shteir was taking part in a Chabad campaign to silence critics. “[My position on Chabad] is not closed-minded, unless Mr. Shteir believes that open-mindedness requires the abolition of all theological boundaries defining the Jewish religion,” Berger wrote.Both articles delve into complex hermeneutics, as do many of the dozens of reader responses posted on the Commentator Web site.In an interview with the Forward, Berger said he was unconcerned about the controversy, which he called “a tempest in a teapot.” He suggested that Y.U. is big enough for both Chabad students and their critics.“Yeshiva College [does not ask student applicants] about personal beliefs, and I don’t think Lubavitcher students should be asked either,” he said.Chabad officials agreed with Berger that the controversy should not be overplayed.“While we don’t agree with Berger, this is not a Lubavitcher issue — it’s a Y.U. issue,” a spokesman for the group said.
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