Jews and Torah — in the Qur’an October 29, 2008

Writing for The American Muslim, Dr. Aisha Y. Musa, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Florida International University, has posted a very interesting article entitled “Jews in the Qur’an: An Introduction”, where she attempts to counteract some of what she holds are commonly believed mistruths about the portrayal of Jews in the Qur’an. The article is the first in a series of articles, which will examine not only the Qur’an but also Hadith as well as tafsir (commentary).

The entire article is very worth reading and quite interesting, and my quotes do not do the piece justice, but I wanted to post a couple snippets here: (more…)

Jewish High School Closed For Being Too Strict?

This story from Hamercaz and Jewish Breaking News doesn’t need too much commentary. Lakewood, NJ’s Mesivta Beis Yisro’el, named after the Ba’al Shem Tov (the founder of the Hasidic movement) has been forced to shut its doors due to an unfortunate combination of demographics and stringency:

A Mesivta in Lakewood that had opened amidst hopes of successfully serving the town’s growing Chasidish population has closed down.

Mesivta Beis Yisroel, named after the Ba’al Shem Tov, was opened three years ago by R’ Shlomo Meyer, a local activist instrumental in the founding of many businesses and Mosdos in Lakewood. The Mesivta was geared towards encouraging the students to focus on what the administration considered important Chasidish practices in addition to providing an intense schedule of learning.

The enrollment growth at the Mesivta did not live up to the founders’ expectations. Recently, several Magidei Shiur left the institution and student enrollment, which was already down, fell even further as more students left throughout the past few months.

Some students blamed what they considered to be overly strict rules for the Mesivta’s downfall. They maintain that Lakewood does not have a clientele interested in what they consider to be such a militantly Chasidish environment. They offer such examples as punishments for speaking English instead of Yiddish or for being seen outdoors without a hat or jacket as regulations that ultimately drove students away.

I hope all of these Chassidish kids have another school to attend and I hope that they go on to yeshiva gedolah ultimately.

Who wins in these situations? The Chassidish school did not compromise on its standards one iota — and now, as a result, enrollment has fallen to the point that the school has had to close. Is this a growing trend? And if it is, is it better to have 500 kids in white shirts learning Torah in English (or, most likely, Yinglish) or 25 kids in hats and jackets (over those same white shirts) learning Torah in Yiddish?

Anti-Semitism Now: A Vaccine Libel in Pakistan? October 17, 2008

Pakistani Muslim pilgrims making hajj to Saudi Arabia this year will be administered oral polio vaccine upon their entry into the country, Pakistan’s Dawn has reported. This year, Pakistan has seen 80 people fall victim to the debilitating illness, largely along the Pakistani-Afghani border, with most of the victims coming from areas in which vaccination campaigns have been unsuccessful.

Why have they been unsuccessful? In addition to anti-US sentiments (including one belief that US-produced vaccines were “designed to sterilize Pakistanis and reduce the Muslim population”):

The number of polio victims has risen to 80 this year. Most of them belong to the NWFP and Fata where vaccination campaigns have not succeeded because of opposition from some sections and fatwas issued by some ulema.

According to sources, these ulema believe that the vaccine being supplied to Pakistan is produced by Jews who use the income from its sale for anti-Muslim activities.

Sigh…

My reaction upon reading this story was quite similar to:

Unity and reduction of hatred benefits our mental, emotional, spiritual — and physical — health.

Jewish Extremism II: Anti-Indulgence Activists October 12, 2008

Haredi activists here in Brooklyn have begun defacing advertisements in a campaign with a new target.

This time, it’s not immodesty. It’s not television or internet. It’s not about secular or non-Jewish music.

This time, it’s restaurants.

The charedi news wire VIN reports:

Over the past several years, the Chasidic community of Williamsburg has experienced several incidents in which anonymous community activists destroyed, damaged or defaced advertising or signage of various business establishments.

The motivation behind the incidents is spiritual. Ads featuring highly detailed images of tantalizing food—and businesses hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food, such a the now-shuttered Sub on Wheels once parked along a Williamsburg street—are seen as excessive and indulgent by austerity-minded activists, who are alarmed by what they see as an intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into their community.

In two recent incidents, an enormous building-side banner advertising Grill on Lee, a new gourmet restaurant in the neighborhood’s heart, was sliced halfway, and a Satmar butcher shop with large photographs of dish-laden tables in its windows had those photos cut out.

VIN News has learned that the same activists behind the most recent defacings are also those behind the campaign that forced entrepreneur Nathan Lichtenstein, a Chosid himself, to close his Sub on Wheels enterprise.

AN UNNECESSARILY WIDE VARIETY OF FOOD?? Unnecessarily wide variety? Subs? What is “necessary”, then?

“You get kugel. We got potato or spinach.”

“Could I get some lukshen (noodle) kugel with salt & pepper?”

“What do you think this is? Get out of here! Rasha!”

Now even glatt kosher restaurants are on the road to having to watch how many options they put on their menus for fear of having their billboards defaced? Subs constitute an intrusion of secular values? Can one get onions with their secular values? How fragile is the community that it has to protect itself from sandwiches?

While the argument could be made that upscale kosher dining establishments like Circa-NY and Solo (or their heimishe counterparts, restaurants like Boro Park’s Glatt a la Carte) do represent a certain level of acceding to a mindset that is alien to Orthodox Judaism — they are hardly a “Sub on Wheels”, and no one would open such a place in Williamsburg, the bastion of heimishkeit that it is. But is adherence to tradition a reason to limit people’s selections at restaurants to only a “necessary” variety of food?

This is “zealotry” on a whole new level.

I wonder what Brooklyn will look like in 15 years.

Kelloggs UK - “Vegetarian” is Not Necessarily Kosher or Halal October 10, 2008

Kelloggs UK has issued an apology to a Jewish man who ate a cereal bar that said “suitable for vegetarians” — when it actually contained pork gelatin.

From the Charedi Orthodox news wire VIN:

Oberon Gardner and his family bought the Rice Krispies Squares bars at a supermarket in Colchester, Essex. Labels on 5,000 multipacks carried the words “suitable for vegetarians”, even though the full ingredients list explained that around one per cent of the marshmallow bar contained pork gelatin.

It was only later that 21-year-old Mr Gardner inspected the individual wrapper more carefully. “After my sister ate one bar and I took a bite of mine, it occurred to me that I had never seen any marshmallow without some form of gelatine in,” he said. “I decided before I ate any more to see what was substituted in its place. I was absolutely disgusted to find that the ingredients list stated it had pork gelatin in it.

I felt so sick. I have been vegetarian all my life, so it was a real shock to the system.

Both the London and Manchester Rabbinical Courts were quick to note that all Kellogg’s cereal bars have been listed as not kosher, and at no point did Kelloggs UK misrepresent the cereal bars as kosher.

Still. This is just a mini-wake up call. The “suitable for vegetarians” logo may not mean anything, depending on the brand and the product. For kosher consumers, this shows the importance of the kosher certification seal (hechsher). For all consumers, this shows we have to check labels regardless of what is touted on the external packaging.

It would behoove all halal-observant Muslim customers — for whom “one percent pork gelatin” is far too much to be acceptable — who buy these products to check their labels and throw out any of these “suitable for vegetarians” Rice Krispies Squares multipacks. Perhaps a refund may be available.

Here’s to a year of increased consumer awareness.

“The extremists are taking over” October 2, 2008

We Orthodox Jews aren’t a huge group of people.

Numbering only 9 percent of affiliated Jews, we are the smallest stream of Judaism in America population-wise. Of all groups who do not need to develop radical offshoots, we have to be up there.

But unfortunately, dispute and disunity have never been foreign to the Jewish Nation, despite their horrible outcomes.

The British Jewish Chronicle has an article this week entitled “The Extremists are Taking Over”, which details, among other things, the music ban and “modesty squads” which have been gaining notariety in the Jewish world as of late. The (himself apparently Orthodox, or at least “fundamentalist”) author decries these recent developments, alluding to them as a “form of tyranny”:

In Israel media attention has recently focused on the tyrannical leanings of rabbis Ephraim Luft and Yitzhak Meir Safranovitch. Rabbi Luft has established a “Committee for Jewish Music”. He contends that much of the music played at Orthodox functions or public events is not kosher. What exactly (you may ask) is music that is “not kosher?” Apparently, any music that is contemporary, and any that is “Western”. Any that uses “modern instruments” and any in which percussion (”the beat”) is emphasised at the expense of the melody.

Modern music, he adds, is “disrespectful”, and leads people - especially young people - astray, resulting in low moral standards and threatening the collapse of civilised society as we know it. No wonder, therefore, that his committee has compiled a black-list of treifah musicians, and that, no doubt inspired by him, Charedi activists were recently able to secure the sacking from an Israeli radio show of a well-known disc jockey, Menachem Toker - despite the fact that Toker is himself Charedi.

So now one of the only charedi DJ’s in Israel finds himself out of a job.

(As an aside, being “blacklisted” does not necessarily negatively impact sales. The “Rap in Yiddish” CD of B’nei Brak infamy sold thousands of copies after it was banned by name, and Lipa Shmeltzer packed Madison Square Garden after being banned by name. Being “banned” or “forbidden” does wonders for publicity in the Jewish world.)

And it doesn’t stop there. Apparently the story of “M”, beaten in Ma’alot Dafna by a modesty patrol, was not the limit to the horrors being inflicted for want of a quieter shoe, or a few square inches of fabric:

Under Rabbi S.’s patronage, “modesty” squads operating under the umbrella of his Va’ad…patrol the highways and byways of Jerusalem beating up women who, in their view or in the view of their husbands or families, dress or behave in an “immodest” way.

In one instance a husband contracted with a “modesty squad” (to which he paid around £1,000) to attack his ex-wife with a club. In another, a Charedi wife who had left her husband and his lifestyle was beaten up. How they could have touched her when they could not have known her menstrual state is beyond me, but what need have we of Yiddishkeit when morality as defined by these yobs is itself at stake?

In Meah Shearim one local “enforcer”, Yoel K., boasts that through his strong-arm tactics he assists people to become “moral”. If his spies report that a Charedi home has a computer, he makes sure the children are thrown out of school. Non-religious girls, he explained to one newspaper, “don’t dress properly. They make me sin.”

But of course it is not they who make him sin. It is his own emotional immaturity, and his conviction that the sort of prejudices he holds sit squarely within Jewish Orthodoxy.

When will this “conviction” — that prejudices “sit squarely” with Jewish Orthodoxy — be proven and shown to be the lie that it virtually always is? What would the source for this be, that someone is allowed to react out of prejudice like this? Ohavei Hashem, sin’u ra’ — those who love the L-rd, hate evil! — is written in Psalms. A hatred of evil, one would think, would drive one to try to improve the world — or at a minimum, would not drive one to beat women with clubs for £1,000. While one could argue that immodest dress, being a violation of halacha, would fall into the category of “evil” that must be “hated”, how do these actions — better yet, how do these organizations really think that beatings and terror make the world more of a dwelling place for G-d, more spiritual, more Divine? Did the blood emerging from M’s wounds after her assault “atone” for something?

And now, worldwide, we are talking about it, and fuming. In other words, our radical offshoots are detracting from our already fragile attempts at unity.

And of course, the gigantic question is, were we truly talking about zeal for the Word of G-d, why we don’t see radical groups advocating forcibly giving 1/3 of peoples’ assets to charity (the general maximum), or beating bosses who refuse to pay their workers (”on that day you shall give him his wage”), or seizing houses whose construction involved the destruction of fruit trees (bal tashchit)?

Why is it only women’s dress? Why music? Is it because of “the children” — who obviously can hear about a pedophile before hearing about a sheer stocking or exposed toe? Does a hiphop beat wreak more havoc on the soul than an abusive rabbi?

I love Judaism, I love halacha, and I love the Torah. I only wish that these actions were wholly based in any of the three.

May this year 5769 be a year of good news, of good occurrences and of the beginning of the realization of a beautiful future.