Modern Orthodoxy’s Surrender
Re “Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis: Synthesizing Religion and 21st-Century Identity” (op-ed, Sept. 29):
Dr. Moshe Krakowski offered some interesting suggestions about enhancing the spiritual experience of students in Modern Orthodox day schools, but the real problem is that the Modern Orthodox community – particularly many of its leading rabbis, educators, and all-around machers – long ago surrendered its pride and self-regard to the right-wing yeshiva world.
Whereas as recently as the mid-1970s it was possible to survey the Orthodox landscape and take pride in the dynamic intellectualism that suffused large parts of Modern Orthodoxy, the situation today could not be more different.
For a host of reasons too complex to detail in a letter to a newspaper, Modern Orthodoxy has atrophied over the past several decades to the point where in the 1990s a Modern Orthodox group like Edah, whose leadership was comprised of distinguished rabbis and scholars, was viewed by almost every frum Jew I came into contact with as being unrepresentative of Torah Judaism – a fringe phenomenon to be shunned or ignored. And indeed the organization, which seemed preoccupied with feminism and other liberal obsessions, lasted little more than a decade before folding.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that had an Orthodox Jew been placed in a state of suspended animation in, say, 1977, he would not recognize the Orthodox world were he to regain consciousness in 2017. That is the problem in a nutshell, and it is the reason why the dumbing down of the community shows no sign of abating.
What we now call Modern Orthodoxy – it was viewed as mainstream Torah Judaism when I was growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s – has been on the defensive for years. The Modern Orthodox public has bought into the notion that stricter necessarily means better, that isolation breeds spirituality, and that our sages in centuries past all wore black hats and spent their days searching out every chumra the human mind could conceive.
The reality of Torah teachers who made their living in “secular” occupations, of scholars who counseled leniency within the parameters of the Law, of rabbis whose interpretation of Torah stressed understanding and conciliation between Jew and Jew and Jew and non-Jew – that reality is unknown to Orthodox young people today in all but a handful of yeshivas. And that is why many sensitive and bright youngsters end up leaving the Orthodox fold entirely. Repelled though they may be by what they see as the narrowness and anti-intellectualism of the right, they see no palatable option in the other side of the spectrum.
Yehuda Biebelberg
New York, NY
Trump Harms His Cause
When President Trump calls any athlete who doesn’t stand for the national anthem a name too offensive to publish in a family newspaper, he does harm to the cause he espouses.
Maybe some of the National Football league owners would be opposed to their players kneeling during the “Star Spangled Banner.” But when the president uses very insulting language to describe the players because they don’t act in a way he sees as proper, he motivates the owners to stand up for their employees. And some of these owners were big supporters of Mr. Trump.
Which brings us to the crux of the problem our president has created for himself as he advocates for his national agenda. He all too often uses inflammatory language that further alienates his opponents and even bothers some of his supporters, and as a result he has no legislative accomplishments to speak of after more than eight months in office, even though his party controls both the House and the Senate.
Howard Allen
(Via E-Mail)
No Comparison
I would like to respond to reader Myron Hecker’s September 29 letter, which was prompted by my September 22 letter.
I have indeed written about the faults of the left, in The Jewish Press and other venues. In a December 1973 article (“The New Conservatism,” under the name Raymond Solomon, in The Jewish Spectator), I wrote about left-wing anti-Semitism in connection with the 1968 New York City’s teachers’ strike and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern’s less than full support of Israel.
I have written about the need for Jewish members of Congress to step up to the plate for Jewish and American issues and have criticized Jimmy Carter. There are other examples I could cite.
But whatever the faults of the left in America, Nazis and Klansmen pose a much greater threat to Jews and African Americans. The ultra-right protesters in Charlottesville were openly marching as Nazis and Klansmen. One does not have to look under every bed, as Mr. Hecker seems to think.
The people who opposed the rightist thugs in Charlottesville did so at great personal risk, and poor Heather Heyer was murdered by a crazed white supremacist.
Mr. Hecker likes to throw around labels like “Communists” and “anarchists.” It was the Communist government of Czechoslovakia that gave Israel most of its arms during the War of Independence in 1948.
Irgunist activist Samuel (Shmuel) Katz was involved in collecting arms for the Irgun ship Altalena. In Days of Fire Katz wrote, “We were kept informed of the progress of friendly talks being held by Jeremiah Halpern with a group of Spanish anarchists who had offered arms in our cause.”
Incidentally, George Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, was very impressed with the accomplishments of the Spanish Anarchists. (Read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Also read Days of Our Years by Pierre van Paassen, who was a great friend of the Jews in pre-state Israel and worked with Ze’ev Jabotinsky.)
The fact that sympathy for the Palestinian cause has become popular among segments of progressives and liberals, particularly misguided college students, is no reason to equate all liberals and progressives with the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who would murder every single Jew if they could.
Reuven Solomon
Forest Hills, NY