Samantha Power first burst into public consciousness as the author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a series of case studies chronicling the virtual acquiescence American policymakers in mass slaughter — from the Armenians at the hands of the Turks to the Holocaust to Rwanda — and the elaborate justifications offered for doing nothing. The book grew out of her experiences as a war correspondent in the Balkans observing the ethnic-cleansing of Srebrenica and Kosovo.

Her outburst at the United Nations Security Council on December 13 against the Russians for their lead role in the mass civilian casualties in Aleppo was thus fully in keeping with her passionate academic work. “Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you?” Power challenged the Russian UN ambassador, teary-eyed and voice-quivering.

The only problem with her denunciation is that Ms. Power is the public face of a U.S. administration that might as well have been using her own work as handbook for justifying inaction. Those justifications have constantly shifted from 2006. First, President Obama confidently predicted that Assad would fall without U.S. intervention. Later he dismissed opposition forces as a ragtag group of “doctors and lawyers” who had no chance of defeating Assad’s army.

The president threatened Assad not to cross his “red-lines” and employ chemical weapons against civilians. Assad called his bluff. When ISIS first arose, Obama dismissed it as the “JV team.” Subsequently, the ISIS threat was deemed so overwhelming that it justified allying with Russia and Iran to defeat it. Yet Sunni ISIS drew most of its initial support from the fact that Sunnis felt themselves to have been abandoned by Obama to the tender mercies of Assad and Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

“Between action and inaction, the administration chose inconsequential action [– i.e., actions] certain not to effect the outcome,” charges Leon Wieseltier. Even a non-fly zone, such as that enforced to protect Kurds and Shias from Saddam Hussein’s revenge after the first Gulf War, was more than Obama would countenance.

When Russian moved forcefully into the vacuum left by the United States, Obama warned that they were entering a quagmire and that there could be no military solution. But it turned out that there was a military solution, as a senior Obama administration security official recently admitted to New York Times military correspondent, David Sanger, “just not our military solution. It’s Putin’s.”

Nor was Obama’s passivity just a matter of apathy to the death of half a million human beings and eleven million more turned into refugees. It was a direct consequence of Obama’s primary foreign policy goal – reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran and rapprochement between the United States and the mullahs. Iran let the Obama administration understand that any talks were contingent on American non-intervention in Syria, and Obama chose to recognize the Iranian “equities” in Syria and the survival of its ally Assad All the shifting justifications afterwards were just more of Ben Rhodes’ messaging into the media echo chamber.

How ironic, then, that Iran, Russia and Turkey recently informed Secretary of State Kerry, that U.S. participation would neither be required nor welcome at their tripartite discussions on the future of Syria. There is nothing that Putin enjoys more than rubbing Obama’s nose in his own impotence and irrelevance.

NO WONDER MS. POWER wept in denouncing the Russian atrocities in Aleppo: She had become the accomplice to genocide she once decried. What a relief it must have been for her to return to the more traditional diplomatic role of being an “honest person sent to lie for one’s country” in announcing the U.S. abstention on Security Council Resolution 2334.

Power began offering, as a sop to Israel, a denunciation of the body’s consistent discrimination against Israel and obsession with it. Members, she noted, “summon the will to act only when it comes to Israel,” a clear reference to the Security Council’s inability to stop the slaughter of Sunni Muslims in Aleppo by Russian, Iranian, and Assad forces.

She then proceeded to lend a hand to the most momentous act of anti-Israel discrimination ever by the UN – one that by labelling all Israeli settlement beyond the 1949 armistice lines, including in Jerusalem, flagrantly illegal will breathe new life into the international BDS movement, make life miserable for Jews — or at least that dwindling percentage of Jews who still support Israel — on university campuses, and create the potential for Israeli political and military figures and citizen living beyond the 1949 armistice lines, to be hounded as violators of internantional law any time they set foot outside of Israel.

The U.S. abstention, Power claimed, was consistent with long-standing U.S. policy. Not true. It was not even consistent with the Obama administration’s own policy. Then U.N. ambassador Susan Rice vetoed a similar resolution in 2011 on the grounds that it “could encourage parties to avoid negotiations.”

Numerous U.S. administrations have urged Israel to freeze settlement activity in Judea and Samaria. But none have deemed that activity en toto illegal under international law. Security Council Resolution 242, the basis of all subsequent Middle East peacemaking, specifically contemplates the return of “territories” captured in the 1967 War, not “all” territories or “the” territories. And it refers to the right of each country in the region to live within “secure and recognized borders free from threats or acts of force.”

That wording was precise and deliberate. No one contemplated in 1967 that Israel would or should ever return its holiest sites. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff made clear to President Lyndon Johnson that Israel had been indefensible prior to its lightning victory in 1967 and it should not be pressured to commit national suicide by returning to those borders – aptly named by Abba Eban as the “Auschwitz borders.”

In 1994, the U.N. ambassador Madelaine Albright announced that the U.S. would veto any resolution labelling Israeli settlement activity as illegal under international law on the grounds that the issue of sovereignty over the West Bank was a matter that could only be determined through negotiation.

Finally, in April 2004, President George W. Bush provided Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a letter making clear that any final settlement must be take into account changes on the ground in the nearly forty years since the 1967 War, including the creation of large Israeli settlement blocs and the transformation of Jerusalem. True, the Obama administration refused to recognize that letter or its conclusions from day one, even as applied to Jerusalem. But in doing so it was departing from the policy determinations of the previous administration, not upholding them.

In treating the 1949 armistice lines as sacrosanct and declaring Israel an occupying power in all areas beyond the armistice lines, the Obama administration has similarly departed from all previous administrations. No country recognized the 1949 armistice lines as Israel’s legal borders, least of all the Arab states, which still hoped to eradicate Israel and push the Jews into the sea. They tried in 1967, and were defeated. Defeats in aggressive wars have consequences. Just ask the Germans.

Prior to 1967, there was no internationally recognized sovereign in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, and certainly no Palestinian state whose lands could be occupied. Under the League of Nations mandate, which created a homeland for the Jewish people in the area to the West of the Jordan River, and which was subsequently incorporated in Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, Israel has by far the best claim of any nation to the West Bank.

But for Power, delegitimizing Israel’s existence must have been a welcome diversion from thinking about Aleppo and the moral bankruptcy of the administration whom she serves.

The post The Pathetic Ms. Power appeared first on Cross-Currents.

That animus came bumbling to the fore once again this week in the pages of the Jerusalem Post. A kiruv rabbi, who will remain nameless, made some outrageous and repugnant remarks about the number of halachic Jews killed in the Holocaust. Not more than one million, he asserted, because of the huge rates of intermarriage in pre-War Europe.

Had Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, addressed himself to the speaker’s “abysmal ignorance,” he would have been on solid grounds. But he could not resist the temptation to take the speaker – who is not himself the product of the chareidi educational system – as a “classic example of the abysmal ignorance about the Holocaust in sectors of the chareidi world.”

“The attitude in the hareidi world to history is totally instrumental, while accuracy and facts aren’t important and the only that is important is what you can use from history to advance your agenda,” Zuroff told Jerusalem Post reporter Jeremy Sharon.

I have followed Zuroff’s career with some interest since 2000, and not once have I seen him address the distortions of the presentation of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, including the near total omission of the activities of religious Jews in the ghettoes and extermination camps.

IN ANY EVENT, it turns out that Zuroff is not free of his own distortions of the history of the Holocaust, and, in particular, of rescue efforts undertaken during the War. Thus my interest in his career dating back to 2000.

That was the year that similar headlines appeared in leading media outlets highly critical of World War II rabbis: “Book Blasts WWII Rabbis” (Associated Press); “New Book Slams US Orthodox WWII Rescue Efforts” (Jerusalem Post). Those blaring headlines were followed in each case by an almost identical lead paragraph.

The lede in the AP story sent to thousands of media outlets worldwide captures the flavor: “During the Holocaust, ultra-Orthodox American rabbis focused on saving several hundred Talmudic scholars, ignoring the suffering of millions of other Jews who were eventually murdered by the Nazis, a new book charges” (emphasis added).

It was not hard to figure out the source of the charges. It was Zuroff trying to boost sales of his book The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust: The Activities of the Vaad ha-Hatzala Rescue Committee 1939-1945.

To gullible reporters who had obviously not read his book, Zuroff peddled two charges. The first was that the chareidi rabbinic leadership had shown wanton disregard for saving Jews in Europe other than a handful of Torah scholars. (In point of fact, the majority of rabbis active on the Vaad Hatzala were affiliated with the Mizrachi movement.) And second, the Vaad refused to join forces with the mainstream Jewish organizations, which were committed to rescue.

Over the next few years, the late distinguished historian David Kranzler and I, sometimes writing together and sometimes individually, repeatedly demolished these charges and demonstrated the bad faith that lay behind them. I would urge all readers to read my summary of that debate in a lengthy August 2005 Jewish Observer article entitled “Anatomy of a Slander.” (Available at www.JewishMediaResources.com and cross-currents.com) No need to rehash that dispute here.

But the most effective refutation of Zuroff came from Zuroff himself in his various writings, including the book whose sales he hoped to boost. In the Afterword to his book, he describes the lasting legacy of the Vaad to the Jewish people as “dedication to saving Jewish lives.” And he credits the “foreign-born, non-English speaking rabbis [who headed the Vaad]” with having led efforts to unite American Jews around rescue work.

In 2003, Zuroff wrote an effusive review of Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, which consists primarily of two interviews conducted by eminent historian David Wyman (The Abandonment of the Jews) with Hillel Kook (alias Peter Bergson) about the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe that he created. In his review, Zuroff fully concurs in Kook’s harsh judgment that mainstream Jewish leaders did everything possible to undermine the Emergency Committee and behaved, in Zuroff’s words, “as if large-scale rescue operations by the American government were either impossible or doomed to failure.” So much for the unity of mainstream American Jewry around rescue.

The pressure of the Bergsonites, working together with Orthodox rabbis, eventually resulted in the creation of the War Refugee Board, which, in Wyman’s estimation, saved 200,000-400,000 Jewish lives. Zuroff made no mention in his review of Hillel Kook’s own comments on his Orthodox allies: “[The Orthodox rabbis were more courageous…. [They] were simply more responsive, more – more Jewish, in a sense. They were more sensitive to the issue, and less affected by the environment.” Specifically discussing his close relationship with Vaad ha-Hatzala, Kook comments, “They operated on the old Jewish theological concept of ‘He who saves one soul, saves the whole world.'”

In short, Zuroff knew very well his charge against Rabbi Aharon Kotler, Rabbi Avrohom Kalmonowitz, and Rabbi Eliezer Silver of “disregard to the fate of other endangered Jews,” apart from a number of distinguished talmidei chachamim trapped in Europe, was baseless slander.

Can a more “instrumental” abuse of history be imagined than making slanderous charges to a media always eager to present great rabbinical leaders in a negative light in order to sell a few more copies of one’s book?

The post The Abuse of History appeared first on Cross-Currents.

To that question, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch notes, the historians had easy answers. The destructions of both Temples were hardly miraculous. Just the opposite: they followed THE normal rules of history. “How could tiny Judea have avoided falling prey to the rising Assyrian and Babylonian imperial powers! How could the insignificant power of Judea mount resistance to the mighty Roman legions!”

And the historians are right, Rabbi Hirsch pointed out. But they misunderstood the question that our Sages were asking. The surprise lay not in the defeats at the hands of the Babylonians and later the Romans. Rather the miracle was the “political existence of Judea for more than a thousand years, an existence for which every natural prerequisite was absent.” At the most vital crossroads of the ancient world, coveted by every major empire, how had the Jews maintained some level of independence for a millennium?

So the question our Sages asked was really: What happened to cause the miraculous Power to forsake Israel? Why did the same Power “Whose eagles’ wings alone raised Israel up to freedom and independence and had maintained it far above the inexorable life-cycle of nations . . . not rush to the scene when the Babylonian power poised to devour and the Roman legions stood poised to capture?” That is what our Sages were asking when they pondered the causes for the loss of Land.

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS BEFORE TISHA B’AV, G-d has revealed to us with absolute clarity how precarious is our existence and how much we are in need of Divine protection.

Once President Obama failed to act when Syrian dictator Bashar Assad crossed Obama’s self-imposed red line and used chemical weapons against the Syrian people, it was clear that all options were not on the table, and that Obama had thrown away all his leverage in advance of the negotiations with Iran. The American position would shift to “any deal is better than none,” as long as it avoids the use of military power during Obama’s term in office.

Obama is lying when he says that last week’s deal prevents Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. All restrictions on Iran end after little more than a decade. So at best, a nuclear Iran is almost inevitable between ten and fifteen years from now. And that’s if Iran does not cheat – something at which the Iranians have long practice and great expertise.

The contemplated inspections regime is so porous that Iran might not even have to follow the North Korean example and expel international inspectors before attaining a bomb. At the same time, the sanctions relief is so front-loaded, that the mullahs have little incentive not to renege at any point, especially once Teheran is awash with men in silk ties and fancy suits eager to sell Iran the rope with which to hang them. (More likely, the mullahs will rely on West leaders to avert their eyes to any violations, as they did throughout the negotiations, so as not to give lie to their legacy achievement.)

So we can pretty much count on living in the shadow of a nuclear Iran that, which vows to annihilate us a little more than a decade from now, and possibly sooner. In the meantime, we can happily contemplate what Hezbollah and Hamas can do with their share of the $100-150 billion in sanctions relief that will flow shortly into Iran’s coffers. Or how that money will be spent to train legions of Iranian hackers and cybersecurity experts to attack Israel and defend against counter-attacks.

FURTHER DISCUSSIONS OF THE AGREEMENT at this point are pointless baying at the moon: Obama achieved what he set out to do – turn Iran into the preeminent Middle Eastern power. Our task now is to figure out how to protect ourselves in the midst of a nightmare from which there is no waking: militarily, yes; but, even more importantly, spiritually.

Not just today, but since the creation of the state, the Jews of Israel have been dependent on Divine protection. James MacDonald, the first U.S. ambassador to Israel, once remarked that Israel is the only country in the world that factors 30% Divine intervention into every government decision. Reading Yehuda Avner’s The Prime Ministers one is struck by the number of times that Israel’s existence hung in the balance, and not just in during the 1948 and 1967 wars. If President Johnson had not responded positively to Prime Minister Eshkol’s plea for rearmament after the 1967 War, Israel would have been left without arms to defend itself from Arab armies bent on revenge. The successes of the Entebbe and Osirak raids rank as near open miracles.

The current situation also contains hints as to what we must do so that we do not find ourselves asking, like our Sages after the Destruction: “For what was the Land lost?” A nuclear-armed adversary helps to clarify one aspect of our situation: We are all in this together. An Iranian nuclear bomb would make no distinctions between religiously observant and secular, Sephardi and Ashkenazi.

We are being shown that enhancing Jewish unity — so that it becomes something freely chosen not forced upon us from Above — is the imperative of hour. The Midrash and Gemara in several places points out that the armies of the wicked Ahav were successful because there was peace and love between the Jewish soldiers, and they did not speak negatively about one another.

About 20 years ago, Rabbi David Geffen started an organization called Common Denominator to bring the full spectrum of Israeli Jews together by working on common projects. Before he started, he went to Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, then the greatest living halachic decisor, and asked him whether just lowering tensions between Jews would be a worthy endeavor, even if it had no impact on any participant’s religious observance. Rabbi Elyashiv told him that it would.

Rabbi Geffen also brought over a period of three years about 25,000 secular Jews to visit families in Meah Shearim. When he heard about that aspect of the project, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, a major American rosh yeshiva, had tears in his eyes, as he told Geffen, “If you can just teach chareidim to love chilonim as they are, without any connection to kiruv, you will accomplish more than all the kiruv groups, and might even bring Mashiach.”

Rabbi Weinberg’s point was that one Jew can only influence another Jew positively if the latter feels that the first genuinely loves him and seeks his good, and is not just motivated by a desire that everyone be like him.

The key to building that love is to focus on our fellow Jews’ virtues, and not spend our time taking their spiritual temperature. Most of us have at least some sense of our many failings. Yet when we look in the mirror, we tend to place more emphasis on our good points. Loving our fellow Jews as ourselves means defining them by their virtues, just as we do with respect to ourselves.

Last week, I heard Miriam Peretz speak. She lost both of her sons, Uriel and Eliraz, in combat. Her rock solid belief in the coming of Mashiach and the rebuilding of the Temple was palpable. She described how she has a small model of the Temple in her home. Two stones taken from the booby-trapped rock upon which her son Uriel was killed in Lebanon – one charred and the other washed clean by the rain — she imagines will be among the building stones of the Third Temple.

She told how her son Eliraz had called during fighting in Gaza to say that he had a few-hour break and was coming to see her. She told him to visit his wife and one-month-old daughter whom he had not yet seen. But he said that he did not have time to reach his home in Eli. Instead he met his wife in Jerusalem, and together they went to the Kotel. It would be the last time they would ever see each other.

Two weeks after Eliraz fell, his wife wrote a description of that last meeting, and how Eliraz told her before the Kotel with tears in his eyes, “Do you see? For this. For this, we live. For this do we beseech [G-d]. For this we fight. And for this, if it’s required, will we give up our lives.”

I cannot fathom how Mrs. Peretz had the strength to read that letter, and even to turn it to a source of optimism to an audience of young women starting sherut leumi. But she did. And with her words she shook me from any complacent assumption that only among the great tzaddikim of my chareidi community is such intense faith to be found.

May we all make the effort to get to know one another better, to be alert to the admirable qualities to be found in our fellow Jews, and through the increased love and unity between us not only merit protection from those who seek to wipe us out but also to see the Temple rebuilt and Tisha B’Av transformed from a day of mourning to one of rejoicing.

The post For What Was the Land Lost? appeared first on Cross-Currents.

Well, we know how well that worked out. Eight years later, North Korea kicked out international inspectors, and in 2006, it tested its first nuclear weapon underground. Wendy Sherman, the State Department policy coordinator for North Korea at the time of the signing of the Agreed Framework, just happens to have been the lead U.S. negotiator in nuclear talks with Iran since late 2013.

But it would be a mistake to make too much of the North Koran precedent. The Iranian deal that the U.S. is poised to sign, as I write, is worse, much worse, in every way than that with North Korea. North Korea at least had to kick out inspectors to go nuclear. The P5+1 agreement with Iran now on the table is so porous that inspections would be nearly useless. After first insisting that inspections would be “robust and instrusive,” anywhere and anytime, the final agreement now speaks of “managed access,” which would allow the Iranians to indefinitely stall the process of dispute resolution long enough to get rid of telltale signs of cheating.

Not only did the U.S. officials, including the president and secretary of state, cave on the issue. They proceeded to defend Iran’s position on the grounds that the United States would also not allow inspectors into its military installations. Hello! If Iran were the United States, the P5 would not have spent the last twelve years trying to defang its nuclear program, for which it has no conceivable civilian need.

But one must step back from the details of what President Obama has wrought to truly appreciate the full magnitude of the catastrophe. When the United States joined the P5 negotiations with Iran, it was the world’s sole superpower, as even the Iranians say in their anti-America demonstrations. The disparity between the military and economic power of the United States and Iran was enormous. As a result of the sanctions regime, Iran’s economy was in shambles, with runaway inflation coupled with a severe economic slowdown. (That slowdown was reversed in 2014 by the first sanctions relief.)

The pending agreement almost suggests that Obama has sought to grant Iran parity, to turn it not only into a “successful regional power,” in the President’s words, but into a full-fledged threat to the United States. The agreement does little, if anything, to limit Iran’s ballistic missile program, which means that Iranian submarines will be able in the not-too-distant future be able to strike from just a few hundred miles off America’s coast.

Moreover, the United States has apparently caved as well on removal of the arms embargo on Iran. As a consequence, Iran will within five years be able to purchase all the goodies, both defensive and offensive, in bankrupt Russia’s arsenal. And it will have plenty of cash with which to do so, thanks to up to $100 billion in near-term sanctions relief.

With its new toys – e.g, cruise missiles – Iran will be a lot closer to being able to make good on its constant threats to close the Straits of Hormuz, through which 30% of the world’s oil supply passes. The U.S. Fifth Fleet will soon be incapable of insuring freedom of passage through the Straits.

President Obama has dramatically upped the danger to the United States, and set the stage for an aggressive Iran to become a regional hegemon, by pursuing an agreement with open desperation, as if the West were supplicants suing for peace. And he has continued to do so, even as the crowds in Teheran on last Friday’s Al-Quds day howled “Death to America,” in the presence of Iran’s “moderate” president Rouhani. In his speech, Rouhani blamed the Zionist entity and the Global Arrogance (i.e., America) for bankrolling the internecine conflicts roiling the Muslim world. A Teheran newspaper pined for the day when the U.S. “which currently terrorizes the world will one fine day cease to be visible on the map of the world.

As the signing loomed, Supreme Leader Khameini addressed the Iranian people to assure them that the battle against the Global Aggressor would never end: “The campaign against arrogance is one of the principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the Holy Quran mandates the drive against arrogance.”

While the U.S. was serially capitulating to Iranian demands, the administration published a study that concluded that Iran’s support for international terrorist groups had not declined, and, in some respects, had even grown in the course of the negotiations.

Nor has Iran refrained from cheating on its commitments under the provisional agreement, as it continued to prevail at every stage in the negotiations. Despite administration claims that Iran has “frozen” enrichment under the provisional agreement, the Institute for Science and International Security estimates that it has enriched another four tons of low-enriched uranium, and has turned into oxide form (which cannot be easily weaponized) only about 5% of what was expected under the provisional agreement. And Germany’s domestic intelligence agency revealed last week that Iran has continued its efforts to procure technology for its ballistic missile and nuclear programs.

Nevertheless, the State Department continues to insist that Iran has met all its commitments under the provisional agreement. That willingness to whitewash violations and act as Iran’s lawyer bodes poorly for the efficacy of any inspection regime if a final agreement is signed.

ALL PRESIDENT OBAMA’S CAPITULATIONS are based on a whack-a-doodle theory that by rolling over and exposing our stomachs to the Iranians they will come to love us. The unremitting insults against America and assurances of perpetual enmity from Iran’s Supreme Leader should have put to rest that theory. But they didn’t.

Beyond the President himself, the chief exponent of this theory has been Deputy National Security Council advisor Ben Rhodes, whose academic expertise in national security consists of a MFA in creative writing. An agreement, he told the ubiquitous Jeffrey Goldberg, would make much more likely “an evolution in Iran’s behavior.” He points to the election of president Rouhani as an example of moderating trends in the Iranian population.

Rhodes is no doubt right that the majority of the Iranian population thoroughly detests the mullahs. But Rouhani is not the proof. He is a thoroughly vetted and completely controlled creature of the regime. If the administration were really concerned about the views of the population, it should have supported the 2009 Green Revolution against the regime for election fraud. But the agreement on the table now will only strengthen the regime by allowing it to decrease economic discontent with its sanctions windfall, and makes regime change less, not more, likely.

Ultimately, what neither Rhodes nor his boss can wrap their heads around is that no everyone or every group is motivated by pleasure and profit. The 1979 Islamic Revolution established a theocracy in Iran, which defined its purpose from the beginning as cleansing the Middle East of America’s corrupting influence. Only those who deny that religion can be the most powerful motivating factor – as we learn from suicide bombers – could fool themselves into thinking that the mullahs will ever transform themselves into a more congenial group.

EVEN PRESIDENT HOPE AND CHANGE, however, would have a hard time selling the dream of future amity between the U.S. and Iran. Instead President Obama, ably assisted by his Secretary of State and the latter’s team, has told a series of whoppers besides which, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” pales in comparison. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard helpfully breaks down some of those whoppers.

In April, President Obama insisted in a Rose Garden statement that “American sanctions on Iran for its support of terrorism, its human rights abuses, its ballistic missile program will continue to be fully enforced.” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew made the same promise at the Jerusalem Post conference at which he was booed in June. In the final agreement, however, virtually all sanctions and the United Nations arms embargo are removed.

Secretary of State Kerry emphatically insisted in April that Iran would detail all military dimensions of its nuclear program: “They have to do it. It will be done. . . . It will be part of a final agreement. It has to be.” But in late June, Kerry said the P5+1 is no longer “fixated” on the past, about which it has “absolute” knowledge, and focused only on the future.

Details of past nuclear work, however, are very much about the future, for without a baseline of past work, it is impossible for nuclear inspectors to assess what the Iranians are up to now. The claim of absolute knowledge of Iran’s past program is total nonsense. Gen. Michael Hayden, former CIA Director under President Obama, said a June conference sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies that American intelligence alone “will be insufficient to build up enough confidence . . . that an agreement is being honored.” The United States has in every instance been caught by surprise by other countries going nuclear – e.g. the Soviet Union in its day, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

As early as December 23, 2013, President Obama correctly noted that the Iranians had no need for an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful program. But under the agreement, the centrifuges in Fordow will all remain in place, and be capable of being quickly reconverted to enriching uranium, according to Olli Heinonen, former International Atomic Energy Agency deputy-director for safeguards.

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor described the “clear” American position in April 2012 that Iran must fully suspended enrichment as required by multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. Under the agreement, those Security Council resolutions will be history and Iran’s right to enrichment expressly recognized. The deal merely limits the number of centrifuges Iran can operate for a period of years.

Chief negotiator Wendy Sherman, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Iran’s ballistic missile program would have to be addressed as part of a comprehensive agreement. Now, she says, only ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads are of concern.

Most important, as mentioned above, the anytime, anywhere inspection regime has been replaced by “managed access” that the Iranians will be able to manipulate with ease.

EACH OF THE ORIGINAL AMERICAN POSITIONS reflected the minimal requirements for a tenable deal. The fact that each has been totally reversed demonstrates what a great deal this is for Iran’s Supreme Leader.

A bi-partisan group of American diplomats, legislators, policymakers and experts — including former CIA Director David Petraeus, State Department nuclear proliferation expert Robert Einhorn, Dennis Ross, who oversaw Iran policy in Obama’s first term, and Gary Samore, Obama’s former chief advisor on nuclear policy — issued a statement on June 24 setting forth the minimum standards for an acceptable agreement. Those conditions tracked the initial American stance, and none of them were achieved.

They listed five conditions: anytime, anywhere inspections; full disclosure by Iran of previous weaponization efforts; sanctions relief must begin only after the IAEA certifies that Iran has fully complied with its commitments; the deal must last for decades; and Iran must fully dismantle its nuclear infrastructure.

Instead as Iran’s semi-official Fars agency reported, the final agreement met all of Supreme Leader Khameini’s requirements, including the full removal of the arms embargo and all economic, financial, and banking sanctions, and the removal of all previous UN Security Council Resolutions relating to Iran’s nuclear program.

Stephen Hayes points out that the Iranians gained a wish list of all their policy objectives: international legitimization of a rogue state, a massive shift of power to an aggressive state sponsor of terror, the strengthening of the mullahs hold on power, and fully sanctioned nuclear threshold status.

Somewhere along the way, according to former CIA director Hayden, the President’s mantra went from “no deal is better than a bad deal” to “any deal is better than no deal.” And that’s what we got “any deal.” Once again “process” took over, until the worst nightmare for American negotiators was that Iran might say no. So we made them an offer they couldn’t refuse – their entire wish list.

The post A Very Bad Deal: Let Us Count the Ways appeared first on Cross-Currents.

But what strikes me most about the shul is not just the amount of Torah learning, but the closeness of the members to one another and their allegiance to the rav, Rabbi Yacov Shalom Felder. Shomrai Shabbos is a chevra of Jews who have joined together with other aspiring bnei aliyah to strengthen one another in the growth process. And in Rabbi Felder they have a rav focused on building a community and on the ruchniyos growth of each member, despite the heavy demands on his time as vice-chairman of the Rabbinical Vaad HaKashrus of Toronto. His success is reflected in the wide diversity of the community in terms of backgrounds, hashkafah, and dress – an increasingly rare phenomenon in an era where we too often obsess over distinctions based on fine differences.

The current issue of Klal Perspectives, an on-line policy journal (on whose editorial board I am the least active member), is devoted to the stress on today’s baalebatim from the multiple competing demands on their time and tensions involved in the transition from kollel to the working world. Rabbi Menachem Zupnik, rav of Bais Torah U’Tefillah of Passaic, notes in his important piece for the journal, “The Simple Jew is Not Simple,” three specific advantages of the Chassidic world with respect to the transition from full-time learning to the working world.

The first is the “greater appreciation for the exquisite beauty of simply being a frum Yid and performing mitzvos each day.” Second is the emphasis on chevra and the importance of being part of a group of like-minded seeking individuals. And the third is the desire for rabbinic mentoring. Each of those elements are found at Shomrai Shabbos.

Ironically, it may be easier to create a shul around common spiritual aspirations where few of the members learned for many years in post-high school yeshivos and kollelim. The members of Shomrai Shabbos or Rabbi Zupnick’s BTT, with its high percentage of ba’alei teshuva, are able to be excited about their Torah learning, without being distracted by thoughts that they once learned with greater iyun or a vague sense of failure that they are no longer in full-time learning. They never imagined that they would be roshei yeshiva one day.

And because the members of Shomrai Shabbos do not have the same loyalty and ongoing connection to a rosh yeshiva or a feeling that their real chabura are those with whom they learned in kollel (and from whom they may now feel slightly estranged) it is easier for them to attach closely to a rav whom they now see every day and to a new group of friends with whom they share a desire to grow in Torah.

My point is not, chas ve’Shalom, that former kolleleit cease to be bnei aliyah upon leaving kollel. There are hundreds of batei medrash in Boro Park, Flatbush, Monsey, not to mention Lakewood, where one can find any early morning or late evening former kolleleit learning with chavrusos with all their former fire. Rather my point is that the focus point of their continued growth is less likely to be the chevra of a particular shul.

Facilitating a less jolting transition between kollel and working world is a major subject of the current Klal Perspectives, and one to which we shall return in weeks to come.

The post A Model Shul appeared first on Cross-Currents.

Recently, we began the Ramchal’s Derech Hashem. In the first chapter, in which the Ramchal specifies what we can know about Hashem, he mentions that all these matters can be derived logically, but that he prefers to rely on the mesorah for his presentation. Elaborating on this comment, the rav made reference to the famous Ramban at the end of parashas Bo, which we have studied together many times.

The Ramban writes that Hashem does not perform open miracles in every generation, and that is why we have so many mitzvos that remind us of yetzias Mitzrayim. The parashiyos of Tefillin, for instance, serve as a constant reminder of what we witnessed in Egypt. And each of us is commanded to “transmit the matter to our children, and our children to their children, and their children to their own children, until the last generation.”

The power of that mesorah from generation to generation – that which assures us that “the matter is true without any doubt” – writes the Ramban elsewhere (Devarim 4:9) is the assumption that “we will not witness falsely to our children.” Because a person will not lie to his child about the most important matters we can rely on the unbroken chain of transmission to verify the miracles recorded in the Torah with absolute certainty.

It follows from the Ramban that any time a parent says anything with even a tinge of falsehood or deception to his or her child, the negative impact is cosmic. For if a parent does so, he or she has thereby undercut in his or her child’s mind the chazaka that a parent will not witness falsely to his child and thus the entire basis upon which our mesorah from generation to generation is based. That is something that should give each of us pause every time we promise our children something and do not follow through or otherwise distort the truth.

I mentioned this conclusion to my teacher and friend, Rabbi Dovid Affen, and he told me a story involving Rabbi Chatzkel Levenstein that confirmed the insight and took it a step farther. Rabbi Affen is the son-in-law of the late Rabbi Aryeh Leib Bakst, Rosh Yeshiva Bais Yehuda of Detroit. Rabbi Bakst spent the entire war together with Reb Chatzkel in Shanghai, and the two became very close.

In the 1950s or 60s in Israel, there was a young child in Bnei Brak, who suddenly began quoting pages and pages of Gemara b’al peh, in a manner that defied explanation. News of the miracle child spread around the Jewish world. Rabbi Bakst in Detroit wrote to Reb Chatzkel and asked him whether he had gone to visit the child and verify the matter for himself.

Reb Chatzkel wrote that he had not. Since his son-in-law had done so, for him to travel to verify the matter would show a certain lack of trust in his son-in-law. And that lack of trust, Reb Chatzkel wrote, would at some very fine level undermine the belief in what others tell us that is the foundation of the mesorah.

The ability to trust one another is the glue without which society cannot function, but it is something else as well: it is the basis of our mesorah.

The post The Basis of Our Mesorah: Parents Worthy of Trust appeared first on Cross-Currents.

There are no doubt many reasons and many culprits. But I would place the political Left pretty close to the top of the list. The Left’s denigration of American military strength and its leadership role in a unipolar world after 1989 and the denial of American exceptionalism – i.e., the United States’ unique history as a nation not based on blood and soil, but on allegiance to a particular system of government in the form of the Constitution – have come at the expense of national pride.

Finally, the Left’s ruthless will to power, with scant regard for the rules of the game or the levelness of the playing field, has made American politics far more divisive than I remember. In 2012, President Obama pursued a campaign strategy of stitching together a slim majority based on a variety of identity issues, such as the trumped up “Republican war on women,” each aimed at a different demographic, while ignoring the major issues facing the United States and the world. Hillary Clinton has already made clear that she intends to replicate Obama’s 51% strategy.

The situation in Israel, I would argue, is dramatically better. Despite facing threats to its existence without parallel in the world, Israeli Jews remain far more optimistic about the future than Americans. That optimism is reflected in fertility rates nearly one child per woman higher than any other OECD country. The dangers of missile attack and now a nuclear Iran (courtesy of Obama and Kerry), threaten all Israelis equally and create an element of common identity.

NEVERTHELESS, IT MUST BE ADMITTED that Israel presaged America in two respects that have had much to do with the increasingly bitter divide in America: a mainstream media mobilized on behalf of one political perspective and an overweening judiciary.

Democratic government, defined in terms of placing the lawmaking power in the hands of the people’s representatives who must stand before the voters at regular and relatively short intervals, lessens social tensions. As long as the playing field is level and the rules adhered to, every voter knows that if his or her views do not prevail today, they may prevail in the future.

Democratic (or more properly republican) government depends on a number of societal institutions for its success, among them a judiciary that protects minority rights, in particular freedom of speech and press. That judiciary, however, must not turn itself via Constitutional “interpretation” into a super-legislature comprised of a handful judges. And the press must justify the freedom granted it by acting as a watchdog of the government in power and viewing the creation of an informed citizenry as a sacred responsibility.

For those who believe that the immediate triumph of their views trumps everything else, however, the rules of the game or proper institutional roles are of little importance. All that counts is winning, and whatever it takes will do. To get a sense of the mentality compare The New York Times editorials on the power to filibuster when Democrats in are in the majority (filibuster is sacred) and when Republicans are in the minority (filibuster is an outmoded holdover from the past).

Winning at all costs has long been the motto of Israel’s mainstream media, whose leading figures have not hesitated to describe themselves as fully “mobilized” for a variety of causes. Even those who have held positions in public broadcasting have tended to treat air time as a private soapbox for the promotion of their political views. Thus Israel Broadcasting anchor Chaim Yavin once boasted that that only because of the media did the first intifada lead to Oslo.

After Binyamin Netanyahu’s first electoral victory in 1996, Maariv’s Ron Meiberg confessed, “Never were we so motivated to bring down the prime minister and hold him up for ridicule.” As an example, two senior editors on the Mabat nightly news, spliced film of a Betar Jerusalem rally to make it look as if, Binyamin Netanyahu was waving and smiling in response to chants of “Death to the Arabs.” When the disgraced editors were fired by the Uri Porat, director of Israeli Public Broadcasting, the National Federation of Journalist rallied to their defense.

But the mobilization began long before the election. When Bibi’s opponent Shimon Peres uttered the words, “Stupid Arabs,” in the presence of numerous journalists, in response to rioting by Israeli Arabs, the story went largely unreported, as the journalists all realized it would sink Peres’s electoral chances, which depended on a large Israeli Arab turnout. (In a similar vein, when Court President Aharon Barak commented that a search for a Sephardi Supreme Court justice would diminish the quality of the Court, his comment too went largely unreported, lest the last bastion of Israel’s Left fall into further disrepute.)

After the Rabin assassination, Limor Livnat stoutly defended the Likud against the charge of complicity in the murder on the popular Popolitika show, prompting the producer of the show, Aaron Goldfinger, to proclaim, “as long as I’m producing this show, there will never be another show in which the Right comes out on top.”

Following the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, which gave rise to the Hezbollah threat, Hanan Naveh, the chief editor on the IBA’s news desk at the time, boasted that he and two broadcasters – Carmella Menashe, IBA’s military reporter, and Shelly Yachimovich, the host of the morning news show – had taken upon themselves the mission of getting the IDF out of Lebanon.

WHILE ISRAEL may have once been the democratic world’s leader in a mobilized media, the United States has caught up and then some. Long gone are the days when the nightly news broadcasts carried any aura of objectivity or anyone believed The New York Times contains all the news fit to print.

Sheryl Atkinson, whose award-winning career at CBS News came to an end over her too eager pursuit of the Benghazi story, has proposed a test whereby readers are invited to imagine how different the media coverage would have been had it involved a Republican rather than a Democrat. Can one imagine a Republican candidate getting away with not releasing his college and law school records – records that likely show he applied as a foreign student – as candidate Barack Obama did in 2008 (and since)? Or the media proving so incurious about what a Republican candidate might have been listening to for 20 years in the pews of his fire-breathing pastor, or why the records of a foundation on whose board he sat and which was headed by a former violent radical were sealed to researchers prior to the 2008 election?

Imagine that a former Republican secretary of state had deliberately violated her department’s own rules over email use, by creating a private (and easily hacked) server, so as to maintain complete control over the record of her term in office. Would a Republican candidate still be viable who had signed off on granting control of half the world’s uranium reserves to Russia, while her husband was receiving half million dollar speaking fees from those with a huge financial stake in the deal?

If there is one institution in American life that has to be above any suspicion of partisanship, it is the Internal Revenue Service. Thus evidence that the IRS treated the applications for tax exempt status from conservative and pro-Israel organizations differently, and that the official in charge, Lois Lerner, deliberately destroyed her hard-drive as part of a cover-up, as did numerous colleagues whose emails were subpoenaed, should have been the big scandal of President Obama’s first term in office. But it has gotten scant mainstream media attention.

The week before Supreme Court’s decision saving Obamacare from legal challenge for the second time, the Wall Street Journal had a long article on 20,000 pages of emails between MIT economist Jonathan Gruber and the White House during the drafting of Obamacare. It was Gruber, readers will recall, who was taped at a healthcare conference explaining how the very provision Chief Justice Roberts found to be ambiguous in King v. Burwell – and thus a fit subject for his redrafting — had been carefully written to force states to set up their own healthcare exchanges.

The release of the Gruber emails should have been a huge story for two reasons. First, it established that Gruber was a major figure in the drafting of Obamacare and that his testimony on the laws provisions is highly creditable. And second, that the administration lied through its teeth, when it portrayed him as a bit player who had little input into the law. Yet with the exception of the WSJ, the story of the emails received almost no mention in the mainstream media, and none at all in the news pages of the NYT and Washington Post.

ONCE FORMER COURT PRESIDENT AHARON BARAK was the world standard bearer for the usurpation of legislative authority by the judiciary. Professor Ruth Gavison pointed out that no high court in the world played the same oversized role in establishing societal norms in every possible area that the Israeli Supreme Court does, even in the absence of a written constitution. During his reign, Barak was never troubled by the question of who should establish legal norms in a democracy. He and his colleagues on the Court gladly undertook the role, in the words of his predecessor as Court President Moshe Landau, of Platonic Guardians self-empowered by virtue of their superior wisdom to make decisions in every area – even the deployment of troops in wartime, according to Barak – for which they had no training. Nor when making those decisions did Barak even feel the need to consider the views of the majority of the citizenry. Enough, Barak wrote, to reflect the opinions of the “enlightened” members of his society, which mirable dictu, inevitably turned out to be his own opinions as well.

But Barak now has a competitor: Justice Anthony Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court, who felt competent to reverse the collective wisdom of every major religion and every known polity until fifteen years ago and declare same-gender marriage to be constitutionally required. Rather than let the legislative process play itself out in the fifty states, Kennedy and the bloc of four liberal justices who joined him and whose votes were never in doubt because liberals can always be counted on to reliably vote their political views decided to short-stop the process.

The consequences of constitutionalizing same-gender marriage will be enormous and potentially devastating for religious Americans of all faiths, despite some feeble attempts by Kennedy to reassure them that their free speech would be protected. School curricula will be altered to promote the new right. Opponents will come to be viewed as bigots comparable to the axe-wielding Lester Maddox.

At oral argument, Solicitor-General Donald Verrilli Jr., was asked whether religious schools and institutions faced the threat of the loss of tax-exempt status if the Court found in favor of a constitutional right. He admitted that there was a distinct possibility. And he was right.

Last week’s decision was this generation’s Roe v. Wade, the imposition of a nationwide social transformation by judicial fiat. Already in my long ago days in law school, the dirty secret of Roe vs. Wade was that it was incomprehensible on legal grounds. Already then there existed a cottage industry of law professors busy writing alternative opinions to that which Justice Harry Blackmun had actually written.

Kennedy, like Blackmun before him, made no real attempt to justify his decision on constitutional grounds. After all, it can not be seriously argued on equal protection grounds that there is no relevant distinction between traditional marriage and that to which the U.S. Supreme Court granted constitutional protection, chief among them the procreative capacity of the former.

One can imagine Justice Kennedy penning his embarrassing, sophomoric fatuities about the mysteries of existence picturing himself as the voice of profundity. But as Chief Justice Roberts put it in his sharply worded dissent, the one thing that could be said confidently of the decision was that it “had nothing to do with the Constitution.”

On such occasions, however, the last and truest word belongs to Justice Antonin Scalia. He focused, as conservatives frequently do and progressives never, on the hubris of nine justices making a decision that is properly left to the legislatures of every state. “The five justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every state violated the Constitution for all 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts permitting of same-gender marriages in 2003. . . . [T]hey know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry.”

In response to the judicial usurpation, Scalia wrote, “A system of government that makes the People subservient to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”

The post Israel Led the Way — Sadly appeared first on Cross-Currents.

The evening’s conversation was wide-ranging, though much centered on why this particular young man felt as soon as he landed at Kennedy Airport at 18 that he would never return to live in his native Israel.

As I was putting on my overcoat to leave, he related that he had once asked his father how it was that he seemed so comfortable with all his children despite their great differences from one another – some are in full-time learning, others in business or klal work; some live in Israel; others in America. His father answered him succinctly: “Because I chose to be.”

That struck me as another example of the great wisdom I have heard from my friend over the past quarter century. As parents, the temptation to live vicariously through our children is constant. If we have had successes in life, we want them to be successful in the same way. And if we have suffered disappointments, we hope for their accomplishments to erase those disappointments.

How many young men do we see harmed by their father’s insistence on pushing them into prestigious yeshivos for which they are ill-suited because of the reflected glory of having a son in such a yeshiva? How many unhappy marriages are caused by parents who fail to focus on what their son and daughter need or want in a spouse, and instead concern themselves with the yichus or bank account of the mechutanim?

In an important short work on dealing with struggling teenagers, soon to appear in English, Rabbi Uri Zohar devotes a great deal of attention to the importance of creating a line of open communications with our children long before they enter their teenage years. That means, inter alia, showing an interest in what is important to them, and making sure that they feel comfortable sharing their feelings.

But there is one kind of frequent communication that should be avoided: that which centers exclusively on the child’s test scores, or how highly they are evaluated by others. Constant questions about test scores or popularity or how many points they scored in a basketball game convey the message to our children that they are important to us not for themselves but only for the glory they confer on us. Rather than building a relationship such communication destroys it.

My friend happens to be a major talmid chacham. I have no idea whether any of his sons will approach his level in learning. But by accepting each of his children for what he or she is, he has made it possible for each to develop his or her own potential to the fullest.

“BECAUSE I CHOSE TO BE,” however, is not just good advice on how to relate to our children. It has implications for every aspect of our lives. We live in an age where the very idea of free will is under assault. There are those who argue that all our apparent choices can be understood in terms of certain neural impulses, and that as our understanding of the brain advances, we will be able to predict how a person will react in every circumstance.

The Torah view, of course, rejects that view. Our lives are defined at every moment by the choices we make: “I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; choose life” (Devarim 30:19).

But even we Torah Jews often succumb to determinism. For as depressing as it would be to conceive oneself as lacking free will, it is often consoling to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our actions and to imagine that we could not have acted otherwise.

Literary critic Gary Saul Morrison observes acutely (in the April Commentary) of one of Tolstoy’s most famous literary creations, Anna Karenina, that she told herself that she had no choice but to succumb to her passions. And that, indeed, is how most modern readers view her. But that was not Tolstoy’s view. Morrison shows how the novelist subtly conveyed “her loss of will [as something] willed.” Even as she feels drawn into a vortex, Tolstoy writes, “She would surrender or resist at will.”

We tend to view our happiness or lack of it as something forced upon us by external circumstances over which we have no control. Yet if we think about the people we know, we will realize how little external circumstances have to do with happiness and how much it has to do with how we relate to those circumstances.

We all know those who have endured one or more tragedies that we imagine would leave us unable to function, and yet maintain a sunny, upbeat disposition and the ability to rejoice in their blessings. And we know others seemingly blessed with all that most people seek, and yet who suffer from anhedonia and seem unable to take pleasure in those blessings.

Some of these differences in disposition are innate. But to a large extent they are chosen. Happiness is quality of the soul, not something imposed upon us.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes in Stumbling Upon Happiness how most people when they hear Siamese twins or people who are disabled in some crucial way say that they are happy deny the possibility that they are telling the truth because they cannot imagine themselves being happy in those circumstances.

That is why handicapped and disabled people are always at the forefront of any campaign against legislation that would confer on doctors the power to terminate lives that are no longer “worth it.” Human beings are notoriously poor predictors of what will make them happy, much less what can make others happy. And much of the reason is the failure to appreciate the element of choice involved.

“Because I choose to be happy” is not just sound advice on how to relate to our children, but on everything else is life as well.

The post Because I Chose To Be appeared first on Cross-Currents.

Seven million Jews in Israel are likely doomed to live in perpetuity under the shadow of a nuclear bomb due to President Obama’s refusal to countenance military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, despite constant assurances to the contrary. American Jews twice voted for Obama in higher percentages than any other non-black group, despite clear indications he is, in the words of former peace-processor Aaron David Miller, not exactly “in love with the idea of Israel.”

Meanwhile, the failure of American Jewry to offer its children any coherent account of why the continued existence of the Jewish people matters, not just for Jews but the entire world, has paved the way for a headlong rush towards oblivion. Four out of five marriages involving non-Orthodox American Jews today are intermarriages, which will lead to rapid demographic decline and highly attenuated identity.

Surveying this scene, Eric Cohen, executive director of the Tikvah Fund, has issued a clarion call in Mosaic for the “spirit of Jewish conservatism.” Jewish conservatism, as described by Cohen, is a three-legged stool based on defense of the traditional family; support for the nation-state and national sovereignty, in general, and that of Israel, in particular; and a conviction that free-markets best ensure societal prosperity and individual liberty.

Tikvah advances these ideals through a number of publications and various institutes led by many of the world’s leading conservative public intellectuals. The most important of the institutes are the lengthy summer programs for Jewish high school and college students, in both Israel and America. For if there is one type of diversity to which future Jewish leaders are unlikely to be exposed on campus it is diversity of thought, in particular conservative thought.

I have participated in several Tikvah institutes, and was on the staff last summer of a program specifically designed for yeshiva students. I’m sympathetic to each of the legs of Cohen’s “Jewish conservatism.”

COHEN SEEKS TO GROUND Jewish conservatism in both the requirements of contemporary Jewish life and classical Jewish sources. That is most easily done with respect to the traditional family. Family has always served as the primary vehicle for the transmission of the tradition to succeeding generations. Morning and night, we recite in the Shema the commandment to “Teach them [i.e., the commandments] thoroughly to your children.”

The breakdown of the traditional Jewish family is closely tied to the demographic disaster facing American Jewry. The median Jewish age in America is seven years older than the national average. Jewish women are less likely to marry, and when they do, they have fewer children.

Support for the nation-state and its ability to defend itself is also well grounded in Jewish sources. The Jewish people are more accurately described as a nation than as members of a particular faith. Only the Jews experienced revelation as an entire people at Sinai, and were there entrusted with a national mission – the revelation of G-d to the world. That revelation encompasses not just religious law, but civil and criminal law as well. Halacha – e.g., the prohibition of taking interest from another Jew — repeatedly emphasizes the special concern owed by Jews to one another as partners in a common mission.

Not by accident did Jean Bodin, the first great theorist of national sovereignty, draw heavily on Jewish sources from both Tanach and Talmud. An entire field, political Hebraism, has arisen delineating the influence of Jewish sources on the development of modern political thought.

With respect to free markets matters become trickier. The traditional economies of European Jewish communities often had numerous anti-competitive features, including extensive licensing of the right to sell certain goods and services. It is impossible to read the Torah as anticipating Adam Smith. At most, certain Torah values were necessary conditions for the development of free markets: equality before the law; the high value assigned to being self-supporting from the labor of one’s hands; stress on property rights; and the absence of hostility to the accumulation of wealth.

Wealth, like poverty, is a test, and it entails extensive duties and responsibilities, but it is not an evil per se. At the same time, the Torah offers no support for the unbounded individualism of an Ayn Rand, but rather emphasizes the interlocking responsibilities and duties owed to one’s fellow.

NO TORAH JEW WOULD EXPECT to divine from the Torah the solution to all contemporary political or economic debates. The G-d-given Torah is not congruent with any humanly derived ideology or political party. At best, the latter can be judged for compatibility with the Torah.

Moreover, the Torah was given in very different circumstances than our own. It was designed to govern a single people bound by a common mission, not for country with a pluralism of peoples and beliefs, the challenge of which the American founding fathers struggled. And it was given in a period when G-d’s Providence was manifest. That period ended with prophecy.

To note the impossibility of mapping any particular economic or political structure from the Torah is not to denigrate the study of economics or the American constitutional faith. G-d instructed Adam to exercise dominion over the created world, and that includes forming communities facilitating the creation of national wealth and prosperity, in which diverse people can live together peacefully.

I NOTE THE DIVERGENCE OF TORAH and any particular secular ideology for two reasons. First, to avoid conflating Torah with Jewish nationalism. Dr. David Luchins, a long-time advisor to Senator Daniel Moynihan, visited Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik the night of Menachem Begin’s stunning 1977 electoral triumph. Luchins expected to find Rabbi Soloveitchik elated. But just the opposite was the case.

Rabbi Soloveitchik explained, “Until now, we [i.e., the religious Zionists] knew our place in Labor-led governments: We were a brake on a bus plummeting downhill [from all connection to traditional Judaism]. But Begin speaks our language – he speaks of Eretz Yisrael.” The Rav feared that religious Jews would be too eager to ignore the distinction between Torah and secular nationalism.

Second, it is crucial to note the limits of “Jewish” conservatism as sufficient to secure the Jewish future by offering a compelling reason for Jews to marry other Jews.

Jewish pride is at best a stopgap measure. (Cohen does not suggest otherwise.) Those for whom Jewish identity is prominent are more likely to marry other Jews than those for whom it is tertiary, and based on ethnic foods and a sense of humor. Rabbi Noach Weinberg, a pioneer of the modern ba’al teshuva movement, always encouraged Jewish activism, “fighting for the Jewish people,” as a means of encouraging young Jews to investigate more deeply what it means to be a Jew.

But Jewish pride is not readily transmitted, especially when removed from the context of close-knit ethnic neighborhoods. Compare the jubilation with which American Jews greeted Israel’s creation in 1948, with the widespread indifference of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren today. Over half of American Jews under 35 say they would not view the destruction of Israel as a personal tragedy.

Clergy of the liberal branches of Judaism have long been adept at citing prooftexts from the Torah to show that whatever is au courant – e.g., a nuclear freeze, in my youth – the Torah thought of first. I doubt that a conservative version of the same will be more effective in attaching young listeners to the Jewish people. Once ideas, whether benevolent or pernicious, become the common property of mankind, shared by those of various religions or none, it makes more sense to choose one’s spouse on the basis of shared politics than shared religion.

THE MISSING ELEMENT in Cohen’s account of Jewish conservatism is chosenness. Chosenness is a recurrent theme in the Torah, which variously describes the Jewish people as: “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation,” “My special treasure among the nations,” “My son, my firstborn son, Israel.” Jews have been hated since ancient times for their fierce endogamy and holding themselves apart.

Yet modern Jews find the doctrine of Jewish chosenness an embarrassment. In a 1996 Commentary symposium on the state of Jewish belief, the heterodox clergy refused to unambiguously affirm the Jews as Hashem’s chosen people.

Only Orthodox Jews experience no discomfort with the idea. It is part of their daily reality. The Torah Jew’s life focuses around the observance and study of the Torah’s commandments. As a consequence, he knows that he has been chosen as the sole recipient of Hashem’s Torah, for the Torah’s 613 mitzvos bind only Jews. Before he begins a day filled with Torah study, he recites the blessing, “Who has chosen us from among all the nations and given us His Torah.”

Cohen is passionately committed to the future of the Jewish people. He subscribes to a Jewish ethic of power “that treats the preservation of Jewish civilization and the Jewish nation as the first and greatest moral imperative entrusted to Jewish leaders and citizens.”

But the threats from within are, if anything, even greater than those from without. And combating the threat from within requires first and foremost a deep exposure to the distinct values and commandments for which Jews have always been willing to give up their lives guided by those who would still be prepared to make that choice today.

The post Jewish Conservatism and Its Limits appeared first on Cross-Currents.

A few days later, I came across an essay in First Things by Maureen Mullarkey, describing her feelings upon being told by a Jewish jewelry store owner that he would not sell her a particular wedding ring. The reminiscence was triggered by the author’s realization that in today’s more contentious climate she could have protested the denial with “accusations of anti-Christian bigotry,” and likely have had a legal case against the store owner.

Such a reaction, however, never occurred to her or her fiancé, and her description of why serves as a model of respect for the religious beliefs of others.

Mullarkey describes how she and her fiancé went searching for wedding rings in New York City’s diamond district. They found exactly what they were looking for in the showcase of an older jeweler, his forearm tattooed with his identification number from a concentration camp. Her eyes were drawn to simple bands embossed with phrases from Tanach in Hebrew letters. She chose Ruth’s words to Naomi, “. . . wither thou goest. . .” for her ring. She ached to claim the “stirring statement of friendship . . . for myself and wear it for the rest of my life.”

The jeweler asked them whether they were Jewish or in the process of converting to Judaism. Told that they were not, he refused to sell them a ring with that Biblical phrase.

Mullarkey understood why. The passage from which the words she chose are taken concludes, “thy people shall be my people and thy G-d my G-d.” The words she had selected, she writes, were not just about friendship. “The story of Ruth is one of conversion that affirms the Jewish nation. It testifies to peoplehood.”

The intensity of the store owner’s “concern to honor the sacred core of the text” moved the young couple. They perceived the “grace in his refusal,” and why he could not grant them the words they craved. For had he done so, “he would have violated the grandeur of them. Ruth’s commitment was not simply to another person but to a covenanted community bound together since the call of Abraham.”

They recognized the jeweler’s moral right not to sell to them. More, they felt themselves in the presence of one of those borders – between Jew and gentile – without which a nation cannot survive nor a culture endure. “That day in the Diamond Exchange we stumbled against the very wall a man had clung to in the camps. It was the same one that had kept Jewry from disappearing centuries before modern nation states existed.”

The post Respect for the Dignity of Others appeared first on Cross-Currents.