Life-saving duties and the "observant" doctor

In the Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society (LVII - love the classy Roman numerals!), Howard J. Apfel, a pediatric cardiologist, rabbi, and teacher at the boys' high school of Yeshiva University, presents a thoughtful and detailed article entitled "Life-saving duties on Shabbat: switching call with a nonobservant Jew."

This being an Orthodox journal, there are a number of premises I don't agree with. The first(implied but present nonetheless) is that all Jews are either "observant" or "non-observant." In reality, while Jewish religious observance is a spectrum, what the author means here by "observance" is membership in the [ultra-?]Orthodox community, which has certain sociological criteria. Thus, while I'm an observant doctor, I am not an "observant" doctor for the purposes of this article.

The second premise is that contemporary halachic decision-making must be attendant on the gnomic public pronouncements of great ultra-Orthodox rabbis. We've talked about this.

But putting those premises aside, there's something else to talk about:

"[W]hile the non-observant doctor or soldier fully intends to save life, they are also deliberately doing the prohibited actions involved [on the Sabbath] for personal gain (for example to receive their pay, or to avoid being fired or prosecuted) as well."

I won't go into the details of the halachic argument, but I will point out that the understanding of motivations here is deficient. Doctors, soldiers, and other people walk around with multiple motivations, some of them primary, some of them secondary. Some of these motivations recede into the background and on occasion cannot even be recognized by the person so motivated. But in the majority of cases, people aren't motivated this way at all! No one thinks, "I need to put in these medication orders or I won't get paid"; "if I don't go check on the patient, I'll get fired"; "if I don't put in this IV, someone will sue me successfully."

Well, maybe some doctors do, but not the good ones.

Why People Become Cannibals

There's cameraderie.

There's shared values.

They practice what they preach.

And there's always someone to have for Shabbos lunch.

[thanks to House of Gil for laying out the principles]

Too bad!

I'm sorry Abbott Katz (great name! - is it for real?) has a problem with "ultra-Orthodox". (I prefer "benighted Yiddish-speakers," myself. Or "Cholentists.")

I have a problem with "Orthodox." Not with the term itself but its use. Whenever someone is observant, or considers themselves bound by halachah, the term "Orthodox" is always put into play in the article describing them. This seems to happen most often in the Times.

I do accept the term when my work friends or colleagues use it to describe me, because they're not looking for a lecture on twentieth-century Jewish religious or intellectual history. But I'd rather be called Conservative, or frum-egal, or sho(y)mer mitsvo(s/t), or (halachically) observant/pious/devout/hyper-religious, or (failing all else) "that guy with the yarmulke/kippah/lid/skullcap/hat."

Annals of theocracy: special Jerusalem riots edition
Condemnation please?

It is probably too much to ask that Stateside religious Zionists (and I mean the Orthodox variety) distance themselves from this sort of loutish talk:

Israel’s chief rabbinate issued a statement Monday [against a planned gay pride parade in Jerusalem] calling Israel’s homosexuals the “lowest of people."

But it would be nice.

Shabbos Dinner

On cleaning out some files, I found this account of a memorable Shabbos dinner with some disaffected Jews, originally published in the now-defunct journal Response in 1999 or 2000. Given the recent publication of Unchosen, I thought it might of interest for some. I know you're not supposed to publish long blogposts, but I couldn't figure out what else to do with it. This is exceptionally long, though; my apologies.

I should also say that I wrote this a number of years ago; I'm posting it unedited, because it's beyond editing. I wouldn't write the same thing now, and I probably wouldn't even have the same opinions.

Let's meet some disaffected Orthodox youth.

I've been invited to a Shabbat dinner in Brooklyn Heights by my visiting friend Yosl, an ex-Hasid, nigunim instructor, and occasional pizza boy living until recently in Omaha, Nebraska.

Although language is more often context than cause, you can say that I got to know Yosl through Yiddish. I was introduced to the language in high school, when my senior English teacher – a brilliant diabetic with thick glasses, little tolerance for fools, and a limited interest in pedagogy – suggested I study Yiddish, which she knew from home, as a filler for one of my free periods. She didn’t instruct me per se, but her suggestion was enough to get me started. Some of my most productive hours of high school were spent in the back of Ms. Donsky’s German class (she knew a half-dozen languages, I think), reading the Yiddish Forward while my recalcitrant contemporaries broke their teeth on German verbs. I’m not sure what everyone else thought I was doing. (I don’t know what Ms. Donsky is doing now, either. The last I heard she was living in Ohio with her sister. I don’t think of her enough, considering the importance of what she introduced me to.)

Thus I started up the slope, wanting to learn a little bit more, then learning that extra little bit and finding that the unknown extended even farther than I had thought. I read Yiddish books voraciously through high school and college (although my academic studies were not in Yiddish). I started writing Yiddish poetry, which has been published in most of the depressingly small-circulation journals that still exist in the secular (non-Charedi) world. I am active in Yugntruf, a Yiddish-speaking young people’s organization. In short, Yiddish-language promotion and creativity is a large part of what I spend my time on.

I am not one of those who became attracted to Yiddish as a means of escape from the religious community. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there – in comfortable suburbia, away from the infighting and unreflective extremism that characterizes New York Jewry – I was exposed to a self-confident if unpunctilious brand of Conservative Judaism. My parents, themselves quite proficient in Hebrew and very knowledgeable Jews, gave me the grounding I needed pursue my Jewish education on my own.

Since high school I have become considerably more observant than my parents; in the inaccurate and obsolete taxonomy favored by mass-market Jewish publications, I am “Conservadox” – that is, on the right edge of the Conservative movement. Some might call me a “baal teshuvah” (a “returnee” to the faith), but I avoid the term due to its unpleasant connotations of blind religiosity. If I might be allowed a more flattering self-description, I try to remain within halachah – the system of Jewish law – while recognizing its inconsistencies and remaining open to necessary, modifying challenges from personal intellect and modern morality.
And that’s why I’m so involved with Yiddish. Not because the language itself embodies any exceptional qualities: Yiddish is no funnier than, say, Portugese, with all due respect to the popularity of Leo Rosten and his ilk; and it’s no guarantor of peace and love, either, having been used as a means to intolerance on both the left (Stalinist) and right (ultra-Orthodox) ends of the spectrum. But Yiddish and Yiddish-language creativity have in modern times been inextricably associated with those wrenching historical transformations which have most indelibly affected the soul and the society of the Jew: from all-encompassing religion to all-challenging urbanization; from certainty to radical doubt; from “God, Israel, and the Torah are one” to a smorgasbord of competing ideologies.

As I make my way as a Jew, I find in the history of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewry a mirror – the old kind, with a decorative frame and mottled glass – of my own doubts and internal conflicts. Knowing Yiddish also affords me an appreciation of those Jews who are modern, but in a different mode – those dissatisfied Charedim who must pass from one sort of self-denying modernity, heavily accessorized to pass for what some imagine to have been 19th-century Eastern European Orthodoxy, into another modernity, broader and more confident, stripped almost bare of myth and religion.

So I follow with eager attention the goings on of Charedi society, and the often labyrinthine tales of those who pass from it into the wider world. (Charedi is a less pejorative and foreign-sounding term for “ultra-Orthodox,” the word often favored in the press. “Chasidic” is inaccurate, since many Charedim are not adherents of Chasidic philosophy and teaching.) That’s the passage my friend Yosl is traversing. He was born in Williamsburg, studied in a number of yeshivas in Brooklyn and Israel, got married – and decided, as the culmination of many years of theological doubt, that he did not want to have kids, because he did not want to raise any children as Orthodox Jews. He left the marriage and Charedi society, moving to Omaha.

I met Yosl at a Yiddish conference in New Jersey which was held (need you ask?) on the grounds of a Catholic college. I was fascinated by his personal history and drawn even more by his flouting of the rules of polite society. At this conference there was a book fair, and a certain newly-published volume on women and Yiddish was being offered for sale and autographs by the authors. Although I ended up buying the book, I expressed to Yosl some (I thought) subtle and quiet reservations about one of the essays. Yosl turned to one of the women and said in a loud voice, “Sholem says this book is bullshit.” There are more examples.

For a time I accepted Yosl’s unsubtleties with an ignorant tolerance: he’s an ex-Charedi, and must have “trouble adjusting.” He must not “be accustomed” to the rules that we follow on this side of the Williamsburg Bridge. In short, I made allowances for him (to myself) much as I would for an autistic child.

But not too long ago a friend pointed out the obvious to me: that’s just the way he is. “He gives the rest of us ex-Os a bad name,” said my friend. “He’s only drifting because he wants to drift.” Indeed, another ex-Charedi acquaintance of mine (who left that society at 16) is a rising young film-maker, well connected to just about anyone in the world of the Jewish culturally hip. Dislocation does not mean what I thought it would mean: sometimes it’s the perfect route to creative transformation; sometimes it amplifies the banalities already present; and sometimes it makes bottomless canyons out of little cracks in the psyche.

Why did I come to this dinner? I find the ex-Charedi crowd entertaining, and I think I might learn something about today’s Jews, a group close to my heart. In the circles I travel in, I know precious few people on the fringe of Jewish society – and observing the fringe gives a sense of what makes up the whole cloth. There’s a personal reason, too. I became more observant than my parents – what is Shabbat (or Shabes) like for someone who has gone in the other direction? The back-and-forth flux from O(rthodoxy) to C(onservatism) to R(eform) is what occupies the thoughts of many American Jews. What are the facts on the well-traveled ground between them?

(Yosl’s one of those who has made the cleanest break with his past, although he does maintain contact with his parents. I’ve changed the names of everyone else I’ve mentioned here, because for some of them being mentioned in an essay like this would have serious consequences.)

I arrive before sunset (so I don’t break the Sabbath by traveling) and bring a bottle of wine. Rachel, who's a non-Jew, a German student in the YIVO Summer Program, says by way of greeting, "I'm sorry, but I'm stoned." She learned Yiddish by listening to Kol Yisrael on her shortwave radio in Berlin, and now waits tables at Tavern on the Green to earn money.

I wait for the other guests to arrive. They all have a lot in common: ex-O (for Orthodox), Yiddish-speaking, versed in the texts of traditional Jewish study (and some in worldly learning as well), jobless, and disaffected. In Yiddish you'd call them apikorsim, that is, apostates. In English you'd call them slackers.

As the guests filter in, a few of us sit in the living room. The ketoyres (pot) goes around. Yudl, who is permanently high, talks with fervent enthusiasm about last night's Bob Dylan-Paul Simon concert. "'The Boxer' is a real Chasidic song," he avers. Through the segue music-entertainment-frum entertainment the topic turns to"Handl erlekh [Deal Honestly]," a Hasidic version of "Monopoly": "You're wearing a loud red dress. Pay fifteen dollars." "You're watching television. Go to hell. Do not pass Go."

The dining room fills up. Someone starts to sing "Shalom Aleichem"; a few join in, but there are some suppressed groans, and many eyes roll. Mendl, from a Vizhnitzer family and a former student at NYU, starts opening the wine for kiddush, while Yisroel Meyer, who works in the Brooklyn public library, says, "Oh, God, I can't take this" -- meaning kiddush, which he can't handle, along with all other appurtenances of tradition.

Why is Mendl able to appropriate the ritual for his own use, while Yisroel Meyer is not? I don’t know. But I do notice that Mendl – after he executes an imperfect opening of the bottle– takes hold of a strainer and begins to extract the bits of cork that have ended up in the wine. Suddenly I speak up: “That’s borer [sorting, one of the types of labor forbidden on the Sabbath].” And Mendl in response, respectfully, even chastened: “You’re right. I forgot. Maybe you should be doing this,” he says, gesturing with the bottle towards the kiddush cup. Why did I say anything? I am not that careful with that category of forbidden labor in my own kitchen, on my own turf. Why do I feel the need to emphasize my observance, when I bear no ill will towards these Jews for leaving observance altogether?

Caleb makes hamotzi, the blessing over bread. If you hang around with Yiddishists, you know Caleb. He dresses sharp, tonight in an outfit out of a 40s' movie (white shoes, white suit, thick, black-rimmed glasses), speaks and writes a fluent Yiddish, and is a goy gomer
-- a complete non-Jew -- on both sides. Nine and a half out of ten American Jews could not make hamotzi with his poise. He teaches Yiddish and earns some money (not an independent living by any means) as a Yiddish actor and public reader of poetry and short stories.

Berl arrives, tall, thin-boned, and with the remnant of a beard, and begins to spin a tale about his supposed profession: armchair terrorism, supporting despots, counter-revolutionaries, and all those who maintain the status quo. He is clever and cynical in the nihilst mold: "The Dalai Lama is worse than the Chinese, otherwise how could he stand by and let millions of people think he's a god?" He does not expect or receive any response to this claim, nor are there any cries of outrage at his choice of “profession.” It’s like a comedy routine without the audience, or any attempt to elicit laughter. The black humor is accepted as a matter of course as the currency of the evening.

Binyomin -- a long-haired, shambling, gesticulating eccentric -- is fascinated by the work of Elias Canetti, the Nobel laureate in literature born into a Ladino-speaking family in Bulgaria, and in particular his book "Crowds and Power." In a high-pitched, excited voice, much like Yudl in ecstasy over Dylan, he starts making fun of the yeshiva students who have just returned from protest gatherings in Brooklyn or Jerusalem: "There were thousands of Jews there! Thousands of Jews!"

Says Berl about Canetti, "That's what all religion is -- a fear of dead crowds: the rebbeim, the gedolim. Men take that fear and call it tradition." This is a quintessentially Berl-like statement: cutting yet overgeneralized, dismissive, dismissable, but fascinating. What can be said against this by one whose relationship to tradition is more positive? “No, I disagree! Religion is not a transformed fear of dead crowds!”? If I were to say something like that, I would be laughed at: not out of scorn, but out of the irrelevance of an argument on the pros and cons of religion. Religion, to these Jews, is not a selection on the menu or a component of one’s ever-shifting moral autonomy, but a determinant of one’s entire surroundings. By accepting this dichotomy between “religious” and “not religious”, they are employing the worldview of the very Orthodoxy they have in greater or lesser measure escaped.

As if to underline the point, someone proposes a debate on the value of religion between the late Bertrand Russell and the late Lubavitcher Rebbe; this leads to a suggestion for an advertising campaign for Smirnoff Vodka, which the Rebbe did not live to endorse.

The conversation, whose coherence is already sorely taxed, breaks into fragments. Binyomin brings up the Kotsker Rebbe, the eighteenth-century Hasidic leader whose philosophy is considered a forerunner of existentialism. What happened on that night, the night before the Kotsker's twenty-year seclusion? Is it true that the Kotsker deliberately extinguished the Shabbat candles by throwing his hat at them from the other end of the table, crying “There is no law and no judge!”? In a long, uninterrupted monologue, Binyomin analyses the treatment of this story in the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel – a Yiddish poet, historian of Chassidism, theologian, and ideologue of the mid-20th-century Conservative movement – considers the story to be generally true, a reflection of the Kotsker’s growing internal unrest. Binyomin finds little support for Heschel’s belief.

I can’t help but see Binyomin as a gilgul of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Binyomin’s knowledge is clearly encyclopedic, and I have been told he is a marvelous writer, although I have not seen anything of his myself. He still lives with his father, in a separate room piled high with books. What sort of writer must he be? If I were to guess, I would not put him with the self-consciously rebellious, sex-obsessed “children of immigrants” (Roth et al.), nor with the modern generation (Goodman, Bukiet), surer in its Judaism but conflicted. He has the speech patterns and casts the brilliant sparks of a European master, of a Thomas Mann or a Canetti. If there were a Left Bank, a Vilna, or a Warsaw to support him, what monuments would he compose?

Or perhaps he is like Yosl, and does not wish to compose anything.

Berl says that if sleep is a sixtieth of death, and sleep is so great, then death must be a real blast. "All I need in life," he says, "is a place to sleep and some nicotine. All the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense."

Berl’s throwaway phrase (“all the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense”) means not at all what you might think it to mean out of context. “All the stuff in the Talmud” is not a dismissive wave of the hand from a college student who has taken a few “X in the Talmud” courses from the Jewish Studies professors, but a deeply felt if casually expressed declaration of rootlessness. “The stuff in the Talmud,” for much of Berl’s life, had been presented to him as “all” – and not long ago he realized that much of what he had learned did not make sense to him. It is this doubt that Berl expressed – a doubt that has been part of the Jewish makeup since Moses Mendelssohn.

I head towards the Brooklyn Bridge for the walk home to Manhattan, but somehow I get lost and fumble around in the dark byways near the bridge for the better part of an hour. By the time I get home and mount the nine flights of stairs to my dimly lit apartment (I don’t take the elevator tonight), I have lost all Sabbath rest.

I thought that Shabbat meal would be an entrée into a fascinating world of tortured, European-style struggle between the man on the street and the Jew at home. In my more self-centered moments, I even thought that we more secular-minded Yiddishists could light the flame of a Haskalah redux which would burn through the divisions between the Charedi and secular worlds. We’d produce Yiddish creativity on a par with the best of the past, lighting the way to a future both more modern and more Jewish.

It’s now been many months. Yosl lives in Moscow learning Russian and teaching some Yiddish. Mendl is back at NYU, and Caleb and I were among the teachers at a Yiddish program this past summer. I don’t know what Binyomin and Berl are doing, but I have an idea it’s about the same – working at regular jobs, finding no purchase for the traction of their intellects. I still write in Yiddish and promote the language, and I still try to follow what’s going on with the Charedim – not to enter into their world but to get a better handle on my own.

O-bashing, continued
Third in an ever-more intermittent series.

I don't think boys younger than bar-mitzvah age should ever wear suits. It makes them look like Little Lord Fauntleroy or pint-size members of the Mob. Yet this appears to be de rigueur in many of my neighborhood Charedi shuls. Is the Shtetl, as imagined by Orthodox ideologues, populated by suit-wearing nine-year-olds?

(A Shtetl, thus capitalized, is a magical, mythically pious place, which even in the modern age harbored no doubt, heresy, or heterodoxy. Some very important Orthodox rabbis, whose naivete in this matter is charming, have quoted works of Yiddish literature [literature! that's imaginative writing, folks, whose relationship to reality is -- at its closest -- beside the point!] as a faithful historical record of what life in the Shtetl must have been like. Cf. R. Soloveitchik in Halachic Man, part 2, with a long footnote quoting I.L. Peretz, and, I believe, R. Aharon Lichtenstein referencing Sholem Aleichem, though I can't find the Lichtenstein text right now.)

But these are aesthetic criticisms, and can easily be refuted. ("Why, I find suit-wearing nine-year-olds deliciously heartwarming!")

This installment address a broader fault of Orthodoxy, viz.: the inability to admit (or, better, face the fact) that great rabbis of the past were often wrong in many ways. I'll take two examples in summary form. (These are examples I've encountered recently in my own Torah study, which means they're more interesting for me to blog about than rehashed and well-known sources [e.g. misogynistic sayings from the Gemara]).

In the tractate Eruvin of the Babylonian Talmud, page 59a (ערובין נט. תוספות ד"ה ותחומין דרבנן, for those of you following along at home), the writers of the Tosefot talk about whether certain classes of people are believable as witnesses for certain classes of ritual law (eruvs, kosher slaughter, setting aside of the challah). Their argument concludes: "If searching for chametz were a Torah-level requirement, women would not be believable [as to their testimony that such a search had been properly completed], even if they're directly involved in the task, because searching for chametz requires punctiliousness and great care. Therefore [in this case] one should worry about women's laziness more than in another case. That too is the meaning of the Jerusalem Talmud, [where it is said that] women are not believable with regard to searching for chametz, because they are lazy and search only the most minimal amount."

Now, I can't say that I'm surprised at such a statement. Misogynistic statements in the Gemara are a dime-a-dozen (as are legal innovations for the benefit of women, albeit with lesser frequency). Nor is this Tosfos a vital pillar of Jewish thought or law (though women's "unfitness" as witnesses has been a long and, actually, quite sordid chapter of halachah). (It's a very interesting Tosfos, of course, as most of them are, but not for its misogyny. I think this Tosfos might hint that "bedikas khomets" is more akin to "Pesach cleaning" than a modern-day halachist would admit.) The reason I bring it up here is that I can guess exactly how an average Orthodox rabbi would respond to it: with apologetics. Perhaps "Oh, we don't pasken like Tosfos here" (I don't know if we do or not), or "This is a metaphysical truth about women's innate capacities" or even "Who are we to criticize Tosfos"?

Here's the most cogent and satisfying way to read the statement of Tosfos with regard to women's laziness: It's wrong. Case closed. This doesn't mean that I'm arrogant, or reject the authority of Torah, or think I know more than the Baalei Tosfos. It doesn't even mean that I eat pork chops with a side of cheescake on Yom Kippur. It just means that sometimes rabbis are wrong. We gay-loving, jeans-wearing, Debbie Friedman-singing Conservative Jews certainly have our faults (hint: only one of those three activities is a sin in my book, and it's not being gay), but we can respect rabbis while calling them on their mistakes and not get tied up in knots about it.

There's a second example I'll give. It's shorter. According to halachah (the Rambam, at any rate, and I believe the Shulchan Aruch and the Remo as well; consult your local rabbi if you're brave enough to talk to her about it!), you're not allowed to have sex during the daytime or by the light of a candle. Why's that? A longish discussion in tractate Niddah of the Babylonian Talmud, starting on 16b, comes down to this: there's an angel (or demon, pick your translation) who deals with conception, and she's only active at night. Now this Gemara is not wrong, exactly. It's a convincing and consistent implication of a magical state of affairs. Unfortunately, I don't believe in the Gemara's magic. What do I do about it? Again, I could wax apologetic (it's a metaphorical apperception of a metaphysical truth! it's a guard against overpromiscuousness in the married couple! it's a segule for exciting lovemaking!), or I could say: I understand (or at least I think I do), and I don't agree. Case closed.

Permissible criticism, or O-bashing part II
Second in an intermittent series of friendly, well-meant criticism.

What do we talk about when we talk about what's wrong with Orthodoxy? A commenter on my previous post suggested that what I'm trying to do here is a "tit-for-tat" in response to Avi Shafran's Moment article "The Conservative Lie." I hope not. Shafran's argument can be summarized as follows: Conservative Judaism claims that it adheres to halachah. However, Conservative Jews and their leaders are predictably lenient, lax in observance; and cavalier about the importance of halachah to their movement. These facts show, says Shafran, that Conservative Judaism is a failure.

I doubt Shafran's interpretation of the evidence. But even taking these claims at face value, Shafran is only applying Orthodox criteria to the Conservative movement, finding the two don't match, and exclaiming, "See! Conservative Judaism is a failure!" It is a failure in Orthodox terms, but these terms are not the only valid ones. Conservative Judaism's approach to halachah is multi-faceted, and Conservative Torah scholars do not speak with one voice -- that very fact makes it very difficult to say how halachah plays a role in Conservative Judaism. (The same could be said about Orthodox or Reform Judaism, as far as that goes.) That Conservative Jews are lax in their observance, or even that they do not recognize the importance of halachah, is a problem to be solved, not an indictment of Conservative Judaism. Laxness of observance and halachic ignorance have afflicted Judaism forever. They might even be the status quo.

Shafran understands halachah according to its ultra-Orthodox interpretation: strict constructionism. But Conservative Judaism can be (and, I think, tries to be) both halachic and lenient. This dichotomy is unfathomable to Shafran, but does not make it any the less true.

The reason I'm rehashing Shafran's old essay is to try and make a stab at what I have to do to criticize Orthodoxy in useful ways. A commenter on my last post suggested that I should not judge Orthodoxy by Conservative standards. Certainly not. But, on the other hand, I can't judge Orthodoxy by Orthodox standards, for two obvious reasons: first, I'm not Orthodox; and second, because Orthodoxy might be too various to define usefully. A possible way out is sociological. Clearly, Orthodoxy plays a necessary role in Jewish society. (Not the only necessary role, or the most authentic role, but a necessary role. I make this claim because it's defensible.) If we can figure out what makes Orthodoxy necessary, and (further) point out where Orthodoxy is departing from this necessary role, this might be a useful beginning for outside criticism of Orthodoxy. In short: not to criticize Orthodoxy for what can't be by its very nature, but for what it should be and is departing from.

Maybe I've set myself too hard a task, because there's not just one necessary function which Orthodoxy performs. Let's try anyway. One definite function of Orthodoxy is to present itself as a uniquely authentic, traditional Jewish religious culture. I'm using the term "present itself" not to be snide, but to recognize that Orthodoxy is mythic (in the positive sense of myth popularized among Conservative Jews by Neil Gillman), fervently believing in its own authenticity. Whether or not that authenticity is unique is not germane to our present discussion. What matters is that Orthodoxy itself is unique by its belief in that authenticity. It's a self-creation through mythogenesis.

Call this the Myth of Religious-Cultural Authenticity. The hyphenate is important, because it's the subject of my first criticism -- which, like much else I'm saying here, is not original. Today's Orthodox Judaism is in danger of ignoring the "cultural" half of its motivating authenticity myth, and focusing exclusively on the "halachic." Not that Orthodoxy should (God forbid) change its fervent adherence to its own halachic standards (though what those standards are, how they're articulated, and how they're actually observed, is a fascinating, fraught, and ultimately very confusing terrain). But halachah to the exclusion of culture can drain Orthodoxy of what makes it convincing and meaningful not just to its followers but to its non-Orthodox observers: a central myth of traditional living as carried through the generations. (Alan Brill wrote about this in scholarly fashion in an article in Edah, which I discussed here. Also here, here, and here.)

I'd like to suggest that the sector of Orthodoxy which is managing to preserve both ends of the authenticity myth is the Charedi (and in particular the Chasidic) sector, and that modern Orthodoxy, though it is well-nigh tangent at times to my own Conservative Judaism, is most susceptible to this over-halachization I'm criticizing here.

Obviously, this is all a footnote to Rupture and Reconstruction.

Some healthy O-bashing, part I
Or: Friends don't let friends wreck their train.

There's a certain sort of sermon that's regularly given these days in Conservative synagogues, judging from my experience and that of a highly non-random sample of friends and acquaintances. The rabbi explains that despite the grave errors and benighted ways of Orthodoxy, he would never think of engaging in "Orthodox bashing."

Now, there's certainly a sort of Orthodox bashing which I don't want to engage in. I love Orthodoxy. Some of my best friends, etcetera. I think it's one of many authentic sorts of Judaism. (Not every sort of Judaism is authentic -- yes, I know the very word "authentic" is problematic, but I'm not going to go into that yet.) I don't want to be nasty about Orthodoxy and I certainly don't want to accuse its practitioners of anything but the healthiest and most Jewish of motives.

But I do think that bashing, done in a good-humored, respectful, and well-foundedly productive way, can be useful both to the bashee and the basher. For the sake of accuracy, perhaps, I should use another word rather than "bash," but then I wouldn't get as many people's attention. And people who have been reading this blog for a while know that bashing is not what gets done here. I could call it instead "criticism," but that's a boring word. What's a blog for if not for the judicious use of inflammatory prose?

So I think it's high time for some well-meant, well-reasoned, not unlearned Orthodox bashing. What I'm going to try to do here, over the next few days, should put you in mind of a response in Moment magazine a few years ago to the now-infamous Conservative Judaism is Wrong article by (I think it was) Avi Shafran. A Conservative rabbi wrote that Shafran's criticism was dead on, and should be accepted by the Conservative movement (at least partially) -- but, at the same time, Orthodox institutions should receive their share of healthy criticism.

I feel compelled to engage in this sort of criticism because I see Orthodoxy tearing itself apart. Its train is about to come off the tracks and explode in a fireball -- at least, ideologically speaking. And if this won't happen, something even worse could still come to pass: namely, that Orthodoxy could enjoy further sociological success (more yeshivot, more kollel students, more blat gemore learned every day, more Orthodox Jews) while continuing to be wrong in crucial, foundational ways.

Proof to come.

Update: I'm grateful to the link from On the Main Line. If I don't have a new bashpost up before Shabbos, please forgive me. I do mean to continue very soon. One response to the comments: if you refrain from criticizing group X on the basis of its defining characteristics, you make any interesting or far-reaching criticism pretty much impossible, no? That is, I don't think it makes much sense to say, "Fine, criticize Orthodoxy as much as you like. Just don't criticize those things about Orthodoxy which make it Orthodox." I take it that one of the points of criticism is to articulate a vision of group X which is at variance with group X's view of itself. No?

Metzitzah b'peh and neonatal herpes
Still real, still serious.

I received a message today from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene about metzitzah b'peh (MbP) and neonatal herpes, an issue that has been of concern for some months now. The complete message is below, but two points should be emphasized:

1. The New York City Department of Health recommends against the practice, but in any case suggests that parents be told before the bris if MbP is to be used, so that they can make an informed decision.

2. DOH has also prepared an "open letter to the Jewish community" on the issue.

The message also reviews the steadily accumulating evidence supporting the earlier fear that one mohel was behind the cases of neonatal herpes associated with MbP.

* * *

Dear Colleagues:

You may have heard about the Health Department’s recent investigation of several cases of herpes simplex type 1 infection in male infants following circumcision which included metzitzah b’peh.

Metzitzah b’peh is a practice performed by some mohelim (religious circumcisers) as part of the circumcision. After removing the foreskin, the mohel places his mouth on the baby’s freshly circumcised penis to draw away the blood. In 1998, the Health Department investigated two cases of neonatal herpes due to herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) – one of these infections occurred in 1988, the other in 1998. Both were associated with one mohel (Mohel A) who performed metzitzah b’peh during circumcision. Mohel A agreed to stop practicing metzitzah b’peh.

In November 2004, the Health Department was notified of 3 male infants with HSV-1. All were circumcised by one mohel (Mohel B), who performed metzitzah b’peh. The infants developed herpes infection in the genital area 8-10 days after circumcision and were hospitalized for several weeks. One baby died from the infection. Two cases were reported by physicians in 2005 and both are also consistent with infection from metzitzah b’peh. Every case occurred in the time frame consistent with transmission from metzitzah b’peh.

Our investigation found Mohel B to be the source of the 2004 cases, and metzitzah b’peh to be the means of infection for these and other cases, for the following reasons:

• The medical circumstances are inconsistent with infection acquired at delivery, in the newborn nursery, or from caretakers.

• Infection is consistent with acquisition of herpes at circumcision. For example, two infants who were circumcised several weeks after birth showed signs of infection in the time frame that would be expected were the infection acquired during circumcision.

• Several mothers tested negative for HSV-1, making it impossible for them to have been the source of infection.

• All infants tested culture-positive for HSV-1, which is found in the mouths of most adults.

• The location of herpes sores (on infant genitals and buttocks) is very unusual and strongly suggests that infection was introduced at the genitals.

With an estimated average of fewer than 30 cases of all forms of infant herpes infections occurring per year in New York City, the odds of one mohel being associated with 3 cases of neonatal herpes are infinitesimally small (about 6.9 million to 1). In the interest of allowing religious communities to address these health concerns first, the Health Department agreed to let rabbinical authorities ensure that the mohel stopped performing the practice at least until the authorities conclude an investigation. In addition, the connection between metzitzah b’peh and neonatal herpes has been documented in the medical literature. Three investigations published within the past 5 years (from New York City [1], Israel [2, 3] and Canada[3]) describe 11 cases of males with HSV-1 infections on their genitals following metzitzah b’peh. Among the 11 cases, there are 4 pairs of cases (including the 1988/1998 cases from New York City).

In the United States, approximately 70% of persons age 40 and older are infected with herpes simplex virus type 1. The mouth is the most common site of HSV-1 infection; HSV-1 spreads easily through infected saliva, especially when saliva comes in contact with a cut or break in the skin, such as occurs during metzitzah b’peh. Most adults with oral herpes do not know they are infected and do not have symptoms. Even without symptoms, however, people with oral herpes can spread the infection to others. If herpes lesions are present, they tend to occur (and recur) on the skin or mucous membranes at the site at which infection was introduced or in related dermatomes. HSV-1 infection is lifelong; antibody is evidence of infection.

Evaluation and management of an infant with suspected neonatal herpes infection

Infants in the first 6-8 weeks of life suspected of having herpes infections should always be hospitalized and treated with intravenous acyclovir [4, 5], a lumbar puncture should be performed at admission, and the infant should be managed in consultation with a pediatric infectious disease specialist. Herpes infection of the skin/eye/mucous membranes may progress to disseminated disease or central nervous system (CNS) infection. Infants with disseminated or CNS infection are at significant risk for death or serious sequelae even with treatment.

For infants suspected of having herpes infection, cultures should always be done on skin vesicles if present. Other sites that may yield positive cultures and should be cultured include blood, nasopharynx, anorectum, conjunctivae, urine, and stool. Direct fluorescent antibody (DFA) staining, if available, may provide a rapid and specific diagnosis. The yield of culture and DFA from HSV skin vesicles is very good if specimens are properly collected. To collect a specimen from a vesicle, unroof or open the vesicle with a sterile needle or scalpel and vigorously rub or twist a sterile swab on the exposed base of the lesion. Use the swab to inoculate sterile viral transport medium and send immediately to the laboratory. Samples for DFA staining should be obtained in the same manner with the material from the lesion smeared onto a glass microscopic slide.

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood specimens should be tested by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for HSV-1 and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2). CSF cultures for HSV are usually negative in a patient with HSV encephalitis, so if a limited sample of CSF is available, PCR testing on the CSF should be done in preference to culture. Because of the passive transfer of maternal antibody, type-specific herpes serologic testing is not useful in making a herpes diagnosis in an infant unless maternal serologies are also done and are negative. Consult your institution’s clinical laboratory director to identify a laboratory licensed to perform viral culture and polymerase chain reaction for HSV-1 and HSV-2.

Reporting neonatal herpes cases to the Health Department

Up to 20% of neonatal herpes cases never develop skin lesions, so providers must maintain a high index of suspicion for herpes infection following circumcision which includes metzitzah b’peh. Providers should suspect herpes infection in male infants presenting with vesicular or pustular lesions on the genitals, perineum, buttocks, or related dermatomes in the weeks after circumcision, or, in any infant with fever or other signs of systemic illness in the weeks following circumcision.

New York City Health Code section 11.03(b) requires providers to report ‘unusual manifestations of disease. Providers should report all suspected cases of herpes occurring in the weeks following circumcision to the Health Department. Call 212-788-4423 and ask for the ‘neonatal herpes desk’. After hours call the Poison Control Center at 1-800-222-1222.

Health Department Recommendations with Regard to Metzitzah B’peh

The Health Department has issued an open letter to the Jewish community regarding the recent cases of neonatal herpes linked to metzitzah b’peh and the risk of HSV-1 transmission with metzitzah b’peh, and has developed a fact sheet to inform parents about this public health issue which will be available online and through 311 in English, Yiddish and Hebrew.

During metzitzah b’peh the mouth of the mohel comes into direct contact with the baby’s circumcision cut, risking transmission of herpes simplex virus to the infant. While severe illness associated with this practice may be rare, because there is no proven way to reduce the risk of herpes infection posed by metzitzah b’peh, the Health Department advises against this practice. Some parents whose infants had metzitzah b’peh say they did not know in advance that the mohel would perform it. The Health Department advises parents to ask the mohel several days in advance of the bris whether he performs metzitzah b’peh. This offers parents a chance to weigh the risks of metzitzah b’peh and choose another option if they wish. While some mohelim consider metzitzah b’peh the only acceptable way to draw blood away from the circumcision cut, others use different means. For example, a mohel may use a sterile glass tube or a glass tube attached to a rubber bulb to suction the blood away from the baby’s cut. Other mohelim use a sponge or sterile gauze pad to wipe the blood away. Unlike metzitzah b’peh, there is no evidence that any of these practices cause herpes infection.

Sincerely,
Susan Blank, MD, MPH Julia Schillinger, MD, MSc

Assistant Commissioner Director of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Research

Bureau of Sexually Transmitted Disease Control
New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
25 Worth Street
New York, NY 10013

1)Rubin LG, Lanzkowsky P. Cutaneous neonatal herpes simplex infection associated with ritual circumcision. Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal. 2000. 19(3) 266-267.

2)Distel R, Hofer V, Bogger-Goren S, Shalit I, Garty BZ. Primary genital herpes simplex infection associated with Jewish ritual circumcision. Israel Medical Association Journal. 2003 Dec;5(12):893-4

3)Gesundheit B, Grisaru-Soen G, Greenberg D, Levtzion-Korach O, Malkin D, Petric M, Koren G, Tendler MD, Ben-Zeev B, Vardi A, Dagan R, Engelhard D. Neonatal genital herpes simplex virus type 1 infection after Jewish ritual circumcision: modern medicine and religious tradition. 2004. Pediatrics. 114(2):259-63

4)American Academy of Pediatrics. Herpes simplex. In: Pickering LK, ed. Red Book: 2003 Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases. 26th ed. Elk Grove Village, IL: American Academy of Pediatrics; 2003: 344-353.

5)Kimberlin DW. Neonatal Herpes Simplex Infection. Clinical Microbiology Reviews. 2004. 17 (1): 1-13.

Abundant kibitzing
In which I half-articulate what might be wrong with the Conservative movement.

This Shefa list I talked about earlier is turning out to be pretty interesting: a lot less personal bellyaching and a lot more considered and creative thought about where the Conservative movement should go from here. Here's an e-mail I sent to the list that might not make the moderator's cut:

1. One distinction which might be helpful is between LIBERAL and LAX. Conservative Judaism is very much a liberal movement, for the following reasons (all of which are discussed, or at least adumbrated/hat-tipped, in Emet veEmunah): recognition of the importance of individual decision-making as something which can't be coerced into homogeneity by communal institutions; or, relatedly, the notion of religious responsibility (mitsves) as intertwined with individual religious progress cum exploration and contingency. There is a connection to be made between the looser, layperson's meaning of "liberal" and liberal political theory, but "this is no place to be lengthy."

In general, C. Judaism is liberal because it tends to be meykil rather than makhmir. It is important to understand what "meykil" does not mean; it is NOT to be equated with laxity, lack of stringency for its own sake. (Those who equate laxity with the term "kule" [leniency] do not understand the latter.) Ideally, the C. movement should be a rigorous application of both liberal and (this is where we've differed
from our friends on the left) halachic ideas. Liberal *and* rigorous Judaism -- isn't this what we want?

2. However (and this is perhaps where rubber meets road, or theory meets Action Plans), this liberal stringency (or stringent liberality) must be based on a wide range of possibilities for vibrant Jewish life. For the past few years, I have harbored a suspicion that dare not speak its name: that the C. movement's loud protestations of its "halachic" nature are meant as a response to our critics on the right. Of course, halachah is the blood of our Jewish being, but it is not the all. There is much more in addition to halachah which goes into living a God-fearing and humane Jewish life. A convenient term for it is "culture." I don't just mean books on Jewish topics, or Woody Allen, or Jewish music (though all these have some role to play). I'm talking about the ways in which a Conservative sensibility can inform a Jewish religious culture. In other words: the Orthodox have their sub-culture, so why don't we have one? Why are we satisfied to participate in secular Jewish culture when Conservative Judaism has something both religious and worldly to bring to the table?

Let me give an example of where culture can play a role. (There are many other ways, of course.) Mishnah Yomit is a worthwhile initiative of the USCJ. But where's the promotion? Where's the advertising? Where is the pop-culture soupcon of kitsch which has made Daf Yomi a "smash hit" phenomenon among the Orthodox? (To head off an expected comment: adopting this strategy of the Orthodox does not at all mean agreeing with their religious approach.) Or another example: what does Conservative Judaism have to say about American secular Jewish culture? Is there any alternative to provide? I think our answers might be at once more congenial and more convincing than those provided by modern Orthodoxy.

yoIn Envisioning the Future of American Jewry, Leaders Emphasize the Past

Leaders of the four major rabbinical seminaries made a rare joint appearance on October 13th at Yale University, on a panel titled “Envisioning the Future of American Judaism.” Though the speakers agreed on the most pressing problems facing the American Jewish community, they did not propose any new approaches – rather, each presented his own movement’s philosophy as framed by the history of the American Jewish community. The event, sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies and the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, was held in connection with the 350th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in North America.

Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, pointed out that the American Jewish community found success even in its earliest years (ballooning from three thousand Jews in 1790 to almost a quarter million at the end of the 19th century), despite the fact that the first ordained rabbi came to America only in 1840. Thus the layperson plays an outsize role in American Jewish life, bringing to the table her instinctive “doubts about the inherent validity of halachah” and the authority of the rabbi. Furthermore, today’s American Jewish community is thoroughly acculturated, sharing, for example, the mobility of the average American family, which upends traditional ethnic-religious allegiances based on kinship. While the core of the community is healthy, enjoying “a renaissance of the Jewish tradition which has been unprecedented,” the periphery “barely identifies Jewishly.” The role of HUC, concluded Ellenson, is to train rabbis who can both satisfy the core and attract the marginal.

Rabbi Yosef Blau, the Director of Religious Guidance at Yeshiva University and a leader in various modern Orthodox institutions, began with the observation that “a hundred years ago no one would have predicted that Orthodox Jewry would participate” in such a panel. After a summary of Orthodox American Jewish history (crediting Orthodoxy’s post-war resurgence to the day school movement), Blau cataloged the problems of Orthodox Judaism in America, and of modern Orthodoxy in particular: the very diversity of the movement; the attraction of newly observant Jews to ultra-Orthodoxy; the status of women; and the need to strike a “proper balance between tradition and modernity.”

Dr. Ismar Schorsch of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary attempted to “extract the meaning” of the arrival of Jews in America. His main, somewhat strident emphasis was that the Jews “came [to America] as a group,” not merely as a collection of individuals, and that Jewish identity, flowing from the “wellspring of the Torah,” is “in deep conflict with the notion of autonomy and the sovereign self” which holds that “nothing is sacred.” Said Schorsch, “Unaffiliated Jews are not social capital for the Jewish community.” Rather, the goal should be to create more “serious Jews” – otherwise, the organized Jewish community is “at risk.”

Schorsch did not mention the Conservative movement per se in his remarks, the only one of the speakers not to put his own institution front and center. He mentioned only briefly, in response to a later question from the audience, that the movement is often passed over by its own members, who must first tend to the needs of the wider Jewish community.

Perhaps the most programmatic comments were made by Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, president of the youngest rabbinical seminary represented, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (founded in 1968). “We are a small movement with a large agenda,” said Ehrenkrantz; since “Judaism is a product of the Jewish people,” future Jewish leaders must appreciate “the entirety of Jewish experience,” being “non-judgmental, yet exercising good judgment.” “We want people who can care for the entire Jewish community,” he said, “committed to Jewish history and the Jewish people without being triumphal or bigoted.” Ehrenkrantz implied that the Reconstructionist movement, whose ordained rabbis serve various functions in communities across the ideological spectrum, is well-placed to determine the direction of Jewish communal leadership: with “profound tolerance and respect for diversity, innovation, and the capability to develop communities” which give “meaning to the lives of Jews.”

Additional remarks were made by John Butler, a Yale expert in the history of American religions. “Religion in America has a doubtful future,” he began, quoting the consensus of experts in the late 19th century. Ever since the beginning of the modern era, religious leaders in America have worried that religion can’t compete with the attractions of high technology, urbanism, youth culture, and everything else beckoning from outside the walls of the church (or synagogue). According to Butler, they needn’t have worried, and they needn’t worry today. American religion (and Judaism as an exemplar of this tendency) remakes itself in just those ways necessary to succeed in time of transformation: from immigration to urbanization, and from city to suburb. The importance of religion in this year’s presidential election, and its near-absence from, say, French political campaigning, point to religion’s solid place in American public life, and should help to place in context dire rabbinical warnings of Jewish communal collapse.

Also worthy of note is what was not represented on this panel. In the introductory remarks, it was pointed out that a similar Jewish communal meeting of the minds occurred some forty years ago, at a Yale-Harvard-Princeton Hillel colloquium. At that event, however, there was a representative of “humanist Judaism.” The fact that no such representative, or indeed, any voice from outside the Jewish religious establishment, was present at this year’s panel might bespeak either a shrinking of American Jewish intellectual diversity, or (more probably) reveal the roots of the event itself, which was originally planned to inform Yale students interested in ordination about the different programs available. In any case, established, institutional voices are unlikely to propose bold suggestions for solving the Jewish community’s future problems.

Postscript: The new issue of the YU Commentator, Yeshiva University's student newspaper, features the text of Rabbi Blau's prepared remarks, as well as a write-up of the panel itself by Menachem Butler.

Compelled to disagree
 
I recently wrote about R. Josh Yuter's review of R. Steven Greenberg's new book. Yuter has now taken me to task for classifying his as a "slippery slope" argument.  He writes: 

In the example of oness, R. Greenberg argued that since homosexuals are born with the desire, then we should treat them in the legal category of being exempt if they commit a biblical prohibition. However, if the mere innate desire is sufficient to exempt one type of sin, then the logical consequence would be to apply that logic to other desires as well. Once all desires are outside of one's control, then all transgressions may be dismissed. This is not an issue of what is moral or immoral, but of the ramifications of assigning legal categories. 

 
Yuter is incorrect on two counts.
 
First of all, homosexuality is not a "mere innate desire," but a sexual orientation. The difference is significant. Homosexuals are able to pursue Godly, dignified, and Jewishly worthly relationships, while this is not true of every realized "innate desire."
 
Secondly, even if we were to call homosexuality, broadly and inaccurately, an "innate desire," it would not follow that "the logical consequence would be to apply that logic to other desires as well." Legal categories are not applied with a broad brush across all cases.
 
To put it another way, Yuter would have us believe that ones, applied to the case of homosexuality, must also ("logically") be applied to any other case. Let's assume that's true. Presumably because of time constraints (the blogger's curse), or leaving it as an exercise for the reader, Yuter neglected to mention what logical criteria connect homosexuality to other cases in which ones might be applied. (He does say "once all desires are out of our control," but I find it difficult to equate the acceptance of homosexual relationships with the legitimization of "all desires." Another slippery slope I don't want to slide down without snow cover.) Near the end of his post, he does mention statutory rape. Presumably Yuter finds some logical connection between homosexuality and statutory rape, so that (he imagines) one might say in either case "I was annus [psychologically or otherwise compelled] to perform that act."
 
But the differences between homosexuality and (lehavdil) rape are quite obvious. One is a non-consensual, violent impingement, the other a relationship between loving adults. These differences seem quite relevant to the application of ones, so that one might reasonably apply it in one case, and not in the other. What other connection does Yuter see between these that I'm missing?

Yuter bristles at the label "slippery slope." In that case, he is bound to explain to us the logical connection which so strongly binds homosexuality to every sort of "innate desire." Why can one not make halachic distinctions between ones in a positive relationship and ones in harmful, immoral acts? One can fairly request of Yuter what Andrew Sullivan demanded from opponents of homosexual marriage:  

The precise challenge for morally serious people is to make rational distinctions between what is arbitrary and what is essential in important social institutions. ... If you want to argue that a lifetime of loving, faithful commitment between two women is equivalent to incest or child abuse, then please argue it. It would make for fascinating reading. But spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage—or else everything is up for grabs and, before we know where we are, men will be marrying their dogs.

In the same way, I think a line can be drawn in the application of ones, the criterion being whether the compelled party is acting in accordance with larger Jewish (i.e. halachic-moral) values, whether the "compulsion" is "mere innate desire" or a different, non-heterosexual sort of loving, permanent relationship. Yuter thinks this line is impossible, apparently on strictly logical grounds which are unclear to me.
 
Yuter also asks: 

[W]hat is wrong with "swinging right" on this or any issue? Furthermore, why shouldn't we be able to discriminate against whomever we chose?

There's nothing wrong per se with being right-wing. But the growing success (or popularity) of Orthodoxy gives rise to some unforeseen consequences. As the community of observant Jews tilts ever rightward, it begins to be affected by the imperfections of the Orthodox community. I don't want to get into these in detail here, but some of them I've mentioned before: e.g. the assumptions that "true" Torah dwells only in the tents of the Orthodox, and that observant Jewish life must somehow conform to ideal, ahistorical, amoral [sic!] halachic frameworks without sacrificing axiomatic consistency. (Keep in mind that each major denomination of Judaism has its own imperfections; I'm certainly not saying that dominance by, say, Conservative Judaism would be ideal either.)
 
As for discrimination: differences are at the heart of the religious life, but they must be justified. Discrimination generally refers to invidious distinctions, and should be avoided.