Standing Up for the Armenian Genocide

The Forward is reporting today that Jewish-American groups have been backing off on their support for a bill currently in Congress that would publicly and officially recognize the 1915 Ottoman Empire attempted genocide of the Armenian people. The groups cite their concern for Turkish-Israeli relations which at present is strained. Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, vehemently denies any reports of genocide and claims that the upwards of 500,000 Armenians murdered was part of a war and not a systematic attempt to wipe out a people based on their race or ethnicity. This assertion, however, is disputed by a wide consensus in the academic community. The Ottomans did indeed attempt genocide against the Armenians.

Jess Hordes, Washington Director of the Anti-Defamation League is quoted as saying in the article: "Inevitably, for some people the enthusiasm isn’t as great as it was in the past, because of concerns about Turkey’s policy on Israel." This is utterly and unequivocally unacceptable. We as a Jewish community need to rally behind those who have been oppressed by the hands of others. The continued denial of the Armenian genocide on behalf of world governments has led to a demoralizing condition amongst the Armenian people. Would we as a Jewish community tolerate our vivid memories of persecution being denied internationally?

Israel has very real needs and benefits greatly from a positive relationship with Turkey. However, our moral conscience must not be sacrificed on the altar of Israel's strategic needs. It is time for the Jewish community to stand with the Armenian people and shout from the rooftops, "Never Again!"

A Man of Vision: Rabbi Dr. Bernard Lander ז"ל

I remember the first time I met him as if it was yesterday. It was after a long five hour flight from my hometown of San Diego and my first New York City taxi ride from JFK Airport to Kew Gardens Hills, Queens that I met one of the greatest Jewish leaders of the 20th century. Rabbi Dr. Bernie Lander welcomed us, the second class of students to inhabit the magnificent space of The Lander College for Men. He did not just speak about providing an institution of academic excellence or about making it, the experience of college education, more accessible to Orthodox Jews; he spoke about the creation of a new generation of Jewish Orthodox leadership. He spoke about the leadership that Jews who at once firmly rooted in their Mesorah and also highly engaged in their professional lives could exhibit in the Jewish community. He told us that "Landers," as we affectionately called our college, would be the place that would forge us into the best of citizens, members of the public square, and talmidei chachamim, serious life-long students of Torah and our tradition.

To hear him speak was so utterly inspiring. It was not only inspiring because you could feel the passion with which he spoke but because here was a man that was well past the age of retirement going about the business of transforming the Jewish educational world throughout the entire world. He did not rest after the creation of Touro College in Flatbush nor after creating his subsequent schools in Manhattan, Queens, California, Russia, Germany and in every other place where there was potential to positively impact Jewish lives.

He gave his entire life to the betterment and advancement of Jewish and secular education. He had a vision one day many years ago and carried that vision with him through the many decades of his life. He was relentless in the fulfillment of that vision and worked tirelessly to see its realization. There are few times in a person's life where one gets to sit at the feet and learn from true greatness. I feel tremendously fortunate to have had such an opportunity during my college years with Dr. Lander. The entire Jewish community has suffered a tremendous loss with his passing and I for one will truly miss him.

May his resting place be in Gan Eden and may his soul be bound up in the bonds of life.

Social Networking and the Obliteration of the Private Life

"I'm at MTA - 42nd Street Station "

"Getting condiments for the super bowl party @ Walgreens"

"Lunch: Tuna sandwich on rye bread with a diet coke"

The quotes above are all examples of real messages sent out over Twitter, Facebook and the new service Foursquare by people all over the country. I have modified a few details of the quotes in order to protect the anonymity of the authors, even though the authors themselves were not concerned about their anonymity. These sort of messages are sent out daily, thousands of them, from people in every corner of the globe and in every major language.

There are a multitude of reasons for why people choose to utilize the variety of social networking tools to divulge every detail of their day to the Internet. For some people there is a profound loneliness pervading their lives and the Internet becomes a constant friend. In this vein, I am reminded of the great sociology book Bowling Alone which began to discuss this phenomenon more than a decade ago. For others the allure of achieving a celebrity status is too great to resist and the Internet presents an almost effortless path to notoriety and stardom. And yet for others social networking becomes an organizer and scheduler for their daily life; it presents an upgrade from a paper and pen organizer to a Palm Pilot to a Blackberry to finally leading to Twitter and Facebook.

No matter the reason for why people become deeply invested in sharing every mundane detail of their lives, the end result remains the same: a blurring or even the obliteration of the line that separates our public and private existence. I argue that it is of critical importance for there to be a division between one's private and public life. Many people have bemoaned the lack of etiquette or civility present in this new phenomenon while others have decried it as inane and mind-numbing. Those points may be true or they may not be but what is certainly true is that it is detrimental to personal development to lose one's private life.

The public sphere is where we project our persona and ego. It is where we assert ourselves, question others, comply with what has been asked of us and perform a variety of other tasks that reflect our identities. The private sphere is where we reflect and further develop ourselves. It is in the sanctum of home that we can pause and think deeply about our beliefs, our convictions and our identities. Without the space that a private life affords us, we can become disjointed, fraught with anxiety and stunted in our emotional, psychological, intellectual and spiritual selves.

There are all types of people that do not have a choice but to lose much of their private life: politicians, celebrities, etc. However, the rush to self-surrender every detail of one's life to the world of Foursquare or Twitter is not advisable and in plain speak not healthy living. We ought to remember that the God who divided the heavens from the earth also divided our public and private spheres and we must learn to appreciate the resource the private life offers us, even if that means everyone will not know what cereal was consumed for breakfast.

The Orthodox Moment

My latest article "The Orthodox Moment" has been published in the February issue of First Things and is also available on their website. A short excerpt from the article:

"With the increased numbers, visibility, and confidence of Orthodox Judaism comes a profound challenge: The Orthodox world must decide how to engage decisive issues from within the commitment to tradition and continuity of Jewish law that defines Orthodoxy. A source of anguish to many in the Orthodox community is the role of women in religious life. Whether Halacha permits the ordination of female rabbis remains the subject of heated contention. Other issues on which the Orthodox world is divided include interfaith dialogue, academic study of classic Jewish texts, and the debate between dedicated full-time Torah study or pursuit of a secular profession. Many of these fall into the meta-question: How and in what way can Jews lead a life true to Torah while engaging the larger society and culture?"

The Minhag of Reform Judaism

Is Reform a proper noun or a verb? Is the process of "reforming Judaism" a continuous endeavor that adapts to the needs of the time or was there a great moment of reform and now Reform Jews are left with Reform Judaism?

These are critical questions for the thinkers of Reform Judaism and apparently there are those within their camp that are advocating essentially the halakhic argument of minhag avoteinu b'yadeinu, which literally translates as the custom of our forefathers is in our hands. In other words, we have a received tradition and we can not alter it. According to a recent JTA report an entire organization has been created to promote and advocate for the preservation of Classical Reform Judaism.

What are the central Classical items that these individuals are fighting to preserve? According to the news story: "... its distinctive worship style -- services conducted mainly in English, accompanied by organ music and a choir." In a world that is constantly changing, where cultural and political shifts are happening all around us, it is tremendously comforting to have religion be an anchor amidst turbulent waters. I do not believe it is a coincidence, as the article points out that "the split is largely generational."

I remember when I first had moved to the neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. I was so thrilled to attend services at K'hal Adath Jeshurun (KAJ), the German Orthodox synagogue that is the direct heir to the legacy of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. One of the unique innovations of Rav Hirsch was to increase the meaningfulness, access and relevancy of services to the members of his congregation by instituting a weekly sermon in German and creating a choir. The spirit behind those changes was to continue to seek ways to make Jewish ritual meaningful and inspiring while still staying true to the eternal truth of the Torah. I was very curious to see what the institution that he began in Frankfurt am Main would look like now, over a hundred years later, in New York City.

To my surprise the services looked pretty much like they probably did in Frankfurt during the time of Rav Hirsch. The sermon was in English but other than that, the melodies employed were the same and they still kept with the style of a Hazzan, with the grandiose Hazzan's hat, and a choir. What had happened? The original innovations of Rav Hirsch developed into the status of minhag avoteinu b'yadeinu and thus unalterable.

Perhaps to the chagrin of the new Society for Classical Reform Judaism, in order to preserve a tradition which declared the "Mosaic Law" irrelevant they end up using -- albeit unintentionally -- a principle of the very same Mosaic Law to do so.

The NEW Pop Chanukah Song

From Tablet Magazine and Senator Orrin Hatch:

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Rabbi tweets Torah 4 Jews on the go

(Courtesy of The Jewish Advocate - Boston's Jewish newspaper. They have a great online subscription plan of only $18 for full access, with PDFs available.)

Rabbi tweets Torah 4 Jews on the go
Harvard chaplain sermonizes in 140 characters or less
By Elise Kigner Advocate Staff

Rabbi Ben Greenberg and his Twitter page.

As he talks about Torah and Twitter, Rabbi Ben Greenberg compares the Internet messaging service to the New York subway system. "The great people equalizer," Greenberg calls it, providing a platform for preachers with and without a realworld platform.

As with everyone else, Twitter gives Harvard's 27-year-old Orthodox Jewish chaplain just 140 characters to express his thoughts on a Torah portion. Greenberg sees the forced brevity as a good thing, especially when it comes to wordy rabbis. He likened the Twitter challenge to a Talmud class he took in rabbinical school, where at the end of each 60- minute session students had to summarize everything they learned in one sentence.

"If the message resonates with people, then it's impactful," Greenberg said. "It has meaning without all the poetry and all the rhetorical tools that rabbis use in sermons, just the meaning itself."

This fall, Greenberg self-published, "Twitter Torah: Thoughts on the Hebrew Bible in 140 Characters or Less," a collection of tweets from himself and four other rabbis, among others. Each chapter includes reflections on a different Torah portion.

He assembled the 53-page paperback despite acknowledging that most people don't have time to read books anymore. So why did he write one about Twitter?

"I think the book exposes a wider audience to the dynamic and vibrant conversations on Torah that happen on the Internet," he said.

He tweets regularly on TorahTweets.org, a site created by Rabbi Shai Gluskin last spring to generate excitement for Shavuot. Citing a book of Torah commentary, Kedushat Levi, Greenberg tweeted, "1st step to success: know that you're capable of succeeding. 1st flaw of Noah: he didn't know his capacity 4 success."

Gluskin, who is also a Web developer, works at the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation in Pennsylvania.

Not everything that Greenberg tweets is an interpretation of holy writings. On Oct. 21 he tweeted, "Cambridge moment: Davening at Hillel, looking out the window and seeing Ben Affleck struggling to get a police belt on outside."

Last month, he attended the inaugural conference of the International Rabbinic Fellowship, an organization of modern Orthodox rabbis from the United States, Canada, South America, Israel and Hong Kong.

At the conference, they debated Orthodox conversions and the question of whether to admit women acting in a rabbinic capacity as full voting members. And Greenberg tweeted his own reflections:

On Nov. 17: "Confirmed in my career choice of rabbi and not lawyer."

And 40 minutes later: "Wouldn't be an irf conference w/o dancing."

Before coming to Harvard, the San Diego native attended rabbinical school in New York at Yeshivat Chevei Torah. He served as a rabbinic intern at the Jewish Center of Teaneck in New Jersey and the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York.

Greenberg said Twitter keeps him in touch with friends and congregants across the country. As of Monday, he had 293 followers on Twitter.

"No matter where you move from, or where you move to, you can stay in a relationship with them," he said.

His wife, Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, Harvard's first Orthodox Jewish female chaplain, recently joined Twitter, using it to campaign in the Jewish Community Heroes contest, sponsored by United Jewish Communities. With more than 8,000 online votes, she was among the 20 finalists.

Rachel Barenblat, a rabbinic student from the western Massachusetts town of Lanesborough, also contributes to Twitter Torah. Barenblat is in the Aleph rabbinic program, which includes online, phone and in-person classes.

A published poet, she said both poetry and Twitter involve "trying to say the most with the fewest words."

Barenblat, who also has a blog called the Velveteen Rabbi, said part of the appeal of Twitter is that people will pay attention regardless of whether you have a title. "Both Twitter and the blogosphere are places where you can make a reputation," she said.

Barenblat has never met Greenberg, but just received an email from him asking whether he could reprint her Torah tweets. "That's part of the joy, that serendipitous connection," she said.

With a baby on the way, she hopes to be ordained by January 2011. When she does become a rabbi, she doesn't expect tweets to replace sermons. Some ideas, she acknowledged, require more than 140 characters.

Still, she said, Twitter, blogs and Facebook provide a convenient way for people to keep up their Torah studies. Rabbis can use Twitter to reach people in their homes, on their computers. "Part of it is going to people where people are," she said.

But Barenblat noted that people who tweet about the Torah do run the risk of making shallow rather than thoughtful commentary.

"I think it probably encourages us to be cute rather than meaningful," she said. "I think that's the challenge, how to say something that's meaningful rather than gimmicky."