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Bigotry for Polite Company 
The Intellectuals’ Assault on Observant Jews by Rabbi Avi Shafran Rabbi Shafran serves as Agudath Israel of America’s Director of Public Affairs and as the American director of Am Echad, the Agudath Israel-inspired educational outreach effort and media resource. On September 11, like most Americans, we observant Orthodox Jews felt we had stared into the face of evil. And so it came as a rude surprise to realize over ensuing weeks that, at least in the minds of some, we ourselves had something in common with the Islamic terrorists who gleefully murdered thousands of innocents.A columnist for The New York Times led the pack. International terrorism, Thomas L. Friedman wrote mere days after the attacks on New York and Washington, reflects a struggle not between civilizations or religions but “between those Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews with a modern and progressive outlook and those with a medieval one.” One could only imagine how Mr. Friedman might judge an outlook that has been preserved for millennia. Karen Armstrong, an ex-nun who teaches at Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism, expressed a similar conclusion Time Magazine. Every fundamentalist movement, she explained, “in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced that liberal, secular society is determined to wipe out religion” and “fighting, as they imagine, a battle for survival, fundamentalists often feel justified in ignoring the more compassionate principles of their faith.” Not to be upstaged, Mr. Friedman felt compelled to revisit his verdict in a second column several weeks later, this time leaving the Hindus and Buddhists alone and focusing exclusively on his own co-religionists. Religious Jews, he proposed, should “reinterpret” their faith “in a way that embrace[s] modernity” and that subscribes to a Creator who “speaks Arabic on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays and Latin on Sundays.” He characterized the alternative, the belief that one’s religion, exclusively, is true, as “single-minded fanaticism.” Then there was Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who was “shaken” by the sight of a Muslim man politely refusing a woman’s outstretched hand at a meeting (he explained that his religion didn’t allow him to shake it) and as a result bemoaned the “ancient evil” of “religious fanaticism” (and, from there, the contemporary scourge of school choice). The Rabbi Weighs In In the meanwhile, Reform Rabbi Uri Regev, the then-director of his movement’s Israel Religious Action Center who has since been tapped to lead the World Union for Progressive Judaism, delivered a sermon that – likely, or at least hopefully, to his everlasting regret – was the subject of a detailed report in the Cleveland Jewish News. The Reform leader spent the first part of his speech, made on Shabbos Shuva, mere days after September 11, quoting the hate-filled words of Islamic fundamentalists. Then he went on to speak about “our own share of people who currently in Israel are spreading the venom of religious fundamentalism,” segueing smoothly to and from Yigal Amir and Boruch Goldstein to Haredi Jews like those who have opposed his efforts to change Israel’s religious status quo. Though several quotations the article attributed to his sermon were subsequently claimed by the Cleveland Jewish News reporter herself to have been embellished or lifted from a separate interview, an examination of the transcript of the speech (the Shabbos sermon, sadly, had been taped) confirmed that her article, carelessly written though it may have been, had nevertheless well captured the implied comparison. (The description and quote above are from the transcript.) Veteran Forward columnist Leonard Fein (a cherished personal friend, as it happens, despite our disagreement on most everything besides the crucial importance of ahavas Yisroel) would not be left behind, either. Following the others’ lead, he rejected the characterization of the current international struggle as a clash of civilizations, and called President Bush’s description of it as a war between good and evil, “fatuous.” Mr. Fein’s reading? What we are witnessing is a “conflict of cultures,” to wit: the “culture of rationality” versus “the culture of belief.” Though the writer did not explicitly refer to his fellow Jews who hold deep and traditional religious beliefs, it is hard to imagine that he would (even as he loves us) exempt us from membership in the camp of rationality’s enemies. Of Love, Faith and Yogurt What the confident commentators seem intent on asserting is that since the Taliban study religious texts and wear beards and shun elements of Western society, all who do the same are perforce their brothers in evil. It might be called the “yogurt principle.” If Osama Bin-Laden eats yogurt, we must be wary of all who share his taste for cultured milk. To be sure, Mr. Bin-Laden doesn’t invoke his breakfast habits as his inspiration to murder, maim and otherwise wreak havoc. But those who are quick to bind all “fundamentalists” with the same turban would do well to ponder the fact that every spouse-murderer on the planet lays his or her actions on feelings of love (either for the deceased or for someone else), and yet most people would not therefore brand love a crime. Faith, likewise, is not inherently implicated when murder is committed in its name. Both faith and love are powerful entities; indeed, they are hardly unrelated. What makes either, in the end, laudable or despicable, though, is what is done with it. A Lonely, Laudable Voice A happy exception to the parade of pretentious pundits was Seth Lipsky, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who characterized the words of some of the more prominent personages mentioned above as “glancing sneers.” “What is one to make,” he asked his readers, “of all this carping about Jewish fundamentalism?” Quoting extensively from (and with kind comments for) letters written by this writer and my esteemed colleague Chaim Dovid Zwiebel and published in, The New York Times in response to the Friedman columns, Mr. Lipsky concluded that “Jewish fundamentalism seeks neither material success nor world domination but rather good deeds and the study of Torah” and that the efforts of Orthodox Jews “to spread the faith extend only to other Jews who may lack traditional Jewish educations.” Mr. Lipsky’s, though, was a lonely voice in a wilderness of religiophobes. Modern Malignment Perhaps most depressing of all was the fact that the kulturkampf against religious tradition was joined, late and feebly but offensively all the same, by a voice within the Orthodox world itself. Writing in December in the New York Jewish Week, for example, a “Modern Orthodox” rabbi from Queens felt the need to make sure that the paper’s readers fully recognized the primitive and superstitious essence of Orthodox Jews less enlightened than himself. As examples of the “immaturity and obscurantism, superstition and intolerance,” he feels “abound in the Orthodox community,” the rabbi cited practices like checking one’s mezuzos at times of travail, ascribing Jewish national tragedy to the Jewish people’s sins and seeking to merit G-d’s blessing by eschewing loshon horah. Leaving aside entirely the distasteful and profoundly unJewish nature of the writer’s sneering tone and words (as well as his astounding assertion in the same piece that most American Jews are alienated from their religious heritage because of the beliefs or practices of those Orthodox Jews he detests – as he surely must know, the most successful kiruv efforts are those operated precisely by the very Jewish universe that so embarrasses him), his message to the Jewish Week’s readers is clear: Those Orthodox Jews who actually take things like mezuzahs and lashon hara seriously are not sophisticated moderns like the rest of us. They, are, in other words, the bad guys, the fundamentalists. That portrayal is sad in its own right, to be sure. Coming, though, on the heels of a campaign by others to paint those of us committed to the entirety of the Jewish religious tradition as part of a conglomerate of backward, sinister, faith-crazed fanatics, the rabbi’s words are not only offensive but pose potential danger to his fellow Jews. He and others like him would do well to pause to consider that the bandwagon they are panting to catch and jump on may well carry nothing less than the contemporary equivalent of anti-Jewish accusations of other times and places. Some Fundamental Facts The pundits and rabbinical critics need to face some fundamental facts: The principles and tenets to which we “Jewish fundamentalists” are _committed are those of the Jewish People’s holy Torah, which places us – as it has Jews over the generations – on a path leading to spiritual refinement, not indoctrination of tens of thousands of children with venomous hatred or grooming martyrs to kill innocent as they blow themselves to smithereens. The enemy we arise each morning prepared to engage in battle is not another religion or culture but rather an entirely invisible, if formidable, foe, the yetzer horah. Anger and violence are things we abhor, not cherish.. We do not operate explosives factories or fly airliners into skyscrapers. Our weapons in our “holy war” of trying to be the best Jews we can be are not bombs, germs and rage but tefilla, mitzvos and mussar. Our shunning of elements of what passes for contemporary culture these days bespeaks not some frustrated fear of modernity but rather a principled stand for morality and G-dliness in human life. We seek to present a moral model to the larger world, and even to influence that world at times, but with reason, wisdom and example, not threats and worse. And so, comparisons, blatant or implied, between religious Jews and people of other faiths dedicated to violence, terror and world-conquest are not only deeply offensive, they are deeply wrong. Because we Jews, in the end, are fundamentally different. |