Jewish Life Winter 1980 by Jewish Action

TESHUVA ISSUE

$2.50

Teves 5740/Winter 1979/80

Teshuva: The Jew's Return to His Origins: The State of the Art in 5740/1980 / Yaakov Jacobs Alienation: An Ideological Basis for Return / Harold Fisch Chaim Druckman, M.K., A Poet of Teshuva / An Interview The Sweet Waters of T orah /D ov Begun Return: A Case History / Barbara Soferr A Young Man from Virginia Teaches "Jewish Identity" To Israel's Defense Forces / Paul Laster: An Interview The Role of Vidui in the Teshuva/Reuven Grodner

Process of

The Teshuva Issue: An Epilogue / The Editor

A publication of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America /Orthodox Union

Volum e 111, N u m ber 4

Teves 5740 /Winter 1979/80

Editor Y aakovJacobs

Managing Editor David M erzel

Associate Editor Yaakov Kornreich

Editor Emeritus Saul Bernstein

Editorial Board Julius Berm an J. David Bleich Judith Bleich David Cohen Samuel Cohen Lawrence A. Kobrin David Kranzler George R ohr Sheldon Rudoff Pinchas Stolper Simon W incelberg

Product ion A ssi stants Miriam Langer Janet Levin

Mrs. Linore Ward and Family have established the Jess Ward Memorial Jewish Life Fund to help assure the continued publication of Jewish Life and to continue the dissemination o f Torah ideology to English-speaking Jewry A tribute to the sacred memory of Jess Ward who in his lifetime gave of his talents and his means to his fellow Jews. We pray that these pages shall be a worthy memorial to his committed life.

V olum e III, N u m ber 4

Contents 3

Teshuva: The Jew's Return to His Origins: The State of the Art in 5740/1980/Yaakov Jacobs

Alienation: An Ideological Basis for Return/Harold Fisch

Chaim Druckman, M.K., A Poet of Teshuva/An Interview

The Sweet Waters of Torah /Dov Begun

Return: A Case History /Barbara Soferr

A Young Man from Virginia Teaches "Jewish Identity" To Israel's Defense Forces/Paul Laster: An Interview

The Role of Vidui in the Process of Teshuva /Reuven Grodner

The Teshuva Issue: An Epilogue /The Editor

Letters to the Editor: On Jewish Journalism /"Who Is Running Our Yeshivos?" Artwork on pages .10, 44 and 54, courtesy of Mendel Gottesman Library ofYeshiva University. Artwork on pages 24 , 28, 3 7.and 64, are from The Hebrew Book, courtesy of Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem.

Because of the small staff producing Jewish Life, contributors are asked to send an inquiry before submitting manuscripts, and to be patient in waiting for a response. We regret any inconvenience we may have caused in this regard, and we trust we will be able to increase our efficiency in the future.

©Copyright 1980 by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. Material from JEWISH LIFE, including illustrations, may not be reproduced except by written permission from this magazine following written request. JEWISH LIFE (ISSN #00-2165-77) is published quarterly. Subscription: 1 year-=K $10.00, 2 years—$18.00, 3 years—$25.00. Foreign: Add $.50 per year. Single copy $2.50, Editorial and Publication Office: 116 East 27th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016. Second Class Postage Paid New York, N.Y.

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Yaakov Jacobs

Teshuva: The Jew's Return to His Origins: The State of the Art in 5740/1980 Wisdom was asked: "What is the punishment for the sinner?" "Their evil shall forever pursue them," answered Wisdom. The same question was put to Prophesy. "The soul that sins must die," replied Prophesy. The Torah was asked: "What is the punishment for the sinner?" "Let him bring an offering," replied the Torah, "and he will be forgiven." And finally, the question was put to the Holy One, Blessed Be He: "What is the punishment for the sinner?" And Ha'Kodosh Baruch Hu replied: "Let him do Teshuva, and he will be forgiven." —The Talmud "Later, as a young man, I could not understand how, with the nothing of Judaism you yourself possessed, you could reproach me for not making an effort (for the sake of piety at least, as you put it) to cling to a similar nothing. It was indeed, so far as I could see, a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke. Four days a year you went to the synagogue, where you were, to say the least, closer to the indifferent than to those who took it all seriously, patiently went through the prayers as^ a formality, sometimes amazed me by being able to show me in the prayer book the passage that was being said at the moment, and for the rest, so long as I was present in the synagogue (and this was the main thing) I was allowed to hang about wherever I liked. And so I yawned and dozed through many hours (I don't think I was ever again so bored, except later at dancing lessons) and did my best to enjoy the few little bits of variety there were, as for instance when the Ark was opened, which always reminded me of the shooting galleries where a cupboard door would t>pen in the same way whenever one hit a bull's eye; except that there something interesting always came out and here it was always just the same old dolls without heads. Incidentally, it was also very frightening for me there, not only because of all the people one came into close contact with, but also because you once mentioned casually that I too might be called to the Torah... "That's how it was in the synagogue; and it was, if possible, even more miserable, being confined to the first Seder night, which more and more developed into a farce, with fits of hysterical laughter, admittedly under the influence of the growing children. (Why did you have to give way to that

Teshuva is a magic word in the Torah lexicon. It rings hells which reverberate in the Jewish psyche: bringing to mind the Bais Ha'M ikdash where Klal Yisrael found forgiveness for its collective sins. It brings to mind the sorrow of our loss, whose only consolation is a small section of the Temple's surrounding wall: the Kosel Ha'M a'aravi. It brings to mind our millenial dream of the restoration of the Bais Ha'M ikdash in time to come. It echoes our prayers for national restoration as the People of G-d, living His Torah in the Land He has given us.

influence? Because you had brought it about.) This was the religious material that was handed to m e... How one could do anything better with that material than get rid of it as soon as possible, I could not understand: precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devoutest action/' —?Franz Kafka in Letter to His Father "Like most of their generation, my parents had been deeply affected by World War II. They insisted that my brothers and sisters and I remember our kinship to the six million dead. In dozens of dinner-table conversations they imbued us with the principle that our history of oppression should make us sensitive to injustice; we fought for civil rights in this country and fought to end the war in Vietnam. "Yet my father had changed his name from Cohen to Cowan because he hated his embittered, unloving Orthodox father. In my parents' house, we celebrated Christmas, not Chanukah. My brother and I attended Choate, an Episcopalian prep school, where I learned stately Christian hymns and litanies by heart. I don't remember knowing anyone who kept kosher or observed the Sabbath when I was growing up. Those acts seemed archaic customs to me. I assumed they did to my father, too. "In recent years my feeling about Judaism continued to change. By 1976 I was fasting on Yom Kippur. And my wife, Rachel, who is not Jewish, had become even more convinced than I that simple aspects of worship—holding Passover seders in our apartment, fasting, gathering in close as we lit the Sabbath candles—would enrich the fabric of our family's life. "I told my father we were fasting. To my astonishment, he said that were he in better health, he'd join us. He had fasted every year until he was 30, he said. He had never told me that." —Paul Cowan, "Orthodox in New YorklThe Village Voice/April 24, 1978 "About twenty years ago anyone writing on religion in the community (Great Britain) would have noticed an established pattern of decline. Sons were less observant than their fathers and grandsons were less observant still. Young couplesfsetting up home might have kept a kosher frying pan among their utensils in case of a visit by some elderly relative—usually a grandparent—who still cherished tradition. They might have belonged to a synagogue, probably fasted on Yom Kippur and almost certainly celebrated a seder, but otherwise the basic components of what we knew as Judaism were a thing of the past. "Today the situation has been reversed to some extent. Sons are more observant than their fathers and grandsons more observant still, and elderly couples moving into their retirement homes have to burden themselves with an extra set

of cutlery and crockery in case they should be visited by their grandchildren. Modish, well-preserved matrons have to keep their shapely limbs under cover, and sometimes even to don a sheitel, all at the behest of progeny— .. A generation ago most people, including many who were thought of, and even thought of themselves, as Orthodox were hardly worthy indeed. The few mikvaot then still in use were hardly worthy of the name (one, I believe, was kept going with the help of a boiler obtained from an old Royal Navy Warship... and the establishment w as... known as. ..H er Majesty's Mikva.) Rabbis rarely spoke of them in their sermons; it was almost a taboo subject. Now there are numerous well-appointed mikvaot... "The events of the past generation, the Holocaust, the emergence of Israel, the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars have compelled many people to reappraise their whole attitude to life and to reconcile them to ideas and life-styles which they had previously scorned. The merest glance at the direction in which so-called rationalism and liberalism has taken mankind has compelled many thinking individuals to ask themselves whether the mind is after all the safest guide in life, and not a few have turned to mysticism." “ XChaim Bermant, British novelist, in the London Jewish Chronicle The anguish I had shared with my family and a few close friends about preparing a special "Teshuva Issue" of Jewish Life, I shared in part with all of you in our last issue. From whence this anguish? I could hear people saying, "What's with Jacobs; he promised to produce a special issue on the 'Teshuva Movement,' and all we have had so far is talk of anguish.' " (I had even asked a dear friend a while ago to endow this issue—which he did—and he has been waiting patiently.) The source of the anguish is really quite simple. I remember as a young man reading from time to time the speculation of thinkers that if a chimpanzee (read: computer) were to be set down at a typewriter where he/she (it) would strike the keys at random, the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and all of English literature ever written, and ever to be written, would ultimately emerge from the typewriter. It became clear to me that there are an infinite number of first words, sentences, paragraphs, concepts, with which one could begin to write about Teshuva in the seventieth decade of the fifth millenium since Creation, and the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the Common Era. And whichever of this infinite number I would choose would in some measure determine where the issue would go. Hence: the an gu ish how could I ever know if I had chosen the best of an infinite series? I have taken some comfort in a recent "study" by one 5

computer scholar which he argued disproves the "chimpanzee theory." Great literature would not emerge even from the electronically controlled machines which can spew forth thousands of characters per minute when programmed to do so. And then it came to me that—perhaps—Infinity is what Teshuva is all about. Teshuva—the return to man's origins— of Jewish existence; it is the heart of human existence; it is the essence of the "end of days" the Prophets spoke of when all of humanity, the cosmos itself, would turn to the Infinite. And so the anguish of producing a special "Teshuva Issue" of Jewish Life is the anguish all people have experienced in contemplating the Infinite. In this realization I take comfort, and with this "revelation" I begin. After all: where does Infinity begin?—wherever one dips into it. Teshuva is a magic word in the Torah lexicon. It rings bells which reverberate in the Jewish psyche: bringing to mind the Bais Ha'Mikdash where Klal Yisrael found forgiveness for its collective sins. It brings to mind the sorrow of our loss, whose only consolation is a small section of the Temple's surrounding wall: the Kosel Ha'Ma'aravi. It brings to mind our millenial dream of the restoration of the Bais Ha'Mikdash in time to come. It echoes our prayers for national restoration as the People of G-d, living His Torah in the Land He has given us. Teshuva: it brings to mind the thundering voices of our Prophets calling us back to Israel's mission. Teshuva: it brings to mind the struggle of every Jew who has lived—and who now lives—struggling against the forces of evil to remain a Jew; to continue to believe when our lives are bitter; to continue to believe when our lives are sweet—to believe when it is hard to believe; to believe when it is too easy to believe. To remain in oneness with the Bo'rai Olom, even as His Creation would tear us away from Him. Teshuva: to choose good when confronted by evil; to choose life when death calls us. Teshuva: those glorious Ten Days when in defiance of human understanding the Almighty is closer to us than He is on all other days. Teshuva: that awesome day of Yom Kippur, when words, when tears, when abstinence elevate us to the level of the angels on jjigh, washing away our sins and giving us a fresh beginning. Teshuva: it brings to mind the hundreds of thousands of Jewish souls—dare we admit, millions—who have been deprived in our time of their Divine Heritage as Jews. Teshuva: it brings to mind the handful of young people who have found their way back to Torah and mitzvos, and whose greatest contribution to Klal Yisrael may prove to be their having forced us to think about Teshuva with greater force, with greater perception, with warmer and more willing hearts. It is they who have prompted us—from the sublime to the

__ there are an infinite number of first words, sentences, paragraphs, concepts, with which one could begin to write about Teshuva in the seventieth decade of the fifth millenium since Creation, and the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the Common Era.

mundane—to dedicate a special issue of Jewish Life to Teshuva. Over the agonizing months that we have been engaged in putting this issue together, certain new insights have emerged. So broad a concept is Teshuva that it encompasses the totality of Jewish Nationhood, and the totality of the life of the individual Jew. To begin to speak of Teshuva in our time, we must set before ourselves the last two hundred years of Jewish experience, with our origins as a People as a backdrop. We must contemplate Jewish life in Eastern Europe, overcoming the vulgarization of the shtetel by the 'Tiddler" syndrome. We must deal with the liberation of European Jewry; with the Enlightenment which brought a cover of darkness to traditional Jewish life; with the struggle against Reform, against modernism, against assimilation, and against the false messianism of a return to Zion bereft of Torah. We must deal with Churban Europa, the destruction of European Jewry with its scholars, its saints, and its centers of Torah learning and Torah living. We must deal with the existential fact of the Return to Tzion, and with the emergence of a Jewish State which stubbornly clings to British and Ottoman law, while it has, at the same time, nurtured a renaissance of Torah learning and Torah living unparalleled in modern times. And we must deal with the arid expanse of the North American continent turned overnight—in the perspective of Jewish eternity—into an oasis-spotted area of small but vibrant Torah collectives encompassing the Yeshiva University complex; Williamsburgh's yeshivos and Chassidic communities; Lakewood, Spring Valley and Monsey, with their Torah communities and yeshivos; Boro Park—and its complexities; Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Atlanta, Memphis, and points South and West. In a word: an examination of the Teshuva experience—and not what I have incorrectly labeled the "Teshuva Movement"—requires not a special issue, but an encyclopedic work describing where Klal Yisrael is at as we enter the year 5740, and the eighties of the Common Era. What we attempt here is a modest effort to crystalize our own thinking, and to stimulate those who read Jewish Life and those who write for us to deal with the realities of a Klal Yisrael on the verge of Geula, and already experiencing | the Chevlai Moshiqch—the Pangs of Redemption. To contemplate Teshuva, we must see it in all its facets: as a national experience molding the destiny of the Jewish People; as the deeply personal continuum which informs the one-toone relationship with G-d; as the return to Yiddishkeit of those formerly estranged from Torah and mitzvos; and as the cosmic process delineated by the late Rav Kook in his master work Oros Ha Teshuva, which is the modern day handbook of Teshuva and which has influenced several generations of Jews in Eretz Yisrael and throughout the world. Teshuva must also be

What we attempt here is a modest effort to crystalize our own thinking, and to stimulate those who read Jewish Life and those who write for us to deal with the realities of a Klal Yisrael on the verge of Geula, and already experiencing the Chevlai M oshiach— the Pangs of Redemption.

understood in the light of another Godol B'Yisrael who graces this generation, Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, whose Teshuva talks have had a broad effect which has yet to be adequately measured and described.

The Teshuva Issue To appreciate light we must experience darkness. To strive for the good we must deal with evil. To appreciate the move toward Teshuva in our time, we must deal with its opposite: Alienation. To set the stage for this special issue we offer Alienation: An Ideological Basis for Return, in which Harold Fisch describes the Jewish and the Human Condition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the dreams and the nightmares which gave rise to the Jewish State; and the illusions which must be destroyed if we are to achieve Teshuva and Geula. In search of the roots of the drive toward Teshuva in the Holy Land, we spent nine days in Yerushalayim speaking to as many people as we could find who were returners and returnees. A brief conversation on the second day of our visit yielded a classic statement from one who is in the front-line of the struggle for Return—Rav Chaim Druckman: A Poet of Teshuva. Several days later we met with Dov Begun at his yeshiva in Yerushalayim. We were able to spend only a short time with him, but we came away with the text of an interview in which Begun described his odyssey from a left-wing kibbutz to the world of Torah and Torah learning. The interview appeared in a collection called El HaMekorot (To the Sources), published by a group of the same name. The Sweet Waters of Torah is adapted from that interview with the kind permission of the publishers. Few Jews today have not met a Baal Teshuva. No one knows for sure how many there are. After all, Jews have been "doing Teshuva" since they started being Jews. Stories are at times overly dramatized; at times puffed up for publicity—yes publicity!—reasons. In Return: A Case History, Barbara Soferr soberly describes one returnee, while shedding light on the entire process. (There is an unhappy note to the subject's reference to Bob Dylan. Dylan, who had a flirtation with Teshuva in an American yeshiva, has now become a "bornagain Christian," perhaps a lesson in the need for stability and deliberation in the Teshuva process.) During our visit to Israel we heard rumblings about a young American oleh (immigrant) who had been commissioned with the rank of Captain in Israel's defense forces. He had been assigned to the Education Branch to work with officers in a

special program on "Jewish Identity." A small notice had appeared in one of Israel's dailies reporting that Captain Paul Laster had been mustered out of the ranks for going beyond his orders. We searched out Captain Laster and our discussion with him appears in: A Young American From Virginia Teaches "Jewish Identity to Israel's Defense Forces/An Interview. The notion of Teshuva has produced a vast classical literature: such works as the Rambam's (Maimonides') Hilchos Teshuva (Laws of Teshuva) in his Mishna the classic Shaarei Teshuva (the Gates of Teshuva); and the recent explications of Teshuva by Rav Yoseph Ber Soloveitchik. Reuven Grodnerexamines The Role of Vidui in the Process of Teshuva. Drawing on classic sources as well as contemporary expositions, Rabbi Grodner describes the process of confession as an integral part of returning. We are pleased to present in this issue several letters relating to our last issue and look forward to continued lively exchanges in our Letters section. The editor is grateful for assistance in putting together this special issue to Rabbi Yaakov Zev, head of the Minal Ha’studentim of Israel's Ministry of Absorption, who literally and figuratively took us to the Teshuva areas of Eretz Yisrael; to Dr. Judy Bleich for her advice and her prodding; to the Chairman of our Editorial Board, Sheldon Rudoff, for his forceful advocacy in behalf of Jewish Life; and to David Merzel, our new Managing Editor.

In forthcoming issues: □ Is There Dogma in Judaism? □ Reb Simcha Zissel of Kelm □ Jewish Life in Morocco Today □ The Torah and Secular Studies □ Synagogue Architecture and Five Hundred Years of Jewish History □ What Did They Know? The American Jewish Press and the Holocaust □ The Pomegranate: A Truly Jewish Symbol □ My Children Reborn □ New York's Lower East Side: Nostalgia—Or Reality?

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Alienation: A n Ideological Basis for Return The Fathers of the Zionist Revolution stressed the healing power of the Return; it was to be the cure of a sickness, the name of which was Galut (Exile). For Galut signified not only the geographical dispersion of the Jewish people, but also a psychological state of disorientation. Jews, said Leo Pinsker in 1882, are sick, the more so because they no longer understand what it is they need to make them whole. Everywhere an alien, the Jew presents a 'tragi-comic figure . . . with distorted countenance and maimed limbs'. Ahad Ha'am, writing a few years later, affirmed that the emancipated Jews of the West were more sick then their persecuted brethren in the East. Their emancipation was only external; within they were slaves. By contrast, the Jews of the East were outwardly confined but inwardly free. The moral and intelectual slavery of the so-called emancipated Jews was the more acute because it was unconscious: they sought to become inconspicuous; to become absorbed into the surrounding culture, but they were not aware of how this marked them out for scorn and derision. Having renounced their inner Jewish identity, they suffered from 'spiritual emptiness'. Max Nordau, probably the most brilliant of the early Zionist leaders, was, amongst his other accomplishments, a trained psychologist. This may have helped him to diagnose the Jewish condition. He described the Jews of the West as enjoying an illusory emancipation. In their desire to disappear, they gave up both their self-respect and their sense of reality. They became Luftmenschen - 'dangling men' - lacking any firm anchorage either in society or in the economic structure of their countries of residence. Spiritually enfeebled, they were not even capable of defending their own vital interests as Diaspora Jews when these were threatened. He cites the Dreyfus affair in Paris in the 1890s. What shocked Nordau chiefly at the time was not the eruption of anti semitism within the supposedly liberal French upper and middle class, but the moral paralysis and cowardice of the Jewish community which, on the whole, remained silent, hoping that the storm would somehow blow over. It was not the official Jewish leadership which raised its voice on behalf of Captain Dreyfus, but Picquart, Clemenceau and Zola. The Jews of the Exile, said Nordau, were like Lacedaemonian helots of Antiquity, degrading themselves for the benefit of their contemptuous oppressors, the Spartans, and silently swallowing every manner of insult.

Dr. Fisch, Chairman of the English Department of Bar Man University, is probably the most literate person writing in the English language today, on matters of concern to Orthodox Jewry. We are privileged to offer this selection from T h e Z ionist R evolution, A New Perspective, with the kind permission of St. Martin's Press. It is against the background of this examination of alienation of Jews from their heritage that we can begin to deal with the phenomenon of Teshuva, which has become apparent in the last two decades both here and in Eretz Yisrael.

Here was the panacea. Restore the Jewish people to its land and all would be well. A ll that was needed was the integrity and strength that come from a corporate national existence on native soil; to become a nation like other nations. Alienation was, after all, nothing more than homesickness, and the cure for homesickness was home.

This, then was a sickness of the soul, for which the modern term is 'alienation'. The early Zionists discerned -and this was their most profound insight - that the effect of granting the Jews civil rights in their countries of dispersion was merely to interiorize their alienation; for the subtler forms of discrimination remained, whilst the inner strength that came from a sense of spiritual and national identity was gradually eroded. But how was alienation to be cured and, above all, what were the components of that true identity of which the alienated Galut Jew had been deprived? It is here that the confusions and contradiction of classical Zionism emerge once again. Pinsker, Nordau and Herzl all recognized in their different ways that the sickness of the Galut was a psychological state involving an absence of wholeness, of authenticity. As such it was not curable by the granting of mere political rights. On the contrary, they recognized that alienation in its sharpest form occurred among those who had, in fact, achieved such rights. Nevertheless they based their remedy for alienation on the simple formula of political restoration; that is to say, the granting of national rights to the collectivity of the Jewish people. Here was the panacea. Restore the Jewish people to its land and all would be well. All that was needed was the integrity and strength that come from a corporate national existence on native soil; to become a nation like other nations. Alienation was, after all, nothing more than homesickness, and the cure for homesickness was home. The Exile of the Divine Presence The failure to understand the full nature of the crisis which the Jewish people was suffering can be expressed theologically; the political Zionists overlooked what is termed in the rabbinic tradition Galut HaShekhina - the exile of the Divine Presence itself. G-d is said to accompany the Jewish people into exile, and lis is in one sense, a source of comfort and strength. But in another sense the exile of the Shekhina implies that, corresponding to the physical separation of Israel from its land, there is a kind of metaphysical exile, a homelessness which affects the very ground of reality as a result of which Israel confronts a universe emptied of meaning. Israel's condition becomes the outward symptom of a deeper disorder, the universal forfeiture of wholeness and unity. And just as this exile is a particularized image of the archetypal exile of man from the Garden of Eden, so the Return takes on a wider meaning also. It does not exhaust itself in the setting up of one

more nation-state among others: it signifies ultimately a movement designed to restore harmony to a world radically in need of healing. This is the burden of the teaching, for instance, of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great spiritual leaders of the Yishuv in Palestine before the foundation of the state of Israel. Nor is this at bottom a matter of an eccentric or mystical reading of Zionism. The fact is that such words as Galut and Shivah-Teshuvah (Return-Repentance) are semantically charged in this way. They have inevitable overtones, like the word 'Zion' itself. They do not signify merely physical or political states. The pain of exile is not the pain simply of separation from one's land: it is a metaphysical ache. The yearning for return is not simply a hunger for national rights: it is a hunger for renewal, as in the plea 'Restore us to thyself, O Lord, that we may return (nashuvah): renew our days as of old' (Lamentations 5:21). Such renewal is a phenomenon associated with the Covenant: it involves the fundamental re-ordering of relations between man and man, and between man and God. These are, of course, literary metaphors with which Zionism is nourished and without which it cannot be understood. But alienation or Galut and its antitype, Return, are not private myths confined to the literary imagination of Israel. It may be claimed that Galut, in the sense in which it was understood by Rabbi Kook and others, is a phenomenon which sensitive men have long recognized and grieved over, and never more so than in our own century. If the Jew is alienated and in search of his true home, then the experience of our time has made us aware that mankind is in need of a cure for its universal homelessness. Alienation was the emotional starting point for nineteenth-century Zionism; in the twentieth century it has become the manifest sign of a general crisis. Modern literature is haunted by images of exile and loss, starting with Proust's attempted recovery of the lost world of his childhood and T.S. Eliot's memory of the children at play in the sunlight of the rose garden. Saul Bellow's hero, Moses Herzog, meditates in mid-century on his childhood in the Montreal ghetto before he and his generation were sucked up in the feverish and unstable life of the great cities. Nor is this merely a questipn of alienation from one's past, from the tradition; there is the deeper alienation of man from himself. In a famous short story by Kafka, we witness the metamorphosis of a man into a cockroach, a vulnerable and short-lived insect. Such symbolism goes deep into man's sense of his condition in the twentieth century. Interestingly, the Jew often comes to typify this universal condition. We have mentioned Bellow's

The pain of exile is not the pain simply of separation from one's land: it is a metaphysical ache.

alienated hero, Moses Herzog. But he was, in fact, anticipated by Leopold Bloom, the Jewish protagonist of James Joyce's famous novel Ulysses (1922). The Jew, outcast and victim, seeking love in a world from which love is largely absent, becomes a representative of Everyman. The Jew: A Symbol for the Human Condition

Too much affluence, too little affluence or else the widespread chemical contamination of the environment - each of these has been designated the root cause of our maladies. But what clearly besets the West is something more than the problem of ecology; it is the problem of a lost identity, of the need for a more stable relationship with oneself, with one s past and with one's future.

There is thus a profound sense in which the exile of the Jew is a symbol for the human condition in our day. For a long time men placed their hopes - Jews perhaps more than others - in the values of Western liberalism with its commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the outcome has not been consonant with these great aims. Fear and violence are often more characteristic of the life of the great cities than happiness and prosperity. In many cases, these cities have been all but abandoned by their inhabitants. The drug culture is for many what is left of the pursuit of happiness, a phantom which still eludes its pursuers. Jews, who are all, in a sense, survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, are peculiarly well placed to measure the failure of the technological civilization of the West: in the very heart of Europe in the mid-twentieth century residual Christianity and humanism have proved inadequate to withstand the upsurge of barbarism. Our help, it seems, will not come from the 'secular city' in which Western man has invested so much of his spiritual capital from the days of Spinoza and earlier. This has been sadly noted by many. But in pondering the meaning of our discontents, observers have generally pointed to the more superficial factors. Too much affluence, too little affluence or else the widespread chemical contamination of the environment - each of these has been designated the root cause of our maladies. But what clearly besets the West is something more than the problem of ecology; it is the problem of a lost identity, of the need for a more stable relationship with oneself, with one's past and with one's future. Now if we view the Zionist answer to the narrowly and on its own terms, as an outgrowth of nineteenth-century nationalism and populism, it would seem to be only marginally relevant to this universal twentieth-century problem. But if we view it in biblical terms as essentially a movement of spiritual return - a'going up to the mountain of the Lord'- then it becomes possible to see its relevance to the of mankind in our troubled century. The return of the Jew to his land and to his origins becomes the concrete symbolization of a wider search for meaning, with Israel in its classical role of mediator, bearing the sicknesses of all but also extending salvation and cure thfough the processes of its own liberation. And all this has the most direct and practical bearing on the policies,

internal and external, of the Jewish state in our own time. Are we a part of Western civilization, subject to the same currents of nihilism, permissiveness and revolt against authority? Or are we called upon to stand apart, to confront the West in the name of values peculiar to the Jewish tradition? And if so, what are those values and to what extent do they constitute an answer to alienation? The Sicknesses of Egypt The biblical paradigms are helpful here. Lot, we may remember, has to be forcibly persuaded to leave the doomed cities of the Plain (Genesis 19:15,16). The land which he thinks will provide him with wealth, security and a home turns out to be an environmental hazard. He does not leave it easily, and perhaps this is the measure of his own inner contamination. Leaving Sodom is for him, in fact, rather like going into exile, for he has become attached to its comforts and he has come to tolerate even its sexual perversions. To that extent he is alienated from his truer self. But the composite biblical image for alienation, with its accompanying loss of true identity, is the exile of the Children of Israel in Egypt. There are wealth, power and influence in Egypt for Israelites such as Joseph and Moses who have 'made it' in a sophisticated and enlightened society, but there is also a lack of authenticity, a sense of homelessness and bondage which even the wealthly and influential experience. The Bible speaks (Exodus 15:26) of the 'sicknesses of Egypt7which the liberated slaves will no longer suffer—sicknesses, presumably, of the soul as well as the body. But still, liberation is not easy and the 'mixed multitude' of exiles often relapses, hankering after the world it has left behind, with its comforting mind-drugs, its easy idolatries, its lack of responsibility. If they have to leave Egypt it is out of necessity rather than choice. And yet, like the Jews who followed the Zionist call at the beginning of the twentieth century, their motives are confused. Many of them are looking simply for another Egypt, where they can enjoy all that Egypt has to offer without being physically enslaved. Others, we may suppose, remain true to the vestigial memories of the Covenant, its promise and obligations. The rabbis noted that, in spite of a radical assimilation with their environment, the Israelites in Egypt held on stubbornly to their Israelite identity -'they changed neither their names nor their tongue'.

The Bible speaks (Exodus 1 5 :2 6 j of the 'sicknesses of Egypt' which the liberated slaves will no longer suffer sicknesses, presumably, of the soul as well as the body. But still, liberation is not easy and the 'mixed multitude' of exiles often relapses, hankering after the world it has left behind, with its comforting minddrugs, its easy idolatries, its lack of responsibility. If they have to leave Egypt it is out of necessity rather than choice.

Egypt: A State of Mind Egypt, then, is a state of mind as well as a geographical location. Over against it stands the Promised Land with its pledge of liberation, but before one can enter it a movement 15

must take place - from the Covenant of necessity to the Covenant of vocation. There must be commitment, self dedication, for the answer to alienation is not unbounded freedom. Indeed, unrestricted freedom resulting in social and moral anarchy is itself a sign of alienation. It is not by giving a license to everyone to pursue his own wayward instincts that we shall achieve a cure for the Egyptian sickness, but by defining social and national objectives to which the individual may willingly commit himself. The liberated slaves must take upon themselves covenant obligations. No longer is the individual the measure of all things: he thinks in terms of family, nation and community. The community living in accordance with its covenant bonds becomes in Hebrew a 'holy community', for the community itself is holy once it finds the true path. Each man seeks his own personal satisfaction, but the community reaches out to something better and higher. It becomes a priesthood and, as a priesthood, it offers healing to all. In the new land there will be cities of refuge for the unintentional murderer; there will be humane laws; the rights of property will be controlled. There will be a task for the individual within the framework of the community; he will devote his tithes to the maintenance of the scholars and the poor; he will consecrate his fields, his days, his family life, by symbolic offering, by abstinence at set seasons, by feast and fast. There will be no room for libertinism either in sex, society or economics. In short, alienation will be cured by commitment: Tor unto me the Children of Israel are servants: they are my servants whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt' (Leviticus 25:55). f

If Zionism is no more than a movement to bring about the physical return of the Jews to their land, then the growing Israeli generation have no further use for it. They are no longer dispersed and statehood as such no longer excites them. Their problem is deeper: it is the problem of a wounded selfrespect, of a doubtful identity, of a purpose that seems to have been lost with the passing of the first generation of pioneers and liberators.

The Real Spiritual Motive of Zionism All this takes us some way from Zionism and its achievements as reflected in the state of Israel today. The Israeli leadership does not call for the establishment of the 'holy community; their language is not that of the Covenant. And the result is that they have little to offer as palliatives for the deeper Galut, the alienation of the spirit for which Zionism was to have been the cure. The question is: how much longer can the real spiritual motive of Zionism be ignored? In the early years of state-building, the ingathering of Jews and the establishment of state institutions provided fulfilment and a sense of purpose in and of themselves. But this is no longer so. If Zionism is no more than a movement to bring about the physical return of the Jews to their land, then the growing Israeli generation have no further use for it. They are no longer dispersed and statehood as such no longer excites them. Their problem is deeper: it is the problem of a wounded selfrespect, of a doubtful identity, of a purpose that seems to have

been lost with the passing of the first generation of pioneers and liberators. In a word, alienation has become part of the inheritance of the young Israeli himself, and what he unconsciously asks of Zionism is a cure for this condition. It is hardly necessary to stress the gravity of Israel's political and military situation at the present; it is perhaps not quite so evident, however, that Israelis, especially younger Israelis, are undergoing a moral crisis of almost equal gravity. Of course the one is bound up with the other. It is the external threat which raises the urgent question of the essential values and purposes for which the state was called into existence. The young Israeli requires to know for what cause he is fighting. At one time, the Zionist Revolution was clearly on the side of progress; one fought for freedom and one fought against tyranny; it was as simple as that. But now the Israeli finds himself unexpectedly cast in the role of reactionary. How is one to maintain one's moral faith and integrity when faced, for instance, wit}* the charge of imperialism? What is the answer to that? It is of course a canard. The young Israeli knows very well from his father and grandfather that they fought in the underground for the Haganah in order to free their land from the yoke of British imperialism. In the thirties and forties they were members of a national liberation movement, with all that that implied in terms of self-respect and the respect of lovers of freedom everywhere. But their children now find themselves assailed on all sides as the representatives of imperialism, while 'progressive' forces everywhere proclaim the members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (and similar bodies) as the freedom fighters of the Middle East! When the PLO come to kill his family or blow up his school, the young Israeli reacts with spontaneous fury and generally wins the battle. He has evidently a bond with the future and the past stronger than the politics of the so-called 'liberation movements' - which are, in any case, not quite so pure and liberating as they used to be. But the switching of roles as between liberators and imperialists compounds the moral crisis for the young Israeli. His confusion becomes deeper, eating away at the source of his self-respect and threatening to convert his idealism and virtue into cynicism. In extreme cases he will decide to quit a country which seems to provide so little rest for his body or spirit. For, let us remember, "Zionism7 also requires him to serve for anything up to a hundred days a year in the reserves, even when there are no wars to keep him away from home for longer periods! The majority will no doubt remain to build their future in Israel, but they will be constantly beset by doubts. Where do we go from here? Who are we? What are we doing here? To what are we bidden? And above all: what is it that others hate and distrust in us? Why can we not achieve normalcy like other

The majority will no doubt remain to build their future in Israel, but they will be constantly beset by doubts. Where do we go from here? \ Who are we? What are we doing here? To what are we bidden? And above all: what is it that others hate and distrust in us? Why can we npt achieve normalcy like other national communities?

The creation of the state of Israel is a mighty fact and, most of us would add, an irreversible one; but then so was the breaking down of the walls of the ghetto in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But neither of these epoch-making events has cured the Jew of the malady of alienation.

national communities? The last two questions were precisely those asked by the Jews of the Diaspora in the nineteenth century, when they became aware of the failure of mere political and civil emancipation. Zionism, as normally presented, does not seem to have answers to these questions, and, as a result, Israelis often find its rhetoric disturbing. Statehood, its crowning achievement, has brought with it problems and difficulties which the authors of the Basic Programme of 1897 or of the Declaration of Independence of 1948 hardly provided for. Zionism, in short, has removed the obvious cause of Jewish homelessness, but it has not allayed the sense of belonging to a community of whom it might be said: 'He was despised and rejected of men; a man of pain and acquainted with sickness' (Isaih53:3). The early Zion spokesmen had somehow not taken this prophecy of Isaiah into account, or if they had, they had treated it as part of that condition which would be automatically cured once Jewish independence had been achieved. In other words, the new Israeli experiences just a little of that sickness unto death which his ancestors in the the Diaspora knew. Pinsker's 'auto-emancipation' has proved no more successful as a remedy for this than the earlier emancipation. The creation of the state of Israel is a mighty fact and, most of us would add, an irreversible one; but then so was the breaking down of the walls of the ghetto in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But neither of these epoch-making events has cured the Jew of the malady of alienation. The Israeli is no longer a Luftmensch like the emancipated Jews observed by Nordau at the end of the nineteenth century, but he nevertheless feels acutely that he lacks a firm anchorage and safe future. In this sense alienation is still with him in the deeper consciousness of a spiritual vacuum which mere statehood cannot fill. The new Israeli is in search of a further meaning for his existence. This search is rendered the keener, as we have said, by Israel's political isolation, which presses down on each and every sensitive person, but it is at bottom not so much a political phenomenon as an aspect of a spiritual crisis. The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. The founders had, by and large, given up the faith of their ancestors and had adopted instead alternative ideologies, such as the Tolstoyan ethic of work (purveyed by A. D. Gordon), the Marxist dialectic or high-minded Western liberalism. Most of these once-hopeful doctrines have since proved bankrupt. The final blow for many of the Marxists came with the revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956; the disillusionment with the West has been nourished by the West's own disillusionment with itself - what, after all, has happened to the American dream? And as for the high idealism of the doctrine

of salvation through work, the young Israeli is now unhappily aware that most of the corruption in his society centres on a privileged class which has grown rich on the profits of monopoly socialism and state-owned corporations. It is difficult to uphold the original image of the kibbutz as the symbol of the ethic of work and service, when the kibbutzim have now, owing to the exigencies of market realities, become large-scale employers of labour, and the members themselves have tended more and more to become a class of business executives and skilled managers. All this is, no doubt, a necessary development and, in economic terms, is probably good for the country, but it has inevitably meant a cooling-off of idealistic fervour amongst the kibbutz members themselves, as well as a check on the unstinted admiration which their pioneering endeavours once aroused. The earlier gods have failed (or at least have become somewhat tarnished with age) but the need for a sustaining faith remains as strong as ever. But where is that faith to come from? The majority will not look to the synagogue, for if secular Zionism has failed to provide them with positive aims of its own, it has nevertheless succeeded effectively in alienating many of them from the traditional religion of the past. The new Jew has been deprived of the sabbath without being granted any alternative source of spiritual power to replace it. What he has been granted instead is a state, a flag and a new annual festival, Independence Day, which tends to lose much of its original exaltation as the years go by. Ironically Independence Day is now most actively celebrated in the synagogues, where the rabbis have devised for the faithful an order of service of sorts to give content and permanence to the occasion. The majority who do not visit the synagogue remain untouched in their deeper selves as the bright memory of the original Independence Day of 1948 grows ever fainter.

The new jew has been deprived of the sabbath without being granted any alternative source of spiritual power to replace it. What he has been granted instead is a state, a flag and a new annual festival, Independence Day, which tends to lose much of its original exaltation as the years go by.

The New Immigrants Statehood, of itself, has not brought salvation. And if this is true for the native-born Israeli, it is even truer for the young Jews of the Diaspora who come to seek a haven for their spirit in the land of Israel. In the years immediately following the foundation of the state, the Ingathering of the Exiles brought to Israel in their tens of thousands the oppressed Jewish populations of Morocco, Algeria, Iraq and Yemen. For them the magic of Jewish independence and political emancipation was sufficient in itself. This was the dream of deliverance come true. They had been brought to the Promised Land on eagles' wings in fulfillment of the prophecy, and they could ask no further blessing. This kind of liberation the Zionism of the time, as embodied in the nascent state, was well equipped to 19

And for many thousands of those Jews the starting point for the Return has been not exactly physical oppression, or even political disablities, but a powerful desire to affirm or discover anew their Jewish identity. They have looked to Israel for a spiritual rather than simply a physical liberation. They have not been in flight but in search!

supply. If for the Jews of Italy and Germany in the eighteenth century it was Napoleon who acted the part of Joshua and blew the trumpet of liberation, then for the Yemenites of 1949 and 1950 David Ben-Gurion was the deliverer. It was a messianic moment. The situation was relatively unproblematical; the trouble only began later. The situation has been very different, however, in the sixties and seventies. During this period the chief candidates for ingathering have come from the free world (chiefly the USA and South America) or from the Soviet Union. And for many thousands of those Jews the starting point for the Return has been not exactly physical oppression, or even political disablities, but a powerful desire to affirm or discover anew their Jewish identity. They have looked to Israel for a spiritual rather than simply a physical liberation. They have not been in flight but in search! True, the young Jews of the Soviet Union have found themselves increasingly restricted in the last twenty years. The path for their advancement in many of the professions and in the universities has been blocked by a discriminatory policy. But this was not really the cause of the great wave of emigration to Israel which began around 1969. It was, to some extent, the other way round. The discriminatory policies were themselves, to a considerable degree, a reaction on the part of the authorities to signs of independence and discontent on the part of Soviet Jewry. Those who had survived the Holocaust and the Stalin purges were no longer quite so ready to become assimilated into the communist system as their fathers and grandfathers had been in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. There was, as all observers have noted, a Jewish awakening, spurred on by the rise and consolidation of the state of Israel and culminating in the Six Day War. Soviet Jews wanted above all to join their brothers and share their fate. Such a spiritual and national awakening is not really provided for in the communist system. In Stalin's time it would have been brutally suppressed. His successors chose the path of compromise: they introduced oppressive measures but they also permitted selective emigration, giving priority to the chief trouble-makers. Israel naturally received the new arrivals with open arms. But it rapidly became clear that this was not a repeat of the North African and Yemenite experience. For these Jews from Russian the open society of Israel was of course a liberation, as was the physical reunion with their people and their land, but they could not rest content with that. Half a century of communist education had conditioned Soviet Jews to assume that societies need collective aims to make them function. They had, on the whole, rejected communism, but where was the alternative Jewish-Israeli doctrine that was going to take its place? Communism had taught them that behind every

work of man there is politics, and behind every political idea there is a myth, a hope. The communist myth had proved false, but what was to replace it? After all, man does not live by bread alone. The new Soviet immigrants did not, therefore, accept the system they found in Israel in the uncritical fashion of earlier immigrants from North Africa. Many of them have shown impatience with the socialist establishment, especially some of its outworn rituals. The red flag on May Day in Israël is a symbol which survives from an earlier time. Only a small minority of those who display it really identify themselves with the ideals of international socialism. But for a great many of the new Russian immigrants to see the flag in Israel is strange and disturbing: it represents for them the autocratic system from which Israel was to be a refuge and to which it was to provide an answer. It is useless to tell them that Israel is doctrinally free, like the West, and that each man chooses to believe as he wishes. They know very well that communist totalitarianism is not the answer, but the free-for-all, laissezfaire system of the West is not the solution either. Such tolerance may seem to some the source of democracy; to others it is the progenitor of moral anarchy and spiritual void. They have been schooled to recognize the signs of inner disintegration in Western-style democracy and they see too many of these in Israel. A trivial but revealing instance is provided by the story of a skilled lathe worker from Leningrad who, on arrival in Israel, was placed in a small factory in the Tel-Aviv area. His employer was more than satisfied with him and all went well for some weeks; then one day he turned up at the labourexchange to ask for another job. On inquiry it transpired that he had worked too hard and too well. His fellow workers in the factory had gradually become tired of his excessive industry and his constant pleas to them to work harder and not to take off unauthorized time for lounging and malingering. Finally they had gone in a body to the owner and threatened to walk out if the new Russian worker was not fired. It seems sometimes that all that is left of classical socialist ideology in Israel is the belief in the absolute right to strike in all circumstances. The other type of immigrant in the sixties and seventies has come from the West, the largest annual group being from North America. These peole are fleeing from oppression even less than their Soviet brethren. Israel's offer of political enfranchisement does not impress them greatly. They have not come to Israel in search of political freedom and the right to vote - they have had all that back home. Nor are they going to be won over by a duty-free automobile and a shining new apartment. These perquisites are, of course, an expected minimum, but they are not what the American Jew fundamentally seeks. He seeks above all an idea, a purpose, some content beyond the ideals of a consumer society. All is

A ll is not well in the American city-jungle, and the American immigrant is not necessarily heartened hy the poor imitations of the urban life-stye of the West that he finds in Tel-Aviv. He has seen enough night clubs and vulgar American films; what he needs is a more satisfying use of leisure and a deeper love between men. He seeks to preserve the Jewish family bond threatened with erosion in the 'other-directed' society of the West.

The computer expert from Boston or the Orthodox lawyer from New York have nothing to learn of modernity or the blessings of emancipation from Israel's secularist majority. Indeed, ironical to relate, they often find the atheism, the heroic rationalism of the second-generation Israelis a trifle quaint and old-fashioned, as though these innocent children of the early socialist pioneers were still living in the age of Comte, Feuerbach or the Fabian Society.

not well in the American city-jungle, and the American immigrant is not necessarily heartened by the poor imitations of the urban life-stye of the West that he finds in Tel-Aviv. He has seen enough night clubs and vulgar American films; what he needs is a more satisfying use of leisure and a deeper love between men. He seeks to preserve the Jewish family bond threatened with erosion in the 'other-directed7society of the West. And above all he seeks a society in which he can bring up his children free from the fear of urban violence, a society enriched with a sense of the Jewish past and the Jewish future. It is no secret that a large proportion of the new American immigration is neo-orthodox in religious outlook and practice. They have been through the full experience of emancipation but they have been left with their Judaism relatively intact. They thus represent an implicit challenge to the majority culture in Israel, which holds that Jewish traditional faith and observance belong to a backward and outworn society. The computer expert from Boston or the Orthodox lawyer from New York have nothing to learn of modernity or the blessings of emancipation from Israel's secularist majority. Indeed, ironical to relate, they often find the atheism, the heroic rationalism of the second-generation Israelis a trifle quaint and old-fashioned, as though these innocent children of the early socialist pioneers were still living in the age of Comte, Feuerbach or the Fabian Society. The situation, therefore, is very different from that which the Zionist establishment encountered in the forties and fifties, when they had to deal with the religious scruples of the Yemenite and Iraqi immigrants. The children of those immigrants had their pious ear-locks summarily removed by the barber and in many instances were transferred in spite of the protests of their parents to non-religious schools and institutions to be turned into good Israelis. The rough-and-ready methods worked and, as a result, a large proportion of the younger generation of the oriental communities lost their faith in the G-d of their ancestors and gained nothing in return. The new American Israeli is less amenable to this kind of treatment. There is a second type of young American immigrant. He belongs to the radically disillusioned generation and his problem, which is indeed the problem of Western civilization generally, is the problem of a lost identity. He has come to Israel with a combination of motives - general discontent, a desire to find something newer and better and a kind of residual Jewish consciousness which represents his last hope in the search for values and a meaningful aim in life. Israel is not particularly well geared to help this kind of young immigrant, the truly alienated youth of our time, some of whom have already experimented with the drug culture and other manifestations of enlightenment. Zionism, which was to have

provided an answer to the alienation from which these young people suffer, has, seemingly, little to offer them. Some, but very few, will find their way to the kibbutzim and will make their future there; others, to some of the more unconventional talmudical academies which have grown up in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the past few years to cater for the rootless wanderers from the West. But, on the whole, Israel will be one more stopping-place in their unrequited search for meaning. Zionism, we must remind ourselves, was to have been the answer to the Exile. And exile is still with us in a different but no less acute form than in the past. Dispersion does not press on the modern American or even Russian Jew in the same way that it pressed on the east European Jew at the end of the last century. It is not because he is deprived of a living by a vicious czarist regime, or because his daughters are threatened by the Cossacks, that the modern Jew desires liberation. His problem is deeper; it is the problem of a lost identity, a problem which he shares with Western man generally but which he feels more acutely both in his exposed position as victim and scapegoat and because his sense of a true identity has not been completely erased. It is still with him in fleeting images, in haunting memories. The garden gate may have been shut and the cherubim stationed there with their revolving swords, but he can still see over the fence and behold a better, more sunlit place within. Zionism has stressed the concept of statehood and, indeed, statehood is its basis. The 'holy community' seeks a holy land in which to fulfil itself. But Zionism has scarcely begun, as yet, to define the society that it will attempt to create in its liberated land. Will it be simply a reflection of the alienated society of the West? If so, what will it have to offer to the young Jew of today who looks to Israel for spiritual enfranchisement, for a word of power, a healing touch? Israel rightly dedicated itself first and foremost to survival. But it may well be that survival itself is bound up with the affirmation of aims and values which give meaning to survival and which alone make all the agony and sacrifice worthwhile. ORTHODOX UNION

SPECIAL EVENTS Please reserve these dates:

April 2 7 , 1 9 8 0 Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry Sunday, May 1 8 , 1 9 8 0 82nd Anniversary National Dinner New York Hilton, New York City Wednesday-Sunday, November 2 6 -3 0 , 1 9 8 0 82nd Anniversary National Biennial Convention

Siteto be announced

]

Rav Chaim Druckman, M.K.

A Poet of Teshuva—An Interview On the second day of my visit to Yerushalayim to discover the roots of the teshuva phenomenon, I sat with my wife in the Knesset cafeteria waiting to be introduced to Rav Chaim Druckman who was on the Knesset floor engaged in one of those religious-secular debates that are typical of the struggle between these two opposing forces in the Land. It was thrilling, when he came off the floor for a few moments, to shake the hand of a Rosh Yeshiva turned M.K.—Member of the Knesset—-who has been a powerful force in turning young Israelis to a Torah way of life, and changing the climate of the Kulturkampf to the credit side of the forces of Torah. The next day, accompanied by Yaakov Zev, head of the Minal Ha'studentim in Israel's Ministry of Absorption, a Yeshiva University musmach who had "made aliyah" a number of years ago, I visited the kibbutz where Rav Druckman heads his yeshiva and makes his home. My wife and I sat in his modest library, crammed with books, as our host brought out the traditional Israeli snack of soda and cookies. He apologized for the absence of his wife who was at work in a nearby hospital where she heads the department of pediatrics. I put the question to him very simply: How can we explain what appears to be a new interest in Torah and mitzvos after thirty years of statehood and many more decades of Israeli indifference to Yiddishkeit? Would that 1 could through the magic of words share with you the resonance of his voice, the seriousness of his tone, and the radiance of his face, after he briefly paused, and then threw his whole body and being into answering the question. And would that the computerized translating machines promised to us by technology could render into precise English his emotion-laden words; and would that my own grasp of both languages w ere adequate to the task. 1 can only paraphrase and condense—and pray 1 may come close to the target.—Y.J. The turning—which is the root of the word teshuva—we are experiencing here in Eretz Yisrael is a function of the era in which we live, and a function of what has happened—and is happening—to Klal Yisrael over many decades. It is the time of geula; it is the time of Rebirth: Am Yisrael is returning to itself—to its true essence. The process which began decades ago which found its expression in the return to the Land, in the return to our language, and in the return to national Jewish values, was in effect motivated by a drive to return to Torah and mitzvos. Rav Kook, zeicher tzadiklivracha, wrote many decades ago that the desire to return to Eretz Yisrael was a sublimated desire to observe mitzvos. "One who stands from a distance,"he wrote, -would wonder: how can you say this when our brothers appear to be so far removed from even simple belief— how can you argue that they are driven by a desire to observe mitzvos? But this seeming paradox does not suprise one who is intimately bound up with the glory of Knesses Yisrael."

It is the time of geula; it is the time of Rebirth: Am Yisrael is returning to itself to its true essence.

I would like to emphasize two words in this basic formulation by Rav Kook. Only one who is far removed, who stands at a distance will ask, "how is this possible?" One who is intricately bound to the glory of Jewish Peoplehood finds no contradiction. It is really simple logic. The early Zionists wanted to return to the Land because they wanted to be themselves; they wanted to free themselves from the mold into which the nations had forced them. They wanted to live in the Land where they could fulfill their Jewish destiny. They came to a Jewish land, and chose to speak in a Jewish language. There is yet another factor, very much part of what Rav Kook delineated, but emerging more forcefully from the experience of the past thirty years. There have been five wars [Rav Druckman began to count them on his fingers]: the War of Independence; the Sinai Campaign; the Six-Day War; the Yom Kippur War; and counting the War of Attrition makes five. Five wars, thousands of lives sacrificed, and a person' begins to ask himself: "Lama?"—"Why?"—"Why?" We had thought that the establishment of the State of Israel would solve all of our problems—they would all just go away. The State was established, and we found ourselves in the midst of a sea of hatred. Five wars followed, and difficult timès plagued us. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. And so people begin to ask: Who are Jews; what are we all about? Why are these horrible things happening to us? And we have begun to search for our essence—for our roots. We have begun to explore our uniqueness among the nations of the world. Of course, this searching is the result of the process of return to the Land, which Rav Kook described. But the last thirty years have accelerated this process. And from our trying circumstances has emerged a new desire to know ourselves. Rav Druckman paused here and asked if he had answered our question, but did not wait for our answer. I believe that the establishment of the State of Israel has caused a similar stirring in America; that it has caused Jews there to ask the same questions Israelis are asking. The process described by Rav Kook has stirred a desire by Jews throughout the world to return, re-awakening within them the consciousness of their Jewishness which is never lost, no matter how far they turn away. When we are at war here, every Jew in the world experiences the war with us. In a sense, the American Jew who experienceaihis stirring is at.an advantage over his Israeli brother. The Israeli Jew lives in a Jewish land, speaks a Jewish language, and lives in a Jewish culture. He can delude himself more easily into thinking that he knows who he is. The American Jew, when he begins to ask questions, has no place to turn for answers, and this is why so

many young men and women have come to us here to search for their identity. I put a final question to Rav Druckman. In the Israeli yeshivos, and in the yeshivos established especially for Americans, the sum total of teshuva students is only a drop in the bucket compared to the losses we have sustained. (Few are willing to venture an accurate count, but at any given time there are perhaps in the area of one thousand students in the teshuva yeshivos, and even adding those who stayed a while and turned to a life of Torah and mitzvos, the number is still relatively small.) What can we do, I asked, to increase the number. Rav Druckman looked pained; his voice lowered, and he spoke slowly. Wherever classes or lectures are held, large groups of people turn out. But we are short of manpower. We need more troops to man the positions. (And with a sad tone that often comes with nostalgia, he reminded me of a song I had heard sung in Yiddish in Williamsburgh many years ago.) Az ich volt gehat ko'ach, Volt ich in die gassen geloffen, Un ich volt geshrigen Shabbos, Shabbos! If only I had the strength, I would run through the streets And I would call out Shabbos, Shabbos! Just this morning I had a call from Eilat—hardly what you might call a "frum town'ff-asking me to lecture for them. And when a lecture is announced in Eilat the auditorium is filled with people. And who are they?—doctors, from the local hospital; stevedores; older men and women, teen-age boys and girls. But we don't have enough troops to go around, to meet the growing number of requests for teachers and lecturers. SUBSCRIBE TO

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Dov Begun

The Sweet Waters of Torah Listen to the story of Dov Begun, former left-wing now Rosh "I believe" means that I possess a dear truth by whose light I Yeshivat N'tiv Meir in Yerushalayim,where he teaches young Israelis who can live and because of which I are returning. would want to go on living. I was fifteen years old when I entered Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon. My entering kibbutz was a deeply personal decision. I had been a member of the Tnuat Ha'Meuchedet. In the movement there was a great deal of talk of the ideal of the kibbutz Jife. I tried to bring to realization what I then thought was most important, and I decided to live in a kibbutz. As a young man I thought a great deal of the need to improve society and I read a great deal of socialist literature in an attempt to select that which I felt was superior. The first signs of questions regarding the validity of my approach began to appear a year or two before I entered the army. I remember a debate wlpch took place when I was in the twelfth grade. The subject of the debate was belief in values. In the course of the debate I asked my classmates, "what exactly do you mean when you say 'I believe'?" They agreed that it was necessary to define the concept "to believe" before each one expounded on the values in which he "believes". Does "I believe" mean "I think"? Does it mean "I trust"? or perhaps "I know"? At the time of that debate I myself had no answer to this question. It was only later on that I found the answer: "I believe" means that I possess a clear truth by whose light I can live and because of which I would want to go on living. From that time on I could no longer see in the various socialist ideologies a firm truth since every one of them had their own personal truth. And when my outlook on my own world began to become unclear, I began to wonder whether there was such a thing as an ultimate truth, or whether the whole search was utopian, a search for something that did not exist in reality. I had very little understanding of the values of Judaism at that time. My knowledge was so limited and this fact brought me to explore the matter of nationalism. I asked myself: Was the sign of the covenant which I bore and the various Jewish festivals I observed sufficient to give me Jewish identity? With great pain I came to the realization that I found little to distinguish myself from a member of any other nation. Belief in G-d was never implanted in me, and while in the depths of my heart I believed in something which I could not articulate, I was yet very far from the reality of Judaism. I met Orthodox people for the very first time when I served in the army. In the nuchal unit, in which I served, there was a group from religious kibbutzim who had entered the service with me, and I saw for the first time the way of life of the 29

The phenomenal harmony in nature, the wonders of existence spoke directly to my heart and the belief in a Creator began to pulsate in my heart with greater force and with greater consciousness.

. . . it became clear to me that not only was there no contradiction between the two accounts, but on the contrary, the explanations of the Torah seemed understandable only against the background of the geological theories of science, and'this first experience with serious Torah study convinced me that I must continue to turn to the sources.

traditional Jew, and for the first time in my life I saw people praying together. I saw, and I was moved. Later on there were sharp discussions between us in matters of belief that dragged on for hours and hours, and for the months that we served together. The truth is that in these arguments I never admitted that their way was the true way but one thing I learn. It became clear to me that Judaism is a complete way of life and that I knew nothing about it. It was then that I said to myself: this culture, this way of life is the very essence of your People and you know nothing about it. Accept it or not you must learn what it is. When I say that I did not in these debates give credence to these religious beliefs, what I mean is that I saw no importance in the observance of mitzvos.I saw them simply whose meanings evaded me. Yet these discussions did bring me to explore more deeply the vague belief that was with me from my earliest years and which slowly began to become clear. The phenomenal harmony in nature, the wonders of existence spoke directly to my heart and the belief in a Creator began to pulsate in my heart with greater force and with greater consciousness. Throughout the period of my service in the army, I continued to contemplate. After completing my basic training, and being commissioned as an officer, I signed with the regular army for a period of time as was customary for officers. With my first assignment as an officer I acquired a with commentaries. The very first subject I studied was the creation of the world. I tried to examine the Torah's account of Creation in the light of my own knowledge of geology, a subject which, as a lover of nature, I was always interested in. At first look it appeared to me that there was no way in which one could reconcile that which was written in the Torah on the subject with scientific theories. However, after closer examination of the commentaries of the Ramban and the Malbim, it became clear to me that not only was there no contradiction between the two accounts, but on the contrary, the explanations of the Torah seemed understandable only against the background of the geological theories of science, and this first experience with serious Torah study convinced me that I must continue to turn to the sources. When I finished my army service I returned to Mishmar Hasharon. I revealed to no one my new doubts; I quickly became once again one of the gang. But I did manifest a great interest in ideological discussions. From then on I was concerned with matters of the spirit. On the ope hand I deliberately avoided discussions of Jewish values in these debates. During that time I had very little time for contemplation because I was working very hard in the pardes. Nevertheless, I tried to find sufficient free time to study Tanach

which I saw as the only way open to me to find the essence of Judaism. One day as I was sitting in the dining hall with one of my friends, I asked him if he would agree to give his children a religious education. He answered that it made little difference to him. His words amazed me: if it made no difference to him, then apparently he felt that the religious life was not something to be avoided at all costs, and if that is the case perhaps it was a viable alternative. A year after I had returned to the kibbutz I left. I had found a job in the Western Gallil with the Society For the Protection of the Environment. I moved to the kibbutz Gesher Ha'ziv, and I lived there for a whole year. In the course of my work, I walked a great deal in the hills of the Gallil. For many days I was alone with nature. I was free to think and to contemplate the wonders of Creation. There was no external influence, nor was I subject to any peer pressures. It was in that peaceful atmosphere that it seemed to me I found my new world—belief in Ha'Shem and in His Torah. However, when I realized the practical aspects of this decision, that I would have to observe Shabbos, wear tefilin, that I would have to wear a kipa, these acts seemed alien to me, and the conflict within me brought me to the verge of collapse. But the peacefulness of nature; the vastness of the sea did their work. I felt more and more prepared to deal with practical mitzvos. Slowly there grew within me the resolve to experiment with life as a complete Jew. 1 felt I was standing at the start of the only road I could take. I became certain that there is a truth in life; I felt that a spark of this truth had been revealed to me and I had no choice but to be guided by it. I felt that without this belief a Jew cuts himself off both from his past and from his future; Out of a stormy and emotional experience which came from the depths of my soul, I placed a kipa on my head for the first time in my life. That day I had to lead a group, from a nearby high school, studying the geography of the Land. The kipa on my head shook them up—"What happened to you," one of the students asked; "are you in mourning?" and others asked similar questions. I promised the students that I would answer their questions after the lecture. The subject of the lecture was "How to Find Palatable Water at the Seashore." Standing alongside the sea there was a natural well, and the group was amazed when I bent down, cupped my hands, and drank the water. They were convinced that I was drinking the salty waters of the sea. "The man has gone crazy," they said to each other. "First he puts on a kipa, and now he's drinking salt water." I invited them to join me in drinking the water. They seemed amazed, having no understanding of this wonder of nature which existed so close to their own homes.

It was in that peaceful atmosphere that it seemed to me 1 found my hew world— belief in Ha'Shem and in His Torah.

to him, "and I want to he a religious Jew."

After the lecture, I carried out my promise. "You wanted me to explain the kipa," I said to them. Before I do that I'd like to ask you a question. "Have you heard about G-d?" "O f course," one of them responded, citing the first words of the Torah, "In the beginning G-d created heaven and earth." "What is this 'G-d'?" I asked. "When we were little," one of them answered, a cynical smile on his face, "and we asked 'What is G-d,' they told us that when we grow up it would be explained to us; and when we grew up they forgot to tell us." And then they asked me, "do you know?" "Not exactly," I answered, "but I want to learn and to understand. That's why I'm wearing the kipa." Since the desire to live like a Jew burned like a fire in my bones, and since I had decided that I was to live this new life, regardless of the difficulties, it again became apparent to me that I knew nothing about how one goes about living as a Jew. I traveled to nearby Naharia and soon found myself knocking on the door of the local Rav's home, who greeted me and invited me in. "I'm from Gesher Ziv," I said to him, "and I want to be a religious Jew." From the look on his face I could tell he was suprised. He chatted with me for quite a while and when it became apparent to him that my desire was real, he took from his bookshelf a Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, and said to me, "Do everything written in this book," and he invited me to spend Shabbos with him. It was not easy to observe all that was written in the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, just as it is difficult to learn all of the Torah while standing on one foot, but during that period I had a strong inner drive, so I decided I would study, and what would be would be. I started with the first halacha: "Therefore one should strengthen himself like a lion and the moment he wakes from his sleep, he should rise with zealousness to the service of his Creator." And so I did. Whether I had gone to bed early or late the night before, sitting with the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, I rose "like a lion" in the morning. I studied the laws of washing of the hands, of the blessings, and so on. I studied and I observed. That Shabbos I spent in the house of the Rav—an unusual experience for me. For the first time I tasted the holiness of Shabbos. From then on, the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch no longer satisfied me. T asked the Rav to help me. "I want to study Torah," I told him. When the Rav realized where I was at, he said to me, "I have a son in the Merkaz Ha'Rav in Yerushalayim. Go to the yeshiva." He blessed me and placed in my hand a letter to his son. I resigned my position with the Society for the Protection of the Environment, and I went up to Yerushalayim. I found the yeshiva and walked up to its front doors. Thunderous and confusing sounds greeted me. The students

of the yeshiva sat in pairs and argued at the top of their voices. The transition from the peacefulness of nature to the noises of Torah study was too much for me. Suddenly I heard someone shout "MINCHA," and they all stood up to pray. I quickly shuffled through the pages of a Siddur, wanting to join them in prayer. I realized I did not yet properly understand the words of the tefilos, and yet I knew I was standing before my Creator. All I could say was that He knows why I don't know how to pray, and from the depths of my heart I begged Him to help me understand tefila and to lead me in the way of truth. By the time I finished my short impromtu prayer, I found myself standing all alone in the .. I was broken. I was confused by the noise of the Beis Medrash, by the speed of the prayers, and I returned to the Gallil and to my job with the Society. I made one stipulation with them: I was no longer ready to work on Shabbos. At first they were hesitant—most of the hikes and most of the work took place on Shabbos. I explained to them that it was possible to arrange hikes for the study of nature within the confines of Shabbos observance. The leaders of the Society agreed and I returned to my work as a Shomer Shabbos. I secretly removed from my parents' home the tefilin I had been given for my Bar Mitzvah, which I had then refused to wear, and each day I placed them on my arm and on my head. Much later on, when I understood more, it was explained to me that I had not put them on properly. Out of force of necessity I became a vegetarian in order not to eat anything that was not kasher. I tried to observe the mitzvos of the Torah as best I could. After a while it became clear to me that unless I would study Torah systematically, I would never achieve my goal. I felt that the Torah was the well-spring which I needed to nurture my soul. I went back to the Rav and at his advice I went to the Yeshiva Kfar Chassidim in the the Gallil. T he talmidim received me with great warmth, and I started to study Pirkei Avos, halacha, and I soon progressed to the study of Talmud. I experienced the intoxicating flavor of Torah study, and began to understand the expression which speaks of "diving into the Sea of the Talmud." My visits to the yeshiva became more frequent; I spent Shabbos at the yeshiva, and studied in every free moment I had. By that time half a year had passed and the Yomim Noraim were approaching, and it was on Hashonah in Kfar Chassidim that my final decision was made: my place was in the yeshiva. The more I learned, the more I realized that I was an illiterate, and I knew that if I didn't learn now, I would remain illiterate forever. I immersed myself in the world of Torah. I was invited by the Rosh Hayeshiva to spend Succos with him in Yerushalayim. I

After a while it became clear to me that unless I would study Torah systematically, I would never achieve my goal. I felt that the Torah was the well-spring which I needed to nurture my soul.

spent two weeks in his home, and I never left the Yeshiva again, and by the grace of G-d I have come to this point in my life. One day when I was already settled in the yeshiva, a member of my old kibbutz visited my home and found me studying. He sat down alongside us and listened. To his great amazement, he found himself participating in the process. He later asked if he could use my telephone to call the kibbutz, and I heard him saying to whoever had picked up the phone: "Tell my wife that I'm with Dov'ele, and tell her that today for the first time in my life I studied a daf aG or nd it was an experience like nothing em else." Since that day when DovBegun put a kipa on his head, a nature-study students how to find fresh water alongside a salty sea, he has introduced hundreds of young Israelis, deprived of their Torah birth-right, to the sweet waters of Torah. Over the years he has maintained his friendships with members of his left-wing kibbutz, and frequently goes there and to other kibbutzim togive classes in Torah. He has organized Torah classes up and down the Land, while at the same time heading his own yeshiva.

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Barbara Soferr

Return: A Case History An item in a recent newsletter published for the Class of You simply cannot dismiss 1979 informs classmates that Jack Kleiman "is learning at a Jack Kleiman as a strange sort, flipping from one peculiar wonderful yeshivain the Old City of Jerusalem, trying tointerest return do another. He is not to Torah." Alumni visiting Israel are invited to get in touch flippant, or weird, or fanatic. with him. I drop Jack Kleiman a note and address it to Aish He is the All-American success story: HaTorah Yeshiva in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's walled Jewish intelligent, well-educated, goodinner city. The class newsletter has not mentioned the name of looking. And for the time a specific yeshiva (study center), but from the enthusiasm in being, he's content doing just Jack's message to his fellow alumni, I guess he is at this what he's doing, studying full particular institution for returnees to the faith. I have seen a time at Aish HaTorah. program on it on Israeli television and have read a piece about it in Rolling Stone. As always, I am eager to meet another Penn -alumnus who has moved to Israel. I am also curious to find out why a classmate has chosen the "Fire of the Law" study center (aish is fire in Hebrew). We arrange to meet. In walks Jack Kleiman at the appointed hour—gray suit, white shirt, black skullcap, short hair, dark beard. We did not know each other at Penn, although we took similar philosophy courses and participated in some of the same campus activities. We had both been leftist, idealistic students eager to express ourselves against war and prejudice. I frequented the Hillel Foundation house, but never bumped into Jack there. In four years at Penn, he had entered Hillel once—to arrange a talk by a black congressman he had worked hard for in Baltimore, his hometown. Back at Penn, it was Hegel, not bagels, for Jack Kleiman. Yet, here he is, calling himself Yaakov, offering a blessing out loud before he drinks his tea. When he passes up the cookies, I wonder if he is embarrassed to ask if they are kosher. Jack Kleiman has been at Aish HaTorah for three years, long enough for him to have finished law school. (As an undergraduate, he majored in political science.) He studies about 12 hours a day, has not read a secular book in two years, no longer goes to movies or watches television, limits himself to "proper" dates with women to whom he has been formally Barbara Soferr is an alumna of the University of introduced. After three years of this regimen, he is still wildly Pennsylvania now living in enthusiastic about the yeshiva and his new way of life. Yerushalayim. Her case Jack is one of thousands of young American men and women history of a Ba'al Teshuva originally appeared in the who either have rediscovered or are in the process of Pennsylvania Gazette rediscovering Judaism in Jerusalem. Most of these young (November 1978), the people came to Israel to work on the collective settlements University's alumni bulletin, known as Kibbutzim, to enjoy the Mediterranean beaches, or to by whose kind permission it is re-printed here. complete a tour of Asia. Some, like Jack Kleiman, were off on 37

"I thought I looked like Thomas Jefferson, and H iked the identification, " he says, "I was the 'new American revolutionary' getting high on ideas, and I didn't want to come down."

spiritual odysseys and found what they were looking for in Jerusalem. "I was looking for truth and I found it," Jack says. Absolute truth is what Aish HaTorah yeshiva claims to offer in return for the efforts and restraints of its students. This is something quite different from the "religion" Jack knew as a youth in Baltimore. He grew up in a Zionist but non-religious household. When the United States Government refused Jack's father permission to join in the fighting in Israel in 1948, his father married a woman in the local Zionist office and brought up three assimilated American kids. Jack, the oldest/ had to attend Hebrew school to prepare for his bar mitzvah. "I can still feel the nausea—like bad medicine—of going to Hebrew school," he recalls. "I was forced to go to something neither relative nor real. What I learned had no connection to life, and the class was a zoo." A bar mitzvah at 13 was Jack's exit visa from the world of Hebrew school, rabbis, synagogues—and, as far as he was concerned, from Judaism. In high school, he was active in student government. He graduated with a basket of kudos, including awards for "doing the most for the school," and the Harvard Book Prize. At Penn, he joined and quit a fraternity after a year in the dorms, then moved to Powelton Village. He became involved in the counterculture, smoked marijuana, tried L.S.D. He now describes himself as a "participantobserver" but not a leader, in the anti-war movement. "I thought the times were changing and the counterculture would replace the culture, yet I was frustrated," he tells me. "I couldn't get completely involved. I guess I realized that all the best intentions and idealistic words don't change the world. I was studying political science and learning that change does happen, but it comes slowly. There was a contradiction!" His drug experiences gave him a sense of a greater power in the world. They also left him bewildered about what that greater power could be. "Either nothing made sense in the world, or everything made sense. I believed the latter was true, but I just couldn't make out what the pattern was," Jack observes. In his senior year at Penn, Jack thought about going on to study city planning, but decided instead to, as he puts it, "figure out what I was doing in a larger sense" first. He went to the West Coast, to camp out and "mellow." He returned to Baltimore with a ponytail and got a job teaching mathematics. "I thought I looked like Thomas Jefferson, and I liked the identification," he says, "I was the 'new American revolutionary' getting high on ideas, and I didn't want to come down." Jack taught in a predominantly black section of Baltimore and rented an apartment in beautiful Bolton Hill. "Within a couple of months," he continues, "I was well-

dressed, living in a great apartment, driving my own car. I asked myself if that was all I wanted in life/' Unsure what it was he did want, Jack booked passage on a freighter leaving Baltimore when school was out. He spent several months in Europe and Morocco. "It was in Morocco," he recalls, "that my conceptual framework was blown to bits. I felt something vague, oppressive, and threatening—as if my life were in danger. At first I thought it was because I was disturbed by the poverty there. Then my Jewishness came to the front. I questioned who I was. Was I an American? If so, then why should I feel strange in an Arab country? I was reading Gandhi's book and, if anything, felt close to Zen Buddhism. I considered going where I would feel comfortable as a Jew—to Israel—but that seemed too straightforward. So instead, I headed for the Canary Islands to think things out." Serious about working out what had happened to him, Jack lived like a hermit on the Canary Islands for almost five months. He saw other humans only when he made his infrequent trips for supplies. He tried to define who he was: "I became aware of the animal level of existence: we eat, sleep, defecate. Again, I found I believed there was something in man beyond this animal level." He made the transition back to civilization by visiting some relatives in Europe, and then made his way to Israel, where his brother was living on a non-religious kibbutz between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He went to Jerusalem and, like most tourists, visited the Western Wall, that fragment of the Second Temple where Jews gather to pray and weep. Jack stood there contemplating life and reading a book on peyote cults he had in his pocket. A middle-aged man with a thin-brimmed black hat tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to put on tefillin, phylacteries worn by observant Jews during prayer. "I thought I might as well try it," Jack tells me. "I didn't have an overwhelming reaction. The same man suggested I visit a yeshiva, get a free meal and a place to stay. That didn't sound like a bad idea." The man at the wall was Meir Schuster, a former American whose work at the Wall and the Central Bus Station is financed by an organization of religious Jews eager to bring Jews back to the faith. He spots potential returnees and tries to encourage them to study at a yeshiva, or at least to spend a Sabbath with a religious family. Serving as a one-man clearing house for various religious institutions in Jerusalem, he has sent hundreds of men and women to part-time and full-time study programs. He tries to match the student to a yeshiva that suits his personality and needs. There are a dozen yeshivahs in Israel for Jews who have little or no formal background in Judaism. All have opened in the last decade. Each has its own combination of intellectual and

A middle-aged man with a thin-brimmed black hat tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to put on tefillin, phylacteries worn by observant Jews during prayer. "I thought I might as well try it/' Jack tells me. "I didn't have an overwhelming reaction. The same man suggested I visit a yeshiva, get a free meal and a place to stay. That didn't sound like a bad idea."

The man at the wall was M eir Schuster,.. . lie spots potential returnees and tries to encourage them to study at a yeshiva, or at least to spend a Sabbath with a religious family.

The revolution Jack wants to create now is to stop assimilation, and to bring Jews back from the ranks of Jews for Jesus, Hari Khrishna, Reverend Moon, the M aharishi, Zen, Yoga, and Scientology. His corevolution aries at Aish HaTorah, a mixed group of 60, include a former Harvard divinity student who had become a Protestant minister, a middleaged orthodontist who was looking for meaning in life, and Israel's sabra Johnny Carson, Uri Zohar.

spiritual instruction. Several push the student to develop a razor-sharp mind, while others are more concerned with the quality of the soul. All of them—Aish HaTorah, Ohr Semeach, Shapells, HaMivtar, Dvar Yerushalyim, Neve Yerushalyim, the Diaspora yeshiva—encourage their students to embrace orthodox Judaism and to keep the commandments. They all preach the importance of devoting many hours to a continuing study of the Bible and Talmud. Schuster took Jack to Ohr Semeach yeshiva, which has a program that is a fairly even blend of serious study and concern for moral improvement. Jack's initial response was positive: "I saw that this is what I needed to learn. I met young people who were okay and were observant Jews. I had always thought that a group of strange Jews did their old-fashioned thing and that was religion. I had to find out what it is to be a Jew. I had to deal with the prejudices against Jews and Judaism I had built up. This was part of my larger cosmic quest, to find meaning in life." Several weeks after arriving at Ohr Semeach, Jack met Rabbi Noach Weinberg, one of the founders of Ohr Semeach, who had started an even newer yeshiva in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Charismatic "Reb" Noach, brilliant, fiery, father of nine, had been ordained in, of all places, Jack's native Baltimore. -'Truth emanates from Reb Noach," Jack insists. "I was impressed also by his humor. I liked the idea of his yeshiva s smallness and its location in the Old City." Ponytailed Jack Kleiman moved into the modest, crowded quarters for students at Aish HaTorah yeshiva, and became one of Reb Noach's students. Jack calls Aish HaTorah an "activist yeshiva." Reb Noach is trying to do more than just educate a few dozen lost Jews. He wants to send off fighters to redeem the lost souls of the Jewish people. The theme of Aish HaTorah is to "light the fire of Torah in every Jewish heart/' According to Jack Kleiman, "There is a freshness here and the feeling that a movement is being built. I see the yeshiva as a means of building a revolution." The revolution Jack wants to create now is to stop assimilation, and to bring Jews back from the ranks of Jews for Jesus, Hari Khrishna, Reverend Moon, the Maharishi, Zen, Yoga, and Scientology. His corevolutionaries at Aish HaTorah, a mixed group of 60, include a former Harvard divinity student who had become a Protestant minister, a middle-aged orthodontist who was looking for meaning in life, and Israel's sabra Johnny Carson, Uri Zohar. The last, once known for his wild living and racey monologues, began appearing on his popular television with a cleaned-up act and tzitsit (prayershawl strings) hanging from his shirt. Many of the students are college graduates; most are Americans.

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Reb Noach loves a philosophical argument, and Jack has spent many hours debating with him. Weinberg is convincedand so is Jack Kleiman now—that he has all the trump cards. The rabbi argues that there is a knowable absolute truth within the grasp of man: "In the face of an undertow of anxiety, there is a need for a strong basis of meaning. But notice, the're is an undertow in another direction. What started out as optimistic pragmatism and tolerance-oriented universalism, turned into 'doing your own thing' and 'you can't really prove anything.' How many college-age students feel the truth can be found by a search directed by the mind? Very few.'" The backbone of the introductory program at Aish HaTorah is a course called "The 48 Ways of Wisdom," described as "a practical guide to wise living as gleaned from the Torah, Talmud, and post-Talmudic literature, formulated and explained by Rabbi Noach Weinberg." Here Rabbi Weinberg outlines the goals of the yeshiva—and how to attain them. He preaches a diet of constant study, discipline, efficient use of time, and getting married early, while minimizing secular business, sex, eating, and light conversation. He prods the student into thinking, defining terms, deciding what is meant by love and happiness. Rabbi Weinberg preaches that "Wisdom is the ultimate goal. The first step to wisdom is hearing someting new." He often confronts the new student by asking him how long he thinks the world will last. He then asks the student his plans for the future, and (for those who predict doom) questions the sense in going to graduate school or starting a business in the face of imminent cosmic destruction. For Reb Noach, studying the Torah is a way of saving the world. He fights against contradictions, urges his students to think clearly about what they want from life. "Don't be afraid of your heart," he advises, "If you refuse to recognize that it exists, yop will never have the courage to ask these questions. It isn't a weakness, sometimes, to listen to your heart, but a great strength." The course, available on tape and outlined in a thick booklet, is couched in language obviously designed to be relevant to his young clientele. "Get in connection with the realization that there are greater forces in the world than you; they can zap you out," he admonishes. The motto "Clarity or Death" echoes throughout the course. If you don't decide what you want in life, you are, according to Weinberg, doomed to spiritual nothingness. Clarity is a prerequisite for attaining a level of spiritual understanding. Writes Weinberg: "We are surrounded by millions of people who are confused, who don't know what they are' living for, who are working out of their emotions and

The backbone of the introductory program at Aish HaTorah is a course called "The 48 Ways of Wisdom," described as "a practical guide to wise living as gleaned from the Torah, Talmud, and postTalmudic literature, formulated and explained by Rabbi Noach Weinberg."

egos. Even among the few who are searching for truth, most of them don't know how to look. If you are alone, you are susceptible to being swept along to the tide of confusion. Don't rationalize that the majority are right; most of the times they aren't." Weinberg goes on: "Destroy the Western concepts of happiness and joy. Happiness is not some 'happening' which just comes to you. It is something which you must seek out in order to achieve. But you must seek it out; if you want to have any satisfaction in your life, you are obligated to go after happiness. Happiness is not a happening, but an obligation. The same applies to joy. You have to able to see what pleasures there are in store for you to feel joy. Be aware that you have to go looking for it." The happiness and joy of the Weinberg formula are the fruits of studying Torah and observing commandments. They were not immediately apparent to Jack Kleiman, who did not make his commitment to Judaism overnight. After Jack had been to Aish HaTorah for six months, Reb Noach, keen at sighting potential, asked Kleiman to pinch-hit for him in the "48-Ways" course while he was abroad seeking funds for the yeshiva. (There is no tuition or charge for room and board. Reb Noach solicits funds to keep Aish HaTorah running.) Jack taught, still wearing jeans and his ponytail. "It gave me a lift and a sense of belonging and growth to teach. I didn't teach anything I didn't understand," he says. About six months later, he cut off the ponytail, although no one had even hinted it was inappropriate for a yeshiva student. He decided his long hair was a sign of pride and that he would like his hair shorter so that the tefillin—the phylacteries he first put on at the Western Wall—would fit closer to his head. "It's possible to be an individual here," Jack maintains. "Religion is a way to reach freedom. Freedom means being the best person you can possibly be." Kleiman has shed his locks because he has made a firm commitment to himself that he will keep the commandments. He has thrown all of his efforts into serious study and helping to build the yeshiva. When I visit him at Aish HaTorah, he is busy organizing a party for the holiday of Purim. He uses a tone of concern for detail I could imagine him using at a board meeting on urban development, had his life turned out differently. Jack is polite, a good host, well-groomed, and selfassured. He certainly seems happy. We walk around the Jewish Quarter, where the rubble of the old synagogues and study houses is being turned into new structures rising from old foundations. He points out architectural structures he admires—and the souvenir and artifact shops to which he objects. You simply cannot dismiss Jack Kleiman as a strange sort, flipping from one peculiar 42

interest to another. He is not flippant, or weird, or fanatic. He is the All-American Jewish success story: intelligent, welleducated, good-looking. And for the time being, he's content doing just what he's doing, studying full time at Aish HaTorah. It's taken some adapting: "At first it was difficult not seeing girls. For a couple of years I didn't see girls at all. I had been leading a very wild life before. Like Jim Morrison, I thought I'd burn out at 35. I needed to get inside Torah." Jack says he knows himself better now, and is more truthful with himself, although he is still struggling with many character flaws and problems. I suggest that this sounds like the summary of a person who has had a good therapist for a couple of years. Couldn't psychiatry have done the same for him? "That would have been patching up the holes. Discovering meaning in life gave me a new orientation," he says. And the future? "I want to study at least a few more years at the yeshiva and develop the tools of leadership to effect change. I would like to influence American Jews not to be'Philip Roth Jews'but to find out what Judaism is all about," he responds. He and his colleagues talk about setting up store-front yeshivahs on American college campuses. "Torah is my life," he claims. "There is no going back. As Dylan says, 'He who is not busy being born is busy dying.'" Jack quotes Dylan and Maimonides with equal facility. "Is there a course on Dylan at the yeshiva?" I quip. "No," he answers, "I did that as an undergraduate."

Jack is one of thousands of young American men and women who either have rediscovered or are in the process of rediscovering Judaism in Jerusalem. Most of thèse young people came to Israel to work on the collective settlements known as kibbutzim, to enjoy the Mediterranean beaches, or to complete a tour of Asia. Some, like Jack Kleiman, were off on spiritual odysseys and found what they were looking for in Jerusalem.

WATCH FOR THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF A NEW CONCEPT IN TORAH STUDY

TH E LU A CH LIM UD Torah Diary

A project of the Limud Torah Commission of the Orthodox Union 43

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First page of Chovos HaLevavos (Duties of the Heart) by Rav Bachya ibn Pakuda Second edition, 1548, Venice

An Interview:

A Young Man From Virginia Teaches "Jewish Identity' To Israel's Defense Forces We met Captain Paul Laster, I.D.F., now retired, in the lobby of the Moriah Hotel in Yerushalayim. He was at the time still on active duty, but had been in effect "drummed out" of the service for reasons he explains in the following interview. With him was Yussie Krupnick, an American oleh working for the American Peeylim, a New York-based group that is dedicated to serving the religious/educational needs of new immigrants to Israel. It says something about American Jewish journalism that the events described here which took place in 1978 are here reported—as far as we know—for the very first time. The interview has been edited from a tape transcription.

The officers walked into the yeshiva dining room to share a meal with ther students— each man with a kipa perched precariously on his head. They listened to a lecture on Talmud and hy evening, when the group had to board buses for a session elsewhere, they were singing and dancing wildly and 1 couldn't tear them away.

PL: I'm Paul Laster and I'm originally from Richmond, Virginia, where I spent most of my life. My family, on both sides, has lived in Virginia for several generations. All this considered, I come from a good Jewish background. My grandparents and parents were associated with a Conservative congregation •where I attended afternoon and Sunday School, and spent some time in USY (the youth movement of Conservative Judaism). My family is active in Jewish community and Israel affairs and in the city's civic life. They are exceptional in that respect since most of the old Jewish families have long been assimilated. I attended the University of Virginia, and never thought I would ever leave America. The Six Day War came after I had already finished a degree in law at U.V. It had little effect on me—Jewishly or Zionistically—but since I had just finished my studies and was planning a trip abroad, I decided to go to Israel to spend a year there and come back to practice law in Richmond. I arrived here in August 1967. It was not long before I was convinced that if I was serious about being a Jew I would have to remain in Israel. YJ: What did you do when you came here? PL: I went to stay in Beersheva which was then just a development town. I spent three months in an Ulpan. You know what that is?—Youdearn to speak Hebrew. It was the first time I had met Jews other than Americans. You hear about Am Yehudi—the Jewish People—but it's just an expression. The only accents I had been accustomed to were Southern accents; but here I met Jews from England, from the Arab countries, Bulgaria—and of course the people from Beersheba—it's such a small town. Then I went to live on a moshav which was mostly Anglo-Saxon. I taught for a while at the local school. As T met more and more different types of Jews I began to 45 4

challenge my own ideas, as an American, about my relationship to the Jewish People, to Jewish History. I had lots of free time and I did a lot of reading. In my second year in Israel I married a girl from Yemen and we have three children. I had already decided to stay, and I worked in preparing emissaries—sh'lickim—who were being sent to Anglo-Saxon countries. In 19731went back to America for a while to study Contemporary Jewish Studies at Brandeis with Marshall Sklare. As an "Israeli" I was able to see America in a new light. The Yom Kippur War broke out while we were there, and it was frustrating not being over here, and seeing the apathy of American students. In 1974 we returned to Israel and I had planned to go back to working for the Jewish Agency but I was invited to enter the Israeli Army. I had been lecturing in the early seventies in kibbutzim, moshavim, high schools and army camps on my own experiences in finding my "Jewish identity." Israelis were convinced that they had no identity problem, and I tried to develop techniques to show them that they really did. For many of them, their connection with the Land was as tenuous as that of other people. I would stand up before a group of Israelis and tell them that as an American student visiting Israel I saw no reason to stay here—which was not true, but it riled them up. "You're Israelis, and I'm an American Jew," I told them, "so I'm going back to America." Having stirred them up, I was often successful in driving home to them that there was more to being a Jew than just living in Israel. So the army asked me if I would join the Education Branch of I.D.F., with the rank of captain, and organize a program for officers and pilots. These people had been demoralized by the Yom Kippur War, and the army was afraid they would lose many of them if they didn't find something strong to identify with. YJ: Did you have a religious commitment at that time? PL: No—an "identity" commitment. YJ: What do you think were some of the factors that caused the army to initiate such a program? PL: Well, there was the depression that gripped the country after the Yom Kippur War. People were asking, "What happened? We beat the Arabs in six days, and this time they caught us unaware—they almost took Tiberias." Then there was the mass emigration—people leaving Israel, and aliyah almost stopped. There was the hostility of the United Nations. The typical army officer was an Israeli—not a Jew. He had little relationship to the Jewish past; to East European Jews, to North Africans... to the Holocaust. YJ: Was this a completely new program? PL: No, they had been taking officers and pilots O u t of the ranks for a three-week leadership and sensitivity training program by army psychologists. In the final week they threw in ArabIsraeli relationships, economics, Israel as a democratic society,

"Judaism," absorption problems, social problems, relations with the United States and Russian-even geopolitics. I told them this was not the way; it was too much—that giving them a sense of Jewish identity was at the heart o f the problem, and other things would follow naturally. YJ: Did they go along with you? PL: I'll never know for sure, but they just told me to go ahead. I turned in a written curriculum and I guess someone initialed it and passed it up the chain of command. It was sort of "benign neglect." YJ: Gould you sum up your program briefly? PL: It was based on five points: 1. Who am las a Jew? 2. What is my relationship to the Jewish people?—to Americans, Russians, and other Diaspora Jews? 3. What is my relationship to Yahadut,to Jewish culture—to Jewish religion? 4. How do I feel about other ethnic groups in Israel? 5. How do we relate to Arabs and the Arab-Israeli conflict? But it was all to be centered in a confrontation of Jewishness. I knew that I couldn't simply have people come in and give lectures. These were no kids; they were hardened officers— both men and women. I determined that the program would have to work on two levels, the theoretical and the experimental, and one of the ideas that emerged was to take them to a yeshiva-fea place few if any of them had ever been to. But what kind of a yeshiva? If I took them to a "black yeshiva" they'd get into arguments about the army. (This was my first exposure to the new Israeli slang term designating Orthodox Jews and yeshiva students characterized by their black garb.—YJ) If I took them to an Israeli yeshiva, they could ati(Orthodox) and we are D shrug it off—"they are (secular)." So I decided to take them to one of the yeshivos, and I spoke to Rav Baruch Horovitz of Dvar Yerushalayim, who said,'"Bring them over. We'll spend a day with them." Most of the students there come from at least quasi-secular backgrounds, yet by virtue of their academic backgrounds they could hold their own in a debate. And of course Rav Horovitz is a "Cambridge man" who could not be dismissed as a wild-eyed fundamentalist. The response was something no one could have predicted. The officers walked into the yeshiva dining room to share a meal with the students—each man with a perched precariously on his head. They listened to a lecture on Talmud and by evening, when the group had to board buses for a session elsewhere, they were singing and dancing wildly and I couldn't tear them away. Many of them, incidentally, ranked me, though I was nominally in charge, but it wouldn't have been wise for me to "pull rank." From then on I would alternate between Dvar Yerushalayim and Yeshivat Ohr Samayach (another teshuva yeshiva for Americans.) Ohr Samayach had another attraction—by then

they had started an Israeli section because young men had come to them clamoring for admission, and they could not easily be integrated with English-speaking students. These Israelis could look the officers in the eye and say, in the Hebrew idiom, "Look man, I've been there, and I know both sides/' At this point I was working closely with Yossie (Krupnick) who was heading a girls' school at the time. YJ: Which one? YK: Shapell's PL: I had received a request from the commanding officer of the women's branch of the army to receive a group of senior women officers for a three-day seminar on Yahadut. It turned out to be a small group—about twelve—but it was very manageable. We took them to the school; we arranged lectures; and they were able to talk to each other "one-on-one." They left "in heaven." YJ: You must have had some problems? PL: Surprisingly, one of our most serious problems was finding people who could relate warmly, and well, to the officers. The questions were sometimes hostile, sometimes aggresive: What is Judaism's attitude to the concept of "The Chosen People?" to G-d? to Eretz Yisrael? to observance of Shabbat? Yossie was extremely helpful because he was able to pull together people who could handle these challenges. Whenever he heard of a visiting rabbi from America, he signed him up for a lecture. YJ: I've heard about a "game" you developed for your own lectures. Tell me about it. PL: Well, it was based on a study where Israelis were asked "if you could be born again, would you choose to be a Jew?" The choices were: "1. Yes, I would want to be a Jew again; 2. It means nothing to me; 3. I would have chosen not to be Jew." From thirty to thirty-five percent of Israelis said they would have chosen not to be a Jew again. As one way of measuring their attitudes before they took the course and afterwards, we gave them a questionable with similar type questions, which tested their knowledge as well as their attitudes. This usually shook them up because they knew so little about Judaism. At the first session I would say to them: "You all have four distinct identities. You are all 'Jews,''army officers,''human beings,' and 'Israelis.' Since we are here to explore identity, let's find out who you really are." I would designate one corner of the room for each category, and ask them togo to that corner which represented their primary identity. They usually divided up as Jews, human beings, Israelis—very few would go to the corner marked army officers. Then we challenged them on their choice, and they began to attack each other's choice. The "Israelis" were attacking the "Jews." The "Jews" were

attacking the "Israelis." And they would both gang up on the "human beings." This often goes on for as much as two and a half hours. The first two days of these and similar exercises, games, and provocative lectures, get them to question things they never before had questioned—issues of life and death. The whole course is based on identity which is more important than the Arab-Israeli conflict and things like that. Now you have them "turned on" as you say in America: how do you follow up? What do you do? Do you just bring in lecturers? Teach them a daf gemora? Do you have them daven? Take them to Yad Vashem? Have them put on tefilin? YJ: Through all this was your own identity becoming more clearly defined? PL: Sure. The course we eventually developed was a reflection of my own struggle with my Jewishness. So we decided to get away from university lecturers who simply droned on in their own narrow academic areas. We decided we would only have really committed people doing the lectures and leading the discussions. YJ: How did the Army feel about that? YK: That was just what the Army told us not to do. They argued that if sonveone is personally committed he is biased. They wanted us to bring in "objective" people... PL: ... by their definition anyone from a university was not biased, and anyone from a yeshiva was. At that time I became aware of the Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva which had that year brought its whole student body to its branch in Yerushalayim for a year. I went to see Rav Moshe Chait, head of the Israeli branch. I asked him, hesitatingly, if he would be willing to take the time to host a group of Army officers. "We'd love to," he said, "'that's why we are in Israel." So we took them to Chofetz Chaim to spend a day. You know many yeshivos in Israel are run down, but this place is magnificent... YJ: I've never seen such yeshivos until I came here. PL: Well, I never saw a yeshiva in my life until I came to Israel so I can't really compare. But the Army people expected a run down, smelly place, hardly fit for a clean-cut Israeli. But Chofetz Chaim was most impressive to them. We started the day with coffee and cake in the dining room. The Rosh Hayeshiya, Ha'Rav Henoch Leibowitz, greeted the men, and gave a D'var Torah. Then we took them up to the Bais Medrash where each officer was assigned to a bochur of the yeshiva. At about 11:30 in the morning you could walk into the Bais Medrash and see what appeared at first glance as a normal yeshiva scene. But at closer look you saw that at each table one of the "students" was dressed in army khaki. But that was the only difference. They were all bent over a gemora yelling at each other in the noisy manner of the Bais Medrash. We found that

the officers responded better to the Americans—the Israelis were skeptical. "Mah pitom?" they would say: "One day in a yeshiva won't do any good. We know these guys; we grew up with them. It's a waste of time/' But the Americans took it as a serious challenge. YJ: Did any of the officers object to what you were doing? PL: Well, some just didn't show up at all—there was little I could dp to force their attendance. For some of them it was a lark—"free time" in Yerushalayim, a chance to see family and friends. But most of them showed up and not one refused to put on a kipa or to go to the yeshiva. Israelis have more respect for religion than we give them credit for. YK: There was one fellow who griped about going... PL: O.K. One. But I guess you could say that was the exception that proves the rule. Sure they joked about "brain-washing" but about 90% said when their course was over that they'd like to participate in a program to study Judaism. And that was our biggest problem. The Army felt that they had done as much as they wanted to, and we couldn't interest religious groups to really dig into a program for the Army. I did set up a one-day Yam lyun (institute) that would meet at my base on a voluntary basis. We woifld deal only with Yiddishkeit, and the one stipulation I made was that no one was to leave during the session which ran on Thursdays from ten in the morning through seven in the evening. But they had to come on their own—I couldn't help them and they had to sacrifice a vacation day in order to come. YJ: Do you have any way of judging how effective your program was? PL: Well... the only person I'm sure became a shomer mitzvos from the program is myself. If you asked me, "Paul, did you succeed in getting anybody to the yeshiva—anybody to become a shomer mitzvos?" I'd have to say "I don't know"—that wasn't really my goal. It certainly was not what the Army wanted. My goal was to give them a chance to examine their own Jewishness; to start asking questions; to start probing; to start seeing who they really are; to know that being a Jew means they must seriously confront Judaism and no longer be content to say "I'm Israeli—and that's enough." A secondary goal was to interpret to these men, who mostly had a negative attitude to the Dati, the feelings of religious Jews. This was important because these men are officers and often have religious troops in their command. We do know that some of the men aré now studying on their own, and that in some groups as much as 90% said after the course that they were seriously considering sending their children to a religious school. YJ: How did you and the Army finally come to a parting of the ways? SO

PL: Well, I was called in by my commanding officer and told that I was being relieved—that a new officer was taking over the program. YJ: Did they explain why... PL: Well, there were two basic objections to our program. They said they wanted to inculcate Judaism into the men, but not the kind we were "selling." They also objected to our saying that Zionism had been a failure. YJ: Were these attacks on your program reported in the press? PL: No. This never got into the press. Lots of the opposition came from the professors and academics who had been lecturing in the past and who were upset about losing these lectureships. There was also a cadre of young officers in the Education Branch who felt that we were putting down all that they stood for. They had the ear of the Ktzin Chinuch Roshi, the head of the Educational branch. YJ: Who replaced you? PL: Americans will find it difficult to understand this, but the new head of this program is a guy who never took a course in education—he does have a B.A. in geography. YJ: Did you get a chance to defend your program? PL: 1 asked the general in charge why he had never studied the effectiveness of the program; why the top officers of the Education Branch never visited the program; never asked for reports. But he had no response. He did offer me another assignment which I refused, and I told him I no longer felt I had a place in the Army. YJ: What are your plans now? PL: I'm still in the service until the end of June (1978) and I'm considering an offer at Yeshivat Ohr Samayach where I can work and continue my own studies. We walked with Paul taster and Yossie Krupnick to the door of the hotel and they walked together down the street in the direction of the Old City. It was clear we had been talking to modern day heroes: Laster, an American from the deep South who found himself in Eretz Yisrael; Krupnick a musmach who had studied with Rav Moshe Feinstein and Rav Yoseph Ber Soloveitchik, and had come to Eretz Yisrael to share his learning with his Israeli brothers and sisters.

M OVING? S E N D U S Y O U R MAILING L A B E L AN D NEW A D D R E S S S O Y O U W O N ’T M IS S A N I S S U E O F

JEWISH LIFE 1 1 6 E ast 2 7 t h S t r e e t □ New York, N.Y. 1 001 6 51

JEWISH LIFE A Statement of Purposes ... In the pages of Jewish Life we will share with you insights into the Jewish past as they clarify the Jewish present, and as they help us to see into the future. We will examine the Jewish present in the light of the past,’and in the light of what must be our future aspirations. We will look into the future, not with any mystical powers—there are few Jews today who lay claim to such powers,—but with the techniques made available to us by the Jewish mind and the Jewish heart refined by Tdrah learning and historical Jewish experience ... ... Jewish Life will continue to be a platform for the expression of diverse points of view in the American Torah commun ity. Here these criteria alone will gain admittance to the minds of our readers: a commitment to Jewish values, and an articulate expression of a point of view on matters of interest and deep concern to other committed Jews* Surely not all readers will agree with our application of these criteria—and we earnestly look forward to hearing from them. Writing is a mystique I hope to explore in these pages, particularly as it relates to the articulation and in terpretation of Torah values and concepts. And reading too is a mystique: but the two can function only in unison... ... Most people who read are aware of the difficulties of trans lating from one language into another. When a judge an grily said to a Yiddish interpreter that there must be an English word that means "shofar," the reply was "it's a horn." When asked why he didn't gÉ| so to begin with, the interpreter shrugged his shoulders and said, "Because it's not a horn!" But few readers realize that all writing is in a sense "translation," particularly when we try to express Torah concepts in any language other than Hebrew. All such attempts must, therefore, by definition, fall short of their mark. It shall here be our objective to come as close to the mark as we can in stretching the English language to accommodate Torah categories and Torah concepts as Jews have in the past used other foreign tongues. In these difficult tasks we solicit your help, your under standing, your patience—and your prayers. Yaakov Jacobs

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First page of Hilchos Teshuva (Laws of Teshuva) by Maimonides Facsimile of first edition 1460, Rome

Reuven Grodner

The Role Of Vidui In The Process Of Teshuva Confession as an Element of Repentance Repentance (teshuva) is a subject that has captured the hearts and minds of Jewish thinkers and theologians throughout the ages. The Bible is replete with examples of man's struggle with evil and his attempt to repair his faults and failings. The prophets of old exhorted the people to change their ways and repent. The Talmud outlines the basic legal structure of repentance, as well as its moral and theological implications. Medieval philosophers devoted a great deal of attention to the idea of repentance. Saadiah Gaon (882-942 C.E.) discusses repentance in section five of his Emunos veDe'os, Bachya ibn Pakuda (1050-1120) devotes the seventh "Gate" of his Duties of the Heart to the subject and Maimonides' (1135-1204) Mishnah Torah, Sefer Ha-Madda contains ten chapters on laws of repentance. Rav Yonah b. Avraham Gerondi (1200-1263) devoted an entire work to repentance in his famous Sha'arei Teshuva. The idea of repentance continued to play a central role in the thinking of modern Jewish* philosophers including Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (Orot Ha-Teshuvah), Franz Rosenzweig (Star of Redemption) and Martin Buber (I and Thou). Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a luminary Torah personality of our generation, has a particular affinity for the concept of repentance. For some two decades, he has analyzed and explored the subject in an annual teshuva discourse. The Kinnus Teshuva attracts hundreds of scholars from far and wide, who come to glean pearls of wisdom and to derive personal religious inspiration from the world renowned Torah giant. From the dawn of history, mankind was destined to struggle against sin and evil. When saints became sinners, the opportunity to right wrongs and return to saintliness was ever present. G-d waits patiently and listens attentively to the pleas and cries of the remorseful soul. He awaits a confession of guilt (vidui) and responds with either a statement of forgiveness or a mitigation of divine justice. Cain cries out: "My sin is too great to bear" (Gen. 4:13) and the Almighty places His sign upon him to protect him. Though repentance is universally viewed as a fundamental principle in Jewish thought, its precise status as a mitzvah is subject to debate. Nachmanides is of the opinion that the act of repentance is, in fact, one of the 613 commandments. He bases his opinion upon the text in Deuteronomy, Chapter thirty:

Teshuva is qualitatively strengthened by the act of Vidui. It raises repentance from potential to actual. It translates thought and feeling into concrete action.

Rabbi Grodner is the spiritual leader of the Young Israel of Scarsdale and teaches at the James Striar School of Yeshiva University.

G -d w aits patiently an d listens attentively to the pleas and cries of the rem orseful soul. H e aw aits a confession o f gu ilt (v id u i) and responds with either a statem ent o f forgiveness or a m itigation o f divine justice.

"'And it shall come to pass when all these things come upon thee... and thou shalt return unto the L-rd thy G -d... If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the L-rd thy G-d, to keep His commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto the L-rd thy G -d... For this commandment which I give thee this day, it is not hidden from thee; neither is it far o ff... But the matter is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart that thou mayest do it." Nachmanides comments on these verses: "The expression used here, this commandment refers to the commandment of repentance... and the sense thereof is to state that if thy outcasts be in the uttermost parts of heaven and you are under the power of the nations,-you can yet return to G-d and do according to all that I command thee this day for the thing is not hard, nor far off from you, but rather very nigh unto thee to do it at all times and in all places. This is the sense of the expression in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it meaning that they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers by words of their mouths, and return in their hearts to G-d and accept the Torah upon themselves this day to perform it throughout the generations..." Nachmanides, thus, views repentance as a mitzvah, and vidui as merely one component within the teshuya process. Maimonides' opinion differs in that he views the act of confession itself to be a mitzvah. In chapter one of Hilchos Teshuvah, Maimonides writes: "When a person repents and returns from his sin he is obligated to confess before G-d, blessed is He, as it is written: When a man or woman shall commit, to do a trespass against the L-rd and that person be guilty, then they shall confess their sin which they have done... (Numbers 5:6,7). This is verbal confession, and this confession is a positive command. In Sefer Hamitzvos, Positive Mitzvah 73, Maimonides writes: "We are commanded to confess sins and transgressions which we have transgressed before G-d, and state them with repentance.. .," citing the same verses from Numbers, above. Maimonides cites the Mechilta which states that confession of sin is not dependent upon the offering of a sacrifice nor upon Eretz Yisroel. Rather, it is a mitzvah related to all sins independent of Holy Temple and Eretz Yisroel. Apparently Maimonides and Nachmanides differ not merely with regard to the designation of the mitzvah, i.e. vidui vs. teshuva. Their controversy lies in the precise function of vidui in its relationship to teshuva. The term teshuva is a carefully selected and precise halachic term. Though it is commonly translated as repentance, I believe the word has a more profound connotation. The root of teshuva is the Hebrew word, shuv, which means return. Shuv is a bi-directional term. For example, one returns from

vacation as he returns home. Teshuva is a departure from a sinful act or a sinful behavior pattern. In a moment of weakness, the individual succumbed to temptation and violated a commandment. Feeling profound remorse over his deed and resolving never to repeat it, the sinner returns from his sin. The story of Joseph and his brothers offers a poignant example of the enormous power that teshuva has in reshaping personality. Judah was primarily responsible for the sale of Joseph. It was Judah who said: "What profit is it if we slay our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites... ft (Gen. 37:26,27). Directly after the sale of Joseph/ Judah turns away from his brothers and leaves his father's house. He feels a hounding guilt. The face of his tearful father haunts him. He has no choice but to leave home. Judah has begun a spiritual descent. "Judah went down from his brothers." He marries the daughter of a Canaanite and has three sons. Within a short period of time, Judah suffers the loss of his two elder sons and his wife. Then he is visited with the shame of a daughter-in-law who is accused of harlotry. Finally, when confronted with the stark reality of his guilt in being responsible for Tamar's pregnancy, he breaks down with a heart-rending admission of failure and guilt. "She is more righteous than I!" In a terse confession, Judah bursts forth with a painful realization that his personal tragedies are retribution for the pain and suffering he inflicted upon his brother and his father. This moment of truth thrusts Judah upon the road to rehabilitation. He rejoins his family and devotes himself to caring for his father. The test of Judah's repentance comes after he guarantees the safety of young Benjamin when Benjamin is threatened with slavery by Egypt's viceroy. Judah, in a tearful plea, offers himself instead. Judah's teshuva strengthened his character ancLenabled him to withstand a fearful test. His teshuva culminated in a verbal confession of guilt. In Nachmanides' view, Judah had nobly fulfilled the mitzvah of teshuva. His repentance was complete. Not so, Maimonides. In his opinon, returning from sin is not sufficient. The sinner must return—to G-d. Maimonides, along with many other philosophers, outlines four steps to teshuva: regret, abandonment of sin, resolve for the future and confession. The first three steps suffice in affecting a change in behavior. A mugger may be profoundly remorseful for the hurt he has imposed upon others. As a result, he may resolve never to mug again and indeed, become an upright citizen. Yet, for Maimonides, the key element of teshuva is still lacking, which is confession before G-d. King David was confronted by the prophet Nathan after he had sent Uriah to the front lines of battle to be killed, so that he, David, may marry Bathsheba. Nathan harshly rebuked David for his actions. He forcefully brought home to him the

The story of Joseph and his brothers offers a poignant example of the enormous power that teshuva has in reshaping personality.

Teshuva alone can be a too of deception, when lacking the element of Vidui.

Teshuva draws the distant odes close. Last night the individual was despised by G-d, loathsome, distant and abominable. And today he is loved, desired, close and befriended. I

full weight of his evil deeds, deeds that are worthy of a most severe punishment. The Biblical text shows a space between Nathan's admonition and David's reply. That pause, says the Gaon of Vilna, reflects the emotional upheaval and inner turmoil David suffered before he exclaimed "I have sinned before G-d" (Samuel II 12:13). David's confession, in Maimonides' view, was a fulfillment of the mitzvah of vidui. It was a return to a state of unity and closeness with G-d. It is clear from Maimonides' writings both in Sefer Hamitzvos and in Mishnah Torah, that the confession of guilt and wrongdoing is to be specifically directed to G-d. In Sefer Hamitzvos he writes: "Mitzvah 73—That He has commanded us to confess our sins and transgressions that we have transgressed before G-d." In Mishnah Torah, Hilchos Teshuva 1:1, Maimonides writes: "When a person repents and returns from his sin he is obligated to confess before G-d, blessed is He." Here we see the dual purpose of teshuva quite clearly to "return from sin" and "to confess before G-d," which is, in effect, returning to G-d. Maimonides gives us the proper formula for vidui: "I implore you, O G-d, I have transgressed, acted wrongfully/ sinned before you and I have done such and such and I regret and am ashamed of my actions and will never do them again." In Chapter 2, Halacha 5, he compares the sins between man and his fellow man wherein a public acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a public confession is praiseworthy, whereas, sins between man and G-d require confession only to G-d: "But, he returns before G-d, blessed is He, and specifies his sins before Him." In a beautifully descriptive manner, Maimonides portrays the return of the sinner back to G-d (7:6): "How great is repentance that draws a person close to the Divine presence. Teshuva draws the distant ones close. Last night the individual was despised by G-d, loathsome, distant and abominable. And today he is loved, desired, close and befriended." Though Maimonides uniquely focuses upon vidui as a mitzvah because it re-establishes a relationship between the sinner and G-d, all are in agreement that confession is an integral component of the teshuva process. Rav Yonah Gerondi states that vidui is an outward manifestation of inner remorse: "Regret and confession together acknowledge that the confessor is remorseful" (Gate 1:19). The Sefer Charedim of Rav Eleazar Ben Moshe Azikri (1533-1600) recognizes the pain of acknowledging guilt. Though preferring a complacent mental cover-up, the sinner forces himself to look at his stained and soiled soul in the mirror of confession. I am told that many more alcoholics would join A.A. if they were not required to endure the public

confession "I am an alcoholic/' Says Sefer Charedim, the sinner's confession is an offering of atonement upon the altar of repentance. Through the anguish of vidui, atonement is forthcoming. The Chovos Halevavos (Duties of the Heart) by Rav Bachya Ben Yoseph Ibn Pakuda states that the act of confession grants the sinner the right to ask for forgiveness. The Sefer Hachinuch attributed by many to Rav Aharon Ben Yoseph Ha-Levi of Barcelona (1235-1300), sees in vidui an expression of faith in an omniscient G-d who sees all of man's deeds and thoughts. Teshuva is qualitatively strengthened by the act of vidui. It raises repentance from potential to actual. It translates thought and feeling into concrete action. An abstract idea is concretized in a word—chatasi. Dr. Willard Gaylin, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University and president of the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences wrote a perceptive article on the question What Is The Real You? Dr. Gaylin stresses the importance of outward, manifest behavior in determining who the real person is. A young man who mugs old ladies is not "really" a good boy. The inner man, he writes, is a mere fantasy. People must be judged not on the basis of their feelings or thoughts, but, rather by their deeds and actions. He writes: "Consider for a moment the case of the 90 year old man on his deathbed (surely the Talmud must deal with this?), joyous and relieved over the success of his deception. For 90 years he has shielded his evil nature from public observation; For 90 years he has affected courtesy, kindness and generosity, suppressing all the malice he knew was within him while he calculatedly and artificially substituted grace and charity. All his life he had been fooling the world into believing he was a good man. This 'evil' man will, I predict, be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven". Vidui, then, may be seen as an outward expression of the turbulent emotions in the heart of the penitent. The Biblical examples of Judah and David mentioned earlier indicate the depth of emotion that may be concealed behind a one-word admission of guilt. Confession before G-d places teshuva upon a higher and more clearly defined level. The moment the voice of conscience is aroused by misdeeds and wrongdoing, a second voice quietly whispers to the individual: "Don't feel guilty, it wasn't your fault, circumstances were beyond control, etc." A confused and ambivalent state besets the individual who is not quite certain whether, indeed, he is at fault or not. When Adam and Eve heard the voice of G-d in the Garden after having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, the Torah tells us that they hid amongst the trees of the Garden. Every wrongdoer seeks to hide behind trees of rationalization and excuses. Every taster of forbidden fruit prefers to blame another: "The woman

Every wrongdoer seeks to hide behind trees of rationalization and excuses. Every taster of forbidden fruit prefers to blame another: "The woman whom you have given to me—she seduced me and I ate".

Confession before G-d fulfills another vital role in the process of teshuva . . . Teshuva alone can be a tool of deception, when lacking the elefnent of vidui. Vidui places the Baal Teshuva before G-d.

The G-d of truth is not dazzled by external manifestations of Frumkeit.

whom you have given to me—she seduced me and I ate." In one breath Adam blames G-d and Eve for his sin. Vidui takes the sinner out of the forest of rationalizations. He steps forward into the open, removing all defenses and barriers between himself and his Maker, and declares: Chatasi, Avisi, Pashati, L'Fanecha. Only when the individual can remove the coverups of his sins is he capable of taking reponsibility for his own actions. The painful self-realization engendered by vidui is, at the same time, the source of greatest comfort to the suffering penitent. For to take responsibility for one's own actions is the unique endowment of a human being. Free Will, the capacity to choose between good and evil, is man's most ennobling characteristic. As the worshipper taps his heart with each al chet, he rises from the gloom of despair to the light of redemption. The vidui he utters speaks to him. Vidui tells the penitent that he is a master and not a slave, a subject and not an object. He is not helplessly caught in a web of sin. Instead, he finds it within his power to re-establish the broken relationship between himself and G-d. Confession before G-d fulfills another vital role in the process of teshuvah. Our tradition has high regard for the Baal Teshuva (repentant individual). Our rabbis tell us: "Even the most righteous cannot reach the place where Baalei Teshuva stand." The Baal Teshuva enjoys special recognition in the eyes of the Jewish community. The personal tribulations endured by many of my students at the James Striar School of Yeshiva University, on their road to a Jewish way of life are simply incredible. Some have severed long standing friendships and love relationships. Others are in the throes of family conflict and parental rejection. Thus, the Baal Teshuva is truly deserving of the respect and emotional support of the Jewish community. However, I have sometimes seen young persons flaunt piety and use it as a status symbol. The nouveau frum can, at times, be selfrighteous and intolerant of others. Teshuva alone can be a tool of deception, when lacking the element of vidui. Vidui places the Baal Teshuva before G-d. There is no room for false piety or self-righteousness in a private and personal confrontation with G-d. The G-d of truth is not dazzled by external manifestations of frumkeit. One of the dilemmas facing the Jew who prays on Yom Kippur and recites the appropriate confession is his awareness that today's teshuvah may soon dissipate. There is a real apprehension of return to old habits and lifestyles. He is fearful of acting like the coal miner who bathes in the evening and then dons the same dirty clothing he wore all day. Maimonides offers at least a partial solution to this gnawing problem. "Let him call upon the Knower of secrets to testify that he will not repeat this sin ever again."

Some have understood this to mean that G-d will he witness to his repentance and he will never repeat the sin. This interpretation is difficult because it'denies reality. Many do fall back after a sincere attempt to change. I believe that the explanation offered by the Lechem Mishnah is accurate. What Maimonides is suggesting to the penitent is that he call upon G-d to be his witness that the teshuva is sincere and that he will not return to his former sins. Such a Vidui serves to strengthen the resolve of teshuva and, in fact, helps to prevent the sinner from backsliding. G-d is a Recaller of things forgotten. He remembers all and is a living, eternal witness. There are two unusual characteristics of our vidui prayers. First, they are recited in the plural form. Second, though the phrase "and our ancestors" is not mentioned in the Talmud, it is found in the versions of Maimonides, Avudraham (14th Century) and Yabetz (15th Century). One would imagine that confession would only concern the individual and G-d. Yet, the standard confession contained in the Machzor does include previous generations, as well as the entire present generation. What we have here is a clear statement concerning the individual's relationship to K'lal Yisroel. The sinner often feels isolated and alone. His sins have separated him from his G-d and from his people. He feels like a traitor to his nation. "My people have suffered and died to preserve a Jewish heritage and I, so gratuitously, have abandoned that heritage." Vidui rejects such a notion. It tells the individual while he is in the throes of repentance that despite all his wrongdoings, he remains a son of his people and a member of the Jewish community. The very act of vidui draws the sinner back to K'lal Yisroel, back to his ancestors. The Shunamite asked nothing from Elisha. She felt comfort and security because: I dwell amongst my people, (Kings II 4:13). This is the comfort and security offered by Vidui to every penitent —Despite all your sins, you remain a member of K'lal Yisroel.

What Maimonides is suggesting to the penitent is that he call upon G-d to be his witness that the teshuva is sincere and that he will not return to his former sins. Such a Vidui serves to strengthen the resolve of teshuva and, in fact, helps to prevent the sinner from backsliding.

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An Epilogue: A Portrait of the Editor as Ba'al Teshuva It has been said that a literary work is never really finished— it is abandoned. As this issue of Jewish Life stands ready for the press, I realize that it contains only a small portion of what I had hoped it would contain. So be it. There will be future issues, B'ezras HaShem, and every one of them will add to what has been said in this one. Teshuva is the "big story" of our time, to be succeeded only by that phenomenon which it is an integral part of as well as being its cause: the Geula—the day on which the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of G-d; when peace and love shall reign over Israel and all Mankind. No Jewish publication is worthy of the name if it does not reflect the apocalyptic time in which we live, in which the muffled sounds of the footsteps of the Moshiach become slowly more audible. Like Paul Laster who grew spiritually from his job in training Israeli officers to deal with their Jewishness, I have learned a good deal in my quest. While working on this issue, I had a call from a young man who was preparing a paper on the influence of Eretz Yisrael on the move toward teshuva (as I would now characterize what I had erroneously called "the Teshuva Movement"—it is simply not a movement.) He had heard that I was an "expert" in the field and wanted to talk to me at length on the subject. After the proper denials, I struck a bargain with him. Since I could ill afford to take the .time to talk to him, which I felt rightly belonged to my readers, I would talk to him if he would give Jewish Life first rights to his paper after it was delivered in Geneva. I hope to offer it to our readers in a future issue. The young man, incidentally, holds a doctorate which he earned for a sociological study of ba'alei teshuva, which he did as a "participant observer," which in the jargon of sociology means that he is himself a returnee. Perhaps we may be able to share with our readers some of his findings in a future issue. I received a copy of a doctoral dissertation, now a book, on the educational theories of the late Rav Kook which I also hope to share with you in one way or another. Preparing this issue has opened up a new little world for me, but I carry with me the anguish with which I began because of the many glaring ommissions. Carried away by my visit to Eretz Yisrael, I have left virtually untouched what has happened in the Galut, here in America, where I have also been a "participant observer." I must here touch on, if only to list them, the various institutions and movements which have revolutionized American Jewry—in effect outlining the Teshuva II issue of Jewish Life. (Why do I suddenly have an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach?) 65

I grew up in the Williamsburgh-Bushwick section of Brooklyn in the thirties and forties. My late parents were Hungarian immigrants who struggled to run a Jewish home like the homes they came from. (Momma used to say "Mirzerien fun die beserer Ungarisher" in a defensive response to the "bad press" Hungarian Jews suffer from.) Yet for my older brother and sister and myself there was no yeshiva training—we went to what would today be called a "store-front" cheder, next door to a shoemaker who was my father's landsman and who ran the only Shomer Shabbos enterprise—other than the kosher butcher shop—in the entire area. And this was not far from Bedford and Lee Avenues! (In those days only rabbis' sons went to yeshiva so they too could become rabbis.) While attending Boys High School in Brooklyn my father took me one Shabbos to a shul on Graham Avenue in whose basement the Young Israel of Bush wick held its own minyan on Shabbos and Yom Tov for the local youngsters. A number of young talmidim of the sainted Rav Dovid Leibowitz, founder of Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yisrael Meir Ha'Kohen (Ba'al Chofetz Chaim) on Williamsburgh's South Ninth Street, would come there to give classes in Chumash and Shulchan Aruch. Today there are scores, if not hundreds of people who are shomrei mitzvos as a result of those classes—we didn't know about "shiurim" in those days. Among them are rabbonim and roshei yeshivos. I was later to learn that this process had been duplicated in Young Israel branches throughout Metropolitan New York, and to a lesser extent in other metropolitan areas of the United States and Canada. At that time—during the black years of World War II, the Agudas Yisrael movement reconstituted itself in a small brownstone at 616 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburgh under the dedicated leadership of a man named Michael Tress, who himself, like many of the leaders of Young Israel, had never attended a yeshiva. A group of us from Bushwick began to attend Agudah's "Night Yeshiva" on Bedford Avenue. At the same time we came under the tutelage of Rav Yaakov London and his brother Rav Yechiel London, and became the pilot group for Yeshivas Haichel Ha'Torah—the first teshuva yeshiva in America, Historians will forgive the absence of proper chronological order, but it was roughly during that time that Reb Feivel Mendelovitz, who insisted on being called "Mister" rather than "Rav"—a prophetic note—was bringing Torah to young Americans at Yeshiva Torah Va'daas, and dreaming about a network of yeshivos throughout the country, later to be realized with the formation of Torah Umesorah. It was during that period too that the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, having been

released from prison in the Soviet Union, came to 770 Eastern Parkway from where he directed a handful of Chassidim in the organization of Oneg Shabbos programs, and released-time classes for Jewish youngsters attending the City's public schools, No Jew anywhere in the world today, whatever his religious orientation, can have failed to take note of the furtherance of Torah education and commitment which has emerged from those small beginnings. And meanwhile, without the aggressiveness of other movements and institutions, Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan, later to become the nucleus of Yeshiva University, was turning out American rabbonim to lead the scattered remnants of American Orthodoxy, some of whose own leaders had predicted its demise. Realizing that all of these efforts left unaccounted for tens of thousands of Jewish boys and girls in outlaying areas, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America organized the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY) under the lay leadership of the late Harold Boxer, and the professional leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Stolper—now Executive Vice-President of the Orthodox Union. Thousands of young people, who might otherwise have been lost to any kind of Jewishness, are today practicing Orthodox Jews, rabbonim and roshei yeshivos, and lay leaders of the new Orthodoxy, thanks to the work of NCSY. Somewhere in this process I managed to enter the Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva where I had the good fortune to study under the Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Henoch Leibowitz, and Rav Chaim Pinchas Sheinberg, now head of his own Yeshivas Torah Ohr in Yerushalayim. The influx of Chassidim who either escaped or survived the Churban Europa cannot properly be called a part of the revival of Yiddishkeit in America. It was in effect a virtual transplantation of Chassidic dynasties whose adherents have grown in vast numbers by self-perpetuation and by the sacrificial efforts of these Jews to raise large families and to create a vast network of yeshivos. Apart from the contribution of numbers alone, swelling the ranks of Jews committed to Torah (in spite of occassional factional rivalries), Chassidus has left an indelible imprint on the yeshiva world, and its spirit has changed the face of American Jewry, even beyond the realm of Orthodoxy. In his master work, Oros Ha'Teshuya, the sainted Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook, prophetically created a handbook for teshuva, knowing that in due time teshuva would become the ultimate resolution of all the problems which have confronted Jewry in our century. He spoke in lofty terms of the need for

safrus, for a new Torah literature to address itself to the needs of our time in the idiom of our time. And in his closing passage he spoke of the need for a "Poet of Teshuva." Perhaps Rav Kook was expressing the frustration of all writers who have felt inadequate to the huge responsibilities they felt. Perhaps he had in modesty defined his own role as a leader in Israel. And perhaps Rav Kook had re-defined the concept of Moshiach—the Redeemer who will sing thé song of Teshuva and Geula. Yaakov Jacobs

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To The Editor: Permit me to take issue with your concluding question in your editorial "Jew ish Journalism—Who Needs It?" Evidently you did not follow all the news stories and comments that appeared in our paper concerning the publication of an eight-page supplement by JAAB. I do not see how we could have made it clearer that we reject the idea that we publish dissent only when it is the form of paid advertising. We had on more than one occasion published in our news columns dissenting comments by JAAB when we considered they had news value. The eight-page supplement was not in that category. You describe it yourself as "drowned in a sea of obfuscation." Is a newspaper (unsubsidized, despite your erroneous statement) that has to support itself against inflation, obliged to give eight costly pages to material it does not consider sufficiently newsworthy? You imply an accusation that The Jewish Week is "inhibited by vested interests.. ."The fact is that we published JAAB stories before the eight-page ad appeared, that we continued to publish stories thereafter. Mr. Yaffe's story gave "the other side" of the JAAB attack on the establishment. This was

followed by another interview with a JAAB official. We did acknowledge that we might have made the eight-page supplement more different from our news typography. In doing so, we reiterated our intention to be a medium for diverse views. As for your impression that we are "heavily subsidized," we have a business relationship with the UFA-Federation, wherein they solicit subscriptions from their contributors. We have felt that our rate was so low that we were subsidizing the UJA-Federation beyond all prudence and reason. We recently advised the UJA-Federation that we could not continue the arrangement unless we received a more nearly fair price for subscriptions. With the increase, we still feel that we are somewhat underpaid. This paper is owned by a group of investors who are community-minded and are pledged to donate dividends, if any, to the Jewish community. I am one of ten such "investors." I have an employment contract which has thus far failed to provide me with a salary, but has given me total editorial independence from the owning corporation. The UJA-Federation has no ownership interest and certainly no control. Philip Hochstein New York Mr. Hochstein is the Editor and Publisher ofThe Jewish Week.

The Editor replies: Mr. Hochstein has perhaps forgotten an editorial note in our issue of Adar 5736 in which we wrote: "To this observer, it appeared that The Jewish Week would become another casualty in the co-opting of the soft, still voices of Jewish journalism.. .To

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the co n tra ry , Philip H och stein, the editor/publisher of The Jewish W eek...has stubbornly retained his editorial rights." We went on to say that "it is encouraging that an attempt is being made to create an independent Jewish new spaper." This promise has yet to be fulfilled, by Mr. Hochstein's own admission. And we still wish him well in his efforts. In this context it is in order to quote from a column which appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle (quoted in the National Jewish Post) which offers a more disinterested opinion than our own. "A frequent moan heard from American visitors to these shores—and in correspon dence from the United States—is about the inability of the great, wealthy American Jewish community to produce a nationallycirculating weekly newspaper on a par with the Jewish Chronicle. "I'm sure that it is a sentiment not unknown to the editor of this journal, but the problems involved are much more complex than the non-professional could be expected to comprehend. "There have been attempts across the years to establish a national, American-Jewish weekly. All have failed. They have failed for a variety of reasons, not least among them the huge investment needed to publish and circulate simultaneously across a land as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, "It is not without point that, the news magazines apart, the United States in general has no national newspaper. For all their international standing, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and lesser props of the American fourth estate are essentially local papers, having a small circulation outside of their metropolitan areas and in British terms, comparatively small circulations overall. "B u t there are other problems in establishing an American-Jewish newspaper: the insistence of potential investors that they

have a say in its editorial policies which pre ordains its failure as a journal of independent opinion; the intensely varied complexion and interest of American Jewry; and, very much a ^consideration in a city like New York, the heavy concentration of the mass media on matters of Jewish interest. "There is a Jewish weekly press in America, but, apart from a handful of distinguished examples, it is a frail, gutless entity, owned either by publishers in the business for what they can take out of it or by the communitybased Jewish welfare funds which, because of their reliance on the donations ,of big givers with a variety of organizational interests, are not free to air those controversial issues which should be agitating the communities they are supposed to serve. "A disturbing aspect of the scene has been the way in which the welfare funds in some cities have used their influence with advertisers in seeking to undermine existing independent newspapers and supplant them with their own unquestioning, noncontroversial sheets, where all Jewish life is sweetness and light and no boats are rocked. "But I am happy to salute one recent and notable victory in Los Angeles, where, after a struggle bravely fought by three fiercely independent publications, the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles voted with only one dissentient to uphold the integrity of the independents and demote its own journal to the status of a house organ. "It was a victory brought about in part by the insistence of the independents' readers that they would not allow the expression of free opinion to be submerged under the uncritical pap of an officially controlled press. And also, to their credit, by the unusual far sightedness of a Jewish leadership which accepted that informed controversy was the antidote to communal apathy.

"Over one-third of the 90 or so Jewish weeklies in the USA are either federationcontrolled or influenced, which is why there is

little serious grassroots discussion therein of the major Jewish issues of the day. It is a sorry situation."

To the Editor: I read with interest the article by Rabbi Alexander S. Gross entitled "Who Runs Our Yeshivos," in the issue of Jewish Life, Tishre 5740. I agree with him that we have a problem today that we did not have 30 years ago. However, I do not agree with his analysis of the problem or with his recommendations for a solution. We do have an erosion of the role of the principal in the modern yeshiva. However, it is not as one educator claimed "We've brought about our own downfall by putting business executives and professionals on our Boards." I have been part of the suburban day school scene for the past 30 years and during all this time there were prominent and successful business people on the boards of day schools. Yet, the principal was not harassed or challenged by these people as he is today. The present dilemma in the day school movement is due to two factors not mentioned in the article. 1. Years ago, day schools were financed primarily through charitable contributions by members of the community. Most of these people were not parents of children in the school. They gave the school over to the principal and trusted him to run the school as he saw fit. They had no special interest in tlje educational aspect of the school nor could they evaluate what the school was doing. They knew their limitations and accepted them.

Today the school is financed primarily through the school parents through high tuition rates and fund raising activities. These people have a direct interest in the daily operation of the school and are in the position to* evaluate properly the effectiveness of the work of the Principal. These people are generally not rich and therefore, are very cost conscious. They want the most education possible for their money and a voice in what is going on in the school and therefore, make demands of the Principal that will tend to drive many competent educators out of the profession. 2. Whereas years ago the parents were not yeshiva educated, today very many are. They are mevinim. They know all there is to know about a day school. They carj tell the difference between the good and the poor teachers and they want a say in the curriculum. They consider themselves as knowledgeable as the principal in all matters of running a school and they are not reticent about voicing their opinions. This condition by itself, would not be harmful to the school if it were well organized and presented respectfully. However, the parents usually don't agree among themselves about almost all aspects of the school program and often are disrespectful in their relationships with the administration. This results in chaos and bickering and generally creates a most negative atmosphere about the school. No wonder Principals refuse to work under these conditions. The problems in our day schools are the methods of financing and the attitudes of the parents. Until these are changed no respectable educator will choose Yeshiva Administration as a career. Rabbi Joseph Maza South River, New Jersey

Rabbi Gross replies: I accept the assessment that we are dealing with a different type of parent than of thirty years ago, and that the parents of today are more involved, more concerned, and bigger

but want a hand in the hiring and firing of Hebrew teachers, in the method of teaching gemora, chumash, and the curriculum? Why can they not accept the Hebrew principal's final psak or grant him professional status? Why the sudden change of attitude to the Ben

mevinim. 5

Torah?

However, why don't these mevinim dare challenge the secular principal on the science curriculum, how to teach math, or the disciplinary measures he utilizes? Why do these mevinim grant him professional status.

I certainly favor input from parents and their participation in the design of the curriculum. But the principal must have the final word, just as the secular principal has the final say over his domain.

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The Orthodox Union, in conjunction with the Rabbinical Council of America and Jewish Funeral Directors of America (JFDA) is committed to providing you with a funeral in keeping with Jewish Tradition. Member chapels of the JFDA have undertaken to provide a copy of the Jewish Funeral Guide to each individual making funeral arrangements.

The Jew ish Funeral Guide Je w ish law and tradition have endow ed the funeral with profound religious significance. A Je w ish funeral should in every respect express the dignity, sanctity and modesty o f a solem n religious service. The following Guide lists the basic requirements o f a Je w ish funeral. * Any ostentation should be avoided, i.e., family and visitors should reflect in dress and behavior the solemnity of the occasion. Flowers and music have no place at the Jewish funeral service. * Embalming and viewing are contrary to Jewish law. * Interment should not be unduly delayed.

JEWISH RELIGIOUS LAW REQUIRES THE FOLLOWING... TAHARAH / PURIFICATION The ritual washing and purification of the deceased by members of the Chevra Kadisha, “The Sacred Society,” or, in its absence, by religiously and physically com petent Jewish persons.

SHM EERAH/ WATCHING The watching over the deceased by a pious Jew or Jew ess until members of the family assem ble for the funeral services, so tnat the deceased is not left unattended.

TACHRICHIM / BURIAL GARMENTS The traditional white burial shrouds symbolizing that all are equal before their Creator.

O RO N / CA SKET The wooden casket, in keeping with the Biblical teaching, “dust art thou and to the dust thou shalt return.”

K'REEAH / TEARING O F GARMENTS The rending of the mourners’ outer garments, a symbol of their anguish and grief.

KVCIRAH / BURIAL The actual burial in the ground; filling in the grave with earth until a mound is formed. To participate in filling the grave is a religious privilege and duty. Kaddish cannot be recited at the open grave-side.

For questions relating to the Jew ish Funeral Guide please write to the Orthodox Union or: Tripartite Funeral S tan d ard s C om m ittee Rabbi Sidney Applbaum, Administrator 1 3 5 0 East 54th Street, Brooklyn, New York 11234, (2 1 2 ) 4 4 4 -8 0 8 0

Prepared by the Tripartite Funeral Standards Committee o f the Rabbinical Council o f Am erica the Union of Orthodox Jew ish Congregations o f Am erica and the Jew ish Funeral Directors o f Am erica

GÇ

FACE THE FUTURE

C j j ^ P WORLD CONFERENCE ON TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE AND HALACHA.

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The First World Conference on Technology, Science & Halacha, will take place in Jerusalem, Israel, on July 23rd 1980, and w ill be headed by rabbis, leading scientists, engineers and community workers. The conference is sponsored by the Institute for Science and Halacha, Jerusalem, Israel, Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists in Israel, the US and Canada, Great Britain and Ireland, and the Associa tion of Orthodox Scientists in France. This conference w ill be followed by the Doctors World Conference on Medical Ethics. Suitable Hotel and Land arrangements have been made by the Conference Committee. For additional information w rite to: Face the Future —World Conference. 1 Hapisgast., Jerusalem, Israel.

__________J THE ANSWER IS:

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UNION OF ORTHODOX JEW ISH CONGREGATIONS OF AM ERICA President: JULIUS BERMAN

Treasurer: DR. JACOB B< UKELES

JOEL M. SCHREIBER Metropolitan N.Y.

Chairman of the Board: HAROLD M. JACOBS

Secretary: MARCEL WEBER

DR. HESCHEL RASKAS Midwest

Honorary Presidents: JOSEPH KARASICK MOSES I. FEUERSTEIN M A XJ.ET R A DR. SAMUEL NIRENSTEIN

Financial Secretary: SIDNEY KWESTEL

JOSEPH MACY New England

National Associate Vice Presidents: HERMAN HERSKOVIC A LH . THOMAS EMANUEL REICH EARLKORCHAK SANFORD DEUTSCH HARRY BEARMAN

JOSEPH M. RUSSAR Northwest

Honorary Chairmen of the Board: SAMUEL C. FEUERSTEIN SAMUEL L. BRENNGLASS Senior Vice Presidents: DR. BERNARD LANDER DAVID POLITI BERNARD W. LEVMORE

JACK M. NAGEL Pacific Coast LARRY BROWN Southeast MARCUS ROSENBERG Southwest

Vice Presidents for Regions: NATHANIEL FUTERAL Atlantic Seaboard

Vice Presidents: NATHAN K. GROSS SHELDON RUDOFF FRED EHRMAN SOLOMON T. SCHARF GEORGE B. FALK DAVID FUND MICHAEL C. WIMPFHEIMER MAX RICHLER DR. DAVID LUCHINS RONALD GREENWALD

E. DAVID SUBAR Upper New York *

HYBERGEL Central Canada

JULIUS SAMSON Israel •

DONALD B. BUTLER Central East

RABBI PINCHAS STOLPER Executive Vice President

ALAN I. LAPPING Chicago EDWARD B. WOLKOVE Eastern Canada

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REACHING O U T . . . t f j j E . . . T O YOU!

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I p eo p le who try our I brisling sardines in olive oil usually go w ild over our Norway sardines in tomato sauce I and our brisling sardines in water I and our skinless and boneless ' sardines ] and our anchovies I and our kipper snacks I and our Columbia River salmon I and our filets o f m ackerel and our tuna in oil or water.

Season. We’re big enough to pack them alL

Open Season...all year round. Distributed nationally through Season Products Corp., Irvington, N.J.

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