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Margie Gutnik, President; Abigail Kutler, Ex-Officio; David Finkelstein; Mary Sue Grossman; Les Kay; Natasha Kraft; Chuck Lucoff; Joseph Pinson. The mission of the Jewish Federation of Omaha is to build and sustain a strong and vibrant Omaha Jewish Community and to support Jews in Israel and around the world. Agencies of the JFO are: Institute for Holocaust Education, Jewish Community Relations Council, Jewish Community Center, Jewish Social Services and the Jewish Press. Guidelines and highlights of the Jewish Press, including front page stories and announcements, can be found online at: www.jewishomaha.org; click on ‘Jewish Press.’ Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole. The Jewish Press reserves the right to edit signed letters and articles for space and content. The Jewish Press is not responsible for the Kashrut of any product or establishment.

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The Jewish Press welcomes Letters to the Editor. They may be sent via regular mail to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154; via fax: 1.402.334.5422 or via e-mail to the Editor at: avandekamp@jewishomaha.org. Letters should be no longer than 250 words and must be single-spaced typed, not hand-written. Published letters should be confined to opinions and comments on articles or events. News items should not be submitted and printed as a “Letter to the Editor.” The Editor may edit letters for content and space restrictions. Letters may be published without giving an opposing view. Information shall be verified before printing. All letters must be signed by the writer. The Jewish Press will not publish letters that appear to be part of an organized campaign, nor letters copied from the Internet. No letters should be published from candidates running for office, but others may write on their behalf. Letters of thanks should be confined to commending an institution for a program, project or event, rather than personally thanking paid staff, unless the writer chooses to turn the “Letter to the Editor” into a paid personal ad or a news article about the event, project or program which the professional staff supervised. For information, contact Annette van de KampWright, Jewish Press Editor, 402.334.6450.

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The Jewish Press (USPS 275620) is published weekly (except for the first week of January and July) on Friday for $40 per calendar year U.S.; $80 foreign, by the Jewish Federation of Omaha. Phone: 402.334.6448; FAX: 402.334.5422. Periodical postage paid at Omaha, NE. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154-2198 or email to: jpress@jewishomaha.org.

Our short memory

ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT

Jewish Press Editor “Six hundred thousand people on Ukraine’s contact line live in appalling conditions without electricty and gas, have intermittent water, face shelling and small arms fire on a daily basis, and don’t have access to a food market.” The quote is from Jock Mendoza-Wilson, director of international and investor relations at System Capital Management. It’s the tip of the iceberg as far as human suffering goes. The Ukrainian government estimates between 12,000 and 28,000 civilians have been killed. That same number for troops is over 23,000. It’s difficult to give an exact estimate in the fog of war, but those in the know think the number of casualties that has been independently verified probably does not match the reality. “War crimes investigators on June 28 inspected the charred remains of a shopping mall destroyed by a Russian missile strike as Ukraine mourned the victims of what the Ukrainian prosecutor general called ‘crimes against humanity.’ Putin denied it; the aim supposedly was a weapons factory. But excuses like that don’t make much difference to the victims. There are new atrocities reported every day, but you have to scroll down to find the stories.

The U.S. have announced its biggest military expansion in Europe in decades, including a permanent troop presence in Poland that reverses a 1997 agreement with Moscow. Moscow in turn has threatened ‘Compensatory measures,’ whatever that means. The situation in Ukraine was, of course,

Smoke billows among headstones of a Jewish cemetery that reportedly

was bombed in Hulkhiv, Ukraine, May 8, 2022. Credit: Dmitry Zhivitsky/ Facebook front and center at the recent NATO summit. But here at home, that is not necessarily the case. We have other things to talk about: Roe V. Wade, the Jan. 6 hearings, gun control, whether we would be better off without SCOTUS. “Even when the cause is just,” wrote George Packer for The Atlantic, “people inevitably lose interest in far-off calamities that happen to people they don’t know. Against [our] will, a numb indifference sets in, and life goes relentlessly on.” I noticed it when I was in Europe a few weeks ago; were it not for the testing site at the Amsterdam airport, you wouldn’t know there had ever been a pandemic. Forget Covid, Ukraine is close, refugees are everywhere, which means the stories are told and retold. The War is real. Here, it is not. Can we go a little easy on ourselves for not constantly thinking about it? Sure, but that doesn’t mean we should accept it as the status quo. Knowing and understanding our own limitations as far as spreading our empathy thin, means being intentional about caring for Ukraine. If we have the tendency to forget, we have to put in reminders. This war is not over, and what’s worse, even when, G-d-willing, it is, there will be decades’ worth of trauma for all involved. In a few short months, we will again begin asking you to participate in the Jewish Federation of Omaha’s Annual Campaign. A portion of that money goes to those in need in Ukraine. But you don’t have to wait until we splash the announcement all over the front page, put the links on our websites or call you and ask you to participate. You don’t have to wait until the Oct. 2 Community Event. You can give right now. What’s more, it’s not only the Jewish Federation that is helping out. There are numerous organizations that are trustworthy and are doing extremely necessary work in Ukraine. The need is big, bigger perhaps than what many of us have experienced in our lifetime. So let’s remember, and let’s step up. Visit www.omahajewish press.com for a list of places where you can donate.

Religion for non-believers: It’s a Jewish thing

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL

JTA There is an old joke about the Jewish atheist who is excited to meet the Great Heretic of Prague. He arrives at the great man’s house on a Friday night, and is immediately told to shush while the Heretic lights Shabbat candles. They sit down for the Shabbat meal, during which the Heretic says the motzi over the bread and the kiddush over the wine. The atheist visitor can’t take it anymore. “You’re the Great Heretic of Prague and you follow the Shabbat commandments!?” “Of course,” says his host. “I’m a heretic, not a gentile.” The joke is about the gap between Jewish belief and Jewish practice, and the old chestnut that belief in God is less important to a religious Jew than performing the mitzvot. In truth, the most observant Jews tend to be the most God-fearing, but the joke celebrates a worldview that I only recently learned actually has a name: fictionalism. Fictionalism, according to the philosophy professor Scott Hershovitz, means pretending to follow a set of beliefs in order to reap the benefits of a set of actions. In a recent New York Times essay, he asks why he continues to fast on Yom Kippur and observe Passover when he doesn’t believe in God. The short answer, he writes, is this: “It’s just what we Jews do, I might have said; it keeps me connected to a community that I value.” The longer answer is a defense of, well, pretending: “When it feels like the world is falling apart, I seek refuge in religious rituals — but not because I believe my prayers will be answered,” he writes. “The prayers we say in synagogue remind me that evil has always been with us but that people persevere, survive and even thrive. I take my kids so that they feel connected to that tradition, so that they know the world has been falling apart from the start — and that there’s beauty in trying to put it back together.” The British philosopher Philip Goff describes fictionalism this way:

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction. Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. The fictionalists I know are maximalists when it comes to Jewish behaviors and minimalists when it comes to God talk. According to the 2020 Pew

A Chabad emissary helps a man don tefillin at Tel

Aviv’s Allenby Street, Jan. 20, 2017. Credit: Amir Appel/Flickr Commons study, 47% of Jewish adults say religion is very or somewhat important to them, while only 26% believe in the “God of the Bible.” My hunch — backed up by zero data — is that Jewish fictionalism is strongest where deep Jewish engagement meets liberalism. By that, I mean in the more observant Conservative (and Conservative-adjacent) congregations and the more liberal Orthodox congregations. A few years back, the attorney Jay Lefkowitz described himself as a “Social Orthodox Jew”— that is, a Jew who practices Orthodoxy but isn’t “really sure how God fit into my life…. I certainly wasn’t sure if Jewish law was divine or simply the result of two millennia of rabbinical interpretations.” “And so for me, and I imagine for many others like me, the key to Jewish living is not our religious beliefs but our commitment to a set of practices and values that foster community and continuity,” he writes. For some, this might sound like Humanistic Judaism. But Humanist Jews eschew deism in favor of “human reason and human power.” The key to fictionalism, however, is that God stays very much in the picture, as the “useful fiction” Goff describes. Hershovitz happily calls it “pretending,” which “breathes life into stories, letting them shape the world we live in.” Humanism, in that sense, is the more “honest” approach; fictionalism is principled self-deception. Fictionalism is also a rebuke to the “New Atheists” of a few years back, who found religion to be meaningless ritual centered on a non-existent deity. By contrast, Alain de Botton, in his book “Religion for Atheists,” described the kinds of things atheists could actually learn from religions. Religion offers “morality, guidance, and consolation.” Religions build a sense of community, create enduring relationships, offer means to escape the constant appeals of media and consumerism, and create rituals and institutions to address our emotional needs. “The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many sides of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed,” he writes. I’ll admit that fictionalism hardly has the appeal of secularism. Getting someone to take on a series of demanding and often inexplicable behaviors in the name of “community and continuity” is a hard sell. But I know of at least one fast-growing and successful Jewish stream that offers fictionalism as a lure: the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic outreach movement. I doubt I could get a Chabad rabbi to agree with me, but the Chabad outreach model (as opposed to the practice of its core followers) is centered on Jewish action, not belief. That’s the impulse behind all those mitzvah tanks and advertisements imploring women to light Shabbat candles. The kids on the street offering tefillin ask if you are Jewish; they don’t ask if you believe in God. In an ethos that is part mysticism and part pragmatism, Chabad holds that doing precedes believing. “Aside [from] the intrinsic standalone value that each mitzvah has, mitzvah observance can also be contagious,” is how one Chabad rabbi once explained the “one off” approach. “Agreeing to opt in, even just once, can have far-reaching effects. There have been untold thousands of Jews who have made permanent changes in their lives for the better, just because they agreed to try it once.” He might even agree with Hershovitz, who says that “pretending makes the world a better place.”

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL

JTA For years I worked in an office where, in order to make an outside phone call, you had to dial 9 plus 1 plus your number. At least once a week, the police would show up in the lobby because someone had accidentally dialed 9-1-1. The head of HR would scold us for not being more careful, and I would think, just change the system! In Jewish law there is a name for rules or actions that would tempt even the innocent to make a mistake — or worse, a sin: “lifnei iver.” It comes from Leviticus 19:14: “You shall not … place a stumbling block before the blind.” Beyond its literal meaning, the verse has been used to establish the principle that you should remove temptation from the path of those who may be morally weak. This became a thing in my house recently, when my wife asked if I could be more careful when opening our kitchen cabinets. The cabinets are off-white, and I was leaving smudges. I replied with admirable honesty, I thought that I couldn’t break a lifetime habit of the way I reach for a cabinet handle, and if I said I would try I would probably be lying. Smudges, I said, are the price we pay for beige cabinets and dainty handles. Blame the design, not me. What ensued was what diplomats call a frank and honest discussion. Convinced I was right, I sought an outside voice: “Judge” John Hodgman, the comedian who writes a satiric ethical advice column for The New York Times Magazine. I explained our impasse in an email, and Hodgman replied in the May 20 issue: Seen from 10,000 feet, I would agree that your wife’s request is unreasonable. That said, from 10,000 feet, I can’t see your disgusting hands. I can’t see what kind of muck you get into, or what kind of smears you’re leaving as you blindly paw at the cabinet face until you hit the handle. (Maybe you can’t, either. Spouses often see cleanliness differently depending on how they grew up, and some are just dirt-blind.) Even if your hands are clean of all sin, don’t meet one marital crime with another. Don’t lie and promise to try. Just promise to try, and tell the truth. The comments that followed were not friendly to my cause, to put it mildly. One reader compared me to Tarzan. Another urged me to be a “grown-up.” But my favorite response came from a self-described architect and former interior designer, who I felt got closest to my original point, writing, “if your home’s aesthetic is so fragile that it’s ruined by normal daily use it’s a serious design flaw. Everyone living in a home should feel at ease interacting with their environment, and everyone has different sensitivities and habits. The design should support them all.” In other words, home design shouldn’t be a stumbling block before a guy with Tarzan hands. The urban planner Jane Jacobs advocated this sort of user-first architecture, writing, “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them … that we must fit our plans.” For example, if you want to keep mail from piling up on the dining room table, you need another little table closer to the front door (another recurring argument from what is, astoundingly, my first and still extant marriage). Probaby the best-known demonstration of user-first design comes from so-called “desire lines”: the footpaths created by people who ignore the actual sidewalks around a building or park and create their own routes of least resistance. The smart planner pays attention to the routes people actually want to take, and then pours the concrete. A close cousin of this approach is behavioral design, which tries to influence the way people use spaces and objects. Good behavioral design might, for instance, put a hand sanitizer right near the place where you are likely to pick up or spread germs. Or, in the case of my kitchen cabinets, it would make the handles big enough or inviting enough that my chances of smudging the doors are minimized. I obsess about this topic not only because I want to win the argument with my wife, but because I think “lifnei iver” has important public policy implications. As Jacobs understood, good, intuitive design can turn private and public spaces into friendlier, safer places by putting users first. For decades public housing was a disaster in part because designers ignored the ways people actually congregated, relaxed and kept an eye on each other. My son the engineer helps design hospital equipment intended to keep tired, overworked doctors and nurses from pushing the wrong buttons or forgetting a crucial step. On the flip side, sinister behavioral design might coerce someone into, say, racking up debts on an addictive gambling app, or hooking kids on vaping, as the Food and Drug Administration argued in ordering Juul to remove its e-cigarettes from the U.S. marketplace. The latter is exactly the scenario that “lifnei iver” proscribes: setting a vulnerable person up for failure. In an article for Chabad.org, Yehuda Shurpin discusses the possibilities and dilemmas of applying lifnei iver to the current debate over gun safety. On the one hand, he writes, “The Talmud tells us that one is forbidden to sell dangerous items including weapons, or anything commonly used to manufacture weapons, as well as their accessories to any person who may have the intent to use them to cause harm or perpetrate a crime.” On the other hand, the law is understandably complex when it comes to determining how to anticipate that “intent” — and under what circumstances the seller is culpable. And yet, the tradition understands that the idea that “guns don’t kill, people do” is specious: “We do not want people getting hurt or dying,” writes Shurpin. “And restricting evil-doers’ access to materials that make this possible is an obvious course of action.” Whether we are talking about gun control, office phones or kitchen design, the principle is the same: People are inherently clumsy and fallible, and relying on their best intentions to solve a problem is a recipe for failure. Sometimes you have to ban the dangerous tool or change the number from 9 to, well, any. other. number. Ultimately, I didn’t consult a rabbi to solve my kitchen dilemma. But I did answer to a higher authority: It’s now my job to clean the cabinets.

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as JTA’s editor in chief and editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News. @SilowCarroll

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

The Jewish Press | July 8, 2022 | 9

‘Jews stood in the way’ of Roe v. Wade’s end?

ANDREW LAPIN

JTA In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist leader and influential figure among the rightmost flank of the Republican Party, told his followers that “Jews stood in the way” of Catholic Supreme Court Justices who “were put on the court to overturn” the 1973 decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion in the United States. Fuentes, who founded the America First Political Action Committee and the ”groyper army,” a radical fringe group, made the comments on his website’s livestream on Friday, according to Right Wing Watch. He added, “We need a government of Christians” and “Jewish people can be here, but they can’t make our laws.” “If Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Jewish woman, didn’t die last year, so that Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic woman, could be appointed to the bench, we would still have Roe v. Wade,” Fuentes said. “Now you tell me that this is a Judeo-Christian country… You tell me that it doesn’t matter that we have a lot of Jewish people in government.” Extremism trackers like the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center have long classified Fuentes as a hate group leader who advocates antisemitism and Holocaust denial, in addition to racist and nativist ideologies. His YouTube channel was previously banned for hate speech. Yet several Republican elected officials were featured speakers at Fuentes’ AFPAC conference in February, including sitting members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona; Idaho Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin; and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (who was censured by her state Republican party for her appearance at the conference). When they were confronted with Fuentes’ views after their conference appearances, all four declined to condemn Fuentes or his organization. Gosar previously hosted a fundraiser with Fuentes. Fuentes’ antisemitic comments mirror similar expressions from “traditional Catholic” groups, who generally believe all Jews are enemies of Christianity. Most interpretations of Jewish law permit abortion access in some form. The seeds of the current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court were planted when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on thenPresident Obama’s Jewish nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016, as a replacement for conservative Catholic Antonin Scalia, instead holding the spot for Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, to fill with conservative Christian Neil Gorsuch (who was raised Catholic but later attended an Episcopal church). The supermajority was then solidified in fall 2020 when Ginsburg died, opening up a new spot for then-President Trump to fill with the Catholic Barrett in the waning months of his administration. Two members of the current liberal minority on the Court are Jewish; one, Justice Stephen Breyer, is retiring at the conclusion of this term.

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