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Jewish World Review Feb. 4, 1999 / 18 Shevat, 5759
Jonathan Rosenblum
Those ornery Orthodox: Myth and Reality
An Orthodox Jew who happened to read that statement called her up and told
her that it was simply untrue that Orthodox Jews hate Reform Jews. "And if
you don't believe me, he added, go with your parents to any Orthodox shul
on a Friday night, say you are Reform Jews looking for a Shabbos meal, and
see what happens.''
"You sound like a nice man and I'd like to believe you," the girl replied,
"but I can't because all my teachers have taught me differently."
The lie that religious Jews hate non-religious ones does more than any
other to poison the air between Jews. It serves as a convenient
justification for the venom regularly aimed at the Orthodox. But its
ultimate victims are those non-religious Jews, who usually have had no
personal acquaintance with observant Jews, and who left more estranged than
ever from their heritage.
Fortunately the claim of Orthodox hatred is easily refuted.
Two months ago, I participated on a panel on the secular/religious divide
in Israel at the annual convention of Agudath Israel of America. Everything
said was for internal consumption of the entirely Orthodox audience.
According to the theory of Orthodox contempt, the discussion should have
been devoted to talking about how secular Israelis are nothing but
Hebrew-speaking goyim. Yet in nearly two hours of speeches, there was not
one word denigrating or condemning the secular public.
The first speaker, Rabbi Yosef Raful-Harari, spiritual leader of the
Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn and a native Israeli, pounded home one
message: Once religious Jews return hate with hate and forget the imperative
to love their fellow Jews, they have lost no matter what the rights and
wrongs of the situation.
Rabbi Shmuel Dishon, director of the operations of Stoliner Chassidim
around the world, began by explaining the Halachic (Jewish religious) concept that every Jew is
a guarantor for every other Jew. One Jew can, for instance, make kiddush for
another Jew who does not know how. Why? Because as long as one Jew in the
world has not madekiddush, the kiddush of every other Jew in the world is
lacking. So when we talk about secular Jews, he said, remember we are
talking about brothers who are bound to us as one body.
He then proceeded to analyze a number of the hot-button religious issues in
Israel from the point of the view of the secular public. Not every word or
deed of a religious Jew deserves our defense, Rabbi Dishon noted.
The final speaker, Rabbi Zev Leff of Moshav Mattisiyahu, did not speak of
the secular public at all. Rather he stressed that the Orthodox world must
constantly reexamine the clarity of its own ideals and whether it is living
up to them.
Last year a new mikve opened up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Nothing
remarkable about that --- until one considers that there are less than 30
women in Bucks County who regularly use a mikve and $300,000 was raised from
Orthodox Jews all over America to build this one.
At the dedication ceremony, the rabbi responsible for raising most of the
money made clear: We did not build this mikve for the 30 observant women in
Bucks County. They could have continued to commute a half an hour into
Philadelphia. We raised the money for the 50,000 Jews in Bucks County who
have never heard of a mikve.
A few months after the dedication of the mikve, I spoke in the adjacent
shul. Driving with me from Lakewood an hour away was a young man whom I
remembered from yeshiva more than a decade ago. Even then, he was a budding
scholar and he has been learning continuously since then in Lakewood
Yeshiva. He was going to Bucks County to teach aleph-beis to a group of Jews.
Imagine an MIT math professor trouping off to nearby Roxbury to teach
ghetto children addition and subtraction. Well, that is effectively what
this scholar was doing. There were Jews in Bucks County who wanted to know
how to read and maybe pray someday, and he was willing to help them. They,
not he, decided what they wanted to learn.
Other groups of married men from Lakewood teach similar classes within a
seventy mile radius of Lakewood every night. More remarkably, in a half a
dozen nearby communities, full-day kollelim have been set up to provide
access to the full-range of Jewish learning to anyone who is interested.
Much of the chesed done by religious Jews has nothing to do with religious
observance and is totally anonymous. Health care organizations like Yad
Sarah and Ezer M'Tzion, or Zichron Menachem for young cancer patients, are
good examples.
Some years back, a mother of 13 in Mea Shearim, heard of a new mother whose
baby could only digest mother's milk and who was unable to nurse. She went
around among her neighbors collecting mother's milk, and eventually
established a milk bank for other such cases. Because of the prohibitive
expense of AIDs screening, only in the haredi community could such a milk
bank be established today.
Over the years, most of the beneficiaries of the milk bank have been
non-religious. Their benefactors -- all residents of Geula and Meah Shearim
-- have, in some cases, gone on nursing after delivering their own
stillborns or adopted rigorous special diets for babies that required it.
All this has been done according to Maimonides' highest level of chesed ---
where both the benefactor and the beneficiary are unknown to one another.
Even where Jews fight over the definitions of Torah, they do not do so out
of hatred. The Satmar Rav was well-known as the fiercest critic of Zionism
in his day. Someone once challenged him: "Avraham Avinu prayed even for the
depraved people of Sdom and Gommorah, so why are you forever castigating
your fellow Jews?''
The Satmar Rav replied, "Do you know what Avraham said to the people of
Sodom themselves? The Torah only records what he said to the Ribbono Shel
Olam (Master of the Universe).''
Then, with tears in his eyes, the Satmar Rav said, "And how do you know
what I say to the Ribbono Shel
Olam?''
"WHY, WHEN THERE IS SO MUCH ANTI-SEMITISM in the world, must fellow Jews
hate us as well?" a sixteen-year-old girl wrote recently to a Reform journal.
JWR contributor Jonathan Rosenblum is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.
02/01/99: Keep the money