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Unity and Disunity: my New Year Resolution
1: So I come home from synagogue after an intense three days of Rosh Hashanah plus Shabbos, with the New Year liturgy endlessly reverberating around my head, sharply focused on humanity and universalism, on examining the human condition and human potential, and on yearning for a world in which every human being comes together in recognition of a universal siblinghood under the reign of a single God whose core values are compassion, understanding and mercy.
2: And I reopen my computer and look at the news and my social media feeds: and everything is about taking sides – and I’m not on your side unless I hate everyone else as much as you do. I cannot see your right unless I see everybody’s else’s wrong: any attempt at shade, nuance or balance is seen as disloyalty to your fundamentalism.
3: And an enormous amount of this hatred and division is in the name of unity: show your solidarity with this group by condemning that group; stand with this group by condemning that group; take up this cause by denouncing that cause. Everywhere I look I see experts (most of them self-appointed) in politics, military strategy, international history, statecraft, diplomacy and every other area of expertise imaginable – and in each case their knowledge or lack of knowledge points inexorably in one direction: sectarian hatred and intolerance of one kind or another.
4: So I close my eyes and try to recapture the message of the last three days in synagogue. Abraham brought two things to the world: belief in a single God, and kindness (chessed). And the connection is obvious: if there are lots of Gods, I want to know whose is most powerful and can “beat” the others: if there is one God who created us all, we are all siblings, and we have the most powerful possible reason to show care and compassion for all humanity.
5: The sound of the shofar is the purest form of prayer possible: the unrefined cry of a lost and bewildered child. And the enduring images of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy are of Yishmael crying out and being heard by God simply because he is a child in distress; of Hannah being listened to by God and having her prayers answered simply because she is a person in distress; of Noah’s ultimate moral failure because of choosing self-righteous certainty over compassion for the weak who lack in moral direction; and on and on and on until the Messianic promise of peace on earth and a Third Temple which is “My house which shall be known as a house of prayer for all peoples”.
6: And so I come to my New Year’s resolution. This year I will try to show unity (achdus) with every group that needs my support: but I will not show you support if it requires me to hate others, or even if it requires me to exclude others.
7: No orphan’s cry pierces the Heavens less powerfully than any other’s. No widow’s or widower’s tears arouse more compassion in the Heavens than any others’. No captive dragged from their home and family, not because of what they have done in the eyes of the law but because of who they are in the eyes of those who hate, deserves more pity than any other.
8: So I will rally to any banner that shows humanity and pity, if it does not lead to hate: but if you want me to hate in the cause of unity, whoever you are, you are the problem and not the solution.
9: My solution this year will be to try to focus on others’ loss, pain and suffering as widely and as universally as possible: to ask myself each time I listen to one person’s cry: “Who else is experiencing the same or similar suffering?” I will try to balance my concern and compassion so that I am seeing the widest possible picture: not strengthening sectarian walls between groups however defined or classified, but simply building bridges between human beings.
Honesty and hypocrisy: military service
[This was my dvar Torah in shul this morning]
The representatives of the tribes of Gad, Reuven and half-Menashe have a very clear, cogent and concise argument in this week’s parashah to explain to Moishe Rabbeinu why they would better serve themselves, their families and Klal Yisroel generally by remaining outside the physical fight for the establishment of the first State of Israel.
After listening to their rationale, Moishe Rabbeinu punctures it by a single unanswerable challenge: how can it be right that your brethren should go to fight and you should remain behind in safety?
And he equiparates their attitude to that of the meraglim, which at first sight is not an entirely apt parallel. The meraglim did not choose to dissociate themselves from the rest of the people, indeed they went to extraordinary lengths to bring the whole of the people around to their assessment of the situation. Neither were they refusing to take up, nor encouraging other people to take to refuse to take up, part of a shared burden: indeed, their argument was primarily with God rather than with Klal Yisrael.
The true parallel lies in their methodology. Again, they clouded what was simple cowardice and a lack of bitachon with spurious arguments that were compelling at a superficial level of ratiocination, but again were vulnerable to being punctured by a simple counter argument: if God says we go into Israel then it is a Divine commandment – we don’t argue, we just do.
History repeating itself unfailingly brings us around to finding the same communal dissension in this year’s period of the Three Weeks. The State of Israel established for the third time in our history requires military defence as much as ever before. And once again, as in this week’s parashah, we have eloquent, detailed and completely spurious arguments being advanced as to why a large portion of the people should exempt themselves from their share in military service.
And once again their reasons are capable of being punctured not even by the words of the novi, we being in a generation lacking in global communal leadership, but by simple recourse to the posuk itself. The mitzvah of לֹא תַעֲמֹד עַל דַּם רֵעֶךָ – not standing idly by the blood of your fellow – applies in an appallingly simple and direct way to considering yourself too holy or too immersed in spiritual matters to take your turn on the front line of battle.
In a few weeks’ time we will read the list of exemptions that the Kohein is required to recite before the commencement of a military campaign: and it includes an extraordinary self-exemption for anyone who is simply too frightened to take part. Extraordinary in one sense: but from a practical military perspective it is not helpful to have soldiers in the ranks who are in a perpetual state of terror. More importantly, it is embracing an honest self-assessment from someone who is prepared to be open as to their own weaknesses and failings.
Significantly, nowhere in the list does it say anything about people standing back from the ranks because they are too holy or occupied in Torah learning to fight: it simply does not feature on the list of possibilities in God’s mind as set out in the Torah – it took man, rather than God, to dream up that spurious and self-serving argument.
In our generation, those who are so immersed in learning Torah that they already know Shas by heart and have no room in their mind for anything other than acquiring the same degree of familiarity with the rishonim, would likely find themselves turned away from the recruiting offices of Tzahal when they reported for duty. But if they were not turned away, they would find themselves in good company on the battlefield among some of the brightest and the best Torah students of our age, young men and young women, whose knowledge and devotion to learning would indeed put theirs to shame; and whose dedication to Torah and mitzvos would put to shame vast numbers of yeshiva students whose actual occupation in learning is part-time, perfunctory and predominantly performative.
The reality is that the study of the Torah is being used as this generation’s Gad, Reuven and half-Menashe argument to mask what is simple cowardice, or idleness, or in some cases both.
Torah study is, of course, a mitzvah. But as we say each morning it is expressly one of the mitzvos without measurement, in this case because it is only a mitzvah at a time when a person’s attention is not required for more pressing matters elsewhere. Those who sit in the beis medrash when they would be better occupied with their families at home, or in pursuing trades or professions to support themselves and their families and keep them out of idleness and debilitating dependency, or in taking their turn defending our people, are indulging in the same self-delusional thought-games, and as unconvincingly, as the tribes of Gad, Reuven and half-Menashe in this week’s parashah.
And to do them credit, those tribes reacted instantly when the moral indefensibility of their position was put to them, and came up with a perfect solution that met their stated aspirations while absolving themselves from cowardice.
Nowadays, perhaps because we lack a Moishe Rabbeinu with the authority and credibility to puncture these delusions, those parts of the so-called chareidi communities that pursue this cowardly self-delusion simply redouble it when challenged. They present palpably false arguments about Torah learning as an effective protection, while their insistence on being protected by the hishtadlus of others shows clearly and shamefully that they have no real illusion as to the hollowness of this argument.
The leaders of the chareidi communities today appear for the most part so frightened of the shallowness and fragility of their followers’ bitachon and emunah, and so unsure of the reliability of the education and training of their youngsters, that in this generation they give support to those who shirk responsibility and not to those who accept it.
Of course, as bnei chutz la’aretz from our vantage point on the other side of the Jordan we are also open to the charge of being the modern-day Gad, Reuven and half-Menashe voices ourselves. As to that, while each of us must make his or her own decisions as to the right and wrong time and way to join our brethren in Eretz Yisroel, in the meantime we must guard against spurious self-justifications, and do our best to find ways to show real and effective moral and practical support to our brethren there, each of us in accordance with her or his own calculation as to what part we play in the collective effort. And of course this shul has done so much to demonstrate solidarity with the State of Israel and all its residents, in so many ways.
The recounting of the conversation between Gad, Reuven and half-Menashe and Moishe Rabbeinu is designed to provide an annual opportunity – at this time of introspection and foreboding – to examine our own motives and justifications carefully, and see how far we conceal our real motivations and concerns beneath a cloak of plausibility.
The human temptation to hypocrisy is not a respecter of persons, and there is not one of us who is likely to emerge from this specific annual cheshbon hanefesh entirely unscathed.
Our annual description of ourselves on Tisha B’Av as a dor yosom feels more accurate with every year that passes. Not only do we lack leaders of the integrity of Moishe Rabbeinu, but in this world of social media and deepfake photographs we are even bereft of fact. So each of us is left to be the voice of our own conscience and the yardstick of our own decisions. Inspired by the warning spirit of the Three Weeks, and in preparation for the spiritual renewal of the yomim Noro’im that are not far behind, we owe it to ourselves to examine our own motives and ideals, and ensure that they match each other and are consistent with our public rhetoric. So far as possible we must be satisfied that we are doing what we should and that we are helping other people to do what they should; but where we inevitably fall short, we must never make the Torah an excuse for our own failings.
Our avoidah needs to be an avoidas emes: and if we can make it so we will b’ezras Hashem be zoicheh to reawaken the ruchnius of our people, and through our people the whole world, ad she’yovo Melech, Go’el u’Moishia, bimheiro b’yomeinu omein v’omein.
Mesirah: The Earliest Form of Gaslighting?
[Update – 30 May 2025: someone whom I respect highly has questioned the veracity of the reports below of what Rabbi Schachter has ruled about pre-scrutiny of complaints of abuse: I have written to Rabbi Schachter to ask him to be kind enough to confirm or clarify his ruling and will further update this blog on receciving a reply.]
In one of its earliest formal rabbinic applications, the rabbis expounded the biblical prohibition of taking disputes between members of the Jewish community to secular courts, and turned it into an expanded set of rules of “mesirah” that is applied with apparently ever- increasing vigour to this day.
Never mind that the original purpose appears to have been to prevent arbitrary and vicious systems of local punishment and oppression from being turned into a weapon between members of the Jewish community, so that the one with the greater influence “at court” could defeat the legitimate expectations of Torah Justice by informing on and framing another Jewish person for treason, fraud or some other crime to an innately hostile system with antisemitic predilections.
Never mind that the Torah also imposes Biblical requirements on rabbis and all those in positions of communal authority to pay particular attention to the need to protect widows and orphans; a category which does not require much common sense to expand into all those who are vulnerable in one way or another, being without the kind of protection that is available to most people.
Without apparently any thought to the origins of the concept or to what its enduring purpose should be taken to be, this has been turned into a technical set of laws that inherently favours those in authority against the vulnerable, resulting effectively in blanket permission for financial depredations or domestic or sexual abuse.
Rabbi Hershel Schachter – Rosh Yeshiva at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS, YU) – is without doubt the most prestigious of the guests for this Mizrachi Weekend of Inspiration in North West London. I will not be attending to hear him at either of the two London shuls to which I belong, because I find his public views on mesirah in the context of allegations of abuse so abhorrent that I prefer not to hear any words of Torah from him, despite his undoubted encyclopaedic knowledge of Biblical, Talmudic and other texts.
The weekend of inspiration has, however, not been wasted on me: it has inspired me to write this instead of attending his addresses.
We corrupt and pervert Jewish values when in their name we deny access to the justice system to a vulnerable person who asserts that she or he has been sexually abused by their teacher, their rabbi or anyone else in a position of communal authority until their claims have been affirmed or checked by rabbis, scholars or other members of the orthodox establishment.
Saying “no, you cannot go to the secular criminal courts or open or support a police investigation” would be bad enough. And there are many rabbis around the world who say exactly that.
But Rabbi Schachter goes one stage worse: he says we will not stop you from going to the police and indeed you should go to the police, living in a world where the religious authorities do not have criminal jurisdiction or other ways of punishing and deterring criminal wrongdoing. We will encourage you to go, but only if you first convince “us” that this is not a malicious libel, but an allegation with real grounds that make it “legitimate”.
(https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2013-03-20/ty-article/yeshiva-university-rabbi-sex-abuse-reports-imprison-innocent-jews/0000017f-dc6d-db5a-a57f-dc6f0d000000; https://www.thejc.com/news/world/yeshivah-teacher-shame-over-schvartze-remark-mnxcitxf?reloadTime=1652832000011; https://www.timesofisrael.com/yu-dean-warns-against-reporting-unproven-sex-abuse-claims/)
To go to the police otherwise, says Rabbi Schachter, would be mesirah. It would be the Biblical prohibition of handing a Jewish person over to the gentile authorities; and young people in the Jewish community are generally encouraged to believe that the spiritual punishment for this in the afterlife will be sufficiently extreme to make them unlikely to want to do it.
In modern parlance, we call this kind of invocation of mesirah: gaslighting. “You, oh quite possibly abused vulnerable person, are possibly the real problem; and therefore we will not allow you to endanger “us” until “we” have satisfied ourselves that your allegations are “legitimate”.
And who are “us” and “we” in this context? We are a selection of the very class of person to whom you recognise your alleged abuser as belonging. You will look into the same kind of face, wearing the same kind of clothing, talking the same kind of language, that you last saw when you were being violated. They may not be your alleged perpetrator’s family or friends (although they may be) but they will be someone in his or her image, infinitely more likely to believe them than you (or so, at the least, you will inevitably fear).
This examination will tend to make you doubt yourself, and to wonder whether you are the real enemy of the cosy Jewish community, not your alleged abuser.
Forget the fact that this behaviour by any “panel” of rabbis is quite likely to amount in UK criminal law to perversion of the course of justice. It is tampering with a witness if nothing else. From a simply human perspective, how is it that brilliant and learned Torah scholars have become so blind to human frailties and vulnerabilities that they cannot see the vast number of Biblical prohibitions that they commit in subjecting vulnerable people to this kind of ordeal, in the interests of maintaining what is ultimately a rabbinic (male rabbinic) creation designed to prevent the washing of dirty linen in public?
That private laundries do not wash is a fact that can be attested by hundreds or thousands of community victims of abuse who cry themselves to sleep every night and wake shortly after in traumatic distress knowing that nothing but an ordeal of gaslighting will await them should they seek redress within the community.
So let us all be inspired by the presence of Rabbi Schachter in our community this weekend to emphasise to all our leaders that they have the right to lead us only when they stand for justice, decency and truth, and only when those values underpin their Torah learning. We and they must stand up for real justice for the victims of abuse in our community. And real justice can mean one thing and one thing only: unrestricted, encouraged and facilitated access to the criminal courts, in the knowledge that in a rule of law country today there is no genuine reason to prevent the machinery of justice from being allowed to take its course. And that the damage that is done to our community by abuse is the abuse itself, and the abusers and nobody else are to blame.
If we cannot protect the “widow and orphan” – the wide class of vulnerable people – we become a mere self-indulgent and corrupt sect that cannot claim any pretensions to be the continuation of the values and traditions of Abraham and Sarah.
How Can We Sing In A Sad World? – Purim 2024
1: None of us are in the mood for an “ordinary” Purim this year. The events since Shemini Atzeres continue to shed their legacy of casualties, captivity and nothing but misery and destruction everywhere. Our sisters and brothers are still held captive in underground dungeons; so many of our sisters and brothers have died or been left injured, or are mourning fresh and untimely bereavements; and the destruction and death continues every day, particularly among the innocent civilians of Gaza who are living a hell on earth that I cannot even properly imagine. And the general mood of antagonism between communities and nations around the world is pretty toxic.
2: So how are we meant to dress up, feast, sing and dance? How do we get in the Purim mood?
3: Well, we could start by asking ourselves, what is the Purim mood? Put another way, what was the mood in Shushan and the surrounding areas at the time of the Purim events?
4: Summarising the events described in the Megillah, the Jewish communities came under an existential threat which they overcame by defending themselves diplomatically and militarily. The Megillah does not recount Jewish casualties during the war of self-defence, but it stands to reason that given the numbers of enemies killed there must have been heavy losses and injuries on both sides; and presumably the atmosphere of antisemitism before, during and even after the events was every bit as depressing and oppressive as at other times in our history and possibly far more than today.
5: But the enduring theme of Purim is not the military victory, but of unreasonable hope and determined reconciliation even in the middle of the worst troubles. Starting with Esther, who says that the way out of her predicament is for the community to fast and pray for her while she and her companions fast and pray for the community. In other words, the Jewish world that at the start of the Megillah is “scattered and divided” starts to pull together and look after each other. And the theme continues all the way through, culminating in the religious legacy of our annual commemoration being a day of looking after others first with food for friends and money for all who need it, before we sit down to show our gratitude to God for our many blessings. In other words, a time of enjoying and sharing our blessings – coming close to God by being close to each other in a sensitive and caring way.
6: The dressing up adds the idea that at the darkest of times when we think there is no real reason for hope, deliverance comes in unlikely ways from improbable sources, reminding us that “God’s deliverance comes in the twinkling of an eye”. Or, as my daughter Shira put it when naming their son “Afik” a few weeks ago, God’s deliverance is like the “afikei mayim” – the water channels in the desert that look dry and desolate beyond hope one moment and fill up instantly as if by magic when the rains come. Nature suddenly turns upside down and the normal order of things is changed beyond recognition.
7: So I will be dressing up today, sharing a Purim seudah of song and delicious food with good friends later, and celebrating with family now, with a real belief that by focusing on each other, looking after each other’s needs before we settle down to enjoy the blessings God has given us, we are doing a great deal to help those in pain and suffering on all sides and for all reasons, by helping to usher in a world where enemies become friends and nobody is left desolate, and where the bounds of practical possibility are overturned into a magical world of Divine deliverance.
8: Building bridges across divisions of all kinds is the real message of Purim – and it has never been more urgently needed than it is today. Purim Sameyach to us all, and b’soros tovos lonu ul’chol Yisroel u’lchol ha’olam.
Armistice Day Shabbos 11 November 2023
The message of today’s Armistice Day really speaks to the mood of the Jewish people around the world this year.
It is a matter of enormous pride to me as a British Jew that after the First World War the United Kingdom did not build a victory memorial. We built a Cenotaph of remembrance, where year after year human beings would come to reflect on the senseless destruction of the First World War and mourn the annihilation of a whole generation of youth and vigour in a pointless war.
There were no winners in war then and there are no winners in war now.
Wars sometimes have to be fought. World War Two had to be fought by the allies of the free world against an authoritarian threat that if left unchecked would have extinguished freedom in every corner of the globe.
Today, Israel is fighting a war for its survival, against a merciless enemy that has committed atrocities that will haunt our collective memory forever.
So we have to fight – but even as we fight we mourn. Every child’s cry pierces to our heart. Every sob of the dispossessed, the bereft, the dying and the disabled fills our hearts and our prayers.
And we hear the cries of the hostages of all ages held by Hamas in Gaza and they pierce our hearts until we hardly know how to carry on.
Avrohom Ovinu cried for Soroh in this week’s parashah with a small chaf, one reason for which was because she lived such a full and wonderful life and there was so little to mourn and so much to celebrate.
What can we say today of young lives extinguished at their very outset in unimaginably inhuman conditions? What can we say of young men full of vigour and promise cut down in the service of their country and defence of their people? What can we say of young mothers left widowed, young children left orphans? All the thousands and thousands of innocent lives destroyed or damaged in a war not of their making and due to a hatred they never felt or fomented.
So we stand in silence because there is simply nothing to be said.
We resolve to fight evil, but never to feel triumph in our hearts. When the Mishneh in Pirkei Ovos counsels us not to rejoice in the downfall of our enemy it speaks not only to the need to show human compassion even to those whose ways and choices have forced us to do battle against them, but also to the stark reality that the defeat of evil rarely leaves us much if anything to be happy about, and its bequests are usually – as today – human misery, suffering, death and disability.
With the help of the Ribono Shel Oilom the Defence Forces of Israel will be successful in restoring peace and security to the land that we dreamed about inhabiting through thousands of years of exile. And when once more b’ezras Hashem we are all able to walk in calm and comfort through our land, we will stand, as we stand today on Armistice Day, hand in hand with all humanity – with all who know how to shed a tear for the victims of senseless violence. And we will whisper the words of the poet Robert Binyon in 1914 that have become the essence of remembrance the whole world over as we remember the victims:
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”
And we will pray for a time when in the words of the Novi “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”, a time when the whole world is receptive to the description of the Torah we give every time we return the sefer to the Oron HaKoidesh: “Her ways are the ways of pleasantness and her every path is peace”. A time when sense and decency will have prevailed, and we will have played our full part in reawakening the ruchniyus of our people, and through our people the whole world, ad sheyovo Melech, Goel u’Moishia, bimheiro b’yomeinu omein v’omein.
Zochreinu L’chayim – Remember Us For Life – Three Weeks Later
1: It feels almost impossible that just three weeks ago we were in the middle of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – intensifying our prayers that God would write us into the book of life this year.
2: As it happens, I led a discussion in shul on Yom Kippur afternoon this year on the theme of the Book of Jonah and the concept of collective punishment. I focused in particular on the sailors who were put in danger because of Jonah embarking on their ship and on the inhabitants of Nineveh.
3: I drew on the commentaries of Rashi and the Malbim in relation to the sailors, and on the Midrash Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer in relation to the King of Nineveh and its inhabitants. In particular, the sailors go to particularly impressive lengths to avoid exposing Jonah to danger until they are absolutely sure that keeping him on board would expose them all to undeserved and serious risks and that expelling him would not add to his own danger. And the King of Nineveh (a reincarnation of Pharoah, according to the Midrash) shows his lack of understanding of moral principle by staging a repentance program that inflicts suffering on children and animals (demonstrating a lack of true moral understanding as a result of which, according to the Midrash, the “salvation” of Nineveh was only ephemeral).
4: I tried to develop some thoughts about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocent bystanders out of these incidents: but I had not prepared sufficiently carefully for my thoughts to be properly articulated and I failed in the discussion to express them coherently.
5: Unhappily, since then we have all had the need to think more deeply about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocents, whether as targeted victims or as “collateral” deaths. And I think I now know what I should have said on Yom Kippur afternoon.
6: The starting point is that Abraham established in his debate with God at Sodom that is axiomatic to Jewish theology that God does not permit the deliberate killing of the innocent with the guilty. The episode of the sacrifice of Isaac can be understood as God’s final challenge to Abraham, seeing if he was prepared to challenge God by saying, in effect, “yes, if You command me to kill an innocent child I will do that, but after that I will no longer believe that you are a God worth following”. My understanding is that if God had not prevented Abraham from complying with the command to kill Isaac, Abraham would have ceased to see God as espousing values of decency and justice and would, so to speak, have abandoned the religion. (I have discussed this elsewhere (https://thescepticblog.com/2014/09/ – and What If God’s A Christian, Chapter 46 – https://www.danielgreenberg.co.uk/product/what-if-gods-a-christian/), and I am told that a similar thesis is found in respectable orthodox Jewish sources.)
7: We are therefore required to emulate the sailors in the book of Jonah to do everything we possibly can to avoid punishing a person for things for which they are not responsible.
8: But sometimes entirely innocent people will suffer, and may even die, as a result of circumstances over which they have no control and for which they bear no responsibility of any kind. There will be all kinds of reasons for this: innocents will sometimes be targeted deliberately, carelessly or otherwise wrongly; or they may be used by murderers or others as human shields; and there are so many other dreadful circumstances in which innocent adults or children die every day all around the world as victims of natural or human events over which they have no control and for which they have no shred of responsibility.
9: How do I continue to reconcile this with a just God? At what point should we consider, like Abraham at the akeida, walking away from our faith on the grounds that it no longer appears to make any sense or to produce anything useful?
10: The critical point here is my belief in life after death. One of the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion is that this world is a physical corridor to a spiritual existence. The purpose of this world is to use its opportunities – and in particular the opportunities for kindness and sensitivity that arise from our interactions with each other – for me to build something in my essence that will survive after my physical death.
11: This is what Rabbinic literature generally refers to as The World To Come – Olom Habo. Critically, in Jewish theology, almost everyone who dies receives a place in the World to Come. Put another way, virtually everyone, irrespective of religion, race or any other characteristic, acquires spiritual merit in myriad ways every day, and that merit becomes their spiritual identity after death. The Talmud lists some classes of person who are thought not to survive into the next world – and the common denomination is the kind of arrogance and depravity that leads them to deny the value of moral or spiritual behaviour. “Ordinary” failings of the kind that amount simply to giving in to normal human temptations do not according to Rabbinic tradition debar a person from acquiring the spiritual merit that amounts to a place in the World to Come.
12: In essence, everybody remotely “normal” receives a life after death, however shallow and flawed their life may have appeared to them to be, in the way that most of us tend to think of our own lives. I have discussed elsewhere how I suspect that the failings we are most shamed of may turn out to be dismissed by the “Recording Angel” as merely human and irrelevant to the final spiritual reckoning, while many of our greatest merits may turn out to be things we thought too commonplace to be worth noticing.
13: And it is fundamental Jewish doctrine that nobody and nothing can take my World To Come away from me. We have not even the vaguest inkling of an idea why God permits wicked people to murder and destroy: but we have a clear faith that their victims rise straight to the World To Come and enter a phase of eternal spiritual life that the rest of us will reach in God’s own inscrutable time.
14: On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we are not really asking for physical life at all: we all know how fragile all human life is and how uncertain it is for any person whether they will survive physically for another day or not, let alone for another year or not. In so far as we are asking to be kept alive at all it is “l’maanchoh – for God’s own sake” in the sense that through self-improvement, introspection and kindness (teshuvah, tefiloh u’tzedoko) we will prepare ourselves for eventual death and what comes beyond it. Yom Kippur is more about the unimportance of physical death than the importance of preserving physical life.
15: (None of this is in any sense a theological excuse for murderers. The Talmud has a lengthy passage in Tractate Rosh Hashanah about the treatment of murderers who argue in the afterlife that they must have been “doing God’s will” or otherwise it couldn’t have happened – the bottom line is that the fact that God “wants” something to happen, whatever that means, does not relieve the perpetrator from the spiritual consequences of the moral decision to be the person who makes that thing happen. And those who murder and destroy out of arrogant belief in their own righteousness, or in the righteousness of their own religious or other ideology, fall within the classes of person who according to the Talmud lack the spiritual qualities to endure after death.)
16: Nor does any of this purport to make sense of any of the madness in the world today.
17: But it does mean that I can – just – remain a committed practising Jew despite the innocent lives that are lost or blighted in so many places around the world everyday.
18: Like us all, I am praying for peace for everyone everywhere as soon as possible; and hoping against hope that the decent human instincts and values that are an emanation of the Divine in whose image we were all created will prevail. And for those innocents who lose their lives every day in so many places around the world, I join the collective and continuous Jewish prayer that they all should be “bound in eternal life”.
Blackmail and Divorce
In the last few months I have heard some appalling histories of get refusal. A recurring theme is of women being told by the Beth Din that there are “minor matters outstanding”, generally the payment of money or the relinquishment of a financial claim, before the get can be arranged.
Unless an extraordinary number of women are telling remarkably consistent lies, a number of Botei Din appear to regard this as part of diplomatic negotiation.
The criminal law of the United Kingdom has a different word for it: blackmail.
Demanding money (whether under the pretence of a debt or not) with the threat of withholding a get unless it is paid is a simple case of blackmail. And a dayan or Beth Din registrar who facilitates a demand of this kind may be committing the inchoate offence of encouraging or assisting an offence believing it will be committed, contrary to section 45 of the Serious Crime Act 2007.
Another relevant offence, section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship), has recently been extended to former relationships by section 68 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. From the way in which the Federation Beth Din and the London Beth Din have reacted to the responses to their original statements about this development, it seems that they may have begun to realise that there are potential personal criminal consequences of continuing to connive at or collaborate in the use of the get as a tool of mental cruelty and extortion.
But they still assert that halachah ties their hands. It does not. They need to understand that prosecution for criminal blackmail or for coercive behaviour is not something a woman “does” to coerce her husband into giving the get: it is simply a consequence of his refusal to do the right thing. It is the State that prosecutes, not the victim. It is of course true that halachic coercion can only be applied by halachic authorities; but that does not permit those authorities to shelter people from the criminal consequences of their actions.
And applying halachah so as to deter a victim of crime from reporting an offence for the State to prosecute is likely to amount to an additional criminal offence of perverting the course of justice.
The community must seize the moment and make clear to dayonim and rabbis that this is not going to go away, and that they are likely to find themselves imprisoned if they continue to facilitate blackmail and coercion as part of their “negotiating strategy” over divorces. If we fail to do this, we as a community will remain complicit in the abuse that women, and some men, are suffering in this respect every single day.
BBC Radio 4 Thought For The Day – Contract Law and Morality
I used my Radio 4 Today Programme Thought For the Day slot this morning to discuss the ethical implications of relying on contractual cancellation rights, with a brief nod to Lord Atkin’s famous religion-to-law translation in Donoghue v Stevenson. Link below.
Kulam Kedoshim? The Status of Those Who Died at Meron.
- As we approach the end of the shiva period for those who died at Meron last week, I was asked this morning whether it is correct or incorrect to refer to them as kedoshim.
- It is true that they were not martyred for remaining true to their belief in God in the face of persecution, and that at least in recent decades the phrase kedoshim has at least largely been reserved for people who suffered martyrdom of one kind or another.
- On the other hand, they were each engaged at the time in an expression of personal spiritual commitment by attending an event which was for them an expression of religious devotion and belief.
- So if it can bring any shred of comfort to those they left behind to commemorate them as kedoshim, I cannot see that it is in any sense an unfitting dignity for people who died in the course of what was for them an act of spiritual dedication, and I can imagine that as a source of comfort to their mourners it could be helpful.
- But there is also a danger associated with the term, which we must be careful to avoid. Already this week I have seen references along the lines of “Hashem wanted him in Shomayim so the world had to let him go”, as though this is all an act of God and their death is almost more to be celebrated than it is to be mourned. Clearly for the families this is a very real and pure expression of their own feelings about their lost child or relative, and as such it must be respected and cherished: but it is not the take-away message for the rest of us.
- While preserving the purity and dignity of the memory of those sweet souls who died, we need to be very clear: this was not an act of God, except in as much as everything that happens in the world is permitted to happen by God.
- The second of this week’s parashiyos makes it very clear in the Tochachah that God permits many things to take place in the world that are consequences of our own actions, and that are not to be construed as leaving us blameless on account of their being God’s will in the sense that everything that happens must be the will of the Master of the Universe. Bad consequences of bad actions must be taken to heart, not explained away as “God’s will”.
- This accident did not occur “because” God wanted these 45 pure souls to die before their time: it occurred “because” of a disgraceful and tragic failure on our part to take health and safety sufficiently seriously.
- Who is “our part” for these purposes? Well I don’t know, and nor does anybody else. And in seeking to determine it we can approach it in one of two ways.
- We can try to narrow it down, by seeking to point the finger of blame at particular individuals. In doing so we are very unlikely to do more than increase division, attribute blame unfairly to scapegoats, and lead to the general issue of health and safety being taken less seriously by those who consider themselves exculpated, rather than by being taken more seriously by us all.
- So in this week of the Tochachah I suggest that everyone who has any kind of connection with Israel or the Jewish community, or even who feels empathy with what happened simply by virtue of being a human being, might usefully consider ourselves all responsible, not in the sense of having been to blame for what happened, but as being obliged to take away from it the message that we need to redouble our efforts to look after each other, and show each other practical care and sensitivity by guarding each other’s safety as well as in other aspects.
- This was not an act of God: it was an act of human beings. The lives that were lost were lost senselessly and pointlessly and unnecessarily. These deaths do not add in themselves to kiddush Hashem in any sense, and although those who died should definitely be dignified by the attribution kedoshim where that brings any feeling of comfort to their mourners and reminds us of their own sweet and holy natures, those of us who are left behind should not forget that this was a desecration of God’s name and not a sanctification, and that it requires to be expiated by our re-doubling our efforts to sanctify and protect human life wherever possible.
The Correct Brochoh On Being Vaccinated
- This is such an obvious point that I would not have troubled to blog about it, if I hadn’t heard someone questioning it.
- What brochoh does a person make on receiving the COVID-19 vaccine?
- There is no doubt that a brochoh requires to be made: any event that is life-changing has a brochoh – and being vaccinated against an illness that has killed hundreds of thousands of people world-wide, ruined hundreds of thousands of businesses and incarcerated millions of people for around a year, is clearly life-changing.
- It is also clearly one of the most profound achievements of medical science, in pursuance of their Divine commandment – v’rapoh y’rapeh – in living memory, to have produced and deployed vaccines against this plague in such an extraordinarily short time and with such impressive results. Again, how could that not require us to bless and thank HaShem for giving humans the wisdom to protect us in this way?
- Bewilderingly, I heard someone seriously suggest that the appropriate brochoh is shechechiyonu – but that is clearly wrong: we say shechechiyonu to thank God for preserving us to witness and enjoy an event that is important to us personally.
- But on an event which benefits me but also benefits others, the correct brochoh is HaTov v’Hameitiv.
- Receiving the vaccine helps and protects me, God willing; but it also protects anyone with whom I come into contact and to whom I might otherwise transmit the illness having contracted it asymptomatically.
- Iy’h I will receive the vaccine this coming Thursday, the local NHS having reached people of my age and summoned me accordingly; and when I receive it, I look forward to being mevoreich HaTov v’Hameitiv. Thursday will be Taanis Esther: it was Esther Hamalkah who turned the selfishness of the banquet of Achashveirosh at the beginning of the megillah (“la’asos k’rtzon ish v’ish”) into the concern for each other at the end of the megillah (“u’matonos ish l’rei’ehu”), by discovering and articulating the need to return to Avrohom Ovinu’s equating belief in God with chessed (kindness and sensitivity), when she says “you fast for me, and I and my maids will do the same” (which former Chief Rabbi Bakshi-Doron explains as meaning “we’ll stop worrying about ourselves and start worrying about you, and you stop worrying about yourselves and start worrying about us”) in a way that storms the gates of Heaven.
- Y’hi rotzon that once the vaccine has controlled the pandemic throughout the world, our lives will have changed irrevocably through our experiences having taught us greater sensitivity to those who are weak or vulnerable, and we will be zocheh to recreate a religious world which places sensitivity to others’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses at the heart of our worship and other religious practices in a way that revives the ruchnius of our people and through our people the whole world, ad she’yovo Melech Go’el u’Moishia bimheiro b’yomeinu omein v’omein.
The Sceptic Blog 