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A Charming and Necessary Story

A prayer for Bibi

This month, Haim Watzman offers a Necessary Story about words and devotion and rules and strangers

By HAIM WATZMAN December 12, 11:03 am

The women’s section was half empty, but the stranger, who stopped several times while walking up the aisle, chose the front row. Not just the front row, but one chair away from where Michal stood, trying to concentrate on the Amidah. Michal was, as always, intense in her devotions, but also, as usual, feeling that the words weren’t getting through, neither to He to whom they were addressed, nor to herself.

She instinctively placed a protective arm over the baby in her womb and evaluated the newcomer out of the corner of her eye. The stranger was breathing heavily, as if not used to walking much, but her figure was not a frail one. Gray hair was visible under a rose-pattered silk kerchief that covered her hair, tied under her chin rather than wrapped stylishly around her head like Michal’s. Worn this way, the kerchief indicated a grandmother of a long-gone age, or perhaps a woman who knew that she was supposed to cover her hair in synagogue but had no idea how to do so except for some vague, long since faded memory of her own grandmother. She leafed in confusion through the pages of the prayer book she had taken from the shelf in the back, her head moving from side to side.

Michal finished the silent Amidah and took the prescribed three steps back. She looked around at the dozen or so other women around her. They were mostly young mothers themselves and Michal admired them, and herself, for making the effort to pray in public, in synagogue. There were far more men, of course, but for the men it was expected, required. They had to be there. The women were there because they chose to be.

Michal helped the stranger find her place in the prayer book, which was obviously unfamiliar to her. The woman closed her eyes and rocked back and forth with such force that Michal feared she would keel over. Michal glanced at the friends and neighbors in the rows behind and beside her and received some encouraging looks. She reprimanded herself for feeling uncomfortable with the stranger and, to repair that emotion, she turned toward the old woman when she opened her eyes and offered her a smile. When the hazan began chanting the repetition of the Amidah, Michal helped the grandmother turn back the requisite pages so that she could follow along.

“I came to pray for …,” the woman whispered hoarsely to Michal, and Michal thought she heard ba’ali, my husband. She nodded sympathetically, but then suddenly realized that the woman had said “Bibi.” Michal did not realize until taking a step away that she had done so. But the woman took two steps toward Michal, standing uncomfortably close.

“I am so scared,” the woman said. “They are sucking his blood, the leftists, the media, the prosecutors. Only God can help him.”

The hazan began the Kedushah, the most sacred part of the service, where the worshipper, like the ancient prophets, envisions standing before the throne of God. Michal brought her feet together and stood erect, as demanded by the laws of prayer. The stranger, however, did not seem to know that talking, frowned on any time during the prayer service, is absolutely forbidden during the Kedushah.

Michal raised her index finger to her mouth. In doing so, she felt arrogant, as if she were demonstrating to the stranger that there were rules that she knew and that the older woman did not. But neither did she want to encourage the woman to disturb the prayer, nor did she want to accept the transgression.

The woman looked around in surprise at all the other women in prayer. “Kol ha-kavod,” she whispered, too loudly, to Michal. “Everyone’s so serious here!” Michal winced. The old woman seemed to be doing her best to be exactly the kind of woman Michal did not want to be, not in shul, not anywhere else.

The hazan completed the Kedushah and Michal sat down. The stranger imitated her, but this time took the chair right next to her instead of leaving an empty seat between them.

“I’m not feeling so well,” the woman confided in her. “And the Iraqi shul up the hill, it takes me at least twenty minutes to get there. So I figured why not go close to home. God doesn’t care if you pray Sephardi or Ashkenazi, right?”

Michal forced a smile and put her finger to her lips again. She looked around at the other women and whispered, very softly, to the stranger: “It’s prohibited to speak during the prayers.”

The woman’s eyes opened wide and she stared at Michal for a long moment. She rose from her seat. Michal saw that she’d offended her and felt awful. The woman was already shuffling down the aisle. After a moment’s hesitation, Michal got up to follow her. She caught up just outside the double door that separated the sanctuary from the foyer. She wasn’t sure what to say.

“Excuse me.” The woman kept walking. Michal touched her lightly on the shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

The woman looked up at her. Michal couldn’t make out what the woman’s face said, what she was feeling.

Michal felt helpless. “We can talk out here.”

“I just wanted to pray for Bibi,” the woman muttered. She did not stop.

Michal was furious at the woman for not accepting her apology. She was worse than her mother.

“Why do you need to pray for Bibi?” Michal blurted out. “He’s rich, he’s powerful. Why does he need help?”

The woman stopped. She looked up to heaven rather than at Michal. “If they can frame Bibi, what can a little person like me do if they try to put me in jail?”

“Listen, it’s not that simple. You know, I work in the state prosecutor’s office.”

The stranger slowly turned her gaze to Michal’s belly. “Until you have your baby? Are you a secretary?”

The stranger was pressing all the wrong buttons. Michal told herself that this was a woman from another world, another age, and that there was no use getting angry. But she was. She bit her lower lip to regain self-control. “I’m a lawyer.”

The woman shook her head. “You’re all liars. He’s a good man, Bibi. What do you want with him?”

“Look.” Michal knew all the talking points. “He’s been investigated. By the police, by the prosecutors. Everything’s been done according to the book. It doesn’t matter whether he’s been a good prime minister or a bad prime minister, whether he’s done good things or bad things. If the evidence shows that he broke the law and violated the people’s trust, he has to stand trial. We can’t have one law for the prime minister and another law for everyone else.”

They had reached the synagogue’s outside door. Michal followed the stranger out. The woman put her hand on the railing by the stairs that led down to the street and stopped to catch her breath. But there was fire in her eyes.

“You have one law for you and another law for me. You’re allowed to talk and I have to be quiet.”

Michal realized that her words had not gotten through.

“Please come back in,” she pleaded.

The woman waved a hand at Michal. “I’m going home.”

Michal stood a long while, watching the stranger walk slowly up the street, stopping to rest from time to time. Then she returned to the women’s section, to say more words to God.

****

Haim Watzman’s Necessary Stories appear in The Times of Israel every four weeks. He is the author of Company C, A Crack in the Earth, and a collection of his stories, Necessary Stories. For more information on his books, and an archive of all his Necessary Stories, visit Southjerusalem.com.

From Times of Israel, here.

Arutz Sheva Introduces Naava Kodesh and Avira D’Eretz Yisroel…

Haredi aliyah initiative blossoms into movement

Naava Kodesh establishes network to facilitate aliyah for English-speaking haredi community, focusing on networking and community

Mordechai Sones, 05/11/19 14:48

“Have you ever wanted to live in Eretz Yisroel? But you thought it was IMPOSSIBLE. THINK AGAIN,” begins the website of Naava Kodesh, an organization created to help members of U.S. Torah communities navigate the challenges in establishing their residence in Israel.

“Today Boruch Hashem there are thousands of Americans living happy and fulfilling lives in vibrant Torah communities throughout Eretz Yisroel. We’ll connect you with our network of community contacts to give you the info you need to make Eretz Yisroel your home, too.”

To facilitate such connections, Naava Kodesh established their community contact database to connect potential Olim with people already living here. By connecting applicants to people with similar backgrounds, occupations, and lifestyles as their own, they are able to get the information potential haredi olim need to find appropriate communities, housing, education, and employment.

In addition, Naava Kodesh has a list of English-speaking rabbis ready to answer questions and provide customized guidance regarding the many aspects of living in Israel.

Additionally, Naava Kodesh is currently developing helpful community profiles of all major, American Torah communities in Israel, including specific information about schools, shuls, yeshivas, kollels, neighborhoods, housing costs, employment opportunities, and more.

More recently Naava Kodesh launched their Haaretz Hatova series profiling Haredi Olim who are living here so that they can share the experiences with their brethren back in the States in the hope that their success stories will inspire them to come and join. Haaretz Hatovah appears on a number of US-based news websites in the tri-state area and in a major print newspaper. They also started distributing the weekly in over 100 Shuls in Lakewood New Jersey. More info about their activities can be found on their website.

Avira D’Eretz Yisroel

The Avira D’Eretz Yisroel project, a grassroots effort to help long-term yishuv Eretz Yisroel for the English-speaking haredi community, with a focus on affordable housing and warm community.

Contacts were made with English-speaking residents in various communities in Israel. These include but are not limited to such diverse cities as Teveria Illit, Rechasim, Givat Hamoreh in Afula, Ma’ale Amos, and Ofakim.

Yoel Berman, who heads the project, said, “The communities we live in may have been suitable for us as young couples, but are not the places in which we want to continue to raise our children. We still find our avodas Hashem benefiting much from the same avira d’Eretz Yisroel that brought us here in the first place, or perhaps even see yishuv Eretz Yisroel as part of our avodas Hashem.

“The solution lies, at least in part, in discovering communities with affordable housing, which have an atmosphere that will allow for our integration. But how do we find out about such places? Do they even exist?”

Berman answers: “This is exactly where the Avira project comes in. It is about creating connections between us and the English-speakers who have already made the various relevant yeshivah/haredi communities their home.”

The project’s website contains a wealth of organizations and resources for haredi English-speakers living in (or interested in living in) the Land of Israel.

From INN, here.

המוסר הכי טוב: מעשי גלגולי נשמות – סיפור חייו של רב יוסף שני שליט”א

וואי איזה סיפור מדהים של רב מקובל !! הרב יוסף שני

Feb 7, 2013

גילגולי נשמות בירושלים הרב יוסף שני.

כל הסרטים שאנחנו מעלים כאן וכל התועלת שיהיה מהם:
מחצית מהתועלת תהיה לעילוי כל נשמות ישראל שנפטרו מאז בריאת העולם ועד עתה. ת.נ.צ.ב.ה.
ומחצית השניה מהתועלת תהיה לשמירה ולהצלחה ולברכה ולפרנסה טובה ובנחת לרפואה שלימה ולבריאות הגוף והנפש שלימה ולזיווג הגון אם עדיין אין. ולזרע בר קיימא ולחזרה בתשובה מהר וללא יסורים ולאחדות ואהבת חינם ולחיים טובים וארוכים ולחיי עולם הבא לכל היהודים והיהודיות בארץ הקודש ובעולם

מאתר יוטיוב, כאן.

אגב, ראה מדור ספרי הרב יוסף שני כאן באתר.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz: True Religion Makes DEMANDS, Not Endowments

Can Judaism Survive the State of Israel?

By Menachem Kellner
July 19, 1992

JUDAISM, HUMAN VALUES, AND THE JEWISH STATE

By Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Edited by Eliezer Goldman. Translated by Eliezer Goldman, Yoram Navon, Zvi Jacobson, Gershon Levi and Raphael Levy.291 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $39.95.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a native of Riga and a physician, chemist and philosopher, has long been a thorn in the side of the cultural, political and religious elites of Israel. An exciting lecturer and indefatigable polemicist, Mr. Leibowitz, who is now 89 years old, has a large and enthusiastic following in Israeli intellectual circles.

“Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State,” a collection of 27 essays, edited and introduced by the American-born Israeli philosopher Eliezer Goldman and ably translated by him and four others, for the first time makes Mr. Leibowitz’s writing available in America. The book reflects his strengths and weaknesses. The essays are incisive, provocative, fearlessly consistent; they are also repetitious, idiosyncratic and doctrinaire. But, whatever his faults, Yeshayahu Leibowitz faces hard questions head on, raising them in their sharpest possible form, and for that, if not for the answers he provides, his work continues to be important. No one interested in Israel, Judaism and the nexus of the two can afford complacently to ignore the questions Mr. Leibowitz refuses to stop asking.

At first glance, he appears to be a bundle of contradictions: an observant Jew, a Zionist and an Israeli patriot, he sees these identities as representing three distinct commitments, commitments that injure one another when they mingle. Thus he represents that rare breed in Israel, an observant Jew who argues forcefully for the separation of synagogue and state, not out of concern for the state but out of concern for the synagogue. In his view, political involvement corrupts Judaism: politicized religion is not truly religious, since it focuses on religion’s utility and not the demands it makes on the believer. No one has phrased the problem more sharply than Mr. Leibowitz: Can Judaism survive the state of Israel? His solution calls for the creation of new categories and structures in Jewish law to deal with new realities, and especially for the total divorce of Judaism from the state.

HE maintains that investing a state with sanctity (“fascism,” according to Mr. Leibowitz) both debases religion and endangers the state, leading to actions that “can be vindicated and even justified — and are nevertheless accursed.” Mr. Leibowitz has been vilified for criticizing Israel while remaining silent about Arab behavior. Yet this criticism misses the point. He is not unaware of crimes by Arabs; but as a Jew seeking to make Israel better, he is fundamentally uninterested in them — they are not his responsibility.

Mr. Leibowitz’s Zionism (“the endeavor to liberate Jews from being ruled by the Gentiles”) leads him to insist on a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the territories Israel occupied after it was forced into war in 1967. Continued occupation is bad for Jews, Judaism and Israel, he maintains. (This is something Mr. Leibowitz has been warning about since 1968.) Moreover, as a philosophical nominalist, he denies that nations have any extra-mental existence. Since purely mental entities can have no legal or moral rights, the dispute between Jews and Palestinians is not one that can be settled in terms of national rights, and the repartition of the land of Israel is the only practical solution. Mr. Leibowitz is a thorn in the side of almost all major Israeli politicians, of whatever persuasion; the winners of the recent elections will hardly find him more comforting than their predecessors did.

His fundamental insight is that religion properly understood makes demands of humans; it does not endow them with benefits. It is in this respect that Mr. Leibowitz — who reduces Judaism to a system of commandments, explicitly excluding from its purview theology and ethics — argues for the superiority of Judaism over Christianity and, by implication, over Islam. Christianity, which for him is fundamentally pagan and anti-Judaic, promises individual salvation, liberation from the “bondage” of law, permanent rest. Halakha (Jewish law) in his view recognizes no such thing: it sets a permanent challenge before Jews, a task that can never be completed but may never be abandoned. For him, Abraham, in his unhesitating willingness to sacrifice Isaac in order to fulfill the will of God, represents the highest ideal of religious behavior.

Mr. Leibowitz believes prayer, as the sincere outpouring of an anguished soul, is thus religiously irrelevant, since it reflects the needs of the person praying. Prayer achieves religious significance only when it is done as obligatory work, executed in fulfillment of a command, and without reference to the needs, feelings and desires of the individual praying. Only then is it worship. Supplicatory prayer is not worship; it is blasphemous, seeing God as an agent for the satisfaction of the individual’s needs and seeking to influence God. Mr. Leibowitz seems to accept St. Paul’s critique of Judaism as a burdensome set of obligations that cannot be satisfied; but he makes that a virtue, not a vice.

What Mr. Leibowitz calls “endowing” religions, pre-eminently Christianity and Reform Judaism, gratify certain psychic needs and are therefore popular, but they are not truly religious in his view; the ultimate perfection of religion can never be truly realized — whether by individual salvation in the world to come or by self-fulfillment in this world.

A consequence of this view is that Mr. Leibowitz must claim that the Messiah will never actually come, but “is essentially he who always will come . . . the eternal future. The Messiah who comes, the Messiah of the present, is invariably the false Messiah.” Messianism is thus always a goal, a task, never a benefit, gift or endowment. This idea — which Mr. Leibowitz borrows from the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, and which has been defended by the American philosopher Steven Schwarzschild — leads him to reject as false messianism any attempts to see the state of Israel as part of the messianic advent. Thus, referring to the self-proclaimed 17th-century messiah Sabbatai Zevi, he labels as “Sabbatean” groups like the Israeli settler movement Gush Emunim, which emphatically understands the state of Israel as representing the first flowering of the messianic fulfillment and derives practical conclusions from that understanding.

Consistent with his view of Judaism as a religion of challenges and tasks is his insistence that mitzvah (commandment) and Halakhah (Jewish law) are central in a correct description of Judaism. Judaism is a religion of commandments, making demands, insisting on obedience for its own sake (lishmah, a fundamental category for Mr. Leibowitz). This Judaism is contrasted with religions of values and beliefs, endowing religions, which are “a means of satisfying man’s spiritual needs and assuaging his mental conflicts.” Indeed there is nothing in Judaism beyond the commandments. As such, the national identity of the Jewish people is nothing other than Judaism, life according to Torah. In this Mr. Leibowitz follows the 10th-century rabbi and philosopher Saadia Gaon (who said Israel is only a people in virtue of its Torah) and stands in stark opposition to Solomon Schechter, the founder of the American Conservative Jewish movement, who defined Judaism as the religion of the Jewish people, turning Judaism into a form of religious nationalism.

Commandments have profound educational significance to Mr. Leibowitz, marking off the realm of the sacred in life, reminding us that sanctifying anything outside of that realm, be it a place or a people or a value, is idolatry. This most emphatically includes the people of Israel, the land of Israel and specific places in the land. Mr. Leibowitz reserves some of his sharpest barbs for those Jews guilty of what he calls idolatry with respect to Erez Yisrael, the land of Israel, or the Western Wall in Jerusalem, or values like national security and military discipline. Only tasks can be holy.

As a religion of Halakha, Judaism has no specific moral system, no position on the best form of political or social organization; as a way of serving God, Judaism has no “particular conception of man, of the world or of history.” Halakhah is, furthermore, ahistorical, growing out of its own inner dynamic, essentially uninterested in and uninfluenced by social change. Mr. Leibowitz identifies as Christian the idea that human history can have religious significance; to make history religiously significant is to put humanity, not God, at the center.

But he does not mean that Judaism is a religion of mechanical practice. Proper observance of the commandments demands proper intention, or kavanah, without which the commandment is literally unfulfilled. Obedience by habit or rote is no obedience.

Mr. Leibowitz’s position on dogma reflects his understanding of faith: it is not a conclusion but an “evaluative decision that one makes, and, like all evaluations, it does not result from any information one has acquired, but is a commitment to which one binds himself . . . . Faith is the supreme, if not the only, manifestation of man’s free choice.” This position is very convenient for Mr. Leibowitz, allowing him to eat his cake and have it too. By denying that religion makes any truth claims whatsoever about the nature of the universe, he solves the problem of religion and science to his satisfaction: the two operate in entirely independent spheres and cannot possibly conflict. Religion supplies no information, science tells us nothing about how we ought to behave, and the two therefore cannot possibly come into conflict.

Mr. Leibowitz’s protestations to the contrary, his representation of Judaism is prescriptive, not descriptive. This raises a general problem: to what extent can he fairly speak about “Judaism” when the religious system he prescribes would be barely recognizable to most of the scholars, saints and sinners who, through the generations, have studied, practiced or violated the norms of what they took to be Judaism?

Students of Maimonides will also be surprised to find Mr. Leibowitz’s views consistently attributed to the great 12th-century philosopher and Talmudist. Many readers will feel that Mr. Leibowitz has not successfully risen to the challenges he sets. But those challenges, like the Judaism he espouses, cannot be ignored.

From The New York Times, here.