Menachem Mendel

While many people following news from Israel are occupied with Ehud Olmert’s latest troubles, the really important news is the galvanization of the national-religious divorce from the ultra-orthodox. As I wrote previously, the tipping point, hopefully, has been reached. It may upset some people, but for the religious zionist it is in my opinion essential. While the national-relgiious public is made up of many different streams and schools of thought, they have the leadership who, if determined, can pull this off. One potential pitfall is that they focus on supplying religious servcies, e.g. kashrut supervsion, conversion, weddings, etc., which while extremely important, are only part of the totality of a religious culture in the modern state. In order to succeed in the long run, they must present an alternative view of the role that religion has to play in Israel. A religion which doesn’t rely on office clerks and functionaries, or the control of a certain government ministry, but rather on a religious leadership whose concern is to what extent people see a value in allowing Judaism into their private lives and the public discourse and culture as we begin the 21st century. R. Benny Lau has continued his call for independence in this post at the web site Kipa (Hebrew). [hat tip]

For the English see below and read here about the signatories.

ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma’pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called “Israel”.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream - the redemption of Israel.

PLACING OUR TRUST IN THE “ROCK OF ISRAEL”, WE AFFIX OUR SIGNATURES TO THIS PROCLAMATION AT THIS SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COUNCIL OF STATE, ON THE SOIL OF THE HOMELAND, IN THE CITY OF TEL-AVIV, ON THIS SABBATH EVE, THE 5TH DAY OF IYAR, 5708 (14TH MAY,1948).

David Ben-Gurion

Daniel Auster,
Mordekhai Bentov,
Yitzchak Ben Zvi,
Eliyahu Berligne,
Fritz Bernstein,
Rabbi Wolf Gold,
Meir Grabovsky,
Yitzchak Gruenbaum,
Dr. Abraham Granovsky,
Eliyahu Dobkin,
Meir Wilner-Kovner,
Zerach Wahrhaftig,
Herzl Vardi, Rachel Cohen,
Rabbi Kalman Kahana,
Saadia Kobashi,
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin,
Meir David Loewenstein,
Zvi Luria,
Golda Myerson,
Nachum Nir,
Zvi Segal,
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman,
David Zvi Pinkas,
Aharon Zisling,
Moshe Kolodny,
Eliezer Kaplan,
Abraham Katznelson,
Felix Rosenblueth,
David Remez,
Berl Repetur,
Mordekhai Shattner,
Ben Zion Sternberg,
Bekhor Shitreet,
Moshe Shapira,
Moshe Shertok

* Published in the Official Gazette, No. 1 of the 5th, Iyar, 5708 (14th May, 1948).

This week may have been a tipping point in the nexus of religion and politics in Israel. It seems that many rabbis in the national-religious community have finally understood that the current political paradigm just doesn’t work. See this post by Dr. Jeffrey Woolf and this article from the Jerusalem Post. One must also read this article by R. Benjamin Lau which contains the following comments,

The Israeli political system is holding all the Jewish citizens of this country hostage to the religious institutions controlled by the Lithuanian (non-Hasidic) ultra-Orthodox, which is doing everything in its power to keep the light of the Torah away from Israeli Jews. According to this worldview, only members of their own internal circles need to help one another; the fate of the State of Israel does not appear on their radar. They do not send their sons into the line of fire, they do not send their daughters to perform national service, they make a living off charity, and refuse to take part in shouldering the burden of the Jewish people. They cynically undermine the little being done by religious Zionist rabbis, who try to chip in and help resolve the general problems of society.

…

Religious Zionism has so far been restrained in its criticism of the ultra-Orthodox, out of a feeling of respect for the Torah sages and a desire to maintain a united religious camp. No longer! In honor of the state’s 60th birthday, we must free Israel, strengthen the Zionist camp - including among the religious - and establish religious services and religious courts that are fundamentally identified with the values of the country in which they operate.

On a different note, let us not forget that today is Yom ha-Zikaron. May their memory be for a blessing.

I recently received the new issue of Nextbook, a semiannual with discussions of Jewish literature and culture. The web site features a number of interesting articles and a large amount of podcasts on numerous topics. As I write this, I am listening to a podcast about the rebirth of Hebrew featuring interviews with people from the Academy of the Hebrew Language. There are a number of podcasts from the conference What’s He Doing Here? Jesus in Jewish Culture. Some interesting articles are on Gershom Scholem’s recently published diaries from his youth, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919 (here) and an article on marginalia found in certain books.

If you were wondering how controversial the International Bible Quiz (Hidon ha-Tanakh) could be, this year proved you wrong. An Israeli girl who is apparently a Messianic Jew is in the finals, and there are some who want to prohibit her participation. (See these two posts by ADDeRabbi and don’t miss this video whose link was supplied in one of the comments.) Rabbinic literature describes many instances of Rabbis having confrontations or disputes with heretics, with the interpretation of Biblical verses often the point of contention. (For one example see bAZ 4a) Richard Kalmin has written about the differences in the portrayal of these contacts as found in Palestinian and Babylonian sources. [1] He has shown that Palestinian rabbis has “frequent interactions with Bible-reading non-Jews,” with one rabbi warning against drinking “turbid water” (מים עכורים, see Sifrei Devarim no. 48). Regarding the situation in the Land of Israel, Kalmin writes,

The urgency and persistence with which Palestinian sources forbid contact between Palestinian rabbis on one hand and Minim and Christians on the other suggests strongly that such contact took place and was probably routine. (68)

On the other hand in Babylonia,

Babylonian sources, in contrast, have nothing to say on the subect of the danger of rabbinic contact with Minim and Christians, apparently because such contact was too rare to be considered a problem. (70)

Kalmin addresses another important problem, and it is

…that disputes between rabbis and Minim are virtually non-existent in Palestinian documents such as the Yerushalmi but are relatively common in the Bavli. The Bavli records many disputes between heretics and Palestinian rabbis, but Palestinian compilations record fewer than a handful of disputes. (73)

He offers three possible explanations:

1. “The general tendency of Palestinian compilations to contain relatively little dialogue, even dialogue between rabbis.”
2. Maybe there is a different use of terminology between the Palestinian and Babylonian sources. It could be that the Palestinian sources just don’t use the term Min and therefore we might discover evidence of these dialogues if we looked for different terms.
3. A deliberate suppression of dialogues by Palestinian sources “in an effort to avoid insulting the Bible-reading non-Jews and heretics who were prominent in the Roman world.”

I guess that this controversy is the Jewish version of the call to boycott the upcoming Olympics. This might have been a bit more interesting if one of the contestants wanted to wear clothing like this that might give them an unfair advantage.

[1] Richard Kalmin, The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity, pp. 68-74. This chapter was originally part of an article “Christians and Heretics in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity” which appeared in the Harvard Theological Review, 87:2, pp. 155-169.

I don’t think that I have noticed this before, but among the articles which Prof. Shamma Friedman has posted on his website is his seminal article, “A Critical Study of Yevamot X with a Methodological Introduction” (Hebrew) which was published in Texts and Studies, Analecta Judaica I, ed. H. Z. Dimitrovsky, New York, 1977, pp. 275-441, a.k.a. Perek ha-Ishah Rabbah. In this early article Prof. Friedman presents an overview of the study and characteristics of the Stam, the anonymous portions of the Talmud.

As people around the world mark Yom ha-Shoah (see this post by Balashon regarding the name itself), I wanted to say a few things about scholarly research of the Shoah. Many of us are familiar with the classic work by Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945. In recent years there have been a number of other books which people should be aware of. First there are two books by the recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Saul Friedländer. They are Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. In addition there is Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942. Another author whose work I have found challenging and informative is that of Omer Bartov. Bartov’s work isn’t limited to examining the events of 1933-1945, rather he also writes about the historiography of the Shoah, its memory, and the role that its commemoration and history has played in numerous countries. I am currently reading his book Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories and I wanted to bring a few excerpts from the book which discuss numerous aspects of the Shoah.

The first selection describes the two main schools of historical research of the Shoah.

The two most influential schools of interpretation of Nazism and the Holocaust have been labeled “intentionalism” and “functionalism.” The former stresses the centrality of Hitler and views the destruction of the Jews as a long-term project planned well in advance; the latter dwells on the structural characteristics of the Third Reich and presents the Holocaust as the outcome of intra-governmental rivalries and self-imposed logistical constraints. Intentionalists insist on ideological imperatives and the realization of a genocidal program; functionalists dismiss Hitler’s role and emphasize the logic of modern bureaucratic norms and procedures, while relegating abstract tenets to the level of empty rhetoric. (80)

While recognizing the millions of non-Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, Bartov stresses that the genocidal campaign against the Jews was unique.

It was only in the case of the Jews that there was a determination to seek out every baby hidden in a haystack, every family living in a bunker in the forest, every woman trying to pass herself off as a Gentile. It was only in the case of the Jews that vast factories were constructed and managed with the sole purpose of killing trainload after trainload of people. It was only in the case of the Jews that huge, open-air, public massacres of tens of thousands of people were conducted on a daily basis throughout Eastern Europe. (107)

Lastly, with regard to German society and how it acquired for itself a genocidal mission,
Never before, or after, has a state decided to devote so many of its technological, organizational, and intellectual resources to the sole purpose of murdering every single member of a certain category of people in a process that combined the knowledge acquired in mass industrial production with the experience of waging total war. This was a novel phenomenon: striving to produce corpses with the same methods employed to produce goods. In this case, however, destruction was the goal of production, not its opposite.

In circumstances of mass murder, sadism flourishes; but sadism is not unique to the Holocaust. Antisemitism is a pernicious phenomenon with long historical roots, but the question remains as to how was it employed in creating and legitimating death camps rather than expressed in savage pogroms. We need to probe much deeper into the culture that produced genocide in the heart of European civilization. (135-6)

For online material both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem have much to offer. הי”ד.

I have written before about the problem of privacy in the Internet Age, and things are just getting worse. Over at the informative NYT’s tech blog Bits there is a disturbing post describing how ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) are thinking about possibly monitoring your internet traffic and supplying advertising based upon your internet usage and whether anti-spyware companies will try and help you combat this (also see these other articles). So not only are they going to be snooping around, but they are going to bombard you with advertising on top of that. Probably the best way to combat this type of snooping is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network). This is actually not such a bad thing to have if you use public WiFi networks. In a nutshell, you log onto the VPN and access the internet through their network with all of the information being forwarded to you in an encrypted manner through what is termed an “encrypted tunnel.” James Fallows discussed the use of VPN’s by people in China who want to overcome “The Great Firewall of China” in this interesting article, and it is a bit disturbing that we may have to use the same technique in America in order to guard our own privacy. Two VPN providers which were mentioned in an article which I read are WiTopia and PublicVPN, although I am sure that there are many more.

The journal Oral Tradition is now online. This includes both the current issue and its archives. (hat tip) One specific issue which will probably be of interest to many of this blog’s readers is vol. 14 no. 11, which has the following articles:

Jewish Folk Literature
by Dan Ben-Amos
The Fixing of the Oral Mishnah and the Displacement of Meaning
by Elizabeth Shanks Alexander
Literary Composition and Oral Performance in Early Midrashim
by Steven D. Fraade
Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah: On Theorizing Rabbinic Orality
by Martin S. Jaffee
Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud
by Yaakov Elman

The entire issue can be downloaded here.

Additional articles which may be of interest are:

Oral Tradition and Rabbinic Studies (here)
by Martin S. Jaffee
Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation (here)
by Walter J. Ong

A post to ha-Safran by YD draws our attention to the following press release:

The central Chabad-Lubavitch library in New York made 1,000 Passover Haggadahs, many of them rare, available on the Internet for browsing by the public. The Agudas Chasidei Chabad Library has one of the largest collections of the Passover orders of service in the world.

Housed at the Lubavitch World Headquarter, the library’s Haggadah collection began years ago with a nucleus of some 400 volumes purchased on behalf of the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, by renowned collector and bibliographer Shmuel Wiener in 1924.

The posting at ChabadLibraryBooks.com represents close to half of the library’s total Haggadah collection and is part of chief librarian Rabbi Sholom Ber Levine’s goal of making the library more accessible to the public. All told, the library possesses more than 2,200 editions of the Haggadah. Although the rarest of the books, all handwritten, are not yet available, Levine is looking for ways to post them next year. Hebrew Books, directed by Chaim Rosenberg, collaborated on the project.

The Chabad Library collection can be found here. In a post at Seforim Eliezer Brodt draws our attention to the posting of 1,000 Haggadot at hebrewbooks.org. When it rains it pours.

Update: After looking at some of the haggadot that the Chabad Library posted online and actually reading the press release, I see that there was much cooperation between them and Hebrew Books and it seems that both of their postings are relatively similar.