Frum lack of perspective on OTD-ers

Chani Goldstein: age 19, kicked out of her Yeshiva High School for smoking, ended up doing drugs and sleeping around, has no real place to live, has no prospects or job skills. She does not keep Kosher or Shabbos.

Rivki Schwartz: age 26, defied her parents who wanted to send her to seminary, managed to get a full scholarship to college, then went to law school while working part-time as a paralegal. She just passed the bar and has a job offer at a prestigious law firm. She does not keep Kosher or Shabbos.

Neighborhood yenta 1: ”Oy, did you hear about Hindy and Shoimie Goldstein’s daughter Chani? Nebach, she went off the derech! Such a shame, such a shame. Such a waste. And, oy, her sisters and brothers will have such a hard time with shidduchim.”

Neighborhood yenta 2: ”Yes, and the same thing happened with Malka and Chaim’s Shwartz’s daughter Rivki! Nebach, she went off the derech too! Oy, such a terrible shame, isn’t it? What a waste of a Yiddeshe neshama! Her brothers and sisters are also going to have a really hard time with shidduchim.”

Both shake their heads sadly.

Regulate sugar?

A friend posted this on Facebook this morning with the comment “this is just silly”:

Scientists say sugar is as toxic as alcohol – and there should be a drinking age for soda

I agree. Not that it’s all silly. Sugar is a serious problem, and our food culture is awash in the refined stuff, causing childhood obesity & diabetes, along with a host of other problems. The human body never evolved to consume so much sugar.

The silly part is the proposed solution. I’m no libertarian, but at a certain point, government regulations become excessive & ridiculous.

If they want to use governmental power to solve it, ending the insane corn subsidies would be a good place to start. Those subsidies result in way too much corn being produced in the US, which ends up making its way, in great quantities, into almost every processed food, especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

The corn industry, in the wake of HFCS’s increasingly negative image, is attempting to rebrand HFCS as “Corn Sugar”, which has a more natural sound.

I have a suggestion – for every rebranding, concerned people should just add adjectives. “Corn Sugar? Oh, you mean Industrial Corn Supersugar!”

Compassionate condescension to the non-orthodox

On VIN today, there is an article on the commendable comments by Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, the Rosh Yeshiva of Ponovitch, that Charedi Jews must love Chilonim, not hate them. Some have applauded those comments and Rabbi Harry Maryles states that “[R. Edelstein's] words are my sentiments exactly”.

The problem with that, as I see it, is that despite his plea for tolerance, and his deeply needed and timely condemnation of Charedi extremists, Rabbi Edelstein still condescends to non-Orthodox Jews in his statement. He refers to them as tinokot shenishbu, which basically means that they sin, but that they don’t know any better.

Is that really how all Orthodox Jews see the non-Orthodox? How about respecting them as adult human beings who have made choices for themselves. They may not be the same choices as halachically observant people, but that doesn’t mean they should be pitied and seen as some sort of ignorant children.

How about simply approaching them as equals?

100 rabbis sign anti gay marriage letter

See the letter here

I’m disappointed in some of the signatories, especially some that are fellow bloggers on blogs I read regularly. This really does show that “Modern Orthodoxy” is really a very big tent, or it’s splitting.

Financial pressures of a frum life

Harry Marles writes today about the higher rates of divorce in the Orthodox world, and attributes this, in part, to the financial pressure of so many husbands learning instead of working.

Here’s what I commented:

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Harry,

You’re absolutely right. But don’t forget about the fact that frum couples are expected to spend even more & more money to live a frum life, at the very same time when men are encouraged to stay in kollel for years. Day school tuition, for increasingly large families, is huge! The cost of kosher meat has skyrocketed. and Shabbat meals have become more & more elaborate in certain circles. What non-Jews do for Thanksgiving & Christmas, frum families are expected to do every week! When I visit Brooklyn & go to the kosher supermarkets, I see kollel wives pushing around carts filled with hundreds of dollars of food.

Basically, the lifestyle is unsustainable, yet the men are told they can’t get jobs.

No wonder divorce is on the rise!

Sorry, Mayim Bialik, it doesn’t work

So Jew in the City has a new video that’s been making the rounds, featuring Mayim Bialik, neuroscientist, actress, and increasingly observant Jew, asking a question about how to believe in both Torah & science.  Allison Josephs, in a cute video, answers her. See my reaction below the video.

While Allison’s explanation is certainly more palatable than Biblical literalism, I have a problem with science/Torah reconciliations as well. It’s basically a struggle to try to mash together two systems that are often incompatible. For example, her equating of “taninim gedolim” with dinosaurs is weak at best.

I prefer to view science & Torah as two separate spheres, utilizing views of the Rambam & others only insomuch as providing a precedent for one to view the Torah allegorically, but not attempting to shoehorn the details together.

Science tells us how the world works, and is based on observation, theories, and peer review. Torah, on the other hand, is about the spiritual realm. The historicity of Torah is irrelevant. The fact that these things may not have happened, that science tells us there was never a worldwide flood, is unimportant. These Torah informs our worship of Hashem, not of science.

The world was not created in 7 days. That’s obvious. We now know the universe is around 14 billion years old and the earth is 4 billion years old, and that we evolved from earlier primates.

Meanwhile, the Torah tells us stories, but those stories are meant to related to spiritually and emotionally. It’s a separate sphere entirely. Trying to reconcile the two diminishes and harms both.

The further you go down the reconciliation path, the more compromises you are forced to make. When you study the Ancient Near East, you begin to realize that much of the Biblical narrative cannot be literally true, and even the authorship of the Torah comes into question. Tying oneself into knots to painfully reconcile details is a losing proposition.

But if you simply view the Torah as a sacred text, whose literal truth and even authorship are irrelevant to one’s spiritual life, then there’s never a problem, and the richness of one’s relationship with Hashem remains strong.

Is Abbas advocating Apartheid?

This image has been making the rounds on Facebook this morning.

I’m certainly not pleased with the quote, but but is it really as bad as right wingers make it out to be? I assume that the context meant the removal of Israeli settlements from what  he views as Palestinian land. It’s part of jockeying for advantage in any talks, positioning the Palestinian demand of removal of ALL “settlements” beyond the 1949 armistice border.

Also, notice he said “Israeli” not “Jew”.

I’m not making out Abbas to be some sort of statesman-like peacemaker. But I also don’t think the quote is nearly as bad as the hysterical right wing portrays it to be.