A lot of Jews think halacha (Jewish law) is a dry and boring subject.

I can’t say that I blame them.  Some of the stuff that you can read about in the papers here in Israel would probably strike any normal person as pretty bizarre.  The latest being a rabbi in B’nei Brak who says if you live on the upper floor of an apartment building you can’t turn water on over Shabbat because it will cause a pump somewhere to work.  Or a debate some time back about whether it’s halachically OK to pick your nose on Shabbat.  Even the Conservative Movement, which prides itself on being tuned into modernity, addresses some questions that many “outsiders” might think somewhat arcane, like whether or not you need to immerse your pots and pans in a mikveh before using them.

Personally, I find halacha fascinating – but not for the arcane questions, for the real life questions.  Halacha is the intersection where “what we believe” bumps into “what we do.”  As such, it forces us to clarify our values.  If some values come into conflict, we have to wrestle with them and try and figure out “what does God want us to do?”  The bold decision to authorize the ordination of people who are publicly “out” as gay or lesbian was, in my opinion, one of the Conservative Movement’s finest hours: we listened to the voice of God we hear through the Torah, and we heard the God of love commanding us not to condemn people for a sexual orientation which God planted in them.

But how could we do that?  What’s the theological justification for such a strong break with well-established rabbinic tradition?

Rabbi David Hartman’s most recent book, “The God Who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition” provides just such a justification, although he does not address that particular issue.  He provides a theological basis for what would appear to be the Conservative Movement’s mainstream meta-halachic framework.  Which is, of course, a little ironic in a way, since Rabbi Hartman insists that he is still staunchly Modern Orthodox – even though many of his halachic decisions and approaches are much more mainstream to Conservative Judaism.

I realize that not all my readers are rabbis, and some of you may be wondering just what exactly is a “meta-halachic framework” and why should anyone care if one is theologically justified or not. 

Within the Orthodox and Conservative camps you will find tremendous diversity in halacha.  At one extreme you will find liberal Conservative rabbis who will say that it is halachically permissible to eat hot dairy meals in restaurants not under rabbinic supervision, that it’s OK to drive to the synagogue on Shabbat, and there’s nothing wrong with a sleeveless dress in the synagogue.  At the other extreme are strict ultra-Orthodox rabbis who wouldn’t eat anything except fruit with a peel that can be removed, like a banana, in a restaurant not watched over by a rabbi; who tear their toilet paper before Shabbat starts; and who believe women need to not only cover their knees, elbows, and collarbones, but that even sitting next to a modestly dressed woman on a public bus is forbidden.

Such a diversity of views is the result of several different factors:

•  Longstanding diversity of opinions regarding interpreting Jewish law.  We have a famous saying “there are 70 faces to the Torah,” meaning there are many different ways to see and understand the same holy scripture.  The Talmud is nothing if not a collection of very diverse opinions held by rabbis and sages.
• Different groups within the Jewish community regarding how to deal with “modernity:” some embrace it, some take up a “circle the wagons” mentality, and reject it, choosing to live in isolated “shtetls” with no internet and no pictures of women in their newspapers.
• Those factors play into how the groups choose between two competing principles in formulating Jewish law: one principle says the halacha follows the most recent authority, similar to the notion of “stare decisis” in secular law, earlier cases set precedents; and the other principle being the judge should go by what his eyes see, you have to make rulings that reflect your reality. 

Rabbi Hartman’s theological basis for halachic boldness is centered on this last factor.  As he puts it, do you favor “the God of rabbinic infallibility,” or do you favor “the God who hates lies?”

Hartman develops much of his argument based on the changing role of women in society.  Two thousand years ago, women were very nearly completely dependent on men. A woman alone was in a dangerous and difficult place.  So it was not an unreasonable assumption in the legal system that a woman would prefer to be married, to anyone, rather than be alone.

Two thousand years later, that is clearly no longer the case, and it would be reasonable to change our assumptions of what women would prefer.  However, some Orthodox rabbis, like the late great Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik argued that the definition of women in the Talmud did not reflect a time-bound condition imposed on them by society, but rather reflected an ontological reality about the nature of women.  The rabbis in the Talmud could not possibly be mistaken in their judgment of the “essential nature” of women. Therefore, Hartman writes, “..according to Soloveitchik, if you think you are meeting a modern, independent, self-sufficient single woman, dignified about her capacity to cope with reality, you are mistaken: it is an illusion.  You are not seeing the real woman, the desperately lonely and abject Talmudic woman that lies at the ontological heart of even the most seemingly capable or contented modern single female.”  Hartman describes this as the “infallibility principle,” that there is “divine legitimacy” to everything in the Talmud.

Rabbi Hartman argues this point: “Is the woman we see walking the streets today the woman of the Talmud?  No authority in the world can convince me that she is; no past authority can make it into a reality.”

Up against the “God of rabbinic infallibility,” Hartman puts “the God who hates lies.”  He cites as examples prophets who changed the wording of prayers because they couldn’t honestly say the words – and they could not “ascribe false things to God.”  The Talmud validates their feelings: God does not want lies.

So then this creates the conflict: “The God who loves permanence wants us to deny what we experience, while the God who hates lies wants us to give it credence, to incorporate it into our spiritual and ritual lives.  Which God will we allow to guide our halakhic development—the God of Rabbinic infallibility, or the God who demands that I be truthful?”

The answer for Rabbi Hartman, for me, and for many of my colleagues as Conservative rabbis is the God who demands that I be truthful must trump rabbinic infallibility.  This does not mean we do not respect custom.  The burden of proving the case remains with the one who wishes to change custom.  But if we do not honor the God who hates lies, we are also lying to ourselves.

Rabbi Hartman also has some great advice for Conservative rabbis who typically serve congregations where the vast majority of congregants do not see halacha as a binding system that guides every decision of their lives, but who still want to experience the tradition and learn.   He says “For those seeking an experiential encounter with the Jewish tradition to get a sense of the tradition as it is lived, halakha should be engaged as an open-ended educational framework rather than a binding normative one.”    He also cites trends within the Hassidic tradition that call for interpreting mitzvot (commandments) as “suggestions” or “counsel” about how to experience the presence of God in one’s life.

“The God Who Hates Lies” is an excellent, thoughtful and thought-provoking book, which is well worth reading by anyone interested in reconciling traditional Jewish practice with life in the modern world.

 In this week's talk, I was aiming for a "Two Minute Torah."  This one is three minutes.  I'm not sure whether to say, "what the heck, it's only a minute, close enough!"  Or "wow, missed the target by 50%!"

The question I discuss this week is whether God hardening Pharaoh's heart is a violation of the principle that God gave people free will.

 For this week, I tried my hand at doing a video version of my d'var Torah.

The text version is available at the Americans for Peace Now web site, click here to read it.

Please leave comments if you like the video format.  I'm sure production values would improve with more practice.

Reb Barry

If you could take a pill that would make you happy all the time, would you take it?

An Israeli neuroscientist, Moran Cerf, has discovered how to trigger different areas of the brain to elicit emotions without any external stimulus. In an article in Haaretz he said, “The purpose of the research is to understand what happens when you become happy, why you can't stay happy all the time…” He plans to do research on how to create a “happiness pill” so that you COULD stay happy all the time.

Would that be a good idea?

A lesson related to this week’s Torah portion explains why NOT.

Kedushat Levi (R. Yitzchak Levi of Berditchev, 18th century Ukraine) asks why, in this week’s parsha, does Jacob choose to bless Ephraim before Menashe (his grandsons via his son Joseph), even though Menashe is the first-born son, and traditionally he should take precedence in the blessing? He says to understand this we first turn to a teaching from the Talmud.

In tractate Megillah, there’s a teaching that the ways of God are not like the ways of man: man first prepares the pot, and then puts the water in it. God first gets the water, and then prepares the pot around it. In a similar way, when people are sick, they then seek a cure. God prepares the cure first.

Kedushat Levi says this explains the suffering of the chasidim (in his days, chasidim suffered a lot, both from pogroms from Gentiles, and from opposition of others in the Jewish community, the mitnagdim). The suffering is just a preparation to make them able to receive God’s blessings. Without suffering, our “pot” or “vessel” is small, and can’t receive much in the way of blessing from God. Just as if you have a small vessel you may have to break it to make it bigger, the suffering increases our capacity to receive the flow of God’s blessings. But the blessings were the original purpose. So in this way, God creates the cure before the illness, and this explains why Ephraim precedes Menashe. Menashe is connected to Joseph’s suffering at the hands of his brothers, and his troubles in the early days in Egypt – it means “forget,” he has forgotten the troubles and put them behind him. Ephraim, on the other hand, refers to blessings – it’s based on the word “pri,” fruitful,” and praises God for making him fruitful. So in keeping with the teaching that the blessing precedes illness, Jacob puts Ephraim first.

What Kedushat Levi does with the teaching from the Talmud is to tell us if we want to be able to receive the blessings, we need to be prepared by way of the suffering. Without experiencing the suffering we do not have the capacity to receive the abundant blessing. So therefore, a “happiness” pill would be counterproductive. Your personal growth would be stunted. Your ability to receive blessings would be limited if you never experiences the “down” emotions.

When I asked the question about whether you would take a pill that made you happy all the time at lunch today, even my kids were smart enough to say “no.” One of my daughters said it would be boring. You’d never know what happiness is if it was the only emotion you felt. It would just be “normal,” it wouldn’t be happy.

Existentialist philosophers have pointed out the same thing: you can’t experience highs without experiencing the lows. David N. Elkins, professor emeritus of psychology at Pepperdine put it well in his book “Beyond Religion:”

"If someone told me that I could live my life again free of depression provided I was willing to give up the gifts depression has given me--the depth of awareness, the expanded consciousness, the increased sensitivity, the awareness of limitation, the tenderness of love, the meaning of friendship, the appreciation of life, the joy of a passionate heart--I would say, 'This is a Faustian bargain! Give me my depressions. Let the darkness descend. But do not take away the gifts that depression, with the help of some unseen hand, has dredged up from the deep ocean of my soul and strewn along the shores of my life. I can endure darkness if I must; but I cannot live without these gifts. I cannot live without my soul.'"

I know my own personal experience is that the most painful experiences in my life – a failed marriage, getting fired from a company I started, the loss of my mother – were also my greatest growth experiences. It really is true that the suffering I have experienced has opened my heart – as Kedushat Levi would put it, made the vessel bigger, able to receive more blessings and good.

Approximately one in ten American women are taking anti-depressant drugs. There is no doubt that these drugs do a lot of good, and prevent many suicides. There is a limit to how much suffering a person can endure, and someone who is clinically depressed, who is no longer capable of functioning normally for an extended period of time, or who is in danger of committing suicide, clearly should take medication to get back on track.

But could that possibly be one in ten American women? It seems very likely to me that many of those women are just trying to avoid feeling sad because they are frustrated with the drudgery of their lives, their marriages, or feel overworked and/or under-loved.

But perhaps the “happy pills” are letting them get away with avoiding dealing with the root cause of their unhappiness.

If I didn’t feel bad when life sucked, I’d never get off my rear to do something about it. The anguished times have indeed expanded my consciousness, increased my sensitivity, and given me a much greater appreciation for meaningful work, love, friendship and family. Not only am I more capable of appreciating the many blessings in my life thanks to the pain I have felt, I’m also a better person.

A pill that would make me happy all the time?

No thanks.

A few days ago Christians around the world celebrated the birthday of a Jewish boy from Bethlehem -- Jesus (in Hebrew “Yeshu”) -- a religious figure revered by nearly half the world’s population: two billion Christians and one billion Muslims (yes, Jesus is important to Muslims).

Yet Jews rarely, if ever, talk about Jesus. I’ve never given a sermon about Jesus, not even at this obvious time of year, and I’ve never heard a rabbi speak about Jesus from the pulpit. I assume, and I presume most of my colleagues presume, that congregants would completely freak out if a rabbi were to speak about Jesus, even as a historical figure, even as a “know your neighbors” kind of thing. I feel like I’m very bold as a rabbi because I’ve actually dared to quote from the New Testament once or twice from the pulpit in the last ten plus years.

What is it about Jesus that gives Jews the “heebie-jeebie’s?” Is he a topic we shouldn’t discuss?

It’s understandable why Jews have problems with Jesus. Centuries of anti-Semitism were carried out in his name. It’s nice that Christians have apologized for that, but the Jewish cultural aversion to Christianity, Jesus, crosses, etc., runs very deep. For Christians, Judaism is the root and source of their religion, so many Christians are comfortable talking about Judaism. For Jews, Christianity is not just heresy, it’s a threat. It’s heresy that has led to persecution and violence on the one hand, and assimilation and loss of identity on the other hand. Christianity is the dominant culture in most of the countries the majority of Jews have lived in for centuries. Compared with converting to Judaism, it’s very easy to convert to Christianity, and the temptation to convert in order to secure access to an easier way of life was great for many centuries. Many Jewish parents worry about ending up like Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn, the great 18th century rabbi, whose grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn, is one of the most famous Jewish apostates.

Furthermore, many Jews look at doctrines such as the Trinity, and objects such as icons, and conclude that Christianity is a form of idol worship, against which the Jewish tradition takes the strongest possible stand.

So when Christians ask their Jewish friends “what do you think about Jesus?” most Jews are at a loss for words. They know that the biggest theological gulf between Jews and Christians is that we “deny” Jesus. But what exactly is it that we deny? What, or who, do we think this character called Jesus was, anyway? Are Christians idol worshippers?

In this blog post, I am not presenting any kind of authoritative “Jewish view of Jesus.” There is no such thing. I’m just presenting my personal opinion, an opinion that has been shaped by actually reading at least part of the New Testament, by engaging in serious interfaith work with Christians for many years (I teach Torah at a monastery here in Israel once a month, and some of the nuns came to our Chanukah party), and by reading books such as Bruce Chilton’s “Rabbi Jesus,” and Hyam Maccoby’s “The Myth-maker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity.”

I have occasionally been surprised when I meet Christians who are not aware that Jews deny the central theological assumptions of Christianity. To wit, we do not believe:

• That Jesus is part of God, i.e., part of a “Trinity” of God
• That Jesus is the son of God
• That Jesus was born from a virgin mother
• That Jesus was the promised Messiah that Jews have been waiting for

But what do we believe? Who was this Jew, Jesus?

I believe Jesus was a historical figure. The earliest gospels are thought to have been written down only 30-40 years after the death of Jesus. It seems unlikely that he was made up out of whole cloth.

Jesus was a rabbi – a teacher of Torah (the picture at right is a picture of "Rabbi Barry" at "Rabbi Jesus's" synagogue in Capernaum). I think he trained as a rabbi, and had a falling out with his teachers, because, like the great prophets of the Jewish tradition, he was disgusted by the hypocrisy of the upper class authorities, who he saw as being more concerned with shows of piety than with either real piety or concern for their fellow man.

I was browsing through the New Testament the other day, and was struck how there are references that nowadays the only people who would really understand them are rabbis. For example, in Matthew 15:2 it says “Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.” To understand this properly, you need to understand the Talmudic discussion on the topic. Even most Jews wouldn’t get this right, because washing hands before eating bread has become accepted as completely normative for all observant Jews. However, if you go back over 2,000 years ago, it was only the priests, the kohanim, who were required to eat their food in a state of ritual purity, and who therefore had to wash their hands. The Pharisees (a.k.a., “the rabbis”) took it upon themselves as a stringency to conduct themselves like priests, and always washed their hands before eating, and they only ate ritually “pure” food. Washing the hands before eating indicated you were a “chaver,” a learned person, part of the “in group” of people who adopted this custom. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a requirement incumbent upon all Jews. So by not washing before eating bread, Jesus and his disciples were making a political statement that they were aligning with the “common people,” not with the “elite.” It is made clear in the next few verses why: the Pharisees were seen by Jesus as hypocrites, violating the commandment to “honor your parents,” while focusing on ritual observances like hand washing.

Jesus was a revolutionary figure, but it does not seem to be Rome he was revolting against. In a historical context, it seems odd that the Romans would have agreed to put Jesus to death. Jesus was no threat to Rome: he preached a message of passivity in the face of the Romans. His famous speech about “turn the other cheek” is directed at the Roman persecutors. It’s a message of “don’t fight back.” If there was any doubt about his message, in Mark chapter 12 Jesus tells his disciples to give him a coin; “’Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?’ ‘Caesar's,’ they replied. Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they marveled at him.”

Yet his criticism against the Jewish power structure – Pharisee and Sadducee alike – was sharp and pointed. He called them hypocrites – more concerned with shows of piety like washing hands and lengthening prayers – than with caring for people. The story of the Good Samaritan is a stinging indictment of priests and Levites, who are indifferent to a suffering person, while the “outcast,” the “heretic” Samaritan takes care of him. But his indictment of his fellow Jews was no harsher than many previous Jewish prophets, such as Isaiah, who said “Is this the fast I want?.... Is not this rather the fast that I have chosen? to loose the chains of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring the poor, who are cast out, to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover him; and that you hide not yourself from your own flesh?”

Jesus was against false shows of piety – “unnecessary” hand washing, and dragging prayers out excessively (we still make our prayers rather long, don’t we? Typical Yom Kippur service: 5 hours. Typical Christmas Mass 90 minutes). He wasn’t against following Jewish law: in fact, in Matthew chapter 5 Jesus says, "Don't misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.” Jewish followers of Jesus were still expected to follow halacha; it was only his non-Jewish followers who were exempt. Jesus was, however, certainly less strict than the Pharisees. I suppose many liberal Jews today would approve of Jesus’ teaching that “the Sabbath was made to serve man, not man to serve the Sabbath.”

Jews wouldn’t call Jesus a prophet, because we say the era of prophecy ended with Malachi, yet his message was one that was clearly in the prophetic tradition.
So if Jesus was a rabbi, what do we make of his followers who turned him into God? Is Christianity, the Trinity, etc., a form of idol worship?

The answer to that one is “no.” Christians are very clear that there is only one God. That one God is expressed in a tripartite form of “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” but Christian doctrine is clear that they are all part of only one God. I think of the Christian concept of the Trinity as similar to the Kabbalistic concept of the ten sefirot, different ways God has of manifesting Himself in the world.

What about the icons, the images, etc., in a church that Christians seem to worship? Isn’t that idol worship? The answer again, is “no.” Christians do not worship relics (remains of saints, or objects associated with Jesus). Saint Jerome declared, "We do not worship, we do not adore, for fear that we should bow down to the creature rather than to the creator, but we venerate the relics of the martyrs in order the better to adore him whose martyrs they are." While it is true that some Christians believe relics or icons have healing power, that seems to be similar to some Jewish superstitions about things like wearing red strings on your wrist. Generally speaking, icons and such are simply used as objects to focus one’s concentration, the way that Jews use a “mizrach,” a wall plaque with phrases or God’s name on it, that we put on the wall facing Israel (or here in Israel facing Jerusalem or the Temple Mount) to help us focus our prayers.

My own view, informed by Maccoby’s excellent book, is that the “Jewish” parts of the Christian tradition are likely the parts attributable to Jesus, and the elements that seem very foreign to Judaism – virgin birth, the deity in human form, “God” born of a woman, the symbolism of transubstantiation in Communion – are elements that were imported from Greek thought and traditions by Paul.

So as Jews, it is clear that we do not accept Jesus as part of God, or I should say at least no more part of God than any of the rest of us (after all, kabbalistically, the ultimate level of God is “Ein Sof,” the infinite, and we are all part of that infinite oneness as well). What about the Messiah part? How do we Jews react to that?

We do not believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah of our tradition because one look at the world around us shows that it is still a very broken place. We do not yet live in the era of peace and prosperity prophesied by Isaiah. What we are waiting for is what Christians call the “second coming.” However, and most Jews may not have thought about it this way, at the same time I have no trouble acknowledging that Jesus has indeed been a PERSONAL savior many millions of people. There is no doubt that there are many people whose lives have been completely transformed, who have been saved from a life of fear, or hate, or drugs and despair, thanks to their belief in Jesus. So to that extent he has been a force for good.

And that is a point that “ardent atheists” like the late Christopher Hitchens miss. Hitchens, a famous and very articulate essayist, who only learned as an adult that he was born a Jew, wrote a book called “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” Hitchens wrote that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." Hitchens was an equal opportunity basher – it didn’t matter what religion you practiced, it was messed up. He thought that Hanukkah was celebrating a “disaster,” it would have been much better for the Hellenized, more secular Jews, to have come out on top.

The bad things that happen in the name of religion are obvious: wars, hatred, anti-Semitism, etc. The good things are less obvious: the lives transformed, the soup kitchens, the care for other people. The Torah tells us “the inclination of man is evil from his youth.” We don’t need religion to be evil. Coming off of centuries of church-sanctioned anti-Semitism, it can be hard for Jews to acknowledge the positive aspects of Christianity, but they clearly do exist.

The thawing of relations between Jews and Christians has led many Christians to develop an interest in the Jewish roots of Christianity, hence books such as Chilton’s. Perhaps as a sign that New Testament studies are becoming less “off limits” for Jews, there is a new book, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” that I’m looking forward to reading which is a Jewish scholarly commentary on the NT. I think it will help interfaith dialog: many Jews who would not otherwise feel comfortable picking up the NT may feel comfortable reading it with a commentary that looks at it from a Jewish perspective – and I mean a “real” Jewish perspective, not a “Jews for Jesus” perspective.

At this time of year, as the Christians celebrate “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men,” may the rest of us also join that spirit of good will, and learn to love and respect one another.

Amen.

And Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manashe; For God, said he, has made me forget all my toil, and all my father’s house. And the name of the second he called Ephraim; For God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction. ...Genesis chapter 41:51-52

Is it such a bad thing for “Abba” to become “Daddy?”

The Israeli Department of Immigration recently faced an uproar of criticism for a campaign to try to get Israelis living in America to move back to Israel. The campaign featured billboards and videos warning against the dangers of assimilation – punch lines (in Hebrew) included הגיע הזמן לחזור לארץDADDYלפני שאבא יהפוך ל “Before ‘Abba’ becomes ‘Daddy,’ it’s time to return to Israel.” One aimed at the grandparents back in Israel said “Help them return to Israel -- before Chanukah becomes Christmas.”

Many American Jews were insulted – the ads implied that you can’t live a full Jewish life outside of Israel.

Of course that’s wrong, and it’s always been wrong.

Two of the Jewish tradition’s most important heroes – Moses and Joseph – came from assimilated backgrounds.

In this week’s Torah portion, Miketz, Joseph is living in Egypt. He has a comfortable life, like many American Jews. He rises to a position of power, equivalent to “vice president,” the same position that another Jew, Joseph Lieberman, was pursuing in America.

Joseph – in Egypt given the name “Tzafnat Paneach” – is so comfortable with his assimilation that he names his first born son in honor of forgetting the past. Menashe is based on nasha, which means to forget, forsake, neglect, or abandon. Joseph has left his past behind. His second son’s name, Ephraim, from the word pri, to be fruitful, honors his lot in life by saying things have turned out well despite a difficult start.

And things turned out well BECAUSE he had successfully assimilated into Egyptian society.

There are many people in Israel even more extreme than the Ministry of Immigration. People who believe it’s not enough to live in Israel, who believe you have to further isolate yourself in a community of people just like yourself, isolated from any “foreign” influences if you want to stay true to your Jewish heritage. See for example the Ashkenazi charedim who don’t want their daughters studying with those lax Sephardi charedim.

But there is a much better approach, one formulated by the Zionist philosopher Ahad haAm – which is to see Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora as each having something to contribute to the other, nourishing each other, supporting each other, enriching each other.

Maimonides is one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of all time. Yet many of his ideas about God, now considered normative Judaism, were strongly influenced by Greek philosophy – which he learned in Arabic.

Cultural influences also go back and forth. Last week at the synagogue I attend here in Jerusalem, the prayer leader used the tune for Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the Kedushah during the Amidah. We’re now in the midst of Hanukah; my kids are certainly glad that we adopted the custom of giving gifts at our winter holiday. A custom we brought with us to Israel, it’s really more an American Jewish custom. And in the spirit of Ahad Haam, we give back to the cultures of the countries where we live – Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld are as American as they are Jewish.

This week’s Torah reading shows us that Jews living in foreign lands play a vital role in the survival of the Jewish people. And it shows us that living outside Israel does not automatically mean giving up your Judaism. On Friday nights we traditionally bless sons by saying “y’simkha Elohim k’Efraim u’Menashe,” “May God make you like Ephraim and Menashe.” The sons of Joseph – assimilated Jews, who lived comfortable lives in Egypt – are our role models. For despite the attractions of Egypt, they remained Jews, and their descendants remained Jews.

As many have observed, the challenge to Jews in America is not that the Christians want to kill us: it’s that they want to marry us. Intermarriage can and often does lead to children not being raised Jewish – but it can also lead to the non-Jewish partner becoming Jewish. In rare cases, such as mine, it can even lead to the Jewish partner becoming a rabbi.

My family and I have chosen to live our lives in Israel, which I do believe is the fullest possible expression of Judaism. But I also believe the implied criticism of Jewish life in America expressed in the Department of Immigration ads was off base. It’s better for Israel and the Diaspora to find ways to strengthen and complement each other. Especially during these days of Hanukah, the holiday that celebrates a rededication to Yiddishkeit, let us rededicate and strengthen the relationships between Jews all over the world.

Chag urim sameach,

Reb Barry