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‘If Only Jews Would Keep the Torah as ’SECULARS’ Its Light Would Better Them Over Time!’

A major topic of this year’s General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America is how to combat assimilation. At the conference, which is being held in Jerusalem this week, JFNA leaders have unveiled various ambitious ideas, including free universal Jewish preschool. I’d like to offer a much simpler proposal: Just stop dumbing down Judaism. American Jews overwhelmingly receive excellent secular educations; they are exposed to the most challenging, rigorous, thought-provoking material available in science, philosophy, history, and literature. Yet they rarely encounter Judaism at a level more intellectually challenging than a kindergarten class. And as long as that’s true, Judaism will never be able to compete with the secular world for their attention.

Ironically, the Orthodox were way ahead of the non-Orthodox in grasping this, and it’s one reason why Orthodox retention rates are currently much higher than non-Orthodox ones. As far back as 1917, one of Poland’s leading Orthodox rabbis, the Chofetz Chaim, approved the opening of Bais Yaakov, the first school to teach Torah to girls. His reasoning was simple: It had become normal for girls to attend secular schools, and if they didn’t obtain a comparable Jewish education, they wouldn’t stay Jewish. The same understanding fueled the opening of numerous high-level women’s yeshivas in recent decades: Today, girls routinely attend not just secondary school, but college and graduate school; hence their Jewish learning must also be on a higher level.

But in the non-Orthodox community, Jewish education never comes close to the intellectual rigor of secular studies. Almost every American Jew who has attended a non-Orthodox Hebrew school can attest to this; just last week, the Forward ran a piece by an associate professor, Michah Gottlieb, deploring the lack of opportunities for serious Torah study at his childhood synagogue. My own experience is equally typical: During 12 years of Hebrew school, the numbing boredom was punctured by only two classes that offered comparable intellectual stimulation to my secular public schools–and both were taught by Orthodox rabbis. The difference was that they took classic Jewish texts seriously, insisting that we read, analyze, and debate them with the same rigor I encountered in secular history or literature classes.

The good news is that, given a chance, Judaism can easily compete with the best secular thought has to offer. There’s a reason why Jewish sources have inspired some of the greatest non-Jewish writers and thinkers throughout the ages–including many of the 17th-century political theorists who laid the foundations of modern democracy. As Herzl Institute President Yoram Hazony noted in a 2005 essay, “Hobbes was learned in Hebrew, and his magnum opus Leviathan devotes over three hundred pages to the political teachings of Scripture. Locke knew Hebrew as well, and the first of his Two Treatises on Government is devoted to biblical interpretation … [John Selden’s] 1635 treatise on the law of the sea, Mare Clausum—one of the founding texts of international law—argued for the concept of national sovereignty on both land and sea on the basis of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.”

In Israel, serious study of classic Jewish sources has exploded in recent years–not because secular Jews are becoming Orthodox, but because they’ve understood that these texts are their heritage, too. American Jews need to offer their children similar opportunities. For without being exposed to Judaism’s intellectual riches, they will never consider it worth a lifetime’s commitment.

Evelyn Gordon, who writes for Commentary’s blog, is a journalist and commentator living in Israel.

The Yom Kippur War: When ‘Stupidity’ Is That Great, It’s Time to Consider ‘Malice’…

What Really Happened in the “Yom Kippur” War?

by ISRAEL SHAMIR

Moscow

Here in Moscow I recently received a dark-blue folder dated 1975. It contains one of the most well-buried secrets of Middle Eastern and of US diplomacy. The secret file, written by the Soviet Ambassador in Cairo, Vladimir M. Vinogradov, apparently a draft for a memorandum addressed to the Soviet politbureau, describes the 1973 October War as a collusive enterprise between US, Egyptian and Israeli leaders, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger. If you are an Egyptian reader this revelation is likely to upset you. I, an Israeli who fought the Egyptians in the 1973 war, was equally upset and distressed, – yet still excited by the discovery. For an American it is likely to come as a shock.

According to the Vinogradov memo (to be published by us in full in the Russian weekly Expert next Monday), Anwar al-Sadat, holder of the titles of President, Prime Minister, ASU Chairman, Chief Commander, Supreme Military Ruler, entered into conspiracy with the Israelis, betrayed his ally Syria, condemned the Syrian army to destruction and Damascus to bombardment, allowed General Sharon’s tanks to cross without hindrance to the western bank of the Suez Canal, and actually planned a defeat of the Egyptian troops in the October War. Egyptian soldiers and officers bravely and successfully fought the Israeli enemy – too successfully for Sadat’s liking as he began the war in order to allow for the US comeback to the Middle East.

He was not the only conspirator: according to Vinogradov, the grandmotherly Golda Meir knowingly sacrificed two thousand of Israel’s best fighters – she possibly thought fewer would be killed — in order to give Sadat his moment of glory and to let the US  secure its positions in the Middle East. The memo allows for a completely new interpretation of the Camp David Treaty, as one achieved by deceit and treachery.

Vladimir Vinogradov was a prominent and brilliant Soviet diplomat; he served as ambassador to Tokyo in the 1960s, to Cairo from 1970 to 1974, co-chairman of the Geneva Peace Conference,  ambassador to Teheran during the Islamic revolution, the USSR Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. He was a gifted painter and a prolific writer; his archive has hundreds of pages of unique observations and notes covering international affairs, but the place of honor goes to his Cairo diaries, and among others, descriptions of his hundreds of meetings with Sadat and the full sequence of the war as he observed it unfold at  Sadat’s HQ as the big decisions were made. When published, these notes will allow to re-evaluate the post-Nasser period of Egyptian history.

Vinogradov arrived in Cairo for Nasser’s funeral and remained there as the Ambassador. He recorded the creeping coup of Sadat,  least bright of Nasser’s men, who became Egypt’s president by chance, as he was the vice-president at Nasser’s death. Soon he dismissed, purged and imprisoned practically all important Egyptian politicians, the comrades-in-arms of Gamal Abd el Nasser, and dismantled the edifice of Nasser’s socialism. Vinogradov was an astute observer; not a conspiracy cuckoo. Far from being headstrong and  doctrinaire, he was a friend of Arabs and a consistent supporter and promoter of a lasting and just peace between the Arabs and Israel, a peace that would meet  Palestinian needs and ensure Jewish prosperity.

The pearl of his archive is the file called The Middle Eastern Games. It contains some 20 typewritten pages edited by hand in blue ink, apparently a draft for a memo to the Politburo and to the government, dated January 1975, soon after his return from Cairo. The file contains the deadly secret of the collusion he observed. It is written in lively and highly readable Russian, not in the bureaucratese we’d expect. Two pages are added to the file in May 1975; they describe Vinogradov’s visit to Amman and his informal talks with Abu Zeid Rifai, the Prime Minister, and his exchange of views with the Soviet Ambassador in Damascus. Vinogradov did not voice his opinions until 1998, and even then he did not speak as openly as in this draft. Actually, when the suggestion of collusion was presented to him by the Jordanian prime minister, being a prudent diplomat, he refused to discuss it.

The official version of the October war holds that on  October  6, 1973, in conjunction with Hafez al-Assad of Syria, Anwar as-Sadat launched a surprise attack against Israeli forces. They crossed the Canal and advanced a few miles into the occupied Sinai. As the war progressed, tanks of General Ariel Sharon  crossed the Suez Canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army. The ceasefire negotiations eventually led to the handshake at the White House.

For me, the Yom Kippur War (as we called it) was an important part of my autobiography. A young paratrooper, I fought that war, crossed the canal, seized Gabal Ataka heights, survived shelling and face-to-face battles, buried my buddies, shot the man-eating red dogs of the desert and the enemy tanks. My unit was ferried by helicopters into the desert where we severed the main communication line between the Egyptian armies and its home base, the Suez-Cairo highway. Our location at 101 km to Cairo was used for the first cease fire talks; so I know that war not by word of mouth, and it hurts to learn that I and my comrades-at-arms were just disposable tokens in the ruthless game we – ordinary people – lost. Obviously I did not know it then,  for me the war was a surprise, but then,  I was not a general.

Vinogradov dispels the idea of surprise: in his view, both the canal crossing by the Egyptians and the inroads by Sharon were planned and agreed upon in advance by Kissinger, Sadat, and Meir. The plan included the destruction of the Syrian army as well.

At first, he asks some questions: how the crossing could be a surprise if the Russians evacuated their families a few days before the war? The concentration of the forces was observable and could not escape Israeli attention. Why did the Egyptian forces not proceed after the crossing but stood still? Why did they have no plans for advancing? Why there was a forty km-wide unguarded gap between the 2d and the 3d armies, the gap that invited Sharon’s raid? How could Israeli tanks sneak to the western bank of the Canal? Why did Sadat refuse to stop them? Why were there no reserve forces on the western bank of the Canal?

Vinogradov takes a leaf from Sherlock Holmes who said: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. He writes: These questions can’t be answered if Sadat is to be considered a true patriot of Egypt. But they can be answered in full if we consider a possibility of collusion between Sadat, the US, and Israeli leadership – a conspiracy in which each participant pursued his own goals. A conspiracy in which each participant did not know the full details of other participants’ game.  A conspiracy in which each participant tried to gain more ground despite the overall agreement between them.

Continue reading…

From CounterPunch, here.

Why Exactly ‘Seven Wisdoms’ (Trivium+Quadrivium=7 Liberal Arts)? No Reason!

Should one study secular subjects, independently of Torah?

Summary: Is the Maharsham correct that a talmid chacham should gain all secular knowledge from Torah, parallel to the menorah which was beaten out of one piece of molten gold?
Post: The following gem, from Revach.net, relevant to parashat Terumah:

Parshas Truma: Maharsham – A Talmid Chochom Must Have Worldly Wisdom
The Menora had seven branches, but needed to be made out of one solid piece of gold that was hammered into shape. Why was this so essential? Why couldn’t it be made out of separate chunks of gold to make it easier to make? 
The Maharsham (Tcheiles Mordechai) explains that these seven branches represent the seven secular wisdoms of the world. The Menora represents Torah and a talmid chochom must know all these wisdoms. If each branch was developed separately and then added to the menora, one would think that a talmid chochom must study each one of these subjects independently in order to complete his wisdom. 
Hashem cmmanded Moshe to make the seven branches by shaping it out of one piece, the Torah. One must study Torah, and from plumbing the depths of the Torah he can know all the wisdom of the world, if he is willing to work hard and bang and shape himself.

You can see this Maharsham inside, in Techelet Mordechai on parashat Terumah:

“In Shemot Rabba and in Rashi, that Moshe had difficulty with the form of the menorah, and Hashem showed him a menorah of fire. And there is to say that behold, this that it was made all of molten gold, and was not made piece by piece, but was rather hammered with a sledgehammer — it appears to me that the seven branches of the menorah hint at the seven branches of wisdom. And that it should not arise in one’s mind that a talmid chacham needs to learn each one by itself. This is not so, for in the Torah is hidden all wisdom, and if he merits it, he will attain all of it from the Torah. And in Shas, in the first perek of Bechorot (8a), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya derived the gestation period for a snake, something which the scholars of philosophy were unable to attain! And since the snake caused sin to come to the world and brought death to the world, and the Torah is the Tree of Life, to fix the sin of the snake, whose gestation is seven years, therefore the Menorah was made of gold and hammered with a sledgehammer to hammer out {להפשיט} the seven branches. And this is what is stated {Yirmeyahu 23:29}:

כט  הֲלוֹא כֹה דְבָרִי כָּאֵשׁ, נְאֻם-ה; וּכְפַטִּישׁ, יְפֹצֵץ סָלַע.  {ס}29 Is not My word like as fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? {S}

And Moshe did not understand the intent behind this. Therefore he showed him the menorah of fire, which is like a hammer which breaketh the rock in pieces, and out of which all spreads.”

This ends the Maharasham.

Yet, I wonder if that is indeed true. Here is a non-comprehensive list of Tannaim and Amoraim who did not get their all their secular knowledge from the Torah, but rather by study or consulting secular experts, from the book Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud, by Fred Rosner:

More than that. It is funny how everyone always cites this gemara about Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya as comprehensive proof that you can get all knowledge from the Torah. While this may indeed be the intent of the statement, as a matter of fact, the gestation period of the snake is NOT seven years. And the gestation period of other animals listed in that gemara are also off! See here and here.

Furthermore, we have practical experience of rabbis who did NOT gain their knowledge from secular study, but from the Torah. The result is a gadol who believes that Jews have a different number of teeth than gentiles. And people who believe as a matter of faith, based on a Malbim and a Chasam Sofer, that a pomegranate has exactly 613 seeds. Torah scholars do need to study secular subjects, in order to be familiar enough with metzius to pasken.

Nowadays, we have the luxury of studying secular subjects in a kosher Torah atmosphere, and it need not be a threat to our faith. The Maharsham, Rabbi Shalom Mordechai Schwadron, did not have this luxury. He had to contend with haskalah and early Reform. But it would be an error to take a polemic written in one intellectual and social environment and blindly apply it to our own.

The seven branches of wisdom he is referring to, by the way, are the trivium and the quadrivium. These are:

    • grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.

But those are a result of a historical accident, not because there are intrinsically precisely seven subjects.