Category Archives: Current Events

Conclusions

Posted on November 6, 2009 | 1 comment

World Trade Center I (1993).

World Trade Center II (2001).

September 11, 2001.

Richard Reid, Shoe Bomber, December 2001.

El Sayid Nosair (assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, November 1990)

John Muhammed (Beltway sniper, 10 murdered, 2002).

Abdul Muhammed (Little Rock, Arkansas, Army recruitment center, one person murdered, 2009).

Nadil Hassan (Fort Hood, November 5, 2009, twelve murdered).

President Obama, November 6, 2009: “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Now, what conclusions could we possible come to ? That each of these terrorist murderers was a Muslim ? That Americans should be on guard against a fifth column that might number in the thousands, that is not reluctant to kill or to die, that serves a master that loves death more than we love life, that is part of a new world jihad ? Certainly no sane person would jump to any of those conclusions.

So the New York Times eight hours after the incident preferred to report that the shooter had “expressed no religious preference,” attempting to conceal his Muslim identity. And others – often Muslim apologists but not exclusively so – will pretend that this was an anti-war act having nothing to do with Islam, or the result of the stresses of serving (poorly) in the combat zone of Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington or his forthcoming deployment to the Middle East.

And people will find fault with the Army – why didn’t they foresee these horrific crimes given Hassan’s anti-American rants in the last year or two ? – to which the answer is: had he been discharged, or prosecuted, or demoted, or treated, he would have cried “anti-Muslim discrimination!” and “freedom of speech!” and his discharge would have been a cause celebre, and the anti-American and anti-Jewish haters at CAIR would have wrapped themselves in the flag and the Constitution defending his rights and lamenting his mistreatment. And most Americans would have joined them, and like sheep continue to tolerate the spectacle of old women with arthritis having to remove their shoes at airport security lest “good people” be accused of profiling the only targets.

These arguments – much like the Goldstone Report that is attempting to deny Israel any right of self-defense (more on that next week) are not serious arguments but ploys, rhetorical tricks that are seducing an entire generation – including politicians – that does not want to ever jump to conclusions, or, better said, just report the obvious.

And those who warn constantly of the threat of the home grown jihad will continue preaching to the few who will listen, unable to attract the attention those will not even crawl to conclusions, much less jump to them.

Hassan’s profile appears much like Israel’s bulldozer terrorists – people who exhibited no prior signs of violent behavior, and “appear” to have snapped. But “appearances” deceive. We will never learn, but can suspect, that there are sleeper cells among us that are activated at the will of the terrorists – that seem then to be random attacks but are not random at all.

Certainly we cannot jump to conclusions. But if we did, we could state the glaring and obvious reality that the last 25 years has banged us over the head with: not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. And when all terrorists emerge from one group, then measures can be taken within that group – if the will is there – and from outside that group in order to protect society from their madness.

We can choose to see, or choose to not see. Americans who avoid conclusions choose not to see, and when those Americans are in positions of power and influence, we are all in danger.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events

The Pursuit of Happiness

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Comments Off

The Declaration of Independence acknowledged that mankind is endowed with a number of “unalienable rights,” among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” While the first two rights are generally understood in both general and specific forms – government cannot capriciously take another person’s life or encroach on his liberty – it is the third that has proved most vexing to define, categorize, quantify and achieve. Note, as many have, that there is no guaranteed right to happiness; rather the right is defined as the pursuit of happiness – each person in his/her own way. And therein lies the hoary problem: if it is a pursuit, how do we know where to find it? In what direction do we turn in order to commence our pursuit of happiness, and at what point do we say that we have found it?

A traditional Torah definition – happiness is the state of satisfaction of a being fulfilling the purpose for which it was created – is both provocative and accurate, but also requires additional explication. Fortunately, modern man quantifies, analyzes, measures and concludes from an inordinate amount of hard date – even in the realm of happiness – that leaves us capable of finding appropriate guidance. Thus, for the last 45 years, almost a third of Americans have consistently defined themselves as “very happy,” and despite great fluctuations during this time in income, social trends, and national stability (1972-30%; 1982-31%; 1993-32%; and 2004-31%). It is remarkably consistent.

These are the findings of a recent book by Syracuse University economics professor Arthur C. Brooks, entitled “Gross National Happiness.” Of course, the most critically important data delineate exactly what each person should want to know – what makes happy people happy? In what realms should we seek to find happiness, and what aspects of life should be enhanced? His conclusions are illuminating, at first glance somewhat surprising, and, upon reflection, most comforting to the Torah Jew.

For example, political conservatives have always polled significantly higher than political liberals on the “very happy” chart – averaging between 10-15% points higher, with the two groups only intersecting in 1974 and 1985. Equal percentages of secular liberals say they are “very happy” and “not too happy” (22%), whereas religious conservatives are ten times more likely to say they are “very happy” than “not too happy” (50%-5%). These statistics transcend ethnic groups and income levels. Religious liberals say they are as happy as secular conservatives (33%).

There are a number of reasons for this, all instructive. Conservatives generally value the role of the individual in society, and place much more emphasis on individual initiative and personal responsibility. Liberals tend to focus on the collective. Conservatives, thus, usually donate more money to charity than do liberals, volunteer more, and even donate more blood. Liberals generally support government solutions to social problems (health

coverage reform, anyone?), and therefore see their primary role as inducing government to act on behalf of the less fortunate. What is relevant here is not which group is more politically successful or logical, but that it is much easier to feel successful when one can rely on his own actions than when it is necessary to rely on the actions of everyone else, especially since the acts of the collective (even successful ones) do not necessarily reflect any individual accomplishment.

Furthermore, liberals are generally discontented with the state of society, and see injustice, victimization, and discrimination everywhere. They are forever, like the mythical Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill and watching it roll down again, and are therefore less likely to feel happy than conservatives who wish to “conserve” the status quo, for better or for worse.

Even more to the point, and most reflective of America’s divisions today, conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to attend weekly religious services, and liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to never attend religious services. And conservatives are also much more likely to be married (2/3) than liberals (only 1/3), and more likely to have children and to have larger families than do liberals. (Children, oddly, decrease short-term happiness but increase long-term happiness.) Married conservatives are three times more likely to say they are “very happy” than are single liberals. Married people generally are six times more likely to say they are “very happy” (they had better!) than unmarried people. Almost twice as many religious people say they are “very happy” when compared with secular people (43%-23%). (Interestingly, agnostics are gloomier people than atheists.) Why ?

Religious people are more likely to be part of a nurturing community (social integration is a key determinant of happiness) and people who live in religious communities tend also to be more financially successful – because those communities reinforce a culture of hard work and prosperity. Religious people also have an innate purpose in life that affords meaning even to the most mundane aspects of life. It is understandable then that – to take the two extremes – 52% of married, religious, conservative people with children describe themselves as “very happy,” whereas only 14% of secular, single liberals without children describe themselves in that way. That validates, to an extent, Tolstoy’s observation at the beginning of “Anna Karenina” that “all happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In another subset, people who donate money to charity are 43% more likely than non-givers to say they are “very happy,” and volunteers are 42% more likely to be “very happy” than people who never volunteer.

All these numbers are exhaustively and comprehensively crunched in this engaging book – you can literally look it up – and all to tell us what we already know (!).

The keys to happiness are:

Faith: “Serve Hashem with joy, come before His presence with song” (Tehillim 100:2) and “be glad of heart, all who seek Hashem” (Tehillim 105:3).

Marriage:“It is not good for man to dwell alone, I will make a helper for him” (Breisheet 2:18).

Work: “When you eat the labor of your own hands, you are happy, and it is good for you” (Tehillim 128:2).

To be sure, there are plenty of unhappy conservatives, unhappy religious people, unhappy marrieds, happy liberals, happy singles and happy seculars – so none of this affects the life of any individual person who still must make his/her own choices. Abraham Lincoln said that “most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” And, of course, life throws us its curves every now and then that necessitate adjustments, and cause temporary variations in our happiness levels.. But the overall message for us is one that is worth summarizing and internalizing: How does one pursue happiness ? Get married, start a family, stay married, go to shul, do mitzvot, give tzedaka, do acts of chesed, work hard and be a friend to others.

And realize that these are Hashem’s blessings that He bestows according to His will.

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Posted in 1, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Machshava/Jewish Thought

The Changing World

Posted on October 25, 2009 | Comments Off

The Great Flood is re-visited annually in the Torah reading, and it is often helpful to return to basics and ask a simple question: why did all of mankind (except Noah and family) have to die? G-d promises the “end of all flesh” because of their wickedness, corruption and violence, but why? If a parent has five children, and four misbehave persistently and grievously, we don’t take the four out back and shoot them, and rebuild through the fifth! So why didn’t G-d talk to that generation, negotiate with them, dialogue with them – in our parlance, and try to solve the world’s problems without violence – instead of drowning away all His disappointments, so to speak? The answer reveals as much about our world as it does about theirs.

The story’s hero, of course, is the righteous Noah, but who are the villains? Everybody else? Eventually, yes, but the Torah focuses on two groups that led everyone down the primrose path to destruction. One was called the “Bane Healthy” – literally, the sons of G-d or the sons of the powerful, and they were influenced by the “Nefilim” – literally, the fallen ones, and together the devastated the world. But who were these two groups, and from where did the fallen ones fall?

Finally, G-d ultimately concluded that He must destroy them, because “I have reconsidered having made them.” But how does G-d reconsider anything? What happened that G-d, so to speak, did not anticipate?

There were two major changes that occurred after the flood that explain the “reconsideration” – and both for the identical reason. G-d created man as a being with free will, and with the scales of free choice evenly balanced. Adam stumbled, to be sure, but then man was placed in an environment where he could indulge his soul and pursue spiritual delights for centuries on end. He could sow once and have enough food to last forty years; he was living for 700-800-900 years in perfect health (without fear that politicians – income re-distributionists – would take away his Medicare advantage or otherwise bankrupt Social Security). Every need was taken care of – man had every possible opportunity to nurture the divine image within him – the tzelem elokim.

But it was too much – man had too much luxury and leisure, temptation was too great, and G-d’s moral strictures were perceived as both elective and ephemeral. It did not have to be like that – Noah was proof of that. But after the flood, the power of the instinctual forces were greatly diminished: the land was never again as fertile, and man would have to work, and work, hard, to earn a living; the change of seasons – cold and heat, summer and winter – were all challenges that man had to overcome in order to survive – and survive he would but for dramatically reduced life spans – from the high hundreds to the low hundreds, and then, for most, to less than 100 years. Longevity and leisure were inducements to sin. Nature itself changed – but man could not have survived the turbulence that accompanied the dramatic change of nature – effectively, a “new” creation – so it was a divine act of kindness that G-d took mankind at once in the flood. The global environment posed too difficult an obstacle for man to overcome – except for Noah, and a system that is adhered too by only one person cannot long endure.

And there was another great stumbling block – the Nefilim. Who were these fallen ones? Perhaps the following is plausible: there are, of course, credible accounts of what is called pre-historic man (man pre-Adam), which should not pose any problem to Torah Jews. The Ramban indicates that the unique creation of Adam was that he was a nefesh chaya, infused with a soul, with the divine image, that rendered him an ish acher, a different type of “man, in implied contrast to other beings that possessed a similar form to his – but were not created in G-d’s image. (Thus Chava could eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and give her husband to eat as well, Rashi says, for “fear that she would die and leave Adam to marry someone else.” But who else – the shidduch pool was very small ? And the answer would be one of these human-like creatures that looked the same, but was not endowed with a soul, with a tzelem elokim, and lacked any moral sensibility at all.

These were the Nefilim, “fallen ones” because they had never risen to Adam’s level – but they successfully corrupted the “Bnei Elohim,” the children of G-d, i.e., the descendants of Adam, and for the most obvious reason: a society cannot endure if it has different rules for different people, if the law doesn’t apply equally, if one group (Adam’s descendants) lives with moral restraint and another (the Nefilim) with immoral abandon.

G-d “reconsidered” the ground rules of creation, in the sense that the global environment and man’s social environment were hopelessly corrupted. Man’s “free choice” was mostly incapable of living in luxury and making virtuous choices, and it was untenable, in a sense, to ask beings with free choice and consequences for those choices to live in harmony with beings without free choice and no consequences for those choices. No one likes double standards – and a society that is founded on it cannot long sustain itself.

That is what Roman Polanski has just learned, to his utter surprise, and to the chagrin of the other inhabitants of his amoral Hollywood universe – civilized society does have rules – but that is what Jews live with constantly. And it makes life unpleasant.

What is the Goldstone Report? Rather than admit that Jews have a right to defend themselves, the world would rather completely transform the rules of war – essentially arguing that an attacked party cannot respond if civilians might be harmed (a most novel, unprecedented and bizarre interpretation – and one that no nation has any intention of ever applying elsewhere but to Israel. How obscene is it that Russia, that killed thousand of civilians in Chechnya, and Sudan, that has killed millions of civilians in Darfur, sit in judgment of Israel, and with a straight face, and without a hint of irony or shame. Mind-boggling.

It is hard to live in such a world – hard to maintain any aspirations for moral goodness in such a world. If Israel is to be criticized anyway even though it tried to avoid any civilian casualties, why bother making the effort? Do what all other nations do. It is hard to justify the continued existence of such a world. But Noah was spared, and in a sense, so are we, in generation after generation, century after century, in society after society across the globe, so we can continue to point out – often to the remnants of the amoral Nefilim who surround us – what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, what is the word of G-d and what is the falsification of the word of G-d.

That remains our mission, in this irrevocably hostile world, as Isaiah prophesied, to be “a witness to the nations and a commander to their regimes,” so that eventually they will join us to bring glory to our Creator.

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

Premature Congratulation

Posted on October 9, 2009 | 3 comments

At almost every Jewish wedding I have attended (40-50 annually), immediately after the first dance, a chorus, often led by the (occasionally off-key) newlywed husband, serenades the new wife with a rousing rendition of Eishet Chayil, the paean to the Jewish woman, wife and mother found in Proverbs, Chapter 31. And I usually think to myself: “Really ? ‘A woman of valor’ ? Already ? Shouldn’t the husband at least wait until she cooks a meal, or performs some other wifely function, or at least he gets to know her a little better – before pronouncing her in front of hundreds of people an “eishet chayil” ? It seems just a tad premature, an exercise in wishful thinking.

Well, perhaps not. President Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his work on behalf of…his diplomatic initiative in…for bringing peace to… I am not quite sure. It is quite a mystery. Certainly, he has made some nice speeches, and has articulated a vision – albeit unrealistic, even slightly preposterous – of world disarmament, universal peace, and friendship among all nations (he is a little light on the freedom and democracy talk), but shouldn’t a prize carry the expectation of some accomplishment in the field in question ? Doesn’t the baseball MVP actually have to play the game ?

Usually, one would not bestow a prestigious art award on someone who has a fine canvas and a variety of paints but has not yet painted anything, nor would we declare a child who has just learned aleph-bet a “Gaon.” It is also appropriate – and healthier – to wait until bananas actually turn yellow before consuming them. This must be different.

Most other Peace awardees have actually achieved something in the area of peace and diplomacy, rather than merely spoken about the subject. Contrast Obama with the only two other American presidents to win the Peace Prize while still in office: Theodore Roosevelt (1906, for negotiating the end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905) and Woodrow Wilson (1919, for his Fourteen Points, and his creation of the League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference at the conclusion of World War I. President Obama take note: Congress wasn’t as impressed, and refused to ratify America’s participation in the League).

Say what you will, but those were accomplishments. Ditto most of the other honorees, even though some had a debatable connection to “peace” (Al Gore, in 2006, for sounding a shrill, unending alarm on global warming ?). Even Jimmy Carter (2002), who was associated with a host of disreputable causes, at least did something. Is there an anticipatory award, a motivational award ? None that I am aware of.

Certainly, the Nobel Peace Prize has made some dubious choices. The trio of Rabin, Peres and Arafat (!) won the 1994 award, just in time for Arafat to escalate his terror war against Israel that lasts until today. But at least they had an impressive signing ceremony. This ? I must be missing something.

Some of it is anti-Bush (as in Cater and Gore), some of it is reflexive European satisfaction at Obama’s constant apologizing for America’s perceived sins, some of it might be the hope that Obama follows through on his rhetoric, and some of it might be a preemptive strike to induce Obama not to send more troops to Afghanistan, not to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and to abandon Iraq prematurely. Or perhaps, with the world at war in so many places, there were no other choices that were meaningful – like there were none from 1939-1943, and so no award was given then. Unlike now. But a new standard has been set: maybe next year Ahmadinejad will win the Nobel Peace Prize for not using his nuclear weapons anywhere. The bar has been set very low.

The real question is: where can Obama go from here ? He might be peaking too soon. Now might be the time for his diehard supporters to seek a repeal of the 22^nd Amendment that currently limits a president to only two terms and therefore was clearly racist in intent (it preceded the civil rights movement by more than ten years.). Many feel he is the Messiah – he himself jokes about it – so his only promotion is to the deity. Of course, he can win the NBA Most Valuable Player Award this year, because he talks such a good game. His failure to join a team is a technicality. The world loves him, far more than the American people.

Fortunately, the Nobel people have the capacity to honor him for years into the future. Extrapolating from today’s award, it is clear that Obama should win the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature (he has written two fine books – about himself, but fine books); the 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine (for his achievements in the field of health care, whether or not his reforms pass); the 2012 Nobel Prize for Science for successfully shifting the alarm from “global warming” to “climate change” (which I have actually experienced in my Succa from the beginning of the holiday until today); and, of course, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics for his most novel theories: health care for all while reducing costs, jobs for all while reducing the deficit, spending money that one does not have as a sign of compassion, and – the most classic – demonstrating how a government takeover of the economy brought prosperity to America and the world.

And a permanent, annual award for bringing hope and change to mankind. Congratulations !

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events