Rabbi Pruzansky's Blog

Imagine a person who gains an average of ten pounds a year. After a decade, having gained 100 pounds, he decides to go on a weight-loss program during which he will gain only 8 pounds a year. He then boasts that he is losing weight, at a rate of two pounds a year. Fanciful ? Ridiculous ?

Now imagine a family that borrows $100,000 annually to meet its expenses (just assume there would be a lender foolhardy enough to provide the funding). After ten years, the family has accumulated one million dollars in debt. That round figure jars them out of their complacency, and due to the precariousness of their state, for the next several years, they only overspend by $80,000 per year. They slap themselves on the back, even throw a party for themselves and their friends, as they trumpet the news that they have cut their spending, and are reducing their deficit, by $20,000 per year. Ludicrous?

Of course! The first person just continues to gain weight – eight pounds a year – and the second family continues to increase its debt at the rate of $80,000 per year. Who in his right mind would ever consider that losing weight or cutting a deficit ?

Welcome to the American government of 2011 – a President who is in over his head and out of his element and a Congress that presides over an economic catastrophe fueled by farcical policies promulgated by flummoxed but hypocritical legislators.

The news that the debt ceiling will be raised (of course) is being trumpeted alongside the Great Compromise of 2011: the enormous and painful concession that, allegedly, over the next ten years, the deficit will be reduced by two trillion dollars or so (!). But unmentioned in the Kabuki theater of government is that the deficit will actually increase over those ten years by more than ten trillion
dollars. So the whole vituperous debate was over the issue of overspending in
the next ten years by 12 trillion dollars or just 10 trillion dollars. How can
that be considered “cutting the deficit” ? Please see the two examples above.
And note, again, how the deficit will increase more than two trillion dollars
over the next two years (the debt ceiling raise) and the reduction of two trillion dollars will occur (allegedly) over the next ten years. Nothing will change, except that the economy will get worse.

And all that assumes that even two trillion dollars will be cut over the next ten years. The likelihood of that happening is actually nil, even if the solons will piously intone that “they didn’t get all they wanted.” In just this and next year, when the debt ceiling will accommodate another two trillion dollars of deficit
spending, just a few dozen billion dollars will be shaved from spending. In
just two years, the debt ceiling will be raised again, and then again, and
again, with Congressmen proclaiming their fiscal responsibility, their austerity,
their patriotism, and their need for re-election in order to save the Republic.
And Congress can always vote to increase spending and to change this hasty and imprudent legislation.

Finally, the American people have seen bi-partisanship – a bi-partisan disgrace. There are a mere handful of legislators who deserve to serve in Congress altogether, and almost none in the northeast. The Democrats are completely clueless, to the point of corruption. Granted, the Republicans have been big spenders too, but the numbers don’t lie: under the Bush Administration, the government ran a daily deficit of $1.4 billion – i.e., every day, the government spent almost a billion and a half dollars more than it took in. That was unconscionable, until we reckon with the Obama mismanagement that runs a daily deficit of more than $4 billion – i.e., and let this sink in, every day the US government spends $4,000,000,000 more than it takes in – and that figure will continue to increase in the coming years, not decrease. If Obama has spent – annually – a trillion dollars more than the profligate Bush, then it is obvious the American government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem (revenues have increased in the last ten years, especially after the Bush tax cuts), and it is equally obvious that nothing will be done about it.

America, sad to say, is now in decline, precisely as Obama broadcasted during his campaign, and he has deliberately accelerated that decline. It should be evident that the US’s credit rating should be downgraded – how could it not ? The debt is astronomical and is not being dealt with in a serious way by serious people. A person who spent like that could not get a loan even from a loan shark; why should a country be different ?

Perhaps the time has come to place the blame squarely on the guilty parties, and they do not work in Washington. For sure, the politicians of both parties are largely incompetent, many are corrupt and motivated by self-interest, and most serve to get re-elected and prepare their golden parachute. Those who come into office wealthy (most of them) are motivated by power and honor, and yet leave office wealthier. But they are not primarily to blame.

The guilty are the American people, and not merely because they vote these clowns into office year after year. The American people are guilty because they have embraced a narcissism that measures a politician’s worth by how much of other people’s money can be sent their way. Thus poll after poll indicates that Americans do not want to pay more taxes (understandably so) but they also want the government freebies to continue – health care, jobs, Social Security, unemployment, perks. Americans want the free lunch, and then dessert, all on someone else’s tab. They want (or many want) to give illegal immigrants free health care, food stamps and public education – as long as it is on the government’s dime and not theirs, clearly oblivious to the fact that government has no money. Government only has the people’s money, or most importantly, what it can borrow or print.

Politicians who made wild promises to get elected are certainly corrupt, but they knew their adience very well. Congress (and LBJ) willfully and illegally raided the Social Security trust fund beginning in the late 1960’s in order to make the Great Society budget imbalance look better, and knowing they were turning SS into the biggest Madoff/Ponzi scheme in history. The money taken out of each of our paychecks to “provide” a stipend for our retirement is long gone, replaced by the IOU’s of a certifiably bankrupt government. It is all spent. But that money became a slush fund for politicians – here, mainly Democrats again – to use for current “needs,” hence the apoplexy that greeted President Bush’s proposal to allow partial “privatization” of Social Security – i.e., allow people to set aside just 10% of their retirement money and invest it themselves. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but liberals could not allow even that small amount of “retirement” money to be removed from the government coffers and deprive them of their desired spending today. (Of course, they argued that the “market” would cause people to lose money and “endanger” their retirement. What a macabre joke – the Social Security funds are perhaps the worst investment around, notwithstanding that it has all been squandered.)

There was a time in the early years of American independence when only landowners were allowed to vote. What sounds strange to our modern ears actually was quite logical: landowners were the only taxpayers, and only people with skin in the game should have a say in how their money is spent. That changed, of course, until today we have a situation when 70% of the population receives some form of handout from the government (and is very protective of it) but a far smaller number actually have skin in the game. Close to 50% of the population pays no income taxes, but they provide the votes for the politicians who promise to take as much money as they can from the productive and give it – few questions asked, just votes demanded  – to the unproductive, and in many cases to the willful poor. Too many people today who do not pay into the system have a disproportionate voice in how other people’s money is spent. That is a recipe for disaster, as the politicians who are dependent on the votes of these freeloaders will continue to be elected by them and to demand an ever greater share of the pie-owner’s pie for their intemperate gluttons. Of course deadbeats should not be allowed to vote, but that is not about to change and is just symptomatic of the decline that is upon us.

Obama’s vision of America was a darker and more constricted one than that of any prior President, and his is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is an America that is in retrenchment abroad, no longer a beacon of hope and unmitigated supporter of aspirants to freedom, and an America that is a financial mendicant, no longer capable of borrowing money from the Chinese and reduced to “borrowing” from the Federal Reserve (i.e. itself) until the dollar collapses abroad and the house of cards crumples.

Any self-respecting legislator should vote down this charade. But, undoubtedly, the present “Great Compromise of 2011” will pass (and there are some valid reasons for it), and work as well as the Great Compromise of 1850 that fundamentally changed nothing and just delayed the Civil War for a few years. It arguably made things worse, as will this compromise. It deals not at all with the fundamental malady in American life today, and in its duplicity just exacerbates America’s financial state and
moral malaise.

I would love to say vote for this-or-that Republican and all will be good. In truth, both parties are wedded to a failing system that is doomed to collapse. Obama’s re-election, which will be the final nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism and greatness, is looking more likely than before. After all, he has the parasite vote locked up; he only needs a few more to put himself over the top.

The atomic bomb was first deployed in combat 66 years ago next week, and as time marches on, its use – twice – against Japan, obliterating the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, becomes ever more controversial. Distance of time engenders remoteness of feeling, and more voices are heard today than ever before that bombing Japan was immoral, unnecessary, racist and even evil. Those naysayers would do well to read a book first published 30 years ago, “With the Old Breed,” by E. B. Sledge.

Sledge was a Marine private who previously dropped out of officers’ school, and enlisted serving during World War II in Company K, 3^rd Battalion, 5^th
Marine Regiment in the 1^st Marine Division. He served in the military less than four years and was in actual combat for less than four months – but the intensity of those battles shaped the rest of his life and produced a riveting story (popularized by an HBO series last year or so).
Sledge participated in two of the most brutal battles ever fought by the United States, and two of the deadliest in the history of the Marine Corps. Perhaps the most horrific battle ever fought by the Marines occurred on Peleliu, an island in the Central Pacific. Although commanders had predicted – and prepared for – an engagement that would last a week or so, the battle raged for almost two months, in October and November 1944. Peleliu was an island of mountains and ridges with a climate in which temperatures regularly reached 115 degrees. The Japanese had dug in behind fortified bunkers, in caves and forests, and fought to the death.

Sledge eloquently but simply conveys the sense of helplessness when one first encountered the enemy – not knowing where the shooting is from, not knowing at whom to shoot, and seeing soldiers all around being eviscerated instantaneously. Those who romanticize war usually share in common the fact that they never fought in one. His description of the stench of battle – an overlooked element – is overwhelming: the heat, the weeks without bathing, or changes of clothing, the dead bodies rotting in the heat (usually Japanese – the Marines quickly recaptured American dead so they should not suffer that fate, and especially because the Japanese often dismembered Marine bodies for sport), the presence of excrement everywhere (field sanitation was impossible). Sledge, part of a mortar crew, regularly carried more than 50 pounds of materiel with him, running up hills and down valleys, and often in the line of fire. There was a dearth of food (especially hot food) and often water, and soldiers lived through perilous and sleepless nights during which the Japanese sent out individual soldiers to kill or be killed, sneaking up on Americans and stabbing them to death.

Add to this environment the fierce tropical rains that rendered their living quarters (foxholes) practically unlivable, the constant bombardment, the discipline, fearlessness and suicidal urges of the Japanese, and the effectiveness of Japanese snipers, it is no surprise that American casualties were enormous. The Marine 1st division was devastated, suffering 6500 casualties. Almost 11,000 Japanese were killed on this small island, with only 302 being captured. Sledge is poignant in describing his feelings when the Company commander, Captain Andrew Haldane, was killed by a Japanese sniper.

After a break of several months to train reinforcements, Company K was dispatched to Okinawa where that ferocious battle raged for two months, April-June 1945. (VE Day was greeted with indifference, so vicious was the combat.) The temperatures on Okinawa were milder than on Peleliu – but Okinawa infested with maggots that covered the soldiers, and drenched by heavy rains that produced mud that clung to them for weeks at a time. It rained – it poured – at one point for two weeks straight. Men lived in wet foxholes with little cover. Sledge didn’t sleep on hard earth, let alone in a bed or building for more than a month. They were constantly bailing out foxholes. And rains also hid the approach of infiltrators.  Here, too, they advanced hill by hill, ridge by ridge, dealing with Japanese that had abandoned the suicidal Bonzai charges of the past and remained in fortified caves and killed with snipers (and were then attacking US ships with kamikazes).

Casualties were beyond belief: the 1^st Marine division suffered 7665 dead on Okinawa alone. (All life is precious, but perspective is also important: US dead in Iraq and Afghanistan combined are still fewer than the number of Americans killed on Okinawa). The Japanese losses were staggering, 107,539 dead – and civilian casualties – Okinawans consider themselves different than Japanese – were astronomical: more than 42,000 Okinawan civilians were killed in the crossfire. (Alas, Richard Goldstone was but a child and not yet filing his tendentious reports.) Company K had only 26 men who survived both battles intact. Yet, and unsurprisingly, many military tacticians later claimed
that the battle for Peleliu was unnecessary from a purely military perspective.
It could easily have been bypassed, but was waged in order to allow General
MacArthur to fulfill his promise to return to the Philippines. Such is
hindsight, and it is not even a small comfort to the foot soldiers that carry out
the orders of sometimes errant commanders.

With it all, Sledge writes reverently of the camaraderie, the spirit of sacrifice and brotherhood, the bravery and loyalty, the bonds forged between soldiers – and of the fear that penetrates all. A commander told him that courage does not
mean not being afraid; courage means being afraid and doing your duty under all circumstances. Part of that duty is the brotherhood of the fighting man – they all had nicknames, usually diminutives of their given names, in Sledge’s case, the only, obvious, derivative – Sledgehammer. (Even in the heat of battle, his comrades took the extra time to call him by his full nickname, instead of his
shorter surname.) He struggles with the moral toll of war and the descent by
many – almost all Japanese – into pure barbarism and savagery. And besides being disciplined and respectful of authority (with occasinal hijinks), they were awestruck by their predecessors who had also fought – admiring, for example, Marines who had fought at Guadalcanal, and not even contemplating until long after the battle, that later generations would revere those who fought at Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

To anyone who fought the battles of the Pacific, it was obvious that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was both necessary and moral. Japan would not have surrendered; indeed, it refused to surrender after the first atom bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945. A land invasion of Japan would have caused an estimated minimum of one million American casualties, and many millions more Japanese civilian casualties. From that perspective, the atomic bombs that killed several hundred thousand Japanese actually saved Japanese lives. Any president would have – and should have – ordered the use of any weapon that would save US lives and bring about a quicker conclusion to the war. To his credit, Harry Truman never hesitated, and he later stated that he never had a sleepless night about his decision.

Sledge writes that when Japan finally surrendered, “we received the news with quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief… stunned silence… We remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.” He adds: “War is brutish, inglorious and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it.”

Sledge became a professor of microbiology and ornithology (at one point, during battle (!), he had become distracted by a bird formation flying overhead, and was almost killed as a result), and died in 2001.

And he concludes with a succinct and eloquent admonition to subsequent generations: “Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country – as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege comes responsibility.”

That is a most timely reminder to a most pampered and coddled generation, who know only of entitlements and not at all of obligation and little of honor.

The Jewish world was briefly aflutter again with the recent exposure of what some of our youth have termed “half-Shabbos.” It is a more “casual” observance of Shabbat, involving the adherence to most Shabbat laws but not all. Teens being teens (and today’s teens have lost the capacity to talk using their mouths and actual words), some will text each other on Shabbat, texting being the most prevalent form of communication, or otherwise access the internet.

I received “honorable mention” in the initial article on this imbroglio in a secular Jewish tabloid having written on the subject of “Orthopraxy:” “Children will text each other in stealth. Their divine service is external; if no human being sees them, it is as if it hasn’t happened.” Of course, I wrote this in March 2010, which is more than 15 months ago, so it is not exactly a new phenomenon. Nor did I write with any first-hand knowledge of the matter. I had only heard such reports, did not know how widespread it was, and spoke about it (then) to our teenagers in shul. Many indicated they had heard of it also; none confessed to doing it him/herself.

As is typical, the response to the article was sheer panic, eliciting the “where did we go wrong?” mantra, the “how could they – don’t they know how expensive Yeshiva education is?” trope, and the frequent lament of the failures of Modern Orthodoxy, etc.

I was a little more sanguine about the matter when it was publicized several weeks ago, perhaps because I addressed it long ago, but also because I think the issue is not necessarily rebellion (in some cases, it probably is) but primarily ignorance. And ignorance is easier to deal with than rebellion. Some perspective is in order, because, as always, the anecdotes are worse than the data. The data show that less approximately 17% of students who attend a Modern Orthodox high school are not fully observing Shabbat. Sad but true, until we ascertain how many do not come from observant homes? Answer: roughly 10%. Many of these teenagers may be simply embracing their parents’ level of observance. And of those who do come from Orthodox homes, what is the parents’ level of observance – not in public but in private – behind closed doors, where there might be a television, a radio, a computer, or an I-phone that do not always remain shut on Shabbat. Nor is this problem limited to the “Modern Orthodox” community.

There are many parents who observe “half-Shabbos” as well – as if Shabbat ends after shul and one can then don casual dress (Dockers and sneakers) and engage in activities that, if not outright Torah prohibitions, are certainly uvdin d’chol – weekday matters. But the way we walk, talk, dress and act on Shabbat has to be different – for all of Shabbat, not just half of it. And, for sure, parents who come late to shul and converse during the davening do not increase their child’s respect for tefila or the Bet Knesset by any measure.

So what are we talking about ? In some cases, children who don’t learn from their parents, and in other cases, children who learn too well from their parents. And we will never know in any individual case. What we do know is that the Gemara says (Nida 31a) that there are three partners, three contributors, to every human being – father and mother provide the physical components and G-d provides the soul and the spirit (life force). Every thing that follows is a consequence of what the parents invest in their children. Too often, we expect our children to be miniature reflections of ourselves, and embrace our looks, personalities, world-views, religiosity and behavior. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. But parents cannot bequeath their religious level to their children – as in a common refrain: “just be like me, not more frum, not less frum. Be like me!” Life is not that simple.

What is sometimes missing from Torah education – both school and home? The internal experience that cannot be taught but only absorbed. The Gemara says (Brachot 7b) in relation to the study of Torah from a teacher that attending to one’s teacher is more important than learning from him; developing a personal relationship has a greater impact than the book knowledge one will acquire. We seem to know that, but we forget it, and we don’t implement it as often as we should. We can learn a lot from books – and we do – but we learn more from people.

We have cultivated a climate where our focus is – on the highest level – finding out what to do, as if all of Torah is just a “how-to” booklet or a “how-not-to” manual – how not eat treif, how not to desecrate Shabbos, “how to appear to be davening,” “how to hold a lulav, etc. We are great at transmitting the external experience of Torah, but not as proficient at conveying the internal experience – but without the internal experience, the externals begin to unravel, until people choose what works for them (and for as long as it works for them) and reject what doesn’t work for them. We cannot long transmit an observance of mitzvot that is technically proficient but is lifeless, and does not animate the soul.

That internal experience cannot be adequately or accurately spelled out in a lesson plan, nor can it be obtained from a book, but only through prolonged exposure to a qualified Torah teacher – and especially through parents. And parents transmit this not through doing or saying anything particular but through a lifetime of observance and commitment.

Certainly, it still surprises me that yeshivot do not emphasize the fundamentals of Judaism. When I spoke to our teens about these matters, I sensed that few knew the philosophical underpinnings of the laws of Shabbat; hence the conclusion: “if I communicate through speech or through texting, what’s the difference?” There is a huge difference, as on Shabbat we commemorate G-d’s creation of the universe by abstaining from any technologically creative acts ourselves. To unlock the riddle is to give meaning to the entire structure.

But it is far easier to obsess on externals and superficial matters, which has become the bane of Jewish life. Too many people look the same – wear the same outfits – as if there is an official uniform of the male Jew beyond tzitzit and kippa. We learn the reality to our chagrin. We can wear the costume of the frum, but that is not the same as being frum. Even psychos, murderers and thieves can wear the costume of the frum.

     Undoubtedly some teens are just rebelling, as teens are wont to do, but statistics – anecdotes and data – inform the extent of our successes and not just the occasional failure. We are mostly successful in transmitting the mesora to the next generation. We mourn every failure, to be sure, but even someone who knows how to swim can still drown. Nevertheless, we still teach our children to swim. But we must teach them Torah in a way that reflects the depth and substance of Torah, in a way that shapes their inner world and does not merely control their external conduct, and in a way that enables them to enjoy, benefit and see the beauty of G-d’s word.

     Yehoshua was selected as Moshe’ successor because he absorbed the personality of his master, served him faithfully, and related to Moshe’s outer and inner worlds. If we want our children to fully embrace the Torah, we have to provide them both with the internals and externals of Torah – the sounds and the earthquakes of Torah, but also the thin, small voice that shapes our inner world and heralds the presence of G-d in our lives.