Piety and Dysfunction

Posted on July 15, 2011 | 8 comments

     What was most striking about the reaction to last week’s piece on dating, published in the Jewish Press, was not just the chord that it struck with so many people about the miseries of the contemporary dating scene or the incapacities of many men to embrace adulthood but especially the criticism that was rooted in the prevalence of promiscuity in modern life and the methods of preventing its encroachment in our world. As many readers stressed, even casual and public interactions are unavoidable inducements to randy and sinful behavior. Strange as it sounds, the objections challenge – or at least, invert – a statement of Chazal.

    The Gemara (Bava Batra 165a) says, in the name of Rav, that certain sins are hardy perennials that are difficult to suppress: “Most [people are guilty] of theft, a minority of promiscuity, and everyone of slanderous speech,” which the Gemara soon qualifies to mean the “dust of lashon hara” – indirect, disparaging
speech but not overt gossip. (It is safe to say that these days few roll only in the dust of lashon hara.) But what of the Gemara’s assertion that “mi’ut ba’arayot” – only a minority are guilty of sexual misconduct? The overheated rhetoric that came my way seemed to imply – strike that, it was stated explicitly and quite stridently – that if young men and women simply talk to each other, even in public and even in controlled settings, that sin is inevitable for all but the most unresponsive and lifeless among them. How can that be, if the Gemara perceives only a minority as succumbing to these sins?

    Conversely, since the more prevalent danger is theft, why do we not embrace the same restrictions in this area that are suggested in the dating context? Rashbam notes that people are prone, especially in business, to allow themselves leniencies that increase their own profits at the expense of others (known in today’s parlance as shtick). Recall that Rav Yisrael Salanter said famously that just as there is a prohibition to seclude oneself with another’s wife (yichud),
so too there should be a prohibition to seclude oneself with someone else’s money. Reb Yisrael was undoubtedly correct, as always, that the temptation of illicit money exceeds that of lewdness, and yet we have not incorporated the same restrictions: we don’t require two people to work a cash register in a Jewish store, we are not admonished not to enter stores alone lest we shoplift or
remain alone in someone’s living room in the presence of his I-Pod or other desirable devices, nor do we require that young people with uncontrollable lusts for money and no legitimate means of earning it just avoid any contact with it.
Perhaps we should – but we don’t, because erecting limitless fences around sin
does not build character or develop reverence for Heaven. What is does is leave
a person incapable of exercising any self-control the moment one of those
fences collapses.

    Indeed, Chazal did establish one fence regarding relations between unmarried people – the prohibition of seclusion that was decreed by the Sanhedrin of King David in the wake of the Amnon-Tamar episode. Consequently, it is surely forbidden for unmarried people to seclude themselves. But how then is another fence built around the initial fence – a decree added to a decree – that would prohibit even public interactions? Is the world so much different today than it was 50, 100, 500, 1000 or 3000 years ago?

    Yes and no. The world is different in terms of the dissemination of bawdy material and the tawdry imagery that inundates our senses. Modern means of communication has eased transmission of both the holy and the profane. Our eyes and our souls are always at risk whenever we venture out into the world, and even when sometimes we sit at home or in front of a computer. But human nature is the same, and we delude ourselves into thinking that, somehow, today’s young people are more concupiscent than people in ancient, medieval or pre-modern times. That is simply false. People are people and human nature is human nature. (Even the display of raunchy material is nothing new. Visit any art museum – I was at the Louvre in Paris last week – and one realizes that medieval art was almost exclusively either Christian-themed or naked women – and sometimes both, simultaneously. Of course, they called it art, like others term even more salacious material today. Either way, there is not much for a Jew to see. I developed a new appreciation to the genius of Monet, and even Morris Katz.) In the past, the public frowned on debauchery, but that does not mean that its incidence was any less frequent than today.

     Obviously, the Bible has many stories of misconduct between the sexes, and the Torah prohibitions reflect that one’s desires gravitate toward those areas. The Maharal himself was banished from Prague (after his first stint there) because the people resented his carping about one of their prevalent vices – adultery – and this in a community that numbered just several thousand Jews. There is nothing new under the sun. So, knowing what we know, how can Chazal say that just a “minority” are guilty of promiscuity? Would they say the same today? Would Rav amend his statement to read that, today, sadly, “all are guilty
of theft, lechery, and gossip” – in which case, what hope is there for any of
us?

     I conclude that Chazal were correct, and that only a minority of people are guilty of licentiousness. All people are subject to fantasies, even persistent ones, but most do not act upon them. Hirhur (fantasy) is part of the human condition; fleeting thoughts are impossible to inhibit and our obligation as strivers for perfection then becomes uprooting them, not dwelling on them, and becoming involved in some more gainful and productive pursuit. To think that we can eliminate unconscious thoughts reflects an ignorance of human nature, and
Chazal profoundly understood human nature. And to think that we can eliminate sin by supplementing the Torah’s and Chazal’s prohibitions with even more prohibitions is misguided. It simply drives sin underground – to which a
generation of Jews who hide televisions in their closets, or received deliveries of televisions in air-conditioner boxes, or who furtively sit over their computers surfing the internet without a life-preserver can undoubtedly attest. At the end of the day, there is no alternative to self-control, which is a function of reverence of Heaven.

     Human nature is human nature, and no community is immune from sin or devoid of sinners. The Jewish world – right, left, center, Modern, Haredi, yeshivish – has its share of miscreants, pedophiles, thieves, psychos, murderers, adulterers, degenerates, deviants, and those who would expose or cover up those sins and sinners, crimes and criminals. The comfort might be that our numbers are smaller relative to the general population in all these vices, and that lasciviousness is still perceived as aberrational conduct that is not or should not be tolerated in our midst and appropriately shocks us when it does occur. But to think further that there is one foolproof way that works for all – one way to avoid sin or temptation, one way to find a spouse, and one way to have a happy, fulfilling marriage – is delusional.

   There is something else that needs to be said, an outgrowth of some of the responses I received. Fear of sin is a virtue in Jewish life, in a way that it is simply not understood in the rest of the world. We should always be mindful that we can stumble at any time, and therefore always have a conscious awareness of G-d’s presence. But there is a fine line between piety and dysfunction that tends to get blurred. Reading recent accounts of families that segregate the sexes for meals – or families in which brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law do not converse for fear of the “next step” – crosses the line from excessive piety to palpable dysfunction. If we posit that Chazal are correct – and who among us would not? – that only a mi’ut ba’arayot – then we have to accept that self-control and self-discipline are sufficient to allow normal interactions and to restrain, even among the most lustful among us, improper conduct. If not – if one cannot walk the streets or converse or casually interact without harboring persistently impure or libidinous thoughts that coalesce with an uncontrollable urge to lunge at random females, that is dysfunctional, and such a person requires all the safeguards that we can conjure, and even some that we have not yet imagined. But normal people do not require that.

    The bottom line is that one who does not learn self-control before marriage will not learn it after marriage either, and invariably fall into that minority category that Chazal addressed. And one who cannot restrain his passions in any area of life – money or gossip included – will never learn to restrain it until he/she begins a process of teshuva, self-awareness, and discipline. That process is the true perfection of the soul that is a primary purpose of life itself, and
that process must always be informed by the recognition that the ways of Torah
are the “ways of pleasantness,” as well as normalcy.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Halacha, Machshava/Jewish Thought, Philosophy

Dating Self-Help

Posted on July 10, 2011 | 27 comments

(This was originally published as an op-ed in the Jewish Press, on July 8, 2011.)

A recent piece posted on Matzav.com signed by “A Crying Bas Yisroel” chillingly lamented the plight of a young single woman, with fine personal qualities but without any family money or yichus, who sits forlornly waiting for her phone to ring with calls from shadchanim. Alas, the phone never rings, and for her, the shidduchsystem is an ongoing nightmare.

     Not coincidentally, but perhaps surprising to some, almost all the weddings I attended this past month were those of couples who had “long-term” relationships. They either met in high school or when high school age, or in Israel or their early college years, and almost all of them met on their own. They did not use shadchanim, but met the old-fashioned way: in healthy social settings where young men and women mingle naturally, without the pressure of “potential spouse” hovering over every encounter. That is not the norm in Jewish life these days, but perhaps it should be.
     That is not to say that the shidduch-system is failed, or failing, or broken. Too many people work too hard on setting up unmarrieds that it would be incorrect and insulting to say that it is broken. So it is not broken – but perhaps it should be a b’diavad (post facto) and not a l’chatchila (ab initio) system. L’chatchila, it would seem, Chazal emphasized that we should find our own mates. The Gemara (Kiddushin 2b) cites the pasuk “When a man takes a woman [in marriage]” and explains “darko shel ish l’chazer al ha-isha,” it is the way of men to pursue women [in marriage]. It is not the way of men, or shouldn’t be, to enlist a band of agents, intermediaries, and attorneys to do the work for them. By infantilizing and emasculating our males, we have complicated a process that should be simpler and made a joyous time into one of relentless anguish and hardship for many women.
    This is reminiscent of the life story of a pathetic man we recently encountered in the weekly Torah reading – Ohn ben Pelet. The Gemara  (Sanhedrin 109b) states that “ishto hitzilato” – his wife saved him from the clutches of Korach. Ohn was an original co-conspirator who is not mentioned again after the first verse, because his wife explained to him the foolishness of his conduct (Ohn loses if Moshe wins and gains nothing if Korach prevails), prevented him from joining his fellow conspirators, and, as the Midrash adds, held onto his bed to prevent the ground from swallowing Ohn and then dragged him to Moshe to beg forgiveness. Ohn was a sad excuse of a man.
     Mrs. Ohn, in effect, saved her husband not only from Korach but also from himself. The problem with Ohn is that he perceived himself as an object, and not a subject or an actor. Ohn wasn’t a leader – he was a born follower, just an object for others to use, He just allowed himself to be yanked along by anyone – for evil and for good. He was just part of the crowd, the personification of the personality of weakness, dependence and self-abnegation. He took no responsibility for his own destiny.  An object is a tool of others; a subject is the master of his destiny. In the realm of dating and marriage, we are breeding Ohn’s by the thousands by freeing men from their obligation to pursue their potential spouses, and thereby relegating women to the dependent role of passively waiting to be the chosen one. Why do we do that, and is there a better option ?
    Some will argue that the shidduch system spares our children the pain of rejection – but part of life, and a huge part of parenting, is preparing our children for a world in which they will experience rejection at some point. That is called maturity.
     Others will argue, with greater cogency, that we prevent young men and women from sinning. Relationships that begin when couples are younger, or friendships that start outside the framework of parental supervision, can induce or lead to inappropriate behavior. That possibility is undoubtedly true, but can be rectified by applying a novel concept called “self-control,” which in any event is the hallmark of the Torah Jew. We do not tell people to avoid The Home Depot even if one wants to buy a hammer lest he shoplift some nails, nor do we admonish others not to shop in Pathmark because one might be led to sin by the aroma of non-kosher foods. Self-control and discipline are routine components of the life of a Jew. And, even granting that “there is no guardian for promiscuity,” it should still be feasible for a young man to talk to or display his personal charms to a woman without assaulting her.
     Sad to say, there is a promiscuity problem, even among some of our high school youth and certainly in college, that cannot be swept away. It can be resolved if parents take responsibility and sit down with their sons and teach them how to respect women – and sit down with their daughters and teach them how to respect themselves.
    Something is not normal, and against human nature as Chazal perceived it, for men to be so diffident, so timid, so Ohn-like, and sit back comfortably relying on others to procure them dates. Young men who would not allow others to choose for them a lulav and etrog do not hesitate to delegate others to find them a spouse. This also unduly delays their fulfillment of the commandment of Pru u’rvu (procreation). And something is not normal, and frankly, unfair, that young women have to sit by the phone for weeks and months waiting to be contacted by agents. As well-meaning as the system intends, it must be demeaning and deflating – worse than even the rejection that happens after casual encounters.
    What is the solution, or the other option? For those people currently of age and in the system, or for communities that would accept only the shidduch­-system, there is no other solution but to redouble our efforts. They will reap the reward, and also, sadly, the misery of those who choose to be passive in life. Obviously, unmarried men and women should be seated together at weddings to facilitate more natural, pressure-free encounters; it is so obvious, it is surprising that it is even debated.
    But for younger people today – say, older teens – there has to be a better way. The paradigm of “don’t smile/talk/socialize/date” until one is ready for marriage constricts the capacity of our young people to assume responsibility for their own lives. Many will disagree with me, even among my colleagues, but if we wish to minimize the heartbreak of so many of our young people, we must find healthy ways of encouraging interaction between teenagers – in shuls, in schools, in youth groups. We have to de-stigmatize self-help and personal initiative. For example, at a shul Kiddush, it should not be construed as abnormal or off-putting if a young man approaches a young woman who has caught his eye, and asks her name, and “would you like a piece of kugel?” That should be normal; at one point, that was darko shel ish. Indeed, that should be even more normal among people of marriageable age, and would consign the shidduch­-system to its appropriate b’diavad status, for people who have not been able to meet on their own. Perhaps the young woman whose lament was featured above should take similar initiatives as well.
     Dating at too young an age is certainly problematic, but teenagers who learn to socialize in groups demystify the opposite sex and learn appropriate boundaries, communication skills and modes of interaction. Such contact makes males more sensitive, and helps them learn at an early age that a young woman is not a shtender, in the Steipler’s elegant phrase, or a vehicle for their own gratification, in the modern lexicon. It certainly helps prepare a couple for marriage if they know each other longer than three weeks or three months, and the recent spate of broken engagements and early divorces in the Jewish world would tend to confirm that. And conversely, the plethora of recent weddings of couples in our community who know each other for years would corroborate that as well.
      I am mindful of the opinions of the gedolim who proscribe any male-female interaction before one is ready to marry, and those gedolim who permit such contact in controlled settings. As a community we have other options than the false choice of isolationism or promiscuity, and we need to strengthen our young men with the inner confidence to guide their own lives. There are too many people walking around with Y chromosomes who are not men. They have an Ohn-like existence, sitting back comfortably and letting others plot their destiny in life. They will never be masters, only objects who cannot lead or build or create. That does not bode well for Klal Yisrael.
      May Hashem bless with success the work of all shadchanim. But we need to shift the culture away from the passive indifference of the well-connected to the active pursuit of spouses by all, and thereby mold more assertive men and more confident women. That is because more is expected of us – as a nation that is called by G-d for greatness not mediocrity, to be active not passive, to be followers of G-d and leaders of mankind.

27 Comments

Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Minhagim, Philosophy

Decision Points

Posted on July 7, 2011 | 3 comments

Anyone with an interest in history will enjoy President George W. Bush’s account of his life and presidency (“Decision Points”), except for those whose minds are closed and blame Bush for all the world’s ills. It is different from the traditional memoir in two key respects: it is not a purely autobiographical narrative of his life and does
not generally follow the cycle of his life, nor does it comply with the common
purpose of a memoir: the justification of every act, decision, and move made by
the protagonist. For the latter reason, especially, it is more interesting than
most autobiographies. President Bush does not try to rationalize every
decision; instead, he endeavors to explain why he thought each decision was
correct in its time and place, and how subsequent events – some that could not
have been anticipated and some that might have been anticipated – impacted on
every decision. Indeed, he often seems tougher on himself than he needs to be.

For example, Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 became Bush’s Waterloo and the costliest natural disaster in American history. Coincidentally, I had visited New Orleans just two months earlier and experienced another hurricane alert during which thousands of residents clogged the highways to leave town. Nothing happened, and I noted then that it is hard to imagine that people would uproot themselves every time there is a hurricane warning. When Katrina blew in, it was not the hurricane that did the damage but the shattering of the old levees that inundated a city that, bowl-shaped, largely rests below sea level, a disaster waiting to happen. But generations of New Orleans politicians had garnered federal funds to reinforce the levees – and just spent the money elsewhere and sometimes pocketed it themselves. So what could have been done differently ?

The untold story of Katrina was the bickering between the female governor of Louisiana and the black mayor of New Orleans (each from one of the liberal media’ protected classes, with job performances graded on a curve – the governor left office when her term expired; the mayor, of course, has since been re-elected despite his abject failures). For five days, the governor refused to permit the dispatch of the National Guard for either relief or security efforts, and a law dating from after the Civil War prohibits a president from sending federal
troops to a state without explicit authorization. No one was in charge, literally. Bush’s main error was perception, what he called the “fly-over” of New Orleans that generated the infamous photograph of the President looking out the window of Air Force One “removed” from the scene and literally “above it all.” (As soon as the pictures were released, he knew it was a mistake. He had wanted to land but did not want to divert security forces that would be needed for his protection.)

By contrast, he notes, LBJ had descended on New Orleans during another hurricane in 1965, even barging into a shelter and announcing “This is your President. I’m here to help you.” Of course, he couldn’t – but the perception was, at least, that he was there. President Bush inadvertently created the opposite impression, not helped when he said to the FEMA head, “Heckuva job, Brownie” in order to boost his morale. But Bush spent the first ten days after the catastrophe alternately frustrated and furious – receiving incomplete and often inaccurate reports from the scene and incapable of getting the local politicians (all Democrats) to do anything but whine. It was an immense failure that was unfairly traced to Bush, when the problems were caused primarily by a failure of local leadership that resulted in the incapability to execute the rescue plans. A president can decide, order, and dispatch; that does not necessarily mean that what he decides, orders or dispatches will be executed properly.

Of course, Bush is too much the gentleman to blame the governor, the mayor or indeed anyone else for any of the decisions he made and their consequences, a marked distinction from his successor who has built his career and is hinging his re-election campaign on the notion that others are at fault for everything that has gone wrong in his administration. Bush accepts blame for the failed response to Katrina; contrast that with Obama’s response to the BP explosion in the Gulf of Mexico (blaming BP, filing lawsuits, shaking them down for money, prohibiting drilling, etc.) and the cleanup that was inordinately slow to begin. One can easily see how, if Bush had been in office, the liberal pundits would have
castigated him for every blackened bird.

Indeed, Bush does not comment at all on President Obama and the decisions he has made. But what he does – eloquently and sometimes poignantly – is take the reader into his confidence, and weigh the factors the led invariably to a particular decision: abstinence from alcohol, his various political campaigns (his mother, a forceful personality, told him not to run for governor of Texas because he could not win), Afghanistan, the WMD’s and Iraq, the surge and the formation of the Bush Doctrine that encourages the spread of democracy across the world, Guantanamo and the use of enhanced interrogation measures, and the response to the financial crisis of 2008. Agree or disagree with the outcomes of these decisions, it is difficult to argue that one in possession of the facts as
President Bush saw them at the time could have reasonably made a different
decision, or that had another course been chosen that it would have yielded a
different or better result. (It easily might have been worse.) The greatest
proof of this has been the Obama presidency –for all his snarky dismissal of
the Bush policies during his campaign, he has essentially continued almost all
of them  – Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, the military tribunals, the Freedom Agenda (Obama was a late convert to that), the surge, the bailouts, etc. Even the enhanced interrogation procedures yielded valuable intelligence that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

There are moments of great poignancy: Laura Bush had difficulty conceiving, and the couple was preparing to adopt when they suddenly learned that she was pregnant, and carrying twins; the Arab-terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center which found Bush criticized for calmly continuing to read children’s stories to second-graders in Sarasota as it happened, rather than – as his critics insisted – he dash out and panic the children and the entire country; the initial
attacks on Afghanistan with the knowledge – that every president lives with –
that some soldiers sent will not return and some families will forever be torn
asunder; the analysis of the intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction, with which all intelligence agencies across the world (including
Britain’s and Israel’s) acceded, and which Saddam Hussein had himself boasted
about (later, Hussein told FBI interrogators that he never thought the US would
attack, and that he had to remain strong in the eyes of his neighbors), and the
threats that accompanied the financial collapse in 2008 in which he was told
that he would preside over another depression unless he agreed to the advice of
Bernanke, Paulson, et al. The housing and market collapses of 2008 are classic
examples of crises that do not originate with the president, in which the
president’s true role is very limited, are foreseeable only in hindsight, and
yet color his entire tenure.

Throughout the book, several themes emerge. President Bush is a man of unique sensitivity, almost preternaturally disposed to making friends, making acquaintances and strangers feel comfortable in his presence, and given to moments of tears and, more frequently, prayer. He personally wrote letters to each of the several thousand families that had suffered a battlefield loss. Yet, he possesses a steely determination that is apparent in the personal – giving up alcohol cold turkey and never again touching another drop –and in the national – what he calls the greatest success of his presidency, the commitment that American on his watch would not be attacked again by Arab terrorists. Every decision made in the realm of national security was rooted in that one simple resolution – would it make America safer? It worked. And although awkward in his use of the English language, Bush turned out to be a better presidential speaker than Obama, although Obama is a better campaign speaker than most presidents. (Reagan was a master of both.) He also has something nice to say about almost everyone he mentions in the book, and his criticisms of a few (Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, for one) are hesitant and muted.

Bush had the strength of character to lead – to goad Iraq into a nascent democracy, to defy his European allies and banish Yasser Arafat from civilized society – and uphold Israel’s right of self-defense, even drafting a letter committing the United States (since repudiated by Obama) to support Israel’s claim to retain settlement blocs in any future negotiations. His “vision” of a two-state solution was lost because of his call for new leadership to replace Arafat and for a sincere commitment by the Arabs to a peaceful solution. (His mother was not amused, sarcastically calling him “the first Jewish president.”) It was not
the only time he disagreed with and rejected his father’s advice. It took leadership to lower taxes when the late 1990s internet boom produced a revenue surplus for the government. (After all, the government has the people’s money, not its own money. Novel concept, that.) Bush is an unabashed supporter of the free market, and therefore quite abashed that he was prodded to intervene through a massive infusion of government money – even having the government choose winners and losers in the marketplace, which Obama has taken to new heights, or depths. Bush is man enough to admit that he had to deviate from his principles because of the financial crisis, his regrets at not capturing bin Laden, and his inability to formulate any policy or strategy that would thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

That type of leadership, and the personal accountability that accompanies it, is sorely missed. This excellent book, worth reading, reminds us that not only are there many factors that influence a particular decision before it is made, but also
that there are many more factors that will shape the success or failure of a
decision, long after it is made. My sense is that history will judge President Bush
more favorably than many of his contemporaries did – for the quality of his
decisions, for the strength of his character, and for his essential goodness as
a human being.

3 Comments

Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events

Centurion Series Recap

Posted on July 5, 2011 | 1 comment

Below please find a listing of the entire Centurion lecture series, along with the appropriate links to the webpages where you may listen and/or download each shiur:

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Posted in Audio Lectures and Shiurim, Jewish History

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