The Enduring Preciousness
of the Secular Jew

By Rabbi Jonathan Lopes Cardozo

We live in an age of unabashed irreverence. Debunking has become the norm, and at every turn we experience a need to expose the clay feet of even the greatest. Human dignity, a phrase often mentioned, has become a farce in real life. Instead of deliberately looking for opportunities to love our fellow humans, as required by our holy Torah, many have rewritten this golden rule to read: “Distrust your fellow humans as you distrust yourself.” People’s lack of belief in themselves has spilled over into their relationships with others. Fearing their own deeds and mediocrity has led them to believe that moral and spiritual greatness has left us and that we are a generation of spiritual orphans.

This condition has slowly entered the subconscious of segments in the religious community as well, although in a more subtle form. Influenced by materialistic philosophies, many religious people who once revered their fellow humans have unknowingly become part of the problem. Instead of sending a message of unconditional love and respect for fellow Jews, whatever their background or beliefs, many within the religious Jewish community have fallen victim to debunking others, which has led to a most worrisome situation in and outside of the Land of Israel.

When observing even those who are fully committed to helping fellow Jews find their way back to Judaism, we see an attitude that is foreign to religious life and thought. We cannot escape the impression that some people, without denying their love for their fellow Jews, tend to talk down to secular Jews. This has become the norm. Constant emphasis is placed on the need to fix the secular person’s mistaken lifestyle. No doubt such an attitude is born out of love, but it lays the foundation for infinite trouble. It is built on arrogance.

While religious Jews are seen as the ideal, they turn secular Jews into second-class members of the Jewish people. It is they who need to repent for their mistaken ways. Such an attitude is built on notions of disparity and lack of affinity. The secular Jew will always feel inferior. As such, the point of departure from which one reaches out to bring fellow Jews closer to Judaism is its undoing. The suggestion that “one should throw oneself into a burning furnace rather than insult another person publicly” (Berachot 43b) may very well apply, since it is the community of secular Jews that is being disparaged and treated as inferior.

For people to bring their fellow Jews back to Judaism there is a need to celebrate the mitzvot that secular Jews have been observing all or part of their lives, not to condemn their failure to observe some others. Only on the basis of sharing mitzvot will an authentic way be found to bring Jews back home.

The foundation should be humility, not arrogance. There is little doubt that secular Jews, consciously or unconsciously, keep a large number of commandments. Many of them may not be in the form of rituals, but there is massive evidence pointing to secular Jews’ commitment to keeping interpersonal mitzvot. Beneath the divisiveness of traditional commitment lie underpinnings of religion such as compassion, humility, awe, and even faith. Different are the pledges, but equal are the devotions. It may quite well be that the meeting of minds is lacking between religious and non-religious Jews, but their spirits touch. Who will deny that secular Jews have a sense of mystery, forgiveness, beauty, and gentleness? How many of them do not have inner faith that God cares? And how many will not show great contempt for fraud or double standards? Each of these is the deepest of religious values.

This not only calls for a celebration but may well become an inspiration for religious Jews – not just by honoring secular Jews for keeping these mitzvot, but by renewing these and other good deeds themselves. There is a need to make the non-observant Jews aware of the fact that they are much more religious than they may know. To have them realize that God’s light often shines on their faces just as much if not more than on the faces of religious Jews.

Just as non-religious Jews need to prove that they are worthy of being friends with religious Jews, so too must religious Jews be worthy of the friendship of their secular fellow Jews. It would be a most welcome undertaking if the religious would call on their secular fellow Jews for guidance in mitzvot that demand their own greater commitment.

There is a significant need for calling Jews back to their roots by showing them that they never left. Once religious Jews learn that secular Jews are their equals, not their inferiors, a return to Judaism on equal terms will come about.

One of the tragic failures of the ancient Jews was their indifference to the Ten Tribes of Israel that were carried away by Assyria after the Northern Kingdom was destroyed. Overlooked, and not taken seriously by their fellow Jews, they were consigned to oblivion and ultimately vanished.

This is a nightmare that, at this moment in Jewish history, should terrify each and every religious Jew: the unawareness of our being involved in a new failure, in a tragic dereliction of duty.

As taken from, https://www.cardozoacademy.org/

Would You Convert?

TTP: 578

Read this essay on the Cardozo Academy Website, For a printable pdf, click here.

In memory of Toby Willig,
Noble Lover of the People and the State of Israel

As we are daily confronted with a steady increase in the number of Jews who have not only left the fold but are actively involved in anti-Jewish activity inside and outside Israel, it would perhaps be meaningful to study an episode in the life of a biblical non-Jew who decided to join the Jewish people at all costs.

Reading the story of Yitro (Shemot 18)—Moshe’s father-in-law and one of the earliest converts to Judaism—presents a challenge, not only to many anti-Jewish Jews but also to those who are actively living a Jewish religious life but lack the intensity and passion for Judaism and its message. For sensitive souls, Yitro’s story is not just a significant narrative but also a painful confrontation with one’s own Jewishness.

After many years of separation, Moshe and Yitro meet again. Moshe had married Yitro’s daughter Tzipora many years earlier but had then left his father-in-law’s home and gone back to Egypt to redeem his people. Subsequently, he took the Jews out of Egypt and miraculously led them through the Red Sea. Once the exodus had been realized, Yitro, Tzipora and her children were able to meet him again. The text tells us that this meeting took place in the wilderness:

Yitro, Moshe’s father-in-law, came with [Moshe’s] sons and wife to the desert, where Moshe was staying… (Ibid. 18:5)

What, asks Rashi, is the importance of knowing that they met in the desert? Rashi answers that this points to the tremendous sacrifice Yitro made when he decided to become a Jew:

The verse speaks in praise of Yitro. He lived in a world of glory, yet his heart prompted him to go out to the desert wasteland to hear the words of the Torah. (Ibid ad loc.)

Indeed, tradition teaches us that Yitro was a man of great wealth. He had held the prestigious post of high priest in Midyan, comparable to the position of pope in Rome today. He was surrounded by servants and basked in glory and abundance. The verse now informs us that he gave up all of this to go to a “desert”, a place where he would no longer have any of these honors. He had decided to convert. In many ways, this was a catastrophic decision. All the glory and prestige would be gone. Instead of holding the post of high priest and playing a crucial role in world affairs, he would now be an ordinary Jew, sliding into oblivion. He would become one among many, no longer a leader in his own right, just “the father-in-law of Moshe”.

In fact, our tradition continues to provide us with remarkable information about this sweeping decision. Yitro had become an outcast among his own people. After having rejected all forms of religion and philosophy known in his day, he was banned and abandoned by the societies in which he lived. He had turned into a “lonely man of faith”, as Rabbi Soloveitchik would say. Once he heard about the exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea, and the soon-to-come revelation of the Divine Teaching at Sinai, everything else seemed of secondary importance. Only this moved him: to be part of the Jewish people and participate in their Torah experience. The price was indeed enormous.

Yitro confronts us for the first time with a new phenomenon: to be a Jew by choice. By doing so, he presents all Jews with a major challenge: how to become a Jew by choice even when one has been born into the fold; how to feel the fire needed to live the life of an authentic Jew, as Yitro did. Such an undertaking is possible only if one is able to re-enact and experience Yitro’s journey to Judaism.

It must have been a long and difficult road, a heart-rending challenge, with many ups and downs before finally arriving at the top. Along the way, Yitro must have had countless fiery conflicts with his former friends and colleagues, and he surely felt terribly lonely. He was plagued by doubts and inner conflicts before he was able to become a Jew. Like a baby taking its first steps, he most likely tried to engage the world of Torah and its spirit, undergoing its hardships before experiencing its joy. How many times must he have nearly thrown in the towel in despair, only to continue his struggle until he overcame all obstacles and took the final, crucial and radical step: to be a Jew and nothing but a Jew; to experience the incredible joy that accompanies it.

For many of us who were born into the fold, Yitro’s desire to become a Jew is a major problem. It hits us in the face. It’s a challenge to all those among us who left the fold, opting for a comfortable secular lifestyle. We must ask ourselves why a non-Jew would be prepared to give up everything to become Jewish. What is there in Judaism that makes a non-Jew conclude that it surpasses everything else? These questions should plague each one of us.

But also for those of us who are religiously observant, Yitro’s engagement with Judaism is a big challenge, posing questions such as: Am I in love with Judaism as much as Yitro was? Am I prepared to give up everything, including wealth, honor and social standing? Would I have been prepared to exchange my prestigious position in the world for a life in the desert, ridiculed by old friends and colleagues?

Yitro forces each one of us to ask ourselves whether we would have opted for Judaism had we not been born Jewish. And if yes, would this not mean that we would have had to start all over again, discovering it on our own so as to comprehend what it is really all about? If Yitro traveled his road to Judaism step by step in order to fully grasp its beauty and truth, we may have to re-engage ourselves with every mitzvah as if we have never done it before, as real beginners. Only that way can we become “Jews by choice”, real Jews. Perhaps we should begin a process by which we take hold of every mitzvah that we have been observing for years and transform it into something radically new.

It is told that the great Jewish philosopher and ba’al teshuva Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), in his earlier days when he was still on his way to becoming a real Jew, was once asked whether he put on tefillin. “Not yet”, was his answer.

Although he may not have felt ready at the time to take on this great mitzvah, he made it clear that he looked forward to the day when wearing tefillin would become a truly religious experience. Surely this does not mean that we should wait until we are fully ready. After all, it was Rosenzweig himself who taught that it is in the deed that one hears the mitzvah. Only when one actually does a mitzvah can one hear and feel its profundity. But it does mean that when a person just goes through the motions of putting on tefillin, they have not yet authentically performed the mitzvah. Only when one approaches it as a novice, as did Yitro, can one experience its full power. Not out of tradition or habit, but from a genuine desire to fulfill the word of God.

This is the road that Yitro took, which led him to realize the enormous religious profundity of Judaism, of each and every mitzvah, for which he was prepared to give up everything. And therefore he poses a challenge to each of us.

The famous non-Jewish, British literary historian A.L. Rowse (1903-1997) gave added meaning to Yitro’s decision when he wrote at the end of his memoirs: “If there is any honour in all the world that I should like, it would be to be an honorary Jewish citizen.” (A.L.Rowse, Historians I Have Known, London: Duckworth, 1955, p.204) For him, it remained an unfulfilled dream.

For many Jews, it is a reality never dreamed about and consequently unappreciated.

One cant consider the Holocaust without wondering about the source of Adolf Hitlers hatred for the Jews. Although much of his political manifesto, Mein Kampf, was devoted to explaining that hatred, which was clearly shared by an enthusiastic German nation, the actions taken against Europes Jews were so monstrous in both nature and scale that it was inevitable that researchers would look for a more personal explanation. Its natural that scholars and others would scrutinize every piece of available evidence for proof of some deeply personal psychological injury that will explain Hitler.

Illegitimate father

Even before Hitler came to power, there were rumors that he was of Jewish descent, a detail of personal history that would be highly damaging, even humiliating to him, and which he went to lengths to quash. The idea derived from the fact – not a secret – that his father, Alois Hitler, was illegitimate. Although Hitlers paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, eventually married Johann Georg Hiedler and took his surname, Alois was already aged five when she did so, and she never did reveal, if indeed she knew, who his father was.

Naturally, there was much speculation about the identity of Hitlers grandfather – most of it centered on Johann Georg Hiedler himself and his brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who was the stepfather of Alois, and who left him part of his estate when he died.

The Jewish angle to the speculation, however, concerned a third candidate, a Jew named Leopold Frankenberg, who according to Hitlers personal lawyer, Hans Frank, was the young-adult son of a couple who employed Maria Schicklgruber as a cook at the time she became pregnant with Alois. According to testimony given by Hans Frank at the Nuremberg Trials, in 1945-46, he had heard from Hitler himself in 1930 about this Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, no evidence has ever been found to support this claim, nor is there any proof that Leopold Frankenberger even existed.

In any event, the connection between having an embarrassing ancestor in ones family tree to possessing a pathological hatred of that ancestors ethnic group is far from obvious.

The physician

Another well-known theory concerns the Jewish physician, Eduard Bloch, who cared for Hitlers beloved mother, Klara Hitler, before her death from breast cancer, in 1907, at age 47. By the time Klaras condition was diagnosed, it was incurable, but Dr. Bloch, at her sons insistence, treated her for more than a month with a quasi-experimental medication called iodoform. The medication caused her excruciating pain, but did not extend her life.

Could the Holocaust have been Hitlers revenge on Dr. Bloch for his inability to save Klaras life?

Certainly at the conscious level, Hitler did not hold Bloch responsible for his mothers suffering. After her death, he actually wrote to Dr. Bloch thanking him for his devoted care. Three decades later, in post-Anschluss Austria in 1938, when Bloch wrote to the chancellor asking for help, Hitler arranged for him to be spared the harsh measures being taken against Jews until he could make arrangements to emigrate to the United States, where he died in 1945.

Mufti’s idea?

Last fall, Israels prime minister suggested that Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from the Palestinian political and religious leader Amin al-Husseini, who was the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. According to Benjamin Netanyahu, Hitler would have sufficed with expelling the Jews from Germany, but Husseini complained that if he did that, they would just come to Palestine. When Hitler asked Husseini what he recommended, said Netanyahu, the Arab counseled him to burn them.

Netanyahus theory was not widely embraced, to put it mildly, and he himself soon backtracked on it, conceding that, responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews is clear to fair-minded people.

Truth be told

In Mein Kampf, published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926, Hitler himself explains that he had no special feelings about Jews before he moved to Vienna, in 1908, and that even then, initially, he thought favorably of them. He saw the light only after Germanys loss in World War I, for which he held the Jews responsible.

During the second half of the 19th century, as the Jews emancipation throughout most of Europe led to their increasing integration into society and into the modern economy, it elicited a backlash. Anti-Semitism, some of it murderous, rose across the continent, including in Germany. When the Jews were kept apart in the ghetto, and limited to certain professions, it was possible to accuse them of clannishness, and resent the interest they charged on loans. But when they emerged from the ghetto, and became captains of industry and finance, and socially and intellectually prominent, there was a whole new set of reasons to hate them. The success of the emancipated Jews was perhaps even more galling than the poverty and degradation of disenfranchised Jews – and it gave rise to racial theories that posited an essential biological difference in them.

When imperial Germany went down to defeat in 1918, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, was forced to abdicate, a popular theory that Germany had been stabbed in the back by the Jews took hold. Jews role, on the one hand, in the socialist and Communist movements that led revolutions in both Germany and Russia, and their prominence in international finance, on the other, led to dark theories about Jews lack of national loyalty, their treachery, and their degeneracy.

In Hitlers mind, all the groups that he saw as foiling Germany – Bolsheviks, socialists, social democrats – became identified with Jews, because indeed, Jews were so prominently represented among each of them. His political theories blended with increasingly technical racial theories that imagined the Jews, along with other groups like Slavs and Gypsies, as biologically inferior to Aryans, the white northern European race that pure Germans were presumed to belong to.

However perverted his thinking and outrageous his theories, though, and whatever personal experiences he did have that may have turned him against Jews, Hitler was supported at every level of German society by people who were ready to see their country return to the greatness they felt had been denied it, and to believe that it was the Jews who were responsible for that fall from grace.

As taken from, https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaust-remembrance-day/why-did-adolf-hitler-hate-the-jews-1.5088390