| Outlook |

Strength from Love

By Yonoson Rosenblum | August 10, 2016

s we mourn the Beis Hamikdash destroyed because of sinas chinam it is appropriate to consider the opposite of that grave sin the mitzvah of v’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha which Rabi Akiva describes as the “great principle of the Torah.” Why is this mitzvah of such unique importance?

The Alshich writes that when Jews are united in this world there is unity in the Upper Realms. That unity reflecting Hashem’s essence is the goal of Creation. The unity of the Jewish People was the condition for the revelation at Sinai of Torah the blueprint for Creation.

The basis for Jewish unity is the existence of a collective Jewish soul. Love of our fellow Jews grows from recognition of our roots in that common collective soul. Thus Rav Boruch Ber Leibowitz considered his entry ticket to Gan Eden to be that “I loved every single Jew” observant or nonobservant.

Ahavas Yisrael minimally requires that we worry about the wellbeing of every single Jew. The many tefillos added wheneverIsraelis at war are one manifestation. Beyond that we are required to do everything we can to ensure the physical wellbeing and security of our fellow Jews. The vast and varied number of chareidi chesed organizations especially in the health field attest to that commitment.

But what about ongoing relationships with Jews who are not mitzvah observant? Will they have an adverse impact on us or our homes? Would a real friendship be perceived as our condonation of a life not guided by Torah and turn mitzvah observance into nothing more than a lifestyle choice? Will we become desensitized to what is at stake when a Jew does not fulfill Hashem’s Will?

Such questions are becoming more common as observant Jews find themselves thrust to an ever-greater degree into ongoing relationships with nonreligious Jews particularly in the workplace. Is the best course to treat one’s coworkers pleasantly and with respect but to avoid any real friendship? Or is even friendship — obviously with coworkers of the same gender — a desideratum to be pursued?

These are not easy questions. Nor I suspect will there be one answer for each religious Jew or in every situation. We have to be careful never to convey approval or even indifference to our fellow Jews’ failure to observe Torah. And we have to work against desensitization just like Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach who would say to himself “Shabbos ” whenever he saw a Jew driving on Shabbos.

In the context of learning Torah with nonobservant Jews the gedolei Yisrael have been highly supportive even where the nonobservant Jew expresses no desire to become religious. The power of Torah is such that it will always have an impact.

And I know personally that the gedolim have permitted ongoing open discussions between veteran journalists across the religious divide and that such meetings have led to real changes in the way that our community is portrayed in the media.

But what about meetings that don’t involve Torah texts and where the goal is simply to break down stereotypes about Jews whose lives center around Hashem’s commandments (as well as stereotypes about those described as chiloni) or just to lower levels of animosity between different groups in Israeli society? The filmmaking group of religious and nonreligious women described recently by Leah Gebber in these pages (“Turning Tides: Wide-Angle View” Issue 501) would be an example. Are reduced tensions and breaking stereotypes independent values apart from kiruv?

In truth that distinction may be more theoretical than practical. For no real kiruv can take place if the not-yet-observant Jew does not feel that we genuinely care for him or her as a person and find something to admire about him or her — i.e. that they are more than a haicha timtza (instrument) of our kiruv ambitions. And there is a positive mitzvah of kiddush Hashem that our conduct should always be such that others admire us and the Torah that shapes us whether they become observant or not.

In general I think — and the switch to the first-person pronoun should be taken as an indication of the tentative nature of what follows — that the time may be ripe for adopting a much more optimistic attitude about contact with nonobservant Jews. We no longer live in the early ’50s when Zionism had created a state and seemed to be the wave of the future.

And I would hope that no regular reader of this column feels that we have much to envy in the society around us whether inIsraelor chutz l’Aretz however much there may be to admire about individual members of that society. The world without Torah is rushing headlong toward the moral abyss and intellectual incoherence.

In a world in which contact with the outside world is increasingly unavoidable a confident optimistic attitude toward contact with nonreligious Jews may be the best defense for us and our children. Rabbi Yitzchok Berkovits makes that point on a Project Inspire video. He begins by noting that there is no way of totally insulating our children today. As soon as they step out the door pernicious influences are everywhere. But when our children see us actively engaged in reaching out to Jews from nonreligious backgrounds rather than retreating in fear we teach them that “there are answers that these Jews are lacking what we have. That prevents them from thinking that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence…. [Y]ou are actually inoculating your children to the dangers of the outside world.”

The Gulag Comes to Campus

Pro football star Richard Sherman doesn’t think too much of Black Lives Matter. Last September he spoke about growing up in the ghetto and losing his best friend as a teenager. His friend was not killed by a policeman but by two 35-year-old black men. “If black lives matter they should all matter all the time ” saidSherman and not just when a cop is involved. He called for the black community to internally address black-on-black crime first.

Nor did he back down when subjected to BLM’s familiar intimidation. “I stand by what I said that All Lives Matter and that we are all human beings. I want African-Americans and everybody else treated like human beings. I also want the police treated like human beings. I don’t want police officers getting knocked off in the street who haven’t done anything wrong.”

Sherman first spoke out in response to a BLM activist named King Noble who posted a photo of Sherman and teammate Marshawn Lynch over the caption: “When we gonna kill these KKKrackas Bro.” In an accompanying video Noble proclaimed “open season on killing white people ” and predicted that “we will witness more executions and killing of white people and cops than ever before.”

In confronting BLMShermanshowed more courage than any Democratic politician this election season and he apparently lived to tell the story. Certainly he fared better than Rohini Sethi student government vice president at the University of Houston who tweeted after the gunning down of five Dallas policemen “Forget #Black Lives Matter; more like #All Lives Matter.” The furies were promptly released upon her.

The Student Government Senate conferred on its president Shane Smith the power to determine Sethi’s punishment for her heinous crime. Smith quickly discovered that being a tyrant wielding absolute power can be fun. He explained to the Washington Post why Sethi must be made an example of: “Her post and subsequent actions were very divisive…. It caused some in our student body to become very upset with her … because they felt she did not understand or respect the struggles of their lives.”

Besides suspending Sethi from her post Shane sentenced her to a thoroughgoing reeducation reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot’sCambodia. She is required to attend a Libra Project diversity workshop whose curriculum is a laundry list of victimology. In addition she must attend three cultural events each month and write a letter of “reflection ” presumably to demonstrate that her mind is now free of whatever demons possessed her to tweet in the first place. Failure to comply would result in her impeachment.

Even before her sentence was pronounced Sethi had already written an abject apology reminiscent of the confessions at the 1937Moscowshow trials. She had been elected she wrote “to represent the voice of every single one of you ” and she confessed that she had failed “to act as your vice president” by responding in her “flawed way” to the murder of theDallaspolicemen. She did however naively continue to express the belief that “we are all human… thus all lives matter.” Perhaps that was her subsequent crime in Smith’s eyes.

Sethi was thus forced to recant for the mildest possible dissent from the slogan of BLM which is itself a second-generation race hustle. BLM was born in fraud: The slogan chanted inFergusontwo summers ago — “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” — was a flat-out lie about how Michael Brown was shot. Even the highly politicized Obama Justice Department agreed with that. It is no surprise that several of the BLM leaders have been convicted of fraud.

The skyrocketing homicide rates in inner cities acrossAmericaare directly attributable to police withdrawal in the face of hostility stirred by BLM — the “Fergusoneffect” documented by American political commentator Heather Mac Donald. And as the King Noble video described above makes clear the group’s anti-police rhetoric occasionally boils over into straight incitement to murder. The BLM platform is comprised of a long list of reparation demands. In short BLM is an organization from the far left of the political spectrum — not one that should be sacrosanct and above the mildest word of criticism on a 40000-student campus.

The “unity” that Sethi says she wants to reach through conversation is an illusion as is the idea that she or any other politician can represent the voice of “every single” student. Only in totalitarian societies do politicians win 100 percent of the vote and only in such societies do all citizens think or pretend to think the same. One of the reasons for the bitter divides in American society today Yuval Levin points out in The Fractured Republic is that the federal government seeks to resolve once and for all too many arguments that are inherently incapable of resolution and should never have been started.

Rohini Sethi’s fate at theUniversityofHoustonshould chill us all. For it demonstrates how effortlessly the progressive mindset slips into totalitarian mind control and how little understanding and respectAmerica’s young have for the moral autonomy of the individual. In the past totalitarian regimes always came to power through force. In the future we may simply slip into totalitarianism through failure to attend to the warning signs along the way.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 622)

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