On the way out of a Chicago eatery last night my party — mostly nonreligious Jews — gathered around an infant on the floor in an infant seat. So insistent was the cooing that the mother — obviously a New Yorker — asked “Doesn’t anyone have babies in Chicago?” I didn’t think it would be appropriate to explain to this woman that this crowd is not quite as used to seeing babies as a frum group would have been and that the difference had nothing to do with New York and Chicago.

I too could not take my eyes off the infant despite being no stranger to babies (and hopefully gaining renewed familiarity via grandchildren). What I kept asking myself was: How could a human being look at the face of an infant or a young child and deliberately slit his or her throat? That is something I suspect each of us is asking in the wake of the slaughter in Itamar last Shabbos. To write about anything else seems so totally beside the point and yet I have absolutely nothing to add to the feelings that we share at this time including the outrage at the world’s very lack of outrage over the cold-blooded murder of Jewish children in their beds. Both Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post on Monday and Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday give expression to this outrage in their distinctive styles. Both are well-worth reading.

My wife and I are currently in Chicago for my father-in-law’s ninetieth birthday. What was to be a celebration has become a rather bittersweet event. His wife of the last twenty-two years who was still teaching college English last summer at eighty-eight has had such a precipitous decline that her son felt that he should take her to live in a state-of-the-art facility near him in LA. As a consequence there is no one left to celebrate with except my wife and I. And most of her time has been spent packing him up to move to the West Coast and sifting through the accumulated memorabilia of nearly a century. I cannot see any reason that he will ever return to Chicago where he has spent nearly his entire life except for the three years in the army during World War II.

The one bonus of the trip was the opportunity to spend Shabbos in Milwaukee in the community of Rabbi Michel Twerski and Rebbetzin Feige Twerski which was everything we had hoped for and more. At one point I asked Reb Michel why his father — a chassidishe rebbe — had been so insistent that all his children attend college. He replied that in those days — the fifties and early sixties — his father felt that anyone without a degree simply had no credibility with non-frum Jews. The latter were in no position to assess Torah knowledge and not prepared to listen to anyone without an academic imprimatur. Reb Michel agreed with his father’s assessment of those times.

Next week I plan to take up the issue of whether there still exists the equivalent today to establish credibility of the college degree of yore.

One last matter. My statement in last week’s Outlook that Reb Aharon Kotler always consulted with Reb Yaakov Kamenetsky before a major decision to clarify the factual nexus was inaccurate. More accurate would have been to say is that when Reb Aharon felt the need to clarify the relevant metzius he did so with Reb Yaakov.