Writing in Commentary’s Contentions blog about the parallels between the Holocaust and the looming threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb Evelyn Gordon observes:

There’s another parallel that’s equally disturbing: the world’s indifference to the relentless incitement to genocide of both Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The [latter] never misses an opportunity to call for “wiping Israel off the map” … a blatant call for mass murder. Yet he has never for instance been declared persona non grata by the EU or investigated for incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Court; indeed he has been feted in many parts of the “enlightened” West …

Gordon goes on to write that “even more troubling is the silence of world Jewry on this issue — a stark contrast to its activism over say Soviet Jews.” But she ended her analysis a bit too soon failing to note one further uncanny parallel between the current predicament and that of the 1940s: The reason for the silence of American Jewry then as now.

In a strikingly honest speech at a national Holocaust conference in 2008 David Ellenson dean of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College acknowledged that leading Reform clergyman Stephen Wise and other American Jewish leaders “failed miserably” in their response to the Holocaust. A report on the conference notes:

“In the early 1930s it was Wise who led rallies against Hitler so why did he fail so horribly in the 1940s?” Ellenson asked. He said part of the explanation lies in Wise’s “absolute and complete love for President Roosevelt.” He noted that most American Jews shared this attitude and recalled that his grandfather kept photographs of Theodor Herzl and Roosevelt side by side as the two people he admired most. 

Saadia Gelb a student at Reform’s seminary during the Holocaust wrote in his memoirs of confronting Wise for trusting President Roosevelt’s assurances that the US was doing everything possible to help Europe’s Jews. “He’s conning you with soapy words” Gelb told Wise. “The problem is not whether you have access to him but what he’ll do about it.”

Can the parallel be any clearer between Wise whose moral blindness was induced by “absolute and complete love” for Roosevelt and today’s American Jewish leaders stricken dumb by their similar infatuation with the current president demonstrated most recently by the love fest that greeted Mr. Obama at Reform’s biennial convention?

But surely Ellenson himself having so publicly and harshly critiqued Wise’s actions during the Holocaust has learned history’s lessons and will not permit his liberal politics to blind him to the urgency of the looming Iranian threat? Perhaps. But this we know: when last year a group of Reform congregants took out an ad opposing Richard Jacobs’ ascension to the presidency of the Reform movement based in part on his affiliation with J Street which states openly that it remains “strongly opposed to the use of military force by Israel or the United States to attack Iran ” Ellenson had this to say:

I’m struck virtually speechless that of anyone in the world … Jacobs would be considered anti-Israel. The ad was beyond simplistic and smacked of McCarthyism ... The attack is the most despicable thing I’ve ever encountered in my life in the Jewish community. This brings great shame to the Jewish community. I’m just infuriated.

One wonders how much of that anger he can summon toward those of his colleagues now engaged in a virtual replay of Stephen Wise’s Holocaust-era moral outrage.

RISE AND SHINE When reading about people like Mr. Joseph Rosenberger who almost single-handedly rescued the mitzvah d’Oraysa of shatnez from American oblivion I often wonder whether such things are still possible. Ours is a time in which entrepreneurs and tzedakah fundraisers alike have seemingly identified every possible mitzvah opportunity that exists from shiluach hakein to Tikun Chatzos to prepackaged sets of ten morsels of bread for bedikas chometz — the better to ensure that one’s bedikahwon’t Heaven forfend entail an ounce more of exertion and untidiness than absolutely necessary. Is it then still possible to rediscover a severely neglected mitzvah the sort that the Chayei Adam (68:20 citing Sefer Chassidim) refers to as a virtual meis mitzvah a forlorn precept awaiting Jews to attend to it and restore it to its rightful place of honor?

I believe it is and I’ll even propose a candidate for rediscovery. Not only does it seem to inexplicably have fallen by the wayside but it is one whose message we’d do well to hear just about now. I speak of the mitzvah d’Oraysa of “mipnei seiva takum – rising in respect for a person of advanced years” the particulars of which are set forth for all to see in Yoreh Dei’ah 244.

Perhaps I’m mistaken but there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis on this mitzvah neither in shiurim anddrashos nor in everyday practice. Indeed it’s something of an irony that at some Jewish weddings there’s punctilious observance of the minhag to rise as the chassan and perhaps the kallah too make their way to the chuppah but when minutes earlier or later the elderly grandparents stroll down the aisle there is at best a mere smattering of guests who seize the mitzvah at hand and rise for them.

That Hashem’s commandment is suffering neglect is really all that needs be said. But the fact is that this is also a mitzvah whose message our age needs desperately to hear. The modern era has by definition been one of ongoing change with life circumstances constantly improving and all of humankind reaping the benefits in improved health longevity ease of communication automation replacing human toil and vastly higher standards of living.

But in recent times the pace of change has quickened greatly and technology has become a ubiquitous and seemingly indispensable part of all our lives affecting our society in insidious but deeply deleterious ways. “Out with the old in with the new” is today a more powerful generational attitude than perhaps at any time since the advent of modernity. The technological entrepreneurs who stand at the cutting edge of continuous innovation are the saints of a new world religion that has “connectivity for the global village” as its catechism.

And who are the primary intended converts to the Church of Modernity? The young. GenNext or NextGen or however it is that the contrived marketing phrase goes. It is they upon whom Silicon Valley’s priests in collusion with Madison Avenue’s missionaries train their sights and in fact they are far savvier and more proficient in matters technological than their elders. The cult of youth has been underway for a long time in American society but galloping technological advance has given it a whole new form of expression.

And how does Judaism which after all has something to say about everything respond to technology’s conquest of the hearts and minds of this generation? It doesn’t and it doesn’t need to either. That’s because the ostensible challenge technology presents is really an illusion a mirage. For all the hype and hoopla surrounding the brave new high-tech world it is concerned exclusively with the How of life and not at all with the What and Why. Technology can’t generate one iota of meaning in life; never has and never will. The most it can possibly be is a vehicle for the maximization of already extant meaning.

So if one wants to know how to do things in brashly new wondrously efficient ways soon to be replaced by even newer and more wondrous ways tech — hi higher and highest — is the answer. But if one wants to know what to do in this world and more critically why to do it there’s only one choice: Go to the old books and the old people the resources that connect us to the old ideas about life’s purpose and the means to achieve it.

Every time I hear older folks commiserating whether in resignation or bemusement over the fact that their kids know their way around computers so much better than they do I cringe inwardly at the lack of simple self-respect this conveys. The halachos of rising for elders are subsumed in Shulchon Aruch under the section addressing the respect due to talmidei chachamim and for good reason: those who even if unlearned have lived through life’s events as Rav Yochanan puts it in Kiddushin 32a have gained an experiential wisdom just by having journeyed through the cycle of life. An essential aspect of that wisdom is the realization that whatever superficial advances society may have made human nature hasn’t changed one whit. And the trials of human living are precisely the same and in need of the same guidance as when life’s journey began.

And if we can cast aside the gadgets long enough to rise the next time one such aged teacher of ageless truths strolls by we’ll be the richer for it.