Speaking recently at the commencement exercises of Tuskegee University the historically black Alabama college First Lady Michelle Obama addressed recent episodes of racial conflict asserting that what has happened in places like Baltimore is “rooted in decades of structural challenges that have made too many folks feel frustrated and invisible.” The notion however that the Baltimore riots are a function of black invisibility is exceedingly difficult to argue considering that as Victor Davis Hanson observes
three black police officers were co-charged for the alleged murder and assault of a black suspect…. [They] who work for a black police chief who in turn serves a black mayor who in turn reports to a largely black city council — all of whom are overseen by a black state attorney who again in turn can be audited by a black attorney general of the United States who serves a black president.
But Mrs. Obama isn’t entirely wrong. There are communities where blacks are invisible. One such place is no more than a mile or two from her home and the man who is virtually blind and deaf too to their plight is her husband. He’s never met a chance for racial grandstanding he didn’t like wading into local law enforcement controversies he knows not the first thing about and musing about Trayvon Martin resembling the son he never had.
Yet for seven straight years now Barack Obama has tried to kill Washington’s Opportunity Scholarship Program which enables nearly 5 000 students 95 percent of whom share Trayvon Martin’s skin color to escape the Capitol district’s backward dangerous public schools. The program boasts a 91 percent high school graduation rate versus 56 percent for D.C.’s public schools.
Joining him every year in this attempted murder by defunding are virtually all of Congress’s Democrats including the black representative of these families’ district Eleanor Holmes Norton. Only thanks to Congressional conservatives like Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz has a program that parents call a “lifesaver” and “our salvation” been spared.
I’ve written about this before in this space and in any event it doesn’t much impact our readers so why revisit it? Here’s why: There are many areas of public policy in which there’s a wide chasm separating left from right and oftentimes each side can make a credible case for its position. Even on racial issues like the ongoing disintegration of urban black communities while I personally believe a half-century’s worth of liberal policy prescriptions are at fault other positions on the matter aren’t entirely meritless.
But the coldblooded opposition to the D.C. voucher program — not opposition to starting it mind you but repeated attempts to shut it down and yank kids out of good schools back into rotten ones — is so utterly indefensible as to constitute a ro’a lev a cruelness of heart that coming from the leader of this nation is deeply demoralizing. It is indefensible because it deprives the public school system of nothing; when Congress created the $20 million program it simultaneously gave the public schools $20 million in extra funding. These children are nothing but a human sacrifice offered up to the god of the teachers’ unions that giveth sustenance and blessing to Democratic campaigns.
But Barack Obama can’t even be bothered to meet with these kids’ parents. Meanwhile his own precious little ones attend the Sidwell Friends private school together with rich little white kids annual tuition a cool $30 000 per child. One parent put it well: “He lives in public housing too — why should he get school choice because he’s rich and we’re not?”
The Republic has previously survived corrupt selfish even criminal behavior coming out of the Oval Office. But this just feels different. It is a display of gratuitous cruelty to the most vulnerable of our citizens to whom the president of all people ought to feel the greatest affinity. How can we hope to fashion a truly compassionate society when this is the behavior emanating from the top?

Shavuos Zitzfleish In an essay I wrote nearly two years ago for Dialogue the journal that has become a premier vehicle for in-depth discussion of important topics in the frum community I addressed the types of Shavuos night shiurim that are in vogue in all too many shuls:
Here finally is one uninterrupted stretch of several hours during which a ba’al habayis can experience what yeshiva men do each day delving deeply with a chavrusa into a sugya in all its profundity. Often instead it is only trite pre-packaged lectures source sheets and all on the order of “Gun Control in Jewish Law ” or for a more frum crowd “Segulos and Shidduchim: Are They a Match?” that are on offer.
I described this as just one manifestation of a larger prevailing norm of what might be termed “spectator learning.” Limud haTorah is intended to be a dynamic full-body interactive experience that engages our minds and stimulates our emotions and actually affects our bodies biochemically. Yet many experience it exclusively through passive participation in a shiur.
Even the most engaged participant in a shiur usually can’t match the level of challenge and engagement of learning with a chavrusa or even by oneself and to be honest how many are that engaged? Unfortunately I wrote the “twin predilections for passive class-based learning as opposed to that involving active individual study and for superficial learning at breakneck speed as opposed to learning at greater depth and with ample review reign supreme.”
We stand just days before Shavuos when we will accept the Torah anew. If what I speak of describes something familiar to you don’t be resigned to the status quo — work to change it. Speak to your rav and the dedicated people who help arrange shiurim and ask for their help in forming even a small group of people who want to opt for learning b’chavrusa as an alternative to the scheduled shiurim.
But isn’t Shavuos night a time when it’s famously difficult for people to remain fully awake? And aren’t shiurim on interesting topics what people need to fight the fatigue? Actually Shavuos night lasts about as long as the daily first seder in yeshivos and for someone immersed in his learning enjoying it and being challenged by it these few hours will seem to be over almost as soon as they begin.
Shavuos night can become the litmus test proving that there’s another way to experience the monumental gift we received on that day 3 327 years ago one that will challenge us intellectually fulfill us emotionally and sanctify us spiritually and bring joy and blessing into our lives. All limud haTorah is wonderful but all limud haTorah is not the same and you don’t have to accept pallid substitutes for the genuine article.
And who knows perhaps actively engaged learning will become habit-forming and that little group will meet again and again and grow and grow.

Light Up Their Lives Last week writing in advance of the Torah Umesorah convention I referred to the pasuk that describes rebbeim as stars. This Shabbos at that blessed gathering Rav Dovid Schustal explained that a rebbi needs to be a self-made luminary a body of light casting a radiant glow that will show his talmidim that genuine happiness is no contradiction to — indeed it’s a direct outgrowth of — avdus l’Hashem.
Later at the Seudah Shlishis Rav Aharon Feldman took the podium to clearly and powerfully enunciate the responsibility of our mechanchim to imbue our young charges with the understanding that a Torah society is at diametric odds on every important issue with the surrounding society in both its secular and religious quarters. His words coming just days before kabbalas haTorah were a bracing reenactment of the mission statement of v’atem tiheyu Li mamleches kohanim v’goy kadosh that preceded the very first Matan Torah.
Next Rav Avrohom Schorr addressed the tzibbur speaking of the unique human capability to pack mere words so full of heartfelt emotion and meaning that they penetrate and transform the listener’s heart. He spoke too of the need for a mechanech to see himself as a shaliach of all of Klal Yisrael rather than as a lone educator in an isolated institution.
And when he finished I turned to my immediate left where the young seventh-grade rebbi I had been shmoozing with earlier in the meal sat crying. I had seen up close a body of radiant light. —