I didn’t think I’d ever write these words but something in the New York Times last week showed the power of sheer goodness to overcome small-minded prejudice and cynicism. Then again I didn’t think I’d ever see a picture of a chassidishe couple the husband resplendent in shtreimel and beketshe a shy smile radiating from their pure faces in the pages of the Times. But that’s precisely what readers of that paper were treated to last week in a story about a letter that Nachman Glauber a”h wrote to his parents before his chasunah.

The photos appearing alongside media coverage of frum and certainly chassidish people often convey even more than the article does. Typically it’s a group shot depicting an undifferentiated mass of black often showing just backs turned toward the camera or joyless faces. The message is clear: these are not individuals with hearts and minds and life stories of their own.

Readers may recall the recent discussion in this space about the Forward columnist whose “own sense of the term ‘ultra-Orthodox’ in American Jewish discourse is that on the whole it has been used neutrally with no overtone of either denigration or praise.” But what I didn’t mention was the irony that the picture accompanying that ringing assertion of neutrality was a shot from above of two dozen or so black “ultra-Orthodox” hats presumably with live even perhaps thinking and feeling human beings under them.

Yet the tragedy in Williamsburg brought to the pages of the Times the story of how a pure neshamah about to be wed had written a heartfelt letter to his beloved parents thanking them for all they’d done for him for the values he’d now use to undergird his new home asking their forgiveness for the pain he might have caused them beseeching them to pray for him and praying that they in turn would see much nachas from him and his “special bride.” It ended

From your son who admires and thanks you and will always love you.

Nachman

And this story was accompanied by a very different sort of picture one that in its wholesome portrayal of a clear-eyed proudly Jewish couple surely provided some readers with a window into the profound goodness that exists within our community. And lo and behold the comments section was filled with letter after letter from Jew and non-Jew alike marveling at the pure goodness of this young man wishing upon themselves the good fortune to have a child like him and mourning anew the tragedy of his and his expectant wife’s sudden passing.

But as I read these beautiful sentiments I couldn’t help but contrast them and the article that brought them forth with a column in the Times opinion section two months earlier by an observant Jew who as I noted in a column last summer is “the reigning academic ‘expert on the Orthodox ’ the media’s go-to guy on the chareidim.” It was a gratuitously nasty piece of fantasy writing about childhood in the Orthodox community.

“The child” he intoned professorially “is first and foremost someone who must be educated. Childhood is not for fun.” And for this he receives generous academic grants and book advances; can an endowed chair be far-off?

Young “Haredi or fervently and anxiously Orthodox” Jews the writer instructed the Times’ readers live in “a sometimes repressive world” featuring the “outcasting or demonization of outsiders … or even those who dare to be different. It’s as if one wants the child to think ‘We are lucky to be the kind of Jews we are and we’d never want to be like the others around us.’$$$separate quotes$$$” Frum kids feeling lucky to be who they are? This really must stop! There were those who called this piece exactly what it was such as the commenter who wrote: “This is a classic example of Jewish self-loathing at work. [The writer] uses negative language to berate Orthodox Jews for doing what any group wants to do: Instill pride in their traditions. I am sure that [he] would have great respect for almost any ethnic group's efforts to maintain their heritage unless of course that ethnic group happens to be the one to which he belongs.… Regarding the statement that childhood is not fun for Orthodox children this is absolutely ridiculous. I assume … [he] only wrote those words to be intentionally incendiary.”

Most comments on the article however followed the writer’s lead ripping into Orthodox Jews with a vengeance. Reading them leaves one not only depressed that there are so many who are consumed with loathing for religion frum Jews and Judaism but also wondering if there’s any way they can be reached.

But then an article like the one on Nachman Glauber appears and one realizes the power of pure goodness to touch hearts and influence minds in ways that no amount of argumentation can.

CHOSEN EXCLUSION Last year saw the publication of something called the New American Haggadah featuring a translation and commentaries by various luminaries of the secular American Jewish literary firmament. Writing in the Jewish Review of Books last spring Leon Wieseltier literary editor of the New Republic penned a take-no-prisoners essay that successfully lays bare the authors’ pseudo-intellectual preening and Jewish ignorance with such devastating acerbity that it even had me feeling bad for those who produced this work.

Wieseltier opens his essay with some choice words about contemporary Jewry’s literacy level:

A history of Jewish literacy remains to be written … and for American Jewish readers of our day I mean the honest ones it will be a disturbing work. Whereas the Jews have always used many languages … the awful fact is that Jewry of the United States has decided … that the Jewish tradition may be adequately received developed and transmitted not in a Jewish language. Owing to the magnitude of their illiteracy American Jews have broken new ground in Jewish incompetence. Translation is an ancient Jewish activity of course…. But no Jewry has ever been as pathetically dependent upon translation as American Jewry.

Then in the following issue he responds to a critical letter this way:

[Her] letter includes two sentences that take my breath away and make me tremble for my brethren. The first is this: "Of course as a woman it would have been rare at any time in Jewish history for me to have known much more than I do now." This after she has admitted to "no knowledge of Hebrew." But she is not living then she is living now. If … in a Jewish community in which Hebrew instruction is not too hard to find a Jewish woman … who takes pride in her Jewishness knows no Hebrew then she has only herself to blame. It can only be because she does not wish to know Hebrew and believes that as a Jew she can do without it. Misogyny religious or secular is no longer what stands in her way…. This is a chosen exclusion.…

Like many American Jews [the letter-writer] is very charitable about her Jewish shortcomings. And so she writes in her second unforgettable sentence: "Admittedly Judaism lite but mine such as it is." I wonder if she is so blithe and self-forgiving about her other passions and obligations.… We are the custodians of what … our ancestors recent and ancient preserved. We hold it in trust for those who will come after us. We claim to revere it and to be its beneficiaries. So by what right by what arrogance and ingratitude do we condemn large portions of it with our ignorance and our indifference to oblivion? … So "Judaism lite" is Judaism weightless and losing gravity; Judaism attenuated and abandoned; our very own race to the bottom. I would not boast about it.

Wieseltier no frum Jew himself is here issuing what is perhaps the greatest single indictment of American Jewry: After all the touting of heterodox theologies and commitments to social justice after all the trumpeting of secular Jewish culture of klezmer of Yiddish what have you … still the question begs — how can it possibly be that this most highly educated and accultured of communities is so dismally ignorant of even the Judaic basics and isn’t at all mortified about it?