One of the advantages of a weekly column is the opportunity to revisit past columns and add correctives as required by further reflection. So I’d like to return once again to Rabbi Ilan Feldman’s important essay in the new issue of Klal Perspectives.

My concern last week was that we not fall into the mindset of Israeli Leftists forever writing mea culpas about how if Israel were just a bit more forthcoming more understanding the Palestinians would gladly live with us in peace — a conclusion incidentally refuted by every public opinion poll of Palestinians. In the telling of those on the left the Palestinians bear no responsibility for the lack of peace.

In a similar vein the Torah community should not engage in too much self-flagellation over the rapid assimilation of American Jewry as if every American Jew would gladly become Torah observant if we were only a little bit better and more welcoming. In particular I contested Rabbi Feldman’s claim that kiruv today “must be done in isolation from the established Orthodox community.”

Au contraire I asserted “Our communities are the greatest untapped resource for kiruv.… That is the message that Torah Jews need to hear.” As if on cue our guest last leil Shabbos commented that despite her four years of positive involvement with the kiruv families at theUniversity ofWisconsin she would never have become fully observant but for the semester spent living in the Chicago Torah community.

Here’s the corrective: When I wrote that is the message that Torah Jews need to hear I was referring only to kiruv efforts. Despite all our imperfections as individuals and as communities we have something very powerful to offer Jews raised with little knowledge of Torah.

I did not mean however that the only message we need to hear is how great we are. Anyone who compares Rabbi Feldman’s vision of “model” communities to my recent “Towards a Kevod Shamayim Consciousness” sees that we are on the same wavelength.

Kevod Shamayim consciousness is not only relevant to kiruv. The Ramchal in Mesilas Yesharim (Chapter 19) makes it the focus of our entire avodah and Rabbi Chaim Volozhin describes the desire to increase kevod Shamayim as the highest kavanah in Shemoneh Esrei. Such a consciousness helps us become deeper more connected Jews in every area.

RABBI FELDMAN IS CORRECT that the Orthodox community today is often a fearful community; in particular many Orthodox Jews live in terror that one of their children will leave the fold. That terror can make the feared the outcome more likely. Either parents are rendered incapable of setting limits by the deftly wielded threat “If you don’t let me do x I’ll go off the derech ” or they end up imposing so many restrictions to “protect” their children that they make rebellion more likely.

Rabbi Feldman suggests that the fear of dangers lurking all around has rendered our communities less willing to engage in kiruv. That’s plausible but it’s not borne out by the facts. (With respect to ever more selective criteria for entrance to our schools — i.e. intra-communal exclusion — he is probably right.)

Forty years ago our communities were internally focused on rebuilding from the devastation of the War not on attracting new recruits. Today we have the luxury of looking outwards. Project Inspire which encourages every adult Jew to look for kiruv opportunities has caught on even in some of the most insular chassidic communities. Thousands are involved in Partners in Torah. An acquaintance who was enthralled Rabbi Feldman’s essay nevertheless admits that there are many more families today to whom to send those in the process of becoming religious than there were 30 years ago.

The honest among us acknowledge that the plague of off-the-derech kids is largely internally generated not the result of “outside influences.” The imposition of historically elite standards — both intellectual and spiritual — on a large diverse population has resulted in many of our children sensing from an early age that they are being set up for failure.

When Rabbi Zecharya Greenwald wrote in the recent Mishpacha symposium that the greatest problem facing our community is our children’s lack of self-esteem I suspect that is much of what he was referring to — kids who have been made to feel by the “system” that they just don’t make the grade.

If there are those who refrain from kiruv because they fear the adverse influences of admitting not-yet-observant Jews into their homes they should reconsider. “Selling” our lives to outsiders provides some of the idealism many of our youth and their parents lack. More important being forced to think about why we are privileged to be Torah Jews is good for all of us and good for our children to hear explicitly from our mouths. Indeed the positive impact of kiruv rechokim in strengthening the Torah community was stressed by numerous contributors to the Klal Perspectives issue.

Revelers Alert

The annual battle betweenIsrael’s Chief Rabbinate and establishments under their supervision who wish to host New Year’s Eve festivities is one of the hardy perennials of the Israeli press. The latter invariably poses the question: True the night’s revelry may not be Torahdig but why should New Year’s Eve be worse than any other night?

The answer was provided last week by Adam Garfinkle in of all places the prestigious policy journal The American Interest.

Julius Caesar first made January 1 the first day of the year in 45 or 46 BCE. (Prior to that the Roman calendar had only ten months and no January.) The early Christians had a habit of appropriating pagan festivals for their own use and they did so with respect to January 1. At the Council of Nicea (325 CE) the various bishops gathered noted that January 1 would be the date of the bris of a Jewish male born on December 25 and instituted the Festival of Circumcision. Somehow the appropriation of a Jewish covenant for Christian purposes was supposed to represent the replacement of the Jews by Christians as G-d’s Chosen People. (Comparative theology is not one of my subjects.)

Thus Jews celebrating January 1 emulate the Jews of Shushan who joined in Achashveirosh’s feast to celebrate the failure of Daniel’s prophecy that the Jews would return to Eretz Yisrael after 70 years.

Sylvester the Pope at the time of the Council of Nicea convinced the Roman emperor Constantine to evict all the Jews fromJerusalem for which achievement he was declared a saint. The night of his “saint’s day ” December 31 was celebrated in Europe with the traditional sports of synagogue and Hebrew book burning.

Pope Gregory the initiator of the eponymous Gregorian calendar in use by most of the world today was an equally pleasant chap. Under his reign January 1 was a day on which the Jews of Rome were forced to listen to conversion sermons and a tax was imposed upon them to pay for a House of Conversion. He also used the day to order the confiscation of all Hebrew books which resulted in the murder of many Jews who resisted the decree.

These associations with January 1 should be enough to keep any self-respecting Jew from turning the “new year” into a time of drunken celebration.

Reliving Bork

Certain events have the power to remind us of the long and sometimes tortuous path we have traveled. The recent death of Robert Bork was such a marker for me.

The so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” (October 20 1973) took place early in my first semester in law school. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than execute President Richard Nixon’s order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. It was left to Robert Bork the number three person in the Justice Department to fire Cox.

The days that followed were heady ones as Yale law faculty and students gathered together to work on drafting articles of impeachment. If any collegial regard was expressed for Bork who had just months before left theYaleLawSchoolfaculty to become Solicitor General I’ve forgotten it.

Fast-forward 30 years. I’m honored to join Judge Bork for lunch at WashingtonDC’s most elegant (and short-lived) kosher restaurant. Joining us is Tevi Troy President George W. Bush’s liaison to the Jewish community. Bork is writing a book on judicial activism around the world and I’ve been invited to share my insights on the Israeli Supreme Court. When Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (Aei Press) appears Bork is kind enough to cite me a number of times in the Acknowledgments and the chapter on the Israeli Supreme Court.

After lunch I spend over an hour in his office discussing religion — if I recall his wife was a former nun; cultural decline the subject of his work Slouching Towards Gomorroh (Harper Perennial); and legal geography — my father was his law-school classmate.

Robert Bork’s passing was not only a reminder of how much I’ve changed over 30 years but as Eytan Kobre has pointed out of how muchAmericahas changed. Adam Garfinkle recently opined that if President Obama wants to appoint as Defense Secretary a former senator best known for his lack of sympathy forIsraeland fierce opposition to military action againstIran’s nuclear program that’s his right and the Senate should confirm.

How quaint that call for bipartisan deference to any presidential appointment meeting minimal standards of competence after the Senate’s 1987 rejection of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court despite his status as one of America’s leading legal academics whose work on antitrust law led to a complete reversal of prior Supreme Court doctrine and his career as a highly respected Court of Appeals Judge.