The story is told of an item that appeared in the “events around town” column of a small-town paper: “The Middletown symphony orchestra played Beethoven last evening. Beethoven lost.” That quip came to mind the other day as I read of a recent debate at New York University one of an ongoing series on various controversial topics. The debate focused on the question “Would the world be better off without religion?” On one side were a couple professed atheists; on the other were a Christian polemicist and well-known Conservative clergyman David Wolpe sticking up for G-d as it were.

The audiences at these debates who tend toward the very liberal are polled about their opinions on the topic before the debate and then again afterward. They previously voted lopsidedly against repealing Obamacare and scuttling diplomacy with Iran and in favor of declaring George W. Bush the worst president of the last 50 years. Yet another vote they took was in favor of the US stepping back from its special relationship with Israel — agreeing with the position of Rashid Khalidi the Columbia academic at whose dinner table Barack Obama had many conversations that were “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases …”

So it wasn’t surprising that a majority of the audience’s members wasn’t swayed from the anti-religious opinions they brought into the debate. But it certainly didn’t help that the advocate for religion was a denier of the truth of Torah.

The New York Times reported that each side argued against type. “The believers brandished statistics — religious people live longer …; give away more money (including to secular causes); and have started far fewer of history’s wars than is generally believed (only 7 percent by one count).… Meanwhile the doubters cited [Biblical] chapter and verse the more appalling the better.”

It was helpful of Wolpe to marshal the evidence that religion is good for us which is of course true. Unfortunately however in countering the other side’s distortions of the Bible a Conservative clergyman whose movement has jettisoned the authority of Torah shebe’al peh isn’t very well positioned to tell his disputants that their literalist way of reading the Bible is in error. After all as British Chief Rabbi Sacks has observed it is “precisely the liberal forms of Judaism that come closest ... to the Protestant fundamentalist model.”

But the choice of a Conservative to defend religion in a debate of this sort was unfortunate for yet another reason. A Torah-true representative would have pointed to the very title of the debate — “Would the world be better off without religion?” — and observed that its underlying premise takes discussion of the truth of religion off the table focusing solely on the pragmatics of whether the world is better or worse off with religion and its adherents.

Yet as Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb compelling demonstrates in his Living Up to the Truth there are only two conceivable attitudes toward religion: that of the pragmatist who looks for a religion that will serve his personal goals and that of the realist who searches for a religion that is true. These approaches need not be contradictory and indeed are not at odds in Judaism’s case. But if and when they do conflict realism must trump pragmatism. This after all is the approach we adopt in all of life where we act based on the reality as it is not as we wish it to be. Our approach ought to be no different when it comes to religion.

Thus an authentic representative of religion would have argued that the wrong question was being debated that evening. He would then have gone on to supply the right question for consideration — “Is Religion True?” — and his answer to it along with the supporting evidence. Sadly a Conservative clergyman is incapable of arguing for the truth of the Torah that his own movement rejects and is thus forced to accept the very limited terms of the debate set forth by its sponsors. 

That’s why a more accurate report on this debate would have read “Last night at NYU David Wolpe played religion’s representative. Religion lost.”

DANCING LESSONS Have you been to a frum wedding recently? I don’t know; maybe it’s me maybe I go to the wrong kinds of weddings (just lost a few friends …) but there seems to be a problem or actually a number of problems with the way things work at many of our weddings (there go the remaining friends and all my relatives … Oh well nothing to lose now). Here are three:

There’s the perplexing contradiction between the smorgasbord and the seudah: mixed seating at the meal is unthinkable while at the buffet the genders mix freely and maneuver in close contact while dressed to the hilt.

Then there is the nonstop chatter at the back of the chuppah room the chatterers seemingly oblivious that something momentous — and quite heilig besides — is taking place in the life of the young man and woman standing at the front.

And there’s that wonderful stretch of time between the seudah’s beginning and the first dance. It’s the photographer’s gift to all of us enabling guests to form deep friendships with tablemates they’ve never before met and won’t likely meet again (at least until the next such simchah …); to savor flavorful nuances of coleslaw pickles and ginger ale they never knew existed; or simply to sit back and enjoy the dinner music assuming they can block out the less-than-idyllic mental images of their kids adrift at home or their chavrusos bereft in the beis medrash.

Some of these issues might not have easy solutions. But I actually began writing these lines with an entirely different observation in mind. Some might see as it as trivial but I don’t think it is.

Recently I attended the wedding of a chassidishe nephew and was taken once again with the power and the beauty of the dancing at such chasunahs. Here’s what they don’t do: they don’t form a small impenetrable core of dancers with one or two tightly packed outer circles of men basically shuffling round and round completely unaware of what’s happening in the center and those not fond of shuffling on the outside and incapable of pushing their way inside opting to simply mill about in the vast expanse of unused dance floor waiting for the sound of “L’Shanah HaBaah B’Yerushalayim.”

What they do instead is form one huge circle save for a small group of baalei simchah — the chassan and mechutanim close mishpachah rabbanim — who with arms linked dance back and forth down the entire floor. This second group of dancers is rightly the focus of everything surrounded by a fast-moving circle of those joining in their simchah. The fact that the dancing is done to the lilting strains of the best of Modzitz Bobov et al only makes the entire experience that much more joyous and uplifting.

Why does this matter so much? Reflecting on that chasunah I realized that its participants came away with something besides the mitzvah of simchas chassan v’kallah. On an otherwise unremarkable weekday evening with no Yom Tov in sight the dancing served as a recharging station for the spiritual batteries of those fortunate guests a booster shot of simchah shared with other Jews to carry them through the week or the month. Who can’t use that now and then?

Come to think of it chassidishe weddings are also blessedly free of some of the other issues we noted at the outset. Could it be that the rest of us have something to learn from them?