May 11-18, 2012 www.jewishideasdaily.com

Jewish Ideas Weekly, published by Jewish Ideas Daily, is a project of Bee.Ideas. To contact us, please email editors@jewishideasdaily.com.

Friday, May 11

Sendak’s ChelmBy Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maurice Sendak

After the publication of Where the Wild Things Are established Maurice Sendak as a force to be reckoned with in children’s lit-erature, he had the opportunity to illustrate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first children’s book, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories. Sendak, who passed away earlier this week, cherished the collaboration, which not only garnered a 1967 Newbery Honor, but more importantly in his eyes, “finally” earned him his parents’ respect.

As a token of our respect, we re-publish three illustrated stories from Zlateh here with the permission of Commentary, in whose pages they first appeared. —The Editors

The Snow in Chelm Chelm was a village of fools, fools young and old. One night someone spied the moon reflected in a barrel of water. The peo-ple of Chelm imagined it had fallen in. They sealed the barrel so that the moon would not escape. When the barrel was opened in the morning and the moon wasn’t there, the villagers decided it had been stolen. They sent for the police, and when the thief couldn’t be found, the fools of Chelm cried and moaned.

Once, on a Chanukah night, the snow fell all evening. It covered the whole of Chelm like a silver tablecloth. The moon shone, the stars twinkled, the snow shimmered like pearls and diamonds.

Of all the fools of Chelm, the most famous

were its seven Elders. Because they were the village’s oldest and greatest fools, they ruled in Chelm. They had white beards and high foreheads from too much thinking.

That evening the seven Elders were sitting and pondering, wrinkling their foreheads. The city was in need of money, and they did not know where to get it. Suddenly the old-est of them all, Gronam the Great Fool, ex-claimed, “The snow is silver!”

“I see pearls in the snow!” another shouted.“And I see diamonds!” a third called out.

It became clear to the Elders of Chelm that a treasure had fallen from the sky.

But soon they began to worry. The peo-ple of Chelm liked to go walking, and they would most certainly trample the treasure. What was to be done? Silly Tudras had an idea.

“Let’s send a messenger to knock on all the windows and let the people know that they must remain in their houses until all the sil-ver, all the pearls, and all the diamonds are safely gathered up.”

For a while the Elders were satisfied. They rubbed their hands in approval of the clever idea. But then Dopey Lekisch called out in consternation, “The messenger himself will trample the treasure.”

The Elders realized that Lekisch was right, and again they wrinkled their high fore-heads in an effort to solve the problem.

“I’ve got it!” exclaimed Shmerel the Ox. “Tell us, tell us,” pleaded the Elders.

“The messenger must not go on foot. He must be carried on a table so that his feet will not tread on the precious snow.”

Everybody was delighted with Shmerel the Ox’s solution; and the Elders, clapping their hands, admired their own wisdom.

The Elders immediately sent to the kitch-en for Gimpel the errand boy and stood him on a table. Now who was going to car-ry the table? It was lucky that in the kitchen there were Treitle the cook, Berel the pota-to peeler, Yukel the salad mixer, and Yontel, who was in charge of the community goat. All four were ordered to lift up the table on which Gimpel stood. Each one took hold of a leg. On top stood Gimpel, grasping a wooden hammer with which to tap on the villagers’ windows. Off they went.

At each window Gimpel knocked with the hammer and called out, “No one leave your house tonight. A treasure has fallen from the sky and it is forbidden to step on it.”

The people of Chelm obeyed the Elders and remained in their houses all night. Meanwhile the Elders themselves sat up try-ing to figure out how to make the best use of

Jewish Ideas Weekly

Get the latest from Jewish Ideas Daily in your inbox every morning.

Sign up at www.jewishideasdaily.com

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 2

the treasure once it had been gathered up.Silly Tudras proposed that they sell it and

buy a goose which lays golden eggs. Thus the community would be provided with a steady income.

Dopey Lekisch had another idea. Why not buy eyeglasses that make things look bigger

for all the inhabitants of Chelm? Then the houses, the streets, the stores would all look bigger, and of course if Chelm looked bigger, then it would be bigger. It would no longer be a village but a big city.

There were other, equally clever ideas. But while they were weighing their various plans, morning came and the sun rose. The Elders looked out of the window, and, alas, they saw that the snow had been trampled. The heavy boots of the table carriers had de-stroyed the treasure.

The Elders of Chelm clutched at their white beards and admitted to one another that they had made a mistake. Perhaps, they reasoned, four others should have carried the four men who had carried the table that held Gimpel the errand boy?

After long deliberations the Elders decid-ed that if next Chanukah a treasure would again fall down from the sky, that is exactly what they would do.

Although the villagers remained without a treasure, they were full of hope for the next year and praised their Elders, who they knew could always be counted on to find a way, no matter how difficult the problem.

The Mixed-Up Feet and the Silly BridegroomNear the city of Chelm there was a village called East Chelm, where there lived a ten-ant farmer called Shmelka and his wife Shmelkicha. They had four daughters, all of whom slept in the same broad bed. Their names were Yenta, Pesha, Trina, Yachna.

As a rule the girls got up early in the morning to milk the cows and help their mother with the household chores. But one winter morning they stayed in bed later than usual. When their mother came to see what was keeping them, she found all four strug-gling and screaming in the bed. Shmelkicha demanded to know what all the commo-tion was about and why they were pulling each other’s hair? The girls replied that in their sleep they had gotten their feet mixed up, and now they didn’t know whose feet belonged to whom, and so of course they couldn’t get up.

As soon as she learned about her daugh-ters’ mixed-up feet, Shmelkicha, who was from Chelm proper, became exceedingly frightened. She remembered that a similar event had taken place in Chelm many years before and, oh, how much trouble there had been. She ran at once to a neighbor and begged her to milk the cows, and she her-self set off for Chelm to ask the town’s Elder what to do. Before she left, she said to the girls, “You stay in bed and don’t budge un-til I return. Because if once you get up with the wrong feet, it will be very difficult to set things right.”

When Shmelkicha arrived in Chelm and told the Elder about what had happened to her daughters, he clutched his white beard with one hand, placed the other on his fore-head and was immediately lost in thought As he pondered he hummed a Chelm melo-dy. After a while he said:

“There is no perfect solution for a case of mixed-up feet. But there is something that sometimes helps.”

He told Shmelkicha to take a long stick, walk into the girls’ room and unexpectedly whack the blanket where their feet were. “It is possible,” explained the wise Elder, “that in surprise and pain each girl will grab at her own feet and jump out of bed.” A similar remedy had once been used in such a case, and it had worked.

Many townspeople were present when the Elder made his pronouncement, and as always they admired his great wisdom. The Elder stated further that in order to prevent such an accident in the future, it would be

advisable to slowly marry off the girls. Once each girl was married and had her own house and her own husband, there would be no danger that they would get their feet mixed up again.

Shmelkicha returned to East Chelm, picked up a stick, walked into her daugh-ters’ room and whacked the quilt with all her might. The girls were completely taken aback, but before a moment had passed, they were out of bed, screaming in pain and fright, each jumping on her own feet. Shmelka, the father, and a number of neigh-bors who had followed Shmelkicha into the house and witnessed what had happened, again came to the conclusion that the wis-dom of the Elder of Chelm knew no bounds.

Shmelka and Shmelkicha immediately decided to carry out the rest of the Elder’s advice and started looking for a husband for their eldest daughter. They soon found a young man of Chelm called Lemel. His father was a coachman, and Lemel himself already owned a horse and wagon. It was clear that Yenta’s future husband would be a good provider.

When they brought the couple together to sign the marriage agreement, Yenta began to cry bitterly. Asked why she was crying, she replied, “Lemel is a stranger, and I don’t want to marry a stranger.”

“Didn’t I marry a stranger?” her mother asked.

“You married Father,” Yenta answered, “and I have to marry a total stranger.” And her face became wet with tears.

The match would have come to nothing, but luckily they had invited the Elder of Chelm to be present. And, after some pon-dering, he again found the way out. He said to Yenta, “Sign the marriage contract. The moment you sign it, Lemel becomes your fiancé.  And when you marry you will not be marrying a stranger, you will be marry-ing your betrothed.”

When Yenta heard these words, she was overjoyed. Lemel kissed the Elder three times on his huge forehead, and the rest of the company praised the wisdom of the El-der of Chelm, which was even greater than that of wise King Solomon.

But now a new problem arose. Neither Lemel nor Yenta had learned to sign their names. Again the Elder came to the rescue:

“Let Yenta make three small circles on the paper, and Lemel three dashes. These will serve as their signatures and seal the con-tract.”

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 3

Yenta and Lemel did as the Elder ordered, and everybody was gay and happy. Shmelki-cha treated all the witnesses to cheese blin-tzes and borscht and the first plate naturally went to the Elder of Chelm, whose appetite was particularly good that day.

Before Lemel returned to Chelm proper, from where he had driven in his own horse and wagon, Shmelka gave him as a gift a small penknife with a mother-of-pearl han-dle. It happened to be the first day of Chanu-kah, and the penknife was both an engage-ment gift and Chanukah present.

_____________

Since Lemel often came to East Chelm to buy from the peasants the milk, butter, hay, oats, and flax which he sold to the townspeople of Chelm, he soon came to visit Yenta again. Shmelka asked Lemel whether his friends in Chelm had liked his penknife, and Lemel re-plied that they had never seen it.

“Why not?” Shmelka asked.“Because I lost it.”“How did you lose it?”“I put the penknife into the wagon and it

got lost in the hay.”Shmelka was not a native of Chelm but

came from another nearby town, and he said to Lemel, “You don’t put a penknife into a wagon full of straw and hay and with cracks and holes in the bottom to boot. A penknife you place in your pocket, and then it does not get lost.”

“Future Father-in-law, you are right,” Lemel answered. “Next time I will know what to do.”

Since the first gift had been lost, Shmelka gave Lemel a jar of freshly fried chicken fat to replace it. Lemel thanked him and re-turned to Chelm.

Several days later, when business again brought Lemel to East Chelm, Yenta’s par-ents noticed that his coat pocket was torn, and the entire left side of his coat was cov-ered with grease stains.

“What happened to your coat?” Shmelki-cha asked.

Lemel replied, “I put the jar of chicken fat in my pocket, but the road is full of holes and ditches and I could not help bumping against the side of the wagon. The jar broke, and it tore my pocket and the fat ran out all over my clothes.”

“Why did you put the jar of chicken fat into your pocket?” Shmelka asked.

“Didn’t you tell me to?”“A penknife you put into your pocket.

A jar of chicken fat you wrap in paper and

place in the hay so that it will not break.”Lemel replied, “Next time I will know

what to do.”Since Lemel had had little use out of the

first two gifts, Yenta herself gave him a silver gulden, which her father had given her as a Chanukah gift.

When Lemel came to the village again, he was asked how he had spent the money.

“I lost it,” he replied.“How did you lose it?”“I wrapped it in paper and placed it in

the hay. But when I arrived in Chelm and unloaded my merchandise, the gulden was gone.”

“A gulden is not a jar of chicken fat,”

Shmelka informed him. “A gulden you put into your purse.”

“Next time I will know what to do.”Before Lemel returned to Chelm, Yenta

gave her fiancé some newly laid eggs, still warm from the chickens.

On his next visit he was asked how he had enjoyed the eggs, and he replied that they had all been broken.

“How did they break?”“I put them into my purse, but when I

tried to close it, the eggs broke.”“Nobody puts eggs into a purse,” Shmelka

said. “Eggs you put into a basket bedded with straw and covered with a rag so that they will not break.”

“Next time I will know what to do.”Since Lemel had not been able to enjoy

the gifts he had received thus far, Yenta de-cided to present him with a live duck. When

he returned, he was asked how the duck was faring, and he replied that she had died on the way to Chelm.

“How did she die?”“I placed her in a basket with straw and

covered it well with rags, just as you had told me to. When I arrived home, the duck was dead.”

“A duck has to breathe,” Shmelkicha said. “If you cover it with rags, it will suffocate. A duck you put in a cage, with some corn to eat, and then she will arrive safely.”

“Next time I will know what to do.”Since Lemel had gained neither use nor

pleasure from any of his gifts, Yenta decided to give him her goldfish, a pet she had had for several years.

And again on his return, when asked about the goldfish, he replied that it was dead.

“Why is it dead?”“I placed it in a cage and gave it some

corn, but when I arrived it was dead.”Since Lemel was still without a gift, Yenta

decided to give him her canary, which she loved dearly. But Shmelka told her that it seemed pointless to give Lemel any more gifts, because whatever you gave him ei-ther died or got lost. Instead Shmelka and Shmelkicha decided to get the advice of the Elder of Chelm.

The Elder listened to the whole story, and as usual clutched his long white beard with one hand and placed the other on his high forehead, and after much pondering, and humming, proclaimed:

“The road between East Chelm and Chelm is fraught with all kinds of dangers and that is why such misfortunes occur. The best thing to do is to have a quick marriage. Then Lemel and Yenta will be together, and Lemel will not have to drag his gifts from one place to another, and no misfortunes will befall them.”

This advice pleased everyone and the mar-riage was soon celebrated. All the peasants of the vilage of East Chelm and half of the town-people of Chelm danced and rejoiced at the wedding. Before the year was out, Yenta gave birth to a baby girl and Lemel went to tell the Elder of Chelm the good tidings that a child had been born to them.

“Is the child a boy?” the Elder asked.“No.”“Is it a girl?”“How did you guess?” Lemel asked in

amazement.And the Elder of Chelm replied, “For the

wise men of Chelm there are no secrets.”

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 4

The First Shlemiel There are many shlemiels in the world, but the very first one came from the city of Chelm. He had a wife, Mrs. Shlemiel, and a child, small Shlemiel, but he could not pro-vide for them. His wife used to get up early in the morning to sell vegetables in the mar-ketplace. Mr. Shlemiel stayed at home and rocked the baby to sleep. He also took care of the rooster who lived in the room with them, feeding him corn and water.

Mrs. Shlemiel knew that her husband was unhandy, lazy, loved to sleep, and in addi-tion had a sweet tooth. It so happened that one night she prepared a pot full of delicious jam. The next day she worried that while she was away at the market, her husband would eat it all up. So before she left, she said to him, “Shlemiel, I’m going to the market and I will be back in the evening. There are three things that I want to tell you. Each one is very important.”

“What are they?” asked Shlemiel.“First, make sure that the baby does not

fall out of its crib.”“Good. I will take care of the baby.”“Secondly, don’t let the rooster get out of

the house.”“Good. The rooster won’t get out of the

house.”“Thirdly, there is a pot full of poison on

the shelf. Be careful not to eat it, or you will die,” said Mrs. Shlemiel, pointing to the pot of jam she had placed high up in the cup-board.

She had decided to fool him, because she knew that once he tasted the delicious jam, he would not stop eating until the pot was empty. It was just before Chanukah, and she needed the jam to serve with the holiday pancakes.

As soon as his wife left, Shlemiel began to rock the baby and to sing him a lullaby:

I am a big Shlemiel. You are a small Shlemiel. When you grow up, You will be a big Shlemiel And I will be an old Shlemiel. When you have children, You will be a papa Shlemiel And I will be a grandpa Shlemiel.

The baby soon fell asleep and Shlemiel dozed too, still rocking the cradle with his foot.

Shlemiel dreamed that he had become the richest man in Chelm. He was so rich that

he could eat pancakes with jam not only on Chanukah but every day of the year. He spent all day with the other wealthy men of Chelm playing games with a golden dreidel. Shlemiel knew a trick, and whenever it was his turn to spin the dreidel, it fell on the winning “G.” He grew so famous that nobles from distant countries came to him and said, “Shlemiel, we want you to be our king.”

Shlemiel told them he did not want to be a king. But the nobles fell on their knees be-fore him and insisted until he had to agree. They placed a crown on his head and led him to a golden throne. Mrs. Shlemiel, now a queen, no longer needed to sell vegetables in the market. She sat next to him, and they shared a huge pancake spread with jam be-tween them. He ate from one side and she from the other until their mouths met.

As Shlemiel sat and dreamed his sweet dream the rooster suddenly started crow-ing. He had a very strong voice. When it came out with a cock-a-doodle-doo, it rang like a bell. Now when a bell rang in Chelm, it usually meant there was a fire. Shlemiel awakened from his dream and jumped up in fright, overturning the crib. The baby fell out and hurt its head. In his confusion, Shle-miel ran to the window and opened it to see where the fire was. The moment he opened the window, the excited rooster flew out and hopped away. Shlemiel called after him:

“Rooster, you come back. If Mrs. Shlemiel finds you gone, she will rave and rant and I will never hear the end of it.”

But the rooster paid no attention to Sh-

lemiel. It didn’t even look back, and soon it had disappeared from sight.

_____________

When Shlemiel realized that there was no fire, he closed the window and went back to the crying baby, who by this time had a big bump on its forehead from the fall. With great effort Shlemiel comforted the baby, righted the crib, and put him back into it. Again he began to rock the crib and sing a song:

In my dream I was a rich Shlemiel But awake I am a poor Shlemiel. In my dream I ate pancakes with jam, Awake I chew bread and onion. In my dream I was Shlemiel the King But awake I’m just Shlemiel.

Having finally sung the baby to sleep, Sh-lemiel began to worry about his troubles. He knew that when his wife returned and found the rooster gone and the baby with a bump on its head, she would be beside herself with anger. Mrs. Shlemiel had a very loud voice, and when she scolded and screamed, poor Shlemiel trembled with fear. Shlemiel could foresee that tonight, when she got home, his wife would be angrier than ever before and would berate him and call him names.

Suddenly Shlemiel said to himself, “What is the sense of such a life? I’d rather be dead.” And he decided to end his life. But how to do it? He then remembered what his wife had told him in the morning about the pot of poison that stood on the shelf. “That’s what I will do. I will poison myself. When I’m dead she can revile me as much as she likes. A dead Shlemiel does not hear when he is screamed at.”

Shlemiel was a short man and he could not reach the shelf. He got a stool, climbed up on it, took down the pot, and began to eat.

“Oh, the poison tastes sweet,” he said to himself. He had heard that some poisons have a bitter taste and others are sweet. “But,” he reasoned, “sweet poison is better than bit-ter,” and proceeded to finish up the jam. It tasted so good, he licked the pot clean.

_____________

After Shlemiel had finished the pot of poi-son, he lay down on the bed. He was sure that the poison would soon begin to burn his insides and that he would die. But half an hour passed and then an hour, and Shlemiel lay without a single pain in his belly.

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 5

“This poison works very slowly,” Shle-miel decided. He was thirsty and wanted a drink of water, but there was no water in the house. In Chelm, water had to be fetched from an outside well, and Shlemiel was too lazy to go and get it. He remembered that his wife was saving a bottle of apple cider for the holidays. Apple cider was expensive, but when a man is about to die, what is the point in saving money? Shlemiel got out the bottle of cider and drank it down to the last drop.

Now Shlemiel began to have an ache in his stomach, and he was sure that the poison had begun to work. Convinced that he was about to die, he said to himself, “It’s not real-ly so bad to die. With such poison I wouldn’t mind dying every day.” And he dozed off.

He dreamed again that he was a king. He wore three crowns on his head, one on top of the other. Before him stood three golden pots: one filled with pancakes, one with jam, and one with apple cider. Whenever he soiled his beard with eating, a servant wiped it for him with a napkin.

Mrs. Shlemiel, the queen, sat next to him on her separate throne and said, “Of all the kings who ever ruled in Chelm, you are the greatest. The whole of Chelm pays homage to your wisdom. Fortunate is the queen of such a king. Happy is the prince who has you as a father.”

Shlemiel was awakened by the sound of the door creaking open. The room was dark

and he heard his wife’s screechy voice: “Shle-miel, why didn’t you light the lamp?”

“It sounds like my wife, Mrs. Shlemiel,” Shlemiel said to himself. “But how is it pos-sible that I hear her voice? I happen to be dead. Or can it be that the poison hasn’t worked yet and I am still alive?” He got up, his legs shaking, and saw his wife lighting the lamp.

Suddenly she began to scream at the top of her lungs: “Just look at the baby! It has a bump on its head. Shlemiel, where is the rooster, and who drank the apple cider? Woe is me! He drank up the cider! He lost the rooster and let the baby get a bump on its head. Shlemiel, what have you done?”

“Don’t scream, dear wife. I’m about to die. You will soon be a widow.”

“Die? Widow? What are you talking about? You look healthy as a horse.”

“I’ve poisoned myself,” Shlemiel replied.“Poisoned? What do you mean?” asked

Mrs. Shlemiel.“I’ve eaten your pot full of poison.”And Shlemiel pointed to the empty pot of

jam.“Poison?” said Mrs. Shlemiel, “That’s my

pot of jam for Chanukah.”“But you told me it was poison,” Shlemiel

insisted.“You fool,” she said. “I did that to keep

you from eating it before the holiday. Now you’ve swallowed the whole potful.”

And Mrs. Shlemiel burst out crying.Shlemiel too began to cry, but not from

sorrow. He wept tears of joy that he would remain alive. The wailing of the parents woke the baby and it too began to yowl. When the neighbors heard all the crying, they came running and soon all of Chelm knew the story. The good neighbors took pity on the Shlemiels and brought them a fresh pot of jam and another bottle of apple cider. The rooster, who had gotten cold and hungry from wandering around outside, re-turned by himself, and the Shlemiels had a happy holiday after all.

_____________

As always in Chelm when an unusual event occurred, the Elders came together to pon-der over what had happened. Seven days and seven nights they sat wrinkling their fore-heads and tugging at their beards, searching for the true meaning of the incident. At the end the sages all came to the same conclu-sion: A wife who has a child in the cradle and a rooster to take care of should never lie to her husband and tell him that a pot of jam is a pot of poison, or that a pot of poison is a pot of jam, even if he is lazy, has a sweet tooth, and is a shlemiel in addition. ___________________________Reprinted from Commentary, July 1966, by permission; all rights reserved.

Monday, May 14

The Moral Costs of Jewish Day SchoolBy Aryeh Klapper

There is a lot of hand-wringing these days about whether the rising costs of Jewish day schools are sustainable. The discussion has been about money: How can we get more? How can we spend less? These questions miss the point: The largest costs of high day school tuition are not financial but moral, and the key to solving the financial dilemma is to address the moral problem.

What are the moral costs? Imagine that someone proposes a new Jewish practice that would have these consequences:

a. Parents take second jobs, or work lon-ger hours, that deprive them of almost all weekday contact with their children and leave them too exhausted to make Shabbat meaningful.

b. Almost half of households are trans-formed, for years, from community contributors to charity recipients.

c. Children aspiring to intellectual, cre-ative, or service work, such as teach-

ing (especially Torah) or other helping professions, are told that these are not options because they will not produce enough money to sustain a committed Jewish lifestyle.

d. For economic reasons, families choose to have fewer children.

We would consider such a practice stun-ningly irresponsible. Yet these are real-life consequences of current day school tuition, even as the community seems committed to making day school education a requirement of serious Jewish child-rearing. How can we live with these consequences?

Furthermore, parents receiving day school financial aid have no guarantee, and often no idea, of how they will be affected by tuition hikes or whether the school will take account of a job loss, a new baby, a car’s breakdown—or, on the other hand, a gift from a parent or extra income from a second job. They cannot make future plans; they are chronically dependent on other people’s decisions. They are deprived of economic dignity. Indeed, financial aid applications require families to state their expenses in often-humiliating detail. They know a committee will sit in judgment of their priorities. A family that eats pasta all month so it can go to a movie risks an aid cut because it spends on entertainment. A

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 6

Tuesday, May 15

Either/OrthodoxyBy Lawrence GrossmanBelying the regimented connotation of the word “orthodox,” Orthodox Judaism is by far the most diverse stream of Judaism, encompassing such incompatible types as rationalists and mystics, West Bank settlers and peaceniks, college professors and ob-scurantists, feminists and male chauvinists.

Orthodoxy’s internal critics, too, come in different varieties.  Recently, two Orthodox

rabbis have leveled serious charges against their religious community, one attacking its theology, the other its primary educational thrust.   In important respects they contra-dict each other.

Norman Solomon is a distinguished Brit-ish academician, recently retired from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Stud-ies, who whimsically claims to belong to the “skeptical Orthodox.”   His latest book, Torah from Heaven (Littman), certainly ex-udes skepticism.  It argues that the central assumption of classical Judaism—the divine origin of Torah—has become so clearly un-

believable in its literal sense that the only way to keep intellectually honest Jews from abandoning Orthodoxy is to reinterpret the doctrine not as fact but as foundational myth.  Solomon, tongue firmly in cheek, tries to reassure the faithful by pointing out that myths are not necessarily false.  But he clearly thinks this one is.

Solomon painstakingly traces the develop-ment of the notion of Torah from Heaven as it mushroomed to include not only the divin-ity of the Five Books of Moses and the some-what lesser holiness of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, but also a divinely inspired Oral Torah,

family that uses an inheritance to visit yet-unseen relatives in Israel risks a cut because it can afford travel.

The price of poverty is often loss of pri-vacy. This is an evil, which we should mini-mize. But the current system maximizes intrusions on privacy by forcing people who make five times the median income to apply for charity. Because the maximum tuition is unaffordable even for many families earning over $200,000 per year, they are forced into a financial aid system that requires complete financial disclosure.

The system also undermines the schools’ Jewish effectiveness. If our children lack Jewish passion, doesn’t that bespeak pa-rental exhaustion? If they are materialistic, isn’t this related to their being told that their career paths are limited because they are poor? When they show signs of being “at risk,” doesn’t this reflect lessened parental involvement? How can children internalize the core Jewish value of human dignity and the spiritual value of financial independence when their schools make them dependent?

Should we therefore undo our commit-ment—admittedly unprecedented in Jewish history, and inconceivable in a less wealthy community—to broad-based day school education? This is not necessary. We can address the moral issues and, in doing so, the financial issues as well.

The Solomon Schechter School of Greater Boston has proposed a version of a model with great potential. In very simplified form, here is how it might work: Tuition is set as either a fixed percentage of income—say, 15 percent, with small adjustments for the number of children in the school—or a rela-tively high set amount per student, which high-income families can use if they wish to pay a lower percentage of their income. Families unable to pay even the 15 percent

could, as now, apply for financial aid.This model corrects many of the current

system’s moral deficiencies:

• It makes the tuition-setting process trans-parent and predictable.

• It moves many middle-class families off the rolls of those receiving financial aid.

• It defines day school education as a pub-lic good to be communally supported instead of an individual good, privately purchased.

• It makes clear that the rich, even when they pay the maximum tuition, are as-sessed a lower percentage of their income than the middle class.

There are, of course, gaps and imperfec-tions. The new system does not (yet) address families with children in multiple schools or questions of what costs should and should not be included in tuition. It also excludes, consciously, family assets. Yes, this exclu-sion could allow families to “cheat” by hid-ing their true financial capacity; but count-ing all assets would provide a disincentive to saving—and, equally important, would have critical implications for privacy and dignity.

No system is without drawbacks, but the proposed system’s moral advantages are sig-nificant.

Still, let’s be practical: The model will and should be required to pass the budget test. It should provide our schools with revenues at least equal to those of the present system. In fact, the new model would meet or exceed the test, if only because the percentage of income required as tuition can be set so as to produce approximately the revenues that schools receive now.

But the new system would have further budget advantages. Under the current sys-tem, schools operate under deeply flawed

ideas about their revenues and their com-munities’ financial capacities. They have ar-bitrary “financial aid budgets” for what they consider tuition “subsidies”; they turn down students when these budgets are “spent” and they can no longer “afford” to take students paying less than full tuition. In fact, how-ever, any student who pays a significant por-tion of gross family income will be contrib-uting significantly more than the marginal cost of his or her education. In rejecting such students, schools forego revenues and profits. Moreover, notes Dan Perla of the AviChai Foundation, if a school sets tuition as a percentage of income during a reces-sion, when costs rise faster than wages, it will realize rising revenues from the same percentage of income when times improve.

In addition, it is wholly reasonable to ex-pect that the new system would change be-havior. Families who do not consider day school under the current system, because of uncertainties or privacy concerns, may well consider it when they know how tuition pay-ments will relate to their income and are re-quired to submit only the first page of their income tax returns. Families with many children will be more likely to send them to day schools; indeed, such families may grow larger over time. Wealthier and even middle-class families, who will no longer see their tuition payments as subsidizing their neigh-bors, may be more likely to donate. Families without children in the schools may also be more willing to donate if day school costs are presented as a communal obligation, not a commodity for purchase.

This new model requires elaboration and customization, but it can redirect the com-munity’s conversation and efforts toward a model of day school financing that is both financially and morally sustainable.

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 7

eventually written down in the Talmud, that explains and elucidates scripture, and rab-binic decrees and interpretations through the generations that are also alleged to embody God’s will.  Solomon then surveys the ancient and medieval critiques of the doctrine, which either denied the Oral Law (Sadducees and Karaites) or superseded or replaced both it and the Bible with a new revelation (Chris-tians and Muslims).      

The rabbis dealt with problems of inter-nal contradictions, anthropomorphisms, and apparent moral blemishes in the Torah through what Solomon calls a “reconciling hermeneutic.”   Familiar to students of the Talmud, this mode of analysis employs inge-nious interpretations of words and phrases and clever juxtaposition of texts to untangle difficulties.  The method was sufficient to satisfy the pre-modern Jewish mind.  But the challenges raised over the last 400 years to the divinity of Torah can no longer be so easily countered, writes Solomon, since we now understand “the relationship between revelation and other sources of knowl-edge”—archeology, history, anthropology, comparative religion, literary analysis, evo-lutionary biology.   These disciplines throw into doubt not only the veracity of what is related in the Bible and the authority of the rabbis’ Oral Torah but the textual integrity of scripture itself.      

Solomon deftly catalogs the strategies that Orthodox thinkers have adopted to fend off these threats to tradition.  Some—the cur-rently popular ArtScroll publishing project, for example—simply close their eyes to any view that veers from the regnant Orthodox line, even if antecedents for it can be found in rabbinic literature.   Others accept ele-ments of modern thought and try to fit them into the traditional framework, reconciling

the Big Bang, for example, with the Bible’s Creation narrative.   Another alternative, a favorite of the philosophically-minded, el-evates Torah to a Kantian conceptual world immune from evaluation by earthbound criteria.

Solomon does not find any of this convincing: Torah from Heaven, he claims, “cannot be upheld by the serious his-torian, scientist, or philoso-pher.”   But how many Jews outside Solomon’s academic ivory tower practice these rarefied professions?   Does Solomon’s alternative, appro-priating the doctrine as myth, an “interpretation  of history through faith,” work any bet-ter?  It is hard to imagine Or-thodox Jews continuing their demanding regimen—of prayer, ritual, study, and raising their children to these tasks as well—for the sake of an Orthopraxy built upon myth.

Gidon Rothstein, a Yeshiva University-ordained rabbi and Harvard Ph.D., thinks Orthodoxy’s problem lies elsewhere.   He claims that We’re Missing the Point (OU Press)—the title of his new book—by con-veying Orthodoxy primarily as a system of commanded behaviors.   While Norman Solomon came of age in the mid-20th cen-tury, when important elements of Orthodox Judaism sought to address intellectual chal-lenges such as modern biblical scholarship, Rothstein is a generation younger, and his concern is how to square Orthodoxy with the currently treasured value of individual autonomy.

Flying in the face of the common assump-tion that Judaism is a religion of require-

ments and religious acts, Rothstein claims to find biblical proof that God originally intended to impose very few commands upon humanity, allowing men and women to devise their individual paths to emulate Him.   Only after human beings’ repeated

failure to find God on their own did He impose an elabo-rate system of mitzvot on one model people, the Jews.  And even now, Rothstein asserts, a Jew is supposed to view those commandments only as a bare-bones framework for de-veloping a relationship with God that is primarily personal and spiritual—as he calls it, in the hackneyed vernacular of contemporary spirituality, a “personal journey.”

The relationship that Roth-stein advocates is based on the very same theological tenet that Solomon finds unbe-lievable: the idea that God revealed Himself to the Israelites and gave them the Torah.  Blissfully ignorant of or indifferent to the thorny problems that the doctrine has en-countered over the last few centuries, Roth-stein calls this the “unequivocal core” of Ju-daism.

These two books are incommensurate: Solomon’s is judicious and erudite, Roth-stein’s disorganized and somewhat bombas-tic.  Yet their critiques of Orthodoxy, taken together, themselves invite a critical ques-tion: If Orthodox Judaism’s core theological claim is weak, and if its commandment-centered approach to religion is so at odds with human autonomy, why is it so much more vibrant and successful than the liberal streams of Judaism, which suffer from nei-ther deficiency?

Wednesday, May 16

Labor PainsBy Ben Cohen

If Ed Miliband, leader of Britain’s Labor Party, emerges victorious from the coun-try’s next general election, he will become the first Jewish Prime Minister to inhabit Number 10 Downing Street since Benjamin Disraeli renovated the innards of that ven-erable residence in 1877. But the compari-son with Disraeli doesn’t reach far. Though

Disraeli was baptized into the Anglican Church as a child, his Jewish origins were an enduring presence throughout his liter-ary and political career. Miliband, by con-trast, has treated his Jewish heritage with seeming indifference. He was raised by Jewish Marxist parents in the vibrant, mul-ticultural surroundings of Camden Town in north London. Indeed, his late father, Ralph Miliband, was one of Britain’s fore-most Marxist professors—a “non-Jewish Jew,” Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher’s term for Jews who had transcended their

Jewish parochialism to attain universalist revolutionary consciousness.

And Ed Miliband’s political career hasn’t exactly been that of a friend of Israel. La-bor’s internal battles over Israel, says Luke Akehurst, a member of the party’s National Executive Committee, go “back to the con-flicts in student politics during the 1970s and 1980s, when Labor supporters increas-ingly embraced the Palestinian cause.” Tony Blair’s support for Israel during the 2006 Lebanon war was received with enor-mous anger by party activists; indeed, says

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 8

Akehurst, “Lebanon was the final straw that brought about Blair’s resignation in 2007.”

In those battles, Ed Miliband has been al-lied with Labor’s Left and with labor unions that have initiated some of the ugliest as-pects of anti-Zionist campaigning, includ-ing boycotts of Israel. In his first leadership speech to Labor’s annual conference, he spoke of the need to “strain every sinew” to lift the blockade of Gaza and affirmed his support for a two-state solution. His mother Marion is a longstanding supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and a fervent backer of the boatload of Jewish anti-Zionists who attempted to breach the naval blockade of Gaza in September, 2010. Miliband’s support for Ken Livingstone’s failed bid to become mayor of London again also fueled doubts among British Jews, given Livingstone’s stri-dent anti-Zionism and his courting of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Muslim cleric who has justified suicide bombings against Israelis.

In short, there was reason for concern that Miliband might take sharply anti-Israel positions. But those close to Miliband say that his Jewish soul has, in the last few months, hesitantly begun to stir.

Miliband’s paternal grandfather and his father, then 16, walked more than 60 miles from Brussels to the Belgian coast to escape the invading Nazis; his grandmother hid throughout the war with her daughter, who was too young to make the trip. His mater-nal grandfather was murdered by the Nazis in Poland; his mother survived in hiding. “I wonder if it’s like this for other Holo-caust families,” Miliband said recently, but the family’s story “was only told in a limited way in our household, because it was such

a painful thing. It was hard for me to com-pute, trying to understand it.”

Recently, however, Miliband attended a dinner at the home of Britain’s chief rabbi, where the grace after meals was recited. Afterwards, he told friends that the songs and prayers made him think of his grand-parents and great-grandparents offering up the same thanks. The episode left Miliband visibly touched; those who heard his recol-lections were similarly moved. But why is his awakening occurring now, and taking place so publicly?

In the last few weeks, a decent showing by the Labor Party in local elections, the country’s economic woes, and splits in Da-vid Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition

have boosted Miliband’s ratings. Still, most of Brit-ain’s political commenta-tors remain wary of betting on a Miliband triumph by the time the next election rolls around in 2015.

The commentators’ skep-ticism is understandable: In the 20 months since his election as Labor leader, Miliband has struggled with credibility and policy woes, not least because that election bid came at the ex-pense of the leadership as-

pirations of his elder brother, David, in an episode some likened to the story of Cain and Abel. Following recent speculation that David may be planning a comeback, Ed Miliband was participating in a BBC radio phone-in program when a string of callers urged him to step down as Labor leader; one labeled him a “laughing stock.” The fol-lowing day, the conservative Daily Mail ran a photo of a grinning Miliband alongside a picture of the bug-eyed, toothy “Gromit” character from the cartoon show Wallace and Gromit.

This wasn’t the first time that Miliband had been lampooned as a “Gromit” loo-kalike, but it evidently lit a fire under his communications team. Two weeks later, the Times of London published a flattering profile of Ed—in which he spoke movingly and at length of his family’s experiences during the Holocaust.

There is another fact: Some of the La-bor party figures who have been pushing Miliband to open up, Jewish-wise, are ac-tive supporters of the Labor Friends of Is-rael. “They’ve been advising him to make it known that he’s comfortable with his Jew-ish identity,” says Martin Bright of London’s Jewish Chronicle. “I don’t think Ed is happy talking about himself in this way, but he’s been persuaded by people who care about him that he needs to tell his story more.” Miliband’s Jewish supporters point out that at a Labor Friends of Israel luncheon in November, 2011 he declared, “I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the state of Israel.”

This was a bold move, but what does it mean? Isaiah Berlin, in his magisterial es-say on Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx, noted that Disraeli, the consummate out-sider, reconciled his Jewish origins with his advocacy of traditional aristocratic privilege by depicting the Jews as the most aristocratic of all nations. But Miliband is an insider; his family background reflects modern Britain in all its ethno-cultural complexity. The vision is one of a gloriously polyglot land of non-Jewish Jews and non-British Britons, proud of its past, yet open to all manner of influences.

For the Labor Party to appeal to British voters, it will naturally focus on boilerplate issues such as jobs and the National Health Service. But with his position perennially in question, Ed Miliband’s priority is to persuade the party that he is the man to make Labor’s case. Whether his appeal to his Jewish origins will endear him, how-ever, remains to be seen.

Thursday, May 17

Aquarius in ZionBy Yehudah Mirsky

In the great crazy quilt of Israeli religious and spiritual life, a cluster of ideas and practices called “New Age” (in Hebrew, ‘Idan Hadash) is increasingly visible.  Love it or hate it, it’s around, in books, festivals, newspapers, the

pronouncements of tycoons (oligarch Shari Arison proclaimed that “peace begins with me”—shortly before changing her employ-ees’ lives through mass firings), and growing networks of popular Kabbalah.  For some, Jewish or non-Jewish New Age is life’s orga-nizing principle.  Others attend festivals and workshops, participate in this or that medi-tation, avail themselves of alternative medi-cine, or visit the occasional channeler.  It is

in some ways part of Israel’s spiritual revival, in other ways tied to developments abroad.

The leading Israeli New Age journal is ti-tled Hayim Aherim, “an alternative life.”  But how alternative?  Where do traditional ideas and practices leave off and alternatives be-gin?  How does New Age relate to ordinary politics and society?  Recent years have seen the emergence of serious scholarly New Age research; and two weeks ago, a conference at

Jewish Ideas Weekly May 11-18, 2012 9

Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute took the mea-sure of the phenomenon.

The issues under discussion included channeling (whose radical individualism mirrors the ethos of turbo-capitalism), Is-rael’s largely closeted neo-pagans (think combat soldier seeking protection of Ca-naanite goddess Anath), contemporary Bratslav meditative practices (transmogri-fying the founder’s reach for divine ecstasy and self-annihilation into self-help tranquil-ity exercises), and New Age imagery in Is-raeli advertising (used mainly by established businesses that want to freshen their image and know that nobody will think they actu-ally believe the stuff).

Some of the most interesting presenta-tions addressed New Age politics (such as they are); the impression one got is that poli-tics is much more evident when adherents join New Age themes to traditional religious practice.  Shlomo Fischer talked about the radical settlers known as “hilltop youth,” driven by a countercultural mix of enthusi-asm and authenticity: The Jewish state and its bureaucracies are illegitimate and inau-thentic, while the settlers are natural, unin-hibited, and close to the earth.  Asaf Tamari explicated the popular, charismatic Ameri-can-born Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh—best known for his volume Blessed is the Man, an encomium to the murderous Baruch Gold-stein—who uses the New Age language of consciousness as change, and vice versa.  In Ginsburgh’s psychologized but still violent politics, the collective consists of ontologi-cally identical souls; proper consciousness differentiates friends from enemies, and dis-gust with the existing secular Zionist order is the beginning of redemption.

Though the speakers didn’t say so, non-religious New Agers seem less connected to politics—which seems congruent with the turn Israeli arts and literature in recent decades away from politics and toward the private sphere, as described in Gadi Taub’s A Dispirited Rebellion (Hakibbutz Hameuchad).  Sociologist Dalit Simchai noted ways in which New Age neutralizes political action and social criticism.  The flip-side of its belief in acceptance is the idea that suffering results from unhealthy living rather than injustice; and New Age shies away from disagreements, which it views as unwholesome forms of attachment to the world’s illusions.  Adam Klin-Oron of He-brew University, in discussing channeling, noted that whatever political dimensions the idea may have had elsewhere vanished

entirely in Israel.   Some adherents believe that as more humans become channelers, light will spread and grow.  Thus, my work-ing on myself will bring universal redemp-tion.  None of this actually prescribes action in the here and now; like they say, “there is no compelling the light.”

It’s tempting, especially in light of depre-dations by self-styled New Age gurus, to dis-miss it all as self-indulgent middle-class self-absorption dressed up as ancient wisdom and spiritual depth. But it does have points of contact with richer, more rigorous tradi-tions, with roots in late 18th- and 19th-cen-tury romantic and esoteric Western move-ments like theosophy, anthroposophy, New

Thought, and Buddhist modernism.   Still, how did we get from William James to the Age of Aquarius?  In the late 1970s, accord-ing to leading scholar Wouter Hanegraaff, groups in Western Europe and North Amer-ica began to perceive an inner connection among ideas like holistic science, healing, channeling, and neo-paganism as an alter-native to the traditional Western dualism of body and soul, science and Christian-ity.  New Age turned to older mystical and philosophical traditions, interpreting them in modern psychological and instrumental terms. 

The blog of one of the conference partici-pants, Tomer Persico, has made him one of the most consistently interesting observers of Israeli religious life. There, he’s   identi-fied a number of New Age tenets.  There is cosmic optimism, and a belief in individual rather than social responsibility for hap-piness.  The truth is found within.  Only I will choose for myself, less through rational choice than through experiential knowl-edge.  Such ideas derive from the “perennial philosophy” at the core of the world’s spiri-tual traditions.

As New Age understands it, what is that core?  Conference co-organizer Rachel Wer-czberger has described a belief in the divine

nature of the self, joined with the “therapeu-tic ambition” to “heal” this inner core from “‘inauthentic’ experiences and emotions” like envy, regret, and anger.  It is this over-whelming focus on the self, neatly coincid-ing with Western individualism and the deep logic of consumerism, that accounts for New Age’s appeal to the yuppified.  As the old joke has it, Pocahontas conversing with trees and fishes is spirituality; her writ-ing a check to the shul is religion.  

But is that the last word?  Kabbalah schol-ar Boaz Huss argued at the conference that in the late 19th century “spirituality,” until then a synonym for religious devotion, took on its contemporary sense of the “individual and subjective core of universal religion.”  Still metaphysical, it was no longer a sign of devotion to God; rather, it was redefined as the beating heart of all world religions, sub-tly undermining the hard, modern dichoto-my between “secular” and “religious.” 

Perhaps it is through this meeting between self-indulgent pap and the undeniably com-pelling teachings of different traditions that New Age arouses its mix of interest and dis-dain.  There is something maddening about the often-blithe self-assurance with which New Age draws on these traditions, showing little regard for their truth claims, internal debates, and disciplines—maddening not just in its implicit (and, sadly, inarguable) claim that one can easily live without schol-ars of religion but in its cavalier dismissal of those traditions’ understandings of them-selves. 

Yet the spiritual masters who developed the teachings and practices underlying much of New Age did so for the sake of Something, or Someone, much larger than themselves.  That reaching beyond also ex-tends within, to the meaning of discipline and commitment to God and others, to liv-ing and regularly suffering in the here and now.  The difference between New Age and classical Kabbalah, for example, is that the former regularly gives effortless answers; the latter asks for great effort and promises no answers.  As the Zohar says, “No thought can grasp Him at all.”

This isn’t to say that New Age doesn’t have its good sides.  As Persico has written, “New Age, thank God, is not a zealous and venge-ful deity.”  But, Persico added, “He is apa-thetic. The one thing He commands is that we discover our truest selves.”  Is that true self a moral self? Whether or not we let the sun shine in, the answer to that question can be answered only through action.