Jeremy Rosen Online

One of the most well known quotes from the Talmud goes, "Rava said: It is a man's duty to get so drunk on Purim that he cannot tell the difference between 'Cursed be Haman' and 'Blessed be Mordecai'" (Gemara Megilah 7b). The text goes on to give an example of how too much wine can lead to murder, and as a result the overwhelming majority of rabbinic authorities, while agreeing one should loosen up a little to celebrate Purim, are strongly opposed to getting drunk.

This week one of the major figures in American Orthodoxy, HaRav Shmuel Kamenetzky, who heads the Talmudical Yeshiva of Philadelphia, called excessive drinking on Purim an "aveirah" — a sin. "Chas v'shalom that our Torah would consider getting drunk to be a mitzvah!"

Still, too many people nowadays who ought to know better, ignore what their rabbis and rebbes tell them! Hoards of drunken religious neophytes staggering down main roads of Jewish ghettos around the world on Purim, accosting passersby with foul breath and vodka bottles, throwing up in alleyways and buses, is hardly the finest side of Judaism.

This whole issue is emblematic of the varieties of Judaism even within the confines of Orthodoxy. On the one hand you have those serious, rather killjoy sort , usually associated with Musar and the Lithuanian wing of Orthodoxy, who argue for sobriety and self-discipline. They will tell you that there is indeed an ancient obligation to drink wine, as there is to celebrate Shabbat and festivals, and on Purim one should indeed go further than normal to celebrate the great occasion. They will point out that the word used by Rava in the Gemara is "besumeh", which also means "perfumed" or "exhilarated", and may refer either to the wine or the person--but anyway is not the common word used in literature for a drunk, which is "shikor". It probably means "pleasantly merry".

The Purim story is indeed about a drunken king who makes disastrous decisions he regrets when he sobers up. This illustrates the difference between religiously ordained "controlled" drinking, and pagan unbridled excess. In Lithuanian pilpul, not knowing the difference between "curse Mordechai and bless Haman" is turned into a game of numerology, or theologically and it is taken to explain why only the Divine spirit differentiates between evil and good. Without it we are all capable of the worst standards of behavior. But even the Litvaks allow yeshiva students to make fun of religious authority with skits and satire (rhymes, called "gramen") on Purim day, to emphasize the contrary and revolutionary nature of the festival.

On the other hand there are the Chasidim who frankly don't need an excuse to get drunk at any time of the year. Their approach to life is that our inhibitions are the reason most of us are unable to reach or communicate with God and therefore alcohol performs an important role in removing inhibition and opening up the channels to God. Of course I agree that we are inhibited in spiritual matters and that is why I favor mysticism; but if God can only be reached through an alcohol-induced miasma, then I doubt very much if they and I are talking about the same god.

I recall, as headmaster, asking the Lubavitcher Rebbe for teachers because I valued the warmth, hospitality, and selflessness of Chabad graduates. He obliged. But the day after their first Shabbat at the school I was inundated by protesting parents who thought that giving 12-year-olds shots of vodka in the name of religion was going too far.

Of course nothing I say now will part a Chasid from his vodka, or indeed me from my malt. And nothing I say is going to stop the drunken masses of all wings of Judaism giving religion a bad name on Purim or any other time. Any more than I can control the hundreds of high school kids who take a gap year off in Israel and use yeshiva as an excuse to indulge in orgies of drink, drugs, and sex.

We Jews have never been prohibitionists. On the contrary, it has always been a matter of pride that we have avoided a culture of drunkenness. Poor suffering Eastern European Jewish peasants didn't have much other source of relief in eras gone by, so no one wanted to deprive them of a drink. And it was always argued that Jewish drunks rarely resorted to the violence usually associated with inebriation. Still given the almost universal excesses of our times, we who proclaim religious values, need to be educating our children, by example to exercise control. And even if I agree we should relax it on Purim, relaxation does not mean excess.

There is a positive side to this. Too often religion is seen as a killjoy. And Judaism is a disciplined religion with lots of demands. Still it is nice to know that on occasion we are commanded to have fun and let our hair down. We should drink and be merry. But not drunk.

Carmel College Reunion - March 20th, 2010
Village Hotel, Elstree, London

Carmel College was a magnificent adventure and experiment in Anglo-Jewish education that lasted from 1948 until 1997. For many people it was a defining experience in their lives.

Having been involved in Carmel through my father, as a pupil and later headmaster, I remember vividly how difficult it always was to get former pupils together and how the OCA (Old Carmeli Association) always struggled to maintain any momentum. Perhaps it was because so many Carmel graduates came from and returned to places scattered all around the globe and keeping track was much harder in previous times.

As Carmel graduates get older and the memories fade, nostalgia steps in. So recently there seems to be a renewed interest in getting together. Jill Kenton organized a great reunion last November for those graduating from the mid-80's to the 90's, and its success has led to a follow up for the 60's and 70's.

Because Carmel graduates are so scattered and the records so inadequate, if you happen to know of any Carmel graduates who might be interested in coming or finding out about future reunions, please pass this message on and ask them to contact Jill Kenton at info[at]connections-events.co.uk.

Education has been the bedrock of Jewish religious life for thousands of years. The Torah insists that "you should teach your children". We recite this phrase at least three times a day whenever we say the Shema (a declaration, not a prayer).

After the Bible, the next greatest book in Judaism is the Mishna (which together with its companion the Gemara came to be known as The Talmud), compiled in the second century. It starts with these words:

"These are the obligations that have no fixed limits--leaving corners of the field for the poor, first fruits, appearing at the Temple on festivals, kindness to other human beings, and studying Torah. These are the things that return one a benefit in this world but the absolute return is in the World to Come--honoring one's mother and father, kindness to other human beings, hospitality, visiting the sick, helping girls get married, participating in funerals, and studying Torah" (Peah 1).

Somewhere in the first millennium the second part was modified to read

"These are the things that return one a benefit in this world but the absolute return is in the World to Come--honoring one's mother and father, kindness to other human beings, attending the Study House morning and night, hospitality, visiting the sick, helping girls get married, participating in funerals, concentrating on prayer, making peace between people (and between a man and his wife), and studying Torah is worth all of them."

And this text, with minor variations, has entered our prayer books.

The list of priorities is significant. Notice how much emphasis is put on what we would call inter personal relations! The final reiteration of Torah study is based on a line in the Talmud that says, "Study is the greatest obligation of all precisely because it leads to practicing everything else." (Kidushin 40b). In theory, of course, that should be true but it is strange that what is thought of as a great spiritual tradition should put so much emphasis on an intellectual activity.

The opening phrase seems to me to have been written during Temple times and the second after its destruction, for those elements dealing with the Temple and the Land of Israel have been omitted. This would also explain the increased emphasis and priority on studying Torah. By then it was blindingly obvious that we would survive as a people only if we maintained our traditions, and the best way of perpetuating them was to study them and to teach them. This had already been clear during the first great exile into Babylon. It became even more so as the challenges of Greco-Roman civilization forced us to respond in an intellectually demanding and educationally rigorous way.

There was a difference of opinion in the Talmud as to the relative priority of prayer over study, and in the end a compromise was reached. But ideally the two should be interrelated, like two arms are essential to the balance and effectiveness of the body.

From an early age I remember my father emphasizing at home, at school, and on the lecture circuit, the necessity of a Jew knowing his heritage. "An ignorant Jew," he would say, "could not possibly be an authentic one." This was part of his great Lithuanian heritage of intense intellectual involvement in studying Torah, which has become the hallmark of Orthodoxy today. In my youth you could be "Orthodox" and be completely ignorant of most of Jewish Law.

Since then the Jewish State, through welfare and financial and moral support, has enabled centers of Torah study to proliferate. Everyone now recognizes the primacy of the Israel Torah community, if for no other reason than that so many of their elite have actually gone to live there. Financial support coming from the Diaspora has also encouraged growth. And in this modern world of individuality, and freedom to choose to belong or not, knowledge as well as a sense of commitment are factors in keeping one "in".

Many Jews still have no inclining of how demanding and tough, intense Talmudic study is. Nothing I ever went through at university compared to the demands and disciplines of Torah study. This is one reason why so many who have had this tough training do so well when they go out into the world to compete in professions and commerce. And there's another plus--continuing to study into old age is wonderful for preventing senility. Not only, but it gives elderly people a sense of value and pride in their old age. In secular society, people are often valued according to how much they earn. With us, ongoing study not only fills the vacuum of retirement but gives one status and significance too.

Study, says the Talmud, must lead to action, and in the end human relationships and obligations are what define a good person. After all, the great "Musar" movement was initiated by Rabbi Israel Salanter in the nineteenth century precisely because, as he saw it, study was not impacting sufficiently on behavior. Still, study is a very solid basis from which to start, because it constantly reminds one of the nobility of our tradition and its obligations.

I am immensely proud that I belong to a tradition that values study. We are not just the People of the Book, we are the People who Study the Books. And everyone is involved; it is not just for priests and clergy. That is why we have survived against the odds. It is why Israel, for all its faults, has done so amazingly well in almost every sphere where brainpower counts. And why if they do not do something soon about the abysmal state school system, yeshiva graduates might soon be the only educated Israelis left.

On this blog I have often criticized the abuses of religion. Here's a clip I'd like you to see because this is the other side--a Kiddush HaShem, giving God, religion, and Judaism a good name. I am proud to have gone to the same school as Dr. Tate!

Dr. Joseph Tate on PBS's Religion and Ethics Newsweekly

So here is this innocent youngster on a flight in the USA trying to put on his tefilin, modestly and as inconspicuously as possible, in his seat. The air hostess has never seen these funny black boxes and straps before. They look like a device. Could be he is a suicide bomber strapping himself into a bomb. Panic. The kid is restrained. His tefilin are impounded. The plane is diverted and then isolated. Passengers are delayed and inconvenienced; appointments and celebrations are missed. It’s a massive scare. The press is alerted. The FBI moves in. The young man is cooperating with the authorities. And it is not a joke. It happened here in the USA.

Is this just another example of the madness gripping us as Islamic-inspired terrorism spreads? Yes and no. We Jews are a very, very small minority and Orthodox Jews are a small minority within a minority. So in one way it is not at all surprising that most people on earth have absolutely no idea what tefilin are. Besides tefilin themselves are so difficult to explain. Aids to prayer? Surely one does not need leather straps and boxes to pray? And the very English term "phylacteries" sounds a bit like "prophylactic". Are they supposed to prevent some plague or something? Perhaps they are like the Scientologists' "magic boxes". A kind of brain monitor? And why only for men? Are they some sort of male enhancers? I recall plenty of jokes about Jews putting on tefilin in hospital and people thinking they were for taking their blood pressure. The fact is that it is very, very hard to sound logical or sane when describing tefilin to a non-Jew who has no idea and no background.

On the other hand, you see so many Orthodox Jews on flights nowadays, and they are often carrying their talis and tefilin bags or praying at airport terminals. I cannot recall a flight anywhere in the world I have taken without a black hat and beard for company. My tefilin have been checked so often at security that by now, surely, word must have got round. In the past tefilin were used so frequently to smuggle diamonds in and out of Antwerp that I'd have thought there must be diagrams posted in every customs house.

And in most schools nowadays comparative religion is taught, if only to make Westerners more sympathetic to the spread of strange Middle and Eastern religions, that the very basic features and customs of alien religions are now more widely known than ever before. Yet clearly most human beings still seem unable to tell the difference between a suicide bomber's belt and tefilin.

The security situation is getting worse and worse all the time. I have had eau de toilette, shampoo, deodorant, and even hair gel confiscated (not to mention a half a bottle of Drambuie). But it’s the lunacy of political correctness and the civil liberties fanatics that are the real problem. It is utterly ridiculous that the anti-profiling lobby has been allowed to create a situation in which an eighty-year-old lady in a wheelchair is as likely to be searched as dishdash-wearing, heavily bearded, agitated twenty-year-old.

My old schoolmate, Professor Edward Luttwak, had an article in the January 18th Wall Street Journal in which he argued that ever increasing body searches and restrictions will not eradicate the problem nearly as effectively as clever profiling and personal interaction:
Given the power of widely available explosives, the amount that can be carried inside a body cavity—let alone two—is sufficient to destroy ordinary pressurized airliners at normal flight altitudes. That makes "pat downs", or indeed any form of physical inspection that is remotely feasible in any airport … entirely futile. That alone rules out scanners … To screen passengers as persons would reduce costs and inconvenience … because entire categories of passengers could be waived through with a rapid examination of travel documents … [and history].This is precisely the sort of checking that we have all experienced on flights to and from Israel. Certainly it is more manpower-intensive than machines, but it clearly works. It is true that the number of employees required to monitor the flights in and out of one small Middle Eastern state would be dwarfed by the needs of massive worldwide air passenger traffic. But considering the billions wasted in the US alone on totally ineffective bureaucratic security agencies, it would make more sense to have well trained, well educated men and women on duty than the poorly paid, low rung employees most of us have encountered.

We may agree that security demands we veer on the side of strictness, but sensible and careful profiling will surely eliminate any suspicion that a teenager putting on tefilin is likely to blow a plane up! On the other hand, someone ought to tell him that although there's a fixed time to say your morning prayers, you can put tefilin on at any time during the day and fulfill your duty. Or, of course, you can fly El Al.

Recently, Shlomo Riskin, an American Israeli Orthodox rabbi, came in for sustained attack because he was shown on a Christian Embassy video referring to "Rabbi Jesus". Such was the brouhaha that Rabbi Riskin had to defend himself, claiming not to have praised Jesus. He said, "I never praised the character or the personality of the person in whose name Jews were slaughtered throughout history. If that is how my words were understood, I am disturbed by that understanding and state that that was not my intention at all. I apologize if my words were taken improperly. I related to the historical persona of Jesus, who was not a Christian, did not hate Jews, but was a Jewish and religious person."

Now I mean no offense, but I still need to be convinced that there actually was such a specific person as Jesus. The Gospels were written in Greek, anywhere between 40 to 100 years after his presumed death, and as the late Hyam Maccoby has amply illustrated, their stories contradict each other and the Jewish context of the times. The text in Josephus that refers to him is suspect, and the derogatory hints in the Talmud were written hundreds of years later.

What is certain is that the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to leaders and teachers that sound very similar to the John the Baptist and the Jesus of the Gospels. Except they speak of a generation earlier. In the period leading up to the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70, there were all kinds of sects and charismatic teachers wandering around the Judean countryside teaching and healing. Virtually all the popular teachings attributed to Jesus can be found in earlier popular and proselytizing mainstream Jewish, Pharisaic, teachers such as Hillel.

It seems to me that it was Paul, Saul of Tarsus, who was the founder of Christianity. As he admits, he never met a historical figure and only had his famous vision on the road to Damascus. It would not have been difficult to create a persona as a construct out of a range of popular figures from a previous generation. The genius of Paul was to create a compelling narrative and legend. He borrowed from Judaism and other cultures and selected a range of popular ideas that appealed to a much wider audience in the Roman Empire than the more exacting, divided, and national-based ideology of the Judaism of the time. There have been distinguished Jewish academics, such as the late David Flusser, who have tried to identify Jesus and place him in a Jewish context, and probably this was what Riskin was basing himself on. But I am afraid I remain a skeptic, albeit a sympathetic one.

As we have seen, both within Christianity and within Judaism, it is not difficult to create new religions or variations on existing ones that acquire a mythology, even supernatural support. Mass hysteria can lead to all sorts of visions and mental states. Religion is notoriously good at persuading its followers of almost anything. Think of all the wars that have been waged in the name of God, Jesus, or Muhammad.

The fact is that history is very subjective. Just consider, in our own case, the different perspectives on the Hasmoneans between the Books of the Maccabees and the Talmud. Different people looking at the same "events" can come up with very different interpretations. Myth is not necessarily derogatory. It doesn’t only mean "fairy stories"; it can also mean "hallowed traditions" and ways of relating to the world. It can be important in conveying values. It creates symbols and examples appropriate to the different moods and values of religions.

There are different ways of regarding Jesus within Christianity. He is worshipped as God, while others see him as man, and some as an ideal. Just as there are differences in understanding the Koran, as between Shia and Sunni, and opposing ways of looking at King David, for example, in Judaism.

In the end, what emerges from different contexts is a religious culture and way of life that sets out to try to make humans, humanity, and the world a better place. Sadly, its efforts are always hampered by the abuses and misuses with which people succeed in distorting the theory. (But then, I cannot think of any area of human ideology where this does not happen.) And then for a while, a new improved version tries to do things better.

Of course, I agree that there is no objective, archaeological evidence for Moses or Sinai, and that too becomes a matter of faith, intuitive or cognitive. What has and does keep Judaism alive is more a commitment to following God's Law rather than historical facts that are as yet unconfirmed. I suspect this is precisely why the Torah describes Moses as a man of poor speech. His inability to complete the cycle from slavery to freedom in the Land of Israel and the absence of a grave are all to emphasize the priority of the Divine over the human and no one has ever suggested Moses was more than man.

If individuals are inspired by whichever Jesus narrative they feel comfortable with, that is entirely a matter for them. What matters to me is that it should increase the amount of good and spirituality in the world. But I do not see why we Jews should in any way feel obliged to adopt an agenda that is not ours, even if its origins were born, in part, from our tradition. Rabbi Riskin's desire to see Jesus as a good rabbi seems to me to be an unnecessary attempt to curry favor with those he might be enlisting to support his political agenda, rather than his spiritual one. Sadly, I fear he ended up doing more harm than good. As they say in Yiddish, and I translate, "Don't mix in!"

Ever since I first encountered the very insular Jews who live in parts of Jerusalem in 1957, I have been aware that some of them have the habits of throwing stones at people they do not approve of and of spitting. I don’t mean spitting to clear the throat. Lots of people do that. It is common in the Middle East and on European soccer pitches. No, I mean the primitive custom of spitting when passing non-Jewish places of worship and in prayer when reciting the ancient Aleinu prayer with its often censored text which thanks God for not making us like those nations "who bow down to vanity 'varik' (literally 'and emptiness') and to gods who cannot save them".

The word "rik" has the same Hebrew root as "spittle". And the numerical value of the Hebrew letters "varik " is 316, the same as Yeshu, Jesus. (It is also the reference to the Gospel of John 3:16, in which Jesus proclaims that he is the Son of God.) Never mind that the Aleinu text is based on Isaiah, written six hundred years before the emergence of Christianity, and applied to Idol Worshippers. Still, under a medieval and oppressive Christianity that put Jews to death for their religion, spitting upon seeing a church or a priest gained in currency the more the anti-Semitism increased. I can understand the visceral reaction, "If you rubbish us and our religion, we will rubbish yours." But I certainly deplore it.

As relations began to get better, Western European Jews in particular began to drop the custom, as well as the text. Of course, the Holocaust set the whole relationship with Christianity back, and it is one of the miracles of the subsequent sixty years that it has improved so much that popes now visit synagogues on missions of peace and cooperation rather than conversion.

But still, in parts of Israel the custom has persisted in its ugliest form, of spitting at Christian clergy, mainly in Jerusalem. Here is an extract from a letter by the well-known teacher and commentator Devorah Weissman and circulated it to her community, Kehillat Yedidya, in Jerusalem:
Some of you may remember that on Yom Kippur of this year, I reacted, or should I say perhaps overreacted (I often do that when I'm upset about something) to the shaliach tzibbur’s recitation aloud of a line in the Aleinu prayer, "…that they kneel to nothing and emptiness, and pray to a god who cannot save…" To the best of my recollection, we had never recited that line publicly before at Yedidya—at least not in the minyanim I have attended. There is a recent trend in some parts of the Jewish world to bring it back, especially in Artscroll and many Israeli editions of the prayerbook. It is missing in editions by Hertz, Adler, and Birnbaum, and in the new siddur of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth), although it is present in the Koren edition of his siddur produced for the US. In a recent article in the Jerusalem Post, Father Samuel Aghoyan, a senior Armenian Orthodox cleric in Jerusalem's Old City, says he's been spat at by young Chareidi and national Orthodox Jews "about 15 to 20 times" in the past decade. The last time it happened, he said, was earlier this month. "I was walking back from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and I saw this boy in a yarmulke and ritual fringes coming back from the Western Wall, and he spat at me two or three times." Aghoyan said, "Every single priest in this church has been spat on. It happens day and night."Dr. Weissman urged her community and the Orthodox world to do something. The issue was raised with the Chareidi rabbinate in Jerusalem, who are usually much better at talking to Muslim clerics, whom they regard as monotheists, than with Christians, who worship the trinity and are therefore regarded as idolatrous (and don’t ask about the Kabalistic idea of the Ten Sefirot). And they responded.

This JTA report appeared in Haaretz:
A rare meeting between clerics from various churches, representatives of the Foreign Ministry and the Jerusalem municipality, and the Edah Haredit, the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox stream, gathered in Jerusalem in an effort to stave off a diplomatic crisis between Israel and a number of foreign states.

The meeting was spurred by the growing number of complaints from churches in the vicinity of Jerusalem's Mea She'arim quarter about violence and harassment toward them on the part of ultra-Orthodox Jews. ...News of the harassment of the clergy was published abroad and met with shock. Complaints were lodged with the Israeli embassies and began piling up at the Foreign Ministry.

...Edah Haredit representatives denied that members of their community were involved, but said it was possible that "fringe youth" who had participated in the demonstrations were causing the problems. ...Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim, a member of the Edah Haredit leadership, met at the Jerusalem municipality ... [and] brought a letter from rabbis of the community's religious tribunal denouncing the attacks.

..."In addition to the desecration of the Lord's name that is involved," the letter states, "our rabbis, may the memory of these righteous men be a blessing, have already forbidden harassment of gentiles." After all the negative things I have had to say about sectors of Orthodoxy I am so pleased to be able show another side. There are impressive, sophisticated, and sensitive--I would say saintly--Chareidi rabbis like Rabbi Papenheim, and they must be encouraged and recognized. It is not ALL black.

Two weeks ago I wrote an article about corruption in the Jewish religious world. As I expected, the response from my target audience was to ignore it altogether, or that I must be a charlatan and a hypocrite, an enemy of Orthodoxy. Why didn't I focus on all the good things religious people do, and why not emphasize all the horrible and corrupt and far more serious crimes that others commit. It is the usual response I have come to expect. Do not address the issues, just kill the messenger.

I am not for one minute suggesting I come anywhere near the ankles of the great Biblical prophets. They too excoriated their coreligionists, their priestly leadership, and the corruption of Temple worship. Were they anti-Semites? When the Torah commands us to rebuke our neighbors, is it too anti-Orthodox? Proverbs says one should not try to correct a fool for he will only hate you.

Of course, one has to try one's best to ensure that the honest criticism one directs internally to one's own is not misused by others on the outside, nefariously. And it is all but impossible to control that nowadays. In the end, however, honest and sincere criticism is essential for anyone's morality. It is this that lies behind the Musar exercises and practices I was taught as a teenager in Beer Yaakov Yeshiva by the great proponent of Musar, Rabbi Shlomo Volbe, z"l. I am justified in criticizing Orthodoxy precisely because I love it and am fully aware of its good points, which indeed underpin and animate my life and work.

So despite everything, here I come again asking for more trouble. This time it is about Israel. I have kept my powder dry hitherto precisely because of the crescendo of attacks, the attempts to delegitimize Israel, and the unholy alliance between fundamentalists and left-wing loonies united only in their hatred of Israel and Jews. But eventually one has to express one's views, regardless.

I have always been strongly opposed to occupation. I agreed completely with the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz that occupation would have a deleterious impact on the values and humanity of the occupiers, however benevolent. That it has been accompanied by land grabs, theft, insensitivity, and bullying makes it worse (and it is no excuse to argue that all this happens constantly, every day, within and between Israelis). There are mitigating circumstances. Palestinian and Arab errors of judgment and policy may have been far worse; this does not excuse the evidence that, to many Israelis, Palestinians are untermenschen. Even if there is corruption and abuse in Palestinian society, the sad fact is that it exists in Israel too.

On the other hand, I have always believed in Land for Peace. When I was in yeshiva, all the major Charedi rabbis, both Sefardi and Ashkenazi, (with the exception of Lubavitch) were all of the same opinion. Important as land is, essential as the Hills of Judea and Samaria may be to our heritage and past, human life and safety overrides all other considerations. And as much as I admire and revere the late Rav Abraham Isaac Kook's vision of Israel and the Jewish people, I did not identify with the cliques that surrounded his son the late Rav Zvi Yehuda and became the powerhouse of Settler ideology. We Jews have survived without any land for millennia, let alone without all parts of it.

I am not convinced there is a partner for peace and I think there is an agenda to see all of the Fertile Crescent in Muslim hands. Even if I do believe in the principle of Land for Peace, I do not therefore believe in submission or suicide. But this has nothing to do with the impossible conundrum of occupation, which by its very definition means subjugation.

As a completely unqualified, inexpert commentator, it seems to me that withdrawing behind defensive barriers until such time as hatred diminishes has its attraction. It has certainly worked in stopping suicide bombers. Except that nowadays you can fire rockets over any barrier. In theory, the Palestinians should be responsible for their own security, but we have already seen how those same security forces can become the vehicles of aggression. And the numbers game is against Israel. Negotiation in other words offers more long term hope than inertia.

Individual Israelis have been guilty of war crimes. Some have been dealt with by Israel itself. Certain governmental and army policies have been wrong and self-defeating. It is necessary to keep on hammering away at abuses. That is the moral obligation of any moral human being. But that does not mean we should not fear the baseless hatred of Israel and Jews which infects not only the primitive reaches of our universe but the so-called sophisticated world too.

I am influenced by the famous line in Proverbs that "God rebukes those He Loves like a caring father." Criticism must come from those who are committed to Israel, committed to its survival, committed to Judaism. A parent who exercises no correction is a bad parent. A friend who does not point out failings is a bad friend. One must not ignore criticism from those who live in, work in, and love Israel. I hear the criticism that comes from other quarters too, but usually those critics have much huger warts on their noses and it is a case of "doctor, heal thyself".

There is too little civilized debate and too much abuse and excoriation. An Anglo-Jewish magnate who objected to the opinions of an Israeli academic emailed him:

"I saw your disgusting contribution to the Dispatches programme. I want nothing ever to do with you and will use whatever influence I have at BGU to have you thrown out. The only thing worse than an anti-Semitic gentile is a traitorous anti-Semitic Jew. I hope you perish and I curse you."

Hardly civilized debate, which goes to prove that money is no guarantee of common sense.

I criticize because I love. Love that will not criticize is not true love.

I know this is going to sound harsh and unfeeling but we ought to leave failed states alone to stew in their own self-imposed cruelties. It is, in the end, up to their own citizens to either put up or shut up.

I really thought Obama was going to usher in a new era and stop trying to cure those sick parts of the world that do not want to be healed. But it seems his arms dealers, his scaremongers, his political allies and supporters all have a vested interest in keeping armed forces overseas, sending young men and women to their pointless deaths, and throwing away vast sums of money that could better be used improving the fabric of society and infrastructure at home. I remember in my youth the arguments for staying in Vietnam. There was the domino theory that all of Asia would collapse into Communism. The line had to be drawn. Failed states would present a danger to the USA and World Peace. And they all proved to be false.

If you cannot tend to everyone else's garden, at least you can make sure yours grows properly. And if you put all your energy and resources into trying to help someone who hates gardening to spend time weeding, you will inevitably fail. Have we not yet learnt that no matter how benevolent an occupier is, an occupier is a resented alien who will never be accepted?

I remember vividly the 1967 war in which Israel ejected the Jordanians from the West Bank they had illegally occupied in1948 (though no one in the UN seemed to mind if it was Arab occupying Arab). The Palestinians threw roses at the Israeli tanks as they passed through the villages, so hated were the Jordanians. Unbelievably, the victors simply refused to learn from what their own eyes were telling them--that any occupier comes to be hated, and certainly one who tries to subjugate and disenfranchise. About the only thing to be said in favor of Russia this last century was that she actually did give up on Afghanistan and get out.

So I say cut your losses and get out. Occupation does not work.

Will a failed state become a haven for Al Qaeda terrorists? So isolate that state. Track those who come and go, rather than try to change it from the outside. Any attempt from the outside will be regarded as a crusade, imperialism, or an American Zionist plot. It will only reinforce blind fundamentalism.

In Iraq, the US ended up in league with the very Sunnis it initially booted out of power. The Taliban rulers were ejected from Afghanistan. Yet most analysts now think the only chance of any kind of success is by making a deal with the new Taliban. Meanwhile, they and Al Qaeda are protected within Pakistani territory, because its own political and military system is riddled with fundamentalists and it is a nearly failed state with an already tested nuclear bomb. Look at all the failed states harboring Al Qaeda or other dangerous potential terrorists. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And in the case of Somalia the US left with its tail between its legs. The world cannot even deal with Somali pirates.

There is a mindset amongst many moderate Muslims that only outside intervention can rescue then from the oppressive Muslim regimes they live under. That is why it is argued that the USA should reach out to and support moderates in Iran or Saudi Arabia. Not that she will be thanked. Only when a sufficient number of oppressed citizens within a country feel so strongly about it that they are prepared to rebel can there be any hope of regime change. That, for example, is precisely what happened in Honduras, and in time it will happen in Venezuela too. Hopefully Zimbabwe as well. They are not as toxic as Iran and North Korea--two virtual nuclear powers. Yet no one I have heard is arguing that the USA should invade them.

In Iran the oppressive regime murders, tortures, and rapes its own people. That’s the way in the East. No one is making a fuss of Christians killed in Egypt or Malaysia. Who cares if in Abu Dhabi a royal prince gets off scot-free after torturing and maiming another Muslim. We don't expect justice or freedom in such places. Shall we invade them too?

Thanks to China's refusal to countenance any interference in the internal affairs of regimes, there is no way to impose universal sanctions or effective restrictions. Free countries have no alternative other than to rely on their own methods of self-protection.

As for locally born terror, stop pretending it is exceptional. Political correctness and appeasement will not protect anyone. Britain still refuses to acknowledge that its universities are centers of recruitment for aggressive Islam, something students have been telling anyone who would listen for years.

America's decision to require stricter security for visitors from certain Muslim states which harbor terror has been attacked both by American Muslims and Civil Rights campaigners. I hope the USA stands firm (I know Europe won't). I do feel very sorry for innocent peace-loving Muslims who suffer as a result. But they have it in their own hands either to help change regimes or bring the pressure to bear on those Muslims who give Islam a bad name.

Yet another case has been revealed of Orthodox corruption. A rabbi, very strict on conversions but lax on morality, was taped offering "Orthodox" conversion for sex. This comes after a yearlong litany including the trial of Charedi youngsters sent by other Charedi bosses out to Japan as drug "mules", another Charedi "rabbi" accused of dealing in sex and drugs, the conviction and sentencing of a Spinka Chasidic Rebbe, the arrest of Sephardi rabbis on charity fraud, the conviction of a Lubavitch magnate on bank and other financial illegalities, the Chasidic Square Town in breach of numerous laws and an Orthodox Lakewood businessman accused of massive fraud.

I am sorry to have to tell you that this is only the tip of the tip of a huge iceberg of corruption that is endemic in the Charedi world. Don't even try to justify it by saying the whole world is corrupt so why pick on a few bearded Jews? The Torah commands us to pursue "that which is upright and good" and even if everyone around you is corrupt, in the words of Hillel, where there are no men, at least you should try to be a man.

This disease within Orthodoxy is corrosive, widespread, and endemic. It has reached the highest levels of our religion, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Lithuanian and Hassidic. It knows no borders, no limitations, America and Israel and all points between. And what makes it even more disturbing is that the few honest good and spiritual men at the top who are untainted are too scared, weak or feeble to make a stand. I won't even begin to mention those who have political agendas. It is all as corrupt as the sex crimes of the Catholic Church and the hypocrisy of many Evangelical preachers. It is the result of exaggerated worship of holy men who seem to think this allows them to get away with anything.

Of course the usual response is to condemn the messenger as an ignorant, backsliding, heretical criminal, himself, who is contravening the Biblical and rabbinical laws of gossip and giving people a bad name. The wagons circle and the criminal is said to be the object of the envious, the uncomprehending and anti-Semites. Adverts appear in the Orthodox press calling for meetings of prayer and support for the poor victims--not the victims of the crimes, but the perpetrators. In Israel any case of prosecuting or convicting an Orthodox person of any misdemeanor is of course put down exclusively to secular bias and antagonism.

Anyone familiar with the murky world of kashrut supervision knows how much monkey business is involved. Backhand payments to kashrut supervisors, deals made between and against rival supervising bodies. "Kosher" sometimes has relatively little to do with the actual laws and more to do with who is paying whom for what. The result has been endemic fraud. Honesty is rare.

It is not easy to find a Bet Din that is not corrupt in one way or another. Money often decides the outcome, rather than the law. Or who knows whom, or who owes something to someone--all matters specifically proscribed in Torah, which is somehow forgotten or ignored. Interested parties can often bribe or bring pressure to bear on Dayanim. One sees it at its worse when it comes to Jewish divorce and the way men often refuse to give a Get unless they are paid blackmail money and many rabbinical authorities at best turn a blind eye and at worst actually encourage it.

As for conversions, the system (where there is one) is riddled with abuse--rabbis prepared to convert for money, expecting kickbacks, applying different standards and criteria, refusing to convert in one country, arranging an easy way out with a friend or relative in another, and indeed expecting sexual favors from the vulnerable. This is not hearsay, I assure you, but something I have come across.

Rabbis seeking sexual favors is typical of male-dominated hierarchies the world over. The underlying animation seems not Torah, but rather personal concupiscence. And this probably explains why there is so much financial corruption and dishonesty in religious circles. It might start off stealing from the State but it invariably ends up stealing from family and friends too. It is like terrorism. Theorists start off by explaining it all away as the result of poverty, deprivation, discrimination, ignorance, and alienation—but then one comes across perfectly well educated, comfortable, apparently stable people who do the same.

So why has this not turned me completely of Orthodoxy? For one thing, of course, I also have firsthand experience of the beauty and inspiration of living a religious life, and I am also fortunate to know enough really honest, sincere, and good Orthodox people to know there is another side.

All religions, like the Parson's Egg, are good in parts. But that of course means other parts are foul. All organizations, parties, indeed any agglomeration of human beings, has its rotten eggs.

Hans Eysenck got into trouble many years ago for suggesting that criminals had an extra chromosome. I am coming round to the view that being good is genetic. Some people just have the good chromosomes and genes and others don't. Just as some are willing to teach and serve and others are interested in accumulating wealth and are motivated by greed. Some will argue it is environmental, and that makes a difference too, but I have seen the same ghetto produce saints and sinners.

Now I know we believe in free will and repentance and change. And indeed I have seen it happen, both ways. But the percentage of those who do actually change is very small. Being religious is like supporting Manchester United. You do it not out of any moral, spiritual animation, but it is a result of accident of birth and loyalty to tradition. No one expects Manchester United supporters to be ethical, good human beings, but we do expect this of people who outwardly adhere to a religion. That is why Maimonides starts of his book of law by dealing with the halachic subject of Chillul HaShem (desecrating God's name). But then what is written is of course irrelevant to those so blind they cannot see.

You want to know why religion in Europe is up the spout? It is called moral relativism. In other words, no standards. A nice English priest, Father Tim Jones of York, has shot to fame or shame by suggesting that the poor should go and shoplift over this holiday season.

Such a genuine and sincere chappie he seems. I'm sure he is a great pastoral comfort to his flock. All Christian charity and goodwill and here he is telling people to break the Ten Commandments. He does qualify it. Only go for the big stores, he says, not the small Mom and Pop ones. Steal, he says, but only from the big guys. As if shoplifters are going to stand outside, calculators in hand, read the balance sheets and then make informed economic judgments. As if shoplifters are going to work out the differences between the threshold of need and desire and decide that stealing basic foodstuffs is fine but electronic gadgets are not.

Of course he is right that our material societies are morally corrupt in many ways. Most people are self-centered, selfish consumers who may occasionally drop a penny or two into the poor box or the collection plate. The fact is most human beings walk by poverty and ignore it. That is human nature, if you will. But now how do we deal with it? Do we suspend all moral laws? It is OK to steal under certain circumstances? No, it is never OK to steal (except to save a person's life). And even stealing from thieves is not acceptable either. Would he say it is fine to beat your wife if you are really feeling very, very depressed and hungry and it makes you feel better? Of course not.

So what is the issue here?

According to the Talmud, a judge always has to follow the law. If someone is guilty of a crime, however small, he is guilty. Motive may differentiate between crimes (e.g., manslaughter as opposed to murder). It may be taken into consideration when deciding on a penalty. But a crime is a crime is a crime. For human society to function effectively, the rule of law is absolute. "On three things the world depends [in order to function effectively]", said Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel in Mishnah Avot, "Truth, Justice and Peace." And what differentiated Jewish law from Hammurabi and other early legal systems was that in civil matters every citizen has to be equal in the eyes of the law.

This classical Talmudic value lies in the narrative of a judge faced with a thief who had stolen to feed his starving family and must, as a judge, find him guilty. In exactly the same way that he may not give preference to a rich man because of his status, so he may not to a poor one. But then as a human being he has a religious and moral obligation to help feed the thief's family! It is this second part of the equation that is missing in many sectors of modern life, and one of the reasons is the European model of the Welfare State. So much money is taken from ordinary citizens by the state that supposedly has taken on the responsibility of feeding the poor and caring for the deprived that the ordinary citizen wonders why the heck he should give up from what is leftover to do what he paid the state to do (amongst other things of course). The result is that the average citizen in socialist countries gives pennies each year to charity.

So our poor priest ought to be preaching charity and good works. He ought to open his church and offer shelter and ask his congregants to give food or money to feed the starving, as indeed many churches do. But apparently he knows that all he will get in North England (as opposed to the USA) is bubkas. Average citizens are fed up with hundreds of thousands of scroungers from all over the place, home and abroad, citizens and aliens, of various religious persuasions that all proclaim the benefits of charity but are far better at taking than giving. So he or she closes up instead of opening up. Churches, mosques, and synagogues do indeed usually try their best, but most citizens don't go there.

Why are we Jews so much better on average at giving? Because we know we have to take care of our own. And we despise dependency (or at least we used to until welfare made it easy and legal). As Hillel said (Talmud Shabbat 118a), "Make your Shabbat no better than an ordinary week day rather than depend on others for handouts." Every morning we say in our prayers, "These are the things that have no limit…being kind to other human beings", "These are the things that give you reward in this world and in the next, materially and spiritually: respecting your parents, kindness to others," etc. And every time we say Grace after Meals, we say, "Help us not be dependent on the gifts of other human beings," and we repeat all this, day by day throughout our lives and somewhere down the line it sinks in.

Our whole religious culture is suffused with charity and giving, financially or otherwise. So it is with many other religions too. But theory is never enough unless it is rooted in daily required practice. And nowhere do our spiritual leaders ever tell us, "Be good, but if you can't then it's ok to steal."

Last week the iconic banner over the gates of Auschwitz with the ironic legend "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Sets You Free") was stolen. The phrase itself has now entered our culture, sometimes to replace the famous words that Dante placed over the Gates of Hell, "Abandon hope all you who enter here." "Arbeit Macht Frei" is far more sinister and horrific, for there was not only the loss of hope, but life too, in unimaginably cruel ways. The language of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has now forever been associated with the wickedest of all human evil, all the more so because it was carried out by such apparently cultured and sophisticated human beings.

It was not a war crime where conflicting armies and their supporters massacred in frenzies of revenge, or to try to end carnage by deterrence. It was not the mindless cruelty of individual soldiers bringing their own issues into a conflict and behaving inhumanely. It was not the result of ancient tribal rivalries and conflicts over territory and revenge for past offences. It was simply, exclusively, and uniquely a masterminded plan, designed by bureaucrats and ordered by commanders, both civil and military. It was carried out with efficiency and expediency to exterminate--not to subjugate or diminish, not to undermine or to displace, but actually to wipe out like vermin, millions of innocent human beings. It was not carried out by primitives, religious fanatics or by reformers in millennia gone by. It was done by men and women at the cusp of modern, rational civilization.

As such, the banal misuse of the term "Nazi" to apply to any crime, real or perceived, just emphasizes how humans refuse to recognize that in evil there are degrees. It also proves that in politics and polemic, truth and honesty are irrelevant.

Now having said all that, I am both amused and annoyed at the exaggerated furor that exploded over what is the simple theft by a handful of uneducated, unemployed yobs to sell scrap metal. Now we will have a legion of Polish jokes. How many Poles does it take to steal a gate? Even if as is now claimed it was a theft on demand for a foreign Nazi collector, so what? If the pieces had not been recovered how much of a difference would replicas make? It was the people who were massacred that count, not the actual wooden barracks, bricks or railway tracks. Will Holocaust deniers be any more or less vocal if they only see a replica rather than the original?

The President, the Prime Minister, and the Chief of Police of Poland all rushed into the media to condemn this outrage. Why? What were they so concerned about? Public opinion? The Prime Minister and the President of Israel set all other matters aside to call for immediate action. The State Department sent a formal message. The outrage was totally out of all proportion to what is no more than a symbolic artifact. It is not a priceless archeological jewel or an essential piece of a nation's ancient heritage. It was not the demolition by Taliban of ancient rock Buddhas. It was not even the equivalent of the hundreds of Sifrei Torah that are stolen every year from poorly protected synagogues by religious gangsters wanting to make a quick buck. It was mid-twentieth-century industrial scrap.

But of course it is more than that, because Auschwitz has now become a religion in its own right. For religiously committed Jews, who proportionally lost most, the response has always been less of outward memorials and more of reinforcing the tradition. They do this by observance, study, and reproduction. Replenishing the destroyed fountains of Eastern Europe is the constant leitmotif of all Charedi thinking and is omnipresent in common discourse. A religion that rebuilds and thrives is the greatest way of avenging and remembering the past. A religion that means something, is a way of life and not just a system of empty rituals.

But for many Jews, the trauma of the Holocaust, of what looked like the Death of God, or at any rate His abandonment of His people, was too much to allow them to continue the old rituals and ways of life; they needed a new religion. As people overcame the initial reluctance to speak, Jew and non-Jew alike have thrown themselves into this new religion whose credo is the slogan "Never Again". Yet the sad fact is that although nothing of the same magnitude has happened again, lots of other "nevers" are happening again and again all over the world.

Auschwitz has become a quasi-religious symbol that is used by Jews to justify their rights and their demands, and is used by their enemies to throw back in their faces whenever something happens they do not approve of, or whenever Israel does something unacceptable. It is the symbol of the Jews and the sword of the anti-Semites. You know, you who suffered so much, should not now defend yourselves so aggressively.

We all have our myths, our narratives that justify our existence as individuals and as peoples. We are convinced of our own right. Each one of us is so conditioned by our symbols that we cannot possibly react sensitively to those that others have. We can only feel our own pain, cannot imagine anyone else's. Unless we, rabbis, mullahs, and priests can step back and try to see the really important issues, then what hope is there of increasing the amount of human understanding, compassion and love in the world today?

This time of the year when there is a tendency to glorify the Hasmoneans as Jewish tough guys, it is appropriate that two Jewish boxers have just hit the news. Both are Russian Jews and both are newly religious under the influence of Lubavitch. Yuri Foreman of Brooklyn, but of Israeli citizenship, surprisingly defeated champion Puerto Rican Daniel Santos in Las Vegas to win the World Boxing Association 154-pound title. On the other hand, the previously unbeaten Jewish boxer, Dmitriy Salita, was less surprisingly knocked out by Muslim fighter Amir Khan from Britain in just 76 seconds. Should we be proud, sad, or what?

Thousands of years of subservience in exile have given us Jews a reputation for being weaklings and softies. It is not altogether fair. There have been great Jewish boxers such as Daniel Mendoza, England’s sixteenth Heavyweight Champion from 1792 to 1795. American Maximilian Adelbert "Madcap Maxie" Baer was briefly Heavyweight Champion of the world. In fact, the Boxing Hall of Fame lists over sixty Jewish boxers. Jewish mercenaries were known to be amongst the best in the Roman Empire (I wonder if they took breaks over Shabbat?) And of course we have in our lifetime had Israeli war heroes, and now everyone accuses us of being brutal tough guys.

Still, it is true we have tended to prefer the book to the sword and Nobel Prizes to boxing belts (though I'm not sure that some Nobel Prizes, particularly those outside the objective realms of science, haven't completely lost their luster).

But I hate boxing. It is a brutal sport in which you simply try to smash your opponent into submission, doing as much physical damage as you possibly can. The nadir of boxing was the ghastly specter of Mike Tyson biting the ear of Evander Holyfield. If you have seen the film Tyson, you have seen a world champion decline from brute to pathetic. Nothing is sadder that seeing the once arrogant Muhammad Ali reduced to invalidity.

It is usually the very poor or the disposed who venture into a sport that batters their bodies and minds into mush in the hope of making a lot of money before that happens. But more often than not crooked promoters filch most of it. The boxing world is an unsavory demimonde of crooks, charlatans, and punters, with a few dedicated trainers on the side. The audience at a boxing match is usually made of screaming frustrated women, neanderthal toughs spitting hatred and invective of the most racial kind, regardless of color, and so-called celebrities who have nothing better to do with their time. It recalls the Roman gladiatorial games and the crude bloodlust of primitive people. Yes, there have been noble fighters, but watching boxing brings out the worst in a person. Although I like seeing excellence in sport, it brings out the worst in me, too.

In other words, boxing is a sport in which you know you will be dealing with the dregs of humanity. So it was surprising that, in explaining his defeat, Salita told the (London) Jewish Chronicle, "It was over before it started. I was in great shape and well prepared but the anti-Semitic chanting left me completely overwhelmed. . .The experience of fighting away from home, and the crowd being so against me, left me shocked."

The article states, "Rabbi Dovid Lewis, of Newcastle United Hebrew Congregation, accompanied Salita, wearing his traditional Magen David-decorated shorts, from his dressing room to the ring. He said, 'We were shocked at the vitriolic abuse shouted at Dmitriy. It was anti-Semitic swearing and spitting with a lot of pushing and pulling.'"

Now initially one might react by saying that this is just symptomatic of the reaction to anything Israeli in European life. On any BBC current affairs or discussion program a person expressing any pro-Israeli sentiment will be booed, heckled, and harassed by the audience. At demonstrations there is no rational engagement, only hatred and abuse.

But in the case of boxing, what else does one expect? Amir Khan himself, writing in his autobiography, describes the constant abuse and hatred directed at him for being a Muslim. The sort of person who shrieks hatred at others usually shrieks it his own family after he has exhausted himself on an enemy. That's why fanatics don't care who they kill. Absolutism, be it Fascist or Marxist, has no room for moderation or exchange.

That this is true of the intellectual world comes as a disappointment, but that it is true of boxing is no surprise at all. So for Salita to express shock is to criticize his handlers and trainers for not preparing him. And for him to use it as an excuse is lame. As Tyson said in his film, it was precisely the bullying and the hatred he was subjected to that made him the fighter he was. Perhaps Salita is just too nice a Jewish boy and would not have made it onto Judah Maccabee's elite fighting corps!

More than the calf wants to suck, the mother wants to suckle.
Talmud Pesachim 112a

It's Chanukah time! Consumerism has gone mad. We ape the rest of the world and we overindulge in an orgy of unnecessary spending, spoiling, and waste. Before my children complain that I am the worst overindulgent grandparent on the planet, hear me out, because this is all about therapy.

Once upon a time Chanukah was a sweet, eight-day-long, home-based, winter's fireside celebration. Returning from work, parents would light up the candles. In my youth in postwar England, olive oil was far too scarce and expensive a commodity to be squandered on lighting. Everyone lit white candles until 1948, when white and blue became fashionable, and then in the mid-fifties we had those multicolored twisted candles. Nowadays, of course, we have only the best and the purest olive oil, and even individual glass phials of oil premeasured to the right amount of time required to fulfill one's obligation. All imported, sanctioned, and sanctified from the Holy Land (and don’t ask where the olive trees actually are), guaranteed to make someone a small fortune in the process.

Then we would sing HaNerot Halalu ("These Are the Lights") which we sang to Handel's See, the Conqu'ring Hero Comes, from his oratorio Judas Maccabaeus. And on to Maoz Tzur Yeshuati ("The immovable Rock of our Salvation"), the cat's in the cupboard and you can't see me.

Mummy would fry up homemade donuts and other oil-cooked food (we wanted chips), and we'd sit around on the carpet playing dreidel for nuts. Four sides of the little top with Hebrew letters--Nun, Gimel, Hei, and Shin. In Hebrew these letters stood for "a Great Miracle Happened There"; in the dreidel game, they stood for the Yiddish words meaning "put one in, take one out, stay as you are, or take the lot"! Of course our parents made sure we were all winners and then off to bath and bed while the grownups took out the cards and gambled away the evening. Actually, my father never, ever allowed us to play cards. He had a visceral hatred of gambling. It was not until I married into a continental family that I discovered so much addiction to gambling in many Jewish communities.

It all sounds positively Dickensian doesn't it? Innocent and romantic. And I guess it was rather innocent in its way, at a time when most Jews, in fact most of postwar people in general, were poor.

But then things changed. It started with American cousins coming over with boxes of Bazooka bubble gum, and then slowly Madison Avenue initiated the relentless move towards consumerism, advertising, and spending. Insidiously, subliminally, the "The Hidden Persuaders" convinced us that buying things was good for the country. We learnt about built-in obsolescence so that we would have to buy replacements every year or so, and a car was no longer to last a lifetime but had to be traded in every two years to preserve its secondhand value, and of course to maintain a profile as a successful whatever-we-were. We deserved it. We needed it. And we were doing a service to the economy and the country. At the same time, in the immortal words of Harold MacMillan, we "never had it so good". And that was when I became aware for the first time that it was a mitzvah to compete with Christmas.

Christmas was no longer the festival of good cheer and charity and Christian values. It had become the pagan celebration of spending money, of going into debt to give lots of people lots of useless gifts. I, too, hung up a stocking on my bedpost and kept a lookout for Santa coming down my chimney with presents. But for some reason my father wasn’t on the same page.

As soon as I had children of my own, and it was the era of a television in every room let alone every house, I didn’t want my children to feel deprived. So I started buying presents, one for each child for each day of Chanukah as if to reassure them that they need not suffer by being Jewish when everyone else was getting presents and the media were seducing them day by day from November--because Chanukah gave them a whole lot more! I got a tremendous amount of pleasure seeing my children happy every evening for eight days, and getting hugs and kisses and adoring looks, and what a good Daddy I was. And now I do exactly the same for my grandchildren whenever I see them, and try to make up for the months in between.

I am addicted to giving because I enjoy it. When my sons and daughters, and daughters- and sons-in-law try to tell me to stop being so overindulgent, and that I am ruining my grandchildren and undermining them, because I am raising expectations and training them to want, and measuring love in terms of material things, I realize they are right. I am a hopeless addict. More than my kids want presents, I want to give them!

So it is that children are conditioned to expect and want the latest gadget and doll and toy car and fashion accessory. Spoiling children really does a lot of damage. I see young men and women incapable of taking "no" as an answer, and incapable of self-discipline, and unwilling to buckle down to work hard at anything. I see marriages destroyed because unreasonable expectations are not met. Yet here I am, the suckling cow, refusing to pull the treat away. How can I say, "Grow up," when I haven't grown up either? Is this really what the Hasmoneans fought for?

I recently watched the debate between arch atheist Richard Dawkins and believing Oxford mathematician John Lennox and found myself alienated from both. And it struck me once again with satisfaction and self-validation, how I do not fit in anywhere completely. Sadly, there are others who turn this into a problem.

In the case of Dawkins it was not his critique of religion that disturbed me, for I almost entirely agree with him about the amount of evil religions have caused, the endemic inhumanity of religious power, and the irrational way so many try to justify the unjustifiable or prove the unprovable. It is just the absence of any spirituality, his materialist certainty, that overrides almost all other considerations.

And whereas I agreed with some of Lennox's critique of Dawkins, when he came to describing his own religious faith, I simply could not understand a literal Christian narrative. I have no doubt that both men would probably say exactly the same about my religious position.

If this true between other belief systems, it is even truer within each religion and ideology. And it has infected science too. Just look at the anger and devious massaging of statistics between rival scientists on the issue of global warming and the recent case in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia where agenda overruled the facts.

Look how impossible we humans are, so convinced we are right and everyone else is wrong, and how easy it is to disengage, despise and hate each other. Humans are just programmed to protect their patches, physical and intellectual, against the outsider, and that is how they think they can survive the challenges of life!

After the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, by a Muslim army major, one response was to ignore any Islamic fanaticism, arguing that there are all too many nutcases of all religions and backgrounds wielding guns in the US. And the easy availability of guns in America simply gives more crazies more opportunities to do evil things. And the army was right to ignore all the signs of Islamic anger because it needs Muslim soldiers and diversity.

The other side argues that so many violent acts have been carried out by angry Muslims that it would be crazy not to be suspicious, and the way the army ignored all the signs of radicalism was not just willful neglect but criminal. Some go further and claim that there is something in contemporary Muslim minds and societies, if not in Islam itself, that encourages violence.

Homosexuality is now a ubiquitous presence in Western societies. Yet public opinion is still as polarized as ever. In Europe it is not politically correct to express reservations. In the US it is. Yet both narratives are discussed and debated. Sadly, in both cases there are sick individuals who physically assault those with whom they disagree.

When differences of opinion turn into hatred and deafness then of course it leads to disaster.

Although it is argued that popular culture dumbs everyone down to a mindless banality, our modern societies are so disparate, so much more mixed with conflicting cultures and ideas than ever before. How can we expect any kind of unanimity? The trouble is that politics, sensationalism and the need to make money have created a climate in which the media from top to bottom is dominated by attack, confrontation, and demolition rather than genuine attempts to understand and to build bridges. I see it at work wherever I turn. Everyone seems busy protecting their own positions by rubbishing any that is different than theirs.

Most societies have evolved out of a single class structure and a dominant religion and culture. In such societies newcomers are severely disadvantaged and too often alienated. But in a few societies, as in the USA, the damage is neutralized because no one position dominates to the exclusion of others.

I do not claim that Americans are more tolerant than anyone else. But I do believe minorities are better protected in the USA and are better able to thrive and assert their own positions than in Europe and most other parts of the world. And that has to do with the culture of the society rather than the behaviour of individuals. In Europe a centralized national culture invariably leads to a dominant media position and it is this that makes "others" feel uncomfortable, over and above individual acts of intolerance.

Most Americans just get on with living their lives, perhaps because they are not so cushioned by welfare, and nothing breeds anger, depression, and violence so much as indolence! In America if they hate, they usually hate those who threaten personally and immediately. But otherwise everyone has to work very hard to survive and almost everyone is a foreigner with a weird system of beliefs and odd practices. Perhaps New York is not typical but Hallal food stands on Sixth Avenue are not overturned. Cabs driven by turbaned Sikhs or festooned with the Koran are still taken. No one turns a head when a fully bedecked Hassid jaywalks on Fifth Avenue. We read of all the villains, the good and the bad and the ugly, but that's life, so long as Clint Eastwood wins in the ends.

I was surprised when a Muslim friend told me that many Muslims in the USA feel insecure. At first I had a hard time understanding why, because time and time again since 9/11 every American leader has emphasized, ad nauseam, that all Muslims cannot be held responsible for the acts of a few, and that America is fighting only those who attack it, and that Islam is a peaceful religion of gentle folk who would not normally say "boo" to a goose. The day after Thanksgiving was a Muslim festival officially recognized in New York (scene of the attack on the World Trade Center, of course) and all parking offences were forgiven. So what makes Muslims feel unwanted in the USA? Graffiti? Assaults? Cries of "Go Home"? Name calling? Bullying? We Jews have been putting up with that forever!

But then I felt bad because perhaps I was not being sensitive enough and perhaps in many parts of the USA the situation is very unpleasant for them. And just because it is almost a given nowadays that Muslims hate Jews because of Israel, why should I allow the generalizations or myopia of others to cloud my mind?

It is legislation that defines a country, not whether some citizens behave badly. But I suspect that because almost the whole of the Muslim world has bought into the myth that America and Zionism are out to destroy them they actually believe that (and incredibly ignore the crude reality that it is Muslims who kill most Muslims). As a result they have created a psychological mindset that takes no notice of reality, only mythology. And chunks of the world accept this. And once again I realize how pernicious differences have become and how, supposedly civilized we think we are, in reality we are still medieval in our hatreds and heresy hunting.

Almost everyone celebrates Thanksgiving in the USA, wherever they come from, because it is simply a celebration of being privileged to live in a society with opportunities and freedoms. It doesn't mean it is perfect or without its problems or mass murderers. But it is the celebration of a haven of difference, not forced toleration. Live and let live, and let me just get on earning enough money to live. And if we don't like what we hear on one channel, or in one magazine or newspaper, we can simply switch to another. So even if you think I'm crazy (and I certainly think you are), even if you hate me, I don’t give a hoot, that's your problem; just leave me alone to be me.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, who died December of last year at the ripe old age of 91, was, as one cynic once said, "An Irishman who wanted to be a Jew." This was not only because he was not anti-Semitic in a rabidly anti-Semitic world, but also a supporter of Israel. He was something of a hero to me, a benchmark of honest individuality and fearlessness, the standard of a cultured, educated, analytical, and moral man.

I first became aware of him because my father admired him and encouraged me to read anything he wrote. At first I thought it was because of a family connection. My father had never lived in Ireland, but his parents are buried there. They moved to Dublin during the Great Depression because there was no work in London. But my father, a teenager at the time, was studying in Etz Chaim Yeshiva in London and so he stayed behind.

I remember going with him only once to Dublin to visit my grandparents, a year before they died in 1950. Ireland then had several thriving Jewish communities (at one moment in Anglo-Jewry there were more rabbis from Cork than any other city in the British Isles), and Jews and Irishmen in general got on very well. But the refusal of de Valera's Ireland to join the war against the Nazis cast a pall on relations, even if one could understand the longstanding antipathy of Irishmen to the English.

It is difficult now to appreciate the extent and the bitterness of the class divisions in British society during the nineteenth century. These divisions were reflected in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jews identified with the Labour Party. In my home the political heroes were all socialists: Clement Attlee, Aneirun Bevan, Jennie Lee, Michael Foot, and Hugh Gaitskell. Although we admired Churchill, and were immensely grateful for his almost singlehanded role in getting Britain to stand up to Hitler, we never indentified with the Conservatives. I'm not saying all Anglo-Jews felt this way, but certainly those who came from poor recent immigrant families did.

That is why there was always a degree of sympathy for Irishmen fighting for their freedom from British rule, and in particular for the Irish socialists--because by and large they were not violent murderers and political gangsters, but rather enthusiastic agitators. Ireland itself was a paradox. Primitive country priests catered to very poor disadvantaged communities. Yet Dublin was a cosmopolitan city, the home of Joyce and Yeats, and a great academic environment in which Catholic, Protestant, and atheist exchanged ideas and generated intellectual creativity.

Conor Cruise O'Brien was a product of this atmosphere. A Catholic who was given a Protestant education at Trinity College, he became interested in politics as an idealistic socialist who was always animated by idealism and hated the duplicity of politics, even though he had chosen to get involved.

He was sent to the United Nations and became the special representative of Dag Hammarskjold, the impressive Secretary-General of the UN at a time when the UN was still held in high regard and promised much (before sinking into corruption and decadence). He tried to deal fairly with the Congo crisis of 1961, but resigned in frustration and wrote To Katanga and Back in 1962. In it he excoriated the incompetence and duplicity of the UN. That book, more than anything else, turned me against the UN long before its abysmal record on Israel.

He became Chancellor of the University of Ghana and a professor at New York University before returning to Irish politics. He was not corrupt enough to be a success as a minister but gained fame, some might say notoriety, in condemning the IRA and its political front the Sinn Fein, and opposing violence. He fought against any compromise or power sharing with what he argued were murdering terrorists. He had a spell as editor of The Observer in London, but spent the rest of his long life writing and lecturing and fighting corruption and intellectual dishonesty wherever he saw it. He used to say that his role in life was to be "a shock to the Irish psyche".

In 1989 he wrote The Siege, a history and defence of Israel's struggle for survival, and this of course alienated him from the new wave of politically correct, intellectually crippled left-wing orthodoxy. The Siege remains one of the best books on the subject.

It is when I think of men like O'Brien that know why I became the person that I am--antiestablishment, nonconformist, a gadfly refusing to accept conventional wisdom or standards. It is the fact that there can be people who think for themselves and yet retain deep loyalty to both religion and national values that reassures me I am neither alone nor wrong! Thank you, Conor Cruise O'Brien, for your life.

An article in an Orthodox Jewish paper recently argued that couples should use contraceptives for the first year of marriage so as to get used to each other before children arrive. This will probably not strike many of you are either remarkable, unusual or in any way worthy of a second thought. Except that officially in Orthodox circles contraception is only allowed under certain circumstances and the very notion of emotional education for marriage, as opposed to ritual, is relatively recent.

The first year of marriage often reveals deep incompatibilities that either destroy or severely hamper it. Given social and religious pressure to get married couples often overlook a great deal in the enthusiastic rush to the altar or the chupah. Once children arrive it may be too late and often couples are then locked into a loveless union feeling compelled to stay together for the sake of their children. But usually children growing up in such a conflict ridden and unhappy home suffer just as much as those who have to cope with divorce.

In my youth, it used to be argued in "modern" circles that couples ought to live together and get used to each other sexually before getting married. And it is true that a lot of marriages do flounder on sexual incompatibility. But then the sexual liberation of the 60's and 70's produced vast numbers of couples who had plenty of sexual experience together without getting married and when many of them in the end did actually "tie the knot" (and that really is a loaded expression isn't it?) they discovered that sex within marriage and sex beforehand sometimes involved very different emotional dynamics. Couples who lived together were even more likely to divorce as those who had no or little experience before marriage. It was obvious that sexual expertise was only one of many factors and not necessarily the predominant issue in the success or failure of married life.

Within very Orthodox families the issue of compatibility looms much larger precisely because in practice, or should I say "officially", there is little chance of living together before marriage. So the argument has been put forward that, particularly where couples get married very young, they should use contraception during the first year.

There are other factors that constrain unhappy couples to stay together. In many cultures one is expected to go on trying to succeed and not giving up regardless of the problems. Marriage is a decision and once taken one is committed. And I do not mean "till death do us part" so much as "if you make the bed then lie in it". Judaism accepts divorce, provided obligations are met and responsibilities accepted. The Talmudic folio dealing with divorce is twice as long as that dealing in marriage. Nevertheless, divorce is not usually undertaken unless there is a very valid reason. And certainly in very Orthodox circles there is still a measure of taboo and resistance which I believe owes more to Christian influences than Jewish ones. So a young couple is often compelled by convention to stay together, even without children.

Despite all this, I have noticed that an increasing number of couples divorce soon after marriage. And rabbis are much more willing to countenance a quick and easy divorce if there are no children. So surely as the numbers of divorces rise everywhere it must make sense to give young couples time to get used to each other or not before having children, if for no other reason than to try to protect any possible children from the traumas of divorce.

I am not for one minute suggesting that this has a cat's chance in hell of becoming official policy. Anyway there is an obligation to get married and to try to have children as quickly as possible. Where contraception is allowed other than in extenuating circumstances, it is usually only where the couple have met Hillel's very liberal ruling, for his time, that one must have one boy and one girl to fulfill the obligation. Not only, but having lots of children, once the natural response of the poor, has now been adopted by the very pious of all religions. In general, however, according The Economist (October 31st) the faster countries industrialize the quicker the size of families declines. Orthodoxy is the exception to the rule.

I do not expect rabbis to take the lead in recommending this, but I do expect sensible parents and counselors to try to take the initiative to protect their children. We all make mistakes. There are all kinds of pressures. Sadly, people are reluctant to tell the truth when shidduchim are in the air and too often crucial information is kept hidden, both physical and psychological. Under these circumstances we must not consign young couples to lives of pain and frustration. The Talmud gives a reason for allowing divorce. If the Torah insists we love our neighbors, we should try to increase the amount of love in this world. Compelling two people to share the same home when they just want to get away from each other only creates hatred.

There is of course a danger in allowing too easy divorce and thinking of marriage as a dispensable permit. Many marriages are political and even commercial, where both parties know in advance what the terms are and love is a bonus. Similarly, many successful couples I know started off marrying out of shared values and love came and grew as they matured. So sexual compatibility is by no means the only criterion. But certainly children complicate the issue. So I am supporting the argument that we should allow contraception and simply postpone procreation. There are many religious obligations we are allowed to postpone, or in which delaying is accepted post factum. And postponing pregnancy until after the first year of marriage may be an example where it is beneficial, if not in all cases then certainly in some.

How come the High Courts of England are now deciding who is and who is not a Jew? The simple answer is that the rabbinic authority of the United Synagogues of London arrogantly believed that everyone else had to fit in with them, rather than that they should accommodate others. Most power and bureaucracy makes this mistake.

In the West, religion is associated almost exclusively with faith, belief. But nowadays all religions have members or associates who do not believe what the religion demands. Can you have your cake and eat it? In England now it seems that unless you actually do believe what the religion prescribes you cannot justify membership. Therefore if you have a school for Jews only religious ones can attend. If, on the other hand, you define Jews by birth you are being racist.

King Herod, who dominated life in the Roman provinces of Judea thousands of years ago, was of Idumean descent, a local non-Jewish, pre-Arab tribe. Yet everyone, including the Romans, called him a Jewish king, and he rebuilt the Temple. He certainly was not what we would call religious. Throughout its history, Judaism has always absorbed converts from all parts and races of the world.

Since Talmudic times Jews were defined religiously. Passion for the Land of Israel and Jerusalem were core values enshrined in liturgy, poetry, and academic study. So much so that in 13th Century Spain Ramban could argue that the laws of the Bible were originally only intended to be in force in the Land of Israel and nowhere else.

In the West, since the 18th century "Enlightenment", Jews have lost their all-encompassing, unitary identity that had been defined religiously ever since Constantine made Christianity the religion and citizenship criterion of the Roman Empire. Under Islam, religion remained the definition and Jews were Dhimmis, inferior believers. In those days, all the world was made of communities with specific religions, worshipping specific gods. Political power and religious identity went hand in hand. Judaism, then, was defined as a community of common worship and shared texts and constitution based on Divine authority.

But then came the separation of Church and State, and then the rise of modern nationalism as a secular phenomenon, albeit with a strong religious element. Some people wanted to abandon religion altogether and others wanted to join religious groups for social rather than religious reasons. Most religions reacted by turning in on themselves and becoming more exclusive. It is the modern phenomenon of people wanting to lay claim to Jewish identity without its religious encumbrances that makes it is so difficult to categorize or define Jews.

In Israel, which is a nationalist phenomenon, they like to think of Jews as a nation, which is why so many have difficulty with the idea of a Jewish state as opposed to an Israeli nation. Just as it is now politically correct for some Arabs to argue there never, ever were Jews in the Middle East before Zionism, so secular Jews have liked to attack the connection between Judaism and its roots in the Middle East.

Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe said that all Eastern European Jews were descended from the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the 9th Century. As if Yiddish emerged from the Caucasus Mountains! An Israeli academic argues in Haaretz this week that all Jews are descended from converts and not a drop of the original bloodline remains.

His conclusion is that Jews today have no genetic claim to the lands of ancient Israel because most Jews nowadays are descendants of converts of one sort or another. Even if he is right genetically (which a lot of experts dispute), if a body of people have a literary and historical link does it matter if it has absorbed others from the outside? Did no Muslims ever migrate into Palestine from other parts of the Ottoman Empire? As if any English today are still pure descendents of Angles. The Queen is more German! Thanks to massive Muslim immigration most Englishmen will soon be of Muslim descent. Does this mean they are not English too? Will England then cease to be English? You might argue that previous migrations abandoned their countries of origin and few nineteenth century Jewish emigres from Russia ever looked back with yearning or a sense of belonging. But German immigrants did and most Israeli emigrants today still do.

So peoples, cultures, and religion are intertwined. Attempting to rigidly divorce them or categorize is silly and wrong. States can define citizens. Ethnicity or culture cannot.

The Bible and the Mishna, regardless of when you think they were written or by whom, originated in the rough area of the Land of Israel. We possess documents and archaeological evidence confirming this, dating back at least two thousand years. And the Judaism practiced around the world today, to a greater or lesser extent, is based on these documents and their contents. Does it matter therefore if the original adherents have been diluted by conquest, rape, conversion, and intermarriage so that the original species is no longer pure? Of course not. Does it matter if every part of my body has now been so transformed over the past sixty years that not one original cell remains? Am I therefore not me?

If Yehuda HaLevy, living in Spain 800 years ago, wrote that he longed to return to Jerusalem, does it matter if he was born a Chinaman? What matters is the yearning of a group of people, reflected in their literature, to return to their land. If some of those people were not religious or were not born Jewish, does it matter? Must Welsh culture only be supported by people living beyond the River Severn and descended from Llewellyn? Can one only support Scottish nationalism if one is a born member of the Church of Scotland or a Highland clan? What matters is the survival of a culture and/or its religious system.

Both Israel and England have got themselves into all sorts of messes because lawyers and politicians like to define and categorize (and so, sadly, do rabbis).I know Muslims in England who bitterly resent being defined as a race instead of a religion, just as much as there are Jews who object to be classified as a religion!

When England introduced laws against one group hating or attacking another, they called them laws against racial discrimination and so they categorized different groups such as Jews and Muslims as races. The fact that Jews meet no biological definition of race, and neither do most Muslims, escaped them. So Jews and Muslims, protected under the laws of Racial Discrimination now have to fit into the straightjacket of a definition arrived at by Anglican lawyers. Interestingly, the only laws still on the books to do with defending religion are the ancient heresy laws that anyway only apply to the Anglican religion and are virtually dead letters!

Over time we Jews have changed from tribal to national to nation-less to religious to religion-less as the sweep of history has taken us in and out of divers peoples and societies. Had we remained a tribe, definition would not have been an issue. Had we remained a nation, definition would not have been an issue. But we have been these and more. The term "Jew" covers a very broad spectrum and range, and religion is only one part, albeit in my opinion the most significant.

If one wants to work within English law or any other legal system, then inevitably one has to accept compromises, however silly they may be (or try to make changes, which is of course the right of anyone living in a democracy). This is why the great Babylonian Rabbi Shmuel established the principal that "The Law of the Land is the Law".

Israel needs to make up its mind if it is Jewish state or an Israeli nation. Muslims need to decide if they want to be protected as a race or as a religion. And Anglo-Jewry needs to decide if it wants to continue fudging issues and pretending there is just one Jewish religious system, one religious authority. Something that only states that refuse to separate Church and State permit.

If a school's entrance is based on religious criteria, then so be it. Ultra-Orthodox schools make no bones about their standards, which are exclusively Orthodox. But if, as in other major Jewish communities around the world, there are Jewish communal schools serving the wider Jewish community, and the majority of the pupils and their parents are actually not observant, then the religious authorities should either think out of the religious box and leave religion to those who choose to be observant, or relinquish their hold on such schools.

Now ironically the JFS has been forced into insisting that applicants prove their religious commitment by bringing proof of synagogue attendance and degrees of obedience. So families with no interest, no desire to lead religious lives, are flooding the synagogues just to get their kids into a school. Is not that making a laughingstock out of religion and teaching hypocrisy instead of morality?

If you want to get into bed with the State you will have to compromise. If you don’t want to compromise don’t team up with the State. And if you pretend to be the religious leader of all Jews then practice what you preach.

That the English High Court should define who is a Jew is as ridiculous as Jews denying other Jews a Jewish education just because they decide on their definitions. They have only themselves to blame for this mess.