Orthodox Judaism – From Under the Fig Tree

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

joselitJanuary 21, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Ever since I began this blog a few years ago, I’ve developed the habit of squirreling away things -- a chance remark, a funny incident, an enlightening news article -- for future use. This week’s post, in honor of Tu B’shevat, the New Year of the trees or Jewish Arbor Day, draws on one of those finds: a piece in the New York Times about one orthodox Jewish community’s sensitivity to its fruit trees.

Inspired more by the dictates of halakha (Jewish law) than by the promptings of eco-consciousness, the residents of Borough Park, Brooklyn, it turns out, are reluctant to chop down the mulberry trees in their neighborhood lest they “tamper with God’s property.”

What makes this practice even more commendable is that space in Borough Park is in short supply. Once upon a time, way back in the 1920s, its verdant, leafy streets and capacious single-family homes drew thousands of upwardly mobile, middle class New York Jews. Far more heterogeneous than it is today, Borough Park afforded a congenial environment in which Conservative Judaism as well as Zionism took root.

That would change with the influx of frummer yidn, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, in the 1960s. Bearing large families -- demographers claim that Borough Park has the highest birthrate in the city -- they transformed the neighborhood’s composition as well as its infrastructure. A former byword for the good life, Borough Park is now renowned as a citadel -- and an unusually crowded one, at that -- of Orthodoxy.

Living cheek by jowl isn’t usually conducive to embracing Mother Nature, nor is traditional Judaism, which, historically, places more of an emphasis on internal rather than external matters. Under the circumstances, then, the concern displayed by contemporary Borough Park residents for their physical surroundings is to be applauded.

God and man in Tampa

joselitSeptember 2, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

People in funny hats, empty chairs, a capella singing, overheated rhetoric, a red dress -- the Republicans put on quite a show in Tampa last week at their national convention. Most of it left me cold. What didn’t was the ardent public display of religion, especially the ritualized invocation. The sight of thousands of earnest delegates, their eyes shut tight in prayer as clergymen from denominations that ran the gamut from Orthodox Judaism to Mormonism intoned passages from the Bible or evoked the presence of Jesus, really got me going.

Bible by Mike Johnson — Bible. Flickr/Mike Johnson

I should know better, of course. I spend a lot of my time studying, teaching, and researching the history of religion in modern America. My bookshelves groan under the accumulated weight of book after book on this very subject. I’m even at work on a volume of my own -- on America’s embrace of the Ten Commandments -- the very point of which is the entangled relationship between religion and culture.

And yet, while watching the Republican convention, I was truly taken aback by the ways in which religion was repeatedly affirmed. Some of my coreligionists, I suspect, were thrilled when Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik appeared on the vast stage of the convention hall to deliver the opening invocation, his hard-to-pronounce and decidedly un-American name emblazoned across the screen. Their hearts might have beat a little faster as the rabbi, in ringing but yeshivish tones, highlighted the connections between Biblical and American notions of freedom and, for good measure, punctuated his remarks with a hefty dose of Hebrew. Hebrew! In Tampa! What a triumph for the Jews!

My heart beat a little faster, too, but it wasn’t out of pride. The whole thing, from start to finish, made me really uncomfortable. It’s not that I think that American Jews should hide their light under a bushel; far from it. But the overt politicization of religious expression, let alone the calculated staginess of it all, unsettled me.

There was more to come. Integrating Mormonism as well as Orthodox Judaism into the proceedings, the Republicans invited Kenneth Hutchins, a Mormon bishop from Boston, to give the invocation on the last day of the convention. Replete with explicit references to Jesus in lieu of the more anodyne 'heavenly father,' his remarks made a point of underscoring just how much Mormonism had in common with the other Christian denominations. And lest anyone within earshot might have missed that connection, Hutchins concluded his presentation by blessing the assembled in the name of 'Jesus Christ, our Lord.'

Only in America.

Vision thing

joselitAugust 12, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

According to the latest eye-popping news from Jerusalem, the ultra-orthodox or haredi community has come up with a stunning new way to keep men and women apart: eyeglasses that blur rather than clarify. Turning the notion of 3-D goggles on their head, these specs block out the world instead of embracing it.

I’m not quite sure how the obfuscatory lens work: Do they automatically fog up when sensing the nearby presence of a woman? I’m not even sure they’re real. Could the whole thing be a giant hoax designed to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes? I’d like to think so.

Then again, there’s ample precedent for this kind of thing. Consider the mechitzah, the ritual partition that separates male worshippers from female worshippers. Years ago, an opaque curtain, made out of heavy fabric, stood between them, cutting off everyone’s sight lines. But these days, in many a contemporary orthodox synagogue, the old-fashioned curtain has given way to a technologically sophisticated version of plexiglass that allows women to “see out,” while preventing men from seeing “in.”

When examined from this perspective, it’s not too much of a stretch to liken a pair of so-called modesty glasses to a miniaturized, privatized and portable version of a mechitzah. Wonder of wonders!

Still, I cling to the hope that the story of this brand new invention is a complete and utter fabrication. Otherwise, the prospect of a world in which people--read men--deliberately make a point of not seeing what’s around them is an awfully cloudy one.