The first shofar blasts of Elul have sounded. Those blasts are associated with fear: “Can the shofar sound in the city and the people not tremble?” (Amos 3:6). That fear, however, is not the helpless, numbing terror felt by those waiting for a hurricane to hit or a missile to fall. Rather it is the high tension felt by soldiers going into battle or athletes before a major competition. The tension comes from knowing that a great deal is at stake, and that one will either rise to the challenge or fail.

That is why Maimonides, in his code, associates the shofar blasts of Elul with an awakening from slumber. If we pay attention to blasts, Elul becomes a time of exhilaration, of rejoicing in trembling, as we recognize the opportunity that lies before us, the chance to make a fresh start of our lives.

Our sages identified a number of verses in which the first letters of four consecutive words spell out E-L-U-L. The best known, of course, is the verse: “Ani l’dodi v’dodi li - I am to my beloved and my beloved is to me.” Repentance starts with taking careful stock of ourself, our “ani - I.” Another acronym for Elul is formed of the words: “Ish lereieihu umatanot l’evyonim - Each person to another and gifts to the poor” (Esther 9:22). Our preparation for the new year must come in the form of a reexamination of our relationship to our fellow Jews and recognition of our essential interrelationship.

On that note, let’s consider what secular and haredi Jews think they know about one another.

I received a good amount of mostly encouraging feedback on my lengthy “Oversize Posting” of last week, and several suggestions that I reformulate the essay for a non-believing reader.

I have indeed done that, at least in part, and shared the first of a three-part series of essays on the topic of the veracity of the Jewish mesora with the general Jewish media that Am Echad Resources services.

In coming weeks, I hope to share with those outlets the second and third installments of the rewritten essay.

Rather than burden Cross-Currents with what is, at least in content, essentially a re-run of a previous posting, I will suffice to simply let readers know that should they wish to receive a copy of the reformulated three-part essay, they need only send me an e-mail requesting the same, to shafran@amechad.com

Last week I wrote about the strain of poverty on chareidi society. Don’t feel bad if you forgot, I often can’t remember what I wrote about a week ago. I only remember in this case because over Shabbos I happened to read A. Amitz’s story in the same issue of Mishpacha on the identical theme: how perpetual financial pressures can lead to a draining obsession with money no less than the pursuit of riches.

The “hero” of her story drops dead shortly after the wedding of his third daughter from the pressure of revolving loans from one gemach to another. But, in a reprise of a grim joke I heard many years ago from a father in the process of marrying off his children, the fathers’ death proves to be the solution to marrying off the remaining children - glossy pamphlets can now be printed for a fund for the orphans.

Amitz details shekel by shekel how even someone living without luxuries, and who has a decent job, finds himself falling inexorably into debt as the children grow. That struck me as far more powerful than my column.

Chareidi fiction has become one of the best venues for the discussion of pressing communal problems. (At risk of revealing all the family secrets, I confess that not only do I read many A. Amitz stories, I always turn first to anything written by Dov Haller, and for precisely the same reason.) Somehow the fact that the stories are in a fictional form, even if they are “true”, makes them less threatening, less subject to the charge of washing dirty linen in public.

Boruch Hashem, they found the body a short while ago.

Tranquil water, clear blue skies, and clean air, all but an hour’s drive from Los Angeles. The beauty of the place clashed so ironically with the grim task of our visit to Lake Piru. For a week now, we had been coming. Some for four hour shifts in various watercraft, others digging in for eighteen hours at a time, or an entire Shabbos. From all parts of the city, and from all walks of Jewish life. We are not there to catch some rays, but to snatch a body from the lake that took life from it. We would have liked to still believe in some miraculous outcome, but we were prepared for the worst as well. We were not prepared to allow life to go on as usual while a young family sat in anguish that we did not want to contemplate. And we refused to abandon the friend we loved and admired to the whims of the lake without struggling with it, without being there to honor him at the first available opportunity.

So we continued to come in small convoys, with binoculars, sunscreen, water and pizzas, coordinated by the indefatigable volunteers of Hatzolah and some other heroes.

Naftoli Smolyansky cut an imposing figure. Tall, energetic, always seen smiling. A successful businessman, other projects occupied much more of his time and energy. He spent the mornings learning in the beis medrash where I daven. He wasn’t just important in outreach to Jews from the old USSR, he essentially coordinated most of it, from planning events, to sitting new faces around his Shabbos table, to finding members of the frum community to help out individuals who came under his wing.

A few days ago, I visited Montreux, a small Swiss town by Lake Geneva. It is picturesque, temperate, and while there are plenty of tourist shops, parts of the town are pretty up-market. It was a lovely place to spend a few hours with the family before driving back into the mountains.

Two significant statues on the lake-front are popular with tourists, both of well-known men who lived good parts of their lives in or near Montreux. One is of Charlie Chaplin, the famous actor and film-director, the other is of Freddie Mercury, a leading pop-star of the 70s and 80s. If we can briefly ignore their private lives (the inscription on the statue of Mercury even mentions the ‘discretion’ of the locals), each of them brought much pleasure to millions of people. Presumably, the residents of Montreux feel honoured that Chaplin and Mercury chose to live in their town and recognised this with lake-side memorials.

I was struck by the lack of a statue of Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, a world-famous posek (Jewish legal authority) who lived in Montreux for a large part of his life until his death in 1966. He was a man of astonishing scholarship, who wrote landmark responsa (published as Seridey Aish, by which eponym the author has become known) tackling the most complex and contentious modern issues. The Seridey Aish was at home in the premier yeshivos of pre-war Eastern Europe, yet was a man of his times, facing modern challenges to traditional Judaism robustly, but with a light touch. He fostered a generation of students, including some of the world’s foremost rabbinical leaders, such as the late Gateshead Rov, Rabbi Betzalel Rakow, zt”l, the late Rabbi Joseph Hirsch Dunner zt”l of London, and ylc”t, Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, shlit”a, the Ra’avad of the Eidah Charedis in Jerusalem.

Where indeed is the statue of Rabbi Weinberg? Of course, hardly any visitors to Montreux will have heard of him and it is unlikely that a bronze likeness of a rabbi would attract the level of interest from tourists to make its manufacture worthwhile; this apart from the obvious halachic issues raised by making a statue in the first place. I’m sure that the matter was never even considered.

Child allowances were back in the news last week with Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On’s call for a further 17 shekel per child monthly cut in next years budget. Even at current rates, a family with eight children under 18 is receiving one-third of what it did prior to the Halpert Law, and one-quarter of what it received under the Halpert Law, before the Law triggered a vicious backlash that resulted in the slashing of child allowances.

Meanwhile, many of the items in the basic food basket distributed by Yad Eliezer have nearly doubled in the past year. For a number of months, the Yad Eliezer warehouse has been near empty and the monthly food baskets worth about 250 shekels have not gone out to nearly 8,000 families. The pleading calls to the Yad Eliezer offices make clear how crucial even that one food basket can be. It is often the difference between sending children to bed and off to school hungry or not.

The poverty figures are well known. What is less frequently discussed, however, is the toll that crushing poverty takes on individual lives and our society as a whole. I would not go so far as the talmid chacham who recently told me that poverty underlies every one of our problems as a society. But I would say that poverty exacerbates, sometimes greatly, every single problem from drop-out youth to marital discord. Speak to any chareidi social worker, working mainly with low-income clients, and you will quickly understand all the multiple consequences of never-ending financial stress.

Every expert in the field of “at-risk” youth, for instance, will tell you that learning difficulties are a leading predictor of later drop-out. Many early learning problems can be overcome. Tutoring, different forms of remedial therapies, and sometimes drugs or alternative medicine remedies can all play a major role. But tutoring is expensive, often prohibitively so for a family struggling to put food on the table. And even where therapies are covered by health plans, stressed parents, with multiple children to attend to and no car to easily transport the child in need, may simply not take advantage.

Thanks all the same but no, I’d prefer my next party not be “the talk of the town.”

The advertisement promising town-wide tittering over my gala affair was for a Jerusalem hotel, and appeared in a publication catering to an Orthodox Jewish readership. It went on to assure me that the food served at the establishment will hew to the highest standard of kashrut, including strict observance of the laws of the Sabbatical-year.

Fine and good. Wonderful, in fact. But I still really prefer the town not end up talking about my party. Because kashrut isn’t the only concern common to observant Jews; so is (or should be) the Jewish ideal of tzeniut – literally, “hiddenness.” That concept is perhaps most commonly associated with manner of dress – clothing designed and worn to clothe, not to… well, advertise. But tzeniut means not only to dress modestly but to live modestly. Jews are enjoined by the tzeniut ideal, for instances, to speak softly, to not be boastful, to shun ostentatiousness. And, presumably, to avoid becoming the talk of the town.

Thank G-d, my wife and I have been blessed with occasions to host a few parties, like the weddings of several of our children. Even though financial constraints would have limited our options in any event, we consciously opted for modest affairs, tasteful but not showy. The weddings were every bit as beautiful to the young couples, our family, our friends and us as any more elaborate celebrations could possibly have been. And if any townsfolk talked about our weddings, what was likely recounted was their dignified simplicity.

This is an unusual posting for this venue, no obvious relative of the short essays I post weekly.

Clicking on “more” below will take you to a long article I worked on over the past few months and which I hope will be of benefit to those who want to engage in outreach to other Jews but are daunted by the prospect of having to deal with basic questions of emunah.

I don’t claim to be an authority in this realm, and am not a “kiruv professional.” All the same, I wanted to share a “mehalech,” an approach, that I have personally found to be very effective.

So if you have an interest in the topic (and some time to spare!), please do give it a read. Should you have any comments or constructive criticisms about the piece, I will be gratified to receive them, at shafran@agudathisrael.org May we soon see the day when knowledge of Hashem will blanket the earth “like water covers the ocean-bed.”

It was both ironic and appropriate that The Guardian chose Tisha B’av to publish Israeli literary icon A B Yehoshua’s examination of corruption in the Jewish State. Yehoshua’s lament underscores not only the problems of an unredeemed State, but the cluelessness with which otherwise intelligent people seek solutions to those problems. Galus, claims the Maharal (Netzach, chap. 24) is entirely artificial, and would tend to evaporate if not propped up artificially. Apparently, one of HKBH’s instruments in perpetuating galus is arranging that those who are to remain captive in it should not have any sense of how to extricate themselves.

Why Yehoshua would chose the Guardian – a paper whose knives are forever sharpened in readiness to eviscerate Israel - to mourn for the purer days of Israel’s past is something I simply cannot grasp. Perhaps he does not realize himself that he has given up on changing Israel from within, and seeks any sympathetic audience that will listen.

I find his reasoning uncompelling. I cannot share Yehoshua’s contempt for the “Occupation,” not being as blessed as he must be in finding an alternative to it short of national suicide. I would concede that it is not good for us to be in the position of hated authority over the lives of others. Someone has to clean sewers, but you don’t come home from a day of doing it smelling like roses. We can easily agree with Yehoshua that playing the role of hated occupier has not been good for the Jewish character. Death, however, creates even larger problems, and Yehoshua et al have not proposed any alternative to the ugly one that currently keeps some distance between the murderous hordes and the sons of pigs and monkeys.

Confirmation that acting oppressively might blemish the soul comes from this week’s parshah about the inhabitants of the city that was led astray. HKBH follows up on the command to kill them with a blessing of compassion, which seems odd. The Ohr HaChaim explains that killing people, even justifiably, takes its toll upon our character. Hashem therefore promises undo the unwanted effects through a special berachah of compassion. (Those who look for the original at 13:18 will find special irony in his description of Yishmaelim who are recruited to be killers, and how they lose all vestiges of compassion.)

Never have the boundaries between the private and public been so blurred. Agonizing deaths from cancer used to occur off-stage. No longer.

In some cases, at least, that blurring of lines has been salutary. Three million viewers have watched Randy Pausch’s appropriately named “The Last Lecture” delivered to a packed auditorium at Carnegie-Mellon University, after the 47-year-old professor (and everyone in the audience) knew that he had only a few months to live. One watches transfixed by the knowledge that someone so alive, so exuberant will soon be dead. Not once in the nearly hour and a half lecture does he lapse, even momentarily, into anything resembling self-pity.

He convinces us that he would not trade his life, no matter how truncated, for any other. With the exception of playing in the NFL, he has realized every one of his childhood dreams - winning lots of stuffed animals in amusement parks, meeting Captain Kirk of Star Trek, being an Imagineer at Disney World. (After The Last Lecture became famous, he even got to scrimmage with the Pittsburgh Steelers.)

He will not live to see his greatest contribution to mankind - software programs that will allow millions to learn difficult material in such a fun manner that they will not even know they they are learning - in mass production. But he is cool with that: Like Moses, he offers, he can see the promised land, even if he will not enter it.

Writing columns must be one of the easiest jobs in the world (though like most easy jobs it is not terribly remunerative). All one has to do is keep one’s ears open and, in the course of a week, one can pretty much count on someone basically writing the column for you.

Two days ago, for instance, someone approached me at a wedding. The conversation did not get off to a great start. After telling me I looked familiar and asking my name, he told me, “Oh yeah, I heard you speak in my shul. You write better than you speak.” I was tempted to argue, but I decided I would not be any happier if he told me, “You sure speak a lot better than you write.”

Anyway, I forgive this fellow because he ended writing this week’s column. At some point, the conversation turned to Switzerland and the idiosyncracies of the Swiss. For instance, on his first flight to Switzerland, my new pal asked the stewardess about train schedules in Zurich. She returned a few moments later with a copy of the 1958 Zurich phone book. When he asked her whether there might not have been some changes in the train schedule over the last forty years, the stewardess stared at him uncomprehendingly.

It was not, however, until slightly further along in his routine that I had the column. Like my wife and I on our recent visit to Switzerland, he had been struck by the fact that on the trams and buses no one takes your ticket or otherwise checks to see if you paid. When we asked our hosts about this, they offered that every once in a while an inspector asks to see one’s ticket. But even then the fine for not having paid is relatively small. A rational economic calculator, with criminal tendencies, might well conclude that it was worth paying the occasional fine.

Anti-Israel diatribes spring from Iran’s leaders like fleas from a dog, but a recent Iranian Parliament statement stood apart, containing as it did a remarkable admission.

The statement was in reaction to a comment by Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, the Iranian vice president for tourism, who contended that Iran is “a friend for all people in the world, even Israelis and Americans.”

Calling for Mr. Mashai’s dismissal because of that “unforgiveable mistake,” the parliamentarians went on to declare that “We do not recognize a country called Israel and so we cannot recognize a nation called Israel.”

The internal logic of the declaration aside, it would seem to depart from the common trope among “progressives” that Iran’s leaders, and others like them, hate only contemporary Zionism, not Jews.

Nothing puts some scientists in a good mood like finding evidence that, at least to their minds, diminishes man’s unique qualities or standing in the universe. Discovering human-like tendencies in the great apes or dolphins, discerning a hint of some form of life on Mars – anything will do, so long as it has the desired effect of “proving” that we’re not that all that special. The always unspoken corollary is, of course, that, hence, the Creator couldn’t possibly be interested in what us li’l old, not-very-special beings do with our lives.

Over half a century ago, Rav Eliyohu Dessler noted the fascinating contradiction inherent in these efforts to diminish man’s stature. On the one hand, men of science are responsible for the technological advances that have given modern society its sense of hubris and invincibility, based on a belief that science can conquer all problems and solve all mysteries if given enough time. Scientists, who are accustomed to enjoying near-universal credibility and adulation, are also often not, on a personal level, the most obsequious of people. In particular, they have little patience and open-mindedness towards those who challenge scientific orthodoxy, as global warming “heretics” and alternative medicine practitioners will attest.

Yet, upon finding the slightest basis for challenging humanity’s uniqueness, these same self-possessed individuals are more than eager to yield their dignity and pride of place in the universe. Apparently, wrote Rav Dessler, when the drive for hefkeirus, the longing to free oneself from the constricting yoke of Divine oversight implicit in such uniqueness, comes in conflict with the opposing impulse towards arrogance, the former prevails.

Another area in which science is often invoked to downsize humans is that of free will, or the purported lack of it. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported on the work of neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes, who found that the brain appears to “make up its mind” some time before one becomes conscious of the eventual decision.

I am enjoying the privilege of holidaying with my family in the French Alps, so I am far from a minyan. While my children rarely see me davening, especially wearing tefillin, this morning my second daughter Tehilloh (10) and younger son Shmuel Yosef (3) were in the room during Shacharis. When I was laying tefillin, my daughter remarked to my son that one day he would have to don them. As I was putting on the head-tefillin, my son asked her, ‘What’s that for – does it hold his kippah on?’ Then, being three, he suggested that I might need one to hold my neck on and another to keep my leg in place!

Other than causing me some amusement as I was trying to concentrate on davening, Shmuel Yosef left me considering something important. How often do I (or any of us) actually think ‘what’s that for’ when putting on tefillin? It’s so easy for regularly-observed mitzvos to become rote performances, devoid of real meaning. I realised that it’s easy to lay tefillin each day, but harder to experience the ritual as a means of connecting with God: a tool of subjugation of the most powerful human capabilities to the Divine agenda.

Many people say a meditation before donning the tefillin, one which I have just re-read. It reminded me that:

God has commanded us to wear the arm-tefillin to recall the ‘outstretched arm’ (of the Exodus), placed close to the heart to thereby subjugate the desires and thoughts of our hearts to His service; and upon the head, close to my brain, so that the soul that resides in my mind, together with all of my senses and capabilities, are subjugated to His service.

Like an amusement park barker inviting passers-by to step right up and throw balls at some unfortunate’s head sticking through a hole, The New York Times editorial page seems to have been calling on any and all to pitch print projectiles at a mark of its own: the kosher-meat producer Agriprocessors.

An editorial in that newspaper on August 1 was entitled “’The Jungle’ Again” – a reference, of course, to Upton Sinclair’s famous novel depicting the horrors of the meatpacking industry in early 20th century Chicago. That book depicts a world of unsanitary, cruel and unsafe conditions, with human fingers mixed into ground meat, gross mistreatment of workers, corruption, venality and filth. Having set the tone with its title, The Times’ editorial begins by referring to “a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa” with “an ugly reputation for abusing animals and workers,” and goes on to cite “reports of dirty, dangerous conditions” there.

While the editorial’s thrust was aimed at the government’s treatment of illegal immigrants arrested at the facility, the imagery of the “kosher meatpacking plant” [emphasis – or at least the italics – mine] and the “abusive practices” of which “once-silent workers now tell” was firmly embedded in minds’ eyes before they likely glazed over as the editorial went on with a predictable lambasting of the government for enforcing immigration laws.

A cynic, or perhaps just a savvy observer, might note that many of the alleged abuses have been denied and none confirmed, and that federal inspectors were a constant presence at the plant.

Education Minister Yuli Tamir became an unlikely haredi hero recently when she defended the Knesset vote to anchor in law funding of yeshivot ketanot (for young men aged 14 to 16) at 60 percent of the funding of students in the state education system.

Evelyn Gordon took Tamir to task in these pages (”Tolerance without state funding,” July 30). Gordon agrees with Tamir that the government should not coerce haredim into accepting the core curriculum. But that does not mean, she argues, that the government must also fund an education system that has declared itself free from all governmental control.

I confess that I find it almost impossible to disagree with anything that Evelyn Gordon writes. Here too, I agree that democratic theory does not mandate government funding of private education. Nevertheless, there are compelling public policy grounds to justify the continual funding of haredi post-elementary education.

First, let us clarify the extent of the issue. Teenage haredi girls receive a secular education that is on a par with, and likely superior to, the average student in the state education system. Increasingly, haredi women are going into hi-tech, accounting and architecture, as well as the traditional haredi professions of teaching and special education. That leaves the boys, whose secular education generally ends in eighth grade.

Q: What do righteous, learned Torah scholars and newly observant Jews, or baalei teshuva, have in common?

A: The way they recite blessings.

No, it’s not funny, nor meant to be. It’s simply an easily confirmed observation – and one that holds a thought worth thinking.

A Jew is enjoined by Jewish religious law to pronounce scores of blessings, or brachot, each day, acknowledging the Creator’s glory and gifts to His creations. Many of the blessings are part of the prayer service; others are offered throughout the day, like before and after eating – the blessings varying according to the type of food. There are brachot to be made upon seeing lightning and hearing thunder, on a rainbow, before smelling flowers or fragrant spices, after using the bathroom.

In the spirit of the Three Weeks, during which we minimize our feelings of happiness, I’d like ask a few questions about the Iranian nuclear threat.

It is widely assumed in Israel that some time within the next year, and likely before the swearing-in of a new American administration (particularly if that administration is Democratic), Israel will strike Iranian nuclear facilities. Benny Morris, the one-time dean of Israel’s “New Historians,” began a recent piece in The New York Times: “Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months.”

Now admittedly the odds of that happening — for better or worse — decrease greatly if Tzippi Livni becomes prime minister of Israel and/or Senator Barack Obama president of the United States. But still one has to ask: Why is there no feeling in Israel of panic about the presumed attack, no sense that we are entering into very perilous times?

Instead the likelihood of an Israeli attack is discussed matter-of-factly, as if its success were guaranteed and any Iranian response nothing to fret about. Have we all become Zionists filled with confidence that the mighty IDF can do anything?

For a chance of pace, I thought I’d provide some shopping tips for after the Three Weeks. I’m convinced the marketplace is filled with great bargains, and I’d like to help others find them.

One area ripe for bargain-hunters is mitzvos? Let me give a few examples. A few years ago, the Israeli government sold off much of its stock of public housing. One tzedakah fund purchased apartments worth close to $100,000,000 for less than 10% of that amount and then made them available at unbelievable prices.

Admittedly most of us do not have an extra million dollars lying around. But suddenly apartments were available to poor families for between $5,000-$10,000 – a small fraction of their value. Those poor families did not have $5,000 either. But the mitzvah of helping a struggling a family realize a heretofore impossible dream of owning their own home was suddenly within reach of many. Every dollar contributed to such purchases paid off in benefits many times greater.

Last year, I wrote a column about Rabbi Aharon Betzalel, who was struggling to keep open a Talmud Torah in Kadima for children of ba’alei teshuva. At the time, he was reduced to personally collecting every night the money for gas to bring the rebbes to school the next morning and cleaning the floors himself.

Israel’s trading of terrorists for the remains of two murdered soldiers caused so much pain and consternation, that another giveaway went by unnoticed at exactly the same time. At the Madrid Interfaith Conference, Rabbi Arthur Waskow gave up G-d’s promise to His people in return for absolutely nothing.

The Madrid Conference seemed laughable. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – a country that does not allow any non-Muslim houses of worship – sponsored the event, which is the equivalent of a geology conference under the auspices of the Flat Earth Society. No participants could be indentified as coming from Israel. The original invitation list included our favorite mainstream Jewish theologians, the kooks from Neturei Karta. (It took a protest from the founder of the Islamic Society of North America to put a stop to that. ISNA argued that marginal groups should not speak for Islam, and neither should they for Judaism.) On the other hand, some very respectable people like Rabbi David Rosen participated, so the conference cannot be dismissed as a complete farce. These participants were willing to accept the premise that half a conference is better than none at all, apparently hopeful that dialogue of any kind is a step in the right direction, given that so many Muslims have never actually met the descendents of pigs and monkeys.

Rabbi Waskow is an iconic figure within the Jewish Renewal movement. According to the document he coauthored after the event

The most fiery moment of the gathering came when one Muslim speaker, discussing Christian-Muslim-Jewish dialogue, cast doubt on whether Jewish-Muslim dialogue was possible. He also asserted that while Judaism is a religious path, Zionism is a political construct.

In a recent column, “Haredim: Underdogs or All-Powerful?”, the New York Jewish Week’s editor, Gary Rosenblatt, writes of a complaint he received from a reader, Chaim, about the paper’s coverage of, and commentary on, the haredi world. Gary, whom I have known for many years and consider a friend, defends his paper and explains how, among other things, the rise of the haredi community’s influence in Israel (citing its insistence on high conversion standards and “avoidance of army service”), its rejection of ideological Zionism and its support for the observance of Shmitta are all deserving of criticism.

I cannot speak for Chaim. But I think the real “haredi problem” at the Jewish Week is the dearth of haredi voices in its pages.

Because issues like those Gary raises (like most issues) do have two sides.

A strong case can be made that loosening conversion standards in Israel would have a devastating impact on whether any Israeli convert is regarded as Jewish by a sizable part of the Jewish community. And it is not hard, once the issue is fully explained, to come to realize that most haredim in Israel who choose full-time Torah-study are not trying to “avoid” army service but to serve the Jewish people (and, perforce, the cause of Israel’s security) in a spiritual way – the way they sincerely believe counts most. Or to understand how a Jew can disagree with the ideology of Zionism yet be fully committed (more so, perhaps, than some card-carrying Zionists) to the security and growth of the State of Israel. And even Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the guiding light of the non-haredi Israeli Orthodox community, pined for the day when the law of leaving Jewish-owned fields fallow every seventh year might be observed as it was intended.

Plastic does not degenerate and is difficult to recycle. Given worlds enough and time, the planet will eventually be overrun by plastic.

Is worrying about such matters an indication of a mind addled by having seen too many exhibits at the Monterey Aquarium last summer of different species endangered by rampant pollution? Or are these legitimate Torah concerns?

The convenience of using plastic dishes are obvious. Plastic offers freedom from sinks brimming with unwashed dishes and fights about whose turn it is to wash the dishes. Against the convenience is the infinitesimal impact any change in our individual behavior would have absent similar changes by millions of others.
Here we come to an old problem in moral philosophy known as the Tragedy of the Commons. Let us say there are a variety of shepherds sharing a common grazing area. It is in the interest of each shepherd to increase the size of his herd. But if each shepherd follows that strategy the common grazing area will eventually be depleted bringing disaster to all.

Another example. The most rational strategy for an individual parent would be not to vaccinate his child to protect against the slight chance of serious adverse reaction. But that is true only so long as all other parents vaccinate. But if other parents make the same calculation, smallpox and whooping cough will soon return and pose a far greater threat to every child.

On the eve of Senator Barack Obama’s visit last week to Israel, Yossi Klein Halevi penned a gem of an essay in The New Republic in the form of an open letter to the Democratic presidential candidate. Halevi began by assuring Obama that Israelis have paid little attention to such diversions as his middle name (Hussein), his early years spent in Indonesia being raised by a Moslem step-father, or any of the other topics so beloved by viral e-mailers. Nor does Barack’s color evoke any concern in a country that “rescued tens of thousands of African Jews and turned their arrival into a national celebration.”

Halevi did not even mention Obama’s former spiritual mentor pastor Jeremiah Wright. He was writing as a citizen of Israel, and the question of Obama’s views on America are of necessity of far less moment to Israelis than they are to American. The former are far more interested in knowing Senator Obama’s views on Israel.

Here too Halevi was quick to assure Obama that few in Israel doubt his friendship: “Your description of Israeli security as ’sacrosanct’ and your passionate endorsement of Israel’s cause at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington were greeted with banner headlines in the Israeli press.”

But precisely because Israelis do not suspect Obama of harboring any ill-will towards them were they hoping for something more from him than professions of friendship and sympathy for the people of Sderot. Above all, they want some indication that Obama understands their predicament.

The front-page headline in the New York Post was striking: “A-Rod brainwashed by Kabbala. Wife blames Madonna, sues for divorce.” I did a double take.

Who is A-Rod? He is Alex Rodriguez, the star third baseman of the New York Yankees, who commands a $300 million contract and is considered the best baseball player since Willie Mays.

Who is Madonna? She is the aging Hollywood pop star who has been dabbling in what she calls the secrets of the esoteric Kabbala and makes sure the world knows about her secrets.

What is Kabbala? The short answer is that it is the overall term for ancient Jewish mystical lore. The long answer is that it is the study of the cosmic ramifications of our behavior, of the hidden meanings behind the biblical text and of the almost inconceivable meticulousness with which human beings must align their actions with the demands of the Torah. That is to say, one cannot even begin the study of Kabbala unless one is thoroughly conversant with Torah, Talmud and the codes; is personally pious and dedicated to spirituality; and is deeply learned in the ways of God. Neither Madonna nor A-Rod seems quite to match these qualifications.

“It is frantic, disorganized, exceptionally neurotic, but somehow the necessary things get done - a metaphor for all of Israeli life.” So Martin Sieff describes Israel’s UN mission, in a Jerusalem Report review of Gregory Levey’s memoir of his stint as the mission’s chief speechwriter. Unfortunately, it is far from clear that the metaphor still works and “the necessary things get done.”

In recent weeks, at least two “crises” briefly gained media attention. The first concerns the country’s “worst water crisis” ever; the second the continued viability of our higher education, with Nobel Prize winner Aharon Ciechanower comparing the brain drain of Israeli academics to that of Jewish scientists and thinkers from Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power.

After garnering headlines, both “crises” just as quickly receded from the limelight. Only in this country could forecasts of an impending lack of water to drink not even merit front-page headlines. And that is part of the problem. Our media, like our politicians, suffer from severe attention deficit disorder.
Sure, there are plenty of distractions: the ongoing corruption investigations of the prime minister and a host of other senior government officials, past or present; the Iranian nuclear threat; the never-ending jockeying in the governing coalition.

Yet the failure over much of the past decade to attend sufficiently to either the water or the educational crisis will have as much impact on our future as those “distractions,” with the obvious exception of a possible nuclear attack by Iran. Even in the unlikely event that a sustainable peace was possible with a Palestinian entity or Syria, chronic water shortages would make peace negotiations dramatically more difficult and create an ongoing tinderbox if they were successfully concluded. Currently one-third of Israel’s water comes via the Golan, and aquifers under land likely to be part of any Palestinian state contribute significantly. A parched country could not dispense with those water sources.