The Torah Attitude toward Women

July 28th, 2015

Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson
Radio Show Transcript – May 14, 2000

Rabbi Simon Jacobson: Good evening. This is Simon Jacobson and welcome again to Toward a Meaningful Life. We’re on every Sunday evening (WEVD 1050AM) from 6-7pm. It’s been very gratifying to receive emails and communications from you, particularly in light of last week’s show which was touching a pretty controversial issue: the Torah view on homosexuality. This show is only possible and only successful due to the synergy and the cooperative give and take effort of the listeners and myself, so I continue to welcome your calls and communications.

In the spirit of generally dealing with contemporary issues, and particularly ones that we hear a lot about—and as it also happens to be Mother’s Day on the secular calendar—I felt it would be appropriate to do a show on women. After looking for a really extraordinary guest who can discuss the issue in a way that sometimes a limited male perspective like my own could not (as a male discussing women’s issues sometimes lacks complete credibility), we asked Rebbetzin Leah Kohn from the Jewish Renaissance Center to be our guest and we’re very honored to have her here. Thank you for coming on.

For those who may not know her (I hear about Rebbetzin Kohn from so many people that I know many already do know her), but there’s always one or two who may not, so Rebbetzin Leah Kohn is the director of the Jewish Renaissance Center, a unique institute that is focused entirely on Jewish studies devoted to women. I find that extremely encouraging because of the many different misconceptions and attitudes about women in Judaism—and to have something that really focuses on women and their particular issues is just a testimony to the universal and relevant appeal of Torah in general.

I’ve also heard rave reviews of her classes. The Renaissance Center does offer a complete range of classes for women, afternoon and evening, summer and winter. I see from the program here that it covers the entire gamut. And there will be a Jewish Women’s conference taking place next Sunday, May 21^st at the New York Bar Association, which I’ll give you more details about later on.

But the main thing is that I’m honored to have Rebbetzin Kohn here, and I thought that it would be really valuable to have a discussion with a woman who lives in the modern, 21^st century, coming from a traditional background, but at the same time able to communicate so well to women, and for that matter to men as well who are interested and want to know about this important issue: the role of women.

The topic doesn’t need too much background and explanation because I don’t know if there’s anyone on this earth who hasn’t been affected by women’s issues, whether in the United States as the search and aspiration for equal rights, the ERA movement and the general feminist movement, or in other societies and communities where people feel that women have not been treated properly or in an equal fashion.

So it’s a topic that is personal (and not just a theoretical, philosophical topic) and I’d like to begin first by introducing Rebbetzin Kohn.

To set the tone, when you talk about this issue of women, in general, the perception that people have of women in Torah is somewhat of an archaic, old-fashioned one. So I would begin by asking you, how would you articulate the role of a woman in contemporary society from a traditional Torah perspective? How would you define that, particularly taking into account the many misconceptions and stereotypes that this usually evokes?

Rebbetzin Kohn: I would say that the role of the woman in many, many ways is not any different from the role of the man. We are here to live a life that has meaning and a life of self-development, of contributing to others—and in this way there is no difference between a man and a woman.

According to Torah, though, there is a division of responsibilities, the concept of a team, where certain responsibilities are distributed more to men and others to women. This doesn’t mean, however, they cannot help each other or shouldn’t be involved in each other’s areas of responsibility, but in every team, each member is responsible for a particular part.

As any Jew today can be involved in any part of society and at the same time be a Torah observant Jew, it is true for women as well.

Jacobson: I was reading today that Mother’s Day was instituted in the beginning part of last century as a result of some of the feminist activism. Reading that I realized that growing up in my own home, coming from a Torah background, every day is Mother’s Day. The value and the preciousness of a woman’s role and a mother’s role is always apparent. You don’t need one day in 365 days to make that point.

Yet at the same time, when many women see, so to speak, a traditional Orthodox Jewish woman, their attitude is that they dress in an old-fashioned way, their role is seemingly exclusively motherhood, and they look down upon them as being career people. Living in a masculine-oriented society, many women feel that if they’re not treated as a man, with equal jobs or equal opportunities, they essentially become second class.

And many feel that Judaism has done that. Many women have shared that with me about growing up in traditional homes where the girls were always treated as the ones who didn’t have to be educated and so on. So I’m glad to hear that it’s not that way, and I know it’s not that way myself. So how do you speak to a person like that, because I’m sure many of our listeners have that attitude. What do you say to a person who has such an experience?

Rebbetzin Kohn: I think we have to understand a little bit some historical background. Jewish women, during history, definitely concentrated more on home and raising children. But let’s understand that raising a Jewish child is not just taking care of his physical needs, but it’s being a psychologist, a person who takes care of his spiritual development, and that is very, very challenging.

I always say at my classes, “You know, I have one daughter, and she’s wonderful, but still, I was challenged by her much more than by any of my students, ever.” Because when you’re with somebody for 24 hours and it’s your sole responsibility to make sure that he or she grows up to be a good, productive human being and a good Jew, it’s a very, very challenging mission.

During generations, this was very valued, and not only by Jewish people but by non-Jewish people too. Unfortunately, in our time, family is not valued as much as it should be, and we suffer for it in society. But it doesn’t mean, on the other hand, that the woman has to be in the family all the time, at home, and not have a career outside.

What we would emphasize is that family is important, and raising the next generation to be a healthy, productive and good generation is essential for us, for society, and there is no greater contribution. But it doesn’t mean that the woman has to do everything. Technical things could be delegated to others. There are different stages when children are at home, different needs of children, and the woman can definitely develop herself and her career side by side with the family. At certain points she may develop her career part-time or do it in a way that won’t interfere with the major task that she has at home—and this is not necessarily the cooking or the cleaning, or this aspect, which can be done by somebody else—but making sure that her children will grow up to be good human beings. This is a very challenging job.

Jacobson: I couldn’t say it any better than that, but my question is, we do live, as you said, in a society that doesn’t value home the way it should. And this is especially true in New York, where they call it an epidemic of single life (the mecca of singles). Being in the situation that we are, where family is not honored the way it should be, and therefore the woman’s role is also seemingly undermined and compromised, how do we address that? How do you begin to turn the tide and address it once society has fallen into that type of situation?

Rebbetzin Kohn: I think the secret is education. In order to do the job properly, a woman has to know her stuff, and this was taught all throughout history. But in history, this was transmitted by osmosis, mother to daughter, but you cannot be a good Jew without knowledge. Women, men, it doesn’t matter. You have to know what you believe, what’s your view of life; you have to know how to live a Jewish life, you have to know current issues in order to know how to relate to them and react to them. You cannot be separated from the reality and be a good Jew at the same time.

It’s only within the last hundred years that life for women in general has changed a lot, and we have to respond to it in the Jewish way of life as well. And that’s why Jewish education for women today is a prime concern of every Jewish community and a lot is invested in it.

I, myself, even though I grew up traditionally all my life, I am teaching already for over 30 years, all ages, not only in the framework of school but after college as well, all ages of women are encouraged to come and study in a stimulating way. You can’t do your job as a mother, as a wife, or if you’re single, as a member of a community, and live Jewishly properly if you’re not inspired yourself, if you don’t know what it is all about.

So being that today the way to educate is formal, women have to get a formal education as well. And you’ll find that women today are very involved in learning. Wherever they are in every society, even the most right-wing societies in Judaism put a very strong emphasis today on Jewish education for women.

Jacobson: You were born and grew up where?

Rebbetzin Kohn: I grew up in Jerusalem. My family is there for 12 generations on one side, six on the other side. It took my family a year to come from Europe to Israel with a lot of self-sacrifice. Here I am outside of Israel only because I feel that it’s a mission to teach outside of the land of Israel where assimilation is more of a threat than it is there. But it was not a simple decision for me to leave Israel and come here.

Jacobson: Did you ever face any resistance from traditional men to what you do, essentially as a woman leader?

Rebbetzin Kohn: I don’t think it’s a problem in any way today. Maybe 60-70 years ago when it was new, but women were leaders in the community even before. Maybe not in terms of teaching and educating, but they were always leaders of many organizations that helped in the community, like helping the sick or the poor, or helping people to get married or in any way or fashion, women were leaders but in a different area.

Today they are leaders in education as well.

Jacobson: I do find sometimes that men are intimidated by that, not necessarily for any good reason. Now I’m sure you hear this as well: Women go into certain synagogues and they feel uncomfortable. They don’t feel that they’re treated equally, whether it’s an issue of an aliyah, which means a traditional way of calling someone up to the Torah, or some other things.

First of all, it’s very encouraging to hear, Rebbetzin Kohn, that you teach. That in itself makes you a role model and shows that you are at the forefront of the single greatest crisis which is the spiritual crisis, the educational crisis, knowledge of why we’re here on this earth. This is not exclusively men, in many ways I’m sure women can contribute in some ways even greater than men, but at least equal, this is really a joint effort.

So women have these experiences of going into the synagogue or Jewish life in general, where they do feel condescension, of not being treated quite the same way as men. I hope that tide turns, and the more success you have the more that will change.

But what do you tell someone who goes into a synagogue like that and says, “I can’t have an aliyah,” and gives a list of questions that you usually hear: “I can’t put on tefillin,” or “at some synagogues they lock me up behind a mechitzah,” (which is a partition like in the back or locked up some people call it in a cage). I don’t want to put you on the spot—there are so many questions and it’s hard to answer every one in detail—but how do you respond to that, particularly of course when the issue here is not an academic one, but an emotional one.

Rebbetzin Kohn: Well, first I would generalize the question to go beyond the synagogue. All experiences that women have when they feel that women in Judaism are treated as secondary are real and need to be explained.

I once had a student who knocked on my door at 10:00 at night with red eyes. She just happened to read something and it seemed to her that it was very discriminating against women. I opened the door and she told me, “Mrs. Kohn, let me tell you. If I would have been a man, I would have had no problem with Judaism. Being a woman, I don’t think I can make it.”

So obviously I hear a lot about all those issues, and the reason I take it beyond the synagogue is that we have to first understand something before we go into the topic itself.  I’d like to tell a story that I heard once from Rebbetzin Heller from Israel. She once said in a lecture the following analogy: Somebody was on a train and next to him was sitting a person by the aisle, and a huge suitcase was next to him in a way that was really an obstacle for people to go by. One person went by and almost fell down and then another person. So the person next to him told him, “Please move it a little bit so people can pass by.” But he didn’t respond.

Once, twice, three times, and the person really got angry. He said, “Listen, you see what’s going on. If you’re not going to take the suitcase away, I’m going to throw it out the window.”

Anyhow, another person came and he also stumbled over it, so the neighbor picked up the suitcase and put it halfway out of the window hoping that now he’d move it. No response. So he really meant business and he threw it totally out the window.

And he looked at him and he’s still totally indifferent so he said, “Now you also don’t say anything?” And the man replied, “No, because it’s not mine.”

She gave this analogy to explain that many times women judge Judaism and the place of the woman in it based on what makes a woman important in the secular world: fame, money, equal salaries to man, and so on, positions that they can have.

And even though those are important issues (I’m not minimizing the fact that if a man and a woman work in the same positions, they should get the same salary) but this has nothing to do with judging the place of a woman in Judaism, because what Judaism is all about is spiritual growth, bringing G-dliness into this world, the connection to G-d.

And if they want to check if men and women are equal in this, we have to ask, do they have an equal opportunity to be close to G-d? And they do. Because the highest level of connection to G-d is prophecy, and there have been both men and women prophets in our history.

So if this is so, why is it that when we go into a shul, many times we feel secondary?

We have to understand that the synagogue in Judaism is not really the heart and soul of Judaism. It’s an obligation for a man to pray three times a day in a group of ten men. It’s an obligation for a woman to pray every day, but she can do it individually between herself and G-d.

There are reasons for it that are beyond our scope of discussion. We cannot discuss it in five minutes, but there are reasons for it. Judaism, in other parts of the synagogue, in other parts of Judaism is really what Judaism is all about. It’s the place where all Jewish activities are taking place, and besides going to the synagogue, there are very few obligations. So when a woman comes with this perception to Judaism, and sees that in the synagogue she’s not treated exactly the same as the man, to her it means that she’s secondary in Judaism.

But if we remember that praying in the synagogue is a very small detail in the Jewish experience of a woman, it will take on a different perspective. Even more than this, a few hundred years ago, there were no women’s sections altogether. It’s a new phenomenon which is to be encouraged, because with changes in the women’s place in history in general and in society in general, they need it today. Being that it is okay according to Torah to be there, why not? And I definitely agree that a women’s section in a synagogue should be respectful and she should feel comfortable there. I think this is changing in many synagogues already and will change more in the future.

If you walk into a synagogue where you don’t feel comfortable, try to create a connection with the people. Maybe through this you’ll feel better, and if not, just change to another synagogue where you do feel comfortable and where the women’s section gives you a really good feel.

Jacobson: The problem is that some people don’t have anywhere else to turn for their religious needs so they go to their local synagogue. I know that when Yom Kippur comes, many people who are not necessarily members go to the closest synagogue they see and just walk into it. Sometimes it’s not even a synagogue. But they may think it is.

Obviously it’s an issue, I assume, of creating that awareness because your point is very well taken. What is the center of spiritual, religious life? But what do you tell someone who did walk into such a synagogue? If you are going to tell them, you should know that this is not the center. So where should they go?

Rebbetzin Kohn: To a place of study. And there are places of study today all over the country. If you are in a place that doesn’t offer learning, there is learning over the web, there are tapes, phone numbers that you can call for a class which cost only one local call, there are partners in learning over the phone, and many, many other opportunities of learning that use modern technology if you don’t have real learning in your area.

If you need information about learning in your area and what is available, you can call us at the Jewish Renaissance Center. We are in touch with many different organizations that teach all around the country, and if you call 212-580-9666 we’ll be very glad to direct you to a learning place in your area.

Anyone can call from any background. We know about more advanced classes and beginner classes.

Jacobson: What do you do when men call? Do you treat them equally?

Rebbetzin Kohn: We try!

Jacobson: Listen, I have to represent the underappreciated male. So that’s great to hear. As a matter of fact, I’ll be referring plenty of people to you.

What would you say about the actual concept of an aliyah? Should I assume that you answered that question because an aliyah is just an extension of the synagogue?

Rebbetzin Kohn: Right. And what I would say is as follows: As I said before, the obligation of prayer is also put upon a woman. With men it’s only the form of prayer that is the different for them, and it goes together with the role as it is perceived for a woman and a man.

There are two aspects of spiritual growth. There is the person’s spiritual growth. Every human being needs to materialize his potential spiritually to the utmost, and grow constantly in his life as long as he is alive.

There is also the aspect of the community or the Jewish nation as a whole and its relationship to G-d. Both are important for every human being, meaning, every Jew has to grow personally and also interact with society, with the community, with the nation, and with mankind at large.

But being that not everybody can be in charge of everything at the same time, we’ll accomplish more if we divide responsibilities between a team, so men are more responsible to the communal, national aspect, while women are more responsible for the personal development of themselves, people around them, whether it’s their own family or people in the community.

Being that this is the case, there will be some differences in the performances of mitzvos, commandments, between men and women. And in prayer it will express itself as well. While a woman is obligated to pray individually in front of G-d, men are obligated to pray three times a day in a form of ten, what constitutes a community.

But obviously, men should approach G-d personally as well, and women, whenever they desire, or if it gives them a better connection to G-d, should obviously go to the synagogue as well and pray in this fashion too.

But everything that has to do with the communal service, according to Jewish law, is given to men. Now I know that women sometimes feel really bad about the fact that they don’t go up to the Torah and read from it. They are going very sincerely in order to have a spiritual experience and feel deprived by not having it.

Let me tell you, a woman might have many, many other spiritual experiences that men don’t experience, or other things that are mainly for women, like giving birth to a child. Nursing a child is definitely not just a physical experience; it’s definitely an experience on a spiritual level that can change a person’s life. You really stand in front of G-d at that moment and see His wonders first hand.

Man cannot have this, so obviously we are a team. It’s not a matter of being better or being less, but everyone is responsible for his area and we are all together. We refer to ourselves as one body. It’s not two sides, where one is on one side of the table and one is on the other side and we try to get the best for ourselves.

We are working together, harmoniously, hopefully, on a job. And we are very happy that we have our own assignment that we are doing, and somebody else takes responsibility for something else, as long as the job is working well and we interact with each other and make sure that we communicate and that we do the job as a whole properly.

This is also true of the Jewish nation, not just of men and women. We have kings, we have Kohanim (priests), we have the Levites, we have the regular Jewish people, each of whom has a different role. Everyone is responsible for his own role, and together we accomplish our mission.

Jacobson: I think a big issue is that once roles have become distorted in a society, and it’s become already a second and third and fourth generation, not just for Jews, but religious, spiritual values in general, and who does what and what does it mean to have a relationship with G-d. I guess once it becomes distorted, it becomes so difficult to sort it out. How do we get it back?

Some people say, maybe we shouldn’t get it back. Maybe we should just start some new order, like creating a philosophy based on an illness instead of seeing it as a symptom.

It’s just frustrating because as I hear you speak, and I relate obviously coming from an education that teaches what you’re saying, at the same time, the frustration is, how do you capture that in a short show like this?

There may be people who are listening to this show for the first time. They may never have heard anything like this. I think it comes down to, if anything, to try just to shake somebody up that there may be a different way of seeing things from the perspective that most of us are accustomed to. Because that’s what growth is ultimately all about, that there is some opening.

Rebbetzin Kohn: Right. I would also suggest, maybe, not to go by the stereotype, but to check for yourself. And it doesn’t have to be just through education, which is obviously the best route, but just to meet Jewish women who are lawyers, doctors, teachers, bankers, in any profession, who are definitely successful in their jobs, who are totally involved in American life, and at the same time lead a Torah way of life in the traditional way.

When you speak to them, they’ll tell you that the real meaning of life, as important as their job is, is not their job but their role as a Jewish woman in Jewish society. And I think just seeing it is an opening and a way to maybe see it in a different light and have the desire and the stimulation to learn it on a different level.

Jacobson: What I’d like to do now is to open up the phones and invite the listeners to call in and ask Rebbetzin Kohn a question, whether it’s a topic that we’ve touched upon or something we haven’t touched upon, or some particular challenge that you may have, particularly if you’re a woman. The number here is 212-244-1050.

We have Leslie on the line.

Caller (a male caller): I always thought the Jewish woman was higher up on the ladder than the male, and I really don’t see the argument of aliyahs other than once a month a woman is impure. I don’t know who’s making the argument and why they feel it’s so important. Is it the Conservative or the Reform Movement that’s making that argument? I know it can’t be Chabad or Ultra-Orthodox. Can you please explain that to me?

Jacobson: You’re asking why people have a problem…

Caller: With a woman not being called up to the Torah for an aliyah.

Jacobson: It’s hard for me to answer that Leslie because I don’t have a problem with that. We need to get someone else on the phone who does have a problem. The Rebbetzin explained it quite well and so it’s hard, we’re all on the same team here.

I think, Leslie, to be honest, the reason people have a problem is due to a misconception. The fact is, if you know nothing about the issue at hand, you come to a stadium, for instance, you walk in and one person is honored and one person is not, and you have no idea why, then of course you can be offended. The same with Judaism: If you have no idea what Judaism is, as Mrs. Kohn pointed out very clearly, then of course you’d be offended that some people get an aliyah and some do not. How come I’m never invited to come up to make a blessing, or whatever it is. So I think it’s a result of a misconception, and it shouldn’t be judged, because a person who asks that question sincerely—there are many who do—it may be out of ignorance, and it may be out of limited experience.

We’re not trying to address malicious people, someone who has some other agenda. And the answer to that, as Mrs. Kohn said, if I could sum it up, is that we have to have a better understanding of what Judaism is and what the synagogue is. Yet, of course, if you’re invited to the White House and you’re not honored like a Senator is honored, you wouldn’t be offended because you’d know that that’s a Senator’s position and you’re a guest in that type of situation.

The comparison is not exact, but the point is you have to have perspective when you come to a place like that. That’s the issue. So thank you for the call.

Today, every generation has its unique challenges and everything is Divine providence. I’d like to believe, and I think any thinking Jewish person likes to believe, that even sometimes things that seem like negatives turn out to be challenges for the positive.

In a way, the fact that there’s a call to women today to assume that type of leadership position you described, the need for education on all levels, is ultimately a blessing we have to believe, because although 50-60-100 years ago it may not have been necessary, today it is an absolute necessity.

How would you define the unique challenges of our time, and how can the woman take not just a passive, but really an active leadership role once they do of course get some education?

We live in a global village. Twelve generations ago in Yerushalayim, they knew about their little shtetl. I’m sure my grandparents had their little place. Today we live in an environment where both women and men can have influence on countless people due to technology, communications, people know about things. Information flows freely. So my question is, how would you define (I don’t want to lock it to one challenge—I’m sure we have many challenges) a way that women in particular can play a role in shaping the future?

Rebbetzin Kohn: I think that even though the feminist movement has had some very positive achievements, like opening up positions for women, giving equality in terms of salary and other things as well, I think there is one thing that did not change, and this is that women are still perceived as an object, being other than a human being with a personality, etc.

I think maybe that’s the calling today of Jewish women, because as much as we are out there and can get to the highest level in terms of career, still, when a car has to be sold, a woman is placed next to it in the advertisement as if that’s the selling point.

And we still have sexual harassment and all the other issues as we had before, and maybe even more, because there is more access on some level.

I think if there is a place were the woman is appreciated for who she is, for her personality, for her essence, for her attributes and not just for being an object, it is in Judaism. I think that’s the contribution that we can make with education through discussions with people that we know. Each discussion with any friend or co-worker is an opportunity and your personality comes across. I think that if there is dignity to women, it is in Judaism because one thing is for sure, by the way Jewish women dress, even if it sometimes looks old fashioned, we emphasize what is revealed, not what is covered, and what is revealed in a woman is the face, the reflection of her soul, of her intelligence, of her personality. We make sure in Judaism to give the woman the place that she deserves as a builder of the nation and I think this message could be transmitted to the rest of society through Jewish women today.

That’s why it’s essential that women study about Jewish role models. Our first foremother, Sarah, was already a teacher to tens of thousands of people. When Abraham and Sarah came to the land of Israel, they came with tens of thousands of people and they taught them about monotheism and changed their way of life, and we still feel that contribution until today. We all can do it, each one in her way in her society in her environment in one way or another.

Jacobson: Okay, let’s go to the phones again.

Caller: Hi. My struggle for women in Judaism is my perception that it’s disempowering in terms of marriage—that they are acquired, and in terms of divorce, that their power in getting divorced in Jewish marriage…

Rebbetzin Kohn: It definitely is a topic that needs to be discussed. It’s perhaps one of the most painful issues, the issue of women who are locked into a marriage. Their husband does not want, for whatever reason, to give her a divorce, sometimes just because he’s not a good person, and he’s definitely taking advantage, and they cannot go ahead with their lives because they depend on him to give a divorce.

Now, first we have to say that the same way that the woman cannot go ahead with her life if her husband does not divorce her, today, a man can also not go ahead with his life; it depends on the agreement of his wife to receive the get, the divorce.

But yes, you are right, there is a difference in Jewish law between men and women.

Let me explain a little bit that the problem we have today is not on the same scale as it was in the past. In the past, a woman was unable to remarry usually when her husband disappeared, sometimes in a war or in any tragic way and there were no witnesses. So being that she could not get a divorce, and she did not have any evidence that her husband was not alive, she could not remarry. It was obviously a very rare situation but it did happen.

Today we have big numbers of women who are married and who cannot receive a divorce, and their husbands definitely take advantage, either from money or some way to take revenge that they will not give a divorce.

We have to understand why is it so, why it is so common today, or so much more common today than it was in the past. We have to understand that the Jewish community today is not what it was in the past. In the past, the community had the authority, sometimes even given to them by the non-Jewish authorities. The Jewish community was a close-knit community, and when a person did not want to do what he was supposed to do, there were ways to bring him to it without force.

The problem according to Jewish law is that the divorce cannot be forced. It has to be dealt with very delicately until the husband does want to give the divorce. Communities today are not communities. We live among many Jewish people but it’s not one community with one authority that has the ability to enforce things that have to be enforced and it’s a sad situation.

But we have to understand that much of it came because of our own choice; not necessarily the choice of the women who are suffering, but we went through different changes some of which were chosen by us because we wanted more freedom and we have the consequences, meaning, the fact that there is not enough structure in the Jewish community is the choice of the people who make the community and that’s unfortunate.

Now, coming back to the woman. We can say that that’s what the Torah says and that’s the law. Obviously, the solution is not by changing the law because that’s not in our hands; it’s G-d’s law. We have to understand only that if we live according to Torah will there be more emphasis on educating people not to do something that is wrong. Maybe that’s the way to work on it. Especially we women as mothers, we have the education of the next generation in our hands, and I think it should start at a very young age that no matter what you have against a person, it does not allow you to do something that will hurt.  You have to teach that you don’t have to have a connection to the person if you don’t want. You can get divorced. But you cannot take revenge or treat a person in such a way.

Now why is it that the Torah did it in this way? Maybe one way to look at it is as follows. Torah does tell us that marriage is not a trap,  meaning, under certain circumstances, when it’s not working, when you tried, tried hard, and it doesn’t work, you should go out of the marriage and you don’t have to be locked into it.

On the other hand, when a way out is given, it’s also important to make sure that it won’t be taken lightly or that people won’t try hard enough. So by making sure that one person can give the way out and the other person cannot, maybe the Torah wanted to tell us that at least one of the two people in the marriage should be more concentrated on keeping the marriage. Yet, even with this being the case, there is still an option to get out.

Jacobson: Well, the last call was definitely a great call and I think it’s an important question. I just want to qualify that in a show like this, it’s hard to exhaust such a topic. I’d like to see this show as a stepping stone, leading to further dialogue either through the Renaissance Center or, if somebody wants to write to us, I’ll give you some numbers as well.

If a topic is brought up here, I’d like to see it turn into a larger dialogue, because you have to remember, Jewish thought is 4,000 years of scholarship. Literally hundreds of books have been written on just these and related topics, and there are many explanations, addressed on many levels particularly on this issue of who acquires whom in a marriage and the rights of divorce and who can get out of it. And ultimately, in a way, the question is addressed to G-d.

Would G-d, who created human beings in a fair and equal manner, create inequality where one person has power over another with the potential to abuse another? The question could also be asked about parents who can hurt their children. That’s a fact. Children are vulnerable naturally. Why would G-d put children in a situation where the parents can abuse their children?

So when you take it from a Torah perspective, one really has to understand and go deeper into the mind of G-d, so to speak, to understand how G-d’s system works. And I find that these questions are very important, because the controversial questions force us to dig deeper. And as the Mishnah says, if you dig deeper you’ll find the answers; and you’ll find deeper understanding of the dynamics and the psychology of men and women. As Rebbetzin Kohn said, to tamper with the law itself because we may not fully understand it is like tampering with the DNA of the universe.

There are many things that scientists once thought were so logical and they played around with it and it actually created a lot of damage. I think this is a great opportunity to really understand what is the dynamic of a man, what is a woman, and why would G-d make it that way that a man, so to speak, acquires a woman? Why can a man initiate more in particular areas of marriage, and of course there are other areas where women initiate, and I think just to round it out, this is really an opportunity for more discussion on the topic and by no means should anyone think that we’ve closed the issue. There will be much more said on this.

Let me just take a small break to reidentify who we are. This is Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson. I’m here talking to Rebbetzin Leah Kohn from the Jewish Renaissance Center. You can call us here live at the studio at 212-244-1050 or you can send an email either on the topic of this show or any show to wisdomreb@meaningfullife.com or visit our website at www.meaningfullife.com and I would really love to hear from any listener who has some issues or questions to address on the topics that we’ve discussed.

The Jewish Renaissance Center, which focuses on Jewish education for women, makes available an extensive array of classes. You can call them at 212-580-9666 and I should also mention that if any of you are looking to have a true woman Torah experience, as a leader in our generation, in being part of shaping the future in a very profound way, the Jewish Renaissance Center is having its third international Jewish women’s conference this coming Sunday, May 21^st, at the New York Bar Association and you can get more information for that at 212-580-9666.

Let’s go to Sarah on the air.

Caller: Hello. Mrs. Kohn, I want to tell you that I totally disagree with your position. I do not attend a synagogue even though I’m an educated Jew. I left the synagogue because I’ve always found it a demeaning experience. I can give you many examples but there isn’t enough time for that obviously on the phone. But I’ll tell you briefly I’ve been to synagogues where women sat so far away from men they could not even hear the cantor, so that the women among whom I sat began to chat among themselves and the men would shush them. It was very annoying.

I’ve been to a Rosh Hashanah service where I sat behind a dirty curtain, I don’t even want to call it a mechitzah, and I saw one woman, a very pious woman, placing a romance novel on top of her machzor and reading it, because we couldn’t hear what was going on. And there too the men said shh! because the women chatted.

I don’t see why a woman who is Jewishly educated, who knows Hebrew, cannot have an aliyah, whereas a man, who has to read the berachot from a card with the English transliteration, because he’s so abysmally ignorant gets an aliyah and a woman doesn’t.

These are just two or three examples that I’ve given you. That is why I don’t attend service and I would love to but I don’t know where to go and many women feel the same way I do.

Jacobson: Sarah, thank you for the call.

Rebbetzin Kohn: I would love to try to help you to find a synagogue that would give you a very positive, wonderful experience. I’ve been in synagogues like this too and I can relate to what you’re saying, but I’ve been in others as well that gave me a great experience. I invite you please to call me at 212-589-9666 and after you tell me where you live, I would try to direct you to places that I’m sure will change your feeling about it.

The aliyah has nothing to do with Jewish knowledge. Men can really not know Hebrew and still get an aliyah. It has to do with responsibilities that the Torah divided between men and women. It’s the idea of a team effort and it has nothing to do with qualifications or connection to G-d or importance in Judaism. Please do call me tomorrow or any other day and I will give you some addresses so that you can have a very positive experience.

Jacobson: So we have Sam on the air.

Caller: I would like to make a comment on the aliyahs. Not only do I feel that women are classified according to obligations, I’m a man and I’m Jewish and I can if I want to feel like a third-class citizen. You know why? Because I never, ever can be called in the first place to the Torah. I have to be the third one. Because I’m not a Kohen and I’m not a Levi, and I’m a peshutah (simple) Yid, Yisroel. I can never go up to the bima to bless the congregation because I’m not a Kohen. So we have it not only in the world of women, we have it in the world of men also. There are differentiations in the whole world. Why can women not accept it? And that is my comment.

I believe it should be emphasized. It was touched a little bit but the differentiations are all over. Thank you very much.

Jacobson: Thank you Sam. I couldn’t agree more. I’m sure the Rebbetzin agrees as well.

Rebbetzin Kohn: Yes, but I still can relate to the negative experiences that women have and I think they have to be addressed. They come from a painful place and there are explanations that need to be given and more has to be understood.

Jacobson: But clearly Sam, there’s no question that on a philosophical level, diversity is what makes life beautiful, and unity doesn’t always mean everything is the same. Beauty means that there’s diversity, but there’s harmony within that diversity, which has been the eloquent message of Rebbetzin Kohn throughout the show, which is that in the relationship with G-d, everyone has his or her particular path.

There are many areas where we’re similar, but there are many areas where we’re unique, and to compromise that uniqueness would be to undermine who you are as an essential human being, whether it’s a man or a woman.

We have a few more minutes. So many questions come to mind and one thing leads to the next. But I’d like to first thank the sponsors of this show, Ivan Stux and James Garfinkel and James and Anne Altucher and some of the others who make this show possible. It’s made possible only by grants and your donations so I encourage anyone who finds this show interesting and wants to have future such programming to please call us at the Meaningful Life Center at 1-800-3MEANING (1-800-363-2646). We offer classes for men and women, and I welcome anyone wanting to attend every Wednesday night at 346 W. 89^th St., corner of Riverside Drive in Manhattan at 8pm.

I would definitely encourage the women listening to this show or if you have friends, to join or participate in some way in the Jewish Renaissance Center headed by Rebbetzin Leah Kohn. You’ve heard her live on the show so you know what kind of sensitivity she has that would welcome any person from any background, whether a skeptic or a seeker, whether you’re a believer, whether you’re questioning or you have no questions, you are definitely welcome at the Jewish Renaissance Center.

We have time for one more call. We have Ronnie on the air.

Caller: My question is that we have been recently hearing a lot that there’s some Reform Rabbis who are approving gay marriages. I want you to comment on that.

Jacobson: Actually Ronnie last week I dedicated an entire show on that and that was the Reform movement’s approval or endorsement of gay unions. I addressed it somewhat last week and the truth is, there’s really not enough time to address it here. I could just say this. That the Torah, if you want to see it as a Divine blueprint for life, is basically as if somebody would tamper with your computer: you buy a computer and you come home with the computer manual. The manual tells you how to operate your computer. The Torah tells one how to live one’s life. And whether someone calls themselves a Rabbi, or a layman, we cannot tamper with that Divine manual or that blueprint.

More discussion on that would really require more time and I would really welcome you to call or leave your number here with us and I’ll call you back or email us at wisdomreb@meaningfullife.com.

As we wind down, Rebbetzin Kohn, would you like to say anything to the women or men listening? You know, we live in difficult times but at the same time we have radio to communicate.

Rebbetzin Kohn: I think it’s a very interesting observation. On one hand we are bombarded with information. We have computers, we have email, we have the Internet, and we are bombarded with information. We know a lot today and we have access to unbelievable amounts of knowledge. Women and men are really educated today and can go as far as they want with their education. On the other hand, when it comes to Judaism, many times all that we had the opportunity to have was an education on a child’s level. Most of us, when we come to the age of bar or bas mitzvah, that’s the end of our Jewish education and it will be really a pity, that we have a limited education in what is essential in life.

I really encourage you—it’s fascinating—to delve into the wisdom of almost 4,000 years of Jewish wisdom. It addresses every aspect of life, including being a woman and acting as a woman in modern life, as interesting as it is. Even though it’s an ancient Torah, it does address all the modern issues, and I would encourage anybody and everybody to seek Jewish knowledge. And as I said before, I would be very happy to connect you to places of Jewish learning wherever you are.

Jacobson: Thank you very much Rebbetzin Leah Kohn. This has been Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson.

Tags: women, radio transcript, Rabbi Simon Jacobson, education, spiritual, Towards a meaningful life
Posted in Social, Women & Men | 2 Comments »

The Democratic Astronaut

July 28th, 2015

From the Rebbe’s remarks at a farbrengen (Chassidic gathering) on Shabbat, Tevet 10, 5729 (December 28, 1968):

Yesterday, an event took place that had no known precedent in human history: a manned spacecraft approached the moon, orbited it several times, photographed both its “light side” and its “dark side,” and returned safely to earth at the exact time and place that were programmed.

The Baal Shem Tov ¹ taught us that:

“from everything a person sees or hears, he must derive a lesson in the service of his Creator.”

Indeed, this event, and its every aspect and detail, is replete with instructive insights into our mission in life. ²

Some twenty-four hours before the conclusion of the space mission, another event took place: a question was posed at an “Encounter” session ³ —a question that the said space mission can help address.

A participant in the “Encounter” challenged one of the speakers: “I understand that under Torah law, if a person eats a bite of non-kosher food, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes. I think that what a person eats is his own business. Laws should forbid and penalize actions that are harmful to others and to society, but should stay out of a person’s private life.”

The rabbi conducting the session was quite flustered by the question. How to explain to a roomful of young people, raised in free and democratic America, the fact that for an act as “harmless” and “personal” as eating a bite of food, the Torah instructs that a person be bound, stretched out, and thirty-nine lashes be administered to his bare back with a whip? After much hemming and hawing, he came out with the standard apologetic reply: that in order for a transgression to be punishable by lashes, it must be committed in the presence of two witnesses; that these two witnesses must first warn the transgressor of the criminality of his deed and of the penalty it carries; that the transgressor must commit the deed within seconds of the above warning; thus, due to these and a host of other stipulations, this penalty was rarely, if ever, actually carried out. It might therefore be said that the Torah-mandated punishment of lashes is more an indicator of the severity of the transgression than an operative penal procedure.

All this is of course true, but it doesn’t really answer the question. Even if the penalty of lashes was administered but once in hundred years, does the deed warrant such punishment? And why does the Torah legislate such a gross intrusion into a person’s private life?

But our sages tell us that “A person is obligated to say: ‘The entire world was created for my sake.’ ” ⁴ In the words of Maimonides, “A person should always see himself as half meritorious and half guilty, and the entire would as half meritorious and half guilty, so that when he transgresses one transgression, he tips the balance for himself, and for the entire world, to the side of guilt, and causes it destruction, and when he does a single mitzvah, he tips the balance for himself, and for the entire world, to the side of merit, and causes salvation for himself and for the entire world.” ⁵

Ingesting a spiritually toxic bite of food is not a harmless act, nor it is a personal one: all of creation is deeply affected by our every thought, word and deed, for the better or, G-d forbid, for the worse. What greater crime can there be than for a person to knowingly jeopardize his own well-being, and that of his family, community and the entire world, because his taste buds prefer a non-kosher cut of meat over a kosher one?

This is what is written in the books. The nature of man, however, is that things are more readily understood and accepted when he sees a tangible example of it. By Divine Providence, we have such an example in the space mission concluded yesterday.

Three adult men were told to put aside all personal preferences and follow a set of guidelines that dictated their every behavior, including their most intimate habits. They were told exactly what, how much and when to eat, when and in what position to sleep, and what shoes to wear. Should any one of them have challenged this “dictatorial” regimen, he would have been reminded that one billion dollars have been invested in their endeavor. Now, one billion dollars commands a lot of respect. Never mind that it’s not his billion–it’s only Uncle Sam’s billion–still, when a person is told that one billion dollars are at stake, he’ll conform to all guidelines and instructions. Of course, he has no idea how most of these instructions relate to the success of his mission—that has been determined by white-haired scientists after many years of research; but he’ll take their word for it, and readily accept the extensive intrusion into his private affairs.

And what if at stake is not a billion-dollar scientific project, but the divine purpose in creation?

Tags: Rebbe, Jewish law, outer space, personal preferences, Maimonides
Posted in Social, Science & Technology | No Comments »

The Rocket Age

July 28th, 2015

Editor’s note: What follows is based on an address delivered by the Rebbe on Shabbat, Tevet 7, 5729 (December 28, 1968), a week after three NASA astronauts made the first manned departure from the earth’s sphere of influence, conducting ten orbits of the moon. The concept articulated here is but one of several aspects of space flight that the Rebbe touched upon in his talk and applied to the voyage of daily life.

Challenge, we are told, is what stimulates growth and achievement. Yet every day we pray for a world in which there is nothing adverse to challenge us. We pray for a world free of evil and strife, free of jealousy, ignorance and pain. For a world suffused with the wisdom, harmony and perfection of its Creator.

What would it be like to live in such a world—a world without conflicts to resolve, without hungry to feed, with nary a pothole to fill? Is this what six millennia of human achievement is to culminate in—a cosmic Golden Acres Retirement Farm?

Reaching For The Heavens

For as long as he could dream, man yearned to fly. To tear free of the earth that claimed him as her own and soar to the heavenly heights.

When he learned that air, the element through which he waded and which extended miles above his head, had mass and weight, the realization opened the door for the invention of flying machines of two varieties. He could construct an apparatus whose overall weight was less than the air it displaced, and rise through the atmosphere as a log floats to the surface of the heavier water. Or, he could claw and slice his way through air, manipulating it this way and that, riding it with a great variety of aerodynamic forms and air-chewing machines.

And so man flew, higher, faster, devising ever more sophisticated ways of exploiting the air’s resisting mass as a carrier and propellor. But this ploy had its limitations. What happens when one climbs through the atmosphere until one has climbed above the atmosphere? When one reaches the point that there is no longer anything to defeat or transcend?

But man wanted more. Having risen to the atmosphere’s ceiling, he wished to rise higher yet, to the heavenly bodies beckoning across a sea of nothingness. But with nothing to overcome, how could he advance? If the void of space would not offer anything he could challenge, he would have to devise an implement that is its own challenge: the rocket.

The rocket is both challenger and challenged. With the rocket, man thrusts forward by thrusting against himself, riding the recoil from his self-agitation to heights yet to be charted and defined.

Best and Better

“From everything a Jew sees or hears,” said chassidism’s founder, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, “he should derive a lesson regarding his service of the Creator.”

The history of aviation and space exploration has much to instruct our quest to soar and explore the heavens of the human soul. Internally, too, man yearns to rise above his “earth” and reach for his limitless skies, to transcend the mundanities of material life and touch the infinite, the eternal, the divine.

Man’s internal quest for the heavens also has its “conventional” aircraft – engines of flight that scale the heights of achievement by overcoming and exploiting the challenges of life. These fall under two general categories: heavier-than-air aircraft, which directly engage with the resisting elements, and lighter-than-air aircraft, whose ethereal contents naturally and effortlessly raise it above the heavier elements of its environment. In other words, there are times when man struggles against the negativities of life on their own terms, and times when he rises above them by inculcating himself with a purer, finer vision and behavior. However, both of these “aviation” methods have in common the fact that ascent is possible only in an environment of resistance and adversity.

This is life as we know it – life in a world in which achievement is measured in terms of a wilderness tamed, a tyrant defeated, a disease cured. A world in which there is a Nobel Peace Prize only because there are wars, learning only because there is ignorance, philanthropy only because there is hunger and want.

But we want more. We want more than to defeat evil – we want to probe the infinite reaches of good. We want our lives to be a “rocket” that continues its climb long after we have met our last negative challenge. We want to ignite what is best in us to challenge itself to achieve yet a higher degree of perfection.

Tags: Rebbe, good and evil, redemption, outer space, Chassidic stories, Shabbat
Posted in Social, Science & Technology | No Comments »

Hate Crimes & Anti-Semitism

July 28th, 2015

Hard stuff to talk about.

Rabbi Simon Jacobson: But though we had said last week we were going to talk about miracles, I think it’s appropriate that we talk about this. I mean, what else is talk radio about if we don’t address these issues, particularly, in a way, that there was a miracle here at least that thank G-d no one was killed at the center. It is quite tragic that the mailman nearby was killed. Yet we must acknowledge the miracle that none of the children were killed.

Feder: The man shot the gun off 70 times and no one in that center was killed, except of course, for the man he murdered outside.

We’re going to talk about this subject tonight and, as always, we ask you to call us with questions and comments. The number here is 212-244-0150. We’re going to start talking about this with the Rabbi and then we do want to hear from you.

It’s hard to know where to start with such a terrible thing like this, and I’m presuming that everyone listening knows what happened, so we’ll just take that for granted. Is it necessary to define a hate crime, or what race or religious hatred is? Do we take it for granted that everyone knows what it is?

Jacobson: I don’t think so because I don’t know if we even understand the anatomy of hate altogether. But I will say that my first reaction, which is a healthy reaction probably shared by all of us, is real outrage, particularly as a Jew, especially when the person made a statement like he did (which is even difficult to repeat) which was a call to kill all Jews.

Feder: A “wake-up call” he called it.

Jacobson: And just reminiscent of thousands of years of similar statements that were acted upon. So this isn’t a theoretical thing for the Jewish people, and I think that it’s most important to express that outrage and, as Jews, there’s nothing at all to be ashamed of to say that we’re Jewish. The Jewish response to this is not to hide our Judaism or in some way to go undercover. The problem is with those who hate, and Jews in many ways are, the world’s moral conscience because hate crimes, though I do not take away from hate crimes against other races, but Jews have been at the brunt of it— almost on the pedestal (in a negative sense)—which represents a very sad chapter and a very low aspect of humanity in how Jews have been treated throughout history.

The outrage is very profound, but as I mentioned, Jewish outrage is not expressed through retaliation, through fear, but through positive action, and ultimately recognizing that there is a calling that we have to live up to.

But I think, especially in America, a loud call has to ring out that we — all people, not just Jews — will not tolerate such atrocities. A crime like this is not just against any individual group; it is a crime against all people, against all of civilization. That’s how I can begin to address your question.

When you hurt or kill one person in the name of hate, essentially you’re killing all people because it’s just a matter of perspective and subjectivity. You know, it’s the attitude. It’s not the question of, “Oh, I only hate this segment.” No. If you hate, you hate. Hate is a poison that seeps through the entire human being.

A person who is unable to hate doesn’t hate anyone. If a person is able to hate, he can ultimately hate everyone, and therefore, it’s a crime against humanity. In America, though we have freedom of rights, there isn’t the freedom to abuse those rights, where we have to cry out. Talk about a wake-up call. It’s a wake-up call against those who will not tolerate a racial crime. I think federal legislation is required to really make this a very serious crime. Because this is a call to hurt someone just in the name of someone’s color or race or religion.

Feder: Or the fact that the one person who did die out there was a Filipino who was shot because he was not white.

Jacobson: And though, thank G-d, the hate criminal is part of a minority, but even with one such crime, you do see what kind of headlines it makes. It touches a chord and we’ve learned from the silence of the Holocaust how silence can be in partnership with the crime itself.

Feder: So let’s talk about the idea of hate crimes. I think everyone understands instinctively what a hate crime is. There are some states that have laws on the books against hate crimes and prosecute people and there are some states that don’t. Now, you mentioned before something about a federal law. Isn’t there already something about that, about violating a person’s civil rights? That’s what happened in Crown Heights, that’s how they prosecuted that guy.

Jacobson: Right. It was not just in the name of individual murder but civil rights, which is the basis of this country. Because if you undermine that you undermine the freedom of religion, the Bill of Rights, and all the rights of an individual to practice religion. And I don’t know the details on the legal level of legislation, but legislation essentially can’t prevent crimes, per se. But still, it’s a statement.

Feder: No, they punish crimes.

Jacobson: And it’s also a statement of a standard of what we’re willing to tolerate and what we’re not willing to tolerate. And I believe that legal laws, even though they are mostly symptomatic, do make a statement of the standard of a society.

So that’s on one end of things. But ultimately the real issue here that we have to address (I don’t know how to make an agenda, but there are short-term solutions, there are long-term solutions, there’s preventive medicine, there’s dealing with the symptoms, the problems…) but obviously a fellow like this has to be treated and prosecuted in the strongest way possible: not just for him, but to send a message to anyone out there who carries similar feelings.

But really, ultimately, this is a catalyst and a call to us all to look at what, in a society, spawns and gives birth to people like this.

Feder: Let’s look at it in its most specific way. The man belonged to a group called Aryan Nation, which is one of a various number of Nazi or Fascist related groups in the United States. They live in compounds, they go to meetings. Actually, there are a lot of these groups in prisons, and then they relate it to the outside.

Now you were talking about preventative things before. Would you prevent the existence of such groups? That’s not the case now, they’re allowed to exist. They have arms training. They march (remember the march in Skokie, Illinois?). They’re allowed to do virtually what they want, although they’re obviously not allowed to kill people. Would you actually prevent them from existing? They’re prevented from existing in Germany. It’s a federal law there against even their existence.

Jacobson: That’s a very challenging question and I have mixed feelings, to be honest, because on one hand, we ought to be very wary of infringing on people’s rights of expression, because then it can carry over to areas of inhibiting areas of free expression of press, for example, if they were going to criticize the government or anyone else.

Feder: And then who’s to say which group should or shouldn’t be in existence? Who sets the law?

Jacobson: But I think that the real issue or problem has emerged because there’s a distortion, in my opinion, in the whole view of the Constitutional Bill of Rights.

Feder: Well that’s a pretty serious statement.

Jacobson: It is, and I will back it up. And there are many commentaries on many radio shows commenting about what happened, and I’d like to address it obviously from a Torah perspective—because that’s what I’ve been trained in—and I’ll leave it up to other commentators to express the anger and the outrage. And I hope to express it in a way that we can go away with something constructive and productive, without minimizing the outrage.

You know, we talk about the separation between church and state in the Constitution. There’s also the discussion of freedom of rights.

Feder: What do you mean exactly by freedom of rights?

Jacobson: Well, freedom of rights of expression, where anyone can express themselves freely, even if it offends someone else, obviously if it’s not criminal. But there’s always been the dilemma, beginning with the founding fathers, with what happens when there’s a conflict between the two: when someone’s freedom of expression, like in this situation, can lead to the education of hate that inevitably has to explode at some point. So what do you do…

Feder: This is combined with the right to bear arms, speaking of the Constitution.

Jacobson: Right. So what do you do? You just allow them freedom of expression to the point where they commit a crime? I mean, it’s quite logical. If a parent has children, and they allow them to say anything, and to express themselves without limits, where do they draw the line, only when they’re ready to go shoot someone?

Clearly, if you allow such education, if you allow such expression, it’s going to cultivate people, and particularly people who may have violent tendencies anyway, to act on them.

So this is not an easy question to answer. It’s similar to the difficulties that we have in many communities, that for the good of the community they don’t want certain freedom of expression. And you see that the federal government allows individual communities to determine certain standards, whether it’s pornography, or other factors that affect that community. So the communal good is affected by someone acting on individual rights.

And this is a conflict that has never been fully resolved.

Feder: Well, can it ever be fully resolved?

Jacobson: Only if one really has that kind of selflessness and dedication to a higher good and is not interested in selfish, narcissistic interests. If there was a person like that, then I think we could come to a point to realize this goal.

It’s very clear why they did that. Because they were coming from an environment back in Europe of religious persecution, and the dangers of that are evident in history. So that’s built in. Yet, on our currency they elected to write the words “In G-d We Trust.” The Congress begins with a prayer every day. And they also state in the Bill of Rights, in the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal.” I think I’ve emphasized before that what is striking here is the word “created.” Created is created. They could have said “all men are born equal,” “all men are equal,” “all men are endowed with equal rights.”

“Created” implies a Supreme Creator, and they did not see any contradiction with the separation of church and state when they were making these statements. They were wise enough to understand that when they put in “In G-d We Trust,” they were talking about G-d. G-d is religious.

But I believe that their intention was a very simple one. Without a G-d, there are no true rights, because perhaps we are created unequal. Perhaps the world is a jungle, and it’s survival of the fittest, and our laws are simply made for some type of civility.

But maybe inherently we’re not equal…

Feder: That’s what these racists believe.

Jacobson: Precisely. When they said, “All men are created equal,” they were wise. If they had said any other statement, anybody could say, no I disagree. But when you say “created,” you’re saying by the Creator, by the mere virtue that you were born, created, you are equal, and no one can take that away from you. No government can take that away from you.

And the strange and the interesting irony here is that because the United States is built on the principle that all men are created equal, someone can rise and say, “I’m an Aryan and I don’t believe everyone is equal.” That’s the irony. They have that right based on the equality that we respect them with.

So they’re abusing that right.

So when the Constitution and the founding fathers guarantee these rights, it’s important—and this is where I think there’s been a major distortion—it’s become freedom from religion instead of freedom of religion.

The founding fathers never meant to eradicate religion. They meant that no one should dictate religion. No one should impose on others their particular religious beliefs. But the concept of a non-denominational G-d is absolutely necessary to establish a moral system. Otherwise morality is ultimately arbitrary and subjective if you don’t have some type of absolute higher calling.

Feder: Just like moral relativism?

Jacobson: Exactly. Because take the Ten Commandments, for instance, in the Bible. They begin with “I am your G-d.” Then it continues with seemingly simple commandments: Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not commit murder, honor thy parents—statements that don’t seem to require a G-d. So the question is asked about the Ten Commandments: why are these moral laws equated with belief in G-d? Why are they included in one set of Ten Commandments, along with “I am G-d.” Morality is morality even without G-d. And the answer is, if there is no G-d, morality is ultimately arbitrary and relative, and anarchy is right around the corner. Because ultimately where do you draw the line? Is it by consensus? If the majority of a country suddenly decides that Aryan Nation is the right thing (and the majority of a country did decide that 50 years ago), does that make it right, because majority rules?

In other words, you must answer to Someone who gave us life. Now, whether that something—we’ll call it G-d—is Jewish, Christian, Islam, Buddhist, or some other thing, that’s where the founding fathers say don’t intervene. That’s for people to decide. But the concept of having a higher calling, that we don’t just do what we like, and we don’t just do it out of fear of being caught but there’s really a moral compass within your spirit, is essentially the basis of any type of democratic society.

Feder: So you’re talking about this in terms of something that transcends whatever conflicts or inherent problems there are in the Bill of Rights or in the Constitution. There’s a higher Bill of Rights in other words, there’s a higher thing than just the Constitution.

Jacobson: And that’s why we have on our currency—money, the symbol of idolatry, the symbol of mundane life, the symbol of selfishness—”In G-d We Trust.” I believe this is the only country that does this, and yet this is the country where separation of church and state is sacred.

Feder: And yet this man is not only a member of the Aryan Nation, but he’s got books in his van, he’s got well-known Right Wing nut fringe literature that are actually Christian oriented that say the same old tired story that they’ve been saying for the last 2,000 years, that the Jews killed Christ, that they are a debased race, etc. He reads this stuff, he’s connected in some terribly awful way with the worst fringe section of this religion, and he is saying that in the name of G-d he did this. So what G-d are we talking about?

Jacobson: Good question. But let’s go to the callers. I want to respond to that because it’s an important question which includes the concept of anti-Semitism and those who, in the name of G-d, are anti-Semites.

Feder: But people have been killing in the name of G-d forever. So we have Mike on the line calling from New York.

Caller: I’ve been listening to this show, and I feel like I have to interject because the country was formed by white supremacists. I mean, there’s an irony in what you’re talking about. Listing the good things that were put forth by these people is one thing, but they existed in the context of total white supremacy.

Feder: Well, that’s a really good point, I must say. Would you like to comment on that?

Jacobson: I would. It’s an excellent comment, but the fact is that the laws that they put into motion created a country, unprecedented in history, that allowed for religious freedom. And I’m not discussing their personal lives here and their personal choices. But the fact is that in the laws of the Constitution… slavery was abolished… the laws of the Constitution are among the most humane, most tolerant, most accepting—notwithstanding their personal lives and behavior.

So that may be a tribute to lawmakers who put into motion something that transcended their own weaknesses.

Is there anything in the laws that would indicate white supremacism? That would be my question.

Feder: Well, in fact amendments had to be added later to…

Jacobson: But the ability to amend the constitution was also allowed and put into motion by the original writers. I’m talking about the picture as it stands now. If someone was to suggest that any line in the Bill of Rights indicates and allows for some type of racism or some tinge of it, that should be addressed, but I’m not aware of anything of that nature.

Caller: Originally, black people were considered less than a person.

Feder: I guess the point we’re saying is that that there’s law and then there’s de facto law, the actual law as it is applied today. In fact, the law of the country, as it worked every day, allowed racism and religious intolerance, sexual intolerance, and this is something that’s in the history of our country.

But what the Rabbi was saying, I think, is that it’s not written in; the opposite is written in as the ideal to aspire to.

Jacobson: And slavery was an aberration, I agree, that was inconsistent, and ultimately it was amended and is no longer part of our laws.

Feder: Thank you very much for the call. Now, let’s take a slight break here to identify who we are and then we’ll move on. You are listening to Rabbi Simon Jacobson, and this is Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson. My name is Mike Feder and we’re here every Sunday night from 6-7pm talking about issues that we hope are inspiring to you, and you’re listening to WEVD, 1050AM in New York City.

We really want to thank everyone who has emailed us or written or called us. Here are some of the ways you can get in touch with us, and we want to hear from you. The most important thing is the telephone number: 1-800-3MEANING or 1-800-363-2646. You can also email us at wisdomreb@meaningfullife.com. You can always write to us at The Meaningful Life Center, 788 Eastern Parkway, Suite 303, Brooklyn, NY 11225.

I’d like to also tell you that we have a new website where you can download transcripts of this program, and previous and future programs. It’s www.meaningfullife.com.

Now we do have a couple of calls, but hold on one second.

Jacobson: I really believe that a topic like this really generates a lot of response, and anything that we can’t cover on the show should be covered on the website where you can find transcripts of the show, so please write to us there if you don’t get through on the phone.

I do want to comment about the issue of the Christian element, briefly. If belief in G-d doesn’t bring a person to personal refinement, ultimately one has to question what kind of G-d that is. So I’m not here to vindicate, argue or debate the different religions, but I’ll speak on a personal level from a Jewish perspective as well as from any religious perspective.

If you have a G-d and you can go ahead and hurt or hate another person, more importantly, take it a step further, that in the name of G-d you can hurt another person, then I wonder what kind of G-d that is.

Feder: You know, there’s never been a religion that I’ve ever seen, including the Jewish religion, no matter what religion (except for the Buddhists as far as I know), that haven’t at one time or another used G-d as a reason to take land and kill people.

Jacobson: Well, I have to disagree about Judaism, because the fact is, look at individual Jews and look at the community of Jews. They have never done that in history.

Feder: In the Old Testament there seems to be quite a lot of that.

Jacobson: No, they did not go and take land that was not theirs. If you quote the Bible, the land was given to Abraham and the Jews returned to their land.

Feder: What about all those wars? What were they all about? There’s a lot of killing going on there.

Jacobson: Well, killing is going on if you’re in your own home and you want to defend yourself.

Feder: Okay, I just thought I’d bring that up.

Jacobson: Fine, for the record I wanted to state that because I completely disagree, but I will say that again, you have to look at the individual. If someone can kill, or try to kill another, to hate another person, in real life, I would question what kind of G-d that is.

Feder: Or whether they are in touch with G-d themselves.

Jacobson: Right. It’s a G-d that is defined by human subjectivity. In other words, if G-d says to you, Do not kill anyone that I love, and I love them by the mere fact that I created them, then because you have your racist feelings, to pigeonhole G-d into your feelings is beyond sacrilegious.

Feder: Okay, we have Jennifer. You’re on the air.

Caller: I disagree with the concept of a hate crime. Not because these crimes are not horrific and abominable and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, but I can’t say that when you call something a hate crime, that allows the crimes that are not so defined to not be called a hate crime. All crimes are hate crimes.

Jacobson: I think that’s a very good point and would concur with Jennifer that any crime against another human being is a form of hate, whether it’s due to jealousy, rage, pettiness, or self-hate. Sometimes you have low self-esteem and you go act out on others. But yet I think the cliché, when we use the word hate crime, is something that is stated as a statement, an anti-Semitic statement or an anti-black statement. I think that’s really what we’re referring to. But the point is very well taken that any type of crime against humanity is ultimately a manifestation of hate.

Feder: All right. Thank you very much. We have Bert. You’re on the air.

Caller: Yes, good evening gentlemen. In the discussion of hate and Jews as targets, I would like to ask if this thing could be expanded to the sources of anti-Jewish feeling that comes not from gentiles, not from Nazis and neo-Nazis, but from the Jewish left. For example, the Crown Heights pogrom. I listened to WBAI back in 1991, and heard the so-called progressive, left-wing Jews joining in the attack against “those right-wing extremist Jews,” those “right-wing Jewish fundamentalists who live in Crown Heights and who are pushing out the black people.”

Feder: Okay, I see what you mean.

Caller: Now, when you, Mike Feder, courageously spoke on WBAI asking people to call in and identify anti-Semitic actions on WBAI, the head of the station publicly…

Feder: Let me interrupt you for a second. I don’t really want to get into my personal history, because the idea is to concentrate this show on general issues that are universal to everyone.

Caller: Can we therefore generally, say that the Jewish left is one of the sources for anti-Jewish hate as well as Nazis?

Feder: Very legitimate question. Thank you.

Jacobson: The only thing I would say is that I think we have to put things in perspective. When a white supremacist or a white self-proclaimed Aryan goes and shoots young children, I think in that type of discussion you don’t want to bring in other crimes, even though you can equate them and they do have similarities. Because it tends to, in a sense, desensitize us to the magnitude of this particular crime.

Because when the Nazis did what they did 50 years ago, and to start saying that there are left-wing Jews who make similar statements, I do agree that I am outraged when someone makes a statement like that on WBAI, but I think you should distinguish between the two, and not because one is worse than the other. I think that because it is a general attitude among people who sometimes stand from a distance and who are not involved to bring their own personal political inclinations into it and that’s my only comment.

Feder: Okay, let’s go to another call. Howard, you’re on the air.

Caller: As a Jewish person, I would want to know why the Jews are always targets, and it’s my feeling that they kiss every shvartze tuchus, every anti-American…

Feder: Okay, we really appreciate your very wide ranging views on things! Do you have a comment about this?

Jacobson: Well, the issue of anti-Semitism in general is a very fundamental one, and it goes back all the way to Biblical times, beginning from the classical battle between the two brothers, Esau and Jacob. From a Jewish perspective, anti-Semitism is not something for Jews, out of fear or panic, to run away from. As a Jew I would say thehatred of Jews is a testimony to a secular world that has difficulty with G-d.

Jewish thought equates anti-Semitism with anti-G-dliness. Because, ultimately, what is it that bothers people about the Jews? Their religion, because Judaism is essentially religion. It’s not dress because you see the Nazis didn’t care how you dressed, they didn’t really care whether you were observant or not, or whether you were half-Jew. They saw it as some type of genetic thing.

So from a Jewish perspective, essentially, a world that is still able to hate another human being, it manifests itself in the scapegoat called the Jew. So from a Jewish perspective the response to that is a response to the following concept: as long as people do not embrace G-d in this world, in a real way, in daily life (I don’t mean only on Sundays or compartmentalized so that it doesn’t affect your personal life), then even the G-d they do embrace is compromised. They once asked Bertrand Russell how he could behave in an unethical way since he was a professor of ethics at one of the universities, and he answered, “I’m also a professor of mathematics and I’m not a triangle.”

That is an unG-dly statement. It means that you can teach one thing and be another. From a Jewish perspective, G-dliness means that you behave in a refined way. Human majesty. Human dignity. You love people even if you disagree with them entirely, completely, about all their opinions. But the mere fact that they are here on earth means that G-d put them here, so you love that element.

The person may be a criminal so they have to be locked up. We’re not naïve and so into brotherhood that we just accept everything. Law has to be enforced and all of that. But with that element of how to deal with anti-Semitism, I was very gratified to hear, right before I was coming to the show, about some of the responses of Jewish groups in Chicago and California, of the acts of goodness and kindness. One group of children in Chicago and in other cities decided, since it’s summertime, to send toys to the children in this Jewish Community Center in LA as a voice of support: we’re one. We’re one people. It’s not just a crime that happened on the West Coast. It’s a crime that happened in the world. It’s a voice of support.

We hear others doing things that cultivate Jewish pride. I hear that in some cities Jewish communities initiated a mezuzah campaign. Mezuzahs are what Jewish people traditionally put on their doorposts as a sign of protection and trust in G-d. And it’s very encouraging and very life affirming to hear such responses.

You will never see as a quintessential Jewish response, an eye for an eye in any literal sense. You will never see Jews mobilize and say “Let’s go get those whites.” There’s no Jewish advocate for that.

Feder: Well, I want to talk to you about that a little later. But we do have Joan on the line who’s been holding on forever. You’re on the air.

Caller: Hello. I’d like to make two points. I learned the Ten Commandments in elementary school, and one is, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” I was in elementary school and I heard key in that commandment, “as thyself.” I know the person who did this horrible crime has to be punished, but if in fact we started with the very young and had an atmosphere of love, if they loved themselves, these people who commit these horrendous crimes… I think basically they hate themselves. That’s point number one.

And point number two. The gentleman who spoke about the black people and the way they were treated, women were treated terribly too, but in order for women to have gotten the vote, and slaves to be freed, there had to have been good people on top who had the vote who allowed women and slaves to become ex-slaves, so there are good people, and they have to be awakened and they have to teach their children that love is of the essence.

Feder: Thank you for your comments.

Jacobson: I think Joan summed up our show in a very powerful way and I couldn’t concur more and say that yes, exactly, you matter, that birth is G-d’s way of saying you matter, and that you are meaningful, and we have an erosion in our community, when a person ultimately has a lack of self-esteem, when they hate themselves or they don’t value their own life, other people’s lives are very easy for them to harm and hurt.

And on a positive note, ultimately on a preventive medicine level, it’s critical to engender, instill, imbue in our children at a very young age the sanctity of life, that it’s a gift from above, where you treat your life as something that’s given to you as a gift and treat it as the greatest gift you have.

If someone gave you a gift worth millions of dollars, how would you treat it? You would make sure it’s protected. You would keep it at night in a place where no one would harm it. You would treat it with a certain sanctity.

Life is that gift, and it’s a gift from Above. Your life and the life of everyone around you. No matter how much you disagree with another person, there are ways to communicate that do not have to be aggressive and violent.

So ultimately that’s the message that has to be taught to children from a very young age.

Feder: But speaking of aggression and violence, and picking up on something you said before, I really have to take issue with what you said before. I think you said that you don’t see the Jews organizing in an aggressive manner. Do you remember the Jewish Defense League?

Jacobson: Mike, I could always rest assured that you will find a little crack in what I have to say!

Feder: I’m not doing that—this isn’t a debating team here!

Jacobson: No, I appreciate it by the way. I said that as a tribute to you.

Feder: But let me just add one little thing. I remember reading, historically, a creature called the golem. You know what the golem is more than I do, I mean, after all, the golem was a creature created sometime in the 15^th or 16^th century which was an avenger, an actual creature sent out by the Jewish community to protect itself, and it would actually fight, it was aggressive, it was a creature who couldn’t be stopped to harm its enemies. And let me just add that one of the basic tenets of the people who live in Israel is “never again,” they are not going to let themselves be pushed around and they will often assume very aggressive stances against people they presume to be their enemies. So you want to go to Tom? Tom, you’re on the air.

Caller: Yes, I agree with the previous caller who said that this country was founded by racists and I disagree with something you said that there are no laws or statutes that actually support racism.

Feder: In the Constitution.

Caller: There were written laws that stated the degree of rights that a particular person would have depending on his race.

Feder: This is in states, you mean.

Caller: And federal laws also.

Feder: These I never heard of.

Caller: Well, I can name a few. First, if you go to the state of Louisiana, there are still laws on the books.

Feder: Well, we all know about the laws in those states.

Caller: The federal laws were made by precedents, for example, the Supreme Court ruling, Plessy vs. Ferguson, [where Plessy argued that the law of separate but equal railroad cars for black and whites violated a clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that guaranteed citizens equal protection of the laws. The Supreme Court ruled that the amendment did not seek to guarantee the social equality of all races.] That ruling established the law by precedent and the precedent was actually set before that ruling and it continues up until today.

But whether it’s written or not, the fact remains that those conditions did exist and they still exist today.

Feder: Can you channel that into what the discussion is about?

Caller: No, I’m just saying that those conditions exist today and people who ignore them or talk like it doesn’t exist, they are either in denial or they really don’t care.

Feder: And the conditions that you say exist are…?

Caller: Racism.

Feder: Oh, okay.

Caller: It may not be overtly as they did before but there were federal laws, in fact, if you go to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC you’ll see flyers, bulletins, put out by the federal government rewarding people for bringing in the scalps of Indians.

Jacobson: This is going a little off on a tangent. I made a statement about the general bill of rights, “all men are created equal,” that statement in the Constitution. The fact that there are contradictions, we hope will be eradicated and finally amended to the extent where the entire Constitution and the laws of this entire country are consistent with that statement, “all men are created equal.” So I agree, of course there are pockets of racism and that was really not my statement. I was really addressing that line. That line is unequivocal. All men, it doesn’t say part of the men. And slavery and other elements of racism were abolished, and the quality of life for women and other groups, are slowly improving.

The bottom line is that it should continue toward that end. But that’s another discussion.

We were addressing people who abuse it and abuse it for their own personal interests or their own low self-esteem.

But let me address your comment about aggression in Jewish history. You mentioned the JDL, never again, the Golan.

Feder: And Israel.

Jacobson: To put things in context, one of the things I get really upset about is when (not at you, Mike) is when you hear of aggression against Jews, and then someone gets up and says, “But the Jews have also been aggressive, look at what they’ve done to the Palestinians,” and so on. First of all, even if there is some merit to that argument, when you’re dealing with one topic, you don’t try to obfuscate it by suddenly bringing up aggression. I’m not suggesting that you did that Mike, but it’s a separate discussion how Jews behave.

Individual Jews, like individuals anywhere, can be accountable and don’t necessarily live up to the consistent view or philosophy of Judaism. The JDL (the Jewish Defense League, Meir Kahane), actually, for many Jews was considered to be something that was inappropriate, it wasn’t considered to be a Jewish approach. So it wasn’t like all the Jews and all groups accepted that.

Feder: Did you think that?

Jacobson: I think it played a role. I thought it was good to have someone who made a statement like that. But would I become an active member personally? It wasn’t my style, but no, I think in context, it’s like having a community patrol. So it may not be something that I’d consider to be Jewish philosophically, but when you have crime going on, it’s good to patrol your streets, and have individual patrols. That’s really, by the way, how the Jewish Defense League got started. It grew out of a group called the Maccabees in the sixties, after the ’60s riots. But if you were to ask me if that’s the general Jewish response, usually not. Except in the cases as with the golem, with the Maharal of Prague, (Reb Yehuda Leowe of Prague), there was a terrible pogrom which was threatening the lives of the Jews there, which was not uncommon in those days in the Middle Ages, but for some reason he felt that enough was enough, and tradition goes that he created the golem to protect the people. But you’ll find that only once in history.

I wish we had more golems throughout history. In the 40’s, it would have been nice to have a golem dealing with the Nazis.

Feder: Well, let’s define this. The golem was a creature created out of the dust of the earth, out of the clay and dust and dirt of the earth, who was indestructible and attacked the enemies of the Jews.

Jacobson: Protected them.

Feder: In a very offensive way sometimes.

Jacobson: No, but the golem did not go and aggressively pursue, it was always in defensive mode.

Feder: That’s true. He found out the whereabouts of criminals, he found out evidence, and things like that.

Jacobson: But shrouded in mystery as well; it’s not really clear exactly what happened.

Feder: Don’t you think we should have one right now?

Jacobson: Well, you need a Maharal of Prague to build one. Now I’m sure if you and I, Mike, try to build a golem, it wouldn’t protect anyone.

Feder: Look, if someone comes up to you on the street, you’ve got your yarmulke, you’ve got your beard, you look very Jewish. Someone comes up to you on the street and says, “You so-and-so Jew,” and says he’s going to knock you down just as a wake-up call to America. What are you going to do out there on Seventh Avenue? Are you going to talk to him about love? About G-d?

Jacobson: That’s not at all what I’m suggesting. No, when I speak about preventive medicine, I’m discussing it on an educational, national level. Let me speak to the listeners out there who aren’t Jewish. Let’s say, if you think that your child can grow up hating only Jews and no one else, it’s a big mistake. Hate breeds hate. They will end up hating in general. It’s just a matter of time before it will express itself one way or another. So a general educational approach, and on a revolutionary level, we need to have a revolution in education, because there’s an erosion.

I don’t want to equate the shootings in Los Angeles with other shootings that occurred these past few weeks, but ultimately life is being compromised, and children’s lives, on a consistent basis. Children, who were always supposed to be protected—childhood was supposed to be an oasis—that no one touches children. Suddenly there are no longer any lines drawn.

If I meet someone in the street the way you described, I’ll defend myself with everything I have. Now, of course, if he had a weapon or if he was threatening, I would have to determine whether it is worth fighting. If you’re able to protect yourself, you do. If you can get out of there, you run for your life.

But my attitude would be that of course I’d protect myself, and no, I would not start preaching to him about G-d. Because you’re dealing here already with a person who is a criminal.

You know, when we speak about G-d, we’re talking about preventive measures. This guy on the street was not born that way. He was born a child. He picked up attitudes. He may have picked up anti-Semitism from his education, from his parents, and he needed a cause, so he got involved in some hate group. It become like a passion that fed him and it became an ongoing thing.

I mean, it’s so difficult to address this, there are so many aspects. But it ultimately comes down to the level of early education. The earlier stage really determines the rest of our lives, and I don’t want to sound naïve, that that’s our solution here. No, the solution is to prosecute this guy with everything you have. Federal government, state government, and send a strong message to anyone of this nature. They should have investigations of hate groups, there should be constant monitoring, just as they monitor criminal groups. I don’t think that’s an intrusion of rights because you don’t invade unless you see something happening, but you have to monitor them, like you would monitor a spy group. Because with groups like that, ultimately something will give, and there could be a tragedy beyond the proportion in which it happened now.

But that’s called symptomatic medicine, that’s dealing with the symptoms. The bigger picture is that we need to cultivate an overall respect and value for goodness and kindness. An aggressive revolutionary statement that human beings have to live up to a G-d. I don’t think this fellow, this gunman, will respond to that message.

Feder: One last comment or question. What do you think we should do at this time, you think he deserves to go walking around in society anymore? No. Do you think he deserves to live?

Jacobson: I think the death penalty is definitely an option in the country’s laws and if I were the prosecutors, I would encourage them to prosecute as far as they could go.

Feder: He murdered a man.

Jacobson: Torah definitely condones the death penalty in circumstances, obviously not just to use it loosely, but if there’s no reasonable doubt, and he was stable, and all of that. But I would believe that even if he had not murdered the postal worker, the mere fact that he turned on children because they were Jewish, that for me is a very powerful, powerful, crime, because there’s absolutely no justification for it. Would that warrant the death penalty? I don’t know the laws of this country, whether abuse of someone’s civil rights warrants the death penalty, but it’s definitely attempted murder. He could have murdered them.

But clearly, laws have to be as strong as possible to deal with preventing these crimes and sending a message deterring others to make similar statements, so to speak.

Feder: Let’s go to one last call before we move on. Baruch, you’re on the air.

Jacobson: Good evening. I just want to say, with regard to the golem which you mentioned before, I recently heard a lecture from a distinguished authority, Professor Lyman from Brooklyn College and other places, about this whole thing and he brought a very strong case that this whole golem thing is really like a bubbemaaseh. He traced it, and one of the things he mentioned is that the Maharal supposedly made this in the 1600’s, and there was no record in writing of this golem for a few hundred years. It was only much later that somebody….

Feder: Baruch, let me ask you a question. That’s an interesting academic point you made, but what is your real feeling about what we’re talking about tonight?

Caller: I wanted to make this point that a lot of people…

Feder: No, but I want to know. How do you feel about what we’re talking about?

Caller: Listen, I don’t have any strong things to argue on what was said, I’ll just make a general comment. I don’t know if it’s correct, I don’t know if I could accept, like it was said in the beginning of the program, that somebody who hates, hates everybody. And also the theory which is popular now which was expressed earlier, which is like a psychological type of theory, that someone who hates, hates themselves. I don’t know if that would apply in all cases.

Now maybe somebody hates, let’s say, a certain group because maybe this person was living in a neighborhood and the other group robbed his store or he feels they brought down his neighborhood, so it doesn’t mean that he hates himself. Maybe he was a victim of a crime from members of that group. I’m not say that if he goes overboard in generalizing that it’s the whole group, rather than the bad people from that group that he should hate, but to say that he hates himself is the answer for all hate, I can’t accept that.

Feder: Okay, thank you.

Jacobson: Good. I’m glad you elicited that. I think Baruch is 100% right. To make a general statement like that is incorrect. Much hate is just directed toward individual groups or it can be circumstantial, but there are elements of hate that are very much connected to a person’s own erosion of self.

From a Jewish point of view, the ability to hate someone else is not recognizing that G-d created us all and we’re all one large organism. So you’re really hating a part of yourself because it’s all part of one life. So even if it’s not directed at yourself but it’s the idea of living a very self-contained lifestyle where you don’t recognize the rights of other people. But his points are very well taken.

Regarding the golem, it may be that there are questions about the story, but the fact is that there are well-established authorities that do accept it, so you can chalk it up to being shrouded in some type of controversy or mystery, but there are authorities who clearly state it.

But the point that we were talking about was the general attitude toward dealing with aggression.

Feder: Well, here we are again approaching the end of the show. Further comments and questions are very much wanted. And you can call 1-800-363-2646. You can email us at wisdomreb@meaningfullife.com, and go to our website at www.meaningfullife.com to download transcripts of this radio program.

I do want to mention that almost all of these issues are covered in the book, Toward a Meaningful Life, by Simon Jacobson, which is available almost everywhere, and I would recommend on this particular subject, chapter 28 on Good and Evil. That’s one place you might look in the book for some insights and guidance about this.

We are again near the end of the program and we want to let you know that these programs are brought to you by you, by the listener, and our underwriter for tonight’s program, the people who brought it to us, is the Gnewisch and Gansbourg families and we thank them very much for helping us bring the show to you.

And also I’d like to say before we end that we have received many requests, in fact, from people asking how they can donate to the Meaningful Life Center, which is the organization that brings you all this, the radio show and the web site among other things. The Meaningful Life Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing a sense of peace, light, inspiration and meaning into the world. All its activities are made possible by donations of listeners just like you who receive the center’s publications and tapes and who listen to this program and visit the website.

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Please call us at 1-800-3MEANING (1-800-363-2646). When you pledge, make sure you ask to receive our newsletter, Meanings. And remember, we don’t have commercial sponsors, you are our sponsors. We count on you the listener to make this show possible.

Tonight we’ve been talking about what happened at the Los Angeles Day Care Center, where a man identified with the Aryan Nation, who thank G-d has been arrested, who turned himself in to the cops, tried to kill a lot of people. He only wounded five people, and then he went down the block somewhere and shot a Filipino postman to death.

We’ve been talking about hate crimes tonight, and now we are near the end of the program and once again we try to look toward the more positive or inspirational thing. Now let me ask you this question. You’re sitting in the cell with this man. I won’t mention his name because I don’t think he deserves to have one. But you’re sitting in the cell with him, right now. What do you say to him? Would you give him a blessing? Would you pray for him? How would you help him and how would you address him?

Jacobson: Well, I assume if that was the case, he’d probably be spewing hate toward me and I don’t think there would be room for any type of discussion or communication.

Feder: But when I say him I mean everybody like him.

Jacobson: No, I understand, I’m just making this statement for a reason. There’s a point to be made, because once there is that type of wall of racism and sterotyping and hatred placed between us, there’s no room for communication. It’s not like you can say, You know, let’s discuss this. He already has preconceived notions. He lifted a gun, weapons, on children to make a statement, so I’m not so naïve as to think that we’re just going to sit down with him and rehabilitate him and educate him.

I would probably ask to be taken out of that cell, because I don’t think I could really accomplish much. I think first things first. He should be prosecuted and once he’s in prison and well away from being able to harm someone, I believe every human being has in them a side that is spiritual, a side that is G-dly, and therefore there is always hope.

Feder: He’s not lost entirely.

Jacobson: I would not say that. You could rarely say that. I mean, there are people who are so poisoned in their lives and spirits that they really are beyond… but he has to be first of all out of commission, in the sense that he has to be out of harm’s way. I would not invite him to any community.

In a prison, if he joins rehabilitative programs, and there is some type of sincerity, then it’s a question of education. I’m not talking about releasing him, or parole, or anything like that. But he has to show an initiative. I wouldn’t spend much time trying to get through to him. Because people like that are often very poisoned.

I would say this overview to us all: You have to separate the event that actually happened here overall message to us all. This event deserves all the outrage and anger, prosecution if necessary. We simply cannot tolerate a person turning a gun in the name of killing Jews. But there is also a larger lesson, as the Baal Shem Tov teaches that everything has to be a lesson to us, that we have to learn from everything.

I think it comes down to, from a Jewish perspective, that adding in acts of goodness and kindness has always been the Jewish response to hatred. Never an “in kind” type of response. Obviously we protect ourselves, we defend ourselves, we do everything that’s necessary, but acts of goodness and kindness to show moral support for each other as Jews, both here and abroad, to know that every time there’s a community that faces certain challenges we have to come together—and the Jewish approach is study, prayer, and ultimately being a living example of what it means to be a G-dly human being, what it means to love, and it may not immediately rub off on others, but some people will be affected by that. And ultimately it will affect all people.

I do want to say one final thing, that I’d like to announce that we will be doing a weekend camping experience on August 28 and anyone interested should call 1-800-3MEANING for more information.

Feder: Okay. Next week the show will be on miracles. Thank you.

Tags: Towards a meaningful life, human value, radio transcript, anti-semitism, murder, America, miracles, Rabbi Simon Jacobson, politics
Posted in Antisemitism, Social, Racism | 2 Comments »

Racism: Can We Get Beyond It?

July 28th, 2015

Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson
Radio Show Transcript – June 27, 1999

Mike Feder: Hello again, this is Mike Feder and welcome to another edition of Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson. I’m here in the studio with Simon Jacobson and this evening’s topic is “Racism.”

Not that we need to be reminded that racism exists, but I just wanted to mention quickly a couple of things that are in the news… something is always in the news about this subject.

Locally in New York City we had this atrocious case involving a man named Abner Louima, a black man, violently assaulted by white police, probably a case that reached the national news, and as far as I know, international. And there’s this one little clipping that I found in the Times the other day, it’s called “Offensive E-mail at Stanford (Unversity).” “A two-paragraph message filled with racial slurs aimed at black and Hispanic students turned up in 25,000 Stanford University e-mail accounts over the Memorial Day weekend.

“The note, sent to students, professors, and others, prompted an outcry on campus including an open letter from the university’s president, President Gerhard Caspar, who denounced the appalling epithets. It was the latest in a string of such incidents on American campuses. Marjorie Hodges Shore, co-director of the Cornell University Computer Policy & Law Program estimates that offensive e-mail is distributed sometimes widely once or twice a semester.”

Just to bring it to a point and up-to-date, the question is, what is the origin of racism? What could possibly cause human beings to discriminate, oppress, enslave, even kill people just because they have a different appearance or color?

Simon Jacobson: Well, if I was able to capture it in two words, I would say, the lack of self-respect and respect of others, and in context of the two words that I want to use it would be that “You matter.”

As you were speaking, I was thinking about something we’ve talked about on many of these shows. We did a show last week on Sexuality, and there’s a certain recurrent thread and theme that keeps coming up in my mind, particularly after we talked about the Littleton tragedy. You mention the white cops and the black man; you think those white cops wouldn’t be able to do it to a white man?

Feder: I’m sure they do all the time.

Jacobson: You know, the thing is this. When it’s a black person, it’s an excuse, so to speak. “You’re different than I am,” which we’ll discuss.

But if you’re able to draw a common denominator of these insensitivities that lead to atrocious crimes it comes down to, do you really think you matter? How valuable do you think you are?

Feder: This is the person committing it?

Jacobson: I’m talking about the person committing it right now. There’s a certain erosion of value of life, our own lives, our actions, and therefore, immediately of the lives of others. There’s no absolute value to the things in our lives and, I don’t want to simplify it, but I would say that that’s what it comes down to. Because anyone who has the respect that “you are G-d’s child,” about yourself, if you really believe that, then you would believe that as well, because G-d has many children. Therefore the other person is G-d’s child also, and you’re constantly aware of that.

I don’t think a person knowing that, and who is cognizant of it in a real way—I don’t mean lip service—would be able to raise their hand to another human being. We’re not trying to create a community of saints, but essentially, you’re asking a question like, when it’s atrocious and barbaric, where does that come from? And when it’s not atrocious and not barbaric, when it takes on the shape of not killing someone or torturing them, but back-stabbing them behind their back?

Feder: Or just subtle insensitivity.

Jacobson: Right. So I don’t want to put it all in one bag, because obviously, crimes have to be measured by results. If you actually hurt someone in a physical way, or murder someone, even though at the root of it may be from a certain insensitivity, the fact is that you’re also expected to control yourself. If you have a bad thought about someone, it’s a far cry from actually acting on it.

So don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to equate it, but if you go to the root of it, I think there’s an ongoing erosion of the value of life. And life doesn’t just mean life and death. Life means even while we live it. How important is it after all? It’s easy to trivialize acts and get away with it.

Feder: Let me just seize for a moment on this word “ongoing” you just used. If you look at the history of the human race, in every place and in every time in recorded history, it’s almost as if racism, or a kind of racism, has been the rule rather than the exception. And it looks as if, from what you’re saying, that most people on earth throughout history have not recognized that they’re G-d’s children. I mean, I’m making an observation…

Jacobson: It’s a very good observation and I think it’s a result of a universe that functions in a very agnostic way.

Let’s talk about it in a more personal fashion. A healthy parent will not torture or hurt his or her own child, we can assume that (I emphasize “healthy” parent). I don’t mean an unhealthy parent, or a deranged one, or in some other way unbalanced through alcohol or substance abuse. A healthy parent will not hurt their own child.

Essentially the reason for it is that it’s your own child, an extension of yourself. You love the child that much. You’ve given birth to that child. A healthy parent will give their life for a child.

What about someone else’s child? We don’t feel the same way. Why? Because it’s just not instinctive. We have boundaries in this world that we live in, we have walls. Walls. My home is my home. I protect those in my home and the next home has someone else protecting the people in it. I don’t feel for them as much as I feel for my own children.

Is this logical? In many ways, it’s not, but it definitely is part of a healthy subjectivity. That’s why we protect our own young and will go to war to protect our rights, but where do these boundaries come from altogether? Why is it that a human being doesn’t just have sensitivity to all children? To all lives?

And the answer lies in the theme that we’ve discussed many times, that in essence—and again, I speak from a Torah perspective—we all come from one larger flame, one larger reality, we’ll call it G-d, and that flame has broken into many sparks, to many components. Each of our lives is one of those components.

When we are in our own life, in our own world, we only see with tunnel vision. We don’t feel that we are spokes that are connected by one hub. We don’t feel that we’re complementary musical notes in a larger cosmic composition. We have our lives.

So the boundaries of life, essentially, are driven by a certain obfuscation, or darkness, in which we don’t really see that we’re all part of one larger natural balance.

Nature, on the other hand, does see that. With animals, plants, even minerals, we see the mysteries of the unbelievable complementary way they function, we see how that sensitivity exists. I hear this from someone who has a ranch in Montana, in what I think is the last wildernesses in this country, and they’re right at the end of this wilderness.

There is the spawning season for the salmon there, which is an fascinating phenomenon and just one example of many amazing natural phenomena. During the spawning of the salmon, thousands of eagles are perched in these little alcoves in the mountains, and as the salmon spawn (swim upstream) and lay their egg—salmon, of course, are food for eagles—the eagles swoop down and eat them. Interestingly, they will not swoop down before the salmon lay their eggs and will not swoop down after the salmon die. So they have approximately a minute or two for this. But it’s amazing: suddenly thousands and thousands of eagles, timed perfectly (a phenomenon that has happened since the beginning of time) will do this. For whatever reason this occurs just like this, we see how it preserves the salmon as a species yet serves the interests of the eagles.

This is just one of a million examples of how nature has a built-in clock, a built-in immune system, a built-in balance—until, of course, humans come and mess it up. But we’re talking about nature on its own.

Human beings, on the other hand, do not feel that same sense of synchronicity. You do see it with young children often, but children can also be cruel to each other, particularly once they learn how to be selfish and “I’m me and you’re you.” But there’s a point where a child still feels it’s an extension of its mother.

Now, I’m not suggesting that as adults we have to feel that way, we’ve cut the umbilical cord, but there is an inner synchronicity to human beings. There’s something that we gravitate to when we love another person.

I know we’re talking about racism, which is in its most blatant way completely antithetical to this discussion, but I think it’s important to define what light looks like, and then we can know what darkness looks like, and understand the contrast.

Light looks like when two people really love each other and they’re strangers (I’m not talking about the natural biological love of a parent to a child). What’s happening? What’s happening is that despite their physical differences and despite the boundaries between personalities, and despite often adversarial or diverse elements of their personalities, there’s some type of inner synchronicity. They transcend those differences and there’s something that they recognize in each other that they really love.

That’s what love is about. So love does not mean that equals love each other, or that clones love each other. That’s not love, that’s just a part and extension of you. Or when a parent loves a child, that’s natural. Love is, that even though we’re strangers, and even though one is more emotional and one is more intellectual, whatever weaknesses and strengths people have, there’s a deeper force or a deeper clock that’s at work that synchronizes the two.

That’s what true love is. In other words, it’s the dominance of spirit over matter.

Racism, on the other hand, is the antithesis of that. The dominance of matter over spirit; that our differences are more powerful than our similarities. That our color, our race, our background, education (racism can be whites to whites as well; some people feel that if they’re educated, they’re elitist and they look at other whites as trash…)

Feder: So you want to redefine this word, then. Most of us think of this word in terms of color, or I don’t know what…other characteristics that are purely physical. But you’re talking about something even larger, right?

Jacobson: Well, when you get to the root of it, it’s larger, yes. Would you trust someone who is a racist toward blacks, with your children?

Feder: Of course not.

Jacobson: Because you know that if they can discriminate against one person, they can find reasons to discriminate against another. So it’s true, racism really reflects a global discrimination. However, I wouldn’t redefine racism and overglobalize it either, for an obvious reason, because there are people who have been subject and victimized in a serious way and I don’t want to minimize their pain and say, hey, it’s not you blacks, we’re all victims. Or it’s not you Jews, others have also been murdered and killed. Or it’s not some other group.

I don’t want to be insensitive, I think those groups who have been victimized and enslaved, discriminated against, that must be seen and recognized and seen as very unique. But if you ask me to analyze it on a more philosophical level, I would say to you those who are the abusers and the oppressors found “black” as an excuse, but essentially, it’s an insensitivity to human beings.

But they won’t say that. They’ll say, no, it’s only blacks. The Germans would say it’s the Jews. The Nazis would say, it’s only the Jews, gypsies, the mentally retarded and the blacks.

But give me a break. If someone really has respect for another human being…

Now, there’s nothing wrong to have pride in your own nationality and heritage: Englishman, Germans, the French, the Jews, the blacks. Every one of them has a heritage. And there’s a certain virtue to being subjective about your own heritage. I’m proud of my ancestry; it’s not your ancestry.

The problem is, of course, when it spills over and it gets to a point of excess where it no longer is being proud of your ancestry, but turns into a lack of respect for others.

I should add one more thing. Any racist is insecure. I invite any listener to challenge that but I submit that…

Feder: I don’t think anyone would argue with that too much…

Jacobson: No, some may say that it comes out of a sense of superiority. Do you know why it’s insecurity? Because when you’re strong and confident with who you are, you have no reason to knock another person. I say that, in most cases, diminishing another makes you bigger, or makes you perceive yourself as greater.

Feder: Like bullies, right? They’re small on the inside so they have to be big on the outside, right?

Jacobson: Yes.

Feder: Let me pick up on something you said before. I don’t mean this to be just merely intellectual or philosophical as an argument, but if you had pride in your heritage, isn’t that part and parcel of the same type of separation that could lead to exactly the very thing that you don’t want? Do you see what I’m driving at?

Jacobson: Perfectly.

Feder: Aren’t they the same thing in a way? How about being proud to be a human, and leave it at that?

Jacobson: Well, if we weren’t created as diverse creatures, you’d be right. If our differences would be superficial and our sameness would be the only force in our lives, then eliminate the superficiality. But our diversity also happens to be healthy.

Allow me to give you an example. The human body. The human anatomy is a perfect example; the Bible says, “From my flesh I behold G-d,” so let’s use our own flesh as an example.

Let’s say there’s an organ (human organ) convention. All the organs get together and they say, “To truly experience bonding and experience each other, let us all become the heart for one week. Next week we’ll all become the mind. The next week we’ll all become the arms, the next week the legs, the next week the liver, the next week the glands, the lungs, and on and on.

What will happen? Not only won’t you have unity, but you’ll have destruction. Because the beauty of a healthy human body is, and this is the key, unity is not sameness. Unity is harmony within diversity. That’s the power of your body: harmony within diversity, where you have diverse elements, forces, billions of different cells. If you dissected a human body, G-d forbid, you would see different systems that are so contrary to each other – the circulatory system, the nervous system, the pulmonary system – where each works with different rules and different functions and yet they come together in one beautiful harmonious whole in a healthy body, and they complement each other.

Diversity in itself is not what causes conflict, it’s when there’s no coordinating voice saying, “You all work together.”

Take a project, for example. Any successful project requires diverse forces. Take a film: you need a producer, a director, actors, choreographers, screenwriters, music, art designers. Do you know when most projects fall apart? When jealousy takes over. When one person doesn’t know his or her role, and they begin to intrude on someone else’s boundaries and it becomes a mess.

When people are very secure and very confident in their particular position, and they don’t do what another person does, that, paradoxically, adds to the unity and you have one large project.

Feder: Now, I suspect that I know the answer to this question already, but I’ll ask it anyhow. And so the director of the human race in this movie that we’re making is who or what? I mean, who’s going to keep us from squabbling like this?

Jacobson: Okay, you thought I was going to answer G-d, right?

Feder: Yes.

Jacobson: Well, I was not going to answer G-d. Because G-d doesn’t intervene, you see? G-d can suggest a game plan and a blueprint and give us life, but He doesn’t intervene like a director can, and He doesn’t fire someone. He hires us all, but doesn’t fire us. We have that choice.

I think there’s a voice inside of you and me that’s a director. I would say it’s the essence of our souls. We essentially have diversity—you, Mike, have particular talents, you have particular strengths and particular weaknesses. I have mine, every human being on this planet has their musical note that they’re destined to play out. But we choose to either play that music or not to play it, and also choose whether we will see others as complementing us in this beautiful music.

We can choose to be completely selfish, narcissistic—”It’s my life, I don’t really care about anyone else. I only care about others as far as how much I can use them for my own needs”—or we can see life with a director inside of our souls so that when I bond with you as a friend, Mike, and I say “Okay, let’s collaborate,” or you say, “Let’s collaborate and do a radio show,” you bring your energy and I bring my energy here.

Sometimes it conflicts and you have your agenda and I have mine. Sometimes it synchronizes with each other beautifully, but the key is that our intentions and our objectives are coming from a director. Who’s the director? I think it’s a voice inside of you and a voice inside of me that both say, “This show is important, it’s good.” And it doesn’t mean that it’s always going to be the way you envision it, sometimes I have no idea where it’s going to head. I had no idea we would be talking about ourselves!

And then it comes together into something beautiful that people can benefit from, as we see in the mail and correspondence we receive: someone’s been touched. Some dynamic, some electricity is happening, some chemistry.

On a deeper level, it’s someone that you may love, or I may love, and you love them to the point where diversity is not only significant, indeed, the complementary part of it fuels the relationship; because each one bring something to the relationship. And you know that the commitment and the connection is deeper than our differences.

So you say, you know, this person is good in that area; I defer there. And you’re happy to defer. Sometimes you’re not happy. But it works out.

Feder: The basic document that this entire country is founded on, has one of the most important lines, and it’s an international recognized line, “All men (and I’m going to add women here) are created equal.”

Jacobson: Okay. What they mean by “men” is all people.

Feder: All people are created equal. This is true, right? Or not? Does this include diversity? What do they mean by that?

Jacobson: I’m glad you brought this up, because I was always intrigued by it.

Feder: The people who wrote this, by the way, owned slaves…but that’s another story.

Jacobson: I know, that’s the strange paradox. But I’ll say something that I want to quote from my Rebbe, my teacher, who said something very interesting. This statement, and I believe that when people’s intentions are pure and they are driven by higher goals than their own self interest, G-d works through them.

You asked me earlier about the director. I think the director is G-d in a way. But it’s not a G-d who intervenes. It’s a director who says “You access me, and I will then direct.”

It’s different from someone imposing. “You access Me through your soul, through your commitments, through your love, and then invite Me as a director and I will direct.”

I think the founding fathers, with all their flaws with the slaves, were divinely inspired, and I’ve heard this from my own teachers. You see it in the deep wisdom in the constitution that is really profound, and more importantly, they were men of weaknesses. They weren’t G-dly. They weren’t even religious necessarily in a sense. Yet they were able to produce such a powerful document. All men are created equal.

You know what it was? I think they understood, first of all, that the early Americans (I’m not getting into the atrocities with the Indians) but the early Americans came to this country for reasons of religious freedom. They didn’t come here because they were looking for gold. Most, at least. They were searching for a place that was not suffering the same persecution happening in Europe. And that, in a way, affected strongly the writers of the constitution in the sense that they understood that freedom must be guaranteed.

I mean, something needs to be said that we’re in a country that, a few hundreds years later, has withstood civil war, diversity, challenges, and remains the world superpower. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of problems in America, but one thing is for sure: you can do what you wish with your religious beliefs in this country. And that was not true 500 years ago. And it wasn’t true 100 years ago in most countries. And that’s a big, big tribute to a country. At least that it has created the environment where you can teach your children what you want to teach them… There are plenty of other challenges. But in a sense, legally, no one can arrest you for what you believe, no one can persecute you for your religious beliefs, and all men are created equal is a very biblical statement, in a way. “Created.” Very key word. They didn’t say, “All men are equal.” Why created? They could have said, all men are equal. It would have been more agnostic sounding.

But I believe they did it because they wanted to explain: how do you know all men (and women) are equal? Maybe all men and women are not equal? Maybe some are not equal.

Feder: But they’re created.

Jacobson: Since they’re created not by us but by G-d, that’s what makes them equal. No man can determine that, because people are not man’s creation. Had it said “all men are equal,” a scholar would say, “maybe they’re not.” Maybe just like when you watch nature shows, you see deer escaping from a lion. The weakest deer or the one that’s ill is going to get killed. So they weren’t so equal in a way. So perhaps human beings are also that way: survival of the fittest.

Not everyone’s fit. There’s one more powerful, wealthier, luckier, whatever.

But when you say “created” you are saying “No, my friend, it has nothing to do with human consensus and groups and votes. The higher force, G-d, determined that we’re equal by the mere statement, the mere fact, that we were created, born, exist. Two people walk on this earth; both are equal because G-d put them here.

It doesn’t matter if one is taller, wealthier, more handsome, more endowed, it doesn’t really matter. Existence is a statement that you matter, as I began, and I think that’s what the founding fathers intended. How they justified slavery with that completely eludes me, I have no idea…

Feder: It’s that same kind of crazy compartmentalization…

Jacobson: Yes, but they wrote “all men are created equal”, so they must have thought (distortedly) that the blacks at the time were not men. They must have thought of them as animals. That must be the way they justified it. I’m not justifying them, don’t get me wrong, I’m not justifying slavery, but that’s perhaps why they said they were like property. Once they freed them they measured them as a half of a vote, a quarter of a vote, they measured them differently.

But that’s not a justification. It can be based on the white’s ignorance. They thought that anyone that’s not their color must be of a different species.

Feder: Not even human.

Jacobson: Yes. And I must tell you a story that I have in my book, Toward a Meaningful Life…

Feder: Can I take a break first?

Jacobson: It’s not sacrilegious to take a break!

Feder: Good. Because one of the things I was created for was to do this right at this moment. You’re listening to Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson, and I’m Mike Feder. This is WEVD 1050 AM in New York. We are here every week from 6-7pm on Sunday evening.

Rabbi Jacobson is the director of the Meaningful Life Center in NY out of which a lot of things flow, and one of the main things that we talk about, that’s a blueprint for the program is the Rabbi’s book, Toward a Meaningful Life, published by William Morrow. Virtually every subject that we cover on this show, no matter how specific, general, or newsworthy, is covered in this book.

Let me give you some of the ways in which you can contact us or send us questions on the various topics you are listening to, anything that you have to direct towards us. The most important thing is the telephone number: 1-800-3MEANING or 1-800-363-2646. You can also email us at wisdomreb@meaningfullife.com. You can always write to us at: The Meaningful Life Center, 788 Eastern Parkway, Suite 303, Brooklyn, NY 11213.

I’d like to also tell you that we have a new website (still under construction) where you can download transcripts of this program, and previous and future programs. It’s www.meaningfullife.com.

You were going to tell a story, if I haven’t jogged you too far off the path…

Jacobson: No, not at all. The story is in the book Toward a Meaningful Life, when Mayor Dinkins came to Crown Heights around the time of the racial riots in the summer of 1991—a result of a tragic car accident followed by a stabbing of a yeshiva student, Yankel Rosenbaum—and Mayor Dinkins, a black mayor, came to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, in Crown Heights for a blessing. One of the things he said to him was, he asked for a blessing for unity among the different races or peoples: the blacks, the Jews, the whites. And the Rebbe interestingly said, “Not different peoples, one people under one administration, under one G-d.” That’s what he said.

And this struck me, and I told this story in the chapter on “love.” Because what struck me was, obviously this is coming from a religious man, a bible expert of course, is that the Rebbe was referring to the fact that G-d created all human beings in the divine image. That makes them all one people. Not one person, mind you, not all similar, we’re not clones—there are different races and different colors and different backgrounds, different traditions and different religions—but he wanted to emphasize not two peoples. In a succinct way, as he often did to relay a profound philosophy that we’re touching upon here, “Who are we?”

Racism is a direct result of a misunderstanding of who we are, or let’s put it this way: a distorted understanding of who we are as people. Who are we on this earth?

If we see ourselves as one large family and in a large family, one may be an engineer, one is a doctor, one is eccentric, and one is more intellectually oriented, a mother or father loves all their children equally.

There may be unhealthy situations where favoritisms exist, but in a healthy situation, I don’t think a mother with 20 children…love can’t be chopped up. It’s not like, you have only a 20^th of my love and I’m only going to give it to one child. It doesn’t work that way.

You love each one in his or her own way. If we saw the entire human race as one large family under G-d, all men and women are created equal, that is essentially the root of unity. Disunity, or racism, is a result of externals, superficials. You’re not like me. Or ultimately what went on in WWII in the Holocaust and now in other ways with the ethnic cleansing in Kosova. — The term always struck me as strange, “ethnic cleansing,” it almost sounds like laundry detergent…

Feder: It’s definitely a weird term…

Jacobson: But it’s essentially genocide, to be specific, which is the most grotesque outgrowth of the lack of understanding of a larger family that is diverse yet unified like one large organism.

Now, this sounds somewhat utopian. Can we really expect the human race to live up to that type of attitude? Diversity does lead to conflict. Because who’s going to run the show at the end of the day? Will it be the Americans, or the original Native Americans who lived here? Will it be the Palestinians or the Israelis? You have diverse views that are conflicting.

So it’s not easy to implement, but I still stand by the philosophy. The question is, how do you take a philosophy like that, where diversity is as valuable and as sacred as unity, and how do you bring it into actualization and governance. Governing a people where there’s a minority, or where there are many minorities. What do you do?

How do you maintain democracy where the majority rules? The majority can write a rule that discriminates against a minority. So it’s a very important question and I don’t think has a simple answer. But since this show is about racism, I think what lies at the heart of racism is a flagrant distortion of one’s entire view of mankind, or as you quoted, “All men and women are created equal,” which very much complements what it says on our currency: “In G-d we trust.”

In a country, where the separation of church and state is so sacred, I find it both amazing that the basis of all human rights in this country are based on the words “created equal,” and “In G-d we trust,” and “E pluribus unum.”

What does it say on the back of some of our currency?

Feder: My Latin is poor, can you translate?

Jacobson: Well, e pluribus unum is “the many are one.” Essentially, again, the appreciation that diversity leads to a higher unity.

Feder: So this is obviously the ideal of America, it certainly isn’t, unfortunately, the practice throughout our history.

Jacobson: But, I’ll tell you something. Better to have an ideal that’s pure and grow toward it, or…

Feder: Or to have no ideal at all.

Jacobson: Or a bad ideal. Because then at least, so to speak, their sights are set. That’s where I want to reach. Many may not reach there, but you know that that’s the objective. We aspire that goal.

Feder: Let me ask you this and it’s a question you brought up yourself before; it’s a question I had written down when I was thinking about the program earlier today. You mentioned the riots, the tremendous conflict that went on in Crown Heights between blacks and Jews out in Brooklyn. In New York City it’s a tremendous subject that’s been going on for the last 20 or 30 years that there’s trouble between blacks and Jews in New York City. It is even, sometimes, seen as a national problem.

You’ve got a guy like Louis Farrakhan, who has what he calls the Nation of Islam, whatever, I’m not sure what that means, but he calls it the Nation of Islam, and he and his minions are preaching hatred of the Jews. It’s not something new, but it’s fascinating to me that when you look at one group that’s been oppressed for most of its history, and another group that’s been oppressed for most of its history, tearing at each other’s throats. It’s astounding. And I have to admit, I’ve heard plenty of Jews in my time be utter racists toward black people. So it’s coming from both sides. It’s astounding. You’d think, of all people, that these people would get together.

I don’t know if there’s a question in there, but it’s something that’s of serious concern to blacks and Jews.

Jacobson: Well I remember when my book came out, and I was on Pittsburgh radio, an all-black station that was interested in interviewing me, and they had call-ins. It was a very fascinating show, I liked it a lot. And one of the call-ins said, “Okay. We hear about your rabbis and teachers and great men, but why don’t you respect, equally, our great rabbi, brother Farrakhan?”

So I said, calmly, “Well, what are you referring to?”

He said, “You hear all kinds of bad statements about him from the press, from the Jews.”

So I said, “Well, it’s hard to ignore a statement that Jews have been sucking the blood of blacks for so long.”

And he responded, “But what happens if it’s true?”

So I said, “Let me tell you this. If my rabbi and my great leader made a statement that all blacks suck the blood of the Jews, or all blacks are murderers because one black murdered someone, I would call him on it. There’s no rabbi, no authority, that’s beyond accountability.”

So then again he said, “But what happens if it’s true?”

So I said, “Okay, let’s dissect that statement. You know, on radio, you’re able to do this. And the host of the show, to her credit, a black woman but she allowed me to speak, and I said, “All Jews have sucked the blood of the blacks for so long… What do you mean by all Jews? Exactly which Jews? Like the few million Jews in the Soviet Union that have just been released and for 60 years were unable to travel outside of their country? Do you mean the Jews in Israel? Do you mean the Jews in Morocco? In France? What exactly do you mean by all Jews? Do you mean the Jews in New York? Detroit?

“So any statement ‘all Jews’ is immediately very dubious,” I said.

Feder: Just like “all” anybody.

Jacobson: Right. So I said, “Bring me a statistic of a Jew that sucked the blood of a black man and we can discuss it case by case. Don’t give me these blanket statements. And I would not want anyone to give you those blanket statements. Then I added something, because the gentleman on the radio kept saying, “Not blacks. African-Americans.”

So I said, “I must tell you that I live on a block where people are resentful when you call them African-Americans because they’re from the Caribbean Islands. They want to be called blacks. Because they don’t come from Africa, not even their ancestry.

Feder: Well, I think originally perhaps.

Jacobson: Okay but there are people that don’t want to be called African-Americans. Their ancestry is from the islands in the Caribbean.

Feder: So that’s how they prefer to identify themselves.

Jacobson: Yes. Right. You know, where they originally came from, I don’t know, exactly. They all came from Africa?

Feder: Most of the slaves, yes I think so.

Jacobson: Even the people living on the islands south of the United States?

Feder: Yeah. I think so. From my reading of history, but I’m no expert.

Jacobson: Because I have some neighbors who said “I don’t want to be called that.” And the point is that everyone has the right to be called what they want to be called and what struck me on that show were these blatant irrational statements that people just buy into, because there are a few factors.

Money is a factor; people want to make a buck and get publicity. Sometimes by inciting a group who have been oppressed and say, “Hey, let’s go get the other group.” So the intentions are very impure. Such leaders are essentially corrupt. They’re exploiting situations, they’re exploiting anger, they’re exploiting poverty by saying “Let’s rise up to the occasion,” whatever it is.

All racism is that way. And the same would be if a Jew would be racist toward a black, or for that matter, to anyone else… Anyone who studies Torah knows, that although there are laws that govern and discuss many issues, including Jews and non-Jews, and so on, the number one principle is, that everyone was created in the divine image, G-d created every human being on this earth, and therefore, their value is Divine.

Now, I’ll just use an example of one of the Rebbes who, when he was a little child, was walking with his father in the garden. And he tore a leaf off a tree and began rubbing it. His father rebuked him and said, “What right do you have to tear a leaf off the tree? G-d put it there. You’re destroying life for no purpose.”

Now, if that’s the attitude even for a leaf on a tree, you can imagine the attitude of Judaism and Torah toward a human being. No matter what race, what color, what age, what mental status. Including someone that is in a completely handicapped state.

There is no such thing as inferiority and superiority in the eyes of G-d. This statement that “all men are created equal” is completely biblical from my point of view, completely Torah-oriented.

When anyone makes a discriminatory statement, it’s coming out of ignorance or out of just racial slurs that a person picks up at school or at home.

Feder: So we’re talking about an ideal that we want to aspire to, like in the Declaration of Independence, or in the Torah. I mean, after all, there really is no group on the earth, even to this very day, who is immune from racism, correct? It happens everywhere, among every group, every people, every religion all the time.

Jacobson: I want to cite one of the ways that we identify the Messianic Age, an age of unity. This is a verse in Isaiah’s prophecy, and this is a key point.

Feder: Messianic, as in, a Messiah is coming.

Jacobson: Yes. Messianic means an age where the world will come to a greater unity, where, as Maimonides puts it, instead of famine, discord, anger, war, there will be unity, peace, appreciation of one another among our diversity. Isaiah says in his prophecy: “There will be no more destruction and evil on my holy mountain. Why? Because the world will be filled with divine knowledge as the waters cover the sea.”

The question is asked, what does one thing have to do with the other? There are many people who are knowledgeable and who are destructive and warlike and angry and jealous and so on. The key operative word here is knowledge. Knowledge brings one to tolerance, it brings to co-existence. Ignorance is the opposite, the antithesis. It brings one to discord, distrust, jealousies.

Because knowledge is not just information and facts. Knowledge is a deep understanding of life, of why we are here, of an inner confidence that “I matter,” that I am important, I have something to contribute to this world, and that always brings one to a maturity that allows one to tolerate an opposing opinion.

You’ll always see the sign of a wise person, someone who is truly wise, a sage, because they have the ability to remain silent in the face of an adversary, of someone disagreeing. They may argue or not argue, depending on the situation. There’s a certain peace of mind, a certain tranquility that comes with knowledge. And in the age that we live in, it’s very easy when your primary time and energy is focused on survival—getting my bills paid—to find scapegoats, or get incited when things don’t go right, economically or personally, and focus of that inner knowledge is not such a primary force. This is what directly leads to a racist attitude.

I was once delayed in an airport flying down south somewhere, and I was sitting near a fellow, and there were thunderstorms going on outside and so our flights were delayed. So we just sat there. He was going to North Carolina and I was going elsewhere and he had to make a phone call. So he asked me if I’d watch his suitcase while he is gone. I said of course. And of course what I did next was I ripped him off—no, I’m just kidding—so he went to make his phone call but I could see that he was very wary and he came back and he said to me, “You know, I don’t really trust you, but instinctively there’s something that I do trust about you.”

Feder: That’s an odd statement. I don’t trust you but I do trust you.

Jacobson: Yes. Listen to this. We began this fascinating conversation that lasted two-three hours, waiting. It was too late to do anything but stay there. We were going, or not going…

So we’re sitting in this airport, and airports, when you’re waiting, tend to lend themselves to interesting conversations, because suddenly you make new friends while you’re waiting, on the plane. There’s a certain superficial intimacy that’s created in such environments.

Feder: Well, you’re headed off in another direction soon, so…

Jacobson: Meanwhile, you’re both victims, you’re both stuck there. So he says to me, “You know, I am an anti-Semite.”

Feder: Just like that?!

Jacobson: Yeah. And he says, “From birth. Education. I just dislike Jews. And it’s irrational, but that’s how it is, and you’re included.” And he was like cold-blooded about it, no passion, and he said, “It’s just inherent. You’re a nice guy. I can talk to you. But there’s something that I will always hate.”

We had a very interesting conversation. I said, “But you did trust me with the suitcases,” and he said, “Yes” Because his intellect overrode his emotions. But he was almost like a professional anti-Semite, like someone hired, and he described his childhood and so on. And I said to him, “You know, I have nothing in me that dislikes you even after you tell me you’re an anti-Semite. I just have empathy for you. I think you are locked and I think it spills over into areas that are far beyond me and far beyond Jews. I’m sure that you can irrationally just dislike anybody. Because if something so illogical can control you, then how can you be trusted with anybody or anything? You may just suddenly and irrationally turn against women, with some excuse: you’ve been spurned, or whatever it is.”

An interesting conversation, indeed. It was quite a few years ago.

Feder: Do you think he learned something from this or changed at all?

Jacobson: My naïve side likes to believe so, but my other side thinks not. You know the story they say about the philosopher, they say it about Maimonides, there was an argument between two philosophers whether or not you can train an animal to act like a human. And they trained this cat to be a waiter in a restaurant.

So here’s this cat dressed in a tuxedo with a tie carrying a tray with champagne, hors d’oeuvres. One philosopher says to the next, or to Maimonides: “See, animals can be trained to be humans. So humans aren’t that special after all.” At that point Maimonides went out to a pet shop, bought back two mice and put them in a bag, and returned to the restaurant.

As they’re sitting there and this guy is waxing eloquent about the virtues of animals and humans being alike, the other philosopher opens the bag and the mice start scurrying about.

The cat in his tuxedo drops the tray, gets down on all fours, and goes chasing the mice. In other words, given the natural inclination of a cat to eat a mouse, all the training which was superimposed became secondary.

Feder: And the moral is…

Jacobson: The moral is that there is certain ingrained racism that I’d like to believe can be eliminated—you asked me if I had an effect on him—but sometimes I feel that it’s so deeply engrained that just throw two more mice down and he’ll go after them.

I truly believe that every person can become educated to become less racist, but it’s an effort for some people because it requires going against the grain of some very primitive feelings.

Feder: And this brings me to my next question before we take a break and head into the end of the program. When I was growing up, I was brought up by some pretty decent people. There were a lot of people in my family. Some of the people I didn’t respect, some of them I really like, my grandmother especially I respected, but they referred eternally to the goyim. I mean, every Jew in my neighborhood where I grew up, and I want to be honest about this, because this is an experience that a lot of people out there may have had, which is a derogatory term for anybody who is not a Jew, but perhaps especially a Christian: the goyim. And this was said with utter contempt by almost every Jew of my grandmother’s age, and she was a pretty educated decent women. And they’re nice to everyone else, right?

And the other question I ask is, and this goes along with too, is, we had in my family, like a lot of people do, there was a woman who cleaned our house when I was growing up in the fifties, who was black, and I was once eating off a plate my mother (who is otherwise very fair-minded) walks in the house and said, “I hope you cleaned that plate first.”

This is how I was brought up in my neighborhood. This is not an uncommon thing. So this leads me to my next question and then I’ll leave it to you, and then we’ll take a break in a little while, is it possible, and I want you to be completely honest about this, to have grown up in the United States of America and not really be a racist?

Jacobson: Well, I don’t see a direct link to that and the experiences you’ve had.

Feder: I’m saying that almost everybody that I’ve ever met, if they were really honest, said, “Yes. It’s in there somewhere.” So how do you deal with it. How do you root out that thing which is in your bones in America. Hard question, you know?

Jacobson: I don’t know if America—why would you pick out America more than other countries?

Feder: Just because we’re living here, because that’s where our experiences are.

Jacobson: If anything, America is more tolerant. America has given rights, legally, which we voted (what people do individually is one thing) that legally in this country, we have more tolerance for minorities than any country that ever existed.

So I wouldn’t single out America here. I would talk about individuals. I’m just making that as a statement. I don’t say it as a patriot, I say it also as a tribute. You have to recognize the fact that this country, with all the flaws and all the racism that exists, even in high levels of government, still, legally has continued to build an approach of equality—trying at least—some are sincere, some are just pandering for votes, but it doesn’t matter. Legal laws definitely state the equality of all people. I’m very impressed when I see those legal statements at the bottom that say “Equal Lending Act” or such things.

Feder: Equal Opportunity.

Jacobson: Clearly it’s not always lived up to, and there is corruption and shams. But there is a legal element, and it has to ultimately have an impact, because it’s legal. And you could take it to court, and slowly it has changed things. Newsweek just had an article about the state of blacks in this country, a very positive article, how things have gotten better. I’m sure many blacks will disagree.

But Newsweek published it, they interviewed enough scholars—I’m not saying they’re the last word—but the fact that they have the chutzpah to publish it says something.

Feder: So the laws and the structure are here to do the right thing.

Jacobson: Right. I think that needs to be recognized, because it creates that type of environment. Remember there were times when such laws did not exist. There was a time that anybody could be plucked out of their home and be arrested and harassed. So, in a relative sense, there’s been some progress.

Now, I want to address specifically what you spoke about. As a Jew I want to address it.

The goyim.

Feder: I heard that all my life.

Jacobson: Well, first of all, the word goyim, in Hebrew, means nations, just for your information. That doesn’t mean that the way it’s used by many people is to just say “nations,” as you said, it was dripping with cynicism or it was derogatory. But I want to address that. I really feel I must address that.

The word goyim itself does mean nations, nations of the world.

Feder: It’s not the way the people I heard said it.

Jacobson: I understand. I’m not talking about the spirit, I just wanted to define the word for a moment, for the record. That’s one thing.

One of the biggest issues in my mind is the issue of distinguishing between people and the system. If G-d gave us a system to live by, it’s critical that we do not allow people to define that system or else it ceases to be G-dlike, it becomes human.

And human means subject to corruption, to all the weaknesses that people have. It also means subjective. I’m not going to criticize your grandmother, or my grandmother, or anyone else. I’ll just say this. All my knowledge of Judaism: the spirit of Judaism, the law of Judaism, the letter of the law and beyond the letter of the law, between the lines — all of this is about the respect for all creatures, and for all human beings, regardless of if they are Jewish or non-Jewish. The mere fact that G-d created every individual gives him or her Divine affirmation, Divine value.

It’s not because you like them, you see, that’s the key. It’s not because you like someone that makes them good, or the fact that you dislike them that makes them bad. It’s because G-d created them that makes them good. Because G-d created them, they therefore have a divine purpose for their existence.

That doesn’t mean a person can’t become a criminal. I person can take that purpose and submerge it, and behave atrociously and hurt others, and then they should be punished and locked up, or whatever it is.

But the person themselves, the fact that they exist, the creature, is G-dly. That’s fundamental in Jewish thought. So the fact that many Jews can make racist statements like the way you describe is their thing. And I agree, it could be a large group as well. Statistics don’t change the fact.

Feder: Oh, I think it can change over generations.

Jacobson: I think the fact is we live in a world where human beings are stereotyped. I always say this. I think stereotypes are the single most invisible enemy in human relations. Do you know why? Because stereotypes are invisible. If you told me, Mike, like this guy told me, “I’m an anti-Semite, I dislike you.” For me, that’s easier to deal with than a stereotype, do you know why? Because a stereotype is invisible. You don’t even know you have it. You think that you’re right. You think that you’re objective.

It’s like this invisible wall, and I continuously experience it, I dress a certain way, people see me, and they immediately draw conclusions.

Feder: You have your beard, you have your yarmulke…

Jacobson: So I will often address that very directly by saying, “You don’t want to be stereotyped, I don’t want to be stereotyped.” You know why we stereotype, I think? And which is directly connected to racism. Because it’s easy to do so. We like to file things away. “You see a person like that? Oh, he must belong on this shelf.”

It’s easy and it’s convenient, and it also gives us a false sense of control, because by steretyping you feel like you know where people belong. But nobody likes to be stereotyped. Stereotyping is very much a result of ignorance, and I would say that all of our communities, including Jews as individuals, can be affected and contaminated by the stereotyping of others.

Feder: Okay. We’re going to have to take a break here as we’re approaching the end of the story. We want to say that we’re deeply grateful to Greta Sarfaty-Marchant for underwriting and helping to bring this program to you today.

We have just maybe two minutes left. We’ve been talking about racism. In two minutes, is there any kind of final comment you’d like to leave with people? I think we talked before about how to deal with this, but what can we say about such a massive illness that we’re all surrounded by?

Jacobson: This goes back to a theme that’s been recurrent on our show, and that’s respecting ourselves, respecting others. It’s important to know that you matter, that everything you do matters, that your life is not just some circumstantial blip or circumstantial accident, it is driven by a higher purpose. Racism, all forms of it, especially when it takes on discriminatory nature, is a crime against G-d and a crime against YOURSELF. It’s a crime against your own soul. Because in a way, if we’re all brothers and sisters, and we’re all part of a larger family, if you write off your brother, do you think you’re not affected by that?

Feder: So we are our brother’s keeper.

Jacobson: And they are ours. Our brothers are our keepers. But keeper meaning, in a sense, in the certain responsibility and sensitivity to each other, and this requires a constant awareness and consciousness that comes down to simply being a kinder, gentler person, more generous, and paying attention to things that we take for granted. Stereotypes and racism often is just a habit, it becomes a vicious cycle by habit. So it’s important to stop ourselves and just say, “Hey, where am I going with my life? Isn’t there something greater, something more beautiful, more sensitive to this world than just my own foolish stereotypes?”

Feder: Thank you.

Tags: radio transcript, justice, inequality, founding fathers
Posted in Trending, Social, Racism | No Comments »

Who Killed Jesus?

July 28th, 2015

Tags: psychology, anti-semitism, Christianity, history
Posted in Social, Racism | 1 Comment »

Organ Donation: Is it Permitted?

July 28th, 2015

To Rabbi Jacobson

I was just curious why when a Jew gets a driver’s license he is not allowed to donate his organs if the person dies. I know you are not supposed to, but would it not be considered a Mitzvah to save another’s life?

Thanks a lot
Josh
—–

Dear Josh,

Thanks for writing. Even though you write that you are “just curious,” be aware that the answer to your question requires an elaborate discussion.

After this qualification, I will try to give you the short answer:

Our bodies do not belong to us. They are G-d’s gift to us to utilize as a vehicle for our soul’s journey in the material world. We are charged with the responsibility to protect and keep our bodies healthy, and use them to serve the purpose for which they were created. (For more on this see the chapter on Body and Soul and Health and Fitness in my book Toward A Meaningful Life).

We therefore have no right to mutilate, harm or in any way destroy our bodies. Upon death we must return our bodies intact as they were given to us. “Dust you are and to dust you shall return.” This is why cremation and autopsies are prohibited. The body must be returned to G-d as He gave it to us. When someone gives you a gift you return it to him/her intact, not burned or dissected.

The same is true regarding organ donations. Whether we understand it or not, our responsibility is to return to G-d our bodies as intact as we can. It is also clear that G-d would not allow someone to die or be denied health as a result of our not donating our organs.

Needless to say, as it is with all Torah law, different laws apply when there is an immediate life and death situation and a life can be saved by using the organ of someone just deceased. A competent rabbi needs to be consulted to determine the situation on a case by case basis.

However this life and death rule does not apply to general organ donations, which may or may not be used to save a life. Indeed, these organs may just be stored, and in many known instances organs have even been known to be left not used and ultimately discarded. It is also well known that organs are primarily used for research purposes.

The bottom line is that the Torah engenders in us an appreciation for the sanctify of life, the sanctity of both the soul and the body. We must treat our bodies with sensitivity knowing that it is a Divine gift. If our attitude to our bodies is this way after death, how much more so would our sensitivity be to life — our own and others — during lifetime.

I hope this was helpful. Thanks for writing and please write again.

Blessings and best wishes,
Simon Jacobson

Tags: death, Jewish law, organ donation
Posted in Social, Medicine | 1 Comment »

Sound & Fury: Issues in the Deaf Community

July 28th, 2015

Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson
Radio Show Transcript – November 5, 2000

Rabbi Simon Jacobson: Welcome. It’s been a while since we’ve been on the air because of the Jewish holiday season (since the holidays were mostly on Sundays). It’s a pleasure to be back—hopefully to a year of meaningful discussions and things that touch and relate to the real elements of life.

In that context, the topic of tonight’s show is “Sound and Fury,” which we’ll discuss in just a minute.

I have a guest with me, my friend Josh Aronson, which brings me back years and years, personally and nostalgically.

Aronson: Thank you Simon. It’s wonderful to be here with you.

Jacobson: I give a class every Wednesday night on the Upper West Side of Manhattan but it used to be in Brooklyn, so Josh is from the original veterans back then.

Aronson: In your living room.

Jacobson: Right. In 1984, and we had those long-night discussions.

I asked Josh to come on the show for a particular reason: because Josh Aronson has been a film director for many years, but recently, playing now in New York as we speak, John has released a film which he Executive Produced and directed…

Aronson: The producer is my friend Roger Weisberg.

Jacobson: Josh directed this fascinating documentary Sound and Fury, which I saw today. It’s playing right now until Tuesday at the Film Forum in New York City on West Houston St.

Aronson: Unless it gets extended, because it’s doing great. And it’s opening across the country in the next couple of months.

Jacobson: It was a chosen selection for the Sundance Film Festival. The reviewers in the New York Times write, “Sound and Fury is powerful, insightful, important and emotionally wrenching.” The Christian Science Monitor calls it, “Dealing with base rock human emotions” and throughout I see amazing reviews.

Now the film itself is an 80-minute documentary that deals with the issue of the deaf community, the deaf culture. What’s intriguing about it, and I speak as a viewer, was it deals with a conflict which one wouldn’t assume would really be happening: the conflict over the new technology of the cochlear implant, an implant that is implanted in the ear, that allows people who have either been born deaf or who have turned deaf to hear sounds and therefore give them the opportunity to begin to speak.

The conflict is that many people in the deaf community found that to be an intrusion and, as a matter of fact, were opposed to it and did not want to use that technology for their children.

In this film, John juxtaposed the two seemingly conflicting worlds. It seems like a logical thing to do. You would think that if a child couldn’t hear, the first thing a parent would do is to use the available technology just as in any type of illness. You go for a cure.

But here you find an interesting backlash where people who are very proud and who have, in a sense, adjusted to being in the deaf culture as they call it, are really against it.

I guess that was really what intrigued you in doing this film, because it wasn’t just about a deaf person and technology, it was this tension of conflict.

Aronson: That’s exactly what attracted me to the story. Like you, I didn’t know about the conflict in the deaf world when I found this story three or four years ago. But I met a woman in her thirties who had recently had a cochlear implant. She had lost her hearing when she was about ten years old so she had some oral skills because she was able to speak up until the time she was ten. But then she’d been deaf for 20 years, living in a signing-deaf community. She learned to sign and functioned that way, and she loved being in that deaf cultural community. She decided to get a cochlear implant because she was told it might restore her hearing enough to speak on the telephone, and since she had a job as a salesperson that’s what she did.

In fact, it did restore her hearing overnight and she could talk on the phone. There’s a long caveat to that because it doesn’t happen that way for everyone. Because she had some skills speaking and she had some experience, she was able to do it that quickly. But that’s a different story.

I found all of that interesting, but when she told me that her signing deaf friends of 20 years had rejected her out of hand, effectively shunning her when she got the cochlear implant, I realized that there was a real story here and that’s what attracted me.

One thing that’s important to understand, and I think that’s what gives the deaf culture its power and resonance, when you’re with people in the deaf cultural community, it’s not the cochlear implant that’s divided the deaf community. The cochlear implant is the climax of a battle that’s been going on for 200 years between people who sign and people who try to lip read and speak and function as handicapped deaf people within the hearing world.

It’s a totally different life choice. It’s a totally different identity. And those two worlds have been at war over whether or not children should be brought up to sign or to speak.

Jacobson: To help the layman get an exact picture of this, what exactly is a cochlear implant? What differentiates it from a hearing aid for instance?

Aronson: Well, it’s a totally different concept from a hearing aid. First of all, the cochlear implant is a surgically implanted device. The difference between an implant and a hearing aid is that the hearing aid will amplify the sound that your particular ear is already capable of hearing. So if you’re only hearing certain frequencies, it will amplify those frequencies.

Sometimes it’s really amplifying noise and is effectively doing nothing other than giving you a headache.

The cochlear implant on the other hand can cause you to hear frequencies you never heard before because it’s a surgically implanted device that stimulates the auditory nerve and allows it to hear sounds it never heard before.

If I get too much more complicated than that I’ll lose everybody.

Jacobson: No, that’s fine. Since when has it been approved for use?

Aronson: The critical thing that happened in the last couple of years is that it was approved for implantation in children under 18 months. Before that we’ve had it for years, and they’ve implanted them to varying degrees of success in people up to 80 years old. Adults often got it.

But the fact that they are all of a sudden implanting children is what drove the deaf cultural community crazy. It was so effective in children, they realized that those children may well not learn sign, and they thought that there would be a real decline in the use of sign language and in the actual numbers of the deaf cultural community. So it’s in the last 3-5 years that children have been implanted.

Jacobson: What I found amazing when I saw the film—I was surprised and even disarmed—was the legitimacy of the case of the deaf culture. Those who sign presented their case very passionately and very effectively, and I’m a hearing person. What impressed me was not so much the pride that they have, that a person is deaf and has pride and has been successful at work so why undermine that type of pride (i.e., “my children will also be successful”) but it was more than that: that the wiring of the mind, the psychological compensation that a person who is deaf has gone through is a price that they pay, and that price is a very bold price and something that has to be respected.

One of the fathers who refuses to use this implant on his daughter makes the case that to tamper with that is affecting his child’s welfare, because she’s really a deaf person. Her mind is deaf, her personality is a deaf person’s personality, and what you’re simply doing is forcing her to use some type of technology to go against her psychological wiring. That was his case.

Now I don’t really have an argument against that except if, for instance, technology gets to a point where you can entirely heal everyone who’s deaf, that’s one thing. But as long as there’s a culture that’s still deaf, it’s a big argument. What do you think about that?

Aronson: Well, I can argue both sides, because as you hopefully will agree, the film is very balanced and does not take a point of view. I try to allow both sides of the story to express themselves. But I went through the deaf world in my research and I tried very hard to understand both sides and be compassionate for both sides so that in making the film we could be completely balanced and not take a perspective, which is different from my own personal perspective.

But if you’re taking the perspective now of the deaf culture and understanding how they might not want to implant their child, I’ll take the other side for a moment.

The down side of not implanting your children is that you’re forcing your child to live within a deaf cultural community in America that has 3 or 400,000 people in it. It’s extremely difficult to get a job. It’s very, very hard to make a living, and you’re limiting your interaction with the outside hearing world to a huge degree and you’re limiting the choices that your child has.

In fact, a child can learn sign language and can learn to speak and function in the hearing world with a cochlear implant. That’s basically the argument on the other side.

The rub is, and what’s difficult, and what the character whom you’re talking about would further say (his name is Peter Artinian).

Jacobson: These are the actual people in the film…

Aronson: Yes, just so we’re not talking in a vacuum, we should take a minute to describe the film.

I wanted to tell the story of this conflict in the deaf world in which I viewed that the cochlear implant was the climax of a 200-year-old battle. The plan was to interview people across America and find five people who represented the range of experience in the hearing world and I did that. I spent a year researching and interviewing people across America, becoming a lay expert in deafness, winning the trust of people in the deaf cultural world as well as the oral deaf world. I isolated several characters and began filming them.

Along the way, we met this family called the Artinian family on Long Island, and in the family there’s deafness that runs on several sides of the family through several generations. Effectively, for the film, there are two brothers who are in their thirties. They both have children. One brother, Peter Artinian, is deaf and is married to a deaf woman and they have three deaf children. The other brother is Chris, who does hear, and who is married to a hearing woman. The hearing brother is married to a hearing woman who has deaf parents. So there’s obviously a lot of recessive deaf genes floating around this family. But the hearing brother and his hearing wife have three children. Two are hearing and one is deaf. So two brothers both have deaf children.

The hearing brother decided to implant his child because they made the decision that it would be useful to have that skill within the family for that child.

Peter, the deaf brother, is very unhappy because he wasn’t consulted. In the course of things, his five-year-old daughter Heather, who’s profoundly deaf, who signs perfectly, who’s happy as a clam (a delightful, brilliant child who will make you cry in this movie, she’s so beautiful) announces that she wants to have a cochlear implant. She tells her Mom and Dad that she wants to talk on the telephone and she wants to talk to her grandmother and she wants to talk to her hearing friends.

Jacobson: And I remember her saying she wants to hear a car crash.

Aronson: There’s an amazing interview where I asked her why she wanted to hear so much and she said she wants to hear a car crash and she wants to hear a house collapse. She says she wants to hear a ghost say “Boo!” There are a lot of things on her list that she wants to hear. She’s quite a girl.

Anyway, Peter and Nita, her parents, decide to pursue it in an adult way because this is what their child is asking for. That’s the journey of the film, as Peter and his deaf wife look into the possibility of a cochlear implant for Heather. Ultimately they make a decision that tears the family apart because the hearing parents of the two brothers become part of the fray, and it becomes a family drama. I threw away all the other characters that I mentioned before. My producer and I looked at the footage in the editing room and decided that this was our story and it became a theatrical movie about this family.

We stayed with them for a year and a half, and we watched this family continue to love each other but effectively fall apart over the issue of the cochlear implant. The conflict in this family mirrored the conflict within the deaf world. It’s a real metaphor for what’s happening in the deaf world.

Jacobson: I found particularly strong the interaction between the father, Peter, and the deaf son. The father says, “You are handicapped. You just don’t want to deal with it.”

Aronson: Yes. He says, “Look, we have to acknowledge that this is a handicap and we have the technology to fix it.” Deaf people don’t like to talk about deafness as something that needs to be fixed because they think that they’re fine the way they are.

(Announcement break regarding obtaining a copy of “Meanings,” the free newsletter of the Meaningful Life Center. Call 1-800-363-2646 or write to us at wisdomreb@meaningfullife.com or write Meaningful Life Center, Suite 303, 788 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11213 to receive your free copy.)

Jacobson: Now let’s not forget Josh, that we studied Torah together back in the 80’s. Kenny Vance introduced us. I know that when Phillip Namanworth, who produces this radio show and is an assistant to me in my work, wasn’t able to come to my class, I suggested that he begin studying at home, and I believe that you were his chavrusa, Hebrew for study partner. So your claim to fame is not just Sound and Fury, it’s also your roots. Let’s not forget that.

Aronson: Being with you here, Simon, speaking about the Sound and Fury is wonderful, reminding me of your class and Kenny Vance, who brought me to your class. As you know, I’m making my next film about Kenny and the Planotones, we’re here…

Jacobson: Kenny is a musician, singer songwriter, who was in Jay and the Americans.

Aronson: He actually founded Jay and the Americans in the 60s and now he’s in a band called Kenny Vance and the Planotones. He did the soundtrack for the movie “Looking for an Echo,” that his friend Marty Davidson directed which is opening this week. And then, it’s such a small world because we made our deal with a wonderful distributor, Artistic License, that’s run by Sandy Zeig and one of her colleagues is Ronny Guttman who comes to your class.

Jacobson: So this is the show you have to listen to if you want to know what’s on the cutting edge of film…

But anyway, getting back to this film which has so many different angles, and I’m just sorry we can’t cover them all, one of the things that always intrigues me when you deal with silence and sound, as also in the film a few years ago, Children of a Lesser G-d, is that in many ways silence teaches us about sound more than sound does. Number one, just watching your film, the appreciation that one should have, that we take for granted as a given, of being born with ears and hearing well. And here are families tearing themselves apart with the struggle, the fragility of the human body and the gift of being able to hear sounds and music. The passion that you hear in a deaf person speaking about… in one scene there, one of the people in the film says, “I don’t hear music. That’s not my reality. I have other things that I do.”

Aronson: She says, “I don’t care about music. I can’t hear. I’ve never heard music.”

Jacobson: So someone says to her, “You can’t hear the rain falling,” and she says, “I feel the rain falling.” The power of just being able to rewire your mind to that reality and experience it differently is just amazing and it has a lot of mystical parallels because, as a matter of fact, it says in the Bible, when the Jews stood at Mount Sinai, that they “heard the sights and they saw the sounds,” which they call synesthesia today. In other words, there are people who, when they see a vision, they actually hear sounds.

This touches upon another point. I have a good friend, Marcia Schwartz, who often calls into this show, who’s unable to see, but she’s taught me more about sight than people who can see, because in a way, the eclipse of the sun teaches you more about sunlight because you begin to appreciate it differently. You look at what exactly is sound and what are the tools that we use to process it.

Many times we look for silence. Silence is a very sacred thing today. Sometimes people just want to meditate, they want silence. There are too many sounds in our lives. You can’t listen to your soul when you’re busy with all the external sounds.

I know that’s not the particular theme here but, in a way, when he makes a case for not using the implant, one can say that there’s a certain embracing of silence that these people have had and have and they don’t want it to be tampered with.

Aronson: To give a little background, when I first started interviewing deaf people for the film, I heard many culturally deaf people tell me that when their children were born deaf they celebrate. They’re so happy that they have deaf children. And if deaf people have children who are hearing, it’s not that they don’t love them, of course they love them, but they shed a tear because their children are so different than they are.

That’s an amazing idea to think about. Neurologists tell us that people who were profoundly deaf from childhood have a different neurological basis in terms of the way they respond to the universe around them or to nature around them. Their way of perceiving is so different—it’s not just a visual thing, it’s a totally different interaction with nature. And their poetry and their story tradition comes down through sign language; it’s not a written tradition, it’s a sign tradition. There’s a legacy to this, an art to it, it’s an historical body of work and it’s a people.

Jacobson: There’s no question. It’s always been known that people who are handicapped in one area compensate in another area. People who, for instance, can’t see are often very sensitive to what’s going on in their environment. But there’s no question that it’s very fascinating. It goes into the psyche and what the human spirit is capable of.

Now I want to touch upon another thing, which is the cultural issue. For a moment let’s play the case of the deaf community or the deaf culture that this is a cultural thing. We’ve adapted to it. This is our life. And we don’t want to be hard on ourselves and say, “Hey, today there’s a cochlear implant. Tomorrow there’s another technology. We’re at peace with our state of being and if we have a child who’s deaf, he or she will assimilate into our way of doing things.”

There’s the psychological trauma of changing midlife—it’s one thing if you have children who haven’t heard sounds yet. But I think, in the film, it’s also Peter’s wife who also looks at taking it for herself, but she also hears that it will be much more difficult for an adult. They say she won’t hear the sounds of voices.

Aronson: Well that’s because the brain is attuned to hear language when you’re 2, 3, 4 years old. So if you’ve been deaf for 30 years and have no oral skills or background, your brain has basically moved on to other things, so it’s not attuned to learning language. Peter’s wife was born deaf.

Jacobson: So do they not do the implant for adults?

Aronson: The particular doctor in the film, Simon Parisi, is a wonderful surgeon at Lenox Hill, and he had only done three signing deaf people out of 300 patients that he had implanted at that time. Very few. And they discourage them from doing it although they do do it.

There’s a recent story of a family in Long Island where both parents are signing and they were both implanted and one of their deaf children was implanted, so it is being done. It takes a lot of work for those people to learn to speak and make use of the sound. It’s just a lot of speech therapy. It’s a lot of listening therapy because what you’re doing is you’re training the brain to interpret sounds that it’s never heard before so if you can imagine all of a sudden hearing after 30 years, never having heard before… this sound that you’re hearing right now in the audience, you know, you’re at home and you’re hearing the sound of my voice and your brain knows what a word is and interprets it, but these people don’t, so they can’t distinguish between a truck going by and a word.

So it takes years of therapy and hard work for these people to understand and discriminate to tell what the sound is.

Aronson: You know it’s interesting, when this subject comes up the word “genocide” comes up a lot. It’s a tough word but many radical deaf cultural people feel that the idea of the cochlear implant, the implanting so many children, is genocide. It’s the medical community trying to eradicate deafness.

Jacobson: That brings me to the next issue here. Without getting into the issue of whether or not this is a handicap from the perspective of the deaf culture, because I think an argument can be made that it is a handicap. You may adjust to it, but if you have a choice to be born with the ability to hear or not to hear, very few people would say they’d rather be born without hearing. They may say that about their children, but I’m talking more objectively.

However, the issue of the cultural change and the difficulty of rewiring your brain definitely has parallels to anyone who makes choices to go from one world to another. From a Jewish perspective, I deal with this a lot with my classes and teaching people who have grown up in a very secular environment and then choose to become more religious or more spiritual. They go through trauma (I’m not comparing traumas), but the trauma of life choices, standards, family members and so on, are real big changes that have to be made, or vice versa, where someone grows up in a very religious environment and in a sense leaves it.

Any type of cultural change has parallels with this film. Of course, we have to qualify it because there are certain elements, for instance, in this case, when you talk about the deaf community, it’s different from hearing about someone who doesn’t have the use of his or her leg. I would think that more people would agree to use artificial legs or some form compensation than we find here with getting an implant in order to hear the issue of being deaf, because I guess deafness is much more psychological.

Aronson: There’s no culture of people without legs, although I understand that there is what you might call a wheelchair community, a wheelchair culture, and I read about that and I hear about “wheelchair rights” and so on. People who are crippled and living in wheelchairs say it was the best thing that ever happened to them looking back. It’s hard to understand that from our perspective but that’s a different story.

Jacobson: The question that I have on a theological level is this: If we’re born a certain way for whatever reason—the mysteries of G-d’s ways, some people are born with the ability to hear and some people are born unfortunately unable to hear, they’re deaf from birth—how much can we tamper with that? Are we tampering with G-d’s plan? I don’t mean tampering with G-d’s plan in a religious sense, I mean it more in a psychological sense. In using technology, would there be anything that everyone would agree is where you draw the line? If technology, for instance, were able to make a perfect human being, should we do that?

Aronson: Well you could make the argument that G-d may have allowed a dysfunction to happen in someone’s inner ear but G-d also gave us the technology to fix it.

Jacobson: I agree. However, I’m talking about it in the context of: if there are clear psychological implications and you start tampering, how far would one go? In the name of technology and progress, would we do anything? You see all the controversy around genetic engineering. If we were able to create a super human being, someone without flaws, or if you have anger inside of you and there were some way to manipulate your genes so that you would no longer have anger. In the name of technology and progress, should we do that?

We don’t even know. We may be tampering with things that go much deeper than the surface.

Aronson: You’re right. Maybe you can draw the line and say you don’t want someone to be angry and yet it’s anger that allows artists to create on the level that they do in many instances. You might say, well, we can avoid cerebral palsy, it seems like most people would agree with that, but where’s the line as you say? It’s a very slippery slope once you have the technology in hand.

Jacobson: And I’m trying to broadenit because I’m sure the listening audience is not deaf, or else they couldn’t hear our show.

Aronson: But you know, it’s interesting Simon, this is about a deaf cultural issue. I always had an image in my mind that I was making a film about human beings and the search for identity. I was trying to make a film that had universal qualities. And I’m heartened to say that from the very first screenings that we’ve had at Sundance, I’ve had people stand up at screenings… someone would stand up and put up his hand at a question and answer session and say, “Hello, I’m a gay American and this is a movie about my life.” I’ve had African-Americans stand up and say, “This is as much a movie about the minority culture of African-Americans as it is about the deaf culture.” It’s about the forming of a minority culture, the roots of a minority culture; how it often comes out of abuse, teasing, prejudice and bias. All those things are true of the deaf culture.

The deaf culture came together and finally called itself a culture in the 80s. If you look back for 100 years, the people in the deaf culture would give you the same story of abuse and teasing as children, being pushed around by the hearing community, the hearing community trying to force language on them. A devastating background.

Now they’re in a community of people. They can love; they can feel comfortable. They can communicate with the language. Who wouldn’t want to be there instead of being in a hearing world that abuses you?

Jacobson: That’s an excellent point and I’d like to say something about that after the break.

(Announcement break for Rabbi Jacobson’s weekly Wednesday Night class at 346 W. 89^th St., corner Riverside Drive in Manhattan at 8pm. Listeners are also invited to visit the website of the Meaningful Life Center at www.meaningfullife.com, call 1-800-3MEANING, or email at wisdomreb@meaningfullife.com for all the activities of the Meaningful Life Center, transcripts of the radio show, seminars, and other important information.)

Jacobson: The thing about identity is a critical point. The fact of the matter is, we do shape our identities based on the circumstances that are given to us in our lives, for good or for bad. Even though no one actually made that argument in the film, that you’re tampering with my identity, I think it is implied in Peter’s arguments.

That’s really interesting because here, the idea of identity is juxtaposed with the fact that there’s a handicap. It’s one thing if it’s an identity that a person has chosen for him or herself, but here, the juxtaposition of high-tech progress that perhaps can heal the entire thing, that perhaps 50 years from now there won’t be a deaf human being because for some reason you’ll be able to genetically or with some type of implant prevent that. But meanwhile, there is an identity and I guess that’s a very big point.

I’m thinking about it in the context of: what right do we have to tamper with the community and the identity of people?

Aronson: There are a lot of people in the oral deaf world, on the other side of the deaf culture who would say, “What is a deaf culture? There’s no deaf culture. What does it mean ‘deaf culture’?” And since you have seen the film and having talked for a while, I would throw that out to you Simon, because you’ve given a lot of thought to this. Is there a deaf culture from what you can observe? And if there is, what defines it? What defines a culture?

Jacobson: Well, more importantly, if a deaf community gets together, a community of 1,000 or a million deaf people get together and they define themselves as a deaf culture, do we have a right to delegitimize that? I think that’s really the question.

I think a culture is defined ultimately not by whether it’s right or wrong, but whether there’s a group of people who have determined to follow that culture. There have been cultures that were completely criminal cultures. There’s a Mafia culture. But a culture is not legitimized or delegitimized whether I like it or not. It’s the fact that human beings have gotten together and feel that they’re a community.

I find, frankly, in the context we’re talking about, from a deaf culture, that I would commend it because it gives them strength. I’m sure they have support groups. The fact is, one of the most beautiful things about the humanitarianism of this country is that you do find parking for the handicapped, elevators, telephones. It’s very special to see that we give special attention for that.

So I think that there is a value to the culture. Here the question is if this becomes their identity, and now someone, technology, is trying to intrude, to take their children away from them, genocide as you put it.

It’s very fascinating. You were very accurate and were not at all one-sided. To be honest, I wouldn’t easily say one way or the other. I think it’s case by case. I think it has a lot to do with the parents and the child. I think no parent should really make a decision about a case like this without really researching it well. I see the decision made in your film, in the documentary, is that the hearing parents chose to do it. The deaf parents chose not to do it. Which would seem quite logical.

Aronson: Well, when people ask me where I am on it and what do I think, I say, “My opinion is the opinion of a hearing person and I can give you my opinion of what I would do in terms of looking at these people.” I think that both families made the right decision. I think that Peter made the right decision in not implanting his child.

Jacobson: Okay. We have AJ on the air.

Caller: Good evening. Well I hope “misery loves company” isn’t part of this problem. I think it’s quite uncharitable for the people who are deaf and who then want to ostracize a person who happens to get one of these items that allows him to hear. Not only that, you run enormous risk in being deaf. You don’t hear things that might be very important to hear, like a horn. I don’t know how many times I’ve been on the street and I’m certainly glad I had my hearing. People get hit with cars and bicycles and things happen to people when they don’t have their hearing. That’s a major thing. Imagine, beautiful music. Mantovani, Lombardo and so forth. To deprive someone of that kind of music and the beautiful lyrics that the old-time songs had.

Jacobson: AJ, I think you need to see the film because there’s another side to the case.

Caller: I understand. I’ve been listening to it. But I can’t appreciate it.

Aronson: AJ, the one thing that you said that I absolutely can agree with is that for the deaf cultural community to ostracize children who have implants is a horror. I mean, these children…

Caller: It’s very uncharitable.

Aronson: It’s awful. Because these children should have the right to learn sign language and function in both worlds.

Jacobson: That’s called reverse discrimination.

Caller: It sounds like misery loves company.

Jacobson: But the fact of the matter is, what fascinates me most is that they are normal human beings in many ways that happen to have these positions. But thank you for the call AJ.

Let’s go to Matt.

Caller: Hi. I’ve been listening to the program and I find it very interesting. But the truth of the matter is, I really don’t understand the point because you’re discussing many different topics. On the one hand, you’re talking about cochlear implants, which today is one of the highest technological models to hearing people. I’m hearing impaired. I’m a victim of Bell’s Palsy and my biggest problem is that I’m single and I go on single weekends and a lot of people look at me with the hearing aid and they don’t consider me a normal type of person. They look at me very differently. I’ve heard the controversy about cochlear implants. Without cochlear implants, what are your children supposed to do?

Aronson: Well, the option that you’ll see in the film and what’s out there in the world is that they can learn sign language and become part of the deaf cultural community. There are also other kinds of oral education techniques with hearing aids as you have in other people. There are certainly ways to function without a cochlear implant as a deaf person.

Jacobson: But Matt is making a very clear point. You’re basically resigning yourself that you are defining yourself into a cultural community that you will never, ever mingle with anyone else.

Caller: I mean the cochlear implant. I’ve heard the arguments once before of the pros and the cons, but the truth of the matter is, what are your children supposed to do? They’re caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the children who are born into this situation have no real say nor have the capability to make the decision, and their parents are left with that and the parents have to make a choice one way or the other.

Jacobson: Thank you for your call, Matt. I want to say that the point is, and I think it’s made by one of the characters in the film, that the fact is, if the cochlear implant can actually allow a person to enter into the hearing world, then how could you deprive them of that? As Matt is saying, you become ostracized with a hearing aid. People see you as less; they see you as weaker. It affects marriage; it affects opportunities.

Aronson: Well, the thing is, and Matt’s absolutely right, with the cochlear implant, you are not a hearing person. A cochlear implant is a prosthetic device that allows you to function in the hearing world. But when you take it off, because it’s not there all the time (there’s an external portion also that you take off when you go to bed or when you swim, or whatever). When you take it off, you are a profoundly deaf individual again. And you will be functioning that way.

Jacobson: Well, I wear eyeglasses so I feel that way myself.

Aronson: But nevertheless, you’re not a normal hearing person with this device.

Jacobson: We have Mike on the air.

Caller: You mentioned something about the original Jay Black. Where is he and how can I find him?

Aronson: Jay lives on Long Island and performs all over America, in fact, I’m going to interview him for our film “Feeling No Pain.” He performs as Jay Black as a single. He was just at the Garden the other night in an Oldies concert.

Jacobson: Speaking of identity crises, I guess for many people in the deaf world, there’s a certain peace of mind just to know that this is what you are and that’s it. Many of us are still struggling to find out who we are.

I found a very moving line in the film when Peter’s daughter Heather is asked why she wants the implant, she says she wants to be in both worlds: the world of silence and the world of sound. I found that quite profound, especially for a five-year-old.

In many ways the power of silence, and if she was able to bridge the two worlds, that would really be an interesting experiment—for someone to bridge the two worlds in a way that she could teach people who hear what it means to be in a world where you don’t hear, and teach people who don’t hear what it means to be in a world where you do hear.

Aronson: The question is, will that really be possible? I mean, we don’t have any long-term studies yet because we’ve only been implanting children for a couple of years. In the film you’ll meet a little girl who’s five years old who got an implant at two, who’s born profoundly deaf and she speaks perfectly with no deaf accent. And she’s not a superstar. She’s the norm among kids who have plenty of speech therapy.

But we don’t know what she’s going to be like when she’s fifteen. We don’t know how she’ll function. If she’ll be accepted by her peers. If she’ll have as good a self-esteem as Heather might if she stays in the deaf cultural community. These are all unknowns.

Jacobson: Did you at all explore or talk to any doctors or psychiatrists about this? Was that at all covered? Or do you let the characters themselves speak?

Aronson: The characters themselves go to Dr. Simon Parisia who’s an auto-laryngeologist, who’s basically a surgeon, and he’s the one who basically implants the children in addition, to Dr. Patshute who’s an audiologist at the children’s hearing institute at Lenox Hill. We allow them to be the experts from the hearing side, to give the expertise of what the technology can and cannot do.

Personally, I did talk to Dr. Ari Lee, who’s the head of the Department of Psychology at Gaudete University and she’s profoundly deaf. She has huge reservations about the cochlear implant in children for the reasons I mentioned before. She said we don’t know the long-term psychological impact of this device on children, living between the two worlds.

Jacobson: What psychological impact has this film made on you? Since I’ve known you, you’ve always been the introspective type, always exploring different schools of thought. It’s a serious film.

Aronson: But an entertaining one I hope.

Jacobson: It’s definitely entertaining. It’s human drama and just to hear the argument between the father and the son is amazing where he says, “You’re handicapped,” and he says, “You don’t accept me Dad,” and all that.

Aronson: In one scene in the film the son says to the mother, in this dramatic family battle, “I never realized until this moment that you never accepted my deafness.” It’s an amazing moment for him to really feel that.

How did this film affect me? I just got really close to people who live in another planet from me. These people who are profoundly deaf and live with another language, a visual language, it’s a different way of life, a different way of functioning, a different way of relating to the world. I became very close with a lot of these people, and it opened my eyes. I grew from it. I can’t write down how I grew, but the wonderful thing about making documentary films is that it gives you the opportunity to become an expert in something totally new.

Jacobson: Did the families feel comfortable being filmed? Did you have to convince them?

Aronson: That’s the other psychological aspect for me because I became part of this family and I love this family. Mary Artinian opened their lives. They were themselves. They fought. They cried. People have come to me after screenings of the film and they want to know how much of the film was scripted. They think this was a movie with a script and these people were doing the lines—crying when I told them to cry, fighting when I told them to fight. None of this movie is scripted. It’s real. And I was with these people for a year and a half and they cried their eyes out. They are searching for the answer of how to raise their children.

Jacobson: Okay, let’s take one more call. We have Shifra on the line.

Caller: First of all, I’m very anxious to see the film and Josh I really honor you for bringing something to mind. What is Hashem saying to me in terms of the whole gift of hearing and listening? For me, I always want to take some cotton in my ears or something that you put on when you go diving, and to know what it’s like not to hear as accurately as I may, but it also gives me the sense of listening and hearing and to be able to really listen in a different kind of way to be able to know that I have the gift of hearing and listening. It opens up a whole other aspect of this world.

Jacobson: Shifra, I know a lot of people who have healthy ears and they can hear but they can’t listen, so that’s an entirely different story.

I know people who are deaf who listen better than people who have healthy ears. I’m sure Josh you know people like that too. Listening is an entirely different art from just hearing. Shifra, thank you for the call. It’s a good point about hearing and listening which is another topic that I’m sure we will address at some point.

 (Announcement break. This show and all of the activities of the Meaningful Life Center activities are made possible by the contributions from people like you who wish to achieve a life full of meaning and purpose. We invite you to join us and become our partners in creating a better world. For contribution and sponsorship opportunities, please call 1-800-3MEANING, 1-800-363-2646, or write to the Meaningful Life Center, Suite 303, 788 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11213.)

Jacobson: I want to congratulate you and commend you Josh for this work and I look forward to seeing you at the Academy Awards.

Aronson: Thank you, that would be great.

Jacobson: The film is quite interesting and quite amazing because of its insights into a part of our lives which we often don’t look at which is sound, our ability to hear, but also looking into a culture called the deaf culture, people who are resistant to anyone tampering with or intruding and trying to destroy their culture and their world.

I was thinking about sound and silence, because for me, having been educated in the Jewish mystical school of thought, I was thinking of some parallels. The Zohar says that there are two ways to serve G-d: one through song and sound and one through silence. The question is asked, which is greater? And interestingly, the service through silence is greater ultimately than the service through sound. The Levites would compose melodies and sing songs at the Holy Temple, but the Kohanim, the priests, would serve in silence. They were silent throughout. And ultimately, silence is greater than sound because silence can contain more energy than can sound.

When we express ourselves, words are containers, they can only contain so much. That’s why we use metaphor, poetry, art to express deeper feelings. But sometimes the deepest and most intimate of expressions can only be expressed in silence.

Aronson: That’s so interesting, because I’ve read of so many composers, and the greater the composer, the more often I’ve seen this—where composers at a certain point in their lives discover the power of silence. The power of the spaces between the notes, where all the power really is.

Jacobson: In publishing design as well. The white space is more important than the black space. But G-d should bless everyone to be healthy and to be born in a healthy way, but I think the message of a deaf culture to us is the appreciation, first of all, for the gifts we’re given, but also there is an appreciation of silence that they have. The fact is that that woman who can feel the rain in a way appreciates rain differently from the way we do, because for us it comes diluted—you can see it, you can hear it, you can taste it.

But when you think about the five senses that we have, ultimately the soul doesn’t need any of the senses. If you were to shut off your senses for a moment, close your ears, your eyes, your taste, touch and smell, you would be left with the inner you. Because you don’t need ears to hear yourself and you don’t need eyes to see yourself. In a way, the sensory world is just a bridge to interact with the world around us. Important and extremely valuable… we couldn’t communicate today if we couldn’t hear each other or we couldn’t speak. At the same time, in an interesting way, and this ultimately is the way to bridge or unite the world, is to recognize that whether you’re deaf, or blind or have all your faculties intact, the soul is always intact.

What I found in the film, whatever character it was, the soul was intact. Peter’s passion in his personal choice for his child is quite admirable. It’s a soul crying out in his own way. We may not agree with his particular choice, but the fact of the matter is, one cannot delegitimize the soul.

It says in Chassidic thought that with the handicapped, the soul is never handicapped. He’s able to listen; it’s just that he listens differently. He doesn’t listen with sounds, he listens with his mind, with his heart.

But no one should ever suggest that a person who’s deaf listens less than a person who’s not. He just can’t hear our sounds so he has to hear a different way. I think that that ultimately is in a way the greatest tribute to human dignity and a person can celebrate that.

However, of course, when you do have an opportunity to give someone much more than that. I’m not making the case for that, I’m just saying that I honor that type of choice.

Aronson: Being with you is always such a pleasure. What a wonderful perspective you bring to things.

Jacobson: Each of us has our mission and I remember telling you years ago, the fact that you direct film, ultimately the mission is not just to entertain people, which is part of it, or to make money, it’s ultimately to touch people in a place that they haven’t been touched before, to bring ideas… I don’t know if that’s you’re motive, but…

Aronson: I have a friend, Barry Sonenfeld, who’s a wonderful comedy director (he made “Men in Black,” “Get Shorty”), and we spoke on the phone the other day and he just finished a movie, and we were talking about the political situation, both bemoaning the fact that the world isn’t running, to Gore and the fact that Bush is doing so well (we’re all Democrats in my life) and I said, “Well, it’s your job Barry to keep us all laughing.” He’d seen Sound and Fury and he loved it and he said, “And it’s your job to make sure you keep teaching us.”

Jacobson: Listen, you’ll end up being a moral advocate for identity and cultures. It’s very interesting. I thought your first film was going to be something a little more risqué.

Aronson: I don’t know. Doing documentary films you go with the material that vibrates for you and this is the material that really meant something to me. It takes so long to make these films.

There wasn’t a day involved in this film that I wasn’t happy to be involved with it. It was a real story that had some resonance for me and I don’t know why it touched my life. I don’t why what parts of my life it touched, but there’s something about how you raise children and how you make choices for your children and how parents have those obligations and those rights that touched me and it felt like it was a very important film to make.

I hope everybody gets to see it. It’s unfortunate that documentaries are so limited in terms of the showing possibilities. Our word of mouth has been fantastic and we’ve been getting better every day.

Jacobson: It’s at the Film Forum at West Houston St. You’ve been listening to Josh Aronson, director of Sound and Fury. You can get a tape of this show by calling 1-800-363-2646. I’d like to thank our loyal audience and we invite you emails and your thoughts. Most of all I’d like to thank Josh and congratulations again on this wonderful film. More than wonderful, it’s a fascinating insight into human nature.

Thank you very much.

Tags: radio transcript, healing, health, disabilities
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Spiritual Vaccination

July 28th, 2015

I was pleased to read that you have begun your holy work in the field of education…

May the Almighty grant that you not be overwhelmed by the initial difficulties—as per the saying of our sages “All beginnings are difficult” ² —that you will experience. On the contrary: these should arouse in you added vigor and provoke hidden potentials.

Among the advances of medical science in recent times was the discovery of certain vaccines. In order that the body should be able to resist certain aggressive diseases, G-d forbid, it is injected with a similar and weaker specimen of the same disease; by this means, the body creates weapons and defenses against this disease, which prevent it from ever invading it. The same is true regarding spiritual medicine (as Maimonides, in his famed “Eight Chapters,” makes the correlation between physical and spiritual healing). By encountering a weak, so-called “hindrance,” the soul creates weapons and defenses with which to vanquish true hindrances and difficulties…

Tags: Rebbe, Rebbe's letters, education, spiritual, medicine
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Medical License: The Responsibility of a Doctor

July 28th, 2015

The young wife of Rabbi Shmuel of Lubavitch had fallen ill, and the doctors were unanimous in their opinion that there was no hope of recovery.

When her father-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch, was told of the doctors’ verdict, he said: “The Talmud raises the issue of a doctor’s right to practice medicine. If G-d has afflicted the sick with illness, what right has a human being to intervene? But the Torah itself refers to the doctor’s efforts when it says (Exodus 21:19) ‘And heal he shall heal.’ ‘From here we derive,’ say our sages, ‘that a doctor has been given permission to cure.’

“But nowhere,” concluded Rabbi Menachem Mendel, “has a doctor been given the right to condemn a human being as incurable.”

Tags: body and soul, Talmud, healing, health, Chassidic stories, Tzemach Tzedek, doctors
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