The attitude of ORA and its rabbis to marriage

Guest post by Rick     Under Jewish law and tradition, leaving a marriage is a grave matter, and should not be done absent serious cause. Yet, some in the Orthodox community seem to have adopted the worst aspects of the 1960s counterculture's attitude towards family and marriage.

If a marriage is irretrievably broken, the parties should work out all issues in good faith, including a get, with the involvement of a beis din if the parties cannot work out a mutually acceptable agreement. It is one thing to dispute under which circumstances a get is appropriate, and, if so, what measures are appropriate to coerce a spouse into giving or receiving a get. It is quite another to assert, as does ORA, that a get is appropriate and that k’fia [coercion], whether with or without [shotim] force, is appropriate in all cases in which one spouse wants out of a marriage. ORA’s position completely contradicts accepted Jewish law and practice over many centuries. [Although in fairness to Rabbi Stern, it should be noted that he has previously claimed that the one exception from his rule that a get must always be given upon demand is if a wife steals one million dollars (as opposed to one child) and runs off Daas Torah 2012/05/ora-1-million-dollars-vs-1-child

But the problem goes far deeper than that. ORA and its supporters are not just trying to overturn centuries of Jewish Law and practice over what is appropriate once a marriage is irretrievably broken, but also under what circumstances it is proper for someone to leave a marriage in the first place. ORA’s position is not just that a woman should receive a get whenever she demands it, but that it is perfectly legitimate and appropriate for a woman to leave a marriage, regardless of whether there are children, for any reason at all.

“Man,” Rabbi Stern said, as though addressing such a fellow [who doesn’t give a get on demand]. “She’s just not that into you.”

The Daily Beast 2013/11/04/for-orthodox-women-getting-the-get-can-take-years

Or as Gitel Dodelson wrote in the New York Post, “I said: ‘You’re not a bad man. We’re just not right for each other.’ …. ‘This isn’t working, I’m moving back to my parents.’ I packed up [the couple’s child] right then and there, and drove off.”

The message of ORA to married women is if you decide at any point that “you are just not that into him” just leave and take the children to wherever you please. Is that also the position of Rabbi Hershel Schachter and ORA’s other rabbinical supporters? And for that matter, is that also the position of the roshei yeshiva who have joined side-by-side with ORA in support of Dodelson?

The Bizarre phenomenon of Sleep - why do we need it?

Scientific American     Sleep is such a large feature of our lives that it’s easy to forget how utterly weird it is. Every night, if we’re lucky, our brain cells switch into a synchronized pattern, putting our lives and minds on hold for hours. Sleep scientists have yet to fully explain why we spend a third of our lives in this state, let alone why we use some of that time wandering through vivid, nonsensical and sometimes upsetting hallucinations.

A recent study in Science suggests that sleep may serve to wash the brain of harmful waste products that build up during the day. Medical researchers observed an increased flow of cerebrospinal fluid in mice that were sleeping or anesthetized. This fluid carries away waste proteins, including one linked to Alzheimer’s disease. The findings join other theories on the function of sleep, some of which I discuss above, in our latest Instant Egghead video.

ORA - Use of national media - change of policy?

Guest post by Rick

“From our perspective [], advocating on behalf of agunot is an internal issue for the Jewish community, not a cause to be advocated in the national media."

Why do some, such as ORA, insist on continuing to highlight in the national media the issue of under what circumstances a get is or is not appropriate [and what measures should be taken in the case of the former], regardless of the tremendous chillul hashem this is causing? Do the rabbis backing ORA, such as Rabbi Hershel Schachter, support ORA’s actions over the past several years in turning this issue into a national news story?

Whether a get is appropriate is a very complex halachic issue that is dependent on the facts in each case, which is another reason these issues should be decided privately in beis din, not aired out in public.

Ironically, the quote above comes from … ORA’s head, Rabbi Jeremy Stern, in January 2011.

Daas Torah 2012/04 Response to R Jeremy Stern's criticism

And finally, given ORA’s repeated and continuing actions in flagrant contradiction of ORA’s own stated purported position, it is amazing that anyone would give the slightest shred of credibility to any of ORA’s assertions regarding any of the cases in which it is involved.

An Underworld of Male Slaves Comes to Light in the U.K.

 Time Magazine   After Darrell Simester, then 30, went missing on vacation at a south Wales seaside resort in Aug. 2000, his family didn’t see him again for almost 13 years. They never gave up trying to find the “vulnerable” and “timid” Simester — and their perseverance eventually paid off. In March 2013, an anonymous tip-off led Simester’s family to a two-berth caravan in a stable yard just outside Cardiff, Wales’s capital city. There they found him, now aged 43, in dirty, torn clothes and with teeth missing – but otherwise okay.

Simester’s case sparked a major police operation codenamed Operation Imperial. In police raids in September, two other men (one Polish, one British) were also found living in poor conditions at or near the same site where Simester had been found. Three men have subsequently been arrested and released on bail, all charged with false imprisonment, conspiracy to hold a person in servitude and conspiracy to force a person to work. A 42-year-old woman has also been released on bail.

Rather than being an isolated incident, the U.K. Home Office said in a statement that the case serves as an “appalling reminder” of the extent to which slavery has reappeared in the country. A report released on Oct. 17 by the Global Slavery Index says that it is estimated there are as many as 4,000 people enslaved in the U.K. – and that more could be done to help them and others from sharing their fate. While slavery — or human trafficking — is often thought of in terms of female victims of sexual exploitation, the statistics suggest that the gender distribution is relatively even. Of the 2,255 potential human trafficking victims identified in the U.K. in 2012, 40% were male. And in addition to sex, the trade in human beings for financial gain can involve forced labor, domestic servitude and even organ harvesting. In 2012, some 87% of the 507 potential victims of forced labor exploitation in the U.K. were male.

To put human trafficking in its international context, it is the third most profitable business for international organized crime after the drugs and arms trades – and is globally estimated to generate profit margins of billions of dollars per year. As of June 2012, the International Labor Organization estimated that 20.9m people are victims of forced labor and sexual exploitation worldwide. And the 2012 U.N. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons says that men and boys are estimated to account for approximately 25% of trafficking victims detected worldwide. But as the report points out, official statistics represent only the “tip of the iceberg” as criminals generally go to great lengths to conceal their activities. [...]

Activists ensnare thousands of online paedophiles using 10-year-old Filipino girl – who doesn’t exist

Independent   A group campaigning against child sex exploitation has run an online sting operation which caught thousands of paedophiles trying to solicit a computer-generated 10-year-old girl.

More than 20,000 separate users were ensnared over the course of 10 weeks, all trying to watch the virtual Filipino child Sweetie perform indecent acts via a webcam.

Researchers from the Netherlands-based activists group Terre des Hommes logged in to public chat rooms under the alias of Sweetie, an apparently real girl who they identified clearly by country of origin, gender and age.

The results were shocking, according to the group’s project director Has Guyt. They found that the forums were flooded with people willing to pay to see a young child perform sex acts live online.

Using basic online search techniques, Mr Guyt’s team at a small, remote office outside Amsterdam was able to compile a dossier of 1,000 named internet users, complete with written and video evidence, engaged in the illegal activity. [...]

Terres des Hommes have passed their findings on to Interpol, but the online abusers will only be prosecuted if police can find evidence in their own investigations. The group said only six perpetrators of what they call “webcam child sex tourism” have ever been convicted of the crime worldwide. [...]

Report of Nazi-Looted Trove Puts Art World in an Uproar

NY Times    [...] When he learned on Monday that the Beckmann seller, Cornelius Gurlitt, now 80, had reportedly sat on hundreds of works, including art by Picasso and Matisse, that were confiscated under the Nazis or sold cheaply by owners desperate to flee Hitler, Mr. Feddersen was amazed. “Imagine!” he said, envisaging seeing and selling such a collection. 

But even before the Beckmann was sold, the Bavarian authorities swooped in on Mr. Gurlitt’s home to seize the rest of his treasure, according to the newsmagazine Focus: about 1,500 works estimated to be worth $1.4 billion. Focus said the works were seized after the police and customs officials entered Mr. Gurlitt’s home in Munich in spring 2011. 

If confirmed, the discovery would be one of the biggest finds of vanished art in years. But word of it left almost equally big questions unanswered: Why did the German authorities let more than two years pass before such a sizable find was disclosed? What will become of the recovered works of art? Did Mr. Gurlitt continue to make sales even after the raid? And where is he today? 

There are no reports that Mr. Gurlitt has been detained or charged, and questions about the history of the artworks, including whether they were confiscated or subject to a forced or voluntary sale, would determine whether a current sale or auction would be judged legitimate.

Since news of the find was first reported Sunday, the German authorities have come under fierce criticism in the art world as to why they did not make the discovery public.[...]

Weiss-Dodelson: Her side of the story

update -For Weiss Family viewpoint  - letter of Rav Dovid feinststein.
****NY Post interview ****
It is important to note that the comments to the NY Post article are not so much concerned with sympathy for Gital but rather are a gloating condemnation of Orthodoxy. I am not sure what "chachom" advise her to go public in the NY Post - but it surely isn't helping her cause - or adding to her Olam HaBah. 

NY Post   Four-and-a-half years ago, Gital Dodelson, now 25, of Lakewood, NJ, married Avrohom Meir Weiss, part of a respected rabbinic family on Staten Island. Ten months after the wedding, Dodelson left the marital home with their newborn son, claiming her husband was controlling and manipulative. Despite getting civilly divorced in August 2012, they remain married under Jewish law because Weiss refuses to grant the faith’s decree of divorce, known as a “get.” As a result, Dodelson’s life in the Orthodox community is in limbo and she is unable to date, let alone get married again. Now, after more than three years of pleading with Weiss to sign the document that will set her free, Dodelson has gone public with her story in The Post: [...]

When I first met Avrohom in October 2008, I thought he was great husband material. That’s what my parents and friends told me. After all, in my society you’re expected to listen to them on these matters.

They told me that at 23, he was learned, a great Talmudic scholar from an esteemed family, whose great-grandfather, Moshe Feinstein, was a legendary rabbi.

It’s traditional to arrange the date through a matchmaker. Days later, there was a knock at my front door. My dad opened it and led a handsome, dark-haired man with bright blue eyes into the room. He spoke softly and politely, but seemed shy. I happily got in his car.[...]

It was a chilly December night, and he took me to a glitzy hotel in Midtown. We were walking around on the mezzanine level, watching all the tourists whizzing around below. Avrohom suddenly dropped to one knee, pulled out a black velvet box with a sparkling, round diamond ring inside, and asked me to marry him.

“Gital,” he said, softly. “We can have a wonderful future together.” He talked about the kind of marriage he wanted, where we’d be equal partners and make decisions together. Suddenly my reservations about him melted away. All I could think about was the excitement of the wedding.

The engagement period in our community, like our dating, is very short. There was so much to do before our February wedding that I didn’t worry too much about our compatibility.[...]<

But only three days into the marriage, I knew I made a terrible mistake. It was our first Shabbat together as man and wife — and it was spent in silence. We were about to light the Sabbath candles, and we discussed how each of our families likes to light it. It’s a female tradition, and you typically do what your mother did. When my way contradicted his way, he criticized me and turned angry. Avrohom said: “You have no choice. It’s not my way,” and gave me the cold shoulder for the next 24 hours. From Friday night to Saturday night, we didn’t speak a word.

When I couldn’t stand the hostility anymore, I said, “You can’t just ignore me — this isn’t how a relationship works. We have to be able to talk about these things.” The only response he could muster was: “When I don’t get my way, I don’t know how to function.”[...]

For Orthodox Women, Getting the Get Can Take Years

Daily Beast   Last month, an FBI sting operation netted a rabbi, the head of a New York yeshiva and eight other men, two of whom were volunteers at an organization for at-risk Jewish youth. Rabbi Mendel Epstein made his living campaigning at the rabbinical courts on behalf of women whose husbands refused to grant them religious divorces; this past summer, he wrote and released a “Bill of Rights of a Jewish Wife.” But he and his coterie seem to have taken his advocacy too far—specifically, they’ve been accused of exacting up to $60,000 from despairing wives in exchange for kidnapping and torturing their husbands, with the aim of coercing the men into signing the Jewish divorce document. All 10 defendants were initially denied bail after appearing in Federal District Court in Trenton, New Jersey (bail was later set for all men involved, and all 10 defendents pleaded not guilty). They’ve been called unlikely criminals. They have also, albeit less frequently, been called unlikely feminists.[...]

A woman whose husband won’t give up the get is referred to as an agunah, from the Hebrew for “chained,” and the condition is more common than you might imagine. A survey spearheaded by Barbara Zakheim, co-founder of the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse (JCADA), found that between 2005 to 2010, there were over 460 cases of “shackled” Jewish women in North America, a number that underrepresents the problem; the research team didn’t reach out to agunot directly, but to domestic abuse and family service organizations—and by and large, agencies serving more right-wing communities declined to participate. Zakheim also found that a sizeable number of agunot were living in poverty and not receiving any sort of spousal support. “There were changes made to halacha [Jewish law] during ancient times and in that respect, those ages were more progressive than the one we’re living in now,” she said. “The Orthodox rabbinate need to get their act together to come up with a halachic solution. They have a lot to answer for.”

In Israel, noncompliant husbands are sometimes sent to jail until they agree to sign the get. But America’s secular court system cannot intervene in a religious divorce, leaving the agunah without many options. A rabbinical court might, if the man won’t respond to a summons, issue an order of contempt, which essentially states that the woman’s husband has refused to grant her a get and calls on the Jewish community to take a stand. She might also approach an advocacy group like the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), a New York-based non-profit that, since its founding in 2002, has resolved 205 agunah cases worldwide. ORA works, free of charge, to open the lines of communication between the two parties. Failing that, it exerts legal and halachically sanctioned forms of pressure on the get withholder. “We see the refusal to issue a get as a form of domestic abuse,” said Rabbi Jeremy Stern, the organization’s executive director. “It’s not just about black and blue marks. It’s about one person asserting their dominance over another.” [....]

Rav Meiselman publishes book on Torah & Science - Critique by Rabbi Slifkin

Ahead of the forthcoming book by Rav Meiselman, Rabbi Slikfin has put up  a series of posts and Rabbi Dovid Kornreich has responded. The book will soon be in the seforim stores and might be available from Yeshiva Toras Moshe

RNSlifkin: http://www.rationalistjudaism.com/2013/11/anti-rationalist-mania.html

RDKornreich:   http://slifkinchallenge.blogspot.com/2013/11/my-job-made-easier-part-ii-problem-with.html

Should Parents be friends with their kids ?

guest post - Allan Katz    Vayeitzei 74

Lots of parenting articles and books admonish parents - Be a parent, don't be your kid's friend. And when I see this I recall the following Biblical sources usually cited when discussing the parent –child relationship.

In this week's Parasha-portion Genesis 31:46, we read how Jacob- Ya'akov instructs his BROTHERS to gather stones and form a mound. This mound was to be a monument and a witness to the treaty between and Laban and Jacob. The obvious question is that he had only one brother   Esau and he was not around. Rashi answers that Jacob referred to his sons as ' brothers' because they identified with his struggle and were committed to him. The relationship between Jacob and his sons could be described as an older brother-sibling relationship.

Further on in the Book of Genesis 45:8 , Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and he says that G-d has placed him as an Av= father to Pharaoh.  Rashi explains that the word Av=father as being a friend and a patron = from the Latin/greek  'pater'.  The word patron means a benefactor and protector.

Traditionally kids show respect to their parents by addressing them with the words my father- mother, my teacher. So from these sources the relationship could be described as one of an older brother, friend or mentor.

It is pretty obvious that a parent should not make her kid her confidant and burden her child emotionally with all her troubles and that she doesn't share everything. But being a friend of your kid helps the parent to be a ' real, genuine   and authentic person'.  Alfie Kohn  reminds us that your child needs a human being – flawed, caring and vulnerable – more than he or she needs someone pretending to be a crisply competent Perfect Parent. If parents don't share with kids things they enjoy or hate, or their needs that they have, kids will never be able to empathy with parents, and see that they are real people who also have needs. Real people are not perfect, screw up and make mistakes. Apologizing to kids not only models how that should be done, but shows that it is possible to acknowledge to ourselves and others that we make mistakes and that things are sometimes our fault, without  losing face or feeling hopelessly inadequate. But apologizing exposes our fallibility and vulnerability and makes us feel a little unsafe when we stand on the perfect parent pedestal, a position of ultimate and unquestionable authority. Even saying thank you to your child in a sincere and genuine way, that without their help you would have been lost exposes your vulnerability. There is nothing to fear because it is when we expose our vulnerability, we create connection and facilitate learning   opportunities.  Brene Brown teaches that it is vulnerability that creates great business leaders and when you shut off vulnerability, you shut off opportunity. If vulnerability is good for business leaders, how much more is it so for parents!

Another reason why parents fear developing a genuine and warm relationship with kids is that it will compromise their ability to set limits , impose their authority and control them.

In fact the opposite is true. Do you ever wonder why parents and teachers are the last to know when kids screw up or act in an inappropriate way? When kids feel that they are unconditionally accepted and loved by their parents for who they are , and trust them to be their guides and help, kids will come to parents for help. It is our healthy attachments with kids that allow us to be their guides and mentors.

We can set limits in a unilateral way and demand compliance or we can let kids participate in setting limits using the CPS – collaborative problem solving approach. When our concerns and expectations are addressed by the agreed solutions, we are in fact setting a limit together with the child.

As parents and educators we really want our kids to learn to set limits.Instead of giving a list of rules and consequences we can offer them principles and guidelines to help them navigate the world. We want kids to derive limits and guidelines on how to act from the situation itself and what other people need .If so, then our coming up with limits, and especially specific behavioral limits and imposing them on kids makes it less likely that kids will become moral people who say that the situation decrees a kind of a boundary for appropriate ways to act.

Parents should be friends with their kids, but it is not a friendship of equals but similar to the trust, respect and caring that a mentor shows for his student.

Barbara Coloroso was once asked to help parents with their young teenager. When he was a pre-teen he was such a good kid, he always listened to us. Now he no longer listens to us, just to his teenage friends. She answered the parents that nothing has changed – he used to listen to you, now he is listening to them. When a parent is a friend and a mentor the child is not being compliant but self determined and acts in an autonomous way giving expression to the values he acquired from parents and teachers and has made his own.

Associate of Beit Shemesh mayor arrested in voter fraud case

Kikar Shabbat (Hebrew)   Times of Israel   An associate of the mayor of Beit Shemesh was arrested last week and remains in police custody over suspicions of involvement in voter fraud in last month’s contested municipal elections.[...]

The police’s Lahav 443 special investigations unit began an examination of the allegations after police found 160 identity cards in an apartment and in a car in the city.

Investigators suspect that Shaya Brand, an associate of Mayor Moshe Abutbul, organized a plan to identify nonvoters and pay them for their identity cards, so that Abutbul supporters could use them to cast fraudulent votes, police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld said.

Abutbul won the election over challenger Eli Cohen by less than 1,000 votes. [...]