Women & funerals: Halacha & minhag?

Bartley Kulp: Can the moderator of this blog elaborate on this? I am not aware of the halachot of women doing a hesped.

The following rather disrespectful article assumes that the only issue of concern is what a child thinks is appropriate. There are a few other elements involved. 1) the deceased - what is really best for him -spiritually and in the way he is remembered. How is honor and respect shown him/her 2) Family. - what is respectful and sensitive to the feelings of the mourners. These two elements are referred to in halacha has the honor of the living and honor of the dead. So first you need to establish which takes precedent.

3) the community. If the community has a particular way of doing something - whether it is halacha, kabbla or minhag - is it respectful to the niftar to insult them and consequently degrade the respect of the niftar?

The details themselves are complex and vary between communities and even within communities. On a social level - if a person wants the community and especially the Rav to participate - she can not dictate how the ceremony is done. In Yerushalayim the children don't go to funerals. Furthermore the issue of woman in cemeteries is taken very seriously in kabbala. Even the Gra said that he only went to a cemetery once in his life - for his mother - and he was seriously damaged.

Rav Moshe Feinstein says that the main consideration is what brings respect in the eyes of the community to the niftar. Thus he says that even if the mourner does not feel sad - he should act sad. The mourner does not in fact have an obligation to feel sad.

In sum, the mourner is free to do what he/she wants on her own. Without forcing the community and the Rav to witness something they view as an insult to the niftar. She should be aware of what her father would have wanted - and not just what she wants for her personal catharsis. This article assumes that the only thing of importance is what a particular child wants to do to feel better.

It has been noted that it is prohibited to get pleasure from the deceased when it is not for the benefit of the deceased - even feeling good about giving a hesped is in this category.

YNET

Rabbi: Satan dances as women attend funerals

Head of Migdal Haemek's religious council stops woman from lamenting her deceased father. 'He acted like a dictator. Do we live in Iran?' woman's cousin asks

Batya (pseudonym) will not forget the day her father was buried at the Migdal Haemek cemetery. Not only was she forced to deal with a great loss, she was also humiliated at the graveyard when she was prevented from lamenting her father over this grave.

The father was laid to rest at the northern city's municipal cemetery. In addition to family members and acquaintances, the funeral was also attended by rabbis, the mayor and chairman of the city's religious council, Rabbi Yaakov Amar.[...]

Before the funeral procession began, Batya asked to deliver an oration in her father's memory.

"I wrote my father things that sting one's flesh. There are things you don’t say during your life, but you want them heard when bidding farewell," she says.

She went on the stage and said she would like to lament her father, but Rabbi Amar suddenly asked her to get off the podium.

"I was surprised. I looked at him and said, 'What do you mean? I want to say a few words to my father.' But he insisted," she says. "The mayor and other people tried to talk to him, and he replied, 'You are a woman, you mustn't say a word.'

"I tried to grab the microphone back, but he blocked me with his body. I felt I had to fight to say goodbye to my father. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me."

Other family members tried to convince the rabbi, but to no avail. "He acted like a dictator, arguing that she was desecrating the dead and that according to the Halacha (Jewish law) a woman is not allowed to deliver orations," Batya's cousin says.

"Where is that written? What, do we live in Iran? This is a stain on this city's reputation," he says.[...]

Eternal Jewish Family - Fishing for souls

Billings Farnsworth writes

Halachic Conversion

Marriage and family are two beautiful and sacred things in the Jewish community. Through marriage comes children, and through children comes the preservation of their belief and way of life. Those who choose to get married do so with the hope that they will be able to have an eternal Jewish family.

However, many of these marriages are intermarriages where one spouse is of the faith while the other isn’t. The two of them agree to work together and teach the same beliefs, but unless the non-Jewish spouse is converted using the standards of halacha, the conversion is often considered invalid.

The conversion doesn’t have to stay invalid, however. There are organizations out there that teach the halachic method of conversion and help these couples bypass this hurdle. By converting to Judaism using the halachic method, the non-Jewish spouse will be considered a valid, orthodox member of the faith and community. When it comes time to teach the children religious beliefs both parents will be assets because they will know they have the belief system and passion necessary for the training of children.

There are many people who convert to Judaism using the non-halachic method. However, by following the guidelines of the Torah and halacha those people interested in converting show their absolute belief in Judaism, and their willingness to follow proper Jewish customs and religious rules.

These converts are sometimes considered ideological converts due to their desire to be identified with the Jewish community from a completely religious standpoint. If you are unsure of the proper halachic standard of conversion, consider finding an organization that will help you achieve the religious belief you are searching for.

Eternal Jewish Family, or EJF, is a website with information on Jewish family issues. Billings Farnsworth is a freelance writer.

Abuse:Dov Hikind's strategic retreat

Foward reports:

Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn, a leading voice in the fight to end child sexual abuse in Orthodox communities, is backing down from some of his previous claims and backing away from one of his most confrontational stands against an alleged pedophile.

In an interview with the Forward, Hikind dramatically scaled down a previously reported estimate of the number of abuse cases he knew about. He also said he could not keep a pledge to force a prominent yeshiva to remove an alleged pedophile from its staff.

Hikind said that he adjusted his tactics in order to be most effective. “Some people want me to yell and scream; they want me to burn the town down. I know how to do that, but I would lose the war immediately,” Hikind said in his office in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boro Park.

After Hikind first publicized the problem of child sexual abuse in religious communities on his weekly radio show, it was widely reported that he heard from 1,000 victims of past and current abuse. That figure was attributed

But the real figure is about 100, Hikind told the Forward. He said the often repeated 1,000 number may have come from his speculation about the possible number of cases, given what he has heard from therapists who treat sexual abuse victims.

“I think what we were saying to everybody was, my God, the numbers must be astronomical,” Hikind said. “We never said a thousand. It keeps on getting repeated; anybody who talks to me, I actually tell them what the facts are.”

In the same interview, Hikind retreated from his previous position with regard to one of the Orthodox community’s most prominent alleged abusers — Rabbi Avrohom Reichman, formerly principal of, and currently a teacher at, the United Talmudical Academy, located in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Reichman, the UTA and the Satmar Bungalow Colony summer camp are all named as defendants in a lawsuit filed by Joel Engelman, 23, who says that he was sexually abused by Reichman when he was 8 years old and that the school covered up the abuse.

Since Engelman went public with his allegations, both his family and Hikind have heard from others who say they were also victimized by Reichman. Last summer, following those revelations, Hikind vowed publicly that Reichman would not return to his teaching job in the fall of 2008.

But the accused rabbi is still teaching, and Hikind has not publicly pressed the issue further. The assemblyman told the Forward that his confrontation with Satmar leaders has been “a rather huge learning experience for me.”[...]

Abuse & the sounds of silence - Yated editorial

I just showed the following editorial from the Yated to Rav Sternbuch. His response was,

"Why isn't there any mention about stopping the perpetrators?" Why isn't there a condemnation of those who committed the crimes against these children? Why are they afraid to condemn the perpetrators?"

This editorial is a welcome step forward but it 1) acknowledges that American gedolim have been aware that there has been a significant problems for years - without doing anything about it. 2) he claims that our American religious leaders were ignorant about how to handle the problem - so why didn't they ask the police, why didn't they ask psychologists and social workers? 3) why has there been an active repression of talk about these issues and pressure on the families not to come forth? 5) why is his focus on belatedly helping the victims handle their suffering without acknowledging that a significant cause of the problem are family, friends and rabbis who should should have been protecting the children instead of abusing them? 6) what is this talk about the abuse being a gezeirah? Does he think that G-d's name is being sanctified by the abuse of these unfortunate children?! That is obscene!


VIN reports an editorial of the Yated editor Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz

There is an issue that has been on my mind for several years. It is an extremely sensitive topic and I tried writing about it many times but couldn’t find the right words with which to express what I wanted to say in a way that would be beneficial and adhere to standards of derech eretz and fairness.

I have discussed my predicament with many gedolim and they all encouraged me to write about it here in the Yated and said that Hashem would help me find the proper voice.

The sad fact is that children in our community are being abused by perpetrators who prey upon their innocence and our silence. We don’t have a count of how many people are hurt, but it is much larger than we realized, even a short time ago. There is no real debate about the catastrophic effects of abuse.

The innocence and purity of children is destroyed for life. The victims remain hurt, shamed and scarred. They suffer in silence, afraid to reveal their secret to anyone. They are hounded by feelings of guilt and embarrassment and live lives of tortured pain. The overwhelming majority of survivors suffer in silence, unless they are lucky enough to endure agonizing, arduous, expensive therapy. However, even a lifetime of therapy doesn’t ensure that the victim can ever be fully healthy again. Not every young victim’s psyche can be healed. Victims are much more likely to go off the derech, become addicted to drugs and lead a life of abusing themselves and others.

Let us be clear: For too long, we weren’t tuned in to these innocent victims’ stories and their pain. For too long, we weren’t sufficiently aware that this problem existed and thus were able to ignore the quiet pleas, the sad eyes, the pained lives, and the personalities withdrawn. We didn’t recognize the warning signs and thus largely ignored the phenomenon. Equally clear, this inattention was not a function of some high level conspiracy to harm people or cover up for criminals or abet nefarious activities. It was simply a function of a lack of education about a complex and highly sophisticated problem. It was a result of our leadership simply being unaware of the depths that such sordid people could sink to, and the extreme skill perpetrators exhibit in covering their tracks. And yes, it was undeniably a gezeirah, which, as so often is the case, claims innocent holy souls - bikroyvai Ekodeish.[...]

Sexual temptation - Knowledge of Chazal and habituation

This gemora (Sukkah 52a) and the explanation of the Ben Ish Chai raises a number of important points The gemora describes Abaye following a couple who he assumes will sin. But they didn't and they didn't even struggle with temptation. Abaye was very upset since he had been sure they would sin. He assumed that he would have given in to a situation that they easily handled - that bothered him. Finally he was comforted by an old man telling him that he had a greater yetzer harah then they did. The Ben Ish Chai explains that Abaye was simply naive about these matters. This can be understood 1) that Abaye simply did not know how human beings reacted to interaction with the opposite sex and that he would have withstood it also. 2) Greater people have greater temptation and thus Abaye hadn't been aware that ordinary people don't have the same lust as great people. 3) Habituation makes sex less of a temptation. Therefore a person who lives a holy live and doesn't intereact with the opposite sex on a regular basis. has greater lust. Consequently this suggests that more normal interaction with the opposite sex is greater protection than stringent separation.

Sukkah(52a):Abaye explained that the yetzer harah is stronger against sages than anyone else. For example when Abaye heard a certain man say to a woman, “Let us arise and go on our way.” Abaye said that he would follow them in order to keep them from sin and so he followed after them for three pasarangs across a meadow. However they simply parted from each other and he heard them say, “The way is long and the company is pleasant.” Abaye said, “If I were in that situation I could not have withstood temptation.” He went and leaned against a doorpost in deep anguish. An old man came to him and taught him: To the degree that a person is greater than others, to that degree his yetzer (evil inclination) is greater than theirs.

Ben Yohoyada(Sukka 52a): An old man taught him that whoever is greater than others - his yetzer his greater. There is an obvious question. How was Abaye comforted by these words? If in fact his yetzer harah was greater than the young couple - who didn’t give into temptation – he also had greater power than they to break and conquer it. Why did Abaye assume that he would not have been able to resist temptation as they did? In fact it was so insignificant to them that they didn’t even notice that they had withstood temptation. It seems to me that his assumption that he wouldn’t have withstood the temptation is simply because he never had been exposed to such a situation. He had never even thought about it before. Therefore he wasn’t speaking from experience but just assumed that he would not have withstood temptation. However this situation happened to them regularly and therefore it was not surprising to them.

Rav Sternbuch - Living with Bitachon

Sampling error regarding views of Orthodox Jews

YNet reports:

The recent headlines resulting from the JDC – ICCD’s study that most European Jewish leaders support greater tolerance for conversion raised both a frown and bewilderment from those European leaders directly involved in conversion, particularly its rabbis and more specifically its Orthodox rabbinate. A frown because it reminds them of their constant battle with lay leaders over standards for conversion and bewilderment because this survey is like asking taxi drivers about world economic policy – they’ve got a lot to say but understand little about the intricacies of the subject matter.

The survey reports a remarkable tolerance towards intermarriage among the respondents. As much as 85% thought that it was not a good idea to strongly oppose intermarriage and bar those who intermarry and their spouses from communal membership.

According to the JDC’s own statistics 30% of those polled were defined as Orthodox, which means that 50% of the Orthodox polled were not strongly opposed to intermarriage. A major problem with this survey is that it allows respondents to provide their own self-definitions.

Anyone familiar with the European Jewish communal scene knows the following: There are many Jews who belong to Orthodox synagogues purely for burial or familial purposes. When asked to identify themselves, these people will identify themselves as ‘Orthodox’ because they belong to an Orthodox synagogue or burial society. Many do not keep Shabbat, Kashrut, and may even themselves be married to a non-Jew. It is hardly surprising that 46% of these respondents agree, that if you have one Jewish parent (even if it is the father and therefore the rest of the family are not halachically Jewish) you should be allowed to be a member of the community. This means that many who participated in the survey are Orthodox in name only.

Most significantly, there is a glaring omission of the one group of leaders who more than anyone are involved in conversion and matters of Jewish status - the rabbis of Europe. [...]

Birthright graduates - limited Jewish identity

Forward reports:

Nearly 160,000 young Jews from North America have taken part in Taglit-Birthright Israel, a 10-day free Israel trip aimed at revving up their Jewish identities.

Of those no longer in college, only half have attended any Jewish event since their return.

That’s one of the findings of “Tourists, Travelers and Citizens,” a new report by the Cohen Center of Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. The report is based on interviews and online surveys of 1,534 Birthright alumni in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto, the four largest Jewish communities in North America.

“It means we have a lot of work to do,” says Daniel Brenner, executive director of Birthright Israel NEXT, a national organization that tries to steer alumni toward greater Jewish involvement in their home communities.

The Birthright program was instituted in 2000 by mega-philanthropists concerned about what they perceived as the younger generation’s lack of Jewish involvement. Numerous formal and informal evaluations show participants’ connection to Israel and the Jewish community are enhanced by their trip, but that does not translate into ongoing Jewish involvement, according to the new report

“Years after their trip, Taglit alumni continue to look more like ‘tourists’ than ‘citizens’ in the Jewish community world,” the report’s authors write. “Although they value their Jewish identities, most have only limited participation in Jewish communal life.”

The report shows that 44 percent of Birthright alumni who are no longer in college have not attended any Jewish program since their return from Israel. A further 39 percent have attended just one or two programs. Only 4 percent have taken part in more than four programs.[...]

Guma Aguiar & his Chabad rebbe's bas mitzva

Chabad Lubavitch reports

How do parents of a severely challenged 12 year old girl celebrate their daughter’s bat mitzvah?

The question was poignantly relevant for Rabbi Moshe Meir and Pnina Lipszyc, Chabad representatives to Ft. Lauderdale, who have cultivated a lively Jewish community over nearly two decades while raising their special needs children under extraordinary circumstances. [...]

Guma Aguiar came from Israel with his wife and children to celebrate. “The first time I came to this Chabad center six years ago,” the founder of Leor Energy told the guests, “I had nothing. I knew nothing about Judaism, and didn’t understand a thing of what was going on during services.”

Aguiar, who went on to become a successful entrepreneur, was born to Jewish parents but raised as an evangelical Christian. “I came here because I wanted to try something authentic,” he said, recalling how he walked into the Chabad center one Friday night in search of something missing in his life. He found it in Rabbi Lipszyc’s unconditional acceptance. Aguiar has since returned to his Jewish roots, living in Jerusalem much of the year.

Like Aguiar, many at the Torah dedication/ bat-mitzvah were there having discovered the joy of belonging through Rabbi Lipszyc. Aguiar says that observing the rabbi’s unfaltering devotion to his daughter has been a tremendous inspiration. “Goldi’s come a very long way since we got to know her six years ago. Moshe Meir has nurtured her with incredible love and patience.”

From the way Rabbi Lipszyc greets an endless stream of visitors to the Chabad center and the Kabbalah Café in Ft. Lauderdale, one would never guess that the 45 year old father of five has twice battled cancer and continues to struggle with his own health while working creatively to build and grow Jewish life in the area.[...]

Children's books are dangerous - lead poisoning?

Washington Post

Rachel Merrill, mother of three, was holding innocuous-seeming contraband in her hand at an Arlington Goodwill store earlier this month: a 1971 edition of "Little House on the Prairie." This copy of the children's classic had just become illegal to resell because of concerns that some old books contain lead in their ink.

Legislation passed by Congress last August in response to fears of lead-tainted toys imported from China went into effect last month. Consumer groups and safety advocates have praised it for its far-reaching protections. But libraries and book resellers such as Goodwill are worried about one small part of the law: a ban on distributing children's books printed before 1985.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the act, lead in the books' inks could make its way into the mouths of little kids. Goodwill is calling for a change in the legislation even as it clears its shelves to comply, and libraries are worried they could be the next ones scrubbing their shelves.

Parents like Rachel Merrill are concerned, too. She home-schools her children and says that new books are just too expensive.

"We eat organic food, and I'm very careful about that kind of stuff," she said. "But to me, it seems like the law's written way too broadly."

Scientists are emphatic that lead, which was common in paints before its use was banned in 1978, poses a threat to the neural development of small children. But they disagree about whether there is enough in the ink in children's books to warrant concern. Some even accuse the safety commission of trying to undermine the law by stirring up popular backlash.[...]

Judges vs legislation to decide moral issues?

(CBS/AP) Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank called Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a "homophobe" in a recent interview with a gay news Web site.

In an interview on 365gay.com, the Democratic lawmaker, who is gay, was discussing gay marriage and his expectation that the high court would some day be called upon to decide whether the Constitution allows the federal government to deny recognition to same-sex marriages.

"I wouldn't want it to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has too many votes on this current court," said Frank. The video of the interview is available online. [...]

Scalia dissented from the court's ruling in 2003 that struck down state laws banning consensual sodomy. He has complained about judges, rather than elected officials, deciding questions of morality about which the Constitution is silent.

Controversial topics like gay rights and abortion should not be in the hands of judges, he has said, calling on people to persuade their legislatures or amend the Constitution.

Religious Jewish soldiers - condemned by secular

NYTimes

JERUSALEM — The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting highlights a debate here about the rules of war. But it also exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.

Several of the testimonies, published by an institute that runs a premilitary course and is affiliated with the left-leaning secular kibbutz movement, showed a distinct impatience with religious soldiers, portraying them as self-appointed holy warriors.

A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

Dany Zamir, the director of the one-year premilitary course who solicited the testimonies and then leaked them, leading to a promise by the military to investigate, is quoted in the transcripts as expressing anguish over the growing religious nationalist elements of the military.

“If clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren’t representative of the whole spectrum of the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population, what can we expect?” he said. “To whom do we complain?”

For the first four decades of Israel’s existence, the army — like many of the country’s institutions — was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated. In the past decade or two, religious nationalists, including many from the settler movement in the West Bank, have moved into more and more positions of military responsibility. (In Israeli society, they are a growing force, distinct from, and more modern than, the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox, who are excused from military service.)

In many cases, the religious nationalists have ascended to command positions from precisely the kind of premilitary college course that Mr. Zamir runs — but theirs are run by the religious movements rather than his secular one, meaning that the competition between him and them is both ideological and careerist.

“The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies,” noted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor who co-wrote the military code of ethics and who is himself religiously observant but politically liberal. “The religious right is trying to have an impact on Israeli society through the army.”

For Mr. Halbertal, like for the vast majority of Israelis, the army is an especially sensitive institution because it has always functioned as a social cauldron, throwing together people from all walks of life and scores of ethnic and national backgrounds, and helping form them into a cohesive society with social networks that carry on throughout their lives.

Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.

He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”

A controversy then arose when a booklet handed out to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy. The Defense Ministry reprimanded the rabbi.

At the time, in January, Avshalom Vilan, then a leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having “turned the Israeli military’s activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war.”[...]

Abuse - Perpetrator as practicing doctor?

NYTimes

A year ago, Sweden’s most prestigious medical school found itself in an international uproar after it unknowingly admitted a student who was a Nazi sympathizer and a convicted murderer, then scrambled to find a way to expel him.

It is hard to imagine how the case could get any more bizarre. But it has.

The 33-year-old student, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, having been banished from the medical school of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the ground that he falsified his high school records, has now been admitted to a second well-known medical school — Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university.

New twists in his and another case highlight the difficulties that three of the country’s six medical schools have had in admitting and dismissing students with serious criminal offenses in just the past two years. The cases resonate far beyond Sweden, raising fundamental questions about who is fit to become a doctor.

The circumstances of Mr. Svensson’s admission to Uppsala’s first-year class — reported in January by Swedish news organizations — are unknown, because none of the officials involved will publicly discuss his case. He apparently uses an assumed name — a customary practice for Swedes seeking to remain anonymous because of a personal threat. Last week, Uppsala officials, responding to concerns about Mr. Svensson’s admission, said he had not participated in class work, but did not say why.

In another embarrassing twist, a Swedish newspaper reported last month that much of the verdict and court files regarding Bjorn Soderberg, Mr. Svensson’s murder victim, had been cut out or replaced with blank pages. The police said they had been unable to find a culprit.

And in still another case, a 24-year-old medical student at Lund University was convicted last April of raping a 14-year-old boy while he slept. A district court sentenced the student to two years in prison, but a higher court reduced the sentence to two years’ probation and medical therapy. [...]

Snake Oil vs. Scientific Medicine

Washington Post

Our conference was being held over lunch, but Pat, a middle-aged health-care consultant, did not touch a bite of her food. When I asked if something was wrong, she revealed her lifelong battle with Crohn's disease, an inflammation of the bowels that causes diarrhea and abdominal pain.

I asked what her doctor advised. With some hesitation, she told me she was chiefly being treated by someone she called her "teacher," who helped her use her use qi gong, a Chinese system of breathing and energy exercise, to manage her illness.

She also sees a conventional doctor. But I was struck that this woman, whose job involves ensuring that hospital practices are supported by scientific evidence, had chosen to consult a provider of alternative medicine.

"My teacher looks at me as a whole person," she explained. "He looks at my emotional state, not just my diseased state. . . . He empowers me on how to care for myself. . . . My doctor looks at me just as a disease."

As an MD with two decades of experience, I felt a sense of rebuke. Personally, I am not averse to alternative medicine. Though I was raised and educated in America, I was born in India, where treatments such as ayurveda and yoga originated and where they are perceived as an equivalent method of healing many illnesses. And I use meditation and massage as aids to relaxation.[...]