Thou shalt not assume

Suppose the Torah did not say, “thou shalt not steal” would it be all right to steal? I read a report by a police detective in Israel, who said that whenever a particularly callous spate of crimes is noticed in a specific area, the first thing they check out is if there is an ex-ortho in the vicinity. You would have thought that anyone brought up with as many rules as we are, in a society as strict as ours, would at least retain a vestige of morality even after leaving. That is patently not the case, as most who deal with such cases will tell you.

The reason is simple. We are not taught morality. What we learn is what God and the Torah allow and what not. That is all. We do not teach a child that it is wrong to hit, we teach them it is an aveira (sin). We do not tell our children that you must not steal, we teach them that the Torah says you must not steal. The result is that if someone decides at some point that he does not believe in God and the Torah, he is left with no rules at all and no inherent sense of right and wrong.

I do not expect our Rebbes and teachers to start teaching human morality. I am not sure they could even if they wanted to. I do remember that our former headmaster, the late Alexander Feurstein, used to take five minutes every day during lunch to teach us a din (halachic rule). Between the usual things, like how to wash your hands before eating bread, how to stand during prayer and what blessing to recite for rice, he would slip in some little nuggets of common decency. “If you see a woman carrying heavy bags, offer her your help. Stand up on the bus if you see an elderly person or a mother with a baby and offer up your seat. Shut the gate if you are rambling in the countryside, to stop animals getting out.” He made no distinction between the kind of din that is mentioned in Halacha and those that human decency dictates.

I do not claim to remember all those little things he told me. I do still get irritated when I see people dropping litter and I know he was the one who drilled it into me, and I am proud that I was brought up that way. The Yesodey Hatorah is now but a shadow of its former self. Today most parents prefer to send their children to the ultra-Chassidic schools that cater to a much more fundamentalist stream. There is no room in today’s curricula for such frivolity.

I was going to open a business at one stage in my life, importing a certain product from the United States. When we discovered that someone in the community was already doing it my partner and I had second thoughts. He went to ask a Rav what to do. The answer he got was that it was Halachically permissible.
When he asked “What about meschlichkeit (common decency)? The Rabbi replied, “You want to be more meschlich than the Torah?"

I don’t, but I am loath to suppose that the Torah is as unnmenschlich as the behaviour of some of those being taught its ways seems to indicate. As Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame so aptly put it “What God wants, God gets, God help us all."

The Torah states that if two people bear false witness on another and they are proved by another pair of witnesses to have been elsewhere at the time they testified to have seen the innocent committing the alleged crime, they must be punished with the same punishment they plotted should be done to the innocent. Thus if they said they saw Mr X commit adultery, a capital crime, if they are proven to be lying they must die, if it was a monetary loss they would have caused, then it is money they pay.

The Talmud asks, if they bore witness that Mr X had divorced his wife and not paid his severance (ksuba), what do they have to pay?
The reasoning goes like this; The ksuba has to be paid if the husband dies or he divorces his wife. If she dies first or in some other extreme circumstances, she does not get her ksuba. So now either he is going to die first, in which case the ksuba would be paid anyway or she will die first and there is no ksuba for her and he would have lost the entire ksuba had the witnesses had their way. So what do we fine them for it?

The Talmud’s answers is; either his worth or hers. Cryptic but sharp, Rashi explains like so. The husband could go to a businessman and offer him the following deal. I have a ksuba on my wife for 100 pieces of gold. How much will you give me now so that if my wife dies before me I will give you the ksuba?

If we suppose a savvy business man would give 7 pieces of gold for a lotto ticket like that then the witnesses have caused him certain damage of seven pieces of gold, because by being forced to pay now he can no longer earn back those seven pieces. The rest is non-proveable loss at this time. That is his worth.

There is another deal the husband can cut. He can offer to buy her ksuba from her now, at a discount. How much would I have to give you now cash in hand so that if I die or divorce you I should not have to pay the ksuba? A clever woman I suggest, would go for half in hand now. The difference is the loss they would have caused. That is her worth.

A friend of mine was complaining today that the arrival of the ArtScroll Talmud with the all the commentaries boiled down to bite sized blurbs, was killing the ability of people to research and explore the Talmud in its original form. I just happened to learn this piece of Gemara today and I left my AtrtScroll aside to struggle through manually.

It took longer but the satisfaction was immense. I thought I would like to share such an exquisite piece of logic with you who have shared my finest whines too. (-;

I'm an Alien - An Englishman In London?

When I was a young boy I had no questions about my identity. I was an English Chassid. As a Chassid in Stamford Hill there was no problem of split-allegiance, there was simply nothing to split it with. We painted Union Jacks to hang from the window when the Queen celebrated her golden Jubilee and proudly went with all the school when she did her walk-about in Hackney to see her and recite the Bracha (special blessing) for the only Queen who still merited one. Israel was to us a then a far away place where even the postmen were Jewish but that was about as far as it went.

When Menachem Begin was elected one boy in my class stood up and announced that a Frummer Yid had been elected as prime minister of Israel. He was awarded with a stint in the corridor for that piece of heresy. It was only as I grew older and we started talking about what Yeshiva we would attend that the issue of USA or Israel forced the question of my ‘position on Israel’ to the forefront.

Like most of my contemporaries the lure of ‘belonging to a country’ was stronger than the indifference we were served up in school and I became an avid Zionist. Of course in the shul it I went to one did not announce that in public but secretly we all did feel a surge of pride whenever some great coup was recounted that the ‘Tziyonim’ had carried out.

Today with my generation the parents and Balei Batim, and Israeli newspapers and products crowding our store shelves and filling our coffee tables that feeling of connection has become the norm although unfortunately the feeling of pride has become somewhat tarnished and often replaced by quiet discomfort and shared despair.

My children on the other hand are feeling something different altogether. For them the British ambiguity towards Israel and the negativity that they feel from the local media is creating a sort of ghetto defiance that is forcing them to ask themselves if they belong here at all.

The size of our community should give us enough clout to get our position heard and put across. It is not happening because we are not organised and demanding it. Instead of creating housing projects to house first the families and friends of those working in the Housing Association, Jewish organisations in Stamford Hill should be developing political clout and representation that will enable the community to continue to make their homes here and feel they belong.

Maybe if we could develop some pride in our community we could also stop the slide towards insularity and fundamentalism that is the obvious result of alienation.

the Evils of Knowing Better

Grove Lane shul was a beautiful example of Jewish architecture and probably the last of its kind in Stamford Hill. When I was a child I remember going in there of a Shabbes morning just to see it in use. Its solemn presence moved me while its grandiose domed ceiling decorated with stunning murals and delicate carvings, gave it a presence that was so lacking in the dingy converted two roomed town house where we davened.

Grove Lane Shul is sadly no more. Having been bought by Visnits, in a move that at the time had me hoping that a new renaissance in Chassidic appreciation of architecture was finally underway; it is now a shabby and crumbling empty hall, standing limp testimony to our strident insistence that we ‘know’ everything better.

It is not only on the sad and amateurish decoration of our shteebles that this attitude is manifests itself. In education we have today a generation of teachers and principles who need no guidance from the professionals. So, while advances in educational methods are allowing dyslexic children all over the world to benefit from the advances in the understanding of what causes this condition and how to overcome it, our dyslexics are still being labeled underachievers by our expert educationalists. A recent survey of the Chassidic schools found one school with almost four hundred pupils that had not one single child diagnosed as dyslexic!

The medicine-doctor has returned in Chassidic society too, with young men like a certain ‘Rabbi’ in Israel who, with no formal medical training at all, advises patients from all over the world on matters of the utmost delicacy. Ostensibly he just tells people which doctor to go to but most who I hear from tell me that he also decides whether medical attention is necessary or not and shares his experiences with patients. London too has its own ‘medical practitioners’ who, with their ‘vast’ knowledge gained from their work in the Hatzole (a voluntary first-aid team) or by merit of their being on first-name terms with some Harley Street specialist, feel themselves qualified to advise patients on whether or not they need medical attention and where to seek it. In fact it is rare today for Chassidim with life-threatening diseases not to go and seek the advice of such quacks, to soon find themselves flying half round the world to ‘the only specialist who can help’.

The fact that the outcome is rarely different than what the first doctor suggested does not seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the poor patients or their families, who in their distress feel like they are doing less than they could if they do not seek such advice. Many a family I know have in the end found they have wasted vast sums of money, not to mention the final years with their loved one chasing the fools gold of the miracle cure on such advice.

Self –proclaimed shulem-bayis-machers (marriage guidance counselors) fly around the world offering their expensive and often useless advice to gullible couples that think that only a yid can appreciate their problems.

Meanwhile all over town shteeble after shteeble is springing up where the unifying force is the lack of any rules in design or behaviour. From Italy ugly cast copper church-chandeliers and wall light fittings, that for years lay gathering dust, are being gleefully bought up by eager young sidelocked young men each trying to prove that their shteeble is the fairest in the land. All over the Chassidic world from New York to Jerusalem monstrously ugly monuments are being built for obscene amounts of money that, to any eye not blinded by the elephantine glittering chandeliers, the garish marble stonework and primitively carved woodwork, look like the were designed by cutting and pasting bits from a picture book called Architectural Styles of the Last Millennium.

The same arrogance and over-developed self-assurance that has allowed individual Chassidim overcome their handicaps and allowed them to achieve a measure of success in their chosen field with little to no formal training, is now beginning to grow out of hand. We have come to believe that we can do anything we set out minds to, regardless of what the experts say. In the decoration of shteeebles it is ugly but will probably cause little lasting damage, except to the aesthetic sense of those growing up in them. In other fields however it can be, and in some cases is, reckless, dangerous and worryingly prevalent.

It's a man's world

My sister called me quite distraught. She caught her husband with a packet of pretzels in the sitting room, which was already cleaned for Pesach. While I patiently explained to her that it was not a personal attack on her nor did it mean that he does not take her, or her cleaning seriously, I was battling with my innate sense of honesty that wanted me to admit that I used to do it too.

I really do admire the vigour that women display in getting all traces of anything to do with wheat out of the house. True the extremes are sometimes funny. I have never actually seen any of the kids swinging from the curtains or chandelier holding a sandwich, but if the women feel the need to remove all traces of bread from there too I am happy to be supportive and even take the curtains down without a murmer.

I am perfectly happy to see a five pound box of washing powder thrown out because it wasn’t on the pesach list and the washing room is already cleaned. I don’t mention that the clothes going into the room to be cleaned are far more likely to have actual chometz on them, because then I might find no more fresh clothes in my cupboard.

For some reason I find it hard to accept that when G-d commanded us not to eat bread for eight days, he really meant us to be driven into smaller and smaller spaces with our food until we climax a couple of days before pesach furtively eating day old sandwiches on the porch. Yet I hold my tongue because I have come to the conclusion that what we men do is incredibly patronising.

Most men you will ask will tell you that, as a general rule, our women today are stricter than the men. Most women will be more forceful and declare that if their husbands had their way their kitchens would be totally treife (unkosher). The reason for this is that the men are the ones that spend their time studying so they know all the loopholes and reasonings. The Women learn in a much more practical way so they get only the do’s and don’ts. That is understandable. What is not is the prevalent attitude of ‘let her do her thing and I will do mine. I find it is demeaning to suggest that they do the work and we condescendingly tell them ‘it’s ok dear you don’t understand’ and then go off and do our thing, to their genuine horror.

I therefore freely admit that I do go along with all the things she makes me do and if I am less of a man for it I think at least I have earned her respect – even if she does not know it.

For the same reason dear readers I will be taking a Pesach break and probably will not be posting till after Pesach.

A story secretly doing the rounds in Stamford Hill alleges that a certain Chassidic young man was being threatened that unless he paid a large sum of money he would be exposed for having had sex with a minor years earlier. When he refused the blackmailer went to the police and denounced him as a child molester, claiming that he and a friend had had underage sex with him when he had been of age.

The police did their duty and arrested the alleged paedophile. You can see more details about the allegations in the comments to the last post.

I have no idea whether the story is true or false and have no wish to try and judge it from behind my curtain of anonymity. Some of the comments I heard people in the community make over the weekend are very disturbing though.

The sad truth is, that such a story, whether it eventually turns out to be true or false, will anyway have permanently stained the good name of the accused. The common reaction of the holimen is to avidly garner every detail and then say “a shmiutziger maase (a filthy story)” before running off gleefully to tell it to all his other friends. In Tzaddikville Technicolor has not yet arrived and everything gets painted in black and white. Shmutzig equals bad and anybody involved with shmutz is shmutzig.

Child molestation, in my humble opinion, is when an older person uses his or her authority to coerce someone underage to do something unwillingly. While the legal definition has to have distinct borders, it cannot be reasonable to automatically assume that if one party is sixteen and the other fifteen, that the older partner initiated the contact or that the younger partner was unwilling. I have no wish to condone such behaviour but I do not condemn one any more than the other. It must also be remembered that in a society as closed as ours, where the very mention of any sex is strictly frowned upon; it is difficult to expect our teenagers to respect a set of rules they have never heard.

On the other hand it is a well-known fact that the powers that be in our community have for years been protecting child molesters and blocking any effective investigation into allegations of it. This should really be an occasion for us to explore this difficult issue and see whether there is anything we should be doing to avoid these problems. True, it is difficult to give our children sex education in school if we prefer they did not know such a thing exists. There must however be some way of ensuring that if youngsters are going to mess around and experiment (and we might as well accept they are), at least they must know what they are doing and the potential dangers. Even more important if they do feel they are being abused there should be somewhere where they could gain help and sympathy without judgment. The only practical way that I can see is through an anonymous hotline where students can call and discuss their problems openly with those who are in a position to advise them sensibly. There are Rabbis and lay leaders out there who understand this although I admit that they are few and far between.

I can only urge any child who is being abused or anyone who has been abused in the past and feels that the abuser might still be active to send me a mail and I will try and put them in touch with someone who can help.

And to anyone who thinks he is being blackmailed my advice is this: if you are innocent sit tight and ignore it or contact the police. If you might not be; get in touch with a lawyer or someone in authority and discuss it, but under no circumstances should you ever hand over any money. Paying a blackmailer does not end the story. The blackmailer will never be satisfied with a one off payment. The moment he needs or wants as sum of money again he is bound to consider making a new withdrawal. Sooner or later the defining moment will arrive and one of the two will blink. Paying up is a sure-fire way of having the shit hit the fan only when you are broke.

Freedom of Choice

I can’t say I have respect for all the Rabbis I know. There is one though whom I met on the Internet. A highly unconventional man in a suave and sophisticated way he is a kind of Rabbi 007, of the Scottish variety (of coursh).

He is the man who decided my fate some years ago, though I doubt he knows it. I met him when we both contributed to some forum or other and he disagreed with a viewpoint of mine. In an acrimonious exchange of e-mails we discovered that we lived close to each other and arranged to meet. He did not expect to see a Chassid any more than I expected a stubbly shaven Gentleman Rabbi who could tell dirty jokes, and name-drop royalty between his quotes of Gemarra and Kabbalistic monologues.

We became pretty friendly and he introduced me into his group of intellectual friends. It was from his, mostly irreligious, friends that I learned to love philosophy and good music. And to appreciate the beauty in the knowledge I had accrued that had lost its sparkle. Not to mention the delights of the amber gold single-malt he taught me to drink. I was thus lucky enough to find a mentor who could show me a quality life outside of Chassidimgrad. I had stopped believing in much when I was 18 and had for a couple of years tried the bohemian life as I saw it then.

Looking, looking at Goylife through the Yeshiva windows, it seems a pretty simple affair. Wake up in the morning, send home whoever you were with and promise to call. Then slip on a pair of Jeans and a t-shirt and off you go for a new day of hunting. It took me a couple of years to discover that dreams are Universal and that’s just what Universal Studios sells. I’d never stopped wearing the chassididc garb so it was relatively easy to return when I realised I was not really equipped to make a better life out there.

I met Rabbi James Years later when I was already married and back in London. I was going through a rough patch and was really fed up. He advised me to take off my Kappel if that’s what I wanted. And he said that that was what God wanted if I did. That was when I decided I did not want to. It seems that all I had ever wanted was the right to choose.

You can all thank him that this blog is not fan site for the Grateful Dead.

Hats hats hats

Of all the Chassididshe clothes I have to wear the one that bothers me most is the hat. People living outside Chassidusville can have no idea how expressive our hats can be. Like mushrooms to a professional picker each one speaks an entire story.

Real Chassidim don’t have dents on the side of their hats. Only Lubavitchers do, so anybody with a dented hat is already one below par.

There is also texture to consider, Rebbishe Chassiduses go for furry felt while balabatishe (civilian) types favour regular felt. For anyone unaccustomed to our hats a simple finger-test will suffice to ascertain this. A 2mm pelt will indicate it belongs to someone from Bobov, Belz or Viznitz. Smooth is probably a Satmarrer or a Gurrer unless if it’s one of those frummer-do-gooders who wear a round hat with a groove in the top. They refuse to belong anywhere and think that just because they happen to believe in God they can be above all that. Wankers!

A word of advice here if you do happen to touch a laidigayer’s hat and rub the flock the wrong way, make you sure you brush it back before he notices. It is the mark of a true liadigayer to have a flawlessly flocked hat so a single brush the wrong way could ruin some poor guy’s credentials.

Of course you have styles within each style too. A low furry hat that looks like a flying saucer is either a Satmar bochur or one of those Neturei Karta who demonstrate against Israel whenever they can get the world's television cameras to train on them. A straight squarish furry hat worn back-to-front is generally a Viznitzer though it could always be a Belzer or Bobover up to no good who prefers that whoever sees him should think it is a Viznitzer doing it. Bobover hats are identical to the Belzer ones but usually cleaner so an expert can tell. A smooth Felt hat with a round dent in the top is always a Satmarrer while a bowler with a longish groove is a just a Shainer Yid (Jewish toff or nob).

Shabbes is a day of rest. Then everybody but the Gerrers (who always have to be different) wears the same Shtreimel. Again the real expert can tell the difference but you do have to have lots of experience for that.

I hate the hat because it is such a difficult thing to look after. Apart from having to protect it from the rain, which is difficult enough, I hate seeing people wearing the bloody thing with a dustbin-liner on it even more. I hate having to find somewhere in the car to put it, where it won’t get squashed. I hate having to find a place for it on the plane. I hate having to hold it when the wind blows or risk feeling like a clown as I chase after it on the street if I don’t. I hate having to wear it indoors when I am the only one wearing one and I hate being caught out at some Chassidishe gathering where I am the only one without one. I hate seeing tiny little Barmitzva boys floating along under huge hats where from my angle you can see no face at all and I hate it even more when I come to a park or the beach and see people dragging their hats along there too.

Ok I will admit there are times when it does come in handy. It is a perfect fan when the air-conditioning is down and it certainly does a fine job as a fly swatter.

James Monroe The 5th US President is famous for having said, “Religion is not so much believing as belonging.” (I suppose it is no accident that a famous Chassidic town is named after him.) He was incidentally nicknamed ‘the last cocked hat’.

There are many cocked hats in Monro today with each angle having its own special meaning. Wear it back with some hair showing in the front and you are a Shvitzer, wear it forward and you are being studious. Too big and you are a Frummer, too small and you are a shaigetz. Too wide you are a Rebbe too narrow a laidigayer.

Oh yes, and somewhere or other there is a God involved here too, I just can’t seem to put a finger on where.

Excluding Service

It is a sad fact that Purim is the time when corruptions reigns free in our schools. It has become a tradition for our parents to give their boys’ Rebbes an envelope with the Mishloach Manot. We all understood why the council forbade giving the dustmen a tip round Christmas time yet the only ones who seem to understand why this is wrong is those with a different excuse for each collection plate.

The moment the handing of a gratuity stops being a voluntary mark of appreciation and becomes a prerequisite for continued good service it loses all legitimacy. It cannot be acceptable that a child should be discriminated against because his father could not afford to compete in the tipping stakes with the highest flyer in his class. The teacher’s attention should not be for sale and our overly expensive education must not become concentrated upon the highest bidder.

One school did for a while insist that all parents put the money they want to give into one envelope so the Rebbe need not know what each individual had given. This was eventually scrapped, according to the headmaster because “The Rebbes complained that they were getting much less.” Oh really, is that so? You would think the most studious one percentile of the cleverest race would be able to figure out why that proves the problem.

I must admit that I don’t always have the courage of my convictions. Like everybody else I too duly handed in my protection money. I cannot subject my children to the risk of being ignored by their teacher but I shudder to think what it teaches them about values.