Route 17: Who's Juicing The Agunah Numbers? / Jonathan Mark in New York
It was recently reported that the United Nations AIDS agency overestimated the size of the AIDS epidemic by a whopping six million cases, a big percentage of the worldwide actuality (33.2 million).
You'd think AIDS advocates would be happy, but no. The New York Times said that AIDS advocates were concerned that they now wouldn't raise as much money as they hoped.
As politicians know, fear is good for business.
It is remarkable on how many issues, such as agunot (women who are denied a Jewish divorce by their husbands), Jewish journalists and academics simply guess at the numbers involved, without any statistical certainty. Sympathy for the feminist cause in most newsrooms likely has Jewish journalists overcooking the estimates of how many agunot there are. Or else, journalists are taking advocates' guesses as gospel. The agunot issue has become the BarryBonds of Jewish statistics: Juiced and pumped beyond credibility.
Bari Weiss, in The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 24), argues that in Israel "there are 10,000 women refused divorces, but in the U.S., Orthodoxy has no centralized legal body, so the number of agunot is impossible to calculate." Actually it is possible to calculate. There are a finite number of major Orthodox organizations. There are a finite number of rabbinical courts. They keep records.
If there are 10,000 agunot in Israel, there ought to be at least several thousand in the United States. But that doesn't sound right. Think about your own synagogue, if you live in a major population area. There might be hundreds of families who are members of your local synagogue. How many agunot have there been in your community, out of those hundreds?
Rabbi Yona Reiss, of the Rabbinical Council of America's Bet Din, told me that RCA court -- the largest Orthodox court in the United States - for the past five years handled "approximately 350" divorces each year. "I went through all our logs," said the rabbi, "and checked how many cases were still unresolved or outstanding, and if I recall, there were five to ten cases that hadn't been resolved after three or more years."
That's "five to ten," not "thousands."
This is not unlike the Jewish journalistic fad in the 1970s that insisted, in dozens of articles, that young Jews were joining cults by the thousands. In the wake of the 1960s, parents were afraid. To Nixonian minds, the whole idea of the "counterculture" seemed like a cult. I began to wonder: How is it possible that I had been living in two heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods (Riverdale and the Upper West Side), and I knew only one Jew - just one -- who actually joined the Moonies, or any cult for that matter?
How come, with all of my professional and personal acquaintances in the Jewish community, surely more than a thousand people, I wasn't on a first name basis with even two women who have ever been agunot? How can that be if there are thousands of them out there? I'm inclined to believe Rabbi Reiss. The numbers were low. That ought to be good news. After all the conferences, that ought to be a front page story. But it's not. Maybe Jewish feminists, like the AIDS advocates, would rather you not know the truth.
What numbers there are can be warped by advocates who twist criteria to their advantage. We have to know the length of time in which a divorcing couple can haggle before a woman becomes an agunah, since every divorce involves haggling and that has to be considered normative, not a reflection on the unique inequity of Jewish divorce law. But some advocates say a woman can be an agunah if there is even a one-day negotiation, or even several weeks, a shorter time period than most civil divorces can possibly take, even without religious complications.
I believe intermarriage statistics. They tell me that intermarriages are near 50 percent and I'm familiar with dozens and dozens of intermarriages. The statistics sound right.
But on too many Jewish issues, there are too many Jewish journalists and too many advocates who are bluffing.
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Beware The Bully Pulpit: The Problems With Heksher Tzedek / Jonathan Mark in New York
Liberal Jews just love the idea that they are embodiment of ethical behavior, unlike the mean ol' Orthodox who supposedly are only about ritual. The American and Israeli police blotters don't bear that out but so what, being smug is more important than being right.
This past week, a letter to the editor in The Jewish Week asked, "Is someone who swings a chicken over his head in anticipation of Yom Kippur but neglects the hungry and oppressed… really a more 'religious' Jew?"
The falsehood of that slur ought to be self-evident to anyone watching in the evening hours when Orthodox Jews deliver several thousands of food packages to hungry Jews before each and every Shabbat and holiday. And from the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in the early 1960s (to pick an arbitrary starting point), Orthodox Jews have been as out in front of just about every movement for the oppressed.
Meanwhile, at last winter's convention of Rabbi for Human Rights, several hundred Conservative and Reform rabbis (and just six Orthodox rabbis, all from Yeshivat Chovivei Torah) spent three days talking about the oppressed in Guantanamo and Ramallah without mentioning once - not once -- the Jews in Sderot, or the captive Israel soldiers. Last time I went to a rally for the captives, it was obvious that if it wasn't for Orthodox day schools and day school graduates there'd barely be a minyan, even counting women.
Why is it "ethical" to slander the Orthodox? And there's no doubt that a lot of this interdenominational waterboarding is fed by leaders who fancy themselves the most ethical among us.
The new Heksher Tzedek movement - linking kashrut certification to the treatment of animals and agribusiness workers - is more about being smug, more about positioning the Jew who is casual about ritual against the Jew who is passionate about it.
The rabbis of the Conservative movement, the heart and soul of the Heksher Tzedek initiative, let us know they care deeply about animal right and workers rights. But why don't they have anything to say about consumer rights? A Federation study determined that there are 350,000 Jews near the poverty line, in the New York State area alone. Hekshers are big business. Some restaurants spend upwards of $60,000 a year on kashrut supervision, and an article in the New Jersey Jewish Standard determined that a non-kosher restaurant going kosher will need to spend $130,000 in its first year. Someone is going to pay and it'll be the consumer. The rabbis will be the ones getting paid.
Rabbinical kashrut supervision has reached such cynical heights that some rabbis charge to give a Heksher to bottled water.
Why is it that pre-Passover price gouging has never been policed by rabbis, Conservative or otherwise, but by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs.
And speaking of agribusiness, a Sukkot bundle of branches from a palm, a myrtle and a willow, coupled with an etrog fruit, ought to cost about ten dollars, tops, but can instead cost Jewish consumers $36 or $72 or upwards of $300, prices totally out of whack with real cost, as betrayed by the price hikes of chai. This price gouging often done in conjunction with synagogues and local rabbis who frequently use the gouging for fund raising. It is a cabal that often includes local Judaica stores that kick back money to the synagogues. To the extent that is fund-raising, it is tax exempt, but that's a meaningless sop to a Jew at the poverty line.
When have the ethical voices of the rabbinate ever spoken up on behalf of consumers that see a lulav and etrog not as a luxury but as a necessity?
Heksher Tzedek press releases make a point of saying they do not intend to get involved with actual kashrut certification, the province almost entirely of the Orthodox. Somehow when it comes to religious price gouging, the great ethical arbiters are suddenly reluctant to critique their fellow teamsters in the rabbinic union. But when Orthodox shuls do the opposite and make Jewish life more affordable? Oh, then we hear howls of protest from the Heksher Tzedek crowd.
The other day one of our reporters, a Conservative Jew, let us know that Conservative rabbis on Long Island were indignant - indignant - that Chabad shuls on Long Island were allowing bar mitzvah boys (of any denomination) to be called to the Torah without their families being charged Temple membership - upwards of $2,000 in some Conservative Temples. The nerve of those Orthodox, not charging a marginally affiliated Jew, perhaps in financial trouble, as much as a Conservative synagogue would charge. Giving Jews a financial break?
That is so unethical!
When Conservative rabbis get together, with that sort of elite economic insensitivity, and say they've dreamed up a new form of rabbinic certification, all in the name of ethics, the first thing I want to know is - in the name of ethical concern for oppressed, financially-strapped Jews - how much is this thing going to cost? You can bet these Conservative rabbis will be charging more than Chabad.
It's a curious thing. The Conservative movement certainly values kashrut but yet has no internal kashrut supervision apparatus, and are not planning for it now. I'd be curious how many zip codes in the United States, with a Conservative synagogue but no Orthodox synagogue in the vicinity, would support a kosher restaurant?
The Web site of Conservative movement's United Synagogue congregational organization, noted (Dec. 19, 2006) that the movement's "Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has voted to accept the hashgachot, or kashrut supervision, of… Rabbi Dov Hazdan, whose symbol is the Ner Tamid K," based on Staten Island.
Surely that rabbi and committee know more about kashrut than I do, but I noticed that shortly before they made Rabbi Hazdan their standard bearer, New York magazine ran an item (April 2, 2006), "When is a restaurant that serves bacon considered kosher? To most Orthodox rabbis, the answer is easy: never. But Staten Island rabbi Dov Hazdan has been granting his own kosher certification to city Dunkin' Donuts franchises that have served bacon, ham, and sausage, the trayf trifecta," although Hazdan says his supervision did not extend to Dunkin's non-kosher meat.
Hazdan, reports New York magazine, was subsequently fired "as the kosher supervisor at a Dunkin' franchise on 34th Street after it received complaints from the Yeshiva University community about the rabbi and the pork. Spokesmen for the four top kosher-certifying agencies said they would never approve a restaurant that served nonkosher meats," but of course, those agencies are the kind that care about the quaint. We need to trust Heksher Tzedek to help us with the ethical.
Hazdan insisted to New York Magazine that his methods of supervision are 100 percent kosher. I take his word for it, but it sure sounds curious. Do restaurants serving non-kosher meat have to be Heksher Tzedek or is Heksher Tzedek just for the rest of us?
I was just wondering, all the non-Orthodox journalists and editors and public relations people and lay leaders that have, so far, given an uncritical free pass to Heksher Tzedek, how seriously do they themselves take it? Are we supposed to believe that these Heksher Tzedek cheerleaders will never again eat in a restaurant, or buy a sandwich from a Midtown lunch counter, or buy a burger that doesn't have proper Heksher Tzedek certification? When these Heksher Tzedek aficionados go to the grocery, will they only buy food that has the Heksher Tzedek certification? Will they not eat at Shabbat tables where non-observant Jews are so lax as to not serve Heksher Tzedek food? In other words, are they as serious about Heksher Tzedek in an equivalent way to real kashrut, the kashrut upon whose back they're riding? Or is all of this just ethical grandstanding to show up the Orthodox who, of course, supposedly care more about the ritual but not the animals or the workers?
Why do I have the hunch that the vast majority of Heksher Tzedek advocates, who talk like Cesar Chavez when the microphones are on, will sit down to eat just like the rest of us when the microphones turn off?
There is yet another problem with Heksher Tzedek, and that is the danger of an imperial rabbinate trying to do some social engineering for one Jewish value, decency to employees, by linking it to a second Jewish value, in this case kashrut.
It seems harmless enough. But the Israeli imperial rabbinate has been playing this game for a while, denying a kashrut Heksher to many non-haredi hotels and restaurants that kosher food because those establishments allow "mixed dancing," or because those hotels and restaurants allow New Year's Eve parties. The Israeli rabbinate can't stop dancing or partying, so they squeeze these venues on kashrut.
Imagine another case, if a rabbi would refuse to give a fully Jewish person an aliyah to the Torah, or access to tefillin, or a tahara ritual purification after death, because that person was intermarried or gay. His linkage is his own version of Heksher Tzedek.
A few months ago, the only Jewish elementary school in Vienna expelled a Jewish child, denying that child his only possible formal Jewish education, because that child's father was among the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta who visited Tehran in support Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinijad. The Zionist rabbinate couldn't touch the guilty father so they punish the innocent child. It is the principle of Heksher Tzedek, a rabbinate that can't enforce one value, grandstands upon a second value entirely.
Liberal Jews and Orthodox Jews alike ought to beware when one religious sentiment becomes hostage to another.
May all rabbis of all denominations be blessed in their attempts to influence agribusiness to operate in more spiritual ways.
May all rabbis enforce existing Jewish law regarding the rights of animals and workers.
But when rabbis on the right or left insist on sanctifying positions in which there can be honest disagreement - be it Zionism, male-female socializing, or the extent of animal rights - by utilizing the pious language of "Heksher" and smug para-halachic self-righteousness, it's time for the rest of us to get up and sit at a different table.
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