What 255 Days of War Has Taught Me – Ten Takeaways …

1. War is brutal – Sounds trite, but the jingoists forget. Eight of our soldiers were killed on Shabbat morning in an RPG attack on their explosive-laden APC in the southern Gaza Strip. Another died from wounds incurred Erev Shavuot in a booby-trapped building blast. By the close of the weekend, one more had been killed in yet another explosion.

Our war of no choice has forced us to kill not just armed jihadists but also inadvertently noncombatants who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In practically all wars, civilian casualty rates are consistently and inevitably high – as often as not, more innocents die in war than bad guys.

Humanitarian crises often follow in the wake of war. Each side is responsible for looking after its own homefront. Except, peculiarly, in the case of the Palestinian Arabs.

2. The veneer of civilization is thin. The Palestinian Arabs launched Operation Al-Aksa Flood on October 7 with military precision that cadets at West Point will be studying for years to come.

Yet the blitzkrieg was about more than inflicting a martial blow against Israel. Integral to the onslaught was its barbarism. High on amphetamines, the Islamists raped, pillaged, and burned. Scores of ordinary Gazans followed behind the Nukhba forces to participate in the bloodlust. Long months afterward, forensic pathologists in Israel were still working to identify victims' remains. That's how vicious the massacre was.

While Hamas gunmen were still on Israeli territory and before the IDF was able to mobilize its citizen-soldier reserves – anti-Israel campaigners swarmed into Times Square, carrying Palestinian flags and chanting "Resistance is Justified," "Globalize the intifada," and "Smash the settler Zionist state."

They smelled Jewish blood. They sensed Israel's vulnerability. The prospect that the Zionist enterprise was a paper tiger was too tempting to ignore. And if Israel was going down, then maybe the Diaspora was vulnerable too – the identifiably Jewish Jews. The pro-Israel Jews. The condescending civil rights Jews. The philanthropic museum Jews. The white Jews.

The tsunami of anti-Israelism and antisemitism rather than ebbing has, with time, only consolidated and intensified. This mass hysteria of Jew-hating has burned through large swathes of Western civilization.

3. This is how Nazi Germany and its enablers did it. Like many of my baby boomer contemporaries, I have studied a fair amount about the Holocaust and the events leading up to WWII. Watching a clip of feverish, kaffiyeh-wearing, COVID-masked Gaza campaigners crowding into a NYC subway carriage last week on the way to Union Square (their usual protestdemonstrationsgelände) gave me a visceral sense of how an advanced cultured polity can be whipped asunder by frenzied mobilization.

The university encampments, assaults against cultural institutions, vandalism at homes of prominent Jews, attacks on religious Jews on the streets, along with the incremental purging of "Zionists" from woke media, recall the Weimar Republic.

I know that history doesn't literally repeat itself, but who wants to test that truism?

4. Neither a uniform nor rank connotes wisdom. We have a splendid military that reflects Israel at its human and technological best. Yet the disgrace of October 7 runs deep and wide. The strongest army in the Middle East could not muster one Apache helicopter gunship on the morning of Black Saturday.

What's no less worrying is the number of infiltrations of military bases since October 7; this exposes a poorly supervised IDF.

The multiple examples of soldiers misbehaving in Gaza (today, two soldiers idiotically posing holding bras to their chests in a Gaza residence) amplified on social media points to an army where discipline is way too slack.

The IDF can carry out a pinpoint strike hundreds of miles from our borders but can't find a terror mastermind hiding a short driving distance from the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. Let's say our military prowess is uneven.

Historian Stephen Ambrose, in his biography of Dwight Eisenhower, says Ike hated to be surprised.

"As a general rule, the easiest way to achieve complete strategic surprise is to commit an act that makes no sense or is even self-destructive. In 1941 it made no sense for the Japanese to initiate a war with the United States; thus the surprise at Pearl Harbor. It made no sense for the Germans to invade Russia; thus the surprise of Operation Barbarossa. In 1944 it made no sense for Hitler to use up his armor in a hopeless counterattack, rather than reserve it for the defense of the Rhine; thus the surprise in the Battle of the Bulge."

So, in fairness to our decision makers who were taken by surprise on October 7 – the Hamas onslaught made no sense. That it would leave Gaza devastated was foretold.

What we Israelis failed to consider, though, is that for Palestinian Arab leaders, what matters is keeping their cause (a state from the River to the Sea) at the forefront of world attention. Whether it is killing athletes at the Olympics, smashing the skulls of babies against a rock, blowing up a university café, or hijacking jetliners – the world will not pull back in revulsion. It will pay attention. It will ask, "What is the root cause of this behavior?" and it will blame the Jewish state.

5. Our political regime needs changing. Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for the better part of 16 years, is blameworthy for October 7. The IDF high command and the domestic spy chiefs are culpable.

Recall that on the day before October 7, Netanyahu was trying to carry out a putsch under the guise of judicial reform. And that he was told for nearly six months that his behavior was undermining Israeli deterrence.

So, we need to do more than rid ourselves of the corrupt, smug, power-hungry, and inept. And we certainly should not replace them with their pale imitations, the likes of Yossi Cohen, Avigdor Leiberman, or Ayalet Shaked.

Above all, we need a system that takes human nature into account. Israel's political system requires structural refinement. We deserve a constitution that protects us from the passions of raw majority rule and irresponsible elites. Some variant of constituent representation is called for.

We need to separate Synagogue from the State. We need a regime that incentivizes the many tribes of Israel to accommodate each other. To live and let live. Even if that is anathema to the haredim.

Presently, the system is not designed to incentivize anyone to think of the greater good and to vote for broad-based nonsectarian parties. Instead, there is every incentive to support extremist or parochial or single-issue parties. Our electoral system gives bad actors – Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Aryeh Deri, Yitzhak Goldknopf, and Moshe Gafni – disproportionate influence.

Moreover, if we change the constitutional regime, more citizens would be obliged to share in the burden for the upkeep and protection of the Zionist enterprise. There would be no financial or political incentives for Arabs or the insular ultra-Orthodox to avoid doing their bit. Whole communities that shirked any form of national service (in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, agriculture, sanitation, public works) would find themselves cut off from the state's social welfare safety net.

6. The masses are asses. Watching men in skirts and snowflake adolescents marching across the Brooklyn Bridge alongside jihadists and woke people of various hues made me understand that too many people today feel obliged to have a political opinion about the Arab-Israel conflict.

Political ignoramuses, regardless of age or dysphoria, can lead perfectly fulfilling lives. It used to be that Joe Sixpack enjoyed staying home watching sports. Alas, social media has transformed politics into a reality show. Demagogues and nefarious movements use social media to co-opt the dimwitted to serve as their useful idiots. Further, it fosters the manipulation of even well-meaning and erudite folks to serve what they naively think is a just cause.

Mobs are dangerous. Mobs comprised of stupid people mobilized by demagogic messages are particularly hazardous to Jews.

7. Disregard world leaders when they say, "Israel has a right to defend itself." It is vacuous dribble. When Western Europeans invoke this pablum, they probably mean it – literally. If Hamas crosses into Israel again, we can defend ourselves. However, if Hamas or Hezbollah shoot at us from their territory, we would be prudent to focus on trying to intercept their rockets, missiles, and drones. Should we go on the offensive, some random Arab civilian could get hurt, and that takes us into "disproportionate" or maybe even "genocide" territory.

7b  America does not have Israel's back. The Biden administration has been as supportive as we have a right to expect. It has resupplied our arsenal and given us substantial diplomatic covering at the hostile UN. Thank you!

However, US and Israeli interests are not in harmony. We need to ensure Hamas can not attack again. For that to happen, we need to control the Philadelphi Corridor, maintain a buffer area near our Negev settlements, and retain the capability of going in and out of Gaza as military requirements dictate – maybe for years to come.

The Biden administration needs us to stop fighting – certainly by the Democratic National Convention in late August. We are not free agents. We are hugely dependent on the US. That said, if we don't exercise sovereignty when our life as a country depends on it – then what is the point of a national Jewish homeland?

8. Anti-government Israeli demonstrators are deluding themselves. Hamas does not crave a ceasefire. Nor is it interested in a one-for-one prisoner exchange. Hamas claims not to know how many of our captives are even alive. So, we are negotiating blindly.

Those who are rallying "to bring home the hostages now" are essentially calling for the release of thousands of sociopathic Palestinian killers. I mean the kind of Hannibal Lecters who'd sexually mutilate the Israelis they've murdered. And the master terrorists who sent them on their missions. Hamas says thank you for your unwitting assistance.

Freeing its "resistance fighters" was the demand that Mohammed Deif made on Day 1 of the war. I can visualize a grinning Yehya Sinwar doing his meet and greet as each bus in a long convoy disgorges its jihadis in Gaza City. Maybe he'd spring Marwan Barghouti, leader of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades during the second intifada. The media calls Barghouti a moderate and a fitting president of Palestine. I don't doubt his fitness. Still, there would be a lot of blood to airbrush out of his bio.

A mass prisoner release would solidify Hamas as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian Arabs. It would take over the Palestinian Authority and get Fatah's seat at the UN and its embassies worldwide. I would rather see us pull out of Gaza without a hostage deal than have that happen.

The rosy conceit that it doesn't matter who gets freed since we can hunt down and re-incarcerate the prisoners is risible. The Hamas leaders in Qatar, Turkey (which runs West Bank operations), and Gaza were mostly released in Netanyahu's Shalit deal. How's the hunt for Sinwar going so far?

9. "As-a-Jews," those self-haters of Jewish extraction who cite their Jewishness in joining the jackals are the vilest of the vile.

This has been one of the most painful times in our lives as Israelis and Jews. Friends, family, and former colleagues abroad who cared were in touch to inquire about my well-being. It meant a great deal. And those who didn't reach out signaled their attitudes loud and clear.

But there is a special place in my purgatory reserved for the quislings of Jewish extraction who melded with the enemy. Your perfidy is a permanent stain through which you will always be viewed. No Arab kafiyyah or COVID-like facemask can disguise your treachery. Your heartless and ostentatious renunciations during our darkest hours are unpardonable. Apostates, you are, and apostates, you will die.

Once you've served your purposes, the jihadists and woke commissars will turn against you. When that happens, you'll get no sympathy from this quarter.

10. A land offensive in south Lebanon against Hezbollah would be a mistake. We are taking an awful beating in the north. The urge to embark on a Third Lebanon War is palpable. I get it.

Unfortunately, right now, we are not in a position to take on Hezbollah. On the bright side, we may not be deterring, but we are hurting Hezbollah. Hundreds of their gunmen have been liquidated. We are destroying some of Hezbollah's vast infrastructure.

And contrary to the impressions of exasperated Israelis, life is not peachy in South Lebanon while we suffer.

Read Sheren Falah Saab's story in Friday's Haaretz on the dislocation and suffering along the Lebanese border with Israel. Digest with care the partisan BBC dispatch by Ali Abbas Ahmadi from Alma al-Shaab, a Christian hamlet, about the travails of the people of that town.

Hezbollah does not care a whit about the Christians (or Sunnis) and uses their territory to launch attacks against Israel. However, it does its best to shelter the area's Shi'ites.

Our main leverage is to undermine Hezbollah's claim to be Lebanon's protector. If we do go to war with Lebanon, Beirut would need to look like Gaza. The US and the "international community" did not let us win the Second Lebanon War, and they would probably behave similarly in any future war. I grant that the transactional policies of any second Trump administration are not possible to predict.

Finally, there is a convincing analysis of the Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter Lazar Berman, in which he argues that now is not the time to fight Hezbollah.

"The challenges the IDF would face in Lebanon would be orders of magnitude greater [than it has faced in Gaza against Hamas]. Hezbollah has far more advanced anti-tank weapons and attack drones. Fighting in prepared defenses in open territory, they would be able to target IDF forces from kilometers away.

Moreover, reservists would be facing their third and fourth rounds of service this year. They would mostly show up, but the strain on families and businesses would be even greater."

My view is that if we handle our disentanglement from Gaza with uncharacteristic wisdom – i.e., we do not take advice from the Americans, we do not capitulate, and we offer Gazans an alternative to Hamas perhaps a PLO 2.0 – we can ameliorate the immediate threat from the north.

***

These are all interim lessons. And my education is continuing.

 

 

 

Why Make it Easier for the Mullahs?

 

My witty childhood friend Aaron Kopolowitz of blessed memory once commented that if you've got nothing nice to say about somebody, you must be thinking of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I thought of Aaron and what he said about the gepaygerter Ayatollah when I spotted a photo in The New York Post of former president Jimmy Carter looking hospice frail at 99. Carter and Khomeini go together in my mind.

Ruhollah Khomeini, from exile, led the Islamist opposition to the Shah of Iran during the revolution that culminated on February 11, 1979.

The overthrow of the Shah’s Pahlavi dynasty allowed for the emergence of what is indisputably the most wicked regime in the Middle East.

Shah made the mistake of crushing secular opponents of his rule, which left the Islamists poised to lead the resistance. When anti-government demonstrations began in October 1977 against the Shah, Jimmy Carter's administration had no good options to save this vital American ally. US intelligence had been blindsided by the revolution. The ailing monarch fled Iran on January 16, 1979, leaving behind the reasonable Shapour Bakhtiar as interim leader. Bakhtiar was assassinated by the Islamist regime while in French exile on August 6, 1991.

In the event, on February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned from exile in France to a tumultuous welcome. And by February 11, he was ensconced as leader until he died on June 3, 1989, at age 86. Not only did the people of Iran welcome Khomeini, but in March 1979, they also overwhelmingly backed the referendum declaring the country an Islamic Republic.

While the embers of the revolution still smoldered, PLO leader Yasser Arafat arrived in Tehran on February 17, 1979, to celebrate the Shah's overthrow with Khomeini. Iran and Israel had close, if unofficial, ties. Most of Israel's oil came from Iran. Meantime, Arafat had connected with all the contending anti-Shah groups based in Lebanon (the south of which was then his Fatahland). Eventually, he put most of his cards on anti-Shah factions loyal to Khomeini. The PLO would later take credit for suggesting that Iran form the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.

Not unappreciative, Khomeini turned the Israeli diplomatic mission (one of our largest anywhere) in Teheran over to the PLO.

The regime began a series of executions of Jewish community leaders on accusations of Zionist sympathies, starting with Habib Elghanian.

Khomeini agreed with Arafat that Israel had to be wiped off the face of the earth. Iran has never deviated from this position. That is why Teheran opposed the March 1979 Egyptian-Israel peace treaty and worked to isolate Egypt from the Muslim world.

When, in October 1979, the Shah was admitted into the US for medical treatment, the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line took over the American Embassy on November 9, 1979. Khomeini promptly blessed the capture. Fifty-three Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, until January 20, 1981, and freed just as Ronald Reagan was about to be inaugurated.

When in 1993, Arafat himself disingenuously professed to accept the existence of Israel in the Oslo Accords, Persian Iran's three proxy groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad (both Sunni Palestinian Arab), and Hezbollah (Shi'ite Lebanese Arab) intensified their jihadist resistance. Alawite-led Syria, another Iranian satellite, also joined the rejectionist camp.

***

Fast forward to June 2024. Israel, isolated and condemned in the international arena, prepares for all-out war with Hezbollah. The possibility that Iran will not stand on the sidelines is real. Iran is a formidable enemy – a massive country with a population of 88 million. Its major export trading partners are China and Turkey. Iran's other key allies are Russia and North Korea. Ordinary Iranians may regret the embrace their elders gave to the Islamists, but there is no freedom of expression in Iran, and all broadcast media is state-run.

Now, Israel finds itself fighting a multiple-front war – funded, instigated, and enabled by Iran:

-       Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon

-       Syria

-       Iraq (where pro-Iranian militias have a free hand)

-       West Bank (Iran funds various terror groups besides Hamas)

-       Yemen (Shi'ite Houties control large parts of the country)

-       Gaza (Hamas and Islamic Jihad remain dominant)

-       Iran itself

***

On the threshold of nuclear weapons, Holocaust-denying, genocide-instigating Iran and its so-called Axis of Resistance is responsible for untold death and suffering across the Middle East (and beyond, including fatal attacks against Jewish targets around the globe).

Iran sees itself in a zero-sum conflict with the West and Zionism. It is Israel's mortal enemy. However, Europe does not see itself as being at war with Iran. Iran Air flies to Paris and London. In February 2024 alone, Europe's trade with Iran was estimated at €847 million. The US seeks any opportunity to engage with Iran, most recently holding secret talks last month in Oman. Both the UN General Assembly and Security Council paid tribute to the memory of Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president who, together with his foreign minister, was killed in a helicopter accident on May 19, 2024. Alas, no one held a moment of silence for the thousands of Iranians Raisi ordered hanged when he sat on the regime's Death Commission.

How far will Iran push its hatred of Israel? Will its Twelvers' eschatological Shi'ism lead it to disregard rationality by attempting a surprise knockout blow against the Jewish state? Such a decision may await the demise of the current Supreme Leader, 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is the final decision-maker on issues of war and peace. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its hyper-terrorist Quds Force branch are loyal to him.

Iran is the most significant external strategic threat to Israel, no doubt.

None of its proxies are mindless puppets, but the mullahs in Teheran provide the essential military, diplomatic, and logistical wherewithal.

***

Now, let’s cut to the chase. Iran has somehow been able to bridge the usual divide separating Turks, Persians, and Arabs, not to mention Shi'ites and Sunnis. We need to ask ourselves whether any of Israel's policies have contributed to Iran's extraordinary achievement. What might we be doing to infuriate Muslims in a way that makes them willing to overlook their historic ethnic and theological differences?

Here's something to ponder. Israel has ostentatiously changed the status quo on the Temple Mount. Mohammed Deif cited this in the Hamas declaration of war of October 7, 2023. You can say that the enemy does not need an excuse to strike out. But the unity among Muslims is unprecedented. What do you think explains it? Or, maybe you think that on principle that praying, prostrating, and prancing on and around the Temple Mount – may be schecting a lamb – is a price worth paying. And the Iran-led united front against Israel will crumble because our God is bigger than theirs. In other words, our apocalyptic vision will prevail over theirs.

On the other hand, if you don’t see the world through this sort of messianic prism, you, like me, are left to wonder if we are imprudently uniting our enemies even as we fragment ourselves.

Jerusalem Day, 2024. Prostrating near Temple Mount

Congratulations Yair Golan - new head of Israel Labor Party I would like to vote for you

 

Congratulations.

I would like to vote for you.

Because I am sick and tired of Netanyahu, his La Familia-dominated Likud, the Haredi parties, and the messianic apocalyptic religious Zionist hardali parties.

I am tired of Benny Ganz playing Hamlet and intensely irritated with Yair Lapid (see below).

So, I mean it when I say I would like to vote for you.

However, you have been advocating emptying our prisons of Palestinian terrorists – not just the very monsters who executed October 7 but thousands of veteran “Yihya Sinwars” – in return for our hostages or their remains.

That would be a Schalit Deal on steroids.

And this will make us …safer?

This will discourage the Islamists from coming back for more.

Today, we paid yet another installment on the Schalit deal.

Now, you say we should have pulled out of Gaza 4 ½ months ago. So, we should leave the Philadelphi Corridor to the Egyptians and Hamas. How well did that serve us until now?

I would like to give you a chance to develop a grand strategy for Israel. I would like to take you seriously and pray you are not another "too-brilliant" Ehud Barak.

Take your time. Think out what you are offering. I am open.

Oh, about Yair Lapid. He also supports a Schalit II deal.

There is always Armageddon

Let me take your mind off our war of survival against Hamas, off the hostages held in Gaza, and off the sociopathic killers we would need to release in return for our captives – not that we know how many are still alive. Let me show you how to mentally brush off those ignoramuses of Jewish ancestry who have made a common cause with wokes, socialists, and Islamists in an orgy of intersectionality. How to ignore the tidal waves of anti-Israelism and antisemitism sweeping university campuses around the world. How to put aside the hypocrisy of world leaders and the international community and – even disregard the stupidities, hubris, and miscalculations of our own government. I can help you momentarily forget all those maddening posts on social media that suck up your time. And even how to figuratively mute the red alerts that are set off on your phone when Hezbollah attacks from the north or Hamas gets off rockets and mortars from the parts of Gaza it holds or has retaken.

For I have just finished a book that is so mind-shattering, so attention-grabbing, that it can temporarily numb us from our present travails.

The book is Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, in which the author sets out cinematically what might happen in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war that begins one mid-afternoon when North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un launches two or three nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles at the US.

Time is of the essence. Begin with the fact that the president has just six minutes to evaluate what he has been told about incoming ballistic missiles before he must give the launch order.

By organizing her deeply researched book into minutes, Jacobsen is able to play out a situation in which there is no time for decision-making, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead, decision-makers must abide by a playbook.

Pyongyang has attacked – why, we never find out. With absolute plausibility, Jacobsen shows how the foretold US retaliation is misread by not-ready-for-prime-time sensors in Russia. Its generals think Washington is exploiting the North Korean aggression to launch a First Strike against Russia.

She takes us from the moment when US eyes in the skies pick up the North Korean launch to a series of ill-fated – but emphatically credible – actions that inexorably ensue, which the reader can’t help but intuit will lead to the unraveling of human civilization.

The book brought to mind the 1983 made-for-ABC-TV film The Day After. President Ronald Reagan found the film depressing and compelling; it encouraged him to urge Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to agree to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Unfortunately, while there has been a reduction in the number of nukes around the globe since the USSR collapsed in 1991, there are still too many – on the order of 12,000.

This book is non-fiction not a post-apocalyptic novel like The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 magnum opus. Annie Jacobsen has produced a corrective for all those books and journal articles that students of politics and wargaming read in graduate school and military academies. Its starting premise is that, for some unknowable reason, deterrence fails.

At the end of the book, in a sort of epilogue, we get to find out how humanity fared when the last of the detonations are over —spoiler alert. Those not incinerated immediately in the US, North Korea, Russia, and Europe will likely face extinction because of nuclear winter and the depletion of the earth's ozone layer.

Would things really turn out that bad? I am thinking about how well Israel did – with the invaluable assistance of the US and other allies – in shooting down the blitz of 120 ballistic missiles, 170 drones, and about 30 cruise missiles, all conventionally armed, that Iran fired at us in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 14.

Why couldn’t the US take down a few North Korean missiles? And why did it choose to retaliate instantly? Thus giving the inept Russians the opportunity to miscalculate. I am thinking about how Washington dissuaded Israel from immediately reacting against Teheran’s attack.

We don’t have a complete picture of how Iran’s missiles were intercepted, but we do know it was not a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack. We had hours to ponder the appearance of the drones. And there was no immediate retaliation that might have been misinterpreted as a First Strike by some non-involved nuclear power.

Furthermore, while Iran has 3,000 conventional ballistic missiles, its leaders made an apparent decision not to try to overwhelm Israel’s defenses. Certainly, had Iran acted differently and had Lebanon and Yemen simultaneously unleashed all their Houthi and Hezbollah-controlled missiles, rockets, and drones, that night would have ended catastrophically. Perhaps the Shi’ite Islamists decided they would bide their time until they had a nuclear deterrent to inhibit any devastating Israeli retaliation.

In Jacobsen’s telling, there are very few interceptors (maybe 44) based in the continental US, making the chances of shooting down a state-of-the-art North Korean ballistic missile low. As part of the scenario, besides devastating strikes on California and Washington, North Korea also detonates a satellite bomb already in orbit above the US that unleashes an electromagnetic pulse or EMP that takes down America’s power grid and everything that works on electrical components – meaning the whole shebang of US society.

Deterrence has worked so far. It is supposed to operate so long as an irrational leader or fanatical terror group does not get hold of a nuclear bomb. Or until there is a glitch in some country’s early warning system. Or until there is some human error. Except that if deterrence fails – Jacobsen’s point is that there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. In a nuclear war, there are no rules about “proportionality” or anything else.

Plainly, the best course for humanity to follow is one of universal nuclear weapons disarmament.

So, while the useful idiots on America’s campuses have been protesting a “genocide” that is not happening in Gaza and shilling for a genuinely colonial and imperialist worldview, attention has undeniably shifted away from the nuclear threat posed particularly by North Korea, Iran, and Putin’s Russia.

Tilting at windmills in kaffiyehs and face masks even as the fate of all mankind hangs in the balance strikes me as unforgivably criminal.

-------------

Here is a C-SPAN interview with the author, which may encourage you to read/listen to this important book.

ASK THE (REFORM) RABBI - A Review of 'Reading Reform Responsa'

Reading Reform Responsa: Jewish Tradition, Reform Rabbis, and Today's Issues by Rabbi Mark Washofsky (CCAR Press, 2024)

This book could open your eyes to a Reform Judaism you may not have realized existed – faithful to tradition, Jewishly learned, and in its own way connected to Halacha. For there is an inclination – at least in my neck of the woods – to denigrate the Reform as the stream that makes it up as they go along.

Since its inception in 1873 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in Cincinnati, American Reform has gone through massive changes, for instance, from anti-Zionist to non-Zionist to staunchly pro-Zionist. Likewise, in matters of ritual and observance. Reform has proceeded from willfully anti-Orthodox – from davka not kosher, davka not Shabbat observant, and davka universalism over Yiddishkeit to something else entirely.

Today's Reform takes a measured approach to kashrut. Many Reform Jews avoid overtly treif food; the movement strongly encourages observing Shabbat, including candle lighting, and it is explicitly committed to Jewish peoplehood, Israel, and Zionism.

Politically, as the most assimilated of the three remaining branches of organized US Judaism, Reform has been buffeted by the winds of woke, and its idea of pro-Israelism is stretchy. But my impression is that post-October 7th – and in the wake of the tsunami of anti-Israelism and antisemitism that has swept America – Reform Jews, though still progressive at the DNA level, may be rethinking some of their woke conceits.

I don't think anyone knows how many Reform pulpit rabbis are pro-Zionists (probably most) and how many recently ordained are unabashedly in the Palestinian Arab camp. Lately, there were headlines connecting Rabbis for a Ceasefire to the Reform movement.  Yes, these business-class clerical activists include Reform rabbis, but the driving force behind what is a Jewish Voice for Peace front group are holy women associated with the Reconstructionists. 

It is undeniable that Reform and Conservative rabbis are active with J Street, whose raison d'etre is an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines. This group brands itself as pro-Israel but has been working to limit military aid to Israel and endorses House Members who oppose funding the Iron Dome. Not long ago, J Street was shamed into pulling its endorsement of Jamaal Bowman. But it continues to collaborate with a cadre of other House members even as they work to undercut support for Israel in Congress.

In fairness, Orthodoxy, too, began in opposition to Zionism. Nowadays, the mainstream ultra-Orthodox in America are mostly non-Zionist, not anti-Zionist. The responsa of the Orthodox sage Rabbi Moshe Feinstein showed him to be less than keen on Zionism. For instance, he opposed displaying an Israeli flag in synagogues. That said, today's Agudah Israel of America (with which Feinstein was associated) is staunchly pro-Israel even as it remains ideologically non-Zionist. Reb Moshe died in 1986, and as far as I know, he never visited Israel. It is hard to predict how his thinking might have evolved.

In Reading Reform Responsa, Rabbi Mark Washofsky, the Solomon B. Freehof Professor of Jewish Law and Practice at Hebrew Union College, makes the case that Reform is engaged with Halacha – to be understood as the laws and guidelines for Jewish living – and that it is futile to debate whether Reform is a "halachic" movement. For in the process of developing their decisions, Washofsky and other Reform rabbis engage with Halacha. And they have been doing so since the earliest days of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the movement's rabbinical body. Washofsky explains that the "word [Halacha] is likely derived from the Hebrew root ה-ל-ך, hei-lamed-chaf, 'to walk,' as in 'the way that one should walk, the path that one should follow.'"

Washofsky is plainly on to something when he explains that "responsa, like all texts, are products of a particular time and place, displaying the influence of the social, political, and cultural environment in which they are written."

For this book, he has selected a dozen or so responsa, "a representative sample," which he uses to explain what responsa is and how Reform and Orthodox responsa differ. He does not have much to say about Conservative responsa. Parenthetically, the US Conservative Rabbinical Assembly ruled in 2023 that "Use of an electric car per se is not a violation of Shabbat as long as the driving is not for non-Shabbat purposes."

All responsa are "questions about Jewish religious practice" that individuals and communities submit as inquiries to a rabbi or, in this instance, to the Central Conference of American Rabbis. These tend not to be easy problems, for if they had an obviously correct halachic answer, they would have been resolved at the pulpit level. What makes the responsa Reform in particular is that the replies are "composed by Reform rabbis for an audience of progressive Jewish readers" who share the same religious, social, and aesthetic sensibilities.

The responsa Washofsky selected reads like a cross between tightly argued legal briefs and literary essays. The authors' goal – and I think this is true across denominations – is to persuade, not dictate. We may think of Reform as institutionally hierarchical, but it is theologically decentralized. "The responsum is an 'opinion,' but it is almost always an advisory opinion," Washofsky writes.

Rabbi Solomon Freehof (1892-1990) anchored modern Reform in the responsa tradition. He chaired the movement's responsa committee (in effect serving as Reform's posek) and collated its work. Washofsky lauds him as a pathbreaker, even if he doesn't always agree with Freehof's conclusions.

For the Orthodox, Washofsky explains, "the meaning of the Torah does not evolve but is eternal and unchanging: the meaning of the text lies objectively (if implicitly) there, between its lines, and our task as students of Torah is to 'turn the Torah over and over again' (Mishnah Avot 5:22) until we discover it.'" 

Take, for instance, whether it is permissible to ride an elevator on Shabbat and under what circumstances. For the Orthodox, the answer would have been hovering about in the holy texts even before electricity had been harnessed. The Halacha turns out to be…less than clear-cut. Some Shabbat lifts meet the guidelines set by some Orthodox decisors. Others do not. 

In contradistinction, Washofsky writes: "We Reform Jews do not consider ourselves bound to the authority of Jewish law, a corpus of writings mostly composed by an all-male ancient and medieval scholarly elite who did not share the modern and progressive commitments that define our religious outlook." That said, "the practice of Reform, the way we have lived out Judaism on a daily, weekly, and seasonal basis, remains firmly rooted in the Rabbinic (that is to say the halachic) tradition." Washofsky allows that "This sweeping insight may be surprising to many readers."

I came away from reading this book with the sense that Reform rabbis in the Washofsky mold care very much that their Judaism rings authentic. They have moved light years from the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, which staked out a combatively anti-Orthodox stance. That may have catalyzed Orthodoxy in a more reactionary direction. It stirred the Chatam Sofer (Rabbi Moshe Sofer) to declare, "Everything new is forbidden by the Torah." I attended an elementary school on the Lower East Side jointly named after him and Rabbi Shlomo Kluger, who was a proponent of insularity in the face of modernity. And here I am blogging about Reform responsa!

In any case, successive Reform platforms Columbus (1937), San Francisco (1976), and Pittsburgh II (1999) have made Reform more traditional and conventionally observant while American Orthodoxy has arguably, though not uniformly, moved in a more inward-looking and ultra-Orthodox direction.

In October 1983, CCAR made an irreparable break with convention by embracing patrilineal descent. I get why they did it – rampant out-marriage and a new generation that understood its Jewish identity as a matter of choice and lifestyle. Yet the consequences have been as shattering as when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. Whatever the technical, historical, or sociological justifications of the patrilineal descent determination, it undermined the peoplehood that Jewish civilization needs to embrace. Washofsky doesn't address this controversial and uncomfortable decision in Reading Reform Responsa.

Instead, the book synthesizes more recent responsa. The appendix contains the full text of all the responsa and a helpful glossary. The issues here include: May the Torah portion be read on a Friday night if there is no minyan on Shabbat? May an Orthodox minyan be granted space in a Reform synagogue? Does one honor a parent's request for cremation? Is it permissible for a bar or bat mitzvah to read from a defective and irreparable Holocaust-era Torah Scroll for its important symbolism? How should we understand what constitutes Sabbath observance and Sabbath desecration? Should congregations display Israeli and or American flags on the Bimah? May they sing Hatikvah? Can a Reform Jew mark Valentine's Day and other secular holidays? Has Christmas become an essentially secular holiday? May one withhold medical information in a job interview? Is it permissible to employ non-union labor in renovating a Reform Temple? May hunger-striking Islamist prisoners in Guantanamo Bay be force-fed?

More than the answers, Washofsky is interested in showing us the process of Reform responsa. Bear in mind that while Reform Judaism is not bound by Jewish law, it does not willy-nilly disregard it. Take the question of honoring a parent's request for cremation. "Reform Judaism does not regard cremation as a violation of Jewish law," writes Washofsky. Classical rabbinic sources were not explicit on the issue, perhaps because cremation wasn't an issue. After the Shoah, cremation became associated with the Nazis. Reform theologians have historically come down on both sides of the issue. The responsa here decides that children are "entitled to uphold their own religious standards against their father's request" to be cremated.

Reform responsa often cites the kind of sources you'd find in Orthodox responsa – Torah, Talmud, Rambam's Mishneh Torah, Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh Dei-ah), and 20^th-century decisors like Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (for example on displaying the Israeli flag). Citing is not following, but it is contextualizing and acknowledging.

Take Shabbat. Unlike the Orthodox, Reform Jews are not constrained on Shabbat from carrying an umbrella on a rainy morning, ripping toilet tissue, or taking a shower. Washofsky reminds us, "We [Reform] have found it more useful to concentrate upon the positive, ritual elements of Shabbat that do strike us as meaningful rather than upon the negative ones that are devoid of significance to us."

What does that mean in practice? For one, the synagogue gift shop should be closed on Shabbat. An already delayed Brit milah should not be held on Shabbat. One responsum found: "The fact that Shabbat' conflicts' with another mitzvah or worthy cause does not mean that it is Shabbat that must give way. Indeed, the reverse is often the case." The Reform rabbis recognize that beyond abstaining from work on Shabbat, there is also a positive obligation to rest. In the final analysis, Reform rabbis like Washofsky want their Shabbat to share commonalities with the Shabbes of other observant Jews. "What does sh'mirat Shabbat even mean in our Reform context?" The answer begins with creating a "Sabbath mood."

This accessible book's principle idea is that Reform responsa are halachic texts. They strive with precedents even if they do not hesitate to overturn them (in how to define "work" on Shabbat, for instance). Their starting premise and aesthetic are non-Orthodox. And they are "Reform" because they are drafted by Reform clergy and aimed at a Reform audience.

If, like me, you are interested in what still binds our tribal people together, you will enjoy - as much as I did - reading this erudite introduction to the place of Halacha in Reform Judaism.