Dear Dr. Lamm: May I herewith inform you that it is our intention to publish your article replying to Dr. Twerski’s “Open Letter” in the form that you submitted it, with no changes. You understand, of course, that Professor Twerski reserves the right to respond to your article in the same issue. Our mutual good friend, Rabbi Yehuda Parnes, indeed does serve us well. It would be inaccurate, however, to say that he transmitted our “invitation” to publish your reply; it would be more accurate to say that we agree to publish it. Cordially yours, Rabbi Nisson Wolpin, Editor

Dear Dr. Lamm, I hope this letter finds you and yours well. At the very outset I would like it to be clear that this letter is meant for you and those listed under the cc at the end of the letter, as communication from one concerned Jew of conscience to another. This is not a dry run for a to-be-published commentary. It was prompted by an article featured in last week’s Forward (copy enclosed). Any quotation-mark-enclosed phrases are lifted from that article. I picture a young lady from Providence, Rhode Island, who lives around the corner from Brown University. Even though she could have stayed home and attended Brown, she elected – at great expense and personal sacrifice – to leave home and enroll in Stern College. We applauded her decision. She would thus have an opportunity to reinforce her commitment to Yiddishkeit while at the same time avoiding the moral quagmire of the contemporary campus scene. She took a class in American literature, along with similarly dedicated young ladies from San Diego, Denver and Atlanta. Their teacher introduced them to Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which the students instinctively rejected as “offensive… inappropriate.” When offered a Calvin Klein bus stop ad as a standard for acceptability, the girls found that public display “disgusting… offensive.” Eventually, after a few sessions marked by “a little nervous laughter, a little blushing,” they were able to leap over cultural barriers, and even identify with the enslaved blacks peopling Beloved, who “have sex all the time – with animals even!” By the time they finished the book, we sense the teacher’s major triumph for her students’ discovery of the universality of the human condition. And we try to swallow our shock for the loss of innocence of a bas Yisroel. (I’m not sure if Calvin Klein ads are included in the turf gained for the sake of humanity.) I certainly agree that literature is a potent force, which can create genuine empathy with people and situations that w…

In this letter, I would like to bring to light a particularly disturbing passage in a back issue of the Jewish Observer. More importantly, I would like to relate to you a conversation that I had with Reb Ely Svei about two weeks ago regarding this topic. In the March 1992 issue, an article appeared entitled “Torah U’Madda – the Book and its Ideology: a Critique” by Rabbi Yonasan Rosenblum. In this review, Rabbi Rosenblum presents a strong criticism of the book and the views presented therein. I would like to quote a specific passage from the article: “So great is the value of Madda for Dr. Lamm that the distinction between it and Torah finally blurs altogether: ‘So long as we continue to learn Scripture and Oral Law, to acquire new knowledge and to refrain from forgetting what we know, then the study of the sciences and humanities is, in effect, the study of Gemora and thus a fulfillment of the study of Torah’ (p. 165). ‘This conclusion leads him to entertain seriously such questions as: Should one recite birkhat hatorah on entering the chemistry lab? May one study calculus all day and thereby fulfill his obligation of Talmud Torah?’ (pp. 163–64).”