Dear Friend: Now that a number of weeks have passed since our Winter Torah Seminar, I want to tell you how wonderful and lasting an impression it made upon me. When I say "it" I mean all who participated, for it was you who made the Seminar the success it was. I particularly enjoyed spending the week with the "geza" group of which you were a member. I was happy, though not surprised, at your enthusiasm and interest in the Jewish studies sessions. However, as I indicated to you then, the intensive program we enjoyed together was not meant to substitute for a Jewish education. It was meant to stimulate a greater desire on your part to intensify your Jewish education. There are many ways that can be done. One of them is through attending a Jewish school. (We hope that some of you eventually will be able to attend either Yeshiva University or Stern College.) Another way is through private instruction. But there is also a third way which every mature and intelligent teenager should take advantage of: reading. As a follow-up to our nine Jewish studies sessions, I recommend the following books. They are all easy to read, interesting, reliable, and informative. You will enjoy them, and they will benefit you greatly. You may order them at the stated price by sending the money and order to Bloch Publishers, 31 West 31st Street, New York, New York.The Siddur and Prayer a) The Hertz Siddur – Prepared by the late Dr. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire; contains the Hebrew prayers, translation, and an excellent running commentary. No Jewish home should be without this prayerbook! b) The World of Prayer – by Dr. Elie Munk of Paris. This is an excellent commentary on the daily prayers. It is especially good for those who can read some Hebrew. Price $3.75Chumash a) The Hertz Bible – A standard work, corresponding to the Hertz Siddur. Price $6 b) The Soncino Bible – While the Hertz culls from ancient and modern commentaries, this commentary offers only the interpretations of t…

My dear Friend, it is a real and genuine pleasure for me to say "Hello" and welcome you in the pages of this, the first Kodimoh Youth Bulletin. I want to say that I am proud of you and of your group leaders and teachers. And I think you should be proud of your synagogue, Kodimoh. During the past several months, we have really been happy to work not only for you, but with you. Together we have made a success of each of our projects – from Junior Cong. to Senior Cong., from our youngest Junior Oneg Shabbat group through the Yaar Ganim to the Bnei Mitzvah. Now, thank God, we have published our first Bulletin. Remember – it is your Bulletin, just like it's your group and your synagogue. Feel free to criticize it, and to write for it. Remember that this is your project, and whether it succeeds or fails depends upon you. Let me wish you lots of luck in this new venture. May God be with you as you become a proud, respected, and noble son or daughter of Kodimoh. Sincerely, Rabbi Norman Lamm.

זכות היא לי להצטרף לקהל המברכים את הפעילים ברמות שפירא, יוזמי הרעיון ומחולליי, מייסרי המפעל ומנהליו. ככל שאנו מתרחקים בזמן מהשר המנוח אשר המקום נקרא על שמו, כן אנו מוקירים דמותו ומעריכים תרומתו ההיסטוריה לעם, לתורה, ולמדינה – ולתנועה שהיא חובקת את אהבת שלשתם. אין ספק שרמות שפירא היא מזכרת נאותה ומתאימה לר' משה חיים שפירא ז״ל. רמות שפירא תהיה בנותן עניין ובנותן טעם לתפוצות, ולאלה שעליהם מוטלת האחריות לחינוך יהדות התפוצות. העולם המערבי נתון היום במשבר תרבותי, חברתי ורוחני, שכמעט אין לו תקדים במאית השנים האחרונות. זרמי המרדנות, הבעיטה בדפוסים ישנים ומיושנים, "התודעה החדשה", לא רק מקיפים את הנוער אלא נובעים ממנו. מרד הנוער בארה״ב היא עובדה שאין להכחישה – הן לזכות והן לחובה, על מתירנותו ועל האידיאליזם שלו, על ל ס ועל געגועיו. ויהדות ארה״ב, במידה שהיא ינטגרלי של ההווי הסוציאלי והתרבותי של פית כולה, גם היא נפקדה מרוחות חדשות אלה. !ענשוי, על כל סיכוייו וסכנותיו, מבליט את. המכריע והגורלי של הנוער היהודי. "ועל כל עמי" — ולכן אין לתאר את תכונותיה ות עתידה של יהדות זו, בת חמשת מיליונים כ״י, מבלי לייחד את הדיבור על צעיריה :יה.-לזאת, אני רואה ברמות שפירא ובתוכניות ו בה, תגובה לאחד האתגרים הגדולים של - ההתמודדות עם הנוער של התפוצות, נוערחושך משמשים בו בערבוביה, נוער שאף מרובה מחמתו זרועים בו ניצוצות של אור ושאר רוח והתמסרות לעם ולתורה. העלאת האלה — חן במובן התעלות הנפש והןישראל. נוער המדינה יכול לשמש כדגם חי וה לאומית, של חיי התורה כהווה באופן לא תסבוכת גלותית, ללא נחיתות דרגה ואף שאות מלאכותית, ללא בושה וביישנות. וח־ מריקאי, ודווקא חדתי, יכול להמחיש לנוער י את מידת גבירת הנפש אשר בלעדיה אין חדות בגולה, גבורה הנובעת ממקורות עתי־ ירים והמתבטאת בנאמנות לתורת ולמצוות, גאולת העם בארצו, אף בסביבה גויית, עוינת.בצוותא, בנוף הנהדר של שמורת הטבע ושלים, במקום שנושא שמו יזכרו של השר תוכל השפעת גומלין זו לסייע לאיחוד העם, נות כוחותינו, ולהתחדשות העם בתפוצותזקנה ידיכם בהגשמת חלומכם הנעלה חזה, ועל שאר התוכניות שהותוו לרמות שפירא. כולכם על הברכה.

Last year we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the liberation, marking the end of World War II. This means that a whole new generation has grown into adulthood not having known of the Holocaust from first-hand experience. For them, it is part of history. It is for this generation, and for all future generations, that the teaching of the Holocaust assumes special significance and presents new problems. "History" does have a tendency to tilt backwards into obsolescence and dissolve into irrelevance, and its most poignant lessons thus become lost to us.Yet, in a way, I wonder if it is not too soon to relegate the Holocaust to the past. I question if we have the right to consider the Holocaust as "history."In some subtle ways, the Holocaust seems to be open-ended, and hence not over yet. Many of the consequences of that single traumatic event in Jewish history are still being played out, and it is likely that the history of the next 20 or 50 years will have to be interpreted as reactions, even if long delayed, to the Holocaust. One may legitimately interpret the data of contemporary Jewish events as a radically different form of Holocaust, but Holocaust nonetheless. The rate of intermarriage and wholesale assimilation, despite the minor eddies and counter-currents in the direction of more intensive Jewish practice, are a gloomy indication of the truth of what I am saying. Moreover, we have not paid sufficient attention to "ZPG" (Zero Population Growth), a situation which is making the number of Jews in the world ever smaller relative to world population in general. While the rest of the world has been increasing, Jews have been decreasing. In effect, we are now confronted with the problem of a "preventive Holocaust," by which I mean, not the murder of Jews already alive, but the prevention of Jews from being born. It is less cruel to individuals, of course, but is equally destructive of the Jewish people as a whole.More directly, we cannot yet relax in considering a r…

Eleven years ago, in this very hall, it was my privilege to participate in the ceremonies at which the first award for Jewish Family of the Year was presented to the late and much lamented Samuel W. and Rose Hurowitz. Since then, and until this day when I happily participate in similar ceremonies conferring this same award upon my very dear friends Larry and Ruth Kobrin, the health and stability of the American Jewish family has not at all improved. If anything, it has considerably worsened, reflecting the general deterioration of family life in this country, both as a result of the accumulated corrosion afflicting all our social institutions, and the frontal attacks upon the family by spokesmen for certain avant-garde pressure groups. This is not the occasion for a probing analysis of what is wrong with the American Jewish family. Moreover, not being a social scientist, my credentials for such an analysis are considerably less than impeccable. Speaking only as a rabbi who has some passing acquaintance with the Jewish tradition, and on the basis of my limited experience in counseling Jewish families, permit me to dispense with diagnosis and prognosis, and concentrate on prescription. Here too, I cannot and will not presume to be comprehensive, but rather suggest a number of essential ingredients in the effort to restore family life amongst American Jews to what it once was, or to what we would like it to be. The first requirement for a stable family is, of course, love. I am almost embarrassed to speak the word, because it has been overused, abused, and misused to the point where it has been semantically debased and emotionally voided of all content. Furthermore, there is a danger of over-romanticization and over-idealization of the traditional Jewish family as bound by mutual love. We do no good in holding up for young couples an unrealizable ideal–two people who agree on everything, who love their children without resentment, and who receive, in return, unquestio…

To the extent that history has any meaning for Judaism; to the extent that experience is relevant to thought; to the extent that no orientation to the future is imaginable without drawing upon the past - to that extent is knowledge of and reflection upon the Holocaust indispensable to the enterprise of Jewish education. There can be no understanding of Jewish character, of Jewish destiny, of the Jew's place in the world, and of the current unfolding of the Jewish drama, without study of the grisly and still incredible events of the World War II period. Moreover, there is also a simple and practical urgency to informing the next generations about what happened to the last one.A Holocaust that happened once can happen again. Once breached, the walls of human restraint remain weakened. The demons know their way ... All the more reason for sending our children into the world forewarned and forearmed - and teach them the Holocaust. It is with this in mind that I address myself to the question of teaching the Holocaust - not as an historian and not as a philosopher, but as an educator. We must determine how best to go about transmitting to new generations of Jews what happened to our people that almost made it impossible for Jews ever to survive on this planet.No effort must be spared in keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive for both Jew and non-Jew. Schools which omit the Holocaust from their curricula are guilty of an unforgivable act of moral blindness. Students are receptive to the study of the Holocaust because they know that in it they are testing the limits of human depravity. And yet very few of our Jewish schools, to my knowledge, do anything at all to teach the Holocaust.The most illustrious exception is Flatbush Yeshiva in New York, where the high school department has established a separate Holocaust Documentation Center. Programs are available to others as they are being developed at the school.I am told that the Principals' Council of Torah U'mesorah is…

The baalei teshuvah (returnees to Judaism) phenomenon is one of the most encouraging and puzzling of our times. Emerging almost ex nihilo at a place and time characterized by a rampant and triumphalist secularism, it has buoyed the spirits of the observant Jewish community which had begun to think of itself as vestigial, marginal, and without cogency or influence in the outside world. It has thrown a monkey-wrench into the tables, statistics, projections, and extrapolations of the sociologists and the futurists. It has disconcerted the assimilationists who, armed with dogmatic faithlessness and strident hopelessness, cheerfully prognosticated the end of Orthodox Judaism and the triumph of assimilation. But this success story has not been without its problems. It has suffered from friend and foe alike, and it is by no means clear whether or not the movement has peaked. Part of its problem has been the extravagance with which it has been hailed; it has had too good a press. Thus, it has been greeted as the sure sign of the inner revitalization of Torah Judaism when that is not at all that certain; it may well be only the Jewish form of a world-wide swing to the right, as expressed in Islam, in Christianity, and in politics. As such it may say more about the disillusionment with modernity and liberalism that about the attractiveness of Judaism and the Torah community. Nor is it helpful to exaggerate the numbers of baalei teshuvah and the significance of the statistics. We are still very much in trouble. The number of Jews coming into the fold as baalei teshuvah is far outweighed by the number assimilating and intermarrying. Good recruitment gives little ground for victory dances when it is surpassed by the rate of attrition. Moreover, the baalei teshuva phenomenon has been appropriated by partisan religious groups who, for political reasons, covet the prestige of being the founders of the movement. A short time ago, a slick right-wing anti-Zionist magazine ran an issu…

After fourteen years of working for his father-in-law Laban, Jacob decides that the time has come to leave and return to his homeland. He now has eleven sons and a daughter from his two wives and the two handmaidens. And so he confronts Laban who seeks to restrain him; Laban knows when he has a good thing going for him. The question we must ask is: why just then? Of course, the obvious answer is that the terms of his contract with Laban have come to an end. He has served seven years for Leah and another seven for Rachel (whom he thought he was marrying in the first place). Yet the Torah implies that some other consideration is involved here: And it came to pass, when Rachel had borne Joseph, that Jacob said to Laban, "send me away, that I may go to my own place and my own country" (Gen. 30:25). The Torah connects Jacob's decision to leave with the birth of Joseph. But what does Joseph's birth have to do with this decision? True, this is Rachel's first child, but if Jacob had some prophetic premonition about the size of his family, why did he not wait for the birth of Benjamin, and thus the full family of the patriarch?I suggest that Jacob's decision, so important in his own life and for the furtherance of his divine mission, was occasioned not by his formal contract with Laban and not by the filling out of the contours of his family, but by something far more significant religiously and psychologically. What prompted Jacob's move was his concern for the spiritual education and welfare of his two wives, the daughters of Laban.Jacob knew that he was at a turning point in his life. Whatever the economic problems and opportunities that presented themselves to him as Laban's employee, there were far greater pressures that were building up. On the one hand, he knew that eventually he must confront his brother Esau who had sworn to kill him. That was good reason for postponing any decision to leave Laban's household. Even though he knew that as time went on and his own po…

In addressing this topic, I make certain assumptions which it is best to declare at the outset. I speak of “Torah Education” as it is known and practiced in Centrist or Modern Orthodoxy. This means Jewish education in that community which subscribes to Torah U’Madda as a desideratum and not a concession, to tolerance and moderation, to the State of Israel, and to the unity of the Jewish people. But these admirable qualities and values are ancillary to the primary principle of Torah as the very source of our lives, both individual and communal, and the study of Torah as the pre-eminent mitzvah of Judaism. My remarks might be viewed as self-critical, negatively constructive. Although I dwell upon our faults and failures and flaws, and forgo self-gratulation, do not conclude therefrom that we are inherently inadequate and doomed. Quite to the contrary: if I am critical of our educational efforts, perhaps harshly, I ask you to attribute the public airing of my misgivings as a sign of collective self-confidence and strength. Were I less confident of our past achievements and future triumphs, I would not risk exposing our weaknesses. I shall cluster my remarks about two poles or centers of concern: Torah and Mitzvot. Why, after all, should a young person study Torah when it is so easy to be accepted, successful, and recognized without a whisper of Jewish literacy? The Torah component in the theme of “Torah Education at the Crossroads” may be divided into a discussion of motivation, continuity, and axiology (or: the role of Torah in the hierarchy of values). Motivation: one of the most fundamental, difficult, and persistent questions which Jewish educators have to confront is that of the motivation to learn. This is universally the case, but it is especially nettlesome for children or adolescents of our community who are exposed to the whole gamut of contemporary experience in which Torah learning is not a prestige item. The perennial problem is getting more difficult of …

יעקב אבינו, לאחר ארבע־עשרה שנות עבודה בבית לבן, עת נולדו לו אחד־עשר בנים ובת, מחליט לעזוב ולשוב למולדתו. לבן מנסה לעכבו, אך יעקב נחוש – והוא קושר את ההחלטה ללידת יוסף: “ויהי כאשר ילדה רחל את יוסף, ויאמר יעקב אל לבן שלחני ואלכה אל מקומי ולארצי” (בראשית ל:כה). מדוע דווקא לידת יוסף מהווה את נקודת המפנה? הרי אם יעקב ידע שעתיד להעמיד י"ב שבטים, מדוע לא חיכה לבנימין? התשובה המוצעת כאן היא שיותר מהחוזה עם לבן או מיעד י"ב השבטים, יעקב ביקש להשלימם ולחנך את נשיו – בנות לבן – לאמונה טהורה. לאה ורחל גדלו באווירה אלילית, ויעקב הבין שתפקידו אינו רק לפרנס ולהגן, אלא להיות להן גם מורה ומדריך. ככל ששהו עוד בבית לבן, גבר הסיכון שיספגו מחדש את התרבות האלילית שספגו בילדותן. לפיכך, עליו לעקור ולהבריחן משם. הקושי היה עצום: שתי נשים שונות, שתי נפשות שיש לחנך, ושני קצבים רוחניים. יעקב חווה בכך את הקושי הידוע לכל מחנך – שכל תלמיד שונה מחברו. הדבר החריף כיוון שחינוכן לא הוגבל ל"שיעור" אלא היה אורח חיים מתמיד. כיצד נוכל להבחין בהתפתחותן הרוחנית של נשי יעקב? באמצעות השמות שנתנו לבניהן – ובעיקר, איזו התייחסות יש בהן לשם ה'. שם "אלקים" יכול להיות קודש או חול, תלוי בהקשר; לעומתו, שם הוי׳ הוא תמיד קודש, ומסמל קשר אישי, עמוק וחסדי עם הבורא. לאה, עם לידת ראובן ושמעון, מזכירה את שם הוי׳ – סימן להכרה דתית עמוקה. אך בלידת לוי אין שם שמים – אולי רפוייה באמונה, אולי הנושא – אהבת אישה לבעלה – אינו תלוי בה'. אולם בלידת יהודה חוזר שם הוי׳ – "הפעם אודה את ה'" – ביטוי לשיא רוחני. בהמשך, עם לידת בני השפחות (גד, אשר), שם שמים אינו נזכר כלל. בלידת יששכר וזבולון – חוזר השם "אלקים", אך לא שם הוי׳ – אולי בשל נסיגה באמונה. רחל, לעומת זאת, מתפתחת באיטיות. בבני בלהה היא מזכירה רק את שם "אלקים". רק בלידת יוסף נאמר “ויזכור אלקים את רחל” – וגם רחל עצמה משתמשת בשם "אלקים", ולא בשם הוי׳. אך יעקב, החכם הרוחני, מבחין שבבחירת שמה של רחל לבנה – יוסף – טמונה קפיצה משמעותית: היא מבטאת אמונה חדשה, התחזקות פנימית – והיא נעשתה ב"אתערותא דלתתא", מתוך התעוררות פנימית של רחל עצמה. מכאן, שהגיעה לרמה הרוחנית המצופה. באותה שעה, לאה – שהגיעה לשיא בלידת יהודה – מתחילה להיחלש, וניכרת ירידה בשם אלקים במקום שם הוי׳. יעקב הבין שאם תישאר עוד …