The Arab mind at work….the once respectable, now antisemitic Haaretz newspaper…the French claim sovereignty in Yosh…

Phantom Nation 19Sept2016 – PODCAST

A number of our Orthodox clients recently signed prenuptial agreements. What made it somewhat unusual was that each of the agreements contained different get provisions but all were designed for the same purpose.

The goal of each was that in the unfortunate event of the dissolution of the marriage, the husband would give and the wife would accept a get. However, the details of how that would be achieved differed in each prenuptial agreement. The reason was that each client was being advised by a different rabbi. They were from different communities and subscribed to different hashkafas as to how an appropriate document meant to avoid an agunah situation was to be drafted.

We were able to take into account the wishes and concerns of each client while crafting a document unique to the individual situation while achieving the common goal of avoiding situations of get refusal.

Currently there is an excellent prenup available to the public. Since Rabbi Mordechai Willig in 1994 drafted the Beth Din of America Prenuptial Agreement, it has become the most widely used Jewish prenup with the goal of avoiding the creation of agunot. In the Beth Din of America Prenup, commonly known as the RCA or BDA Prenup (or simply the Prenup), the parties sign a binding arbitration agreement obligating them to appear at the Beth Din of America for the giving and receiving of a get.

(The parties may choose a different bet din by substituting the name of the bet din they agree on in the body of the document prior to executing the agreement.)

The RCA Prenup also obligates a husband, upon notice, to pay support to his wife until the get is given. Through the strong support of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) and its membership, the Prenup has become a mainstay for brides and grooms in the Modern Orthodox community. The RCA has mandated that its member rabbis not officiate weddings without the execution of the Prenup.

The RCA Prenup has a stellar success rate. It has induced Gittin in situations where the get may have otherwise been withheld. The Prenup has also been tested and upheld in civil court. We personally have seen success with our clients who had signed the Prenup. In our practice, we advocate for our clients to use the Beth Din of America Prenup so long as they are comfortable with it. When clients approach us for financial prenuptial agreements, we always strongly suggest they either sign the halachic RCA Prenup as well or we insert language in the tailor-made prenup to include the halachic component.

There are still those who opt out of using the RCA Prenup. The primary reason is that the boilerplate language does not fit the parties’ needs or goals and does not address the concerns of their rabbis. The truth is that prenuptial agreements are not always “one size fits all.”

In our recent cases, we had to address three different concerns. In one case, the couple’s rabbi didn’t agree with the “support provision” in the RCA Prenup; in another, he had concerns with the get language; and in the worst case of the three, the rabbi didn’t want the client to sign any prenup at all. Fortunately, they came to discuss their dilemma with us and we were able to draft a specific prenup that satisfied both their need for protection and their rabbis’ opposition to or concern with the RCA Prenup.

For a variety of reasons, the signing of any prenup is still not common outside of the Modern Orthodox community, and it certainly is still not used often enough even among Modern Orthodox Jews. In fact, when three of the attorneys from our office lectured in Israel last December at the TAHEL international conference on abuse in the Jewish community, many of the attorneys from outside the United States were shocked that prenuptial agreements were not more common here, given the stance of the RCA on the matter.

{Originally posted to the author’s website, Abu Yehuda}

A 25-year old woman who is running for Congress in California has been the target of a remarkably ugly campaign of anti-Jewish abuse.

After Erin Schrode’s personal information was posted on a neo-Nazi website, she received hundreds of messages of anti-Jewish abuse, including death and rape threats.

It’s beyond horrible. Unfortunately, her response misses the point. She wrote on her Facebook page,

This unspeakable vitriol goes far beyond anti-Semitism. It is not merely an attack on me or on one people, but rather an attack on any individual or group who is targeted because of faith, race, nationality, gender, ability, orientation or other arbitrary classification.

No, it  is precisely an attack on you and your people. Saying that it is in some way a generalized expression of hatred de-emphasizes the sharply focused nature of the attack. It blurs the fact that in recent times there has been an explosion of public expressions of Jew-hatred to a degree that has rarely been seen in the US since WWII.

Ethnic and racial hatreds are not all alike. They have their special flavors. There is nothing in the world quite like American anti-black racism. And there is nothing like the Jew-hatred that today is sweeping the world, even the supposedly immune USA.

It was a surprise for some. America was supposed to be different from depraved Europe, where something like Nazism could flourish, and where old fashioned Jew-hatred is growing by leaps and bounds today. That could never happen in America, they thought, where more or less since the 1960s Jews have been able to live wherever they wanted and work in whatever profession they chose. Today’s young Jews didn’t experience academic quotas, restricted subdivisions or jobs that were closed to them (who would believe today that a Jew would have had a hard time getting a position in banking?) And very rarely were they chased home from school for being “Christ killers.”

It was assumed that the America that was celebrated in Hollywood movies, where race or ethnicity were dealt with in a stereotypically non-threatening way, was the real America. There was continued discrimination against blacks, but most whites thought it was confined to the South and then eliminated by the 1960s civil rights movement. And Jew-hatred was ancient history. There were just a few crazy “bigots” running around and they would ultimately die out.

Well, folks, the golden age for American Jewry is over, and it is happening faster than almost anyone expected. There was a lot of wishful thinking in those movies (most of which were made by Jews, after all).

What happened is that back in the 1960s the Left eagerly adopted the KGB’s anti-Zionism, which it promulgated as part of its Cold War psychological warfare strategy in support of Soviet clients in the Middle East. As the facts of the Holocaust became generally known, many people were so horrified that they became immune to straight-up Jew hatred; but anti-Zionism was an acceptable surrogate.

Meanwhile the old Jew-hatred of the Right – the sort of people that appreciated Lindbergh and Father Coughlin in the 1930s – never went away. But the expression of Jew-hatred was socially unacceptable after the Holocaust, so they pretty much kept their ideas to themselves.

But little by little, the barriers broke down. The Holocaust retreated in history and people got tired of hearing about it. Some trivialized it by subsuming it under the general category of ‘bigotry’, and including all of Hitler’s victims, obscuring its central feature: it was an attempt to extirpate Jewish DNA from mankind. And there were those who said that it had been exaggerated, that Jews were using it to obtain special treatment, and so on.

The anti-Zionist Left became more and more open to the idea that maybe it was the Jewishness of Israel that was the problem. Anti-Israel Muslims in the West who did not live in the shadow of the Holocaust were more up front about seeing the Jews that supported Israel as the problem and saying so. The Occupy Wall Street movement pointed to the visibility of Jews in finance (they had finally been allowed to get those banking jobs) and media.

The Occupy movement and the growth of Muslim-led pro-Palestinian groups in universities marked a watershed moment for the Left, the point at which it began to believe that the Jews themselves were the problem, and to feel that it was acceptable to say that in public.

And what about the old-fashioned ‘paleo-’ Jew-haters? They saw that they were not alone anymore, that many intellectuals and left-wingers weren’t shy about expressing their opinions. Why should they repress their true feelings?

You would think that the blacks and the Jews would work together to oppose racial and ethnic hatred. But historically it has worked out differently.

The prevalence of black Jew-hatred is an ugly secret. It had multiple causes – the influence of the Nation of Islam, friction between Jewish merchants and residents of ghetto neighborhoods, historical conflicts over control of schools between Jewish teachers and black parents,  communist influence on radical black movements in the 1960s, demagogues like Farrakhan and Sharpton, and lately the success of the concept of ‘intersectionality’ which relates (with utter illogic!) the ‘oppression’ of American blacks and Palestinian Arabs. But however it began, today anti-Jewish attitudes are widespread among American blacks.

The Paleos hate blacks as much as Jews, so they find it convenient to blame the Black Lives Matter movement and other unrest on the Jews. The white middle-class Left is afraid of the blacks, but relates to them in a painfully obsequious way in order to defuse their fear and their guilt over white racism. So they buy into black Jew-hatred as well – especially if they themselves are Jewish.

All of this is mixed together and amplified by the social media. The so-called ‘echo chamber’ tends to drive expression in the direction of extremism. People live in information bubbles with those that agree with them, and when nobody pushes back, status in the bubble depends on who pushes the envelope the farthest.

Social media are used as a weapon, too. And Ms Schrode has become a target of that weapon, along with other public Jews.

I can’t conclude without a word about Donald Trump. Trump has been blamed for some of these social media attacks. A journalist named Julia Ioffe who wrote a relatively mild article about Trump’s wife Melania was an early victim like Ms Schrode. Other Jewish writers who have opposed Trump as well have been targeted.

It is 100% certain that some of the worst scum in America are supporting Trump. Like most things about Trump, it is not clear if he is encouraging them, failing to push back against their behavior, or is absolutely blameless and it is just a coincidence that these people see him as their savior.

For American Jews, it doesn’t really matter. The genie of Jew-hatred is out of the bottle in America, along with a lot of other unsavory creatures. It is not going back in.

I invite Ms Schrode to come to Israel and run for the Knesset (although she’s probably too leftish for me to vote for). But at least here she would have a future.

Jews in America don’t.

In parshah Ki Tetzei, Moses teaches us, almost as an afterthought, “Do not hate an Edomite because he is your brother.” This teaching is understandable. After all, even an estranged brother who has wronged me is still my brother. But then, in a leap hard to grasp for many of us, the Torah goes on to teach, “Do not hate an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land” (23:8).

What? How can we help but hate those who enslaved us? Whose king demanded that “every male Israelite born be thrown into the Nile”? There must be a deeper meaning to these words. How can we be expected to develop good relations with such a mortal enemy? Which do we do? Do we recall our suffering in Egypt (l’maan tizkor et yom tzetcha m’eretz Mitzrayim) or do we “not hate an Egyptian”?

When I studied at Yeshiva University, hundreds of us would rush to the cafeteria after morning seder to quickly get our lunches so we could make it to our afternoon shiur on time. As you can imagine, the line could grow very long. There, standing behind the counter, dishing out daily helpings of whatever was on the menu was a gentle Holocaust survivor, Mr. Weber. To this day, so many years later, I can still hear his voice prompting us along: “Move de line, move de line.”

Over the many years of my life, his constant refrain has become integral to my personal philosophy. To me, he was not simply asking us not to slow down the line; he was telling us not to get stuck in a tough spot and, by extension, not to remain mired in the bitterness of the inevitable challenges and disappointments we all face – not to bear grudges for the rest of our lives.

We all have to “move de line.”

That means letting go of the negatives that hold us back – the things that enslave us, that humiliate us, that degrade us. Ironically, until we can let go of those things, we will remain enslaved, even long after our captors have set us free. We need to “move de line” if we are to forge new paths and realize new goals.

Hurt begets hurt. Anger begets anger. Hate begets hate. If you want to move de line, you have to let go of hurt and anger. If your “captor” allows you to go free, the least you can do is grant yourself the same grace. As long as you continue to be enslaved by negativity, you can know no freedom; you cannot embark on a new beginning. You are stuck.

As Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks eloquently teaches, “To be free, you have to let go of hate. That is what Moses is saying. If they continued to hate their erstwhile enemies, Moses would have taken the Israelites out of Egypt, but he would not have taken Egypt out of the Israelites. Mentally, they would still be there, slaves to the past. They would still be in chains, not of metal but of the mind – and chains of the mind are the most constricting of all.”

But what of all the mitzvot centered on Yetziat Mitzrayim – including those recalled on Shabbat, when laying tefillin, putting on our tzitzit or reciting the ancient truths at our Seders? In fact, there is no hate, no rage, no call for revenge or retaliation – not even a shred of negativity – in any of these mitzvot. Instead, they focus on the positive: Remember. Learn. Grow.

Move de line.

Rav Soloveitchik views the Egyptian exile and suffering as the “…experience which molded the moral quality of the Jewish people for all time.” Rather than embitter us, our experience in Egypt and subsequent emancipation teaches us not to hate and retaliate but rather “…ethical sensitivity, what it truly means to be a Jew. It sought to transform the Jew into a rachaman, one possessing a heightened form of ethical sensitivity and responsiveness.”

The most practical method of teaching compassion, sensitivity and concern for others, the most direct way of imparting a sense of mitgefiel, is to recall one’s own experience of tzarah. It should come as no surprise that it is often he who has suffered sickness who best understands the discomfort of the ill; he who has sustained loss who can best comfort the bereaved, and he who knew wealth and success but who suffered reversals who can best identify with a colleague or neighbor who confronts similar obstacles.

The Kinneret Bot reports:

In the last 2 days the water level of the Kinneret rose 2cm to -212.38m, 62cm above the lower red line.

This rise has been due to the rain that Israel has been having over the past 2 days.

(((CLICK BELOW TO HEAR AUDIO)))

Yishai broadcasts from Jerusalem’s International Convention Center while waiting for Malkah to vote in the Likud primaries.  While waiting on line (or is it in line?) Yishai interviews Daniel Tauber, who is running in the Likud list.  Together, they talk about the core values of the Likud party and how they also discuss some of the candidates that are on the list and which would work best for Israel.  Back in the studio, Yishai and Malkah discuss Malkah’s experience with actually voting in the primaries and how system issues were continually causing delays during the voting process.

Yishai Fleisher on Twitter: @YishaiFleisher
Yishai on Facebook

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We just received this report from the Tazpit news agency: Today at 9:00 AM Israel time, a resident of Gush Talmonim was traveling with her infant (less than a year old) to the city of Modi’in. Some 300 yards before the security checkpoint of Modi’in Illit she drove straight into a crowd of Arab demonstrators with Palestinian flags, who threw down lengths of cables across the highway to block traffic.

As she was sitting there, in her car, with her baby, stuck in a line of motionless vehicles, IDF troops fired tear gas grenades at the Arabs who had reached to within a few yards from the Israeli vehicles.

Israeli media today announced that the frightening event had taken place in Samaria, meaning “out there” in the territories, where anyone who gets in trouble was, basically, asking for it. But that was a lie. The entire event, from a crowd with flags blocking the road to the crowd getting near the stuck Israeli cars, to the IDF rushing on the scene just in time – the whole thing took place only about three miles from Modi’in, well within the safe and recognized and leftist-sanctified “green line.”

That’s what the media can do to history: if reality doesn’t match our concepts, we can always move reality a few miles over to where it fits.