Only Torah can unite us

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

“There are four things that I think are inescapable in terms of what will happen in the next generation for the Jewish future. The four things involve a Jewish community that is more Israel-centric; number two, a Jewish community that is more Orthodox and, then, a Jewish community that is less prominent and less united,” syndicated U.S. radio talk show host and author Michael Medved told the audience of about 100 who gathered at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver for this year’s Faigen Family Lecture.

Presented by Vancouver Hebrew Academy, Dr. Morris Faigen, who passed away in December, created the annual lecture series “to foster and promote provocative and intelligent discourse and debate on issues of the day pertaining to Jewish and Israeli interests.” Now in its third year, Glen Bullard, on behalf of VHA’s board, welcomed attendees and introduced Medved, as well as Faigen’s daughter, Gina.

“He created this event,” she said of her father. “It’s his legacy to the Vancouver Jewish community and it brought him great joy and comfort planning the series with Rabbi Don Pacht of Vancouver Hebrew Academy, knowing that his passion for the Jewish people, for fighting antisemitism and promoting conservative Jewish thought would live on. And it probably also moved him to know that, on at least one day of the year, I would listen to someone who shared his political beliefs.” At the event’s conclusion, Pacht noted, among other things, that Morris Faigen not only lived his ideals, but had a passion for them, and that it was a privilege to be a part of his legacy.

Early in his remarks, Medved commented on the Boston bombings and the foiled Via Rail attack. “I think that highlights some of the common threats that not only the Jewish people face, but that civilization faces from Islamo-Nazi terror,” he said. “And there’s something else that struck me as I was preparing to come up here to speak tonight. I was stunned to realize that I am now speaking in the country with the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world.” (Ranking ahead of Canada are Israel, the United States and France.)

Noting the “astonishing growth” of Israel’s population – “over 45 percent now of all Jews in the world live in Israel” – and its economy, Medved said, “The idea that Israel is a backwater that other more wealthy, more fortunate countries have to support, that’s all gone.” He later added, “The Israeli secular birthrate is more than double ... the Jewish birthrate in this country or in the United States. People actually think kids might be a good thing, and that has had a tremendous impact.”

The other thing that is changing, in Israel and all over the world, continued Medved, is the increasing orthodoxy of the community. “There are now 3,300 Chabad Houses – actually, that’s a couple of months out of date, there may be 3,500 by now,” he joked. “The largest seder in the world in recent years has been in Katmandu, Nepal,” he added. Medved contended that, “The reality of the growth in the Jewish world of kollels, of yeshivahs, of day schools like this one, and of the Orthodox is so dramatic and so important, it is the biggest under-covered story in North American religiosity.” He gave as an example the recent UJA-Federation of New York survey of that city’s Jewish population, which found that the community, which had been shrinking, had grown for the first time since 1950, “by six percent in 11 years.”

He also offered other statistics from the survey, including that 40 percent of the Jews in the city identify as Orthodox, 30 percent as secular – with 74 percent of Jews under 18 Orthodox. This led into Medved’s point that the community will become more polarized. He also connected it to his belief that the community will become less prominent, Jews no longer dominating cultural, artistic, scientific and other fields, in part because the number of Jews as a percent of the total American population is less, but also because “a higher percentage of those Jewish people are less willing to make the compromises to pursue that kind of public success.”

After pronouncing Conservative Judaism as future-less and humanist Judaism as already being in the “ash heap of history, where it belongs, in my opinion,” Medved said that, as the community “sorts itself out into Orthodox and secular, some of the issues are simply unbridgeable.” He gave two examples.

“J-Street is poisonously anti-Israel,” argued Medved, citing the group’s opposition to Israel’s Operation Cast Lead and Operation Pillars of Defence, “operations to stop the rocket fire from Gaza, right? It’s unbelievable. Literally, the only voices in American politics who opposed or condemned Israel were people who were reflexive and veteran antisemites, like Congressman Ron Paul, but that’s another story.” Disagreement over Israeli policy is one thing, said Medved, but “that’s different from questioning the right of Israel to exist, and it’s different from simply not caring about Israel – and that is the fundamental difference and disunity that simply cannot be bridged.”

The other irreconcilable issue, according to Medved, is that of “redefining marriage.” He said, “To say that gay people can be wonderful people and nice people, and that gay couples can be loving couples and very positive contributors to the community, fine. Fine. But, if you are going to take the religious position that a wedding of people of the same gender is equally consequential, is equally holy, is equally expressive of God’s will, to a wedding of a man and a wife, that’s a problem.”

Medved concluded that there needs to be an “understanding that the most important distinction in Jewish life is not right or left, it’s right and wrong.” He then explained, using verses from the Torah, that compassion should not be confused with justice; the former should be confined to the personal realm, while the latter is how institutions should operate.

While every Jew considers themselves an expert in politics, he said, there are “too many Jews who don’t know anything about Torah.” But “what should be able to unite us and keep us alive and sustain us and allow our communities to grow and thrive is an emphasis on what matters most. An emphasis in pursuing not only what is right for society but is right for us as individuals, and that emphasis can be found in a Torah approach” – “changing the world by changing ourselves and building our families.”

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