[Avodah] Cancel Simchas Torah!

Thu Oct 8 11:52:45 PDT 2015

Professor, what allows you, collectively, the community, to publicly mourn
on the Chag?  Not having the 7th hakafa does not sound like an appropriate
halachic response.

On Sun, Oct 4, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Prof. Levine via Avodah <
avodah at lists.aishdas.org> wrote:

>
> Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2015 23:59:19 -0400
> Subject: [RCA Forum]: Fwd: fyi - Cancel Simchas Torah!
> From:
> To: rca-member-discussion-forum at googlegroups.com
> I like the sentiment. Not sure about the actual suggestion. Any thoughts
> on doing something, or not,to acknowledge the current situation?
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Rafael Medoff" <rafaelmedoff at aol.com>
> Date: Oct 3, 2015 10:28 PM
> Subject: fyi - Cancel Simchas Torah!
> To: rafaelmedoff at aol.com
>
> CANCEL SIMCHAS TORAH!
>
> by Rafael Medoff
>
> (Dr. Rafael Medoff is the founding director of The David S. Wyman
> Institute for Holocaust Studies, and winner of a 2015 Rockower Award from
> the American Jewish Press Association for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.)
> One of the most poignant anecdotes I have encountered in thirty-plus years
> of Holocaust research came out of an interview I conducted many years ago
> with the daughter of a Brooklyn rabbi.
>
> She told me of a remarkable rule that her father, Rabbi Baruch David
> Weitzmann, imposed on his Brownsville congregation in 1942, after the first
> reports about the ongoing mass murder of Europe's Jews were confirmed.
>
> "He wanted us to feel the tsa'ar of the Jews who were being killed in
> Europe," the rabbi's daughter recalled. "So if somebody wanted to get
> married--and there were a lot of these situations, involving boys who were
> about to go into the army--they came to our house, there was a little
> chuppah, some cake and soda, nothing more. No celebrations, no dancing,
> just the chuppah. He explained to us that you cannot celebrate at a time
> when other Jews are dying."
>
> Consider, for a moment, how drastically this deviated from normative
> Jewish practice. The mitzvah of making a bride and groom happy at their
> wedding is considered so important that it is one of the few commandments
> which supersede the obligation to study Torah. Normally stoic rabbis set
> aside their books to take part in wild dancing and assorted ribaldry to
> entertain the newlyweds.
>
> The Talmud (Tractate Brachot 6-b) declares that one who gladdens the
> hearts of the bride and groom at their wedding "merits to acquire the
> knowledge of the Torah." One Talmudic sage compares making newlyweds happy
> at their wedding to bringing a sacrifice in the Temple in ancient
> Jerusalem; another says it is the equivalent of rebuilding some of the
> ruins of Jerusalem.
>
> This is the mitzvah that Rabbi Weitzmann in effect temporarily suspended
> in 1942, in order to raise Jewish awareness of the mass murder in Europe
> and, hopefully, galvanize his congregants to action. The importance of
> feeling another Jew's pain, he decided, took precedence over the obligation
> to celebrate at a wedding. There is a time for singing and dancing, but
> there is also a time for mourning--and mourning sometimes must extend
> beyond one's immediate family.
>
> The very existence of the American Jewish community, after all, is based
> on the premise that Jews should care about, connect with, and assist each
> other. We are not merely a haphazard mass of individuals who happen to
> practice similar religious rituals in our private lives. We join
> together--in prayer, in celebration, and in other activities of communal
> partnership. The classic United Jewish Appeal slogan, "We are one!,"
> resonated deeply precisely because it spoke to the essence of Jewish
> peoplehood.
>
> Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, in his seminal book "Were We Our Brothers'
> Keepers?," confronted the painful fact that most American Jews in the 1940s
> failed to adopt an appropriate sense of urgency with regard to the plight
> of Europe's Jews. "One looks in vain," he writes, "for a sign that American
> Jews altered some aspect of their lifestyle to indicate their awareness of
> the plight of their European brothers [and] keep the matter at the
> forefront of their consciousness and to generate feelings of sympathy and
> solidarity….The Final Solution may have been unstoppable by American Jewry,
> but it should have been unbearable for them. And it wasn't. This is
> important, not alone for our understanding of the past, but for our sense
> of responsibility in the future."
>
> One wonders how Rabbi Baruch David Weitzmann would have responded to this
> week's brutal murders by Palestinian Arab terrorists in Israel. Two rabbis
> stabbed and shot to death in the streets of Jerusalem. A young couple
> gunned down in front of their four children. The latter attack hit
> particularly close to home for American Jews, as one of the victims, Rabbi
> Eitam Henkin, was the son of the renowned educator Rabbanit Chana Henkin,
> who has touched our lives through her writings, lectures, and her Nishmat
> school, where so many young women from our community have studied.
>
> If he were alive today, maybe Rabbi Weitzmann would cancel the singing and
> dancing of this year's Simchas Torah holiday. Maybe he would say this is a
> time to feel the tsa'ar of the Jews in Israel, not a time for celebrating.
>
> But today's Jewish community may not be ready for such a dramatic step.
> Perhaps something more modest would be in order. There are seven extended
> dances in the synagogue during the Simchas Torah celebrations. Why not
> cancel the seventh one? --and, of course, explain the reason for the
> cancelation.
>
> Still too drastic? How about just shortening the last dance--and pausing
> to speak about the Henkins, about their orphaned children, and about what
> practical steps American Jews can take, in the realm of political action,
> to respond to the murders. Is that too much to ask of American Jewry today?
>
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