Dear Rav Chaim,

As any good Jew I know the question about this crucial point but I don't know the answer. As you must imagine I have been to places where no Orthodox (correctly) would dare to go, and imagine what goes on in th "lost children's" mind. There is a great spiritual vacuum in the world that needs to be fulfilled, it is getting more and more visible, I mean... the "great voices" of previous decades who were unfortunately commercially run pop superstars (who followed the leftist icons prior to them) are devoid of credibility right now, no one believes in political leaders anymore nor in anyone as a matter of fact, the picture is getting clear that there is definitely something wrong. In my view the answers are all in our beloved Torah and ultimately in Hashem.
So why dont people just simply return?
I think one of the main reasons of people not wanting to return to their origins is the feeling that they are a lost case and that they will never be accepted back because of their ignorance and the impurity they have reached. Ignorance is also a great draw-back factor, and unfortunately there are many negative stereo types attached to Orthodoxy which turn people away.
After all these centuries of exclusion and persecutions we Jews have become somewhat of a secret and closed society and there has got to be away to break out of this deadlock.
There is so much our Torah can give to people in this soul-less age, and so many Jews lost and in need of Torah that this religious apathy is not to be understood. This is a serious problem! Non-Orthodox Jews are losing the plot even in Israel!
It may sound corny (certainly un-Orthodox), but what I think is needed is a great PR effort, it's time to let people know what Torah and the Jews are all about, it's time to direct the effort outwards, and do HaShem's service on other people, rather than perfect ourselves. How to do it? I don't know ... but it would be a great mitzvah!!! I feel this as being the most important thing for us Jews right now. The Shoah is behind us, we have our State, we should finish up the job!

I see your point. The media is blatently anti-orthodox, so it gets a bad rap (Bernie Goldberg, in his second book, mentioned orthodox jews as part of what the media is biasly against). Especialy from very left wing jews.
Agudas Yisrael started an Am Echad resource center to combat it, and to put a good PR on,and it is helping somewhat, but the left media is very dominent, and is going to be hard to overcome that. That's why most kiruv org. ops for the one on one and going to the people, because an outright media campain would be hard, since all the bad press.

Also, another problem is funding, these things take a lot of money and there is just not so much to go around

What you wrote that people should service other people rather than perfect ourselves. The problem with that, to have a vibrant returnee movement,you must have a very vibrant orthodox community. Without that, what are you bringing them to? We don't want to spread Judaism too thin. On the contrary, you have people that are on a high personal level, this brings up the level of those below him, and it has a ripple effect on everyone else. Then when you have a returnee, he can be obsorbed in the community. That's why all across America where they brought Kollolim (people that devote their day to learning) into dieing communities, it lifted the community to be a vibrant community. The ones that didn't bring a kollel in, they continue to decline.

Their is also a big debate amoung Kiruv people (I learm with returnees from both groups, so I hear both sides of the issue from them, even though I'm not involved in Kiruv too much) about is it better to have more quality returnees or more quantity. The mass kiruv has the fault that the commitment of each individual returnee. HOw long will their commitment last? Will they be able to transfer their devotion to their kids etc. While the other side , you spend more time with the individual, you make sure he has the devotion and skills that are needed for an observant jew and to pass it on to his children, but a lot of people get left behind. So, at least their is a side, that mass producing BTs maybe doesn't produce the best results.

As I said I do not have the answers, and where I live there are very few Jews, so it is all theoretical for me at the moment. The money problem as well as the quantity vs quality one, are things that are great walls to be climbed.
Still I see the main problem as being the disunity of the Jewish nation as whole, and a certain bewilderment of the Jewish nation as a whole with the situation we live in which is very different to the one of even 60 years ago.
Perhaps the best way out of this stale mate is to promote the debate between the several groups and re-think the situation of the Jewish nation. HaShem and our unity should be above all the differences.
The Catholic Church and the Bhuddists have the advantage of having a Central figure, perhaps it would be an idea to have a recognized Central Commitee (if that exists already excuse my ignorance) who would be able to coordinate such monumental tasks as bringing the Jews back to their origins and uniting the nation.
I don't know.. but there is a lot of scope for thinking and doing things. Nevertheless it is dangerous to keep on this stagnant root of disunity, David only managed his victories when the entire nation was united, a similar thing happened when Israel was created, but now we are loosing the plot, to an extent that we open the space for such abnormalities as the Kabbalah Centres of the planet. That is what I meant about re-thinking things...

Dear Richard,
I would recommend to you to find some place with a reliable Rabbi where you could learn Talmud for a hour a day. My experience shows me that getting involved in learning brings a lot of clarity to many different aspects of Judaism. I will try to ask in the Mir for a reliable Rabbi in Glasgow who you could contact if you are interested.

Dear Rabbi Mitterhoff,
Thank you for that, I have already contacted the Cheif Rabbinatte of the UK, and they have given me a name. He is on holliday right now, but I'll hopefully be in contact with him next week. I also read a lot of on-line things, the weekly Parshat from diverse sources, the VBM (Virtual Beit Midrash) the Beith Chabad one as well as the one from project Genesis ans the have people writing about the Talmud there. I am also reading the Mishnah. The problem is that I do it alone, so it would be great to have someone to talk about it with. I hope I am not making too much of a nuisance of myself in your site, I am just raising questions that as Jew I think are necessary to be discussed.

Dear Richard,
I don't think a debate between the branches would solve a anything. It was already tried in the RAbbi REinman and A. hirsch's book, in which the debate per se was ignored, all it did was the reform to claim that their guy was an equal to the Orthodox, since they debated, they must be equal.
There is a statement in the Talmud: Where there is peace there is no truth and where there is truth there is no peace. To make peace, sometimes you must make a concession on the truth, which in concern of Torah , the truth can't be sacraficed.
What the non orthodox would want out of such a group would be recognized as a legit branch of Judaism, which we cannot in good faith (no pun intended ) give to them

I think one of the greatest issues in the O world today is that usually the only side that non-Os see is the restrictive, conformist view. From the outside, I think, the world sees only the physical expression of Torah law, whether it be black hats, bekeshes, or the like. Within the context of Halacha, we need to return to the contemplation of HaShem's perfect unity that we practiced long ago. Learning can bring you to that point, but I think that, at least for the non-frum, we should build a basis of what the Chassidim call hitbodedut. We need to emphasize communication with and closeness to HaShem, which is the true neshama-touching satisfaction and spirituality we seek.

Dialoque is fundamental.
We are entering new times for Judaism, we stand in a position that is very different to whatever has come before; we are relatively free to follow our beliefs, we have our State and western societies (where the vast majorities of us live) have internalized many Jewish principles.
Secular and religious thinkers and historians agree that we are living in a transitional age
and the world is changing rapidly, only Hashem knows into what it will change into, but the pattern is going into a configuration than before.
I absolutely believe that Torah and the Jewish should contribute into stabilizing and taking things to the right place. This is our mission here, this is the basis of our covenant. If it is not please tell me, because all my efforts of purifying myself and reaching out to something holier are based on a false premiss.
Now about us Jews: we are disunited right now full stop. And if one sees the nation as a whole we are confused and shooting into all directions, seeing ourselves sometimes as greater enemies than our real ones, this pattern is similar to the one of the nation at the time of the destruction of the 2nd Temple. I would also say that the majority of the Jews are away from their roots, and in many cases even reject them. One does not need to be a genius to see the problem.
I sincerely pray that we somehow manage to find a solution rather that it be imposed on us by tragedies as has so often been the case. As I stated before the first step is respectful dialogue.
Man made organizations should not get bigger than the service to HaShem, man wants to prevail, G-d wants unity. G-d wants man's satisfaction and happiness, that's why he put us here in the first place, humility and respectful dialogue are ways that the Torah teaches us. He surely does not want his children to argue or prevail over each other, he wants us to accept his will.

I agree about dialogue with individual jews, which does take place. I'm just warry of trying to do it with secular "Rabbis" and leaders. We must reach people, but we have to do it in ways where it's most likely to help

I don't know what they have in UK, but here in the states "talk Radio" is very popular. You have a host that leans to a certain political side. if you are invited for an interview, and you belong to the other side, it would be suicide to do so. The host controls the conversation, and could pull it and manipulate the conversation in anyway he wants.

If your going to have dialogue, you need to have it on your turf, or else you are asking for trouble.

Dear members of this list,

I'm rather interested in pursuing a debate which Rav Chaim (above) touches on: the Reinman/Hirsch book *One people, two worlds*, which I have before me as I write and which I've been reading this last week. (I’m trying to write an article on this.)
The background to this is the attempt, by a number of Dutch ('child') Holocaust survivors, to come to terms with what that means: 'Judaism'. (This really goes back to a congress organised by Jewish organisations in Holland for the 'child survivors' in 1992, at which we first discovered that we had experiences in common. Experiences quite different from those of Jews in Israel or the USA. e.g. an intense preoccupation with WWII in general, with the fate of our families in particular, all of this in the context of very dislocated and dysfunctional early family experiences.) Perhaps one could characterise our situation thus: we are the chance survivors of an unimaginable cataclysm, and at the same time alienated from the very tradition in the name of which we and our families have suffered so much: Judaism. We are, at the same time, *Dutch* Jews, and that means: the remnants and rather shaky representatives of one of the oldest and most progressive Jewish communities in Europe. Around the corner from where I'm writing these lines is the 'Esnoga', the most impressive synagogue in northern Europe, completed by the Marranos in 'New Jerusalem' (i.e. Amsterdam) in 1677. This is where the Haskalah started - Spinoza! - and so much else besides. In a word: this is where the *Enlightenment* started.

In our individual lives, many of us have had successful careers: in the professions, in business, in administration. That was because, before the advent of immigrants from North Africa and the first Intifada, antisemitism here in Holland was somewhere between unknown and negligible. On the contrary: the House of Orange, the Dutch monarchy, has a unique history of cooperation with the European Jews, and this was strengthened after the war. (The origins of this make an interesting read in Graetz: *Geschichte der Juden*.)

I give all this as background to indicate the following: as 'lost children' (is that a Torah term?) we are much drawn to Judaism, yet have problems with certain aspects of the Orthodoxy. In Reinman the themes we have enormous problems with are pretty clear: the natural sciences (rationality in general); Israeli policy with regard to the Palestinians, to mention these two huge areas.

So let's start there: what does the Orthodoxy say with regard to the natural sciences?

best,

Frederik van Gelder
Amsterdam

I'm not a scientist, but, to my understanding, there are plenty of scientists that believe evolution is false. I saw a poll in Time Magazine in 1999 that 40% of scientist believe in G-d (which in itself misleading, that they wanted you believe that 60% believe there is no G-d, but it only says that the rest don't believe there is definite a G-d, but could be agnostics) This is even after the evolutionist have the "establishment" of science, and everybody is brainwashed this when they are tought in HS and on.

There are good books on debunking Darwinism, written by Jews, Christions and agnostics (that just believe evolution is bad science). They bring in the Cambrian explosion, the missing links (after millions of fossils found), the complexity of the cell, the complexity of DNA etc. are some of the proofs against Darwinism.

I have a friend who held a chair of physics at MI State that became Orthodox because that's where the facts led him.

So, even though the "left" has a stranglehold on the establishment of science, besides having the stranglehold in the establishment of academia (here in US and of course in Europe), A person might think there is no argument in this field, but we know better.

Yes, evolution and Darwinism is one of the issues raised by Reinman. (There is of course a whole range of attitudes and convictions which could be covered by both terms.) Can, in your view, an Orthodox Jew accept the empirical evidence of the paleoanthropologists and the geologists? i.e. that human beings once had common ancestors with chimps and gorillas? (There is after all the case of Teilhard de Chardin... Not an orthodox Jew, granted, but still..) Perhaps the question should be: is there, within Orthodoxy, something comparable to the faith/reason controversy?

best,
Frederik van Gelder

There are, in the books I read, a lot of questions about the evidence of those finds. They claim that, even the ones that where not prooved to be fakes, are very liberaly "interpeted" in order to represent "evidence" of a transition, which they need to "prove" their preconceived notion of evolution. They claim that anything they found could either be a modern human or a complete ape. Now I'm not a scienctist, let alone a paleoanthropoligist, and I wouldn't be able to check the evidence for myself, but I definitely do not see any claim by evolutionist that hadn't been rebutted by non evolutionist, that to say I got to compromise science for my religion.

A good book that I read, Shattering the myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton , goes through the whole subject, and is also understandable to the regular public

To get into a discussion of evolution (on which I have some ideas of my own, having studied under the paleoanthropologist Philip Tobias, in Johannesburg) would be to narrow this down unduely: at issue is the status of secular, non-religious forms of knowledge in general. Surely the whole Haskalah revolved around this question: secular, positive knowledge versus revealed truth; how this is to be handled. I did'nt think I'd have to defend Moses Mendelssohn on this list, or Franz Rosenzweig... This is what I was trying to get at when I emphasised that I came from a *Dutch* Jewish background: in this tradition science and rationality - even philosophy - are taken seriously. Could this be one of those things that divide Orthodox from Reform? The conviction that Talmud is the sole and only criterium of truth. (What then is the status of medicine, astronomy, geology, physics, mathematics - not to mention psychology, sociology, a couple more besides..)

On a related issue to the one above: would anyone have the Rambam passage handy where the rationalist critique of religion is summarised and then refuted? (Must be in the *Guide to the Perplexed* somewhere.)

I don't think this is an issue. You're trying to make the assumption that somehow science and Creation can't coexist. I don't think that is true, nor do hundreds of scientist. I never learnt any of this in depth-I'm a rabbi by trade, not a paleoanthropologist, but there are plenty of scientists that do. There are many books on the subject (the one I mentioned before is not written by a creationist, just somebody who feels that just because evolution is the best theory yet not to include G-d , doesn't mean you should prop it up if it's bad science.) Did you ever asked the hard questions on evolution? Did you ever study the critiques? The big question I have, if life was so simply formed, that it happened itself in nature, why can't we, as the most advance science and technology, we make super computers, for decades have a ton of metal flying in the sky, but we can't make a human from scrap (from amino acids). We have the many samples to copy, yet we can't do it. why?

Now, since there at least 2 sides to the story, why would one take the secular side of science and one the religious. I think the difference is where the heart is. If someone's heart is to do what's right and to be a pious Jew, there is enough evidence for design that he can be a religious Jew without any questions of the truth. But if someone's heart is not to do what's right, but to do what's easiest for him, he's prone to set up a philosophy that goes with his lifestyle. (By most people now, it's basically how they where taught when they were young, depending on their secular or religious background.If they were born in a different background, they would have chose the one they were brought up in).

My theory is that there is a bigger percentage of Jewish scientists that are non believers in G-d more than non-Jews (Thus I always see Jewish names attached to the evolutionists (this is my own personal observance)). Because if one is forced to accept Christianity, there is very little he must change in his life if he accepts creationism. The Jew, on the other hand, has a much more complicated religion, and it would be a major change if he must change, thus I think their resistance is stronger. I don't think scientist are without their biases.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Rav Chaim,

Dear Frederick,
First of all let me say that my father escaped from Holland to the UK in the WWII and that my cousin fought for Holland (my dad, may G-d bless him, was born in 1900 and had me at the age of 62). I am also Brazilian and many of the people who constructed the Jewish community of Amsterdam were Portuguese (including Spinoza) so we have things in common.
Secondly I would like to thank you and probably on behalf of Rav Chaim too, because for once you have put us on the same ground.
Please allow me to make some points here:
The void between the most evolved Chimps and us is so great, that the divine blowing into Adam's nostrils is a great probability however metaphorical that may be.
The theory of relativity stating that energy and matter are the same thing is a concept that has brought science much closer to religion as well as the big bang theory. Strangely enough the most recent Scientific theories are becoming closer and closer to religious propositions.
Science at the end of the day is a tool for man to understand things that are beyond him. Which means to say that it has not discovered every thing that is there to be discovered, in other words it is a finite tool to deal with the infinite.
Rationalism or the substitution of Religion by Science was a reaction against the abusive powers of Churches against their subjects and their intrusion in politics etc... but one should never forget that it's actual basis stems from our good Torah when it comes down to viewing the world as governed by a big and united rational system. Rationalism was a way to return to this essence without the interference of these Churches.

Allow me to apologize for taking a while to respond - I'm away from my PC till next week. I read the replies with intense interest and genuine gratitute, and have taken them with me on my travels. I hope that some of this gratitude shines through the hamhandedness of my replies and the limits imposed by this medium.
best,
F. van Gelder

Dear Rav Chaim,

thank you for replying at such length to my very tentative posts of last week. It is very kind of you to go to this trouble.

Just so that we do not end up on opposite ends of a quite unnecessary argument, let me hasten to say that I'm as critical of the popular versions of Darwinism as you are - living on the Continent, I'm very aware of the pernicious role such theories played in rise of Fascism in the twenties and thirties, and how dubious *all* such reductionisms are. Yes, I have studied these things thoroughly, and I did work through the critiques available to me at the time. (Though I must say all this took place forty years ago, when I was a medical student, and it's been a long time since I last looked at the literature.) But I've made a note of the book you mentioned, [Richard Milton: *Shattering the myths of Darwinism*] and am quite happy to read it at the next opportunity and give you my own reactions to it. (I see with interest that the Milton book is also cited by Yosef Reinman: p. 196)

In the meantime, let me give you some reasons why I think that a discussion about evolution is not really going to get to the nub of the question: 'why are (so many of) the lost children not being attracted?' When I say this I have in mind many of my own little group here in Holland - the 'hidden children' - but it holds, I perhaps, for many other secular jews as well. On the one hand we've gone through hell - each one of us bears, in one way or another, the scars of the persecution of sixty years ago. (And now that we're getting older these things are getting worse and worse.) For that reason any conception of the world - including that of the Orthodoxy perhaps - which does not address directly that most disturbing question of all: 'why did it happen?' why the murder of millions? is from our point of view not quite relevant to the contemporary world. On the other hand we are, as I pointed out above, representatives of that European Jewish tradition which postwar Judaism (with its Zionist, American, and Orthodox preponderance) has tended to sidetrack - 'European', as we know, has become a term of opprobrium in a part of the American and Israeli Press. The assumption seems to be: because there are so few European Jews left, their ideas and their tradition can be treated as a quantite negligeable.

For us the question is: can one accept the findings of the natural sciences, (right through to sociology and psychology) and *still* be a good jew? Can one accept the findings of *Darwin* and *Freud* and still be a good jew? Where does one start to look for authors capable of giving convincing answers to questions concerning the world crisis starting 1914? I'm not saying that there are hard and fast answers anywhere - just that a notion of Judaism which ignores these questions must not then complain that it's failing to attract the 'lost children'.

For myself, I tried to formulate this paradox many years ago, while at a congress on child survivors and trauma. I put it in the form of an antinomy, called 'A' and 'B', and I must say that to this day I'm convinced that both are correct and that they can't *both* be correct at the same time:


" Jewish identity – two views

A: The concept of a jewish identity is an anachronism, a self-contradiction. To take it seriously at all is to abandon the hard-fought principles of intellectual universalism which marks the modern world, to which we owe our emancipation from religious dogma and superstition, to say nothing of the positive advances in science and medicine. To take the notion of Jewish identity seriously is to abandon the principles upon which modern society is based – of justice, freedom, equality – for a return to cultural particularism, to the ghetto, and hence also to the tacit acceptance of what the consequences of such an intellectual regression are: the inevitability of religious wars.

B: I disagree. Whatever these principles you try to defend once meant, they've been betrayed, gutted, reduced to slogans meant to hide what the so-called first world is doing to the third, to the environment, to the future of our children, to – if you will excuse the pathos – the foundations of life on this planet. These so-called principles of yours are a metaphysical fig-leaf behind which you hide your fear of the future, your cowardice, your deliberate ignorance of what can be read about in the papers every day. In the synagogue I can weep unashamedly for the dead, can steel myself for what lies ahead, can see to it that my fears do not degenerate – as yours do – into hatred of out-groups. Can try to protect the young from these hatreds. All of this I do in the company of others, in the company also of the many generations who have gone before, whose fortitude and courage I can try to emulate. I am not as alone as you are, not as afraid of death as you are."