Emunah Magazine

Rabbi Shmuley appears on the talk show to discuss the latest events facing the middle east.

Emuna Magazine is happy to have renowned rabbi, author and blogger Rabbi Shmuley Boteach join our editorial staff.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is host of the award-winning national TV show, Shalom in the Home on TLC. He is also the international best-selling author of 22 books, including his most recent work, The Michael Jackson Tapes (Perseus Books). His book Kosher Sex was an international blockbuster, published in 20 languages, and his recent books on the American family, Parenting With Fire and Ten Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children were both launched on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In 2008, Rabbi Shmuley served as Oprah’s marriage, parenting, and relationships expert on her “Oprah and Friends” national radio network, hosting the daily ‘Rabbi Shmuley Show.’ In 2007, Rabbi Shmuley was labeled “a cultural phenomenon” and “the most famous rabbi in America” by Newsweek magazine, and in 2007, 2008, and 2009 was named as one of the ten most influential rabbis in America. Also in 2007, Rabbi Shmuley was honored by The National Fatherhood Initiative, receiving their most prestigious award for his efforts on Shalom in the Home to promote the importance of a caring father in the contemporary family. Rabbi Shmuley has also been named by Talkers Magazine as one of the hundred most important radio hosts in America.

In 1999, just days before the millennium, Rabbi Shmuley won the highly prestigious “Preacher of the Year” Award from the London Times, setting a record for the most points ever garnered in the competition’s history. Rabbi Shmuley also publishes a weekly syndicated column for which, in 2005, he was awarded the American Jewish Press Association’s highest award for excellence in commentary.

In 2008, Rabbi Shmuley became one of five finalists for Brandeis University’s ‘Bronfman Visiting Chair in Jewish Communal Innovation’ for his proposal ‘Bringing Judaism Into The Mainstream.’ The proposal is an extension of This World: The Jewish Values Network, the organization he founded and chairs which aims to bring Jewish values to mainstream American culture via the media, politics, and the arts. As part of This World, in 2008 Rabbi Shmuley launched the national family dinner initiative ‘Turn Friday Night Into Family Night,’ which has garnered support from every corner of American society.

Rabbi Shmuley first came to world attention through his founding of the Oxford University L’Chaim Society, an organization of Oxford students that within three years of its founding in 1988 had become the second largest student organization in Oxford ’s history. At the University, where Rabbi Shmuley served as Rabbi to the students for eleven years, he played host to, and debated, some of the world’s leading thinkers, statesmen, and entertainers including Mikhail Gorbachev, Professor Stephen Hawking, Shimon Peres, Deepak Chopra, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elie Wiesel, Yitzchak Shamir, Prof. Richard Dawkins, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Simon Wiesenthal, and Prof. Colin Blakemore, to name but a few.

Hailed by Dennis Prager as ‘possessing one of the most fertile minds of our generation,’ Rabbi Shmuley has written many best-selling books including Wisdom, Understanding, Kosher Adultery , Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments , Face Your Fear , the critically-acclaimed Judaism for Everyone , The Private Adam , his critique of American celebrity culture , and his review of Oxford history and life, Moses of Oxford , Vols. I & II. His book Why Can’t I Fall in Love was a finalist for the 2002 Books for a Better Life Award, and in April 2005 Rabbi Shmuley published Hating Women: America ’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex . In 2007, Rabbi Shmuley published his monumental study of the American masculinity, The Broken American Male and How to Fix Him.

Many of Rabbi Shmuley’s books have been serialized in major international publications and have been translated into languages ranging from Japanese, Thai, Czech, Chinese, and Italian, to Dutch, German, Russian, and French.

Rabbi Shmuley is a highly sought-after television and radio guest, having appeared on shows ranging from The Today Show to The View to The O’Reilley Factor to Good Morning America, and nearly everything in between. He was also the subject of a full-length BBC documentary, Moses of Oxford. He has been profiled in many of the world’s leading publications, including Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The London Times, The L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.

Engaged in such a wide range of endeavors, it is no wonder that Salon.com wrote that “Boteach has his scholarly finger on the pulse of the nation.”

Rabbi Shmuley is married to his Australian wife, Debbie, and they have nine children.

His website is www.shmuley.com

Books by Rabbi Shmuley

The Michael Jackson Tapes (Perseus Books, 2009)
The Blessing of Enough (Sony, 2009)
The Kosher Sutra (HarperOne, 2009)
The Broken American Male, And How to Fix Him (St. Martin’s Press, 2008)
Shalom in the Home (Meredith Books, 2007)
Parenting with Fire: Lighting up the Family With Passion and Inspiration (Penguin Press, 2006)
10 Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children (HarperCollins, 2006)
Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex (HarperCollins, 2005)
Face Your Fear: Living with Courage in an Age of Caution (St. Martin’s Press, 2004)
The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age (HarperCollins, 2003)
Judaism For Everyone: Renewing Your Life Through the Vibrant Lessons of the Jewish Faith (Basic Books, 2002)
Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin with your Spouse (Adams Media, 2002)
Why Can’t I Fall in Love?: A 12-Step Program (HarperCollins, 2001)
The Psychic and the Rabbi: A Remarkable Correspondence (Sourcebooks, 2001)
Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments (Broadway, 2000)
Kosher Emotions (Hodder & Stoughton, 2000)
Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy (Doubleday) 1999)
Wrestling with the Divine (Jason Aronson, 1995)
Moses of Oxford: A Jewish Vision of a University and Its Life, Volumes One and Two (Andre Deutsch, 1994)
Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge (Jason Aronson, 1993)
The Wolf Shall Lie with the Lamb (Jason Aronson, 1993)
Dreams (Bash Publications, 1991)

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Word on the street is that the bomb placed in Times Square, near the
headquarters of Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, may be in response to a
South Park episode that portrayed the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume. If
true, and some fanatical Muslims believe that people ought to die because of a
couple of jokes on a TV show, then it’s another nail in the coffin of the
public’s respect for the usefulness of religion.

Indeed, this is religion’s summer of discontent. Humankind’s most
powerful impulse, to approach the divine, is being undermined by the
directionlessness of today’s great faiths. From ongoing violence in the name of
Islam, which is the most serious of all modern religious sins, to priestly
pedophilia, to the evangelical fixation on gay marriage to the near exclusion
of everything else, to Judaism’s impotence in purging materialism from its
community, mainstream religion is being discredited, becoming increasingly
irrelevant to the lives of modern men and women.

The main reason for the deterioration of modern faith is not its sins
of commission, but its sins of omission. People can forgive scandal in religion
so long as, the rest of the time, religion guides and inspires them. But
secular people today see religion’s main goal today as self-perpetuation, more
concerned with its timeless institutions than with the pressing needs of its
flock.

Last week I met with Pope Benedict in Rome after his Wednesday
audience, arranged by Gary Krupp of the Pave the Way Foundation. The substance
of the meeting received significant media play because of what I asked of the
Pope. In essence, I pressed the pontiff, who graciously received me, to join in
creating a global family dinner night on Fridays, something we have already
begun with our ‘Turn Friday Night Into Family Night’ initiative. I presented
the Pope with a dual-time Phillip Stein watch and told him it was set to the
time zones of Rome and Jerusalem, signifying my desire to have him focus on
Israel and the threat the Jewish people face from Iran who, with openly seek to
wipe Israel off the map. And second, the dual clock face is symbolic of my
request that he take the lead in our global campaign by calling upon all the
world’s parents to give their children two uninterrupted hours every Friday
night, inviting two guests, and discussing two important subjects with their
children.

He nodded his assent and repeated twice, ‘We will work together.’

When the papal meeting was over we met with Walter Cardinal Casper,
President of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity. I continued my pitch,
now with the Cardinal, for the importance of the worldwide Church partnering
with us to create an international family dinner night. The Cardinal, a close
friend of Pope Benedict for more than forty years, strongly endorsed the idea
and related his memories of family dinners with his own parents.

I made the case to the Cardinal that the pedophile priest scandal had
significantly undermined the Church’s standing as a champion of family. Many
influential American commentators were now skewering the Church for being an
all-boys club, run by men who do not marry and who had, in the imagination of
some, been prepared to sacrifice the welfare of children in order to protect the
reputation of the Church. What better way to reverse this perception than to
use the full power and reputation of the Church to address children’s core
needs, namely, receiving the love and attention of parents.

Would this not be a new and positive narrative of the Catholic Church
as a champion of family, giving productive and useful advice as to how to
reinvigorate the parent-child bond?

There are two kinds of children. One who receives time and love from
their parent as a gift, and the other who receives it, if at all, as something
that must be earned. The former grows up steady and sturdy like a cedar,
fortified by the ongoing validation given to him by doting parents. The other
becomes a crowd-pleaser, riddled with insecurities, always feeling that there
is nothing especially worthy about him and that he needs to perform and produce
in order to become special. I asked the Cardinal to help us populate the world
with the first kind of child.

Within the Vatican hierarchy I encountered priests who were all-too-eager
to discuss the current controversies facing the Church and who understood the
need for the Church to re-emerge as a global champion of family. With the
Church operating the world’s largest network of schools, hospitals, and
orphanages, it is crucial that it also reach everyday mothers and fathers who
are struggling to raise purposeful children in a world that celebrates
narcissism and fame.

For many people religion offers ritual but no wisdom, dogma but
practically no self-help. And all the splendors of the Vatican will not save
the Church from being anything other than a wonderful tourist destination if it
doesn’t take the initiative and teach people to master life.

The irrelevance of modern religion is something being felt worldwide.
Europeans especially have no time for religion. Secular Israelis feel the same.
Religion for them is a form of OCD, forever concerned with meaningless minutiae
while life’s larger issues remain unaddressed. In Israel religion is viewed as
a parasite, living off the hard work of the secular people who built the state.
Religion is the Yeshiva which teaches meaningless texts while refusing to serve
in the army.

But if religion is inevitably destined to be consigned by modern
Westerners to the ranks of the useless, then why are sophisticated and highly
educated people turning in their tens of millions to the Dalai Lama as their
hero? It remains a striking phenomenon that people who work on Wall Street and
go to Harvard believe in a man who dresses in a sheet and believes he is the
incarnation of earlier spiritual teachers. The reason: the Dalai Lama addresses
modernity’s greatest problem. We’re sinking in a morass of materialism that is
suffocating our spirit and he shows you the way out.

The Pope has the largest microphone to the world and with it the
greatest opportunity to heal marriages which are struggling to remain intact
and children who are in pain over lovelessness and neglect. An international
family dinner night would be a huge step toward religion becoming vital again
and toward the Catholic Church being seen in its true light, as a faith that is
focused on protecting children and cherishing family.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network. On
May 14th he will publish Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life. Go to www.fridayisfamily.com
to sign up your family as part of a global dinner initiative.

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Go to www.FridayisFamily.com.
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By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Since the public announcement of my upcoming meeting with Pope Benedict this Wednesday at the Vatican, courtesy of my friend Gary Krupp, many of my close Jewish friends have expressed not approval but disappointment. ‘They blamed the pedophile priest scandal on Jews and compared the attacks on the Church to anti-Semitism. How could you, Shmuley?’ ‘The Pope was in the Hitler Youth and he wants to make Pope Pius XII, who never condemned the holocaust, into a saint.’ ‘The Church has always been anti-Semitic. You’re being used.’

Come now. Jewish insularity is the ultimate obstacle to the dissemination of Jewish values, while Jewish contempt for the non-Jewish world because of its past immorality and Jew-hatred is itself immoral and hateful. Pope Benedict is being kicked to the curb in nearly every part of the world. But I as a Jew do not forget that for all his failures in properly handing the abomination of pedophile Priests, for which the Church must atone and repent, Benedict has been a great friend to the Jewish community, visiting an unprecedented three Synagogues in four years as well as the State of Israel. And whom does it benefit to see a mighty Church fall? The millions of orphans the Church tends to worldwide? The schools it runs and the pupils it teaches? The hope its Priests give to the poor, especially in the third world?

I have been one of Pope Pius XII’s foremost critics in the entire world. But Benedict is not Pius and before we holler for his demise let’s recall that as the Cardinal Secretary of State he did more to extend the Church’s hand in friendship to other people’s and faiths than nearly anyone who preceded him.

There is much in Jewish law and tradition that could bring healing to the Church, beginning with the Jewish laws of modesty and sexual seclusion. In Judaism a man and woman who are not married are not allowed to be in a locked room together. When I was Rabbi to Michael Jackson I took this law and applied it his special circumstances. I told him that the only way he could rehabilitate his reputation, after the pedophile accusations against him, was to quite simply foreswear ever being alone with a child. I even grabbed Michael’s shoulders and made him promise me he would never seclude himself with a child not his own. And for the two years we were close to he stuck to the script. When he and I launched our initiative to help children, the focus was on working with their parents to prioritize their kids, rather than with the kids themselves. It wasn’t until Michael stupidly disregarded this simple advice and decided to share a bed – however platonically – with a young child and then brag about it on international TV that he was arrested and started the inexorable decline that ended in his death a few years later.

The Church should embrace the same straightforward rule. No priest should be allowed to be in alone with a child. Period. If a Priest needs to speak to a child alone, the door must never be locked and there must always be the possibility that they can be intruded upon by outsiders. If they walk in a park, it cannot be one that is empty of people. This way we’ll know that any Priest who breaks the guidelines will be punished whether or not they abuse a child. It would significantly curb the potential for any act of child molestation and might even discourage pedophiles from entering the priesthood in the first place.

But more importantly, it’s time for Jews and Catholics to work together to promote new values in America. While our country is gripped in an epidemic of materialism and an orgy of greed, the only values religion seems to talk about is opposition to gay marriage and abortion. But the emphasis on the negative is not going to create much that is positive. We need values that promote family, strengthens marriage, inspires selflessness in children, and advances the cause of a purposeful life that makes us less obsessive about money and career.

This is why I wish to discuss with Pope Benedict the Catholic Church getting behind our ‘Turn Friday Night into Family Night’ initiative, the push for a global family dinner night. Imagine if all the world’s families – Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Atheist, Agnostic – sat down every Friday night and embraced our ‘Triple Two.” Parents giving their children two uninterrupted hours every Friday night, inviting two guests to teach the children sharing and hospitality, and discussing two important subjects rather than a movie or celebrity gossip. And Friday night is the one evening that unites all. It’s sacred already to Jews and Muslims. Up until Second Vatican Council it was a night where Catholics were forbidden to eat meat. And for the non-religious it’s the beginning of the weekend and sets the tone the activities that will follow. If the family gets together on Friday night, chances are they’ll do more stuff together on Saturday and Sunday as well.

This is the right time for the Catholic Church to own a global family dinner night. The pedophile priest scandal has reinforced the conclusion of some that the Church is an old boys club that at best makes concessions to the weakness of human nature by allowing men and women to marry. The ideal, however, is celibacy and childlessness. The Church must return to its previous posture as a champion of family and what better way than to mandate that all Catholic families worldwide do as Jesus did. Put the worldly stuff away on Friday nights and consecrate it as an evening of holiness and togetherness.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network. His major book on the universal Jewish values that can enrich the lives of every man and woman, Renewal, will be published by Basic Books on May 14th. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

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*Follow Shmuley on TWITTER! http://www.twitter.com/RabbiShmuley
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*Join the national “Turn Friday Night Into Family Night” initiative. Go to www.FridayisFamily.com.
*See Shmuley on the web at www.Shmuley.com

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

I was horrified to hear that there were South African Jews objecting to Judge Richard Goldstone attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Blocking a fellow Jew, let alone a grandfather, from a family’s religious celebration because of his opinions on Israel is disgraceful. I recall once that the Lubavitcher Rebbe said that any Synagogue that bars a fellow Jew from entry ought to be shut down. We’re not Hamas, Hezbollah, or Fatah. We don’t summarily execute compatriots accused of collaborating with the enemy, as these terrorist organizations do to innocent Palestinians. We don’t character assassinate them either or banish them from our communities. Rather, where fellow Jews, like Goldstone, are harsh critics of Israel, we show them respect and deference and then destroy not them but their arguments in the cold light of fact and reason.

The Goldstone Report is a modern-day blood libel against the Jewish state and has been torn to shreds by expert international jurists, including Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard and Prof. Richard Landes, Director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. Among the many compelling arguments against Goldstone is the fact that his report failed to focus on Hamas initiating the war by firing thousands or terror rockets against Israeli cities, intentionally using women and children as human shields in order to draw Israeli attacks and then accuse them of killing civilians, and how Goldstone granted near-complete credulity to all Hamas claims while cynically deriding those of Israel. As Dershowitz expressed it, the Goldstone Report is ‘to any fair reader, a shoddy piece of work, unworthy of serious consideration by people of good will committed to the truth.’

But that does not make Goldstone an enemy of his people. Rather, I believe, Goldstone, like so many others, reactively chooses the side of the Palestinians not because he is a self-hating Jew but because he boorishly assumes that the weaker party in any conflict is necessarily the aggrieved party. During Israel’s invasion of Gaza to stop Hamas’ murderous rockets it was easy to look at Israel’s tanks and helicopters and view the Palestinians terrorists as helpless victims. By the same logic, however, the awesome military invasion of a million soldiers on the beaches of Normandy made the Nazis into peace-loving innocents, and American shock-and awe over Baghdad made Saddam into a blameless target.

Goldstone is a foolish ignoramus rather than a traitor to his people. We have to stop believing that anyone who is anti-Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic. That misguided notion is what led Israel to have such abysmal PR in the first place, assuming as it did that since these critics have an innate hatred of Israel there was no reason to rebut their arguments. The toxic result is that Israel has tragically failed to promote the justice of its cause in a well-organized PR offensive and the Arabs, in the greatest PR coup in history, have somehow convinced the world that six million vulnerable Jews are opporessing five hundred million oil-rich Arabs.

Upon my last visit to South Africa on a book tour I was warmly embraced by the South African media who told me that ‘a Rabbi as open-minded and universal’ as me ought to be bold enough to criticize Israel’s ‘apartheid’ policies toward the Palestinians. Many black South Africans view Israel like the Boer and British Europenan colonizers who oppressed the indigenous population prior to Mandella’s presidency in 1994. I could have easily dismissed them as anti-Semites. But I knew in my heart they were decent, G-d-fearing people who had never heard a robust defense of Israel and I seized the opportunity on TV and radio to make Israel’s case.

The Jews are very similar to black South Africans, I told them. Long ago we too lived peacefully in our land, in Israel. The Holy Land, as the New Testament makes clear, had Jews and no Arabs. Then the Romans, a brutal, European occupier destroyed our Temple and took us as slaves to Europe where we lived under brutal oppression for millennia while praying thrice daily for a return to our ancient homeland. In the Arab countries where many migrated, Sephardic Jews lived under Arab governments where they were further treated like black South Africans, second-class citizens, denied basic human rights and required to pay jizyah, the Koran-obligated poll tax. My father who grew up in Iran, remembers the humiliation of having Islamic shopkeepers refuse to take money directly from his impure Jewish hands. Likewise, Ashkenazi Jews, like their black South African counterparts who were stuffed into townships, were placed into ghettos in Europe and forced to live apart. Finally, the flowering of modern nationalist movements enabled the Jews to begin leaving these lands en masse and returning to their indigenous, ancestral homeland.

But even amid the Jewish dispersion after Rome’s conquest, a minority Jewish population retained an uninterrupted presence is Israel for more than three thousand years. We did not colonize the land but were always a part of it. And when the waves of European Jews began returning to the land in modern times, the land was virtually desolate. The Zionist pioneers did the laborious work of draining the swamps and making the desert bloom.

Far from being a white, colonial settlement, the establishment of Israel is analogous to American blacks who had been forcibly removed from Africa and returned to create the nation of Liberia. The obscene comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa also ignores the fact that Israel is the first country in history to airlift tens of thousands of black men, women, and children from Ethiopia to become free and full citizens within its borders.

Finally, I told my listeners, black South Africans who inspired the world with their capacity for peaceful coexistence could not be more different to the Palestinians who have tragically embraced hatred and terrorism. Nelson Mandela rose to become the foremost statesman in the world with his message of forgiveness and reconciliation. Yasser Arafat fathered international terrorism and stole millions of dollars from his poverty-stricken people.

In stupidly shunning people like Judge Goldstone we in the Jewish community are alienating those who need the light of Jewish values most.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network. On May 14th he will publish his major work on Jewish values, Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life. www.shmuley.com

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*Join the national “Turn Friday Night Into Family Night” initiative. Go to www.FridayisFamily.com.
*See Shmuley on the web at www.Shmuley.com

At middle age I have come to accept my limitations. Although I like to have an opinion on almost everything, I am conscious of the fact that I am not a legal scholar and do not understand all the complexities of the criminal case against Shalom Rubashkin, the former CEO of America’s largest kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors of Postville, Iowa.

But I am not a stupid man either. And I, and a heck of a lot of other fairly intelligent and educated people are scratching our heads as to why government prosecutors are requesting that Rubashkin, who has ten children, including an autistic son, and a reputation for enormous philanthropy, be given a life sentence in prison.

A life behind bars. The very words are ominous. Isn’t that reserved for society’s most heinous offenders? Life sentence has one conjuring images of rapists and murderers, international drug cartel kingpins and white-collar criminals guilty of gargantuan fraud, like Bernie Madoff.

What did Rubashkin do? After an INS raid on the plant that found hundreds of illegal immigrants, the company was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy and Rubashkin, who had already been arrested for employing illegals, was subsequently found guilty of defrauding a bank and producing false invoices in order to keep the business going. There is no insinuation that he did any of this for personal profit or gain. Unlike Madoff, he had no Hamptons estate, no fancy yacht, and no Manhattan penthouse. By all accounts he and his family lived in incredibly modest circumstances.

Obviously, the Rubashkin story has been an enormous embarrassment to the American Jewish community in general and orthodoxy in particular. The largest kosher meat plant in the country employing hundreds of illegal immigrants? Engaging in bank fraud in order to remain a going concern? Falsifying invoices and misleading lenders? These are serious charges that go against both terrestrial and celestial law and constitute actions that neither man nor G-d can condone. The expected flight of Jewish leaders and spokespeople from Rubashkin’s side ensued, whatever the injustice of his proposed sentence. We Jews are accustomed to run from scandal like the plague.
So let’s remove the smoke from this unsavory story and focus on truth.

Yes, we Jews unfortunately have our criminals. Yes, we orthodox Jews unfortunately have our felons. We’re human, too. We have people guilty of serious wrongdoing. And we too must confess our sins, repent of our actions, be punished for our crimes, and teach our children to always do better and never excuse our behavior. Our community need to know that no matter how important you believe it is for other Jews to eat kosher food, you cannot purchase that mitzvah at any price. You cannot be a good Jew if you are not an honest person. A religious obligation that comes through theft – even when your intention is to simply keep a business open so you can eventually pay off your loans – subverts all principles of religious morality.
Rubashkin is no hero. Whatever the nobility of his intentions, he is a poor example to religious youth. His behavior must and should be condemned. He has been found guilty of a crime and he must do the time.

But he is no monster either. Unlike Wall Street bankers, he did not bet the farm and other people’s deposits in order to buy himself a Ferrari. Unlike AIG executives, he did not cost the government billions in bailouts and then get a bonus. And while I, of course, understand that criminal conduct is infinitely more serious, so is prosecutorial overzealousness that borders on fanaticism.
The time that Rubashkin serves must be fair and just. This is America. Just as there is no room for toleration of criminal conduct, there is also no room for a lynch mob mentality. I realize I am not a lawyer. But I have enough sense to understand that a punishment of a few years in prison sets an unassailable example that criminal conduct is utterly inexcusable. Anything more than that for a crime of this nature gives the false impression that the American justice system is prejudicial and untrustworthy.

As for the outcry from the Hassidic community that Rubashkin is being treated unfairly and that his yarmulke and beard make for a prosecutorial bull’s-eye, I love America too much to believe any of it. This is the fairest, most decent country on earth. But I do believe it possible that when an overtly religious person perpetrates a crime – especially one that involves companies catering to religious needs – there is a feeling on the part of many that the hypocrisy mandates an even harsher sentence.

So let’s be clear.
This is not in any way analogous to other ugly religious stories dominating the news like pedophile priests. There is no suggestion that Rubashkin’s crimes be covered up. Less so is there any insinuation that Rubashkin be moved to another state where he can start up a new kosher meat plant. Rubashkin’s trustworthiness in the American Jewish community is finished.

But there is an insistence that he be treated like a human being. That it be taken into consideration that he has no prior offenses and that his company provided kosher meat to hundreds of thousands of people at affordable prices so that more Jews could observe their faith. That he and his family are legendary in the Hassidic community for their charitable giving, their hospitality, and their communal involvement. That Rubashkin himself devoted a substantial portion of his profits to funding a soup kitchen and supporting organizations like Collel Chabad that feed the hungry and the poor. To disregard all these considerations when it comes to sentencing is to disregard the universal belief that the good we do is not cancelled out by our horrendous mistakes.

I know my own limitations. Perhaps Rubashkin’s prosecutors ought to know theirs as well.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, host of TLC’s ‘Shalom in the Home,’ is the international best-selling author of 23 books, winner of the London Times Preacher of the Year, and winner of the American Jewish Press Association’s highest award for excellence in commentary. His website is www.shmuley.com.

According to Frank Rich of the New York Times, Wall Street is a bigger threat to the United States than Al Qaida. It’s an exaggeration, of course, but conveys the degree to which some of the smartest people in the country have come to loathe an industry that puts itself before every other interest, screwing the little guy even as they grow fat off the misfortune of others. There are, of course, countless extremely moral, decent, and charitable people on Wall Street who devote their resources to the public good. I personally know many of them. But as an industry, Wall Street is becoming a graveyard of ethics and a carnival of consumption.

Nearly twenty years ago, as Rabbi at Oxford University, I began writing about the potentially negative consequences of the growing Wall Street behemoth. I questioned the rise of an industry that pays so much for so little, and how it was pulling my Oxford students away from law, teaching, and medicine to careers in finance and banking. But even I was taken aback by the latest actions of JP Morgan Chase, as reported in the Huffington Post.

Under a headline that read “JPMorgan Chase Argues Against Mortgage Modifications, Citing Sanctity Of Contracts,” the story detailed how David Lowman, CEO for home lending at the bank, was fighting against a government program designed to have lenders and investors decrease the amount of money owed on homes whose value had fallen significantly below the amount of the original loan. “Like all loans, mortgage contracts are based on a promise to repay money borrowed. Importantly, there is no provision in the mortgage contract… that the lender will… reduce the repayment amount if the value of the… home… depreciates.”

Interesting argument, until you remember that this is the same bank for whom the government bent all the rules that allowed it to make so many more billions. JP Morgan Chase received $25 billion of TARP money in a tax payer-funded bailout and, although it has since been repaid, it facilitated the bank’s enormous subsequent growth. But the bank received a lot more government assistance than even that. As the Huffington Post reported, “JP Morgan Chase also received $41 billion in cheap funding through a tax payer-backed debt issuance program from the FDIC, money that has not been repaid.” To compound the insult, JP Morgan Chase swallowed the mammoth Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in 2008 in a deal whose risk and cost was also born by the taxpayer. JP Morgan Chase got the deal of the century, fitting too since, as it turns out, both Bear, who collapsed through greed, and JP Morgan Chase, who accept bailouts but then when it comes to denying assistance to struggling home owners cites the sanctity of contracts, seems to excel in blood-sucking avarice.

So, here we have a gargantuan bank that made untold billions for itself through sweetheart government deals and bailouts, while having the audacity to lecture struggling homeowners on honoring their commitments. They’re allowed to be bailed out by taxpayers who have to assume the responsibility of their shoddy investments. But the little guy who is struggling to keep a roof over his head is out of luck. The hypocrisy is laughable, but we shouldn’t be surprised. This kind of heartlessness and arrogance is par for the course for this banking goliath where, it seems, money is the deity at whose altar JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns executives regularly prostrate themselves.

I have already written two articles about my own horrific experiences with JP Morgan Chase, leading to my bringing a lawsuit against Bear Stearns. It concerns how one Matt Zimmerman, who sought to take over my accounts at Bear after they had collapsed under its Chairman, Ace Greenberg, tried to triple charge me for fees related to the account. When, after losing considerable sums of money at the bank over so many years I finally stood up for myself and demanded that my accounts at least be restored to their pre-Zimmerman position, a pittance that would have cost the bank something in the range of about $3500, Ace Greenberg, a friend of mine for nearly ten years, called and threatened me to let the matter drop. You can read the full article on the Huffington Post.

I had originally met Greenberg when he sought involvement in the finances of Michael Jackson, with whom I was close. Was I a convenient vehicle for drawing closer to Michael? Whatever the motive, for years I did not complain as my accounts declined and Greenberg gave me, at most, a few sporadic minutes to discuss them. I respected Greenberg’s commitment to philanthropy. But once the bank resorted to gouging, bullying, and threatening me, taken aback, I had had enough and filed suit.

It seems that Bear’s executives will say anything in order to abscond from their responsibilities. Judging from the example of Wall Street executives’ behavior before Congressional panels – the Chuck Prince, Bob Rubin, Citibank testimony of last week was positively painful – I am, sadly, not surprised by Zimmerman and Greenberg’s actions. One of the interesting things about Wall Street bankers is how willing they are to feed on each other. Zimmerman pursued me aggressively even though he knew that the Chairman of his own bank was my account manager. But then again, Wall Street is a culture whose only loyalty is to money. But I believe that the time will come – and sooner rather than later – when the actions of Wall Street’s executives will come fully to light. History has consistently shown, it’s rarely the crime and nearly always the cover-up that gets you.

I am a Rabbi, not a fighter. But there comes a time when, as a father of nine, you have to stand up to being gouged by Wall Street. That time has come for me and it must come for the American people as well. We must not allow JP Morgan Chase and other Wall Street banks to get away with taking billions in bailouts while refusing to modify the loans of everyday, hardworking people.

I have earlier written about the horrors of even trying to get through to anyone at Chase to discuss a mortgage modification and how, amid the billions in TARP money to ease people’s mortgage burdens, Chase seems intent on finding every reason to deny modifications so that they can callously seize people’s homes, as the New York Times graphically illustrated on January 2, 2010.

In my own article, I gave a brief taste of what it’s like to even get a mortgage loan officer on the phone, or have them stay on the phone without hanging up on you. It’s a rare achievement. Good luck, America. Maybe the billions of dollars that the bank is paying its executives has come at the expense of hiring a few more people at the bottom of the totem pole whose sole duty is to answer customer service inquiries. Perhaps a tax-payer-funded Ferrari is more of a necessity these days.

The latest gambit by Chase, as I’ve discovered, is where they pass the buck on denying any mortgage application by telling you that their ‘investor’ won’t agree to it. Yet, you guessed it, they never reveal who the investor is or how you may contact them. I’ve covered this ’silent-investor-doesn’t-agree-to-your-modification’ scenario on my radio show on WABC, 770 AM in NYC. I’ve asked Tom Kelly and Mike Fusco, the PR people at Chase, what the bank’s policies are regarding the anonymity of these investors. Specifically, I wanted to know why Chase took tens of billions in taxpayer money to help people receive loan modifications if the modifications themselves can be denied by nameless investors. Doesn’t sound fair, does it? The reply, as you might have guessed, was silence, which makes you wonder what JP Morgan Chase has to hide. When I first started making inquiries of the bank, I found Fusco to be a courteous gentleman who, amid having his hands tied by his bank, tried his best to get me answers and I praised him on the air. Once his superior Kelly got involved, however, the information shut down, which just goes to show that when you have practices that are questionable, even unjust, the best policy, JP Morgan Chase has concluded, is to say nothing.

In the final analysis, the name Wall Street is quite apt since arguing with it is the equivalent of banging your head against a wall. If we Americans do not find our collective voice, Wall Street will run roughshod over our interests. We may be the little guys but together we are a giant force. I was against all the bailouts. But one thing’s for sure. If the government decided to use taxpayer money to bail out the banks, then it shouldn’t be used just for a banker’s bigger mansion in the Hamptons but first and foremost on keeping more Americans in their homes.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the international best-selling author of 23 books, is the host of ‘The Shmuley Show’ on WABC, 770AM, in NYC. He is also host of the national TV show ‘Shalom in the Home,’ on Planet Green, and founder of This World: The Values Network. His website is www.shmuley.com.

Follow Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RabbiShmuley

The only institution worse at PR than Israel is the Catholic Church. Never in my life have I seen such a formidable world power handle a crisis more catastrophically than how the Vatican is handling the current scandal of pedophile priests. And the sad thing is that the weakening of the Church in general, and this pope in particular, is bad all round. The Church does incalculable good throughout the world with innumerable orphanages, schools, and hospitals. And for Jewish-Catholic relations Benedict has been a godsend (pardon the pun).

For most of its two thousand years the Catholic Church has been anti-Semitic, responsible for horrific atrocities against Jews and others who branded heretics. But in the latter half of the twentieth century the Church repented of its past due to the courage and spiritual integrity of three special men: John XXIII, the greatest of all modern Popes, John Paul II, a leader of extraordinary humanity and humility, and Joseph Ratzinger, the cerebral Cardinal largely responsible for the theological underpinnings that served as John Paul’s foundation in reaching out to the Jews. In the five short years of his pontificate Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, has visited Synagogues in Germany, New York, and Rome, not to mention his much-heralded visit to Israel last year.

Which begs the question why the Church would itself undermine this impressive record first with Cardinal Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, comparing the attacks on Benedict to that of Pius XII. Pius was the highly impious, amoral pontiff, who signed a Concordat with Hitler in 1933 and never once directly condemned Nazi anti-Semitism or the holocaust. In October, 1943, he watched literally as the Jews of Rome were rounded up to be sent to Auschwitz and did not publicly protest.

But rather than unnecessarily alienating the Jews by comparing the attacks on the Church over pedophilia to anti-Semitism, as the Pope’s personal preacher Raniero Cantalamessa did in the Pope’s presence, it would be wise for the Church to learn the following from their Jewish friends: don’t be afraid to be fallible and human.

The principle difference between the Catholicism and Judaism is the former’s emphasis on the perfection of Jesus and the infallibility of the Pope versus the latter’s insistence that no human is divine and no Biblical figure is perfect. While people are not prepared to forgive the infractions of the perfect, they are extremely understanding of the failings of humans when they apologize sincerely for their failures and take full responsibility for their actions.

Later this month I am scheduled to meet the Pope through Gary Krupp, with whom I have sparred over Pius’s legacy but who has since become a friend. I wish I could impress upon the well-intentioned leader of the Catholic Church the need to come clean with the public. Face the people and tell them how you never wished for any children to be harmed and it breaks your heart to see how your inaction and obstruction may have led to more kids being violated. But you made the colossal error of moving slowly and cautiously because you feared what public exposure and the defrocking of criminal Priests would do to the reputation of the Church. You erred hugely in putting the needs of an institution ahead of the safety of the individuals that institution is meant to protect. Explain how you further erred by accepting the prevailing psychiatric opinion of the time that pedophiles could be reformed through counseling and you thought that after extreme therapy these Priests were cured. Admit you screwed up and ask forgiveness for your failures. Human beings forgive the flaws of other human beings. But they don’t forgive gods. Pledge the remainder of your days to helping heal the victims, making reasonable restitution, and declare unequivocally that henceforth the Church will hand over all priests guilty of molestation to the authorities for prosecution.

As the author of Kosher Sex, a pivot in the intersection between faith and sexuality, I would counsel the Church to announce a conclave examining the effects, if any, of clerical vows of celibacy on pedophilia in the clergy. Some would argue there is no connection. But few would deny that an announcement of this magnitude by the Pope would demonstrate the seriousness with which he is addressing the issue and his preparedness to take unprecedented action to heal the Church.

But the Pope is not the only one who needs to apologize. Many in the media have gone beyond all reason in their attacks. Maureen Dowd, who is Catholic, offered the unbelievable comparison of the Church’s refusal to ordain women or place them in positions of leadership with Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses of women. Are you kidding? The Saudis, in 2002, allowed 15 High School girls to burn to death rather than run out of their smoldering school without a head covering. Amnesty International accuses the Saudis of subjecting women to “arbitrary arrest… torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; and the use of the death penalty” for religious infractions, like meeting with men in public. Yakin Erturk, the United Nations special representative on violence against women, visited Saudi Arabia and reported ‘the domestic abuse [women] systematically encounter with little prospect of redress.’ She added that the Muttawa, the Saudi religious police, are “responsible for serious human rights abuses in harassing, threatening and arresting women who ‘deviate from accepted norms.” And then there are the continued reports of female genital mutilation that is practiced in northern Saudi Arabia.

And I thought it’s only we Jews who can be so self-hating.

The Western world suffers from an epidemic of materialism, divorce, broken families, and celebrity obsession, the most effective antidote for which is more spirituality and a stronger religious presence. The Catholic Church might be terrible at crisis management and the pope may not be perfect. But what might emerge from this dark episode is a more transparent, more accessible, and more sensitive Church which, in its humanity, might just begin to connect with the eighty percent of lapsed Catholics who pay only lip-service to the Church throughout the Western world.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, founder of This World: The Values Network, has just published ‘The Blessing of Enough.’ Folllow him on Twitter @Rabbishmuley.

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When it came to protecting the right of the Libyan Ambassador to the UN living immediately next door to me in Englewood, my Democratic Congressman, Steve Rothman, found his voice, issuing a three page press release about a deal he had brokered with the State Department 27 years ago for the Libyans to bizarrely remain in a New Jersey suburb. But when I asked Rothman, who is Jewish, to give me a comment on Obama’s degrading treatment of Israel’s elected officials and the Administration’s opposition to Jews building in all parts of Jerusalem, his Chief of Staff sent me an email that said the Congressman was “away for the holidays so we won’t be able to provide you with a statement.”

Attitudes like these on the part of influential Jewish members of the American establishment explain why Obama has been allowed to get away with his appalling treatment of Israel. Yes, it is we Jews who allow it, afraid to take a stand against a President who is rapidly emerging as the new Jimmy Carter.

Don’t think Obama isn’t listening.

When it came to endorsing a recent Congressional vote to label the Turks’ slaughter of over one million Armenians during the first World War a genocide, Obama quickly broke a campaign pledge, and a moral duty, to do just that and publicly distanced himself from the term genocide in order not to offend the Turkish government. And when it came to hosting the Dalai Lama at the White House, the President of the world’s sole superpower quickly bowed to Chinese bullying, not only refusing to greet the great humanitarian publicly but sending him out through the service entrance of the White House where the Dalai Lama was photographed surrounded by giant bags of garbage. But when it comes to treating America’s most reliable ally like a pariah nation, Obama has no fear of the American Jewish community because he’s convinced there will be no price to pay. The Jews are too timid to react.

How sad that we Jews have become so politically pathetic. Although there were grave suspicions about Obama’s position on Israel before the campaign, greatly compounded by his having sat through 20 years of vitriol toward Israel from his own pastor, American Jewry gave Obama the benefit of the doubt. Nearly eighty percent of American Jews voted for him against a proven friend of Israel in John McCain. But fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Amid the Jewish propensity to blindly pull the Democrat lever in every vote without even thinking, if Obama gets anything more than twenty percent of the Jewish vote in 2012 it will be a manifestation of a community which simply doesn’t know how to stand up for its itself and has contempt for its own interests.

And spare me the lectures on dual loyalty. If there is one thing the American people have learned it’s that the Israeli people are their canaries in the coalmine. Attacks that Israelis experience first just presage what Americans will later face. Why? Because the Islamic nations hate Israel for the same reason they hate America. Israel is a bastion of freedom in a region of tyranny. The Mullahs are religious, the Arab dictators mostly secular. But what they share in common is an absolute desire to rule absolutely. They hate Israel and America for its freedoms. They know that elections will knock them out of power and, like Saddam, they would face trial for crimes against humanity.

Ahmedenijad hates his own people even more than he hates Israel, brutalizing and slaughtering them in the streets whenever they stand up for themselves. The last thing the House of Saud wants is democracy, preferring to plunder their country’s oil wealth and concentrate it in the hands of princes of the blood all of whom live like kings. The same hatred of liberty is harbored by all the other Arab potentates who have oppressed their people for decades, from Mubarak who has been in power for three decades, to Kaddafi and the Assads who have stolen power for four.

The same is true of Israel’s policies of human rights. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where gays can march openly. Any attempt to do so in Riyadh would end with the marchers all being decapitated. Of course, we don’t have to worry about that in Iran since Ahmedenijad assured us in his lecture at Columbia that Iran has no homosexuals.

And this applies even more importantly in the area of women’s rights. Israel is the Middle East’s greatest champion of women’s rights, with women enjoying all the freedoms of men. But the Islamic countries do everything in their power to oppress women, afraid of the possible corruption women would bring if they showed an ankle or drove a car.

Rather than pressuring Jews not to build condos in Jerusalem, Obama ought to pressure the Arabs to liberalize and democratize. He ought to use his considerable eloquence to state the obvious truth. That until such time as the Arabs allow their citizens to be free, there will never be peace in the Middle East. Israel is the solution rather than the problem. The more Arab countries emulate its market economy and liberal democracy, the more our oppressed Islamic brothers and sisters will prosper. They will not need scapegoats, like Jews, to vent their understandable frustration at their wretched, impoverished lives, all brought about by clerics and dictators whose steal their money and their freedoms.

According to many estimates, Muammar Kaddafi is the richest man in the world, with a net worth of over $70 billion. That a thief and a murderer of that magnitude is allowed to own a tax-free mansion next door to me where we, honest and hard working Americans, pay for his police protection and trash removal, is a travesty of truth and justice.

When American Jews stand up to the lie that Israeli intransigence is the reason there is war in the Middle East, they end up helping their Arab brethren as well. Because the last things the five hundred million Arabs who live under state censorship and political oppression need is their rulers and clerics finding a convenient scapegoat upon whom to place the blame for their people’s suffering.

And every time Obama falsely puts the blame on Israel for the Middle East’s tensions, he puts another nail in the coffin of future Middle East freedom and Arab democracy and liberty.
—
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a renowned TV and Radio host, is the international
best-selling author of 23 books his most recent, The Blessings of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed , Embracing Spiritual Hunger is now available and Renewal: Living the Values-Filled Life (Basic Books) has a release date of May. His best selling Kosher Sex is now out on DVD. He is the founder of This World: The Values
Network. www.shmuley.com

The advent of Passover and Easter, which always fall around the same time, beckons a
deeper discussion about one of the principle differences between Judaism and

Christianity. In essence it is the difference between a values system based on
struggle and a values system based on perfection.The reason
there are no perfect people in the Torah is that we don’t believe in perfect
people and we do not respect perfection. Do you know what the perfect person
lacks that the imperfect person has? An imperfect person fights to do what is
right. He struggles with his conscience. When you fight for something, you
demonstrate its worth.Look at the
contrast with every other belief system. Christianity is predicated on perfection,
on the idea that Jesus was tempted but never fell. The same is true for Muslims
and Mohammed. In Buddhism, the Buddha is perfect. In Hindu, Krishna is perfect.
Even in the pantheon of great American heroes, our founding fathers were once
portrayed as saints. I remember being taught as a young boy that George
Washington never told a lie and that Abraham Lincoln walked miles to return a
single penny. Both these stories were pure invention, but the idea was: How
could you respect the founder of your nation if he was flawed?Here in
America we live under the tyranny of perfection. We are constantly being sold
glossy images of people with perfect bodies, perfect résumés, and perfect
lifestyles. Convincing people of their inadequacy in relation to these paragons
of physical, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic perfection has always been a
good racket, but never more so than today.It even
seeps into our religious debates. The insinuation that Jesus was lonely and
required the love of a woman, as Dan Brown suggested in The Da Vinci
Code, deeply offended many of our Christian brothers and
sisters. When I debated Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington,
D.C., about the subsequent movie, he said that the film’s protestors should
remain calm but he could understand why people were upset. I said I understood
how the departure from New Testament orthodoxy was provocative, but why was it
deemed so hurtful? Dan Brown and the moviemakers didn’t say
anything bad about Jesus—they said only that he got married! So what? If he
were a young Jewish man growing up in the Galilee region in ancient Israel, not
only would he have been expected to marry but it would have been sinful
for him not to.Why were
Christians offended at the thought that Jesus married? Because the idea
suggests he felt something was missing in his life. In short, he wasn’t
perfect. As a perfect being, he required the love and validation of no one. You
and I? We get cold and need comfort and want to be held. We feel dispirited,
and we need someone to inspire us.I am always
impressed at the deep spirituality of my Christian brothers. I am a rabbi with
a deep love and awe for the incredible commitment to goodness and faith that is
so characteristic of my Christian colleagues. But ultimately Christianity loses
me when it dismisses the humanity of Jesus in favor of his divinity. Jesus is
so much more interesting when we read of his struggles in the New Testament to
fulfill the will of G-d, like when he says, while dying on the cross, “My G-d,
my G-d, why have you forsaken me?” And I am always puzzled why my Christian
brothers and sisters seem disheartened to discover Jesus’s vulnerabilities.Personally,
I have no patience for perfect people. I find them boring, predictable, and
judgmental. It is human beings whose goodness is real, yet purchased amid
Herculean effort and struggle, whom I find so endlessly fascinating.Judaism
doesn’t value perfection. I believe that perfect people are sweet and nice but
I have no relationship with them, nor would I seek one. If they’re perfect,
they don’t need me. It has been estimated that in many marriages, the
criticism-to-compliment ratio is three to one. The argument troubled couples
make is always essentially, “but my spouse is so imperfect!” I counsel them to
remember that if their spouse were perfect, he or she would never have married
in the first place. So why not be thankful for our loved ones’ imperfections
(as long as they take responsibility for their actions and apologize sincerely
when they’ve done wrong)?I am not a
Christian not because I was born Jewish, because if Christianity were true I
would be obligated to convert. Rather, perfection has no appeal for me. Perfect
people do the right thing every single time. How could they understand someone
like me, for whom every day is a struggle?Being with
perfect people is like watching a movie when you already know the ending. You
can’t thrill to perfect people’s victories because they don’t involve real
courage. Real courage means to be victorious over fear. If you were never
afraid, were your actions courageous? No.People used
to think Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint. He started the civil rights
movement when he was only twenty-four years old. He was killed before his
fortieth birthday. Of course, one thought, saint that King was, he was able to
lead those marches in Birmingham and in Selma and inspire a whole generation.
No wonder he was so incredibly eloquent and courageous. He was perfect. But
then we discovered that in fact he was deeply human and did things that
betrayed big character flaws. Suddenly we saw him differently. In fact, his
true greatness was thereby manifest: He was flawed and frail and still he
accomplished so much. You mean he was scared in front of those
attack dogs and Bull Connor? He had to struggle to do those things? My G-d,
that truly is a great man.To me, that
is so much more inspiring. King wrestled with his conscience. Now he
speaks to me, because I’m just like him. He was not an angel, not a saint, just
a person who struggled to live righteously and courageously. And in so doing he
changed America, dealt a fatal blow to racial injustice, and restored the
country to its founding creed of all men being created equally by G-d. And he
did all this not intuitively or instinctively, but amid great effort and
struggle. It was never easy. But if he could do it and he was human like me,
then I have no excuse not to try to rise to similar acts of courage.The truly
righteous man is not he who never sins but rather he who, amid a predilection
to narcissism and selfishness, battles his nature to live a virtuous life. The
truly great man is not he who slays dragons, but he who battles his inner
demons, who struggles with himself to improve and ennoble his character.The truth is
that perfection fosters dependency. It is an engine that actually retards human
progress, because it continually tosses humans back on a sense of their own
inadequacy. Rather than lift them up, it keeps them down. That’s why kings used
to claim they were perfect beings, kissed by G-d and standing high above their
lowly subjects—because if you can convince people that they’ll never be as good
as you, they won’t even try. They will worship you and hate themselves. Those for
whom life has been so sweet and smooth, those who refuse to struggle, will
never know the true taste of courage. They will never develop the ability to
overcome obstacles to do what is right. They will never firmly establish that
their convictions are not just feelings. Struggle is where the infinite value of
goodness is established.The Zohar
says that every single time you choose to subdue and subjugate evil, G-d’s
glory rises higher and higher. Every time you exert the effort to choose
righteousness over selfishness, you are showing that righteousness is precious
to you, that G-d is a living presence, and that you are prepared to fight. Even
when it’s inconvenient. Even when it entails sacrifice. Struggle is what
establishes the infinite preciousness of righteousness.Israel literally
means “he who wrestles with G-d.” It was the name given to Jacob, who wrestled
with a brother who sought to kill him and a father-in-law who sought to enslave
him. Most of all, he wrestled with an angel. Israel is he who wrestles with the
G-dly portion of his existence.Most of what
we cherish in life involves a struggle. I was a child of divorce, so I was
extremely excited to be married. I anticipated perfection. Shortly after our
wedding in Australia, I went out, a newly married man, to buy a camera. And in
the camera store I couldn’t help but notice that the woman behind the counter
was pretty. I was mortified. This is ridiculous! I
thought. What kind of husband am I? I came home and confessed
to my wife that I had noticed that another woman was attractive. She laughed at
my naïveté. But it still bothered me, so I thought deeply into this. Why did
G-d make love so imperfect? How do we even notice the opposite sex when we are
in love with our spouse? Why is it that even in the best marriages we still
recognize that other people are special?Now I
understand why G-d made love imperfect. Relationships are special when you
choose each other anew every single day. Some think marriage is when you choose
your spouse under the chuppah—the canopy used in Jewish weddings—and you’re
done. Married! You never make that choice again, and your choice becomes a
thing of the past. The marriage becomes stale and ossified, and the commitment
is never renewed. But because we all struggle to keep the passion and intimacy
in our marriages alive, because we struggle to compliment and love each other,
because we wrestle with our nature to always focus on each other, love each
other, and put each other first, we choose each other over and over again, and
that’s why love is imperfect. The man who chooses his bride and never has to
choose her again is one who takes her for granted, who doesn’t seek to bring
novelty to his relationship, who allows it to stagnate. But if you forever
renew your commitment and investment, your goodness and your relationship never
go stale.
—————–
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a renowned TV and Radio host, is the international
best-selling author of 23 books. He is about to publish Renewal: Living the
Values-Filled Life (Basic Books). He is the founder of This World: The Values
Network. www.shmuley.com