Birthright Israel Wants You to Be Ultra-Orthodox

NCSY has some nice programs.

http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=trip_to_ncsy_ab...

About Us
Vision Statement
NCSY presents "Israel Free Spirit" trip as a ten day Taglit Birthright-Israel experience which emphasizes the spiritual connection between the land of Israel, the people of Israel, contemporary Israel and our vibrant Jewish tradition. We know you have a lot of choices and we take your “Free Gift” as seriously as you do by maximizing every moment of your experience.

On an Israel Free Spirit trip you’ll hike Israel’s lush landscapes, spend time with Israelis and Israeli soldiers, see artistic and archeological treasures and journey to the Kotel, “The Wall” the sacred remnant from our Holy Temple built by King Solomon thousands of years ago.

Israel Free Spirit comes in different varieties to give the best experience for our participants with different backgrounds and interests.

Our “JSU Journey” is a “love your fellow Jew” trip run by specially trained staff by our allied agency JSU (Jewish Student Union) so that participants from all Jewish backgrounds can be brought together for an experience all can enjoy while operating within a framework acceptable to all backgrounds. JSU is non denominational and certifies its staff, most of whom are Orthodox.

Our NCSY "Chizuk Track" presents an Orthodox perspective and adheres to Orthodox practice. At participants' request, we run both coed and separate gender options. Participants of all Jewish backgrounds are welcome; but we do want you to understand our overall orientation.

Good post but I think you are oversimplifying Steinhardt's motivations.  Yes, he gives to people he likes personally (it's his money, after all) but he has also espoused a respect for Orthodox Judaism that is contradictory to his own lack of practice as an avowed atheist.  He believes the Orthodox hold the "secret" for "keeping their kids Jewish" despite statistics that show how, in actuality, no denomination sheds more Jews than the Orthodox.

There are a ton of Jews like him.  They see Orthodoxy as the only "authentic" form of Judaism, even though they would never do it themselves.  It's sad, but it's also the other movements' faults for not being a little more confident about their own authenticity (and a little more challenging of Orthodox practice in general and some of the ethical double-standards we keep reading about). 

Anyway, the bigger question is not how much Steinhardt is giving JEC, but whether any communal funds went to JEC from UJA or the Israeli government, in which case that is the much bigger scandal.  Steinhardt owns his own zoo; he can piss away his money however he likes.  (Makor, anyone?)

If you do not like it - you can give several millions and specify which organization must get the majority of the funding. As for the article in Forward: following their logic "can you belive it the rabbis were educated in all male yeshivah!" we should be jumping on the President Obama for being educated in the madrasse.

I am not orthodox, FYI.

The goal of the JEC is to get young Jews connected to their heritage in a way that is personally relevant and meaningful for them.  As an unaffiliated Jew who checks out some of the JEC programming from time to time, I can say that there is no missionary agenda.  Feel free to round up some funding and start different programming if you don't like the outreach work JEC does.   

As for charges of "Cronyism," isn't philanthropy all about giving to causes that are both close and meaningful to you? 

I'm not Orthodox.  On the contrary:  I left ultra-Orthodoxy, and it was a deeply personal and informed decision; however, I find a sentence like this offensive and ignorant:

"Is he eating glatt kosher and wrapping tefillin, doing Jewish line dances with sweaty bearded men in frock coats and fedoras or uttering fervent prayers at rabbis' graves?"

It seems that your real problem here is with Orthodoxy, and not Birthright.  Perhaps you need to reevaluate the way you look at people that observe differently than you, because I don't see why Birthright (a privately funded organization) is expected to fund all denominations of the same religion equally.  If you don't like that they are disproportionately funding the JEC, then you don't have to take their free trip to Israel.  

>> It seems that your real problem here is with Orthodoxy

You hit the nail on the head. The poster despises Orthodoxy. He has a problem that stems from his not getting a private audience with the Lubavich Rebbe OB"M and has devoted his life to put down and make fun of Orthodoxy. His is unemployed and spend all his time hosting a foolish Blog called FailedMessiah which purports to cover Orthodox Judaism. Why he posted here when he has already a post about this issue on his blog is rather pointless unless he feels that his blog is not getting enough traffic. 

Anyone who resists ultra-Orthodox hegemony in any consistent way is CRAZY!

We should all just let Big Kiruv do whatever they want, no matter how deceptively.

Sustained resistance is an expression of insanity. 

Egolinsky:

Can you direct me to a website or other source of information that shows the statistics that you cite above that more Orthodox-raised children abandon Judaism than those of other groups? (I would posit that the other ones don't have a whole lot to abandon, but anyway I'd like to see those statistics and what they are based on.)

Rabbi Harry Maryles discusses the use of deception in Ultra-Orthodox kiruv: The Kiruv Con.

I agree almost totally with what he says, but I wish to make a minor quibble on one remark of his. His thesis is summarized when he says, "The ends [viz. kiruv] do not justify the means [viz. deception]."

I just finished Rabbi Emanuel Rackman's One Man's Judaism, so I'll have to disagree. Rabbi Rackman makes the point that the ends always justify the means. Only, what are your ends? For Machiavelli, the only end was the preservation of the state, and so any means justified it, because that end had no competition from other ends. But for others, providing justifice and safety and security and happiness to all people is also an end, and that end takes precedence over the end of the state's preservation. Whether the end justifies the means depends on whether you have another end that contradicts the present end.

Here in the case of kiruv as well, I think. Is one's end simply to get kosher-eating tefillin-laying conformist robots who tout the Dahs Toyruh party-line? If so, then of course deception is valid, since in the end, it works!

But if one's goal is to create intelligent, critically-thinking, sensitive and aware Orthodox Jews who seek to apply the Torah to all of human knowledge, experience, and civilization, then deception undermines the very attempt - you cannot create critically-thinking individuals by brainwashing them! The very attempt will fail, by definition.

There may very well be a fundamental moral issue of whether deception is conscionable, but I don't think that this issue is the crux in our case. Rather, it all depends on what one's goal is. Ohr Somayach has taken the first route; we will take the second.

mikewinddale, you wrote,

 There may very well be a fundamental moral issue of whether deception is conscionable, but I don't think that this issue is the crux in our case. Rather, it all depends on what one's goal is. Ohr Somayach has taken the first route; we will take the second.

And there's the rub, Mike. You see, most Modern Orthodox rabbis are not like Rabbi Maryles. Yes, they may personally prefer the second route. But they sure do accommodate the first. They work together to in kiruv.

Watch and see how few Modern Orthodox Jews complain at all about the deception in ultra-Orthodox kiruv in public, or even in private. 

They don't care. Because "they make them frum." So what if they deceived them? "It was their choice."

NCSY works with Aish and Ohr Somayach, and used to boast (http://www.jewcy.com/tags/ncsy) about how they got public school kids to forgo college and go to haredi yeshivas and seminaries until a few secular bloggers brought it to the secular Jewish community's attention.Who were they boasting to? Other Modern Orthodox Jews. Modern Orthodox Jews who would never send their own kids to haredi institutions. But it was secular and liberal Jewish kids. So fuck them.

Now they shut up about it, and finally, after decades of feeding kids to the haredim, added some Modern Orthodox options as well. YU still includes Ohr Somayach's "Derech Institute" in their approved Israel program.

Rabbi Maryles is an all too rare Orthodox voice of dissent. 

Thanks for shining a light into another dark corner.

As I’ve argued in a recent blog post, we need to hold our Machers to account for diverting funds to the Rebbes (even if it’s their own funds, and even if there’s little we can do apart from calling attention to it.)

This “Judaism by proxy” (what others have referred to as “I play, you pray”) smacks of hypocrisy, and in the long term will only damage efforts to strengthen Jewish identity a sustainable Judaism.

The Machers and the Rebbes
http://blog.maskil.info/2009/08/the-machers-and-the-rebbes/

David, I thank you for that anecdote. I find this simply appalling, that NCSY - ostensibly a Modern Orthodox organization - would willfully condemn unsuspecting and innocent non-observant Jews to Haredism, and boast about this betrayal, no less. If NCSY can suffer these non-observant Jews to become Haredi, then I think it shows that NCSY's convictions as Modern Orthodox are quite weak. Of course, this only brings us to the fact that many Modern Orthodox Jews are naught but Haredi-lite.

(Alternatively, perhaps NCSY, for some bizarre reason, despite truly and sincerely being Modern Orthodox and not Haredi-lite, nevertheless sees itself as being more closely allied to the Haredim than to the Reform and Conservative. I cannot understand why on earth anyone Modern Orthodox would hold such a view, but some well-intentioned and quite staunchly committed Modern Orthodox Jews are indeed this confused and erring. See Rabbi Marc Angel's article "Modern Orthodoxy's Allies: Hareidim or the Non-Orthodox Movements?" at http://www.jewishideas.org/blog/modern-orthodoxys-allies-hareidim-or-non-orthodox-movem, and my reply at http://www.jewishideas.org/blog/modern-orthodoxys-allies-hareidim-or-non-orthodox-movem#comment-125. Anyway, back to what I previously said, that "Of course, this only brings us to the fact that many Modern Orthodox Jews are naught but Haredi-lite.") 

The same goes for those Israeli Religious Zionists who call themselves "Hardal", "Haredi-Leumi". They may claim to follow Rav Kook, and in many cases they actually do (except when they themselves censor those words of Rav Kook that are too Modern Orthodox sounding, such as Rav Kook's suggestion - veiled in mystical language - that if the public cannot abide by a certain Rabbinic law, then that law is no longer valid), but nevertheless, they - by their own admission, i.e. in their self-title of Hardal - aspire to be Haredi. It amazes me how someone can follow Rav Kook - who said "m'kadesh et ha-hadash u'm'hadesh et ha-yashan" ("Sanctify the new [i.e. secular] and renew the old [i.e. religious]" - and yet also follow the Hatam Sofer ( = Haredism) - who said "Hadash assur min ha-torah" ("Anything new is forbidden by the Torah"). How can one combine these two antithetical opinions??!! There is a story of a Haredi yeshiva student who came to Rav Kook and complained about one of Rav Kook's rulings, saying that Rav Kook had violated "Hadash assur min ha-torah". Rav Kook said he interpreted that saying differently, interpreting it according to its Biblical context (which the Hatam Sofer had homiletically interpreted), meaning "New grain (hadash) is forbidden by the Torah until after the omer is brought on the second day of Passover". Rav Kook was chiding the yeshiva student, and being sarcastic, but the point is that Rav Kook rejected the Hatam Sofer's aphorism.

Similarly, the Hardalim rely whole-cloth on the Hatam Sofer's justification for secular learning. The Hatam Sofer said that in the Diaspora, all secular learning and occupation is meaningless and non-religious for the Jew, but that in Israel, these secular pursuits are holy because they serve to perform the mitzvah of settling the land of Israel. This is part of the general Haredi view that secular learning is permitted only for utilitarian aims, such as earning a livelihood. The Hatam Sofer held that just as an individual needs livelihood, so too a state needs livelihood. But either way, the justification for secular learning and occupation is only that it is utilitarianly necessary. By contrast, Rav Kook held that the hadash must be m'kadesh, that the new (secular) must be sanctified. This is similar to Rav Hirsch's view that the derekh eretz ("way of the world", i.e. secular civilization) must be Toraized (Rabbi Shelomo Danziger's formulation), similar to how form must shape matter (Rabbi Yehiel Weinberg's formulation), in the end creating not a chemical mixture but a chemical compound (Rabbi Dr. Yehuda Leo Levi's formulation). Rav Kook's view was mystical, and has its own nuances, but broadly and generally speaking, it was similar to Rav Hirsch's. The point for both is that all of knowledge - both religious and scientific - comes from G-d's having created the universe, and that all of human life is to made holy under the mitzvah of "be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it". But the Hardalim, who claim to follow Rav Kook, reject Rav Kook's view and instead adopt the Hatam Sofer's view. And as we know, the Hatam Sofer is the father of Haredism.

All of this discussion pertains only to Israeli religiosity, but we could note how in YU as well, Modern Orthodoxy has been Haredizing. See Professor Haym Soloveitchik's "Rupture and Reconstruction" (http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm): "What had been a stringency peculiar to the "Right" in 1960, a "Lakewood or Bnei Brak humra,” as—to take an example that we shall later discuss shiurim (minimal requisite quantities), had become, in the 1990's, a widespread practice in modern orthodox circles, and among its younger members, an axiomatic one. The phenomena were, indeed, most advanced among the haredim and were to be found there in a more intensive form. However, most of these developments swiftly manifested themselves among their co-religionists to their left. The time gap between developments in the haredi world and the emerging modern orthodox one was some fifteen years, at most."

The upshot of all this is: most Religious Zionists are not really Kookians, and most Modern Orthodox are not really Modern Orthodox. They - both the Hardalim and the MO - are Haredi-lite, Haredi wannabees. Tell me your aspiration, and I'll tell you what you'll be in fifteen years.

If this is a damning condemnation of YU and NCSY, so be it.

David,

In the several discussions we've had on Jewcy, you may have noticed that the two of us agree on matters.

It seems that me that we differ only in tactics. You, on the one hand, work to discredit Haredism - and most of Orthodoxy therewith - as being bankrupt. I, on the other hand, while agreeing with you that Haredism is bankrupt, work rather to write Haredism out of Orthodoxy and establish it as its own sect quite outside out authentic Orthodox Judaism. We both work to defeat Haredism, but I am additionally trying to save Orthodoxy even as I defeat Haredism. So I cannot discredit Haredism if I discredit Orthodox Judaism in the process. Instead, therefore, I emphasize traditional and authentic Orthodox Judaism - whether it be German Neo-Orthodox, or Sephardi Turkish/Greek Judeo-Spanish, or non-Sephardi un-Haredized Mizrahi (Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Yemen), or pre-Enlightenment/Emancipation Ashkenazi (see Professor Menachem Friedman, who flatly declares that contemporary Haredism is neither traditional Ashkenazi nor traditional Eastern-European). I wish to write Haredism out of the picture, and establish it as illegitimate even from an Orthodox standpoint.

But for the most part, our goals are the same, and 99% of the time, I get the feeling that we could work together if the occasion every arose.

Yasher koah, and hazak u'varukh.

Why can we not see Birthright for what it is and ought to be - a pro-Zionist enterprise, sometimes pro-religious. It can be viewed as a recruitment programm for allya, for the IDF service, a million other things. And there is nothing wrong with that!

The Israeli government and Jewish charities fund programms that most promote their cause. There is no problem with that at all. I am afraid their funds are misplaced because most participants view the trip as a free vacation, a chance to engage in amorous activites with Israeli service men and women, and hardly attach any special significance to the experience.

I can only attest to what I have experienced:

More than fifty percent of the participants in my Birthright trip had only the most superficial understanding of Middle East's history and politics. I'm sure less than ten percent could explain the differences (in the most simplistic terms) between Fatah and Hamas, or name Olmert's (then PM) party.

The (excellent) tour guide not once said anything that could be possibly interpreted as Zionist propaganda even by the most sensitive participant. In fact, he spent a lot of time discussing Israel's culpability for Palestinian's plight, and the validity of their claims. He made no attempt to confront those participants who openly expressed anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli views (and he shouldn't have).

You don't like Israel? Don't go on the trip. You are a stalwart secularist, delete the "aftercare" e-mails. Please, don't bemoan Israel's effort to inspire pride and the most inocuous brand of nationalism in Diaspora teens.

Just one more point I wanted to make:  I think we’re all agreed that Steinhardt is free to do whatever he pleases with his money (there’s precious little we can do about that anyway).  What we can do, however, is to demand that what he does within the framework of the Birthright Israel program should be part of mainstream/consensus views about Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity.  Clearly, donating funds to a Haredi front does not meet that criterion.  Steinhardt may be one of the co-founders of Birthright Israel and one of its mega-donors, but it is no longer his personal fiefdom.  It belongs now to the Jewish “public sector”, and here each of us does have a say.
--
http://blog.maskil.info/

"What we can do, however, is to demand that what he does within the framework of the Birthright Israel program should be part of mainstream/consensus views about Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity."

and that consensus is what exactly?

There are tens of different trip offerings, and participants can simply vote with their application sheets. Since the entire enterprise depends singularly on the participation of Jewish youth (usually liberal in both thought and action) I doubt that the religious trips will ever come to dominate the Taglit landscape.

Mike,  David Kelsey has alleged all kinds of things on this blog without evidence or argument only bias--and you are here to back him up.  Very shocking.  "Big Aish" is not in the business of being deceptive.  If the complaint here is that Birthright runs a program that people do not like--fine--run your own program.  It is fine to criticize what they are doing and criticisms and there to be had but this is a very popular and worthwhile program and Fishman has made very good points. It is no "con" that Rabbi Mayrles suggests simply because they are not warned that Ohr Sameach is "ultra Orthodox."  Huh?  This is a such a bizarre bit of infighting, perhaps typical of the Jewish people but highly unseemly.  If some Orthodox Jew loves "his" Judaism but despises the "ultra" Hardedim--this is no good argument on its face.  Great, stick to the specific theology that rings true for you.  Further, I even have significant agreement with you, Mike, on two central complaints, where the Haredim hold specific theological points that go beyond the pale--we should not be shy about verbalizing what is essentially part of our tradition and what is not and secondly, specific techniques and beliefs in kiruv are demonstrably counter-productive--we should also stand up and lobby for those positions to be toned down or eliminated.

However, the essential thesis held up by David Kelsey is incorrect--there is no deception, no over-selling, no con associated with Aish, Chabad and Ohr Sameach.  There *is" on the other hand, some bad kiruv and some of this is brought up by Rabbi Harry Mayrles in the letter from Seth he references on his blog.  This is evidence of a ill-fated attempt at kiruv with some bad theology and we agree here that it great to have the highest and best beliefs out there for a prospective BT.  My complaint here is that having these goals must allow for the reality which is oftentimes deficient.  And my suggestion here is that if you a persistent belief that kiruv is not done correctly in Aish or Ohr Sameach--they would all be very willing to listen to what you have to say.  If it is not broken, don't attempt to fix it but I have also been at a Chabad center or two where the Rabbi believes the Rebbe was Moshiach, the age of the universe is less than 6000 years old--etc--I told him pointedly to stop making such statements to no avail.  Chabad has some great centers and a few, a minority, where I would agree some bad theology occurs.  Experience suggests, the good chases out the bad eventually.