How's this for rank cronyism?

Birthright Israel, the program that gives every Jewish young adult in North America a free trip to Israel, also funds ‘aftercare' programs back home under the auspices of Birthright-NEXT meant to keep newly-Jewishly-enthused Birthright participants in the Jewish communal fold.

Birthright has so far shown little success in aftercare and retention. Most participants barely participate in Jewish communal life after returning from the greatest free vacation many of them will ever have. Of those participants who have already finished college, only about half participate in any measurable way, and "participation" can mean as little as attending one program several years ago.

A recent study commissioned by Birthright emphasizes the need for varied programming conducted in small intimate settings by many organizations in each locale.

To achieve this, many different organizations need funding. But that is not what Birthright does. Indeed, in the New York City area, home to the largest concentration of young Jews in North America, Birthright focuses its funding on a small handful of organizations. One of them, the Jewish Enrichment Center, gets a heavily disproportionate amount of that funding.

The JEC is an ultra-Orthodox founded and run outreach center, started as part of the Kiruv Movement - in other words, the JEC was conceived and birthed by Jewish missionaries out to make you ultra-Orthodox.  Beginning in 2002, the JEC was the NYC "outreach post" of Ohr Somayach, the right wing ultra-Orthodox kiruv yeshiva and missionary network. So why is Birthright-NEXT funding ultra-Orthodox missionary activity?

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Since I last posted on Agriprocessors, shortly after the company was hit with more than 9,000 counts of child labor violations, the company's "former" CEO (and still current VP) Rabbi Sholom M. Rubashkin was arrested on felony immigration and identity fraud charges. That was followed two weeks later by his second arrest on felony bank fraud charges. Rubashkin faces more than 50 years in federal prison, along with more time in state lockup.

Agriprocessors itself was indicted shortly after Rubashkin's second arrest, and the company faces millions of dollars in fines.

Early in November, Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy.  Then, on November 14, the day of Rubashkin's first federal arrest, Agriprocessors missed its payroll, leaving workers – many of them already poor – without money and, in many cases, food. Production ceased shortly after.

Now Agriprocessors' court-appointed trustee, Joseph Sarachek of New York, is trying to restart production and pay workers – at least those workers who play ball with the company.

In effect, Sarachek is running a plantation with slavery replaced by indentured servitude. If workers come back to work, they will be given back wages owed to them in dribs and drabs. If they do not come back to work, they will need to wait for the final bankruptcy settlement  – which means they likely will never see any money. Secured creditors like banks get paid first, and Agriprocessors has more debt now, including potential fines, than industry experts I've spoken with believe it has equity.

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Earlier this month, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews waved live chickens over their heads in a ritual known as kapparot, or "atonements." They chanted solemnly:

"This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my expiation. This chicken shall go to its death and I shall proceed to a good long life and peace."

As the Orthodox Jews watched, each chicken was ritually slaughtered, then donated to the poor.

Kapparot is of questionable origin. There is no mention of kapparot in the Bible or in post-Biblical Jewish literature until the Middle Ages. And many great Jewish legal scholars, including Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulkhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law), believed it to be of pagan origin and forbid it. According to many rabbinic opinions, kapparot can be done with money. Chickens are not necessary. But kapparot was promoted by the Hasidic movement, which these days is primarily responsible for keeping kapparot, as opposed to kapparot chickens, alive.

If kapparot was done carefully and humanely, the only argument against it would be theological. But often kapparot are neither carefully run nor humane.

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Israel is facing an economic crisis of truly epic proportions, but even though its immediate cause is the declining dollar and the crisis now gripping US financial markets, its roots lie in Mea Shearim quarter, not on Wall Street.

Every year, Israeli ultra-Orthodox charities raise almost $1 billion abroad. That money is used to support soup kitchens, food pantries, organizations like ZAKA, and the ultra-Orthodox school system, including yeshivas and kollels. Kollels are yeshivas for married men. And herein lies the problem.

70% of ultra-Orthodox married men choose not to work.  Instead, they study in kollel. They are each given a stipend from the kollel that amounts to about $300 per month. Their families subsist on government welfare benefits, aid from various ultra-Orthodox charities, and whatever else the mothers of seven (or more) children are able to earn in their “spare” time.

This planned unemployment – which often lasts well into a man’s forties – is a tremendous drain on government resources. It is also a tremendous drain on charities which, one way or another, are compelled to support it.

Dirt Poor: in the city of goldExcept for those few lucky kollel students with rich parents or in-laws, these families live in real poverty, packed together in small, aging apartments, worried about their childrens' next meal.

Why would anyone voluntarily do this? Because their rabbis told them to.

For a generation, ultra-Orthodox rabbis have ordered their followers to study at all costs. From the rabbis’ perspective, it is easy to see why.

Kollel students are exempt from army service, which not only keeps them off the battlefield – it keeps them out of the army, where they would surely mix with and befriend non-ultra-Orthodox Jews. This could, in the rabbis’ view, lead to a weakening of faith.

In the same way, because kollel students do not leave their ultra-Orthodox enclaves for work, they do not mix with non-ultra-Orthodox coworkers.

On top of that, at the rabbis’ direction the ultra-Orthodox do not study in universities. This keeps them blissfully ignorant of modern science, philosophy, and history – all things that could easily lead an ultra-Orthodox person to question his faith. It also keeps them away from secular members of the opposite sex.

In other words, kollel study combined with an enforced lack of secular knowledge serves as a buffer from modernity, the mortal enemy of ultra-Orthodoxy.

Of course, that's not how the rabbis sell kollel study to their followers. Instead, it's presented as a religious obligation: it is holy, work is not. Work is a last resort, something to be done only if there is no other option left, and then only if the rabbis agree.

For years this system survived because the government partially supported the kollels, supported the kollel families through child allowances and other welfare benefits, and because American Jews donated money.

But the government cut back on those child allowances. And then, the worst happened – the US dollar went into a tailspin.

Dollars are worth about 20% less today than they were a year ago. That  means, all things being equal, these charities have 20% less to spend for the needy.

But all things are not equal.

Because of worldwide economic uncertainty, the amount of dollars coming in has also dropped – how much, no one is yet sure – but Israeli ultra-Orthodox charities report their net incomes are down about 30%.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox non-profits were already stretched to the breaking point before this economic downturn. Now many are cutting back on services. Soup kitchens are serving smaller portions and even skipping meals. The newly needy are not finding help.

Despite all of this, the rabbis have not changed their call: ultra-Orthodox men are still expected to study full time.

Even if ultra-Orthodox rabbis would tell their followers to go find jobs, few would be employable. These men have spent their lives in a school system that did not teach them science, history, civics, English, modern Hebrew, or even math. They lack the skills necessary for all but the most menial jobs.

And, because so few ultra-Orthodox men now work, that means few create jobs that could be filled by other ultra-Orthodox.

Welfare payments are a major issue fought over by ultra-Orthodox politicians and the beleaguered public servants who try to keep Israel’s budget on an even keel. Entire governments have been held hostage by small ultra-Orthodox political parties demanding increases in these welfare payments. Those small parties’ threats to leave the governing coalition would force new elections.

When Israelis think of welfare, they tend to think of "welfare cheats."  In their minds, these are the ultra-Orthodox, who do not serve in the army, who often do not pay taxes, and who take from the country in so many ways without giving back.

None of this is meant to excuse Israel’s attitude toward its poor who are not poor-by-choice – or, more accurately, poor-by-their-rabbis’-choice. These unfortunate people are expected to subsist on welfare payments so low, many go hungry. It is not at all uncommon to see elderly begging for food on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Israel also has its homeless, many of whom are not mentally ill or substance abusers – they’re just poor.  The country could go a long way to rectifying this situation by outlawing welfare payments to able-bodied men above the age of twenty-one who choose to study in kollel rather than work or serve in the army. That would free resources that could be used to help the truly needy, and could also be used to ease the ultra-Orthodox transition to work by providing job training and internship programs.

None of these changes would stop ultra-Orthodoxy from itself supporting its true scholars and allowing them to study in kollel for many years – perhaps for their entire lives.

Ultra-Orthodoxy treats its rabbis like popes, infallible and exceedingly wise, with a direct line to the Divine Will. But, like every cataclysmic event to befall the Jewish people in recent memory – the Russian pogroms of the 1880s; the upheavals and slaughters of World War One; and, of course, the Holocaust –  the rabbis did not see it coming. They did not prepare their followers for the day after Wall Street’s collapse any more than they did for  the collapse of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire or the Nazi Holocaust.

After each of those earlier tragedies, large numbers of ultra-Orthodox left the fold. Chances are, some of them were your ancestors.

Will that happen now?

It would, I think, if ultra-Orthodox defectors were given the necessary support to transition from their closed communities to secular society, where a strong back and a willingness to work hard is no longer enough to get by. But without that support, these potential defectors will remain trapped in ultra-Orthodoxy, dependent on ultra-Orthodox charities for subsistence.

That is why you can expect ultra-Orthodox rabbis to fight any attempt to provide widespread job training or secular education for their followers.

It is also why the problem of Israel’s poor-by-choice will not go away any time soon.

On Sunday, Jewish law killed a 55-year old American-Israeli man. Rabbi Yossie Raichik died of a lung infection. He was waiting in Israel, where he had lived for almost 30 years, for a transplant to replace his irreversibly damaged lungs. It could have saved his life. It did not because the donor organs that matched him did not arrive.

Raichick headed Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl project. Children of Chernobyl took children from the area around Chernobyl’s exploded nuclear reactor and brought them and their families to Israel for medical treatment. Raichik brought more than 2500 children to Israel during the 22 years since the disaster. He is said to have played a role in airlifting Jewish children out of Iran just after the revolution ushered in what became the Islamic regime.

Raichik’s transplant didn’t come because the donor’s family insisted on consulting with an unnamed leading Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbinic expert before allowing the transplant. While the rabbi investigated, the woman’s heart failed and the organs – including the lungs that could have saved Raichik – were lost.  Raichik died soon after.

Unlike kidneys and livers, which if necessary can be removed immediately after cardiac death, lungs must be taken while the donor’s heart is still beating.  This means the only way to get lungs for transplant is to take them from patients who are brain stem dead, or from Chinese political prisoners killed by the government for their organs.

Orthodox rabbinic interpreters of Jewish law seem united in their opposition to the Chinese option, as everyone should be. But they are divided on the validity of brain stem death, and it was this divide that killed Yossie Raichick.

The Jerusalem Talmud, the older brother of the commonly studied and followed Babylonian Talmud, defines death as the complete, irreversible cessation of breathing. This is defined in two ways: 1) No discernible air exhaled or inhaled through the nose, and 2) No respirations discernible by intently studying the navel area (i.e., the diaphragm).

Manuscript versions of the Babylonian Talmud follow this reading, including the versions used by leading medieval scholars like Isaac Alfassi, Nachmanides, Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, and many others.

But one medieval scholar living in what was then the remote hinterland of Jewish communities had a manuscript with a different reading. Unfortunately for Raichik and many others, that scholar was Rashi, and Rashi wrote what is considered the seminal commentary on the Talmud. When the printing press came into use hundreds of years after Rashi’s death, Rashi’s commentary was printed alongside the main text of the Babylonian Talmud.

Rashi’s version of the Talmud replaced the word “navel” with the word heart, so death was defined by complete cessation of breathing and heartbeat. Printers apparently amended the text of the Talmud to match Rashi’s commentary.

Rashi’s opinion makes most transplants impossible.

For hundreds of years, Jews determined death by placing a feather at the nostrils and intently watching for signs of breathing. If there were none after a few minutes, the person was declared dead.

(This was by no means foolproof. Rarely, faint breathing was missed by the observers. This sometimes led to ‘corpses’ “coming back to life” in their coffins.)

With the advent of modern medical technology came ventilators and cardiac resuscitation devices. Suddenly, stopped hearts could be restarted and lungs too weak to breathe adequately on their own could be assisted.

These and many other advanced medical treatments have allowed very physically compromised people to live, and some eventually to recover.

Eventually, improved medical technology brought the potential for organ transplantation. But along with organ transplantation came a renewed concern about how to determine when a person is really, truly dead.

Medical science uses brain stem death to define death in applicable cases. Brain stem death is like decapitation. Without a living brain stem, a person can never breathe independently. He can never regain consciousness. He can never function in any way, however compromised. And, like decapitation, brain stem death is irreversible.

If a brain-stem-dead patient is removed from his ventilator, his body will make no visible or measurable effort to breathe, and his heart will fail.

Based on this, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (d. 1986), the leading American ultra-Orthodox rabbi of his era, accepted brain stem death as death, allowing viable organs to be taken from brain-stem-dead patients.

But many Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbis disagreed. Even with special tests devised to prove lack of both spontaneous breathing and lack of brain function, these rabbis refused to accept brain stem death as death.

Why?

In the words of nonagenarian ultra-Orthodox leader Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv – posted across Jerusalem and published in ultra-Orthodox papers in late March after Israel passed an organ donation bill recognizing brain stem death as death – “[A]s long as the heart is still pumping blood, even in the case of 'brain death,' it is not permitted to remove any organ from the patient.” And, under banner headlines proclaiming, “Thou Shalt Not Murder!,” Elyashiv and his followers called reliance on brain stem death “murder.”

It was those words that apparently caused the donor’s family to delay donation, and it was those words that apparently caused the leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi they asked for advice to himself delay.

Taking Elyashiv’s position to an illogical extreme, it could be argued that a decapitated person with a beating heart and a surgically closed neck wound is fully alive, even though headless. Indeed, two rabbis, Hershel Schachter and J. David Bleich, both associated with Manhattan-based Yeshiva University’s right wing, have done just that. To them, the complete absence of a head does not signify death. Schachter is to Modern Orthodoxy what Elyashiv is to ultra-Orthodoxy – the top guy.

Speaking at an Orthodox medical ethics conference in 2006, Schachter makes significant errors of medical fact, avers that heart and lung transplantation is murder  – even though he acknowledges the donor’s entire brain may be irreversibly dead – and misrepresents the original decision of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate permitting such transplants. In response to a question from a physician, who asks Schachter if he permits Jews to take a donated heart when that heart has come from, in Schachter’s opinion, a “murder,” Schachter answers by saying many rabbis permit taking these organs because the “doctors” will “murder” the patient anyway.

The truth, however, is significantly different. The only organs removed from a donor are organs for which there is a recipient match within the immediate geographic area. If no such match exists, no organs are taken. Schachter and many of the other rabbis who permit taking organs but not donating organs must be aware of this. They simply ignore the truth out of expediency.

It would be one thing if Elyashiv, Schachter, and their followers refrained from accepting donated organs. But they don’t. While forbidding donating organs, Elyashiv and Schachter have said nothing about not taking them. Their followers who need organs take organs, often displacing people on recipient lists who are, themselves, potential donors registered with various organ donation programs, including the Halachic Organ Donation Society.

This, along with the traditional Jewish desire to bury the body intact, has caused a dire shortage of organs in Israel. This shortage is made worse because Israelis cannot get organs from many other countries. Why? Because of the shortage, Israel cannot provide those countries with anything like reciprocity. Israelis are seen as takers of organs but not as givers. If not for the unusual generosity of the United States, Israelis would have few places to turn.

This perception of Jews as organ takers but not givers extends to communities worldwide with large Orthodox communities. This has sparked fears that countries will start banning all Jews, not just Israelis, from receiving donated organs.

Elyashiv and his fellow travelers claim they object to brain stem death because they want to protect the sanctity of life, and this may be the case.  But medical science has advanced exponentially since the Talmud was compiled in the 8th century. Just as Orthodox Jews benefit from those advances, the Jewish law they follow needs to take these advances into account. Just as we do not mix the potions described in the Talmud to cure illness, and we do not follow its diet recommendations to promote health, we should not be basing something as important as death on 1300 year old Talmudic science – or on a 500 year old printer’s error.

Yossie Raichik’s donor died. So did Yossie Raichik. It didn’t have to be that way.