Letters
Torah is not a retreat from the world
As a 71-year-old who grew up in the Conservative movement in Bergen County, I find Mr. Berman’s column (“Rabbis need to cool it with ICE,” March 6) frames a false dichotomy: that rabbis must choose between teaching Torah and engaging with the moral crises of our time. By labeling rabbinical advocacy on immigration a “political frolic” — time supposedly stolen from combating Jewish illiteracy — he fundamentally misreads what Torah demands.
The Torah commands us no fewer than 36 times to protect the stranger. The prophetic tradition Mr. Berman dismisses as a distraction is, in fact, the beating heart of Jewish ethical life. When the prophet Amos declared that God despises religious rituals unaccompanied by justice, he wasn’t indulging in a partisan whim; he was articulating the very terms of the Covenant.
The rabbi who inspired my youth by marching in Selma, Alabama, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this implicitly. As the late Rabbi Andre Ungar wrote, the “ethical legacy of Bible and Talmud militates on the side of human equality,” and a rabbi’s obligation is to “advocate the concrete application of it in the social setting of the time and place.” He saw no tension between Torah scholarship and prophetic witness; they were two sides of the same coin. Under his leadership, notably, his congregation flourished.
Mr. Berman asserts a correlation between social engagement and congregational decline but offers no evidence. I suggest the causality runs the other way. Synagogues are not shrinking because rabbis speak out; they are shrinking because many Jews can no longer answer the question: Why does my Judaism matter? A rabbi who insists the Torah is silent on the plight of the stranger has already answered that question in the negative.
The rabbis in Minnesota were not abandoning Torah. They were proving it is still alive.
Adam Brown
Englewood
Adam Brown is an attorney and a past president of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County.
‘Shut up and dribble!’
Several years ago, a Fox News host took exception to NBA star LeBron James expressing his political thoughts. The host admonished James and told him to “Shut up and dribble!” Ari Berman (“Rabbis need to cool it with ICE,” March 6) follows suit and tells non-Orthodox rabbis to shut up and daven when they engage in social justice activism. Mr. Berman also criticizes these rabbis for “cherry picking” Torah verses to justify their progressive positions.
Mr. Berman knows full well that our rabbis and sages have “cherry picked” Torah and Talmud verses for thousands of years to support halachic decisions. Mr. Berman is correct that the Jewish community must engage in intensive, thoughtful actions to maintain Jewish life in the U.S. But that effort is not binary. We can, despite Mr. Berman’s protestations, do both. Mr. Berman’s real concern, though, is not a dwindling Jewish community. It is, as he suggests, that non-Orthodox rabbis do not advocate for “right-wing policy issues.” Perhaps in a future column Mr. Berman can identify a right-wing policy issue that aligns with Judaism’s emphasis on social justice.
Peter Herbst
Montclair
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