Person of the Week: Gloria Steinem

Judaism, among all Abrahamic faiths, pays particular attention to the iconic women in its scriptures and history. While biblical texts can hardly be called non-sexist in even the loosest modern context, the stories of the Torah are downright radical for their time concerning social issues. It should come as no surprise, then, that Jewish women have stood at the forefront of political progress throughout history. Many of the most important individuals in thought and in action during the major strides in civil rights in the 20th century were Jewish women. Of them all, none are as famous or as overtly influential as Gloria Steinem.

Gloria was born to Leo and Ruth Steinem in Toledo, Ohio in 1934. At the age of 10, Gloria saw her parents part ways. Her father spent much of his time in California where he searched for steady work and her mother eventually experienced a nervous breakdown and subsequent mental instability with which she struggled for the rest of her life. Despite these problems at home, Gloria was a driven student, attending Smith College and making some coin teaching college calculus until she found her first journalism job with Help! magazine in 1960.

Help! was a light, humorous culture periodical. It wasn't until 1962 that Steinem wrote her first serious political piece as a freelancer for Esquire magazine, a powerful article on the concept of contraception and the social struggles of women in the workplace. This began a trend in Steinem's career of writing important but controversial pieces. Her talent and forward-thinking philosophy led to a job as one of the founding members of New York magazine. While there, Steinem founded Ms. magazine, the most popular feminist publication in America to date.

Through her famous writings, Gloria Steinem became one of the most well-known figures in the feminist movement of the 1960's. Just as important as her writings, she helped introduce the world to some other very influential feminist leaders. Steinem served as a co-founder of several major mainstream feminist organizations, such as the National Women's Political Caucus, the Women's Action Alliance and the Coalition of Labor Union Women.

Gloria Steinem's most famous work is the Address to the Women of America. This speech called for no less than the entirely equal treatment of all people in the United States regardless of sex or race. The key statement of the Address is the line, "We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned." This is the core of so-called Second Wave Feminism and Gloria Steinem is a living example of its sentiment.

Though her name is synonymous with feminism, Gloria Steinem should rightly be called an active political philosopher. To this day she maintains a hands-on approach to the betterment of society as a whole through whatever channels fit best. She has been a vocal supporter of reproductive rights, equality under the law for LGBT Americans and improved prevention of domestic violence.

At the age of 75, Gloria Steinem remains an integral part of social progress in America and around the world. She has battled illness, including a 1986 breast cancer diagnosis, and political opposition to promote the continued creation of a better, more peaceful society.

Shabbat: Parsha Matot-Masei

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah Portion for this week is Parsha Matot-Masei, Numbers 30:2-36:13.

The key to understanding any Torah portion is to find the overarching theme of the narrative. As I have often pointed out, the seemingly random collection of stories and codified laws in a given portion almost always relate to one another thematically. Though there is no hard and fast form for a parsha, one of the more common conventions is to place a general rule at the beginning, followed by a much larger socio-political application of that rule. The two understandings of a mitzvah, the micro and the macro, act as concurrent, counter-balancing metaphors for one another.

In the case of Matot-Masei, the philosophical theme is that of oaths and obligations. The portion opens with a description of how fathers and husbands are meant to handle the oaths of their daughters and wives. Before we get too deep into this concept, I must once again adjust the focus of biblical sexism to fit into a modern context.

In the plainest terms, the Torah approaches daughters and wives as if they are essentially children by most accounts. They are considered incapable of making their own decisions, a concept that is abhorrent by modern standards. So, rather than throwing out this entire moral, we must look at the intent, or rather the heart, of what it's trying to express. For our purposes, it's not important that these rules are applied to women, but that they are applied to those who are considered incapable of making decisions for themselves. In the modern sense, we ought to apply these rules to those under our care who truly are not capable of making major life decisions, primarily our children before they are grown.

That said, the law in the Torah states that a lesser party (daughter, wife, etc) is only responsible for any promises or oaths if those oaths have not been refused by their corresponding authority figure. In short, young people ought to be allowed to make mistakes and not live with the full brunt of their consequences, providing someone deemed it necessary to caution them against such decisions.

Matot-Masei closes with the building of several cities outside of the Promised Land because God has decreed that none of the Israelites freed from Egypt are fit to live in the nation of the covenant. We are meant to see the parallel of this proclamation to the rules of oaths and children. The Israelites, children under God, made a pact with their creator to live under the law in exchange for peace, protection and a country of their own. Because they have so frequently broken that oath, the Israelites have essentially voided their contract with God, but only unto their first generation. When God tells them to build their cities, the phrase "for your little ones" is repeated often. The emphasis is meant to draw our attention to the intent of this decree. It is not so much a punishment as it is a means to safeguard the younger generation from the iniquities of their parents. Time and again, the Torah reinforces the belief that sins are not passed from one generation to another.

Ultimately, this Torah portion is about the responsibility we have for our own generation and the example we set for the next. Beyond that, it is a story of a bittersweet kind of hope. Though we may fail in our obligations as people of the law, there is no guarantee that our children will fail just the same.

Person of the Week: Spinoza

Judaism, like any philosophy, is an evolving field of concepts stimulated by debate. Likewise, it also harbors its fair share of staunch opponents to change. For a significant portion of its existence, Judaism has struggled to define itself. As the world around the earliest Judaic documents changed and new ideas filtered into the intellectual communities that studied Torah, Jews began to struggle with the very definition of what is and what is not Judaism. Our greatest philosophical documents, like the tractates of the Talmud, are nothing if not debates between great thinkers. However, some great thinkers were never even invited to the table because their ideas were too radical for their contemporaries. Among the most influential, controversial figures in not only Jewish thought but philosophy as a whole, few are as well-known as Baruch "Benedictus" Spinoza.

Many of the Person of the Week features talk about the contributions and struggles of Spanish and Portuguese Jews in and around the Renaissance. Indeed, Baruch Spinoza's family came from that same Sephardic tradition and were almost certainly Conversos. Baruch's grandfather, Isaac, moved his family from Lisbon to Amsterdam where they could practice Judaism without as much scrutiny as in Portugal, Spain, Italy or France. His father, Miguel, was a merchant who eventually died at war. Baruch was born in 1632 and at the age of 24 was already widely known for his unusual beliefs. The Jewish community of Amsterdam issued him a cherem, an excommunication, for the heresy of his published works.

The cherem differs from the kind of excommunication practiced by the Catholic Church, if only in its intent. Unlike the dominant faiths of the time, Judaism had no political refuge in the world. The Catholic Church especially focused on Jews who courted controversy to demonize Judaism as a whole. Spinoza's ideas were radical enough that they drew the ire of religious non-Jews, thus all the dangers that come with that attention.

So, what were these controversial ideas? Put in simple and unfortunately inadequate terms, Spinoza was heavily influenced by Rationalist philosophy and contended that, among other things, God and Nature are one in the same. This runs contrary to a central Jewish tenet that God is unique to everything else. In more elaborate terms, Spinoza's concept of God/Nature unity shifted the focus of divine authority. The traditional model, which is still largely held today, is that God is an active authority issuing law. Spinoza's concept is that God's laws are actually the laws of nature.

While this element of Spinoza's philosophy remains controversial, some of his other ideas have recently come to be much more widely accepted. For instance, he opposed the Cartesian model that states mind and body are two completely separate entities. Spinoza wrote that, all things in the universe being of a single substance (God/Nature), the mind and body are actually a single entity. With modern science, we today have come to understand many of the physical properties of that which we call the mind, including neurochemistry, the role of electricity in brain function, and the discreet centers of individual functions in the brain.

The big question surrounding Baruch Spinoza is whether or not we can really call him a Jew. Is his philosophy so divergent from Judaism that he no longer qualifies? Personally, I'm not so ready to excommunicate Spinoza as the Jews of Amsterdam were. Call his philosophy what you will, Spinoza's chief aim was to discover the truth and achieve a measure of harmony with the world around him. He held knowledge, even wisdom, to be the highest attainable virtue. For those who would lump Spinoza in with the atheists of later philosophies, take into account his understanding of truth and the human capacity to understand it. In the most pithy possible definition, Spinoza believed that to acquire new knowledge is to be blessed. If you believe in God and come to find something to be true, is it possible for that truth to issue from anywhere but God?

Shabbat: Parsha Pinchas

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Pinchas, Numbers 25:10-30:1.

Though it may seem that many Torah portions are a mish-mash of unrelated stories, the majority of them are actually careful selections of thematically similar threads. Parsha Pinchas is all about inheritance in one form or another.


The first story, that of Pinchas the grandson of Aaron, is the most large-scale, high-concept version of inheritance. Pinchas discovers a prince among the tribe of Shimon who has instituted idol worship in his domain, a capital crime as it violates one of the initial Ten Mitzvot. Pinchas kills the prince and his wife for their sin, which seems brutal until God informs Moses that, had Pinchas not enacted such justice, God would have destroyed all of the Israelites for harboring such a crime. As a reward, God grants Pinchas the B'riti Shalom, the covenant of peace. In this story, the entire society inherits the responsibility of upholding the law, while Pinchas represents a new generation inheriting the original covenant between God and Abraham. As previously mentioned in this blog, the concept of the covenant is one of an agreement. God blesses the Israelites if and only if they uphold their end of the bargain.

The second inheritance here is that of each tribe's lot of land in the new country. God's instructions are plain: Give more land to larger groups of people and less land to smaller groups. In other words, be fair. For the Israelites, the Holy Land is a fresh start. Everybody is going to get their fair share.

The next kind of inheritance in this parsha is the most literal type, though in a brand new context. A man named Zelophehad dies, leaving behind only five daughters and no son. At this time in history, all wealth and station passed from a man to his first-born son, and at the death of the first-born son it fell to the next eldest son. With all this talk of inheritance and fairness, Zelophehad's daughters contend that they are entitled to their father's estate as they are his closest relations. So as to make this case unambiguous, God gives the final ruling. Yes, the daughters are completely entitled to the estate. This is a revolutionary legal decision and it establishes the proper order for inheritance in every conceivable case.

The final inheritance in this parsha is the passing of Moses's leadership onto Joshua. Because Moses has been forbidden from entering the Promised Land, the people need a new leader. What's important here is that God selects Joshua. This makes it clear that Moses didn't pass his power to a successor as a king would. Joshua is not Moses's son or adviser. God selects Joshua for his good qualities, establishing the precedent that we ought to empower those who will be good leaders rather than selecting them by arbitrary means.

Parsha Pinchas is about fairness and responsibility, how each generation must endeavor individually to establish justice and peace. There are no kings here, nor are there sins passed from parent to child. Pinchas is a hopeful parsha, as it ought to be. These Israelites, rough as they are, still stand at the very edge of the Promised Land.

Person of the Week: Gracia Mendes Nasi

As we saw with the Person of the Week last week, Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, being a Jew in medieval and Renaissance Europe was difficult and often dangerous. But revered scholars and community leaders like Nachmanides were often spared the gruesome fates of common Jews. In Middle Ages Spain there was a significant Jewish population thanks to the comparatively lenient laws of the Muslim dynasties that controlled much of the country. With the Reconquista, Catholic rulers returned to Spain from the north, bringing their much harsher policies with them. Jews were persecuted, expelled and even mass-murdered for their beliefs. As a result, many became Conversos, Jews who outwardly professed Catholicism but practiced Judaism in secret. One of the most influential among them was a Conversa named Gracia Mendes Nasi.


In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, formally expelling all Jews from the country. This was just one of many vehemently anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim laws issued by the monarchs. Many Jews, whether open or Converso, left this oppression for the somewhat friendlier nation of Portugal, bringing with them a significant amount of wealth. One such family originally from densely Jewish Aragon settled in Lisbon where they welcomed their daughter Gracia into the world in 1510.

Gracia married into the Mendes family, whose name used to be Benveniste. That name should be familiar from last week's feature as well. Rabbi Nachman's brother was a Benveniste. In Gracia's case, her husband was Francisco Mendes, a man who ran one of Europe's most successful trading companies with his brother Diogo. After the death of her husband and his brother soon after, Gracia took control of the family's commercial interests.

Gracia Mendes was perhaps the most successful, influential businesswoman of her time (which isn't to say she had a lot of competition in the 16th century). She was an incredibly smart, crafty woman, and brave. Using her wealth and influence, she freed countless persecuted Jews from unjust imprisonment, secretly funded the printing of important Jewish texts and even swayed the papacy to delay supporting the Inquisition in Portugal.

Gracia's later life was wrought with turmoil. Fleeing Portugal, she found herself in Venice where Jews were eventually blamed for an outbreak of bubonic plague. She was arrested and eventually escaped to the city of Ferrara, now unable to live behind the mask of the Conversa. Finally acknowledging this part of her identity, she adopted a Jewish surname, Nasi.

Gracia Nasi became a significant political activist in this period. In response to a state-sanctioned murder of several Jews in Portugal, Gracia Nasi used her still significant wealth and influence to place a trade embargo on the port of Ancona. She continued her religious philanthropy by funding the construction of Jewish schools and synagogues, as well as providing study grants to promising scholars. One of the synagogues she built in the city of Istanbul still functions today.

In the final years of her life, Gracia Nasi leased the Galilee, Palestine town of Tiberius (modern Tverya, Israel) from the Sultan Suleiman, paving the way for her son-in-law's eventual governorship of Tiberius and Safed, thereby safeguarding the continued, safe settlement of Jews in the region. Gracia Nasi died outside of Istanbul in 1569.

There are many great women in the history of Judaism, people of strength, wits and compassion. Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi fought for the safety of her people, ensuring a prosperous future for us all.

Shabbat: Parsha Chukat-Balak

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Chukat-Balak, Numbers 19:1-25:9.


A lot happens in this parsha, but I want to talk about two things specifically. First, the punishment of Moses that kept him from ever entering the Promised Land and second, the use of war in the Torah.

Chukat-Balak opens with a game-changing event for the Israelites. Miriam, who had been the people's divinely ordained source of water since they began their trek through the wilderness, passes away. Desperate in their thirst, the Israelites do what they do best: they complain, dramatically. Moses and Aaron ask God what to do about the water shortage, so God tells Moses to go out to a specific rock (probably a large natural structure) and speak to it. According to God, water will then flow from the rock. But when Moses goes to the rock, he angrily addresses the Israelites and strikes the rock with his staff. Water does indeed flow from it, but because he went against God's instructions, Moses is punished. God forbids Moses from ever entering the Promised Land.

This may seem like something of a harsh punishment. All things considered, Moses actually got off pretty light. In the Torah, even in last week's parsha, people were killed for crimes of equal severity. The question we must ask is why Moses is punished in such a way. This passage is a lesson about the tendency of leaders to be too severe. Indeed this is a motif for the entire parsha. Where talking would have sufficed, Moses brought violence and anger. In modern language, Moses decided to forgo diplomacy. If we accept that the Promised Land is as much a state of mind as an actual place, God's punishment of Moses simply points out that hotheadedness and violence have no place in an ideal society.

Later in the parsha the Israelites need to pass through lands that are occupied by other kingdoms. They ask to peacefully move from one border to the other, even promising to leave any resources untouched, or to pay for what resources they take. The first king refuses to let them pass under threat of war, while the second king, Sichon of the Amorites, denies them passage and brings war even though the Israelites don't cross his border. What results is a systematic route of the Amorite kingdom.

Once again, where talking and civility would have sufficed, a leader brought violence. Sichon's punishment is to see his kingdom crumble. Placing these two stories, the smiting of the stone and the Amorite war, side by side we see just what the Torah wants to express about the responsibility of leaders. One way or another, anger and violence will lead to the destruction of a people.

Whether or not the historical Israelites were such adept warriors is mostly irrelevant. Though many sages past and present would disagree with me, I believe the value of the Torah is in the lessons of its metaphors, not as a historical document. Parsha Chukat-Balak, for all its death and war, is about the necessity of even-handedness and neighborly peace. Countless times in our own lives, we are faced with problems that can be solved by delicate means. In other words, don't strike the rocks to which you need only speak.

Person of the Week: Nachmanides

One thing to remember about the great sages of Jewish philosophy is that they were not monks studying away in cloisters. They were some of the most prominent, worldly men of their time. In many ways, they were international celebrities. After all, they were the keepers and producers of knowledge both spiritual and secular. In a time when religion was the core of governance at every level, no figure beside the king himself was more revered and respected than the religious scholar. As with any celebrity, a sage was not immune to the pitfalls of tabloid drama. Late in his life, a great commentator called Nachmanides was at the center of a controversy than involved King James I of Aragon himself.

Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman Gerondi, aka Ramban, aka Nachmanides was a 13th century scholar originally from Girona in Christian-controlled Spain. Moshe lived in a highly respected, educated family. He grew to be a professional physician while his brother Benveniste de Porta was a very successful financier who was granted a post by King James himself. The King's respect for the family would prove to be vital later in Moshe's life.

By the age of 16, Ramban had already cultivated fame as a formidable Judaic scholar. He made an early career of addressing long-standing philosophical debates and attempting to reconcile them. Though he had many strong beliefs and could be extreme in the conservatism of his views, Ramban was only hard-nosed when it came to deep spiritual matters. Where human issues were concerned, he had and maintains to this day a reputation for gentleness and peace-making.

As it is often the tradition in Jewish philosophy to pit two sages against one another, Nachmanides is considered the counter-point to the teachings of Maimonides, who was already a widely revered scholar by the time Nachmanides began writing. Maimonides often strikes a very classical, humanistic stance, thanks in no small part to his lifetime of globetrotting. Nachmanides rejects at least half of Rambam's positions on the grounds that they are overly influenced by Greek philosophy and occasionally stray into the profane. Ramban certainly had great respect for his forebear, but he was a bit more of a fundamentalist in his own views.

Nachmanides enjoyed a relatively quiet life until July 1263. As the foremost scholar of Judaism in Catalonia, he became the target of a former Jew who later converted to Christianity and became a Dominican monk, taking the name Pablo Christiani. Christiani was sent to engage Ramban in a Disputation. This was a common practice at the time which the Church used to encourage Jews to renounce their faith. Scholars and other significant figures would be called to defend their philosophy. If they lost the debate, it would demoralize their Jewish followers. Christiani debated Ramban on various topics, mostly concerning Messianic issues.

What sets Ramban's Disputation apart from any other is that Ramban requested and was granted full freedom of speech during the debate. Where other Disputations had strong censorship against anything that might be considered blasphemous (which includes any meaningful rhetoric contrary to Christian philosophy), Ramban's was on even ground. In the presence of King James, Ramban and Christiani debated for four days. In the end, Ramban was essentially declared to have successfully defended his faith. This ruling erupted in a controversy and Ramban attempted to clear his name by publishing the transcript of the Disputation. This only inflamed things further, resulting in his exile and a hefty fine. Though the exile was de facto permanent, the fine was lifted as a favor to Ramban's brother.

Nachmanides eventually found his way to Jerusalem where he established a synagogue. That synagogue stands to this very day in the Old City. It's a small, unassuming building that has no indication of its importance other than a faded plaque by the one and only door. At the time, very few Jews actually lived in Jerusalem thanks to the constant wars in the region. Ramban's presence there may have saved Jewish culture in Jerusalem from fading forever. He died at the age of 73, though his burial place is unknown today.

Shabbat: Parsha Korach

Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Korach, Numbers 16:1-18-32.

The story in the Five Books of Moses reminds us that the Israelites' journey through the desert was a time of great turmoil. In this parsha alone they face plague, natural disasters and political upheaval. To read these documents is to get a glimpse into the state of mind of a people lost in the desert, ignorant of the greater forces that drive them.


Consider the muse for the events in the Torah. Whenever we read stories of divine wrath, it takes the form of disease, fire, earthquakes and other torments of the natural world. Imagine what it must have been like to watch people grow ill without having any concept of micro-organisms, or to literally witness the ground below your feet tremble and crack open without having even the slightest understanding of plate tectonics. The Israelites, the nomadic Hebrew people, have none of the few elements of security available to humans at that time. The light and containment of a city is a far-off dream for them and they can't even stay in one place long enough to grow a steady supply of food.

These such themes beg us to reconsider the role of faith in our own time. For the ancient Israelites, religion was the only means at their disposal to reconcile feeling small, helpless and ultimately negligible in a very unforgiving world. They saw natural disasters as divine wrath because they had no means to conceive of the forces behind them. Human society has progressed significantly since then, rendering this purpose for faith obsolete. The question we must ask, then, is whether or not faith itself is obsolete.

If one were to simply define religion as magical thinking in the absence of fact, then of course faith is obsolete in the modern day. However, if we read the Torah as the great philosopher Nachmanides urges, with both our hearts and minds, we can see that the true purpose of faith was not to explain physical realities but to express the emotional content of the human experience.

Today we don't need to choose between rational thought and spirituality, so long as we understand what roles those two concepts play in our modern lives. It is the outmoded version of faith that calls a modern problem like HIV/AIDS a "punishment from God" like the plague visited on the rebelling Israelites in parsha Korach. It is the useful, mindful version of faith that calls us to comfort and heal the sick. Is religion absolutely necessary for humanitarianism? Of course not, but it is also inadvisable to tear down the humanitarian structures of faith when they still call so many people to action.

Just because we aren't wandering in the desert without science or reason today doesn't mean we don't still long for answers to the most difficult questions in our lives. This longing pushes people into religion, thanks in no small part to the promises of the proselytizers that every question can be answered in faith. But religion is not science. The purpose of religion is not to provide answers. This world is filled with people who are happy to provide comforting lies in exchange for money, power and obedience. The great lie is that faith provides wholesale truth. The reality is that faith, at its best, gives us the spiritual focus to pursue truth wherever we can find scraps of it.

Person of the Week: Eli Wiesel

In the examination of the human rights atrocities committed during World War II, there are many pitfalls. Growing up, I witnessed practically all of them. I recall the woefully incomplete, out-of-context Holocaust literature unit in my 8th grade English class when a school full of young people who, except for me, had never known a Jew, were asked to process the articulated anguish of Anne Frank and Eli Wiesel. In the entire district we had maybe two Jewish teachers and they certainly weren't at my school. Given no means to comprehend those well-documented horrors, my classmates took nothing from the experience.


Later I attended a small liberal arts college for a brief time before finally ending up at Ohio State University. At that tiny school there was only one Jewish student's organization and the only thing they wanted to talk about was oppression. They were fixated on the victimization of Jews, so naturally they had nothing of value to say and nothing to offer the world in which we live.

Of all the voices in history, literary or otherwise, none have been more important to Holocaust education than Eliezer Wiesel. He endured the very worst of Nazi cruelty and survived to write the single most valuable memoir of the death camps ever written. That book is Night, first written in Yiddish in the mid-1950's, then translated into French and eventually into English by 1960. Few people read the book for more than a decade after its American release. By the 1980's Night found its place in the high regard it deserves, winning its author the Nobel Peace Prize. Today it is required reading in essentially every Holocaust education program in America.

Night chronicles Wiesel's life in the Romanian ghetto where his family was quarantined in the early 1940's, then his experience in several of the most brutal concentration camps of Europe. It is a disturbingly matter-of-fact recounting of the torture, starvation, murder and all manner of cruelty visited upon Jews, Roma and other minorities in the camps. Wiesel watched his father, Sholomo, die slowly of dysentery after years of imprisonment. Just shortly after the last death march to Buchenwald, Wiesel and the surviving prisoners were freed by American forces.

In the closing lines of Night, Wiesel describes the most complex emotions experienced by survivors. Where we readers expect cinematic jubilation, Wiesel only finds emptiness and faithlessness. He does not recognize himself in the mirror and he cannot yet comprehend his own torture now that he's ostensibly past it.

In took years before Eli Wiesel would write even a single word about his experience during the Holocaust. Such was the case for many survivors. In time, Wiesel came to be the most courageous orator of that nightmarish history we will ever see. His non-profit organization, The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, was at the forefront of the creation of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and today is one of the leading voices raising awareness about current human rights atrocities. The foundation has called for action concerning such events as the systematic violence in Darfur, the South African apartheid and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, among others.

This is the most important lesson of Holocaust education. While the horrors of the Second World War were some of the most widescale brutalities in history, they are by no means the last. This is where the Holocaust unit in my school and the Jewish student's group at my former college failed. Atrocities past have only one true lesson in them, and that is to prevent atrocities in the present and future. Such is the value of Elie Wiesel, one of the most important educators of our time.

Today, Elie Wiesel continues to lecture at several American universities and has taken an active role in modern politics. The future of the Wiesel Foundation is uncertain thanks to its loss of assets to the Bernard Madoff investment firm's crimes. With help, the Foundation can continue its humanitarian work. You can get more information about the Elie Wiesel Foundation, what their continued mission is and how you can support it at their website.

Shabbat: A Special Message About Our Friends In Iran

Shabbat Shalom, to my American readers and to everyone else around this stunning, ever-transforming globe of ours. I have decided to use this Shabbat entry to discuss something different than the Torah portion. The greatest lesson we can learn from the Torah is that, as Jews, we are citizens of the world. We seek shalom, peace, and its advancement wherever it is lacking. That is why I would like to take this time to talk about our fellow pursuers of peace in Iran.

This past week has been an historic one in the Middle East. One of the most vocal opponents to Israel and the rights of Jewish people has been Iran, but that itself has been a horrible misrepresentation of the people who live there. Iran takes its name, a modern invention, from a philosophical solidarity with the Aryan concept, a word itself stolen from the fair-skinned and dominant people of the Middle East and Northern India. But just because the over-vocal leadership of that country, which saw a revolution just 30 years ago, has espoused an anti-Semitic and strongly anti-Israel sentiment does not mean that the 40 million people who inhabit that land share the same views.

For several days now, hundreds of thousands of people all over Iran have contested the allegedly fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They don't cry for war or blood like the increasingly lopsided depictions of people in the Muslim world. In fact, the protesters hold up peace signs and demand freedom, even holiness. When we as Jews observe our fellow human beings crying for "Solh" in Farsi or "Salaam" in Arabic, they cry for "Shalom", for Peace. The young people, the woman, the educated and the progressive individuals in Iran are indeed our brothers and sisters. Pray for them, as Jews, Americans and human beings. Speak out for them. Join the protest.

I have followed the fallout of the Iranian elections very closely and the first thing that came into my mind when seeing the massive response was a sentiment we as Jews utter every year at Passover. We say that, just as we were slaves in Egypt so many years ago, just as we defied injustice in Mitzrayyim,  so should we pursue the rectification of injustice wherever we find it. Today, injustice abounds in Iran and the people, like Israelites under Pharaoh, have begun to throw off the weight of oppression. It is no less dramatic than that and no less important.

It is difficult to claim historical importance in our own time. We are so used to the clarity of hindsight, of recorded history, that we sometimes forget to think of today as being a moment in history of which future generations will speak. I firmly believe that we are living in a time of great historical importance. As Jews, as lovers of peace, stay informed about the developments in any place where change is on the horizon. It's not difficult to find inspiration in the potential growth of the blossoming global community. Don't just pray for our friends in Iran, learn the details of their struggle and raise awareness about their cause. When they make their voices heard, and they most certainly will, they'll need allies on our side of the world.

Shabbat Shalom, Salaam and Solh to all who read this today and to all who fill the streets of Tehran.

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