Dr. Lawrence Schiffman on the Growing Popularity of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Why are literally hundreds of thousands of people streaming to exhibits of the Dead Sea Scrolls all over the United States and the rest of the world? Why should anyone even care about these remnants of close to 900 scrolls from the second and first centuries BCE and the first century CE? What possesses some of us in academia to devote our professional careers to teaching and research about the Scrolls?

Yeshiva University presents its first annual Dead Sea Scrolls conference on May 19.

The discovery of the first scrolls by Bedouin in 1947 in Cave 1 at Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, set off a wave of excitement. But this initial interest was misused by scholars who were intent on understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Second Temple period Jewish sect that gathered them as a precursor of Christianity. To make matters even worse, the long delays in publication that ensued understandably fostered conspiracy theories worthy of Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code, and served as a great distraction from the Scrolls’ real significance and message. After all, they are Second Temple period texts authored, copied and left for us by Jews who lived and breathed devotion to God’s Torah and its commandments, even if they represented an approach that, from the point of view of the sweep of Jewish history, was sectarian. Read the rest of this entry…

Chani Wiesman Berliant on the Need for Genetic Education and Testing

In my role as genetic counselor, I meet with men, women and families who have personal or family histories of cancer. I take a detailed medical and family history, assess the chance for an hereditary risk for cancer, and recommend appropriate genetic testing. Genetic testing can help identify what that “hereditary factor” is. When the results come back, I interpret them in the context of the family history and help make screening and management recommendations.

Chani Wiesman Berliant is a genetic counselor at YU’s Program for Jewish Genetic Health

Inevitably, the following statement would come up in discussion:

“…and if you carry one of these BRCA mutations, it means that there’s a 50/50 chance that you could have passed it on to your kids…” Read the rest of this entry…

President Richard M. Joel: Israel Must be Seen as a Destination for Our Destiny

As often as possible, I leave the confines of my 12th-floor office and meander around the campus of Yeshiva University. I do this for many reasons, principally because I so enjoy speaking with our students and absorbing the sights and insights of our campus experience as much as they do.

But even when students tuck themselves away in their classrooms and study halls, I examine the magnificent buildings in which our students pore over their texts, both Judaic and secular. Those edifices themselves seem to speak almost as loudly as the passionate, smart and vociferous undergraduates studying within them, serving as architectural symbols of the many great institutions of learning that we Jews have built together in North America and around the world.

One particular structural feature of our campus always strikes a chord in me. Three flags, each flapping and flailing in the unremitting Washington Heights wind: The flag of Yeshiva University, the flag of the United States of America, the flag of the State of Israel. Degel Yisrael, that 65-year-old symbol of hope with its ancient Star of David affixed at its center, with thousands of years of Jewish endurance and hope enchantingly summarized in its blue and white hues.

And I ask myself: What message does that flag bear for the sprawling, growing, Diaspora-based institution over which it flies? Why fly the flag of Israel? Read the rest of this entry…

Rabbi Benjamin Blech on the Sin of the Innocent Bystander

The latest revelation about the Holocaust stuns even the scholars who thought they already knew everything about the horrific details of Germany’s program of genocide against the Jewish people.

It’s taken more than 70 years to finally know the full facts. And what is almost beyond belief is that what really happened goes far beyond what anyone could ever have imagined.

For the longest time we have spoken of the tragedy of six million Jews. It was a number that represented the closest approximation we could come to the victims of Hitler’s plan for a Final Solution. Those who sought to diminish the tragedy claimed six million was a gross exaggeration. Others went further and denied the historicity of the Holocaust itself, absurdly claiming the Jews fabricated their extermination to gain sympathy for the Zionist cause.

But now we know the truth. Read the rest of this entry…

Utku Sezgin: Can President Obama’s Proposals Succeed in a Gridlocked Congress?

State of the Union addresses are the annual wish-list presentations of American presidents, mixed with appeals to rally behind the leader of the nation.

The addresses stem from the once-obscure mandate the Constitution gives presidents to submit proposals, recommendations and their political views to Congress. Until the 20th century, presidents mostly sent Congress written messages without any of today’s media-savvy pomp. In recent decades the speeches have become widely-anticipated political theater to be parsed for a sense of where a president aims to take the country. However, despite the modern presidency’s inflated powers, proposing bills to Congress and getting to sign bills containing those proposals later on is not the same thing.

President Barack Obama delivered the first State of the Union address of his second term last night, doing his best to lay out his vision—emboldened by an electoral mandate—before a partisan, polarized, divided and oft-gridlocked Congress. But the future looks uncertain. Read the rest of this entry…

Rabbi Benjamin Blech: Does the Word “Love” Still Mean Anything?

Are you in love?

Millions of people will take advantage of Valentine’s Day to affirm their strong feeling of affection with the three words “I love you.” That statement has been called the most beautiful phrase in the English language.

Love after all supposedly signifies the strongest bond possible between two people. Love is nothing less, as the Zohar puts it, than “the secret of divine unity.”

What troubles me though is that in our day, the word love seems to have lost its meaning, suffering from what I call verbal inflation. Read the rest of this entry…

Susan Crawford: How to Get High-Speed Internet to All Americans

On Monday, President Obama said that during his second term, Americans would act together to “build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores” and that “we cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries—we must claim its promise.”

Susan Crawford is professor of law at Cardozo and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

The president is right that digital communication networks — especially high-capacity fiber networks reaching American homes and businesses — can be a powerful economic engine. But we are far away from being able to realize that vision, even as we cede the advantage such technology offers to other countries.

Although Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has challenged the country to build additional gigabit fiber networks — about 100 times faster than most residential connections today — his words won’t advance our digital future unless they are backed up with the leadership necessary to enact pro-growth, pro-innovation and competition-enabling rules.

At the heart of the problem lie a few powerful companies with enormous influence over policy making. Read the rest of this entry…

As We Celebrate Tu B’Shevat, A Call for Rabbis and Educators to Stay Informed About Jewish Genetic Diseases

“Thus was he [the cedar tree] beautiful in his greatness, in the length of his branches; for his roots were upon abundant waters.”– Ezekiel 31:7

Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees, is quickly approaching. Now is when the earliest-blooming trees in the Land of Israel wake up from their winter slumber and begin a new cycle of bearing fruit. The roots are prepared to do their job, to anchor the tree in place and to extract nutrients from the soil so that the tree can be strong and healthy.

Estie Rose is a genetic counselor with YU’s Program for Jewish Genetic Health.

As a genetic counselor who advocates for pre-conception genetic testing, I take the roots-to-tree metaphor very seriously. I believe that in order to sustain a healthy community, the roots of the community have the responsibility of relaying just how important genetic testing is.

Carrier screening for autosomal recessive diseases that are common in the Ashkenazi Jewish population is widely available and has been recommended by professional organizations to be completed prior to conception or in early pregnancy. While the tests for these diseases are generally accessible, the uptake has been found to be disproportionately low in comparison to the number of Ashkenazi Jews who are of childbearing age.

One suggestion for increasing awareness of the availability and importance of pre-conception genetic screening has been to train rabbis. Read the rest of this entry…

Adina Shmidman on the Various Roles of the Rabbi’s Wife 

Recently, a congregant asked me to speak to her daughter, who was planning to become a Rebbetzin, to give her some words of encouragement and advice. I immediately agreed and offered heartfelt congratulations and sincere wishes for all to go well. But, knowing how difficult the role can be, I had to give some serious thought as to what I would say to the new Rebbetzin.

Adina Shmidman serves as the Rebbetzin of the Lower Merion Synagogue in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Being a Rebbetzin can be a great deal of work. Responsibilities often range from hosting meals to visiting sick congregants to supporting families through challenging times and reaching out to the unaffiliated. And there is the added challenge of juggling one’s home, family, and jobs.

The flip-side is the reward—not just the heavenly payback, but the earthly satisfaction. Forging deep, meaningful bonds with your congregation and knowing that you are changing Jewish life in your small corner of the world is incredibly gratifying.

So when I met with this young woman my first message to her was to embrace the position. I explained that the scope of the position—including adult and youth programming of all kinds, public and private Torah classes, and hosting guests and congregants—may seem overwhelming at first.

But I reassured her that just as in a new marriage there is an adjustment period where one gets to know her new spouse, here, too, the union of the rabbinic couple and shul is a relationship that develops in time. While there are many demands and responsibilities, you have the opportunity to use your unique talents and strengths to contribute to the spirit of the shul and the community.

Her first question was about managing her communal responsibilities while holding another job. Read the rest of this entry…

Moshe Sokolow on Israel’s Endangered Ally, the Island Country of Palau

The recent UN General Assembly vote granting observer nation status to Palestine was 138 in favor, 41 abstentions, and nine opposed. In addition to the United States, along with Canada, Panama, and the Czech Republic, the few nations that supported Israel’s opposition to the resolution were Palau, Micronesia, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands. It would be tragic if Israel were to lose the vote of any of its few reliable supporters at the United Nations, but that is just what might happen over the next few years—not due to any political intrigue but on account of global warming! At the moment, the endangered ally is the island republic of Palau, and just this summer PBS aired a report, titled Paradise Lost, calling attention to the potential of climate change to inundate and eliminate Palau and its Pacific neighbors.

An archipelago of 300 islands lying in the Philippine Sea north of Australia, with a total area of only 459 square miles, or, one for every Palauan (Israel, by comparison, has 21,000 square miles), Palau more than makes up for its diminutive size with its consistent support of Israel in world forums. Although all of Palau cannot scrape up even a minyan (a quorum of 10 Jews), its ambassador to the United Nations since 2004, Stuart Beck, is Jewish, as is Larry Miller, who served for 14 years as an associate justice of Palau’s Supreme Court. Somehow, Palau also produced two cyclists who competed in the 2009 Maccabiah Games. Read the rest of this entry…