High Holiday Essay (3): Stealing Torah and Slandering the Pious
David Shasha
Stealing Torah and Slandering the Pious
One of the most sinful actions of the Christian Church against Judaism has been the Abrogation of the Law and the reframing of the Hebrew Bible as the “Old Testament.”
Christianity did not make do with the founding of a new faith but insisted that it was the true Israel; heir to the promises of redemption in the Sacred Scriptures.
To this end, the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible (Hebrew, Torah she-bi-khtab) were read as referring exclusively to Jesus of Nazareth; proclaimed as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. The promises of redemption were now fulfilled, so the great edifice of the Law, detailed so lovingly by the Rabbis of the Talmud according to the Oral tradition (Hebrew, Torah she-be-‘al peh), was effectively made null and void. Those Jews who remained beholden to the Law were seen as living in darkness. The Jewish Law as enshrined in the “Old Testament” was from a bygone time of no use to the present.
At issue in the battle between Jews and Christians was how to properly read the ancient texts. Jews read the texts as strictly conforming to the Law, while Christians read them as the “Good News”; a redemptive narrative that freed those who believed in Jesus Christ from having to perform the actions mandated by the Law.
The “Old Testament” implies the Abrogation of the Law and vice versa.
Back in 1955 the brilliant writer Rod Serling – soon to become famous for his groundbreaking “Twilight Zone” TV series – produced a television play, quickly turned into a movie, called “Patterns.” The story concerns a young man named Fred Staples, played in the movie by the underrated Van Heflin, who is brought to the New York office of Ramsey and Co. from his job at one of their regional divisions. He is to work as an executive under owner Walter Ramsey, played by Everett Sloane of “Citizen Kane” fame. Unbeknownst to Staples, Ramsey has brought him to the New York headquarters to replace a veteran employee named William Briggs, played by the great Ed Begley.
The triangle reflects the changes in the corporate world of the 1950s. Briggs is an old-timer who has worked for the Ramsey family business for over 30 years – he predates the younger Ramsey’s tenure in the company. Ramsey – a tyrant who does not have one ounce of human compassion – deeply resents his presence in the company. Briggs represents the humane values of Ramsey’s late father that his son wishes to wipe out.
Ramsey has taken the company into the financial big time by cutting corners and changing the way his father did business. Rather than taking a hands-on approach and caring for his employees in a paternal manner, Ramsey represents the changing times of the 1950s as a new breed of executive who is less concerned with the quality of his products and more concerned with the endless corporate scheming that cuts directly to the financial bottom line. The company is now not about making things, but arranging deals and working with stocks, margins, and futures.
Staples teams with Briggs to write an important report, but when the final version is submitted, Ramsey – as has become routine – brutally harangues Briggs over his old-fashioned direction and corporate philosophy, while he lavishes praise on Staples who he sees as a reflection of his own “new breed” mentality.
Ramsey is a brutal autocrat who cannot see beyond dollars and cents. For him there are no human beings, only profits to be made. Human beings are not just expendable; they are impediments to the practice of sound business strategies. It is all about numbers and pushing impersonal algorithms and flow charts.
Once Staples comes to understand that Ramsey has hired him to push out Briggs, he starts to hate Ramsey and questions his nefarious methods. Tragically, Ramsey pushes Briggs so hard that he has a heart attack and dies right in the company offices after a particularly harsh board meeting. Serling’s script ends on an ambivalent note with Staples finding a form of accommodation with Ramsey after rashly insisting that he is quitting and getting out of the trap Ramsey has set for him.
Longtime SHU readers will find the story of “Patterns” somewhat similar to the writing I have done on Hakham Matloub Abadi; perhaps the last truly authentic Sephardic rabbi of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community.
I have spoken out in praise of Rabbi Abadi’s brilliant learning and his innovative pedagogy. My own esteemed teacher Rabbi Jose Faur was a protégé and disciple of the great rabbi and spoke to me many times of his life and his great Torah knowledge.
Over the course of the past 30 years I have tried my best to speak out on behalf of Rabbi Abadi. What has made this so difficult is the counter-intuitive way in which his service to the community has been erased.
It has become clear over time is that Rabbi Abadi, once the most important rabbi in the Sephardic Jewish world – he was once offered to be Rosh Yeshiva of the rabbinical academy Porat Yosef in Jerusalem, has become a cipher to the community he once served so devotedly. He remains invisible to the vast majority of Syrian Jewish students who learn absolutely nothing about him in their schools.
After arriving in America, Rabbi Abadi insisted to the lay leaders of the immigrant Brooklyn community that a Torah education be given to the children, who were then attending local public schools. To this end he helped found the Magen David Talmud Torah on 67th Street in Bensonhurst where most of the community still lived. There are some people still living who recall having Hakham Matloub as their teacher.
But there are precious few who are aware of the tragic story of this rabbi and how his pedagogy and intellectual legacy vanished from the community.
To this end I produced a special edition of the SHU to tell the story of the rabbi and the loss of his Sephardic heritage in the community:
https://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/76979b25ece6e487#
A public lecture on the subject at Rabbi Abadi’s Magen David Synagogue in Bensonhurst preceded publication of the special newsletter:
http://www.merkaz.com/lectures/ShashaIntro_ZviZohar_Abadi__08-26-07.mp3
A few months ago I was made aware of an academic paper that would effectively victimize Rabbi Abadi yet again; exhuming his corpse from the ground and beating it down one more time.
It should be understood that my outspoken defense of the rabbi ran against the prevalent feeling in the community: Rabbi Abadi was seen as a benign figure who was not very important and whose loss is not much of an issue. Rabbi Abadi himself was an extremely humble and circumspect man who faced the difficulties of a changing community without much resistance. He was much too humble and far too self-effacing, and I felt that someone needed to speak out on his behalf even after so many years of relative silence.
According to the story as presented by his disciple Rabbi Jose Faur and his student Abe Shamah, the rabbi was removed from his position as head of the Talmud Torah by Isaac Shalom.
Isaac Shalom continues to be revered by the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn as their visionary leader; the man who took the reins of leadership and brought the community into the modern world.
It is not disputed that Shalom was the primary leader in the community in its early days. Few could stand up to his iron-fisted autocratic ways. Certainly Rabbi Abadi was in no position back at the time when the Talmud Torah was growing to challenge Shalom’s authority. Shalom controlled his livelihood and he could do little to force that iron hand to bend to his will.
According to those who knew Rabbi Abadi, the relationship with Shalom was acrimonious. Shalom was moving the community in a direction – that of Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy – which was in conflict with Rabbi Abadi’s Sephardic Religious Humanism.
A number of things are clear outside of the clash between these men: Isaac Shalom founded the Magen David Elementary School using the curriculum of Torah U-Mesorah that was current in many Ashkenazi Jewish Day Schools. Gradually, Magen David eliminated the Sephardic teachers from its staff, and over time its pedagogy became indistinguishable from its Ashkenazi counterpart the Yeshivah of Flatbush.
This essentially was the aim of the Shalom vision.
On the other hand, the broken remnant of the Abadi contingent led by Abe Shamah and his group continued to stand against Shalom and his chosen rabbinic leaders, Rabbi Jacob Kassin and – especially – Rabbi Abraham Hecht. The Abadi group was loosely affiliated with Rabbi Jose Faur who quickly ran afoul of the mainstream leadership even though he continued to receive the approbation of Rabbi Abadi.
In the history of Shalom’s control over the community two interconnected processes manifest themselves: The classical Sephardic heritage is completely removed from the schools and Synagogues of the community. Along with this intellectual-pedagogical erasure is a parallel movement that points to the deterioration of personal moral standards among community members. This new laxity in ethical behavior has over time turned the community into a seething cauldron of conflict, cruelty, and corruption.
While community members are largely blind to this history, anyone who looks at the temporal arc of its institutions can clearly see that there has been a destruction of the Sephardic heritage along with a degeneration of moral values on a wide scale.
Sadly, the history is not known and very difficult to scientifically reconstruct.
Unlike most other Jewish communities that maintain minutes and other written records of their institutional meetings and events, the Syrian Jewish community has no written archive that could serve the researcher with any precise information.
This, naturally, has become a central part of the fulfillment of Isaac Shalom’s vision: The lay leader would assume all power and not provide any transparency to either community members or outsiders. An obsessive secrecy took over institutional leadership and created opacity which effectively concealed how decisions were made and who was making them. Leaders could basically do as they pleased without any public interference. Democratic values were completely absent from community institutions and their decision-making process.
This means that the value of “Might makes Right” continues to inform the community’s understanding of its own history.
Isaac Shalom and his contingent continue to be seen as the legitimate leaders of the community. The obstinate rejectionism of the Abadi group is seen as a fictitious figment and a spurious attempt to impugn the hallowed memories of the Shalom leadership faction.
Making things even more complicated was the equally outsize role that Shalom played in the Syrian Jewish business world where he often employed members of the community who were placed in the quite awkward position of disagreeing with his institutional choices but needing to outwardly show their respect for him to ensure that he did not compromise their personal financial interests.
Shalom was an extraordinarily cruel and tyrannical figure who would viciously bully his subordinates and those weaker than him. His financial success allowed him to lord it over others and set into place a leadership system of uncommon harshness that continues to be the rule.
Over the long run Shalom has continued to play an important role in the community. In spite of the massive evidence of corruption that was uncovered by Solomon Dwek in the so-called “Jersey Sting,” the reputation of the rabbinic leaders, particularly the Kassin family, continues to remain intact. There has been absolutely no public questioning of the standard narrative that is grounded in Shalom’s leadership and his religious vision.
As those affiliated with the Abadi network have understood for a very long time, to speak critically of Shalom and his minions in a public way is an extremely dangerous thing. Marked as malcontents and eccentrics nursing their sour grapes, those who continued to promote Rabbi Abadi and his teaching as the true Syrian Jewish tradition were forced into a marginal position and silenced for many years. History, after all, is written by the victors. And it is quite clear by now that the Ashkenazim have soundly defeated the Sephardim, leaving a figure like Rabbi Abadi out in the cold.
That is, until I elected to speak out on their behalf in the hope that the community would come to understand that what they had been led to believe was simply not true.
Recently a young Syrian Jewish student matriculated at Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies has produced a research paper on Rabbi Abadi which seeks to support the standard narrative and refute the positions of Abadi’s main students and of Rabbi Faur.
To repeat, there is no written evidence to support any position in the matter. All that we have are the memories of those who were involved – to whatever extent that might be – and the inevitable biases and distortions that come from memory.
What exactly happened between Abadi and Shalom is known only to those two men – and neither of them left a formal record of what happened.
It is thus necessary to reconstruct the matter out of the realities that we now face in a way that can best account for the facts as they relate to the community history that we do in fact know.
The single most important reality is the imposition of Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy on the community. Those who were educated in the Isaac Shalom system were effectively barred from the Sephardic past and its literary and religious heritage. Of this there is no question. There is not a single school, Synagogue, or pedagogical initiative in the Syrian Jewish community that has adopted the classical Sephardic curriculum as it is known from the texts of Andalusian Judaism and of Maimonides who was perhaps the most important expositor of that tradition in our rabbinical heritage.
The identification of Isaac Shalom as the single most important leader of the community makes clear that Rabbi Abadi has been elided and left to wither and be forgotten. The only rabbi in the community who bravely fought to keep the Sephardic tradition alive was Rabbi Jose Faur. That Rabbi Faur and his students have been relentlessly persecuted by the mainstream community is also an uncontested fact.
The intimate ties between Rabbi Abadi and Rabbi Faur are clear and accepted as true, but are nevertheless extremely uncomfortable for many community members. The close relationship between the men does not reinforce the pre-set script that marks the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community as an elite group in the Jewish world with Shalom as its visionary leader and his hand-picked rabbis as its spiritual giants.
For this reason it is much easier for those who wish to avoid acknowledging the bitter loss of Rabbi Abadi’s historical-religious legacy to support an interpretation of his life that comports with a tacit acceptance of the status quo.
Thus we have come to learn that the current paper on Rabbi Abadi insists – making use of extensive interviews with those who claim to know the “truth” of the Shalom-Abadi relationship – that there was no firing and no acrimony. Rabbi Abadi, the claim is being made, never had any intention of devoting his life to the rabbinate and to the education of the community’s children. After leaving Porat Yosef and coming to America we are being asked, contrary to commonsense logic, to believe that he simply wanted to be a businessman and not a professional rabbi and educator.
While it is certainly true that Rabbi Abadi spent the majority of his adult life in commercial business, the claim of the new study has sought to fit the facts into the standard narrative rather than provide a logical explanation that would comport with the biography of Rabbi Abadi as we know it.
And, after all, given the educational system set up by Shalom and his minions, this would make perfect sense: Rabbi Abadi would be seen, as so many Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox Jews now obsessively hold, as not seeking to earn a living from being a teacher of Torah. And yet, contrary to this belief, he was in fact working at the Talmud Torah and earning his living there. The claim is that he never intended to continue as an educator in spite not only of the witness of Abe Shamah and Rabbi Faur, but of the written record of Rabbi Abadi who spoke endlessly about his desire for re-instituting the classical Sephardic heritage in all its aspects in the Brooklyn community; a desire that he understood before he died was not going to happen under Shalom’s system.
Rabbi Abadi’s discontent was transmitted to his students, followers, and disciples. It is common knowledge in the community, but it remains a very bitter pill to swallow given how bad it looks for a Jewish community to undermine and persecute its most important and learned rabbi and eviscerate its own cultural heritage.
More importantly, this discussion comes at a time when the Isaac Shalom-inspired Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox transformation has basically come to an end. Transformations sometimes have unforeseen consequences.
When Shalom brought Modern Orthodoxy to the community he established a fountainhead of Ashkenazi divisiveness that permitted the intra-Orthodox conflict to gestate.
And this is just what happened.
By the late 1960s, in the wake of the emergence of Syrian Modern Orthodoxy, the community saw the first development of Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian-style institutions along the lines of Lakewood Yeshiva. Today these institutions have made huge inroads in the community. The Solomon Dwek story must be seen against this backdrop. The contentiousness of community institutions can now be seen as a product of this Orthodox infighting.
It is necessary to note that the current examination of Rabbi Abadi has been undertaken by a Syrian Jewish student at the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox institution Yeshiva University. The methods and conclusions of the paper are both consistent with the specific orientation of YU and its Modern Orthodox Jewish worldview; a view that has taken hold of many young members of the community and displaced the older tradition of Sephardic Religious Humanism. In effect, Rabbi Abadi’s life and legacy, dedicated to the classical Sephardic heritage, has been reprocessed through the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox prism.
I have discussed the matter of Sephardim and Yeshiva University in my article “The Idiot Sephardim”:
The article shows the deep well of anti-Sephardic prejudice that is systemic in the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox world. It has brought a deep hatred for the preservation of the classical Sephardic tradition among those Syrian Jewish students who attend the school. Sadly, this Ashkenazi-Sephardi dynamic has a great impact on how Rabbi Abadi’s story gets processed in the Syrian Jewish community.
Like the harsh and depressing narrative of “Patterns” that Rod Serling wrote over half a century ago, the Rabbi Abadi situation points to the triumph of the “new” at the expense of the “old.” In both cases the “old” values were the ones that affirmed the basic rights and essential dignity of the human being. Rabbi Abadi’s pedagogy firmly articulated the noble principles of Religious Humanism that marked the apogee of Sephardic civilization for so many centuries.
In my article “A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction,” which has caused a good deal of consternation among the self-hating Ashkenazified Sephardim, I developed this important idea in great detail:
The Ashkenazi system once sought to adapt to these Sephardic values, but in the 20th century a number of critical changes and reversals took place. Conflicts between liberal modernist reformers and extreme Orthodox fundamentalists took place that prevented the moderate middle-ground of Religious Humanism to take root in the American Jewish community. It is a long, tragic, and complicated story that I have discussed many times in my writings.
Isaac Shalom bet on Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy and lost. The Modern Orthodox Jews have been defeated in their struggle with the Ultra-Orthodox whose beliefs and lifestyle patterns now rule over the larger Orthodox Jewish world. It is this ascendancy that we are currently seeing dominate the Syrian Jewish community.
The attempt to characterize Hakham Matloub Abadi as a Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi might fit into the mainstream community’s idea of itself, but it betrays not only the religious values that Rabbi Abadi stood for and taught to his students, but has been strongly undermined by the triumphalism of the Syrian Ultra-Orthodox who have also sought to re-create Hakham Matloub in their own image.
So the question of whether or not Rabbi Abadi was a Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi is not really germane anymore; the movement is now in its death throes. Its rabbinic leaders and institutional clusters are being dismantled and a new Syrian Jewish community, Ultra-Orthodox in nature, is emerging right before our very eyes.
Beyond this, the moral clouds that now hang over the community can be seen as part and parcel of the forced suppression of Hakham Matloub’s Sephardic Jewish Humanism. As his students knew so well, he placed personal character and morality above all else.
Rabbi Abadi and his generation of Syrian Jews were punctilious when it came to the performance of rituals, but never at the expense of honesty and civility. Personal character was not part of the “new” system of Isaac Shalom, similar to the moral transformation outlined by Rod Serling in “Patterns.” Speaking over the years to many of those who were strongly opposed to Shalom, it has become clear to me that Shalom saw the model of the unaccountable lay leader as critical to his success.
For Shalom and his supporters it was very much a “Might makes Right” situation. And, as is commonly known throughout the Jewish community, for the Syrian Jews the final arbiter is not Torah, but money.
It is thus doubly ironic that Rabbi Faur in his magnum opus The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism exposes the dichotomy between hierarchical societies and pluralistic and tolerant ones.
The very genius of Sephardic Religious Humanism is predicated upon a rejection of a vertically-structured community. Sephardim have traditionally presented a liberal form of Judaism where no one person was superior to another. The ideal Sephardic scholar was one who mastered multiple sources of knowledge and expressed traditional ideas in a creative and dynamic way. It was a culture that fully embraced the complexity of universal human civilization without ever relinquishing the eternal values of Judaism.
So many of the great Sephardic scholars were polymaths who could write wisdom literature in a moral-ethical key, poetry and narrative tales, philosophical tracts, historical chronicles, scientific analyses, legal treatises, literary criticism, lexicography, and grammatical studies all under the rubric of a strict fidelity to the Torah.
That the Syrian Jewish community adopted a hierarchical system based on a person’s financial worth rather than personal character is deeply connected to the way in which its noble religious values have been decimated. The project envisioned by Rabbi Abadi and put into practice by his student Rabbi Faur is ironically the very antidote for what now ails the community.
Hakham Matloub Abadi fought valiantly to preserve the “old” Sephardic tradition. It is clear that he failed in this regard. The community has devolved both morally as well as intellectually. There are no more Sephardic scholars of the old style.
So rather than try to turn him into something he was not, all to affirm the dominant – and failed – model that continues to rule the community, it would be better if we try to understand the things that were important to him and what he strove to teach to the community. It was the classical Sephardic literary and religious-philosophical heritage that was determinative to Hakham Matloub in spite of this new attempt to characterize him in ways that he himself did not.
When the Christians sought to destroy Judaism with their messianic “Old Testament,” the Jews stubbornly continued to adhere to the Law. They rightly refused to give in to the Christians, even when all over Europe – from Spain to Poland – the Christians persecuted them to convert and give up the Law.
Sadly, the Sephardic Jews have stood by silently while their tradition is being destroyed by the Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim have sought to impose their own traditions on the Sephardim and transform, as has been the case with Hakham Matloub Abadi, that venerable heritage into something it most assuredly is not.
At the very moment that the Jewish world is in dire need of the knowledge of eminent Sephardi Torah scholars like Hakham Matloub Abadi, there are those who seek to rob us of that legacy and proclaim that we have been “redeemed” and freed of the rich literary legacy of the Sephardic tradition that is now nowhere to be found in either the Sephardic community or in the larger Jewish world.
Stealing the Torah of Hakham Matloub Abadi is an act of the utmost cowardice that speaks to the continuing immorality of a Syrian Jewish community that has become completely alienated from the very truths that Rabbi Abadi so much wanted to transmit to its members, but was prevented from doing so by a leadership led by Isaac Shalom whose legacy has become one of ignorance, cruelty, and corruption.
David Shasha
From SHU 552, October 24, 2012