ICYMI: From Norman Lamm to Matis Weinberg: The Tikvah Fund Loves Pedophilia!
David Shasha
From Norman Lamm to Matis Weinberg: The Tikvah Fund Loves Pedophilia!
In their weekly Shabbat e-mail, Tikvah posted an item from Rabbi Mark Gottlieb that proudly included the “insights of Rabbi Matis Weinberg”:
For many of Judaism's classical commentators, the tale of the spies is a story of slander and its ramifications. Rabbi Mark Gottlieb draws on the insights of Rabbi Matis Weinberg and philosophers Herder and Wittgenstein to shed light on the nature of the spies' derogatory speech, and apply those insights to 21st-century America's current moment of cultural upheaval.
Here is the complete podcast:
Weinberg was credibly accused of sexually abusing his male students, as Gary Rosenblatt reported back in 2003:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/panel-to-hear-charges-against-prominent-rabbi/
It created an upheaval in the Orthodox Jewish community:
https://jewishjournal.com/community/8152/
The case was settled before the truth could be made known to the public:
In 2006 the Jewish Survivors website went a step further and bitterly questioned whether Weinberg’s books were still “Kosher”:
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2006/01/are-books-written-by-rabbi-matis.html
The issue remains a festering wound in Orthodox circles.
It is good to know that it is not an issue in Tikvahworld.
But Anti-Zionism is:
https://tikvahfund.org/library/podcast-einat-wilf-on-the-wests-indulgence-of-palestinian-delusions/
As is PC culture:
https://tikvahfund.org/library/podcast-gary-saul-morson-on-leninthink/
It all comes together in the following list of programs in their series “The Future of College: A Jewish Townhall” which features all the usual suspects – and a few more!
And this of course brings us to the late Rabbi Norman Lamm:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/obituaries/Norman-Lamm-Dead.html
Here is the latest of many YU tributes to the man:
https://yeshivauniversity.wufoo.com/forms/in-tribute/
I was honestly not going to do anything special on Lamm, having already prepared a bunch of articles for SHU 963, but which I now include in this special post.
Gottlieb’s mention of Matis Weinberg kind of forced my hand, as can be gleaned from The New York Times obituary:
In an emotional letter announcing his retirement, Rabbi Lamm apologized for not responding more assertively when former students of Yeshiva University High School for Boys accused the two rabbis of having abused them in the 1970s and ’80s. Rabbi Lamm had quietly forced the two men out but had done nothing to prevent them from working elsewhere.
That obituary was thankfully forthcoming when it came to Lamm’s Ratzinger-like behavior in protecting the pedophile monsters in his employ.
But, as we can see, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik was not nearly as forthcoming in that regard:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/meir-soloveichik/the-genius-of-norman-lamm/
Soloveichik praised the pedophile-enabler to the hilt as both genius and visionary:
One Yom Kippur, a young rabbi in a prominent New York synagogue delivered a sermon titled “Divine Silence or Human Static?” His inspiration was a rabbinic statement that “every day, a divine voice issues forth from Sinai.” The question, this rabbi reflected, was obvious: If the voice of God continues to thunder forth, why is it not heard? His answer was that if we do not hear God in today’s day and age, it is not because God is not speaking, but because “we are too busy talking.” We are too involved in so many other things that are inconsequential and meaningless. Our society is too wordy, we are drowned in the verbosity of our mass media of communication. Words come to us not in sentences, but in veritable torrents, from mass media.”
One can easily imagine these words being spoken today as a description of the digital age. Yet they were said in 1965 by Norman Lamm, who passed away at the end of May. Lamm ultimately became the president of Yeshiva University, saved that institution from bankruptcy, and propounded in writings and rhetoric its affiliated philosophy of Modern, or Centrist, Orthodoxy. He is without question one of the most significant figures in American Judaism in the past half century. In the face of this legacy, it is easy to miss that, prior to assuming leadership of Yeshiva, Norman Lamm was the greatest composer of sermons in the English-speaking rabbinic world.
Ditto his grandson Ari Lamm, whose article also cited those sermons, but did so in a way that falsely turned the YU pedophile-enabler into a Civil Rights Liberal:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/norman-lamm-engage-the-world
The Neo-Con grandson actually had the CHUTZPAH to cite David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass:
If that strikes you as a rabbi’s wishful thinking, take a moment and study the long and still ongoing struggle for freedom and rights in this country. In the entire history of our nation, we have not achieved a single victory in the fight against racism that hasn’t depended upon the values and stories of the Hebrew Bible. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps America’s foremost theologian of liberty, drew extensively upon the Hebrew biblical tradition, especially in his famous Second Inaugural Address. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight referred to the legendary black orator as a “prophet of freedom,” noting “Douglass’ deep grounding in the Bible, especially the Old Testament.” Martin Luther King Jr.’s public addresses are saturated through and through with learned references to the great Hebrew prophets, from Isaiah and Ezekiel, to Amos and Zechariah. Barack Obama’s repeated references during the 2008 presidential campaign to “the Joshua generation” are incomprehensible without an understanding of the Hebrew scriptures. It is true, as Haifa University’s Eran Shalev documents, that white abolitionists in America’s antebellum period evinced an increasing tendency to invoke the Christian Bible as well. But this “further spotlights the one group that did not take the privileged American majority’s lead in preferring the New Testament to the Old: black Americans, enslaved and free, would remain committed to the Hebrew Bible throughout the antebellum period and beyond.”
Given where the YU community stands on Trump and Race at the present moment, the citation is deeply misleading:
https://www.thejewishstar.com/stories/yu-told-donald-trumps-o,17952?
Indeed, both David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt are closely allied to the institution:
Whatever the political angle on Lamm, the end result is depressingly the same:
By the time I finished reading, it was long past midnight. I had read through dozens, maybe hundreds of sermons, luxuriating in the sound of my grandfather’s poetic, prophetic voice. Yes, I was still completely heartbroken. But I found that I could stand a little straighter. In a world and at a time that feels so broken, I began to feel a surge of hope. My grandfather may have departed this world for the next, but he left his wisdom behind for us. He instructed us to listen with an open heart to the perspectives of others; he charged us to bring the Torah out into the world around us; and he cautioned us never to forget our Jewish self-respect when we engage with society.
Lamm the poet!
Lamm the prophet!
Unfortunately, Lamm represented the reactionary Orthodox side of White Jewish Supremacy, and ultimately had no interest in “the perspective of others”:
https://www.academia.edu/40402302/Yitz_Greenberg_and_Modern_Orthodoxy_The_Road_Not_Taken_Sampler_
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg had his issues with YU, which Lamm did not help resolve:
The key to understanding the problem can be seen in the following article:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/yitz-greenbergs-lonely-road/
As Eugene Korn writes of Greenberg:
He learned the values of tolerance, generosity of spirit and commitment to Torah early in life from his learned Orthodox European father. However, as the rabbi began his professional career, Orthodoxy started moving in an opposite direction from his pluralism and intellectual openness. In the 1960s his progressive vision was still within the pale of Yeshiva University, but was later rejected by Centrist Orthodoxy, which today finds more currency in the fervently Orthodox (charedi) camp. The rabbi’s program for a true integration of Torah and modernity, and his acceptance of Jewish pluralism, became the road not taken. In his essay, he acknowledges that this marginalization has been painful.
As Greenberg admits:
[Aharon] Lichtenstein’s Commentator article and the way it was used confirmed that he and the emerging centrist leadership would not support the exploration of
these dangerous issues. In the ’70’s and ’80s, this rightward shift took on the form of systematically excluding people like Hartman and me from the conversation. My views became off limits, and Yeshiva University students and centrist
laymen heard only those from the right and never from the left. Modern
Orthodox leadership went along with this exclusion, sometimes at the behest
of the right and sometimes in anticipatory compliance with the right’s growing
dominance of community policy. Modern Orthodox institutional leadership
folded and/or drifted, as American Modern Orthodoxy moved steadily toward
the Haredi position in most areas of rabbinical adjudication, education, and
community policy.
Norman Lamm, whether it was with pedophiles or with maverick YU professors, always took the party line and did not make waves.
His job was to keep YU and Modern Orthodoxy afloat in a sea of what they perceived to be hostility coming from the Ultra-Orthodox as well as from the larger secular world.
The shameful outpouring of praise for Lamm reflects the twisted values of White Jewish Supremacy, which are translated by Tikvah into Neo-Conservative dogmas.
The lesson of all this is that you cannot question the Neo-Con YU dogmas, but you can molest children with impunity.
And that is a legacy worth remembering.
David Shasha
From SHU 964, Septmeber 16, 2020