Hakham Matloub Abadi: The Most Important Rabbi in the History of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish Community
David Shasha
Special Newsletter originally published in Spring 2007
A public program was presented at Congregation Magen David in Brooklyn, New York in August of that year.
The audio of the program can be accessed at the following link:
https://www.merkaz.com/tag/hakham-matloub-abadi
Friends,
Each year right before Passover I take the time to honor the memory of Hakham Matloub Abadi. Rabbi Abadi was the last authentic Sephardic rabbi here in Brooklyn and his legacy has sadly been forgotten and dispensed with. The high moral principles and intellectual standards of Rabbi Abadi are now a thing of the past. Instead, the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn has chosen – as we have seen in media reports over the past few years – the path of corruption over the ways of justice, cruelty over compassion, greed over humility. It has become a community where living in a moral way is a sign of weakness. Moral degeneracy has become the order of the day.
I recently did a Google search with the words “Rabbis of Syria” and was confronted with links to articles reporting on the criminality of community rabbis in the Jersey Sting case. The process by which the classical Sephardic tradition has been erased from the Sephardic community has been frustrating and difficult for those who still have faith that this tradition is the one that would pull the community out of its corrupt ways. In addition, there is the specter of Rabbi Abraham Hecht who did his best to demean and humiliate Rabbi Abadi. It seems that Rabbi Hecht remains beloved by a community that rejected the values of Hakham Matloub Abadi:
http://www.chabad.info/index.php?url=article_en&id=26630
Rather than embrace the Religious Humanism of Hakham Matloub, the Brooklyn Sephardim have chosen an ostentatious form of religiosity that is fraught with the sort of religious hypocrisy that Hakham Matloub constantly inveighed against. The battle that Hakham Matloub fought with a lay leadership led by Isaac Shalom was one that has had serious repercussions in a community that does not seem to understand and appreciate the true religious values of Torah Judaism. We now have a community that is predicated upon materialist values and which rejects the importance of knowledge and ethics.
Over time it has become all too clear that it is what one possesses materially that confers status on a community member rather than the good deeds one does or the knowledge one possesses. A system of “pay-for-play” has gradually taken over the life of the community which is founded on its religious institutions. Sadly, the rabbis of the community are very much a part of the larger corruption that Hakham Matloub fought so hard against. The rabbis are part and parcel of that corruption and are all too willing to forget the Torah in order to get ahead.
It is not simply a matter of including Sephardic history and literature in school curricula – although this too is a matter of some urgency. The problem is also that the ethical foundations of Sephardic Religious Humanism and its adherence to strict values of justice and compassion have become outmoded and disregarded. What is most disheartening is the apathy and acquiescence of the younger members of the community who have little or no concern for the noble heritage of Sephardic Religious Humanism and its forgotten practitioners.
The community is now ruled by the “Might makes Right” law of the jungle. There is no legal authority that can break the stranglehold of the powerful and their greed and cruelty. Community members have no place to turn to find a truly ethical person in the leadership. It has become a contentious struggle to achieve material supremacy and forcefully take the reins of power regardless of the moral consequences. The community hierarchy is now completely predicated upon principles that are deeply antithetical to Torah values as Hakham Matloub understood and taught them.
It is for these reasons that I choose at this time to return people’s attention to the figure of this great Sage and it is my sincere hope that we should look to his genius and holiness and begin to emulate him.
Once again, I would like to personally thank our dear friend Zvi Zohar who selflessly has given of his time and energy to compose the definitive portrait of Hakham Matloub’s scholarship which is the centerpiece of this special newsletter.
David Shasha
Hakham Matloub Abadi: Levantine Humanist
By: David Shasha
A Seal of Truth Which I Have Sought and Loved With all My Being: Aspects of the Halakhic and Theoretical World of Rabbi Shaul-Matloub Abadi
By: Zvi Zohar
Postscript: On the Moral Destruction of the Brooklyn Sephardic Community
By: David Shasha
Stealing Torah and Slandering the Pious
By: David Shasha
[The following cover letter and article were both posted on 7/26/09 along with the special newsletter]
Friends,
As we continue to process the ongoing revelations and implications of the corruption scandal involving rabbis in the Syrian Sephardic community, I wanted to take the opportunity to resend to our readers a copy of the special newsletter we published a couple of years ago on the brilliant Rabbi Matloub Abadi; a figure who represented the intellectual genius of our Syrian Sephardic tradition. His uncompromising personal integrity has been an inspiration to those of us still committed to Sephardic continuity.
For reasons that are becoming obvious in the tragic aftermath of the scandal, Hakham Matloub Abadi represented a Syrian Jewish tradition that was opposed to the corruption and hubris that we have been seeing on our TV sets and reading in our newspapers. It is impossible to witness what is going without coming to terms with the community’s history and the role played in it by the Hakham Matloub saga.
Hakham Matloub Abadi is a symbol of what has been lost and what must be recovered in the community in order for true reform to take place.
Again, my sincere appreciation goes to our dear friend Zvi Zohar for all the work he has done to help us better understand our tradition and the figure of Hakham Matloub.
David Shasha
On the Syrian Jewish Scandals: Cultural Erosion Leads to Moral Corruption
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/matloub/davidshasha/Hc8lIK6sOXA/0AJ72giRjW8J
In a harsh assessment of the Brooklyn Syrian Jews published in The New York Times’ Sunday Magazine in October 2007, Zev Chafets painted a malignant picture of a community whose moral values had been warped by a vulgar materialism and a culture of greed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/magazine/14syrians-t.html
Rather than seeing itself as others saw it, the community rejected the veracity of Chafets’ report and continued to laud itself as a sterling example of a charitable and supportive Jewish enclave.
With last week’s troubling allegations of criminal misconduct on the part of prominent rabbis in the community, the continued attempt to disregard critical views of the community has been disastrous.
Apart from the ongoing revelations about the nature of the corruption and how deeply embedded it actually was in the community, we would do well to more carefully examine the cultural erosion of the Syrian Jewish tradition; a phenomenon that has become common to many Sephardic communities who have been unable to effect a cultural continuity allowing a perpetuation of their traditions to coming generations.
In the case of the Syrian Jewish community, the story goes back to the tumultuous upheaval of the immigrant years. Lacking a firm institutional base from which to reconstruct its traditional culture, the Syrian Jews were caught between two variant leadership models.
On the one side there was the rabbinical leadership cadre led by Hakham Matloub Abadi which extolled the traditional Sephardic Rabbinic Humanism of the Andalusian tradition. Abadi insisted that provisions be made for the community’s youth to learn the Sephardic heritage in an authentic manner.
On the other side of the equation was the vision of a wealthy businessman named Isaac Shalom who had a very different model of pedagogy and sense of cultural continuity. Shalom’s aim was to create a cadre of quiescent religious leaders who would follow his dictates rather than the ideals of the older tradition. Under the rubric of continuity, Shalom eviscerated the old system, viewed henceforth as antiquated and irrelevant to “modern” concerns, and in its place installed a form of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy that immediately transformed the climate of religiosity in the community.
The critical aspect for the current controversy is the way in which community leadership devolved from the rabbinical cadre to the lay cadre. Henceforth decisions vital to the community would not be decided in the rabbinical court, but in the private offices of the businessmen of the community.
Taking Hakham Matloub Abadi and what he represented out of the equation proved to be a disaster that the community has still not recovered from.
Putting unlimited power into the hands of laypeople meant that the religious institutions of the community would be administered along different standards than had previously been in place.
Matloub Abadi was effectively removed from public service and lived out his life as a businessman rather than a minister and rabbinical leader in the community. The current leadership is heir to the dominance of Isaac Shalom and his hand-picked protégé, Rabbi Jacob Kassin.
In effect, the new arrangement permitted the creation of oligarchic pockets in the community which could function as private fiefdoms dispensing largesse to their supporters.
An “in-group”/”out-group” mentality began to permeate the community. Those inside the leadership held sway over the decision-making process of the community which ceased to be monitored by an independent rabbinate. The lay-leaders and leading rabbis worked hand-in-glove to promote their own vested interests and were not limited by any outside interference. Strict canons of conformity permeated the leadership circles and deviation from their dictates resulted in social rejection.
Intellectuals and independent religious figures were closed out of the new system if they elected to remain critical of the system and its massive financial perquisites. No critical mechanism was made available to monitor the community’s public institutions.
The new model was enabled by the ongoing evisceration of the traditional Sephardic pedagogy. In its place, Shalom and his peers brought to their religious and social institutions the Ashkenazi Orthodox paradigm which had hitherto been marginal to community concerns. With the inclusion of this model the community was left without its native heritage and began to acclimate to the predominant American Jewish model, leaving it bereft of organic self-knowledge.
The new model enabled the promulgation of closed cadres of leaders who were not accountable to the community. Orthodoxy rigidly enforced specific ideational tenets that replaced the expansive culture of Arab-Jewish civilization. Intellectual attainment declined, material values burgeoned and the moral backbone of the community collapsed.
An ongoing debasement of Sephardic culture in both the secular and religious Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish world has caused an upheaval in the Sephardic community; bringing us to the point where the community is showing itself prone to the type of unethical behavior that continues to plague a number of prominent Ashkenazi groups, particularly in the Orthodox world.
The current scandals that have just unfolded reinforce the fact that a breakdown in cultural continuity can often lead to the failure of communal authority and morality. Given the ongoing prejudices against Sephardic culture in Israel and the West, it is not at all certain that the current status quo will have the ability to reform itself. Within the Syrian Jewish community there is a moral collapse that has come from a cultural breakdown of monumental proportions. This has been reinforced by a Jewish world dominated by Ashkenazi interests which is often oblivious to the Sephardic minority.
Because of this cultural system, Sephardim such as the Brooklyn Syrians have come to comport themselves in a way that resembles the way in which business is often done in other sectors of the religious Jewish world.
Regardless of how the current corruption charges are adjudicated, until the older models of Sephardic Jewish leadership and critical self-examination are restored, it is highly unlikely that the current scandals will be addressed with the proper gravitas needed for true moral reform.
David Shasha