Tribute to Rabbi Norman Lamm, YU, and The Tikvah Fund
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
Norman Lamm, 92, Dies; Rescued Yeshiva U. From Brink of Bankruptcy
By: Joseph Berger
Norman Lamm, the longtime leader of Yeshiva University who nurtured it as a centrist Orthodox Jewish institution that encouraged engagement with the secular world and in doing so rescued the school from the brink of bankruptcy, died on Sunday at his daughter’s home in Englewood, N.J. He was 92.
He death was confirmed by his son Joshua.
Yeshiva, occupying a sprawling campus in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan with satellites in midtown, has been the wellspring of the modern Orthodox movement, and Rabbi Lamm was associated with it for the better part of almost 70 years — an otherwise distinguished career that ended under the cloud of a sex-abuse scandal involving two rabbis whom he oversaw.
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.
The Orthodox world that Rabbi Lamm grew up in, still redolent of its immigrant roots in Europe, was far more insular than the one that exists today. Jews who graduated from Yeshiva University in those years typically sought work as rabbis and Hebrew teachers, or went into commercial or professional fields that kept them within the Jewish world.
After he was elected president in 1976, Rabbi Lamm championed the concept of Torah U’madda — leading a life that blends rigorous adherence to Jewish law with full-throated pursuit of worldly knowledge and immersion in the wider society.
The idea was controversial because Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox rabbis argued that exposure to decadent influences would erode traditional Jewish life and lead to more interfaith marriages, which they feared would assimilate the six million American Jews out of existence.
But Rabbi Lamm, a man of protean talents as clergyman, philosopher, teacher and administrator, made a forceful case for his synthesis of the spiritual and temporal in books and speeches during his 37 years as either the university’s president or chancellor.
“He gave modern Orthodox Jews a special sense of their own legitimacy vis-à-vis the other Jews in the Orthodox world,” said Jeffrey Gurock, professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva.
His philosophy took hold throughout the modern Orthodox movement. Jews who identify with it can now be found working in white-shoe law firms, television and movie studios, and big-city newspapers; running for vice-president of the United States, as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman did in 2000, or serving as secretary of the Treasury, as Jack Lew did for President Barack Obama; writing best-selling novels, as Faye Kellerman has done; or breeding a Triple Crown horse, as Ahmed Zayat, a 1983 Yeshiva graduate, did with American Pharoah in 2015.
As a new president in the mid-1970s, with Yeshiva’s financing wobbling perilously as a result of a nationwide recession, Rabbi Lamm was able to persuade non-Orthodox benefactors to give generously to an institution that would sustain traditional Jewish life yet produce graduates comfortable in the secular world.
By 2001, when he stepped down as president and took the largely figurehead role of chancellor, Yeshiva’s endowment stood at $875 million, many times the $25 million it was in the 1970s.
Rabbi Lamm made it a point to maintain warm relations with rabbis from the Conservative and Reform movements, even while more right-wing colleagues questioned the validity of their ordinations. He also advanced opportunities to study Talmud at the Stern College for Women, part of Yeshiva University; the move was an incendiary notion to right-wing adherents who felt such endeavors should be reserved for men.
The one significant stain on Rabbi Lamm’s record was his failure to take stronger action when a Talmud teacher and an administrator were accused of molesting students at the university-affiliated high school for boys. Twenty former students, who attended the school in the 1970s and ’80s, told the newspaper The Forward in 2012 that they had been sexually, physically or emotionally abused.
The administrator, George Finkelstein, went on to teach at a school in Florida and was later posted to a synagogue in Jerusalem. He drew complaints of abuse in both jobs.
Rabbi Lamm resigned as chancellor in July 2013, saying in his letter of apology that he was doing so as a kind of atonement — the Hebrew word is teshuvah — for having mishandled the abuse cases.
Rabbi Lamm, then 85, said that in failing to report the abuse to the police, he had submitted to “momentary compassion” and given the two men the benefit of the doubt “in a way I thought was correct, but which now seems ill-conceived.”
“I understand better today than I did then that sometimes, when you think you are doing good, your actions do not measure up,” he said. “And when that happens — one must do teshuvah. So I must do teshuvah.”
Rabbi Lamm, known among students and faculty for his quick wit, neatly trimmed goatee and occasional cigar, was born on Dec. 19, 1927, in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., then dense with Jewish immigrants.
His father, Samuel, was a civil servant. His mother, Pearl, was the daughter of Rabbi Yehoshua Baumol, author of an important work on Halakha, or Jewish law, and a sister of Rabbi Joseph Baumol, whose sermons to Yiddish-speaking congregants were to deeply influence Rabbi Lamm.
His brother, Maurice Lamm, also became a rabbi and was the author of “The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning,” originally published in 1969. A nephew, Shalom Auslander, is a highly regarded fiction writer who often satirizes Orthodox life.
Rabbi Lamm was educated through high school at Torah Vodaath yeshiva in Brooklyn and studied chemistry at Yeshiva University. He graduated in 1949 as valedictorian.
While taking college classes, he did research on munitions at an upstate New York laboratory under the direction of a scientist who later became head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. Although Rabbi Lamm never said so, the suspicion was that the research had to do with developing weapons to be used in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Contemplating a career as a doctor, he began graduate work in organic chemistry at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. But Yeshiva’s president, Samuel Belkin, prevailed on him to enter the university to study for the rabbinate. With mentoring from Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, the towering intellectual of modern Orthodoxy, he was ordained in 1950.
After taking rabbinical positions at three synagogues in Springfield, Mass., and Manhattan, Rabbi Lamm gained the pulpit of the Jewish Center on West 86th Street, among the city’s most prestigious. He also joined the Yeshiva faculty as an instructor in philosophy while pursuing a doctorate, which he received in 1966 and which led to his being appointed a professor of Jewish philosophy. Along the way, he was a founding editor of Tradition, a prominent journal of Orthodox thought.
Rabbi Lamm wrote several important works examining the thoughts of the early Hasidic masters, Jewish perspectives on the environment, and on marital and sexual relationships. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing the majority opinion in the landmark Miranda case that required police officers to inform suspects of their right to remain silent, quoted an essay by Rabbi Lamm that compared the Fifth Amendment and Jewish laws.
When Rabbi Belkin died in April 1976, the trustees of Yeshiva searched for a successor who could navigate the jostling strains of Orthodoxy, enhance Yeshiva’s academic reputation and recruit wealthy donors to beef up the endowment. They chose Rabbi Lamm, naming him Yeshiva’s third president and its first to have been born in the United States.
Among the milestones of his tenure was the founding of the Sy Syms School of Business for undergraduates, named after its chief benefactor who founded a chain of clothing stores, and a doctoral program at the Ferkauf School of Psychology. He also oversaw the expansion of programs at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the Wurzweiler School of Social Work.
By 2018, Yeshiva, whose roots reach back to an elementary school founded in 1886 for the children of immigrant tailors and peddlers, had roughly 7,300 students, including 2,900 undergraduates; 3,600 graduate and professional-school students; and 230 rabbinical aspirants.
When the university was about to make its final debt payment in 1982, Rabbi Lamm recalled one of the tales featuring the legendary fools of the Polish city of Chelm. “They said that people should wear tight shoes for the sense of exhilaration that comes with taking them off,” he said. “I can’t wait to take off these shoes.”
His wife of 66 years, Mindella (Mehler) Lamm, died of the coronavirus in April. His son Joshua said Rabbi Lamm had not contracted the virus.
Besides that son and his daughter Chaye Warburg, he is survived by another son, Shalom, and 17 grandchildren. Another daughter, Sara Lamm Dratch, died in 2013.
In the 10 books and dozens of articles that he wrote while president, Rabbi Lamm often tried to reconcile Jewish law with scientific advances, often doing so with a light touch.
Analyzing how Judaism might confront the possibility of extraterrestrial life, he wrote: “God makes himself available to His creatures wherever they are. He is not a social snob who will not be seen in the cosmic slums and alleys.”
From The New York Times, June 18, 2020
The Genius of Norman Lamm, z’’l
By: Meir Y. Soloveichik
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.
Every single sermon he delivered from 1952 to 1976 is now available online in the Lamm Sermon Archive. Reading the PDFs of these typewritten pages, complete with edits added by hand, one senses the labor of love that produced them, the attention painstakingly paid to both substance and style. This man practiced homiletics not merely as a duty but a delight. The sermons take one through the Torah’s text, but also the issues of the day: Israel’s early years, Kennedy’s assassination, the moon landing, Vietnam, the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars. In its breadth, few other collections of sermons in Jewish history can compare.
To read them is to discover homiletics as a lost art. In the 1980s, Peggy Noonan reflected, “The irony of modern speeches is that as our ability to disseminate them has exploded, nevertheless their quality has declined. Why? Lots of reasons, including that we as a nation no longer learn the rhythms of public utterance from Shakespeare and the Bible.” She urged speechwriters to respect the audience by aiming high: “Be honest and logical in your approach and they will understand every word you say and hear—and know—that you thought of them.” Writing at almost exactly the same time, after he had left the pulpit, Rabbi Lamm reflected that if rabbinic rhetoric was no longer rising to the occasion, it was because “part and parcel of today’s society is the loss of verbal potency.” Preaching “is a form of communication; rhetoric demands verbal skills,” he wrote. “And the art of homiletics therefore suffers along with all other forms of verbal communication. Even if one is endowed with the requisite talents of imagination in interpreting a text, he lacks the skills needed to express himself.”
These were not skills Norman Lamm lacked, and he used them to hone a message about the modern world. The New York Times obituary described him as “the longtime leader of Yeshiva University who nurtured it as a centrist Orthodox Jewish institution that encouraged engagement with the secular world.” That is true. But in his sermons, Lamm also consistently criticized the spiritual flaws of modernity. Speaking of Adam in Eden, who foolishly fled following his sin, thinking that there was somewhere devoid of the divine, Lamm suggested that we have restaged the same scenario.
“Modern man,” he said, “repeats the same syndrome—with even more tragic results. We have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge like no generation before us—and we have found the fruits bitter; for such is the taste of radioactive ash. We have developed science and technology at an incredible pace. Yet we have become what in Jewish literature is known as hakham le’hareia, ‘wise for our own hurt.’ Our genius has proved an evil genius. With our increase in knowledge has come a shrinkage of wisdom; with the conquest of the universe, we have discovered that we have let our own lives lie fallow; learning to make a living, we have forgotten how to live; exploring outer space, we have ignored the thunderous silence of our inner space and inner void.”
Lamm concluded that modern man “gets even with God; once He expelled us from Paradise, now we shall build ourselves a little Paradise and keep Him out.”
What was true of America in general applied, in his view, especially to American Jewry, who he thought had eschewed the opportunity offered by America to embrace both their faith and society. In 1961, Lamm visited Fatehpur Sikri, an ancient city in India that had been abandoned because it was built without regard for a water source. Lamm returned to New York and saw parallels in his own civilization:
As a community, we American Jews have come dangerously close to doing just that. In too many instances we have built fabulous public Jewish institutions—charitable, educational, social—without any regard to G-d, Torah, Judaism.…A Jewish-sponsored university in Massachusetts is one of the most heavily endowed schools in the country. But its builders forgot all about God.…Jewish country clubs in the most fashionable neighborhoods are elaborate, ornate structures which have everything—except the vital source of Jewishness…we have become Fahtepur Sikris, having everything but the Source of living waters—G-d. Life has run dry. Our social lives are bathed in cocktails, but the soul is parched. Outside we are the envy of our neighbors; inside we are dried up.
What Norman Lamm said on that Yom Kippur more than half a century ago is even more true today. We live an age of torrents of words, a multitude of media, but while it has become easier to communicate, that does not mean we have become better at it. He reminds rabbis, and really anyone in a public position, that particularly when whatever we say and write can be preserved forever, it is our obligation to weigh every word, carefully fashion every phrase. Yet in today’s digital world, with the advent of every controversy, some rabbis and other Jewish public figures are tempted at times to take to Twitter, or fulminate on Facebook, or propound from the pulpit, without giving every single word the careful consideration that Rabbi Lamm would every week.
One Sabbath, while still in his twenties, Norman Lamm delivered a sermon on the tale of the Tower of Babel, whose builders, creating an arrogant monument to their might, were punished by God by a sudden inability to speak to one another. Babel, the Torah tells us, was given its name because of the root balol, to confuse, describing the linguistic result. But as he noted, this is a sarcastic pun; originally the Mesopotamians themselves called their city Babel because in their language the name was derived from the words Bab-ili, meaning the “gate of the god.” It is only in Hebrew that “Babel” is etymologically linked to “confusion.” This, he argued, is the inside joke: What the builders thought was their gate to their own divinity was nothing more than the “confusion of their poor minds.”
Reading the sermon today, I fear it speaks to our own age all too well. Biblical Babylon was the first technological society; I worry that today, with all our technological methods of communication, what we are left with is babble. In the face of this human static, we can turn to a sermon archive where the homiletics of a true artist can pierce our cacophonous cocoon, and make the sound of Sinai heard again.
Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
From Commentary magazine, June 17, 2020
‘We Must Engage the World Right Now’
By: Ari Lamm
It was Sunday evening, the day after Shavuot, and my body felt like it was shutting down.
The first thing I learned when I turned on my phone just after the holiday ended was that my grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, had taken a turn for the worse. By Sunday morning he had died. He was perhaps the greatest Jewish orator of the last century, legendary theologian, and president of Yeshiva University. He was also my guide, my hero, and my teacher. His death would’ve been devastating for me under any circumstance, but it was even more so because my beloved grandmother Mindella Lamm had passed away just a month earlier from COVID-19.
These twin losses, coming after months of sheltering in place and economic devastation and civil rights protests, were more than I could take. By the time I returned home from my grandfather’s funeral on Sunday, I felt something inside of me give out. I lay down on the couch. I couldn’t move. I could barely think. I slept. It didn’t help. The Jewish tradition warns us against despair, but, to be honest, at that moment I felt something very close to it.
In a daze, I stumbled to my bookshelf. I found my grandfather’s books, and began scanning through the tables of contents, searching for something, anything that would bring him back to me. I rifled through erudite disquisitions on religious doubt, Jewish higher education, modesty, even the spiritual implications of extraterrestrial life. All wonderful, but, somehow, I knew none of these would bring me what I sought.
And so I turned to his sermons.
While my grandfather’s many scholarly books and essays represented him at his most analytical, what I needed in my moment of anguish was not learned words on a page, but the sound of his voice. I needed to hear him speak from the soul. I needed his sermons, which, at their best, majestically captured the poetry of the Torah and its wisdom. I needed to see if he’d left behind any wisdom that might help me find some light in our dark collective moment. I clicked on the digitized database of his sermons, and clicked almost at random. And there, in a sermon from 1952, was the voice I was hoping to find:
“When the propaganda machines have ceased their loud clattering and the din of the partisan shouting has been silenced,” read the sermon, “the still small voice of religion must make known its moral and spiritual judgment.”
Consider the state of the Union when a young Rabbi Lamm wrote those words. The country was still mired in an increasingly unpopular overseas conflict. Domestically, a polio epidemic was sweeping across the nation. And on the social policy front, the nation was firmly in the bloody grip of Jim Crow. Twenty-seven states still had anti-miscegenation laws in force. Many states mandated racially separate services form railcars, to restaurants, to barbers. Three days after my grandfather preached these words, in fact, the Supreme Court began to hear arguments in Brown v. Board of Education.
I read and reread my grandfather’s words perhaps a dozen times. I was stunned. I could almost hear my grandfather calling out from the halls of heaven, reassuring the Jewish people and our country that there is a way forward; that the Torah—the still small voice of the Jewish tradition—must inform our present, and holds the key to our future.
For my grandfather, Torah required two things: listening and teaching. Regarding the first, my grandfather believed, with ancient Jewish tradition, that God is the architect of creation, and that the Torah is the blueprint from which He worked. So in order to know God and His Torah, we must investigate and appreciate all the mysteries of creation, from physics and astronomy, to literature, history and all other records of the human condition. My grandfather articulated this point as a fleshed-out philosophy in his most famous book, Torah Umadda, published in 1990. But its roots lie already in his sermons, which are replete with references not only to traditional Jewish sources, but also the writings of Plato and Aristotle, scientific and literary journals, and great works of contemporary philosophy and social critique. The point is clear: In its most refined form, Judaism requires that we listen to, and learn from, others.
This is a critical message for us in 2020: As the nation continues to wrestle with historic mistreatment of black Americans, now is precisely the time when listening to those communities tell their stories would be both a source of increased wisdom and a catalyst for healing. Keeping our ears open to black experiences can help us better understand our fellow bearers of the divine image, and bring to life the Torah’s call, enshrined on the Liberty Bell, to “proclaim liberty throughout the land.”
A willingness to listen is especially important at a time when prominent voices in the commentariat and government close their ears in the name of “law and order.” In a sermon delivered in 1968, following unrest in nearly every major American city in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, titled “Law and Order,” Rabbi Lamm preached:
Human law is important—but it is not infallible, inviolate, or absolute. It must be subordinated to a divine dayyan [judge]. In essence this means that law prevails, but not above conscience, not above religious principle, not in the presence of a higher moral code. Therefore, for instance, Jewish religion teaches that dina de’malkhuta dina, that the law of the country wherein we dwell remains our law. However, when such governmental law bids us violate the law of the Torah, then it must yield, for human law is subordinate to divine law.
The higher, divine law requires us to listen and learn so that, as the Psalmist taught, we may gain a heart of wisdom.
But listening alone is insufficient. In fact, it is cowardly, reflecting a belief that deep down we have nothing to add ourselves. The student of Torah has much to learn from others, but has tenfold as much to teach. As my grandfather relentlessly emphasized for decades, all of society—the lofty and downtrodden alike—desperately needs the Torah’s wisdom as well.
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.”
The Torah, as my grandfather understood, is civilization’s best hope. It represents the greatest, grandest moral tradition in the history of humanity. America’s Jewish and black communities (which, of course, sometimes overlap), have always understood this best. And without the Torah, my grandfather warned during the turbulent summer of 1953, we all become “easy prey for any cruel ‘ism’, which can tyrannize the empty souls of ignorant children, from atheism to communism to materialism.”
This is my grandfather’s answer from beyond the grave to the question of how Jews should contribute to society. Should we attend rallies? Should we give to activist causes? Should we call our members of Congress? Perhaps all of the above are worthy options. But these are activities in which anyone can engage. But what can we do that no one else can? What unique service can Jews render to society?
My grandfather’s answer is that we are the ones best prepared to bring forth the Torah from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. In my grandfather’s words, “we must engage the world right now and, speaking in a cultural idiom it understands, say that we are dissatisfied with it.” The answers society seeks will not be found in secular academia, the jargonized world of activism, or the trendy domains of pious social media exhibitionism. None of today’s cruel, or even just empty “isms” could ever substitute for the majesty and wisdom of the Torah.
To give just one example: In place of the clunky, alienating phrase “systemic racism,” we can instead teach an American public still attuned to the language and morals of biblical religion that racism constitutes the sin of idolatry. Rabbi Lamm, in fact, developed this theory in several sermons spanning almost a decade. The Shabbat after the march on Washington in 1963, my grandfather drew upon the 19th-century commentator Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (known by the acronym “Netziv”) in explaining that idolatry—a crime that usually requires the support of an entire social and cultural apparatus—is the best way to think about racism in America:
It was bad enough when hate-frenzied mobs lynched individual Negroes, but this crime of shefikhat damim [homicide] is exceeded by the greater blot on our record: the methodical economic exploitation of one segment of our population, the systematic oppression of one race as the source of cheap labor and its designation as the first to suffer in any economic recession. When the economy of a great nation is built upon such patent injustice, it is a crime of avodah zarah [idolatry], it is a breach of faith. It bespeaks lack of faith in G-d who is av echad le-kulanu, One Father for all humans, making us all brothers.
Here we can find all the concepts that talking about systemic racism hopes to convey. But rather than reflecting the sterile terminology of academia’s secular gospel, Rabbi Lamm drew from an elevating biblical vocabulary that has always nourished this country. He employed the only common language Americans have ever shared for discussing race, equality and human dignity: the Hebrew Bible. These, my grandfather reminds us, are the truths we can and must teach our fellow Americans.
My grandfather believed that the Jewish people must listen to and learn from others, yes, but he also knew that we must never accept the role of listening or following only, even when this is what social justice activists demand. This would be an abdication of our responsibility to teach, bringing the Torah’s insights to those around us.
Reading through my grandfather’s sermons, the dual charge to listen and to teach, came through clear as day. But the more deeply I delved into them, the more I also began to perceive a warning simmering just beneath the surface. I think he expressed it best in a sermon from 1970, “Confessions of a Confused Rabbi,” delivered two weeks after the Kent State shootings and shortly after the beginning of America’s Cambodian campaign.
In that sermon, my grandfather relates that young people in his congregation had approached him to ask why he hadn’t addressed those events when they occurred. He confessed that he felt conflicted. On the one hand, he was outspoken against the Vietnam War and considered the Kent State and Jackson shootings “a blot on the history of our nation.” Moreover, he several times delivered spirited (if qualified) defenses of hippie culture and ’60s campus activism. (Considering his audience of prim, refined German Jews, that was probably the bravest stand he ever took in his rabbinic career). And yet, as he explained, he could not go all the way with the zealous student activists of the day. He gave several reasons, but the third one in particular stands out:
Third, I question the priorities and consistency of many Jewish students when they make of the Black Panthers a cause celebre of their moralistic movement. Yes, I agree that they are, in this country, entitled to a fair trial and to be protected from police brutality and vindictiveness. I believe we should see to it that the police who were brutal are punished, and that even Black Panthers receive their rights as American citizens. But they are not our friends! They are anti-Semites and they are anti-Israel. I would like to see young Jews who seek justice for the Black Panthers—and more power to them in their passion for justice—oppose these pernicious anti-Semites with equal zeal.
Although my grandfather considered the anti-racist cause for which the Black Panthers, the most influential black militant political organization of the late 1960s, fought a righteous one, he could not and would not ignore their blatant anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Citing the early rabbinic sage Hillel’s famous dictum, “if I am not for myself, who will be?” he exclaimed, “I have nothing but contempt for the so-called ‘universal’ Jew who makes every people’s concern his own, save that of his own people.”
That my grandfather believed with all his heart that black lives matter and, in light of American history, require special care and protection, I have no doubt. He said as much, and more, over the course of decades’ worth of preaching and teaching. What, however, would my grandfather have thought of the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella organization that, to this day, proudly proclaims on its website that Israel is an apartheid state (in its “Cut Military Expenditures Brief”)? We cannot know of course. What I do know is that he insisted that everything we do, we do not because we are “allies,” but because we are Jews. That means that we are morally bound—whether by God, as he believed, or at least by the force of history or self-respect—to exhibit no tolerance for those who would demonize our people. As my grandfather stressed, “we have no right merely to dismiss offhand the interests of kelal yisrael [the Jewish people].”
I suspect that while today’s Jewish community’s anti-racist activism would have made him proud, as it did once upon a time, he would have been horrified by those, like the Movement for Black Lives, who ignore, excuse, or only half-heartedly protest the defamation of our people by those who should know better. It would certainly be much easier, especially in the untamed wilds of social media, to downplay our concerns, or weakly deflect that “this is not about us.” But as my grandfather preached in that same sermon from 1952 with which I began, “if Peace conflicts with Truth, Peace must go and Truth must prevail.”
In the end, as I eventually drifted off to sleep, all I could think about were the words with which my grandfather concluded his eulogy for his own grandfather in 1949: “I [imagined] him say to me, in an affectionately mocking tone, ‘Why make a fool of yourself crying here now?’ And then, ‘Go home and start learning. You have a lot of constructive work to do that you’ll be missing if you tarry here too long. Not that I mind your presence …’”
From Tablet magazine, June 12, 2020
Remembering Rabbi Norman Lamm
By: Michael A. Helfand
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the name Rabbi Norman Lamm. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, only a block from the Jewish Center, where he had served for almost two decades. By the time I was born, Rabbi Lamm had already left the Jewish Center and become president of Yeshiva University. But in the years immediately after his departure, my father delivered monthly sermons in the shul under Rabbi Lamm’s watchful eye. That experience profoundly influenced my father—who ultimately chose academia over the rabbinate—and, as a result, Rabbi Lamm’s name was constantly invoked at home. Sometimes it was in the context of a classic Rabbi Lamm zinger—like telling my father that he was a 70-year-old trapped in a 35-year-old’s body. Other times it was in an exchange. My unrivaled favorite is when Rabbi Lamm, after hearing my father deliver a eulogy, remarked that it was at moments like those he regretted that my father hadn’t remained in the rabbinate. A compliment from Rabbi Lamm was like a compliment from nobody else. But my father, knowing how much Rabbi Lamm enjoyed a good retort, couldn’t help himself: “Rabbi Lamm,” he said, “had I remained in the rabbinate, it would be me there now in the coffin.” Rabbi Lamm simply laughed.
During my childhood, I didn’t understand much of Rabbi Lamm’s philosophy or theology. But I knew that he was the example we were all meant to emulate. The way Rabbi Lamm carried himself, expressed himself and even the way he typed up his sermons so they would be available to his congregation on Saturday night—all of these elements were part of what it meant to be Rabbi Lamm. He personified dignity and professionalism, wit and wisdom; and even if I didn’t understand the ins and outs of his ideas, I knew from a very early age that to be Rabbi Lamm was to embody the very best traits we were all meant to aspire to.
That relationship with Rabbi Lamm—or, more accurately, the idea of Rabbi Lamm—changed as I entered college. I had spent two years in yeshiva in Israel, during which I had dedicated nearly all my time to Torah study. As a result, returning to Yeshiva University as an undergraduate student was not the smoothest of transitions. I continued to spend much of my day studying Torah, but I now did so alongside a complete academic schedule as well. The days were fulfilling and enriching, but also long and exhausting.I found myself wondering whether full dedication to a dual curriculum was really possible.
Those years coincided with Rabbi Lamm’s announcing that he was stepping down as president of Yeshiva University. During that time—a time before a robust internet with cataloged sermons—I happened upon published pamphlets of Rabbi Lamm’s recent speeches, strewn about in the Yeshiva University Beit Midrash. The speeches were unlike anything I had ever read before. They brimmed with confidence in an Orthodox project that did not compromise in its pursuit of either Torah or secular knowledge. I remember hanging on to every word of each speech and craving more. And so, like many others, I began making my way through Rabbi Lamm’s works. With each passing book and each passing page, I found Rabbi Lamm responding to a growing pessimism within me that my dual-curricular aspiration was doomed to failure. This brought me back to a conversation with my father.
It must have been 2002 as I was wrapping up my time at Yeshiva College. I was apprehensive about the graduate program I was scheduled to start the next fall and, as had become my habit by then, found myself searching for more of Rabbi Lamm’s wisdom. I mentioned to my father that I wished I could read some of Rabbi Lamm’s old sermons—those mythic sermons that made up Helfand family lore. I knew there was one collection—a book called The Royal Reach—but it was out of print. My father made it his business to track down a copy of the book and gave it to me as a present. I still remember opening it for the first time. The collection read nothing like the sermons with which I was familiar; each had an unmistakable feel. They didn’t follow the typical question-and-answer format of a rabbi’s speech, but instead charged unflinchingly and unapologetically ahead, bringing the full force of the Jewish tradition to bear on the most pressing questions of the day; indeed, in the section of the book titled “The Contemporary World,” Rabbi Lamm’s sermons addressed race relations, student protests, law and order, the “new subjectivism,” and any number of highly charged issues—issues so critical that they still very much remain with us. In both substance and form, the collection had an undeniably modern feel.
And yet the more I read, the more it became clear to me that Rabbi Lamm sought to resist this impulse—this desire to carve out a “modern” version of Torah—with every fiber of his being. In what remains, to my mind, the most memorable sermon in the book, “The Arrogance of Modernism,” Rabbi Lamm recounted his great displeasure—I might even say disdain—for the privileging of what is modern over what is ancient. One sentence has long stood out; it’s a sentence I can repeat by heart: “nettling is the remark ‘he is religious, but modern,’ spoken in almost exactly the same condescending tone as one would say, ‘he is slightly insane, but sincere’—as if modernity can save the benighted religious soul from the damnation to which the unsophisticated are foredoomed.” Rabbi Lamm would not brook for even a moment the possibility that modernity, by definition, maintained some sort of advantage over the Jewish tradition.
For the reader, the inexorable conclusion couldn’t have been clearer. The very modernity of Rabbi Lamm’s sermons—and their ability to readily respond to “modern” challenges—were intended to prove the Jewish tradition’s timelessness. Torah wisdom would forever sit comfortably alongside modern intellectual trends—as it had for generations of the Jewish people—embracing, engaging, or, if need be, rejecting the ideas of the day.
But I took something else from the book. To me, the entire body of work—the ease with which Rabbi Lamm traversed spheres of knowledge—meant that living a Jewish life of integrated wisdom, where curiosity might pull you in any number of different directions, could be an Orthodox reality. And it could be a reality because there existed this giant of a man who had not only done it, but encouraged others to follow his lead. It is precisely because Rabbi Lamm wasn’t some mythic character from another era that he could be a symbol for the modern Jew, showing the true range of what was possible.
In more recent years, both my father and Rabbi Lamm would daven together at the Jewish Center. My father would often walk Rabbi Lamm home and they would talk. They would reminisce about times past, continue with some of their favorite forms of sermonic word play, and wonder aloud about what the future held for American Orthodoxy. In many ways, I was one of the prime beneficiaries of those talks, getting almost daily updates from my father about what Rabbi Lamm had recounted on their most recent stroll. The insights were as good as ever; but more than that, I drew confidence from the fact that the world still had a Rabbi Lamm. It meant that living the life he exhorted us all to pursue—one that brought all forms of life and wisdom under the banner of the Jewish tradition’s wisdom—still remained possible. It’s also why his death is so devastating.
And so when the news of Rabbi Lamm’s death broke on Sunday morning, I found myself rifling through my bookshelves. I needed to find the old pamphlets, to flip through my old tattered copy of The Royal Reach. I readily admit, it was an odd reaction—and even more odd that I’ve kept those pamphlets and books throughout multiple moves around the country. After all, the sermons and speeches are now online, accessible with the press of a button. But touching them that morning, knowing that they were still there, somehow ensured that the world of possibility that Rabbi Lamm opened hadn’t now closed. There will never be another Rabbi Lamm. But his timeless words, in all their beauty and wisdom, still remind us that a truly integrated life is not beyond our reach.
Michael A. Helfand is professor of law and associate dean at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, visiting professor at Yale Law School, and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
From Tablet magazine, June 4, 2020
Honoring Norman Lamm’s Legacy after #MeToo
By: Joel Avrunin
Norman Lamm leaves behind a complicated legacy. For many, Lamm was “an architect of and a spokesman for Modern Orthodoxy” and “the premier expositor of our community’s worldview.” But for the alleged victims of abuse at Yeshiva University High School under his administration, the legacy is more challenging. The Forward reported that Lamm told them that he “dealt with credible allegations of improper behavior against staff by quietly allowing them to leave and find jobs elsewhere,” what plaintiffs against YU have called a “cocoon of callousness.”
Marci Hamilton, an expert and commentator on child sex abuse, lambastes YU’S failure to provide full factual disclosure, writing, “It is sad to see that YU has chosen the Roman Catholic bishops’ approach to the scourge of child sex abuse: Keep as many secrets as possible for as long as possible, and, thereby prolong the suffering of the victims, the believers, and the institution itself.
When the archbishop emeritus of Boston died, the New York Times obituary headline read, “Bernard Law, Powerful Cardinal Disgraced by Priest Abuse Scandal, Dies at 86.” Law had been known for his advocacy for civil rights and immigrant justice, but his legacy was defined by his cover-up of abuse.
The NY Times called Penn State Coach Joe Paterno’s legacy “complicated.” Yet the same paper’s obituary for Norman Lamm read, “Norman Lamm, 92, Dies; Rescued Yeshiva U. From Brink of Bankruptcy,” with his cover-up of alleged abuse at his institution mentioned later. Ironically, the civil complaint alleges that publicity of the abuse “would have jeopardized YU’s much publicized $100 million fundraising efforts,” the very thing for which Lamm is lauded in his obituary.
Admirers of Lamm note that he acknowledged his mistakes in his retirement apology. Norman Lamm wrote “I too must do teshuvah.” The Jewish sage Maimonides taught that a sin between people requires not just confession but also making amends.
Kevin Mulhearn, the lawyer representing the men allegedly abused by teachers at YUHS during the tenure of Norman Lamm notes Lamm’s letter was, “’a positive first step, but only a first step,’ and that the entire university, not just Lamm, must ‘make amends.’”
A few months after Lamm penned his apology letter, his lawyer Joel Cohen was in court arguing that Lamm was not mentally competent to be deposed regarding the abuse he had just apologized for covering up.
There was a heated online debate regarding when Norman Lamm lost his mental faculties, but I prefer to think he was competent to pen his apology and that it was heartfelt. If so, then we have a path forward to honor his legacy, past, present, and future.
To rectify the past, Yeshiva University needs to make amends. They are currently being sued by dozens of plaintiffs for alleged failures to protect children from abuse suffered from the 1950s to 1980s. YU should offer restitution now without dragging these men through the pain of litigation. This new lawsuit was only possible thanks to the New York Child Victims Act (a similar suit was dismissed in 2013 due to the statute of limitations). Halacha (Jewish Law) has no statute of limitations, and YU could have made moral amends back in 2013 without hiding behind New York law. One of the plaintiffs, Jay Goldberg lamented the failure to change. “It is still the culture of Yeshiva University and the culture of modern orthodoxy in Judaism that it is a scar for us to come forward, it is with shame. And it shouldn’t be.
To sanctify the present, Yeshiva University must release the full Sullivan and Cromwell research. Despite promising at the outset of the investigation that they would release the findings, the report they published was short and non-specific, but referred to hours of interviews. Penn State set the example by releasing the full report on allegations of not only abuse, but institutional cover-up and Coach Joe Paterno’s involvement. Shmuel Herzfeld notes the YU summary report refers to those who knew about the allegations in the plural as “members of the administration” and he asks, “Are any of these administrators…still working for Yeshiva [University]?”
Hamilton insists that, “[w]ithout providing full factual disclosure, YU perpetuates the harm to the victims, and keeps secrets that can only hurt it in the future, when other victims of previously unnamed perpetrators come forward, which they surely will.”
To safeguard the future, Yeshiva University needs to set a positive example of child protection for Modern Orthodoxy, in keeping with Lamm’s legacy as a leader of the movement. The anti-harassment policy I can find is not clear on mandated reporting of abuse. The reporting protocol for sexual assault includes six different reporting pathways, none of them being law enforcement (mandated reporting to law enforcement is at the end of the policy). Hamilton observes, “This hard-to-follow path is guaranteed to have employees throwing up their hands in confusion, or worse, it is likely to result in reports that get lost in the cracks of the bureaucracy.” The Australian Royal Commission on child abuse recommends institutions empower children and the community to participate in the safety process. In my opinion, the YU faculty handbook and student handbook fail to empower staff and students to know how to speak up when they witness abuse.
Cardinal Law, Penn State Coach Paterno, and YU President Lamm were not abusers. They were all great men who did wonderful things, but their legacies have forever been sullied by allegations of cover-up of child abuse. We need to be aware of the power of our speech, and how glowing praise of Norman Lamm is emotionally impacting those plaintiffs who are still in pain and still suffering, not only from the alleged abuse but from Modern Orthodoxy’s communal indifference to past, present, and future allegations of abuse.
Joel Avrunin is a leader in building technical sales teams, with a passion for technology, teambuilding, coaching, and helping people develop their careers. Experiencing the heartache of being a father to a victim of clergy child sex abuse has motivated him to be a vocal proponent of robust child safety and anti-grooming policies in our schools, houses of worship, and summer camps. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and children, where he enjoys long runs down the Atlanta Beltline and hikes in the North Georgia mountains with his family.
From The Times of Israel, June 4, 2020