A Cautionary Orthodox Tale for Sephardim: Tradition Magazine’s Rabbi Norman Lamm Memorial Volume

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David Shasha

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Mar 22, 2022, 7:31:37 AM3/22/22

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A Cautionary Orthodox Tale for Sephardim: Tradition Magazine’s Rabbi Norman Lamm Memorial Volume

I recently referred to the Tradition magazine memorial volume to Rabbi Norman Lamm, and would like to recommend that all those who continue to confront the scourge of YU Modern Orthodoxy with its anti-Sephardi racist White Jewish Supremacy purchase the book and read it carefully:

https://rabbis.org/product/tradition-norman-lamm-memorial-volume/

The book is not simply a presentation of Rabbi Lamm’s reactionary ethnocentric Jewish ideas, rooted firmly in the Hasidic tradition with its irrationality and magical thinking, but serves as a summation of all that the current Washington Heights worldview stands for, and how it connects the different historical eras of what is now commonly called Neo-Conservatism, with Lamm as a critical pioneer in the movement.

As for the centrality of Hasidism and Hasidic magical thinking in Lamm’s Judaism, there is the book’s final article by Shlomo Zuckier, “Study (of Hasidut) is Great for It Leads to Action: Two Generations of Hasidut at Yeshiva University”:

https://traditiononline.org/study-of-hasidut-is-great-for-it-leads-to-actiontwo-generations-of-hasidut-at-yeshiva-university/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=study-of-hasidut-is-great-for-it-leads-to-actiontwo-generations-of-hasidut-at-yeshiva-university

The book is replete with paeans to Lamm’s Hasidic affiliations, and the way in which the Eastern European Jewish tradition marks for him the only true iteration of Judaism. In this sense, Zuckier points to how student life at YU has evolved over the years, and how Hasidism and the New Haredi synthesis have staked a firm place in Washington Heights.

For those trying to process Modern Orthodox thought, this development is critical to seeing the Intersectional alliances that tie together the different factions of the Orthodox world.

We just received an announcement from The Lehrhaus for a Lamm tribute Torah u-Madda symposium that speaks to the White Jews-only aspect of the school, with the notable absence of any Sephardic participants, as is the case with the Tradition volume:

https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/reclaiming-torah-u-madda-a-symposium/?utm_source=Lehrhaus+Readers&utm_campaign=4e3714d912-Lehrhaus+Latest+152_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5effc5ad09-4e3714d912-15704435&mc_cid=4e3714d912&mc_eid=4344685f12

As is made clear by the articles in the Tradition volume, there are deeply anti-Modern, anti-Liberal, and anti-Critical values that undergird this rigid system, which misleadingly masquerades as “philosophical” and “scientific,” when in reality it is simply a slightly-modified version of the usual dogmatic Orthodox fundamentalism.

Lamm combined Brisker Lomdus with a sermonic Midrashic sensibility that stands in stark counterpoint to the Jewish Post-Modernism of important thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jose Faur:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NETtR-l9eFY7o0gOXsSK_tRYwkGqES_SD3bXjaGa2M8/edit

Lamm’s reductive understanding of the Torah is very analphabetical in its atavistic mien, as can be clearly seen in his 1971 sermon “How to Read the Torah,” which resolutely ignores issues of language and textuality that have become prominent in those Post-Modern Jewish reading strategies:

https://archives.yu.edu/gsdl/collect/lammserm/index/assoc/HASH019d/eb14f510.dir/doc.pdf

The sermon is included in the 2020 Lamm collection Torah Beloved:

https://www.amazon.com/Torah-Beloved-Reflections-Celebration-Holiday/dp/1602803870

Most importantly, none of the Lamm memorial contributors – all Ashkenazim – ever refer to what has sadly become his most lasting legacy; the callous mishandling of the Yeshiva University High School child molestation scandal:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hua9rt14Yql2s_NN73wLU1KbqkycJZjP4IPheyO1VKE/edit

In the Torah Beloved collection, Ari Lamm doubles down on this deplorable silence by approvingly citing a heimische letter his benevolent grandfather wrote to a young Jewish Center member who stopped attending services when her pet bird died!

Would that he cared as much for the YUHS sex abuse victims.

Those paying tribute to Lamm present his often-overbearing moralistic views in a way that is quite ironic given that, at the very key moment in his career as an Orthodox Jewish leader, he consciously chose to avoid moral judgement and what most of us would consider an adequate response to the horrible allegations of sexual abuse by YUHS teachers.

The lack of a proper response is quite reminiscent of how Lamm’s peers at the RCA dealt with Baruch Lanner and his sex abuse scandal; the one that involved the Syrian Jewish community of Deal, New Jersey:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mot1cm8wGHF7AplT_tWK7kpiF7LilCNn93uMUVhoZyY/edit

For those of us who have been “cancelled” by the Washington Heights cabal for debased ideological and doctrinal reasons, it is an irony that is very hard to swallow. Indeed, in the Modern Orthodox world it is often safer to molest children than to present alternative views of Judaism.

Following this note I will be presenting an extensive set of articles dealing with the contributors to the volume, as well as my articles on the Sephardic heritage and the problems it continues to face from Lamm’s toxic YU worldview.

In order to help you situate the history of Orthodoxy, I include an important article by Jacob Katz which reviews the history of Ashkenazi Judaism and its breakdown into warring factions.

Also included in the resource sheet are my articles on the Tradition memorial volume contributors Jonathan Sarna, Ari Lamm, Zev Eleff, Meir Soloveichik, and institutions like The Lehrhaus and The Tikvah Fund that count Lamm as a crucial influence, and which are prominently represented in the book.

In this sense, I also present material on Jonathan Sacks, who passed away before he could write an article for the Tradition volume. The book’s editors chose to include his 1990 review of Lamm’s book Torah u-Madda which reminds us of just how revolutionary a shift his 2002 Dignity of Difference was, and how it was rejected by many of the Washington Heights contingent. Which ultimately led, as I have written, to his gradual reversal of his position on Jewish Humanism, so eloquently presented in Dignity. The 1990 article, unlike the 2002 book, contains the usual confusion over the relationship between “Religious” and “Secular” in Modern Orthodox thought. Sadly, his career ended as it began.

Finally, I present a set of articles which serve as a reflection on Lamm’s impact on the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, featuring David Eliach, Joel Wolowelsky, Ezra Labaton, and Marc Angel, that are buttressed by pieces on Samson Raphael Hirsch and what I have called the New Sephardic Jewish Binary.

The resource sheet ends with the SHU special newsletter on the imperilled legacy of Jose Faur, whose work – callously rejected in toto by the Washington Heights machers – stands as an enlightened Sephardic response to the massive influence that YU has had for the Orthodox world, and for the Idiot Sephardim who continue to ignore the values of the classical Sephardic heritage and our noble Jewish Humanism, as they blithely accept the White Jewish Supremacy of those who are considered their “superiors.”

As I frenziedly and anxiously read the Lamm memorial volume, I could not help feeling even more despondent about the future of Sephardim – and the future of Judaism without the Sephardic heritage – as the institutional power and organizational infrastructure that supports Ashkenazi Orthodox Judaism is simply too vast and too well-funded to do battle with. It has been quite a depressing and sobering experience.

In spite of that, I present these resources with the hope that it might still be possible to defeat the Illiberalism represented by Norman Lamm and his hypocritical vision of a Judaism which rejects the critical values of Maimonidean Humanism and the Open Book of the Talmudic tradition, in favor of a narrowly-defined magical literalism that marks Jews and Judaism as the sole means to engage the sacred.

David Shasha

Norman Lamm Memorial Volume Resource Sheet

Lamm YUHS child molestation

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hua9rt14Yql2s_NN73wLU1KbqkycJZjP4IPheyO1VKE/edit

From Norman Lamm to Matis Weinberg: The Tikvah Fund Loves Pedophiles!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dPa3H9x4bKLmdXTk8nwJRezNW4Bj720spj17OMoO-e0/edit

Baruch Lanner

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mot1cm8wGHF7AplT_tWK7kpiF7LilCNn93uMUVhoZyY/edit

The Idiot Sephardim

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fUx-B5XHPIrr7b_7xS4ZpmiEmvo_qBy0pKqOAtmJ5WI/edit?usp=sharing

Jacob Katz, Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SnpaBSAfAz5dQ2HO9U8vQ4JgZUO1QxAe/view?ths=true