I am conducting research for an article to be featured in an upcoming issue of Jewish Action magazine (the OU’s quarterly publication) on family estrangement – parent and adult child, adult sibling and sibling, etc.
All interviewees will remain strictly anonymous. If this applies to you, I welcome your participation.
Please contact me at brennerbs@ou.org. Thank you.
Bayla Sheva Brenner
Senior Writer
Department of Communication & Marketing
The Orthodox Union
Times have changed in the 25 years since kiruv reached its first peak. The Orthodox community has grown stronger in numbers, in learning, and in observance. That growth has caused a dislocation to some members of the community, which in its most extreme manifestation has lead to some of our youth diminishing their Torah Observance.
One kiruv organization has leveraged their experience and knowledge of what excites Jews about Judaism to shine a light on some of our disconnecting youth. That organization is the Jewish Heritage Center of Queens and Long Island.
Since 1987 The Jewish Heritage Center of Queens and Long Island’s mission has been spreading the value and relevancy of Judaism to Jews of all backgrounds. The JHC has offered a full array of free lectures and classes, hotel retreats and educational and social programs designed for Jews with little or no formal background in Jewish Studies. In that time it has reached tens of thousands of Jews and has significantly impacted upon the lives of thousands of them.
Three years ago the JHC expanded its services to include inreach, strengthening the emotional and spiritual development of disenfranchised Chassidic Youth while at the same time providing prevention based programming to mainstream Yeshiva High School students.
In the last three years alone, the JHC has brought in hundreds of new young families and thousands of new young students and participants. The JHC has hired five new young dynamic Rabbis to take the organization to even greater heights.
From Monday, March 21 at 1:00 pm, to Tuesday March 22 at 1:00 pm, you have an opportunity to voice your approval and support for efforts such as this.
Click here to follow and help the JHC try to reach there $400k fundraising goal. They have benefactors who collectively will quadruple your donation. That means that for every dollar that you give, the JHC will get $4.
Support outreach that leads to inreach – which benefits the entire Jewish community.
Feldheim Publishers has just released New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Dovid Lieberman’s book, ‘How Free Will Works’ for just $9.99.
You can read about it here and purchase it at Feldheim.com, Amazon.com and at Jewish bookstores everywhere.
We, at Beyond BT, are big fans of Dr. Lieberman and we highly recommend this book.
Here’s a short excerpt:
Live Or Let Die
Within all of us exist three inner forces that are often at odds with one another: the soul, the ego, and the body. In short, the soul seeks to do what is right; the ego wants to be right and see itself in the optimal light; and the body just wants to escape from it all.
Doing what is comfortable or enjoyable is a body drive. Examples of indulgences of this force are overeating or oversleeping — in effect, doing something merely because of how it feels. An ego drive can run the gamut from making a joke at someone else’s expense to making a lavish purchase that’s beyond one’s means. When the ego reigns, we are not drawn to what is good, but to what makes us look good — in our own eyes and in the eyes of others.
Over time, these choices erode our self-esteem because when we routinely succumb to immediate gratification or live to protect and project an image, we become angry with ourselves and ultimately feel empty inside.
When we do not like who we are, we punish ourselves with activities that are disguised as pleasurable: excessive eating, alcohol or drug abuse as well as meaningless diversions and excursions. We long to love ourselves, but instead we lose ourselves. Unable to invest in our own well-being, we substitute illusions for love. These ethereal delights mask our self-contempt, and since the comfort sought is rewarded instead by greater pain, we descend further into despair.
As our behavior becomes increasingly reckless and irresponsible, the ego swells to compensate for feelings of guilt and shame. Our perspective narrows, and we see more of the self and less of the world; this make us even more sensitive and unstable.
For over two years the media have been reporting on a bloody war going on between Russia and Ukraine. The scenes are often grisly and violent. But amid the thundering tanks and artillery inflicting death on both sides, a surprising figure emerges: a Jewish man, a Lubavitcher chasid, complete with a long beard and twinkling eyes. He is praying Shacharis, enwrapped in tallis and tefillin, and smiles for the camera.
…
“I received a Communist education, not a religious one. For many years I didn’t know what Judaism was or how to observe the mitzvot or holidays,†he tells me. Cherkassky, who is tall and sturdy, worked as a laborer doing renovations. In the 1990s he served in the Russian Army. “I was in the army for several years. I learned how to fight and how to operate weapons. That was also the time when the Russian Army was fighting in Chechnya. I learned a lot.†Today, he uses the knowledge he learned from the Russians…against the Russians. Familiar with the Russian Army’s strengths and weaknesses, he takes advantage of that knowledge.
It was during those years that Cherkassky discovered Judaism and belief in God. “My father, with whom I was very close, was seriously ill. He was admitted to the hospital, but the treatments didn’t help him. The disease progressed and the doctors gave up. It was then that I realized that no one could help us except for the One Above; everything depends on Him. I went to the synagogue and learned how to pray. I asked God to heal my father. After discovering the power of prayer I made a commitment to increase my observance and to uphold the Torah and Jewish law. I began studying Judaism in depth and started to keep Shabbos and kosher and accepted all of the mitzvot. Eventually, after being sick for a very long time, my father passed away, and he was given a Jewish burial. He has now gone to the Next World, but in his merit I have continued to grow stronger.â€
After living elsewhere for a time Cherkassky returned to Feodosia, got married and had two children. He became a leader of the small local Jewish community. Then, around two years ago, riots broke out in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and pro-Western rebels took control of the government. Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, who had supported Russian President Vladimir Putin, was removed from power. Yanukovych fled to Donetsk, a pro-Russian stronghold in the far eastern region of Ukraine, and everyone thought the crisis was over; Ukraine would move politically closer to the West. But Putin had other plans. “Now we have to start working on the return of Crimea to Russia,†he declared at the time.
Read the whole story about Asher Yoseph Cherkassy, the Chasidic Freedom Fighter here.here.
Rav Noah Weinberg on Happiness
1. There are many important things we all seek in life – happiness, love and success among others. Judaism teaches that a crucial tool for living is to have clear definitions for these important concepts.
People can often spend many years of life striving for something that they think will give them happiness – the right job, the right girl, working my way up the corporate ladder, retirement, the new home etc, but when they actually get it, they’re still miserable!
Why? – Because they didn’t take the time to define what happiness really is. Instead, they simply went for what society says will give them happiness or what they might feel might bring them happiness. Defining happiness would have saved them a lot of time and unnecessary pain.
People often say – you can’t define happiness. Interestingly, Judaism actually gives a definition. Let me explain.
2. If I offer you a thousand dollars for your eyes – is it a deal?
How’s about 10K? 100K? 1M?… As much money as I offer you, you’ll turn me down – right? Your eyes are worth more to you than all the money in the world.
3. So, now, imagine that I’m very wealthy, and after speaking to you for half an hour, I take a liking to you – so much so, that I say to you: let me give you this brief case as a gift. You take the brief case and open it up and look inside. You see wads of $100 bills. There’s a million dollars in there for you from me – no strings attached.
How would you feel – if it were really true? Wouldn’t you feel like a million dollars?! Wouldn’t you be doing a jig down the street?
Now, if you ask someone: You have eyes – how do you feel? Most people say: “the same miserable person I was before you asked me!†But, if our eyes are worth more to us than any money, and we’d feel ecstatic for the million, shouldn’t we feel even more ecstatic that we have eyes? Shouldn’t we be doing that jig down the street, all the more?
4. So what’s the problem?
The problem is that we get used to things – we take things for granted. Someone gets a beautiful Porsche for his birthday. He feels grand. Come back in a couple of months – he’s miserable again!
Happiness is therefore defined as the emotion of pleasure that we feel when we appreciate what we have.
Misery is the reverse. To be thoroughly miserable – just take all your blessings for granted, and focus on what you don’t have. The fact is that it’s much easier to focus on what you don’t have than what you do – we just slide right into it. It’s easier to get up in the morning and think: oh no – another work day at that miserable job… and I can’t believe it’s raining again…and I hate that train ride – especially all those weird & miserable people on the subway… and I wish my work-mates wouldn’t be so irritating…and my boss is so controlling…. etc
The trick of happiness is to learn how not to take things for granted.
If you can get used to your eyes you can get used to anything. You’ll get used to the new car, the new home, the new wife, the kids… If we don’t appreciate what we have – there’s no point getting any more – we’ll just get used to that too!
If you learn how to appreciate your eyes, you can learn how to appreciate all the gifts of life. That’s why every morning in Judaism we get up and say, thank you G-d for giving me life. We appreciate that we can think, see, have clothes, can walk, and that we have all our needs both physical and spiritual. We say blessings on food – to appreciate the food that we eat and not to take it for granted.
Each one of us has eyes, ears, a heart that pumps, hands and legs, friends and family – gifts worth more to us than any money. Each one of us is a walking multi-millionaire, even if we wouldn’t have a penny to our names. Only by learning how to appreciate the gifts we already have, how rich we truly are, can be truly happy.
Bayla Sheva Brenner, senior writer at the Orthodox Union (OU), is currently doing research for an article (to be featured in the upcoming issue of the OU’s Passover Guide) about people’s approaches to making their Pesach seder stimulating and meaningful for everyone at the table.
Pesach is a pivotal and challenging time for every Yid; we all come to the table with hopes and challenges. “The time of our freedom†is an opportunity to take ourselves out of our communal and personal Mitrayim (again) in order to serve G-d more fully – more of the person we are meant to become. With Hashem’s “Strong Arm†we will experience another Pesach, as well as another step towards true freedom – as a person and as a People. If you have children, please include your approach to teaching them this all-important lesson.
If you would like to share your perspective, please contact Bayla at brennerbs@ou.org. You can remain anonymous if you choose to.
In Mesilas Yesharim, Chapter 15 – the Ramchal says:
There is no pleasure more tangible and more palpable than that of eating. Yet is there anything more short-lived and fleeting that the pleasure of eating?
The food is enjoyed for the short time when it is in a person’s throat, and once it leaves the throat to descend into the intestines, its memory is lost and the food is forgotten, as if it had never existed.
Enough black bread will satiate one to the same extent as fattened geese.
One will be made especially aware of the truth of what is being said if he considers the many illnesses connected with eating or the heaviness and dull mindedness that one experiences after eating improperly.
These considerations would unquestionably cause one to avoid unhealthy eating, after seeing its limited upside and big downside.
In 2014, former AP correspondent, Matti Friedman, wrote an essay on how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters. Here are some excerpts:
The Israel story is framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest for a “two-state solution.†It is accepted that the conflict is “Israeli-Palestinian,†meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “Israel-Arab,†or “Jewish-Arabâ€â€”that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “Israel-Muslim†would be more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims worldwide.) This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “Palestinian†was in use.
…
You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.
…
Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.
…
Many in the West clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’ problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.
What’s your story?
Many BTs cringe when they hear that question. The intrusion into a potentially private affair is disturbing.
Others love to share details about their past.
It often depends on who’s asking the question: a fellow BT, an FFB, a non-Observant Jew, a reporter?
Julie Sugar, a BT writer living in Nashville takes a very public approach and thinks it’s important to have some more BT memoirs available in the Amazon stacks.
Find out why in her article Why Secular-to-Orthodox Memoirs Matter.
We’ve posted quite a few Teshuva Journeys, penned primarily by Michael Gros, over the years.
R. D. Joshua Berman has a good post on “Why Are Young People Leaving Religion?” at Torah Musings. He references a book titled “You Lost Me”, by David Kinnaman, a devout Christian and a sociologist who discusses the four premium values of today’s youth:
Choice and Tolerance: What a young person sees is an endless parade of people like himself making choices about the ideals to follow and the lifestyle to lead and airing the feelings about the choices they’ve made. The result is that the paramount virtue of the younger generation is tolerance. We all do something a little differently, and that’s ok. Traditional religion, of course, says that there are absolutes, and that there is a core one, right way.
Complexity, Uncertainty and Doubt – In this vast exposure to viewpoints and ideas, young people quickly learn that there are no absolutes. They find cogent arguments against the existence of God, the divinity of the Torah, traditional notions of sexuality and endless more. They are more keenly aware of complexity than any generation of youngsters before them. When articles of faith are presented to them as simple fact with no complexity, they sense something phony.
Individual Expression – The Facebook post, the selfie – these accentuate for a young person the importance of self-expression, of being a unique and distinct “me.†They witness in their peers incredible creativity of expression literarily, musically, and artistically. For this generation davening in shul is a challenge – in shul, you do the same thing every single time, and you do it in lock-stop with everybody else.
Reduced Regard for Hierarchy and Authority – You don’t need to turn to anyone anymore to gain knowledge. No matter what question you have, it’s all there on the internet. The internet knows best, not father. Young people don’t turn to adults for advice; there’s Google for that. Once upon a time rabbis were placed on a pedestal, their esteem was unquestioned. But today, no models enjoy unquestioned esteem. Heroic athletes turn out to be steroid cheats. For young people, regular reports of rabbinic misconduct mean that today a rabbi must earn his esteem. It is no longer automatically assumed.
Go read the article to see Dr. Berman’s suggestions for dealing with these issues.
In the Practical Guide to Teshuva, Rabbi S. Wagschal writes:
-The process of teshuvah which begins on Rosh Chodesh Elul and continues until Yom Kippur, may be successfully achieved if it is performed in a gradual manner.
-One should strengthen his tefillah by becoming more punctilious about the times of the tefillah.
-In addition one should endeavor to improve the quality of his tefillah by increasing his level of conecntration and intention.
-The simple meaning of Kriyas Shema and the first blessing of Shemoneh Esrai should be clearly understood.
-Some emphasis should be put on raising one’s level of concentration during the recital of the prayers Ahavas Rabbah, Atah Chonein Le’adam, Hashivenu, Sleach Lanu and the first blessing of Birkas Hamazon.
