JustASC

Here’s  another story out of Teaneck. It’s about a “nonprofit organization that provides religious and community activities and counseling” that neighbors somehow suspect is another way of saying “synagogue.”

Organizers seemed to deny that for a while, but their tactics are shifting, and now they have “applied for several variances from the zoning board, which would allow Etz Chaim to designate part of the Queen Anne Road property as a house of worship.”

A couple of points:

1/Tension is inevitable. Teaneck, with a large and growing Orthodox population, has a few dozen synagogues. They tend to be wedged in right among the residences (unlike other suburban synagogues, where they’re set back on campuses or zoned away from housing stock). That makes sense for Teaneck’s Orthodox community, whose members walk to synagogue on Shabbat and holy days.

The challenge for neighbors and zoning boards, however, is that it throws together private homes and houses of worship and their non-private functions — large crowds for worship, noise complaints from neighbors, parking issues for events held when it’s not Shabbat or a holy day. It’s a formula for conflict.

2/ Modus operandi. We’ve covered a couple of stories about synagogues that start with a minyan that appears to be held in a private home, and inexorably the home morphs into a full-fledged synagogue, usually by design, I suspect. The current law privileges religion (see this primer from a Christian legal association), so once a house of worship gets a foothold in a neighborhood, it is awfully hard to dislodge. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing, but I don’t like the way some congregations exploit the law and surreptitiously set up shop, asking disingenuously, “You mean I can’t worship in my own home?” It feels — sneaky. (Or maybe that’s the fault of the law, which forces them into subterfuge. Discuss.)

3/ Ask a neighbor.  Zoning meetings often end up being arguments about parking, but I rarely see the opinions of people who currently live in a neighborhood with an Orthodox synagogue. Let me, someone  who lives five doors down from a major synagogue with multiple minyanim, discuss my experience:

On a typical weekday morning, there is a rush for on-street parking as men pull up for morning minyan, usually between 7:00 and 8:15 a.m. And by rush, I mean rush —  guys zip into spaces, grab their tallitot and tefillin, and jog up the block. I’d prefer for safety’s sake that they slow down.

Since it’s early morning, my cars are usually already on the street or in the driveway, and since I’m usually not expecting any guests, it’s no great inconvenience, except the one time in nine years a shmeggegge blocked my driveway.

As for evening minyanim, it mirrors the morning rush, but not as much, and I rarely have parking or traffic issues.

On Sunday mornings there is often a simcha of some sort, usually a bris, or a more relaxed davening. Two hours, say. Again, the street spaces tend to fill up, but it’s at an hour that doesn’t inconvenience me.

On Shabbat, there is no auto traffic at all, of course, but a ton of foot traffic. Sometimes this spills into the streets, which has led to complaints in the area from drivers. (The walkers claim that the Teaneck sidewalks are in need of repair, which is sometimes true, but I detect a sense of ownership, swagger, arrogance [call it what you will] on the part of the walkers — who project a sense that “This is Shabbat, and the streets of this neighborhood are for walkers.” [Full disclosure: I am a walker, and I sometimes share this impulse -- what's nice about Teaneck is that if you are shomer Shabbat, Saturday feels like Shabbat.])

Also on Saturday and holy days, police block off the street directly in front of the synagogue with sawhorses, and a cop directs traffic on the main drag (they also do this on Sunday mornings at the big Korean church a few blocks away on a busier street. FYI: The church is situated away from private homes, alongside a Route 4 entrance ramp, and has a large parking lot). There’s usually a lot of kids playing rambunctiously in the synagogue playground, sometimes a big catering tent set up in the parking lot, crowds of kibbitzers standing on the sidewalks, and, after services let out, big crowds of families and strollers and men chatting it up on the sidewalks and the closed street. I’m far enough down the block that it doesn’t really affect me, although I don’t blame the people who live in a residential neighborhood who don’t want a weekly block party right next door.

Be warned: Near sunset before and after Shabbat, there are clumps of strollers, usually wearing dark colors. I worry about hitting them as I pull into or out of my driveway. I’ve seen some synagogues urge congregants to wear reflective material, but to little effect.

A lot of syangogues host simchas on Sunday afternoons or Saturday night. The smaller synagogues tend not to have catering halls, so that’s not an issue, but there will be other events attracting cars. Parking is not a problem in my neighbohood, however, and only occasionally do I look out the window and think, “There must be something going on at the shul.”

So that’s my experience. Living near a shul is no biggie. But I can’t speak for the people who live closer than I do, or the folks who bought their houses before a shul moved in next door. In the interest of neighborliness, those who are bent on establishing synagogues need to show a little empathy, indulge in a little outreach to the neighbors, and educate their own folks about leaving as small a footprint as possible.

My column this week is about Rush Limbaugh vs the ADL. I like the updated version that appears in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Excerpt:

Foxman is right that Limbaugh’s remarks were “borderline anti-Semitic.” There’s been a lot of creepily coded rhetoric floating around since the start of the current financial crisis, with bankers being referred to as “moneylenders” and “bloodsuckers.” Jews on the Left and Right get a little worried whenever people talk like this. If Limbaugh and his allies weren’t interested in scoring the usual ideological points (“Mr. Foxman, if you really want to go after anti-Semitism you should first start looking at it on the Left,” he said the next day), they might have acknowledged that in linking Jews and the banking industry, he stumbled, inadvertently or not, into toxic territory.

Arutz Sheva reports on my neighbors [go here for background on why visits by Jews to the Temple Mount are controversial, and the split on the propriety of such visits among Orthodox rabbis]:

 (IsraelNN.com) A group of about 30 Jews from the Rinat Yisrael congregation in Teaneck, New Jersey, headed by Rabbi Yosef Adler, went up on the Temple Mount this week, guided by Chairman Yehuda Glick of the Temple Mount and Temple Heritage Fund.

Glick told Arutz Sheva “The police made every effort to cast a shadow on the visit, including dividing the group into two, such that the second of the two groups had to wait for an hour in the rain and cold until the first group finished.” He added that the group was subjected to being photographed by the police.

In the rain and cold? And they had to have their picture taken! Where’s Human Rights Watch when you need them?

Maybe now they’ll have some sympathy for these women:

Conservative Jewish leaders called for the letter-writing campaign to Ambassador Michael Oren after Nofrat Frenkel, an Israeli medical student and observant Conservative Jew, was detained and interrogated by Israeli police in November while wearing a prayer shawl and carrying a Torah during a prayer service held by Women of the Wall, an activist group, in the women’s section of the Wall.

In January, Anat Hoffman, director of Reform Judaism’s Israel Religious Action Center and leader of Women of the Wall, was taken to a Jerusalem police station, where she was interrogated and fingerprinted, and informed that she might be charged with a felony for violating rules of conduct at the Western Wall.

London’s Jewish Chronicle published my thoughts on the Tefillin Bomber:

And then a funny thing happened — call it The Revenge of the Schmucks. At some point, readers and the media started to agree that the authorities had acted reasonably under the circumstances. A few Orthodox web commentators even turned on poor Calev for using poor judgment in whipping out his tefillin mid-flight.

We snickered when the Philadelphia police spokesman referred to the boy’s “olfactories”, but that only proved his point when he said: “It was unfamiliarity that caused this.”

Knock me over: I grew up using “fumferred” as a word meaning “stumbling over one’s words.” I just thought it was some homegrown onomatopoeia, and wasn’t even sure anyone else used it outside my own family.

Now J.J. Goldberg uses “fumfitted” in a post, and I found out it’s actually a Yiddishism! I found a reference in a book called Give Peace a Stance by Rabbi Hanoch Teller, who explains, “the word is fumfit, and roughly speaking it combines the English terms splutter, mutter, and stutter.” (My parents grew up with Yiddish, to one degree or another.)

Go know. I had the same experience with the word “regn” (rhymes with beggin’) which is how my father refers to rain. For most of my life I thought he was just punning on the homophonic spelling of rain (reign) and pronouncing the silent g. Regn, of course, is Yiddish for rain.  You may, or may not, know it from one of the verses in Tumbalalaika:*

Meydl, meydl, ch’vel bay dir fregen,
Vos kan vaksn, vaksn on regn?

Maiden, maiden tell me again
What can grow, grow without rain?

By the way, my mother, z”l, named our dog “Maydl.” That one I understood.

*You know, the folk song:  ”Tumbala, tumbala, tumbala-laika…” Which reminds me of another story, this one told by Steve Feldman, who I knew when he worked at Biblical Archaeology Review.  Steve was once at a wedding and a strolling klezmer violinist was taking requests. Steve asked if he knew ”Rumania.”

“Never heard of it,” said the musician. 

“But it’s a famous klezmer song. You know, ‘Rumania,’” said Steve.

“I still never heard of it,” said the violinist.

“C’mon,” said Steve. “It goes, ‘Rumania, Rumania, Ru-MAN-ia…”

“Oh!” said the violinist. “You mean ‘Rumania, Rumania’!”

The ZOA comes out in support of Rush Limbaugh. In truth the headline on this one should read,

“ZOA agrees with Limbaugh: An attack on America’s banking system
 is an attack on Jews.”

From the ZOA release:

“We are puzzled and shocked by Abe Foxman’s wrong, confused and irresponsible attack on the strongly pro-Israel Rush Limbaugh. Anyone who reads Limbaugh’s remarks can see that no attack on Jews is either made or intended. Limbaugh was simply telling the truth that people who are ‘prejudiced’ against Jews often use the code term ‘bankers’ and ‘Wall Street’ to mean Jews; and that when Obama criticized bankers and Wall Street, some prejudiced people could have interpreted this as an Obama attack against Jews.

Actually, that is not what he said. Read Limbaugh’s quote again. The plain meaning of what he said is this: “It’s true that prejudiced people label Jews as bankers. But a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. Isn’t attacking Wall Street the same as attacking Jews? That’s why Jews should be having buyer’s remorse.”

Again, to support Limbaugh on this you have to accept his premise that Jews identify so closely with banking that they will, or at least should, interpret an attack on the banking industry as a cause for communal concern and group action.

To lay it out in terms that ZOA might understand, imagine if one of their ideological enemies — say, Thomas Friedman– had said the following, “I am glad Obama is assaulting money people. Prejudiced people associate Jews with Wall Street, but let’s face it: A lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. I hope all those Jewish bankers who vote Republican are starting to sweat.” [Bold face lines are Limbaugh's words.] The ZOA and the conservative Jewish pundits would have gone nuts.

What saddens me about the conservative rush to defend Rush is that none of his defenders will acknowledge that even if you accept ZOA’s interpretation of Limbaugh’s remarks (presidents need to adjust their policies so as not to rile the anti-Semitic fringe?), it was certainly dumb and strained. Only Eugene Volokh on the right, as far as I can tell, says as much here.

Remember how excited I was that my office lunchroom was in a Wendy’s commercial?

Now my college roommate is in a Windows 7 commercial. Way to go, Steve!

Last week the ADL blasted Rush Limbaugh for equating Jews and bankers.

I agreed with ADL’s Abe Foxman that Limbaugh appeared to be trafficking in an anti-Semitic stereotype (as opposed to “reporting” on one). But see if you can spot the disingenuous remark in the ADL statement:

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate. While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans. His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

C’mon, Abe. It’s hardly anti-Semitic for someone to suggest that “Jews vote based on their religion.” We all talk about the “Jewish vote,” and with just cause: Of course Jews vote “their interests as Americans,” but there’s an entire scholarly literature – and campaign apparatus – based on how Jews vote their particular interests as well.

Granted, that’s not necessarily a “religious” vote (although certainly a large segment of the Jewish community votes according to their “religious” values, from “tikun olam” liberals to the family values that have drawn many Orthodox into the Republican column). And of course there’s Israel, which is a top Jewish concern for a tangled web of historical, ethnic, and yes, religious reasons.

Every ethnic and religious group has voting tendencies based in part on their religion. Hell, every year the American Jewish Committee polls Jews about their political attitudes. A tendency is not the same as a conspiracy. Plenty of Jews either diverge from the prevailing Jewish pattern or don’t consider “Jewish” issues at all whenthey enter the voting booth. But a politican would have to be an idiot to wander into, say, New York politics without giving strong heed to the Jewish vote — or, for that matter, the Catholic vote, the Main Line Protestant vote, the Evangelical vote, etc.

Limbaugh’s remarks were offensive because of their content — not because he suggested the existence of a “Jewish vote.”

I somehow missed the two-word lede on the NY Daily News coverage of the tefillin that set off a bomb scare:

What schmucks.

A US Airways crew panicked by a Jewish teen’s prayer ritual aborted a flight from LaGuardia Airport on Thursday, landing in Philadelphia amid unfounded fears of a terrorist bomb.

Everyone’s in a tizzy about the US Airways jet that had to make a cautionary landing because a passenger thought a boy’s tefillin looked suspicious. Comments range from “the airlines are over-cautious” to “the boy was disruptive” (not true) to “the kid was stupid” to “Why is this a story?” to “this is what you get when you don’t acknowledge the real enemy” (i.e., radical Islam).

The wisest comments on this came from a Hasidic politician in Brooklyn, quoted in the Times story:

Some observant Jews said they were not surprised that the ritual had attracted attention — or that people on the plane would have been unfamiliar with it. “When they see a passenger strapping yourself,” said Isaac Abraham, a Satmar who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and campaigned for the Democratic nomination for a City Council seat last year, “you might as well strap yourself with hand grenades. They have no idea.”

“He probably just figured, ‘I have nothing else to do on the plane, I might as well use this time to pray,’ ” he added. “Other people read. They watch a movie. He figured, ‘Let me grab the time.’ But the obvious reality of it is that when we see people carrying explosive material in their shoes and their pants and I am the passenger next to him and see someone strapping, I would panic too.”