Dear Rabbi Swims in Hudson River on a Triathlon Relay Team

It happened on Sunday, July 14! We did it!

And believe me - it was tough!

Update: Yitz's dad (that's me) swam 1500 meters in the Hudson as part of a relay for Team One with teammates Harvey (bike) and Leiba (run).

Yitz completed all three legs of the tri in excellent time.

Yitzhak Zahavy's Team One Family Fundraising Triathlon Event. Help Celebrate Three Lives with Three Sports.

Yitz Tells What Happened
On October 27, 2002 my platoon in the IDF was attacked by a hamas suicide bomber outside the city of Ariel. Three soldiers, Amihud Hasid, Tamir Masad and Matan Zagron, where killed saving my life and the lives of my fellow soldiers. The One Family Fund is helping their families cope with the difficulties of life without their loved ones.



New York City Triathlon July 14
To celebrate the lives of the three brave Israeli soldiers who saved my life, I will compete in the NYC Triathlon. I will swim, bike and run to raise money for their families and for other families who lost their loved ones to acts of terror.
Helping Out
Please help support victims of terror and their families by donating as much as your can. Please donate.
Check out the story about my fundraising efforts  in the Jewish Standard.
My Goal
This year my goal is to raise $3600, that is $1200 for each man who saved my life.
The One Family Fund
The One Family Fund is at the side of Israel's terror victims – be they civilians or soldiers- from the moment of an attack through the many years of recovery. OneFamily provides victims and their families with the emotional, financial, legal and material assistance they need to rebuild their shattered lives. Through hospital visits, camps, retreats, holiday programs and one-on-one assistance, OneFamily is helping more than 2400 families.

Pledge / Donate

Thank you for your generous help.

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What are the connections between religions and terrorism?

What are the connections between religions and terrorism? 

That's a big set of questions. We tried to answer, explain and understand them in the past.

Here is a selected list of our blog posts of study resources in the analysis of the connections between terrorism and religion (compiled when we taught a course on religion and terrorism at FDU a few years ago).

1. Questions about American Christian Terrorism
2. Religion and Jewish Terrorists (and see the JTA report)
3. What is a Religious Culture of Violence and Terror? 
4. Who were Shoko Asahara and the Buddhist Aum Shinrikyo Religious Terrorists? 
5. How did Religion Motivate Sikh Terrorists? 
6. What is the Logic of the Theater of Religious Terror? 
7. Why Do Religious Terrorist Martyrs say that they aim to kill the demons? 
8. What do Sexuality and Humiliation have to do with Terrorism? 
9. Will the War Against Religious Terrorism Ever End? 
10. From Kahane to Osama: How Do Men Make Religious Terrorism Into Cosmic War? 
11. How can we end religious terrorism and achieve the peace of God? 
12. Concluding Questions on Religion and Terrorism

We recommend:

God's Favorite Prayers

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Morally below an eye for an eye - a life for a video

In light of the barbaric murder of Americans in Libya, a very good friend reminded us of our concern on this blog and in our op eds for the concept of lex talionis - often associate with the biblical notion of an eye for an eye.

We wrote in the past about how that biblical legal notion was a great leap forward in moral compensation thinking in the ancient world of the middle east, even though it seems to many of us now to be a brutal principle of justice.

To be clear, we say now that those who murder and claim it is a response to a video will have to be classed with the most primitive of the pre-biblical tribes.

See one newspaper op-ed that we wrote about this in 2005 - here.

44 Talmudic Books for Kindle | The 36 Volume Kindle Talmud in English | Whence and Wherefore | God's Favorite Prayers

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Is Tisha B'Av Relevant?

Is Tisha B'Av relevant? No we do not think that the fast of Tisha B'Av is relevant anymore. We need a holiday from Tisha B'Av.

That day was for a long time a commemoration through fasting and prayer over the destroyed city of Jerusalem and the Temple. We've last visited Jerusalem in May of 2011 and can attest that the city is not desolate. It is without reservations, glorious.

Who then wants the bleak story to be told? Archetypally the "celebrity" archetype wants to keep recalling defeat, destruction and desolation, to spur team Jews on to fight the foes and to triumph at the end of time. That scheme may work for that archetype as long as the facts of reality do not fly smack in the face of the narrative. And when they do, what then? The narrative loses all of its force. We cannot imagine Jerusalem in ruins. Period. And indeed, why should we perpetuate an incendiary story of gloom and doom into a diametrically opposite positive world of building and creativity? The era of desolation has ended.

For at least twenty-five years, we've been lamenting the irony of lamenting over a city that is rebuilt. It's more rebuilt now -- way more -- than it was twenty five years ago. What do we do then about Tisha B'Av, the Jewish fast day of lament and mourning? Here is what we said those many years ago.

We wrote this op-ed for the Jerusalem Post in 1986 where we summed up many of our thoughts about Israel in our day, and of Jerusalem in particular. The article appeared in the Post on the day before Tisha B'Av:

I shall be fasting this week from sundown Wednesday until sundown Thursday. But this year, more than ever before, I feel silly mourning over the destruction of Jerusalem. I really do not know what to do when it comes time to listen to and to recite for myself the classical laments for the fast of Tisha B'Av.

Much of what we say about Jerusalem in the synagogue is just not true any more.

It is obvious to anyone and everyone that Jerusalem does not lay in ruins. On the contrary, this is my fourth extended visit to Jerusalem in the last seven years. [They say: your not in galut if you commute.] Over the last seven years I have watched as buildings spread out from the center of town to the new neighborhoods. Now Jerusalem sprawls across the hills of Judea, south and north from Gilo to Ramot and beyond.

On the ninth day of Av this year the observant Jews of Jerusalem will congregate in synagogues throughout the city to mourn and lament. What they say inside these halls will not reflect the reality immediately outside them.

And so this year I have resolved to add some few paragraphs for myself, silently, to my prayers. Then when I leave the synagogue and step out into the rebuilt city of our people, I will feel that I have been candid in my meditations and forthright in my worship. I shall say something like this:

"Jerusalem is not desolate. It stands glorious above our Land. Our capital looks down on the miracle of the modern state of our people, rebuilt by the sweat and labor of our brethren and sisters. A thousand settlements testify to our return and we our homeless no more.

"The inhabitants of Jerusalem are not homeless. Beautiful buildings abound. Apartments, condominiums, villas, large and small. Hotels and hostels, old and new. Whosoever wishes may come and live here. Whosoever is hungry shall find sustenance here.

"Enemies do not govern our land. The Kenesset building, the site of our self-government, stands at the center of our new metropolis, a vibrant testimony to our freedom. Independent and sovereign we struggle with each other, and with the states of the world, and somehow we manage to live in harmony among ourselves, and to survive in the swirling community of nations.

"Yes, the Temple was destroyed. But we have built other edifices in its stead. Long ago, in another age, our national center was taken from us by forces we could not resist. But now we have built new structures where we symbolize and express our spirit, our minds and our creative energies, and most of all, our freedom.

"A great synagogue and many more stand in our capital. They serve as the many beating hearts of our spiritual organs. In dozens of Yeshivot teachers build the religious minds of our youth. Schools abound. When school is in session, wherever you turn their are children on their way to classes from kindergartens to high schools, soaking up the knowledge of our world.

"A great Hebrew University answers to the essence of our wider educational appetites, right here in the capital of our nation. In its laboratories, classrooms and libraries, students try to unravel the mysteries of nature and society and strive to construct a new and better order.

"The Israel Museum, the Bezalel School, the Jerusalem Theater and other institutions small and large, cater to our cultural needs. In Jerusalem today we display our past and our present. We sing and dance and we mourn no more. We paint and draw and sculpt and adorn the urban hub of our people, the crown of our Land.

"As we watch, day-by-day, luxury hotels go up and up. Lush green gardens bloom before us. We repose in parks and swimming pools. We find our needs in supermarkets, bakeries, and department stores. And we indulge our extravagances in shops and markets, elegant restaurants and offbeat cafes.

"The city of Jerusalem has been rebuilt. Still, the work is never done. And the struggle will not end. But our city is not desolate. How can we mourn? We must, yes, we are obliged, indeed, it is the highest duty, for us to celebrate. For with God's help, but in accord with our own will and with our own hands we have raised Jerusalem beyond its highest heights. Never before in all of our history has this city attained such glory.

And so that is what I shall add as I conclude my lamentations on Tisha B'Av this year. I shall be cheerful this year, and I will not mourn. But I shall do so silently because this is my own private devotion. Will others join me?

In a public lecture in Minneapolis in October 1986 I read this editorial and expanded upon it:

The personal response I received to this article was enormous. More people read this than any other piece I have written and almost all agreed with its sentiments. Only a few Orthodox friends hesitated in their praise because they interpreted my words as a call to abolish Tisha B'Av. Not at all, I told them. And they had better be more careful in what they read lest they make a mistake in interpretation when they consult the shulchan aruch. More than a month later I am still hearing good words about my reflections on the rebuilding of our holy city.

I could say much more, though the Jerusalem Post is not the only forum for criticism and discussion of the impact of modern Israel on the future of Judaism.

I felt strongly and for the first time without equivocation that we in the galut do not adequately appreciate the achievements of those who built the modern state. Never, even in the greatest ages of our people's history, in the kingdoms of David and Solomon, after the rebuilding of the Temple by Ezra and Nehemiah, or in the era of Herod the Great, never did our people achieve so much in the building of our land. Israel today is a true marvel. Its streets and infrastructures in all of its settlements, its political system, and of course, its military might, make it one of the great countries in the world.

And this accomplishment is even greater in light of the destruction and devastation which preceded it in Jewish history. Yet does the average American Jew understand or appreciate the modern state? I often doubt it.

[edit and repost from 2007]

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Will the War Against Religious Terrorism Ever End?

Will the War Against Religious Terrorism Ever End?

Mark Juergensmeyer, in Terror in the Mind of God, lays out five ways that the reign of religious terror can come to an end. Let's consider each. First consider the end will come with the forceful eradication of the terrorists, what appears to have been the US response to the 9/11 attacks, continued with the more recent killing of OBL.

Juergensmeyer outlines,

The first scenario is one of a solution forged by force. It encompasses instances in which terrorists have literally been killed off or have been forcibly controlled. If Osama bin Laden had been in residence in his camp in Afghanistan on August 10, 1998, along with a large number of leaders of other militant groups when the United States launched one hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles into his quarters, for instance, this air strike might have removed some of the persons involved in planning future terrorist acts in various parts of the world.

It would not have removed all of them, however, and the attempt may well have elevated the possibility of more terrorist acts in reprisal. The war-against-terrorism strategy can be dangerous, in that it can play into the scenario that religious terrorists themselves have fostered: the image of a world at war between secular and religious forces. A belligerent secular enemy has often been just what religious activists have hoped for. In some cases it makes recruitment to their causes easier, for it demonstrates that the secular side can be as brutal as it has been portrayed by their own religious ideologues.

The 1998 U.S. attack on Osama bin Laden's camp neither destroyed the militant Muslim's operations nor deterred his aggression. Immediately after the attack several other American embassies were targeted, and several months later, in February 1999, George Tenet, head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, announced to the press that he had "no doubt" that "Osama bin Laden and his world-wide allies and sympathizers" were plotting "further attacks" against U.S. installations and symbols of American power. In Algeria, attempts to eliminate Muslim militants also had violent repercussions. When the military junta in Algeria halted the elections and began running the country with an iron hand, popular support for the Islamic party and violent resistance against the junta escalated.

In order for the destructive strategy to work, a secular government must be willing to declare total war against religious terrorism and wage it over many years, as the Israeli government attempted to do against its terrorist opponents.

Second consider the approach of "cracking down" -- one step back from wiping them out. Juergensmeyer suggests this has not been and will not be a fruitful path.

A second scenario is once in which the threat of violent reprisals or imprisonment so frightens religious activists that they hesitate to act. This is the strategy adopted by many law enforcement agencies to "crack down" on terrorists: even if the authorities cannot eliminate the terrorists completely, they can at least frighten them by raising the stakes associated with involvement in terrorist activity.

Though some fringe members of activist groups may have been sobered by such threats, it is doubtful that the "get tough with terrorists" strategy has had much of an effect on the more dedicated members. In the view of most of them, the world is already at war, and they have always expected the enemy to act harshly. In fact, they would be puzzled if it did not. So the threat of an additional increment of penalty to be meted out for their actions has had little if any deterrent effect.

The case that is sometimes offered as a successful instance of terrorist intimidation is the one involving Libya. In the mid-1980s Libya was thought to harbor Muslim activists responsible for a series of acts of international terrorism against the United States. In 1986 the United States undertook an air strike against the leader of the country, Muammar el-Qaddafi, in reprisal. The missiles were aimed at one of his residences, and in fact a member of his family was killed in the attack, but el-Qaddafi himself survived. Over ten years later there were very few terrorist acts aimed at the United States attributed to Libya. Were the air strikes effective?

It is doubtful. Although it is possible that Libya was eventually intimidated by the strikes, the immediate response was quite different. According to the RAND--St. Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism, the number of terrorist incidents linked to Libya and directed against the United States rose in the two years following the U.S. air strikes: fifteen in 1987 and eight in I988. The most devastating terrorist attack against the United States in which Libya has been implicated--the tragic explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 on board--occurred in December 1988.

Third consider the possibility of violence winning. This example that Juergensmeyer cites seems less compelling when you consider that Rantisi was assassinated in April 2004:

The third scenario is the reverse of those cases in which terrorism is defeated or diffused: it is when terrorism, in some way, wins. This is the outcome for which every religious activist, understandably, has yearned. When I asked the Hamas leader Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi whether Jews and Muslims could live in harmony in the area he described as Palestine, he affirmed that they could--but not under the present arrangement. He could not accept "Israel's sovereignty over Palestinian land," he said. But the two groups could live in peace if the situation were reversed and the land were controlled by Palestinian Arabs. "Jews would be welcomed in our nation," Rantisi explained, adding that he did not hate Jews as such. He pledged not to mistreat them "when we become strong." He hoped for a South Africa-type solution, where the whole of the area would be united--Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank--and the Palestinians who had left the region would be allowed to return. With Arabs then a majority, Rantisi would accept democratic rule over the united region, which would be called something other than Israel.

It is a solution that would delight Palestinians both inside and outside the Hamas movement. Needless to say, it has not been a solution enthusiastically embraced by Israel. Given that fact, and considering that Israel holds a preponderance of military power in the region, could any part of the radical Islamic Palestinian objective be achieved? As I suggested earlier, acts of terrorism tend to be strategically unproductive and do not usually lead to transformations of power. If one is not willing to wait, as Dr. Rantisi claimed he was willing to do, beyond his own generation and perhaps the next, symbolic action will have to be replaced by the kind of strategic planning aimed at achieving goals either totally or incrementally. Revolutionary changes can occur through a well-organized mass movement, as in Iran, or an effective military force, as in Afghanistan. They might also come about through political pressures, as in Sudan and Pakistan, where regimes have capitulated to religious nationalist ideologies in what have been incremental but virtually bloodless coups. But as noted earlier, none of these cases has involved terrorist acts as the primary means of achieving power.

A fourth path to resolution entails the separation of religion from politics. Many would like to see this happen, but the likelihood now seems more remote than ever. Juergensmeyer discusses,

The fourth scenario for peace is one in which religion is taken out of politics and retired to the moral and metaphysical planes. As long as images of spiritual warfare remain strong in the minds of religious activists and are linked with struggles in the social world around them, the scenarios we have just discussed--achieving an easy victory over religious activists, intimidating them into submission, or forging a compromise with them--are problematic at best. In some cases where religious politics had previously been strong, however, the image of cosmic war itself has been transformed. A more moderate view of the image of religious warfare has been conceived, one that is deflected away from political and social confrontation.

The extreme form of this solution--one in which religion returns to what Casanova described as its privatization in the post-Enlightenment world--is unlikely, however. Few religious activists arc willing to retreat to the time when secular authorities ran the public arena and religion remained safely within the confines of churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues. Most religious activists regard the social manifestation of cosmic struggle to be at the very heart of their faith and dream of restoring religion to what they regard as its rightful position at the center of public consciousness.

Yet, in the 1990s, many Islamic countries witnessed a certain reaction against politicized religion. In 1999, Iranian students demonstrated in support of such leaders as the moderate theologian Abdol Karim Soroush, who argued that interpretations of religion are relative and change over time. He made a distinction between ideology and religion, and claimed that Muslim clergy had no business being in politics. Similar statements have been made by such moderate Islamic thinkers as Hassan Hanafi in Egypt, Rashid Ghannouchi in Tunisia, and Algeria’s Mohammed Arkoun. For them, the image of struggle consists largely of a spiritual battle or a contest between moral positions rather than between armed enemies.

The fifth path is one wherein, "secular authorities embrace moral values, including those associated with religion." Juergensmeyer gives several examples,

These moderate solutions have required the opponents in the conflict to summon at least a minimal level of mutual trust and respect. This respect has been enhanced and the possibilities of a compromise solution strengthened when religious activists have perceived governmental authorities as having a moral integrity in keeping with, or accommodating of, religious values. This, then, is the fifth solution: when secular authorities embrace moral values, including those associated with religion.

In some cases where religious violence has been quelled, religion has literally been subsumed under the aegis of governmental authorities. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the efforts of the government to destroy the Janarha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)--the People's Liberation Front--a movement supported by many radical Buddhist monks, were double-pronged. The harsh measures involved tracking down and killing the most dedicated members of the movement. The more accommodating measures included efforts to win the support of militant religious leaders. In 1990 President Ranasinghe Premadasa provided a fund for the financial support of Buddhist schools and social services, and created a Ministry of Buddhist Affairs, naming himself the first minister. Premadasa created a council of Buddhist advisers, including Buddhist monks who had been quite critical of the secular government previously. One of these told me in 1991 that after Premadasa's pro- religious measures, the government was finally beginning to "reflect Buddhist values."

In other cases, such as the British response to Irish terrorism, the government's stance in following the rule of law and not overreacting to terrorist provocations demonstrated its subscription to moral values. This made it difficult for religious activists--with the exception of Rev. Ian Paisley--to portray the government as a satanic enemy. It also increased the possibility of some sort of accommodation with religious activists on both sides of the Northern Ireland dispute--leading to the signing of a peace accord in 1998.

So, will the War Against Religious Terrorism Ever End? We hope it will. [reposted]

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Daily Beast: Is there a moderate islam?

We don't know what the question means when people ask, "Is there a moderate Islam?" There is no denying that Islam lends itself to radicalism and part of that agenda is deeply embedded in the Koran.

Sure, we wish to encourage moderate politics in Islam, especially when radical Islam is aimed at the US. But wishful thinking must not replace scholarship and analysis.

Chris Dickey writes that prominent Dutch politician, "Geert Wilders Says There's No Such Thing as Moderate Islam." He opines, "Can't Someone Tell Geert Wilders to Stop His Anti-Muslim Diatribes Before Somebody Gets Hurt?"

Is Dickey worried about Wilders getting hurt? That is not clear to us. In some ways there is no denying that Wilders is right. Moderate Islam exists when Muslims actively ignore core preachings of their religion.

It's much like Modern Orthodoxy in Judaism. To live it, you have to actively ignore deep seated essences of the rabbinic religious tradition.

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