Of brokered kidneys, money laundering and the Halacha

Is it me, or is it getting quite embarrassing being a Jew and reading the headlines in our nations newspapers. The Madoff scandal was bad for our public image, but he was a lone individual, every people has a bad egg. But last week, next to the headline, 44 Charged by U.S. in New Jersey Corruption Sweep, there was a picture of black suited rabbis wrapped in hang cuffs, not tefillin, and this list; "the rabbis arrested included Saul J. Kassin, 87, a leader of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and New Jersey; Mordchai Fish and Lavel Schwartz, both rabbis in Brooklyn; and Eliahu Ben Haim and Edmund Nahum, who lead congregations in Deal.” Oy!
When the last two governors of my great state of Illinois were arrested for corruption, I was embarrassed, but I had only voted for one of them, and neither was a member of my tribe. Now we have five community leaders, rabbis who teach and interpret Torah, arrested by the feds, how could this be? Or maybe we should ask why it doesn’t happen more often?
When I read about the rabbis in New Jersey and Brooklyn, my mind went directly to something Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the Israel scientist, Talmud scholar and peace activist explained about his orthodox beliefs, something that has bothered me for a while and may explain why some observant Jews can see themselves as so pious and yet behave so unethically.
For Leibowitz, whom I happen to see as a very ethical person, there are no such things as Jewish values. Observance is not a matter of right and wrong, it is about doing what God asks of Jews. While in our morning prayers we proclaim that God listens to our prayers, Leibowitz believes that worship is merely the fulfillment of a commandment. It is the service of the God who asks us to pray thrice daily. The same is true for other commandments that would seem otherwise neutral and value free such as keeping kosher or not mixing linen and wool. This is what God wants, so we do it. There is no value judgment. Not mixing milk and meat is just as important as visiting the sick because both are commanded by God. For me this explains why some rabbis can justify for themselves their money laundering and brokering of human organs. It affords them the ability to build their communities and continue to observe mitzvot. For me, this is observance of the letter of the law without respect or concern for the spirit of the law. I wonder what kind of God they imagine they are loyal to. In my system of beliefs, Judaism is designed to make us holy. What these rabbis in New Jersey did was not even mundane. It was a desecration.
This is not to say that those commandments that are not clearly ethical are null and void. That Reform approach to the Halacha, our Jewish way, also seems antithetical to the spirit of Judaism. Halacha is not a shmorgasbord of commands to be picked through like items in a rummage sale. It is a system of our practices that should be studied and reinterpreted in each generation, for the same reason that we pray to, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, The God of Jacob…” and hopefully the matriarchs as well, because in each of our forebears generations there was a unique understanding of the law and it’s inception. Starting out the Shmonah Esar, our silent prayers, with a reminder of this changing understanding keeps us in that beautiful and vital tradition. Jewish tradition that is fundamentally good, not fundamentalist. The letter of the law is subjugated to the spirit of the law and its adherents. Just ask Rabbi akiva.
While I am ashamed of these rabbis in New Jersey, and dread the public scrutiny of our beliefs, there is a part of me that wants to make lemonade from these lemons. Now we have a chance to confront the fundamentalism in our own backyard and ask what it really means to be observant. Now we are nudged to ask why we observe the way we do and what are the intentions of our laws. And now we are confronted with a conflict between laws and ethics, and good thinking comes out of these conflicts. So let’s not totally hang our heads low and feel the well deserved shame of our co-religionists. Let’s take this as an opportunity and reexamine where we stand and why we stand there so that each and every one of us can own the tradition as we understand it in our time.