National Scholar Updates

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook wrote, “The wise do not complain of darkness rather they increase the light.” The Orthodox and greater Jewish community seems racked by scandal after scandal where laymen, political leaders and rabbis are demonstrating what can only be termed ”ethicopathy”- the complete disregard for ethical living and consciousness.  While it may be instinctive to invoke the aphorism, ”There is always a bad apple in every bunch” thus placing the onus of responsibility on the individual’s lack of moral scruples, I believe this would not do justice to what I sense is a systemic and communal responsibility in how we are educating are children, adults as well as our rabbis.  As a member of the Orthodox community my focus will be on my own religious community which I am most familiar with and which sadly seems as of late quite efficient in producing rare but nonetheless ethicopaths of the first order.

Allow me to begin with a seemingly ridiculous question, ”Does the Orthodox community care about ethical living?” As an Orthodox rabbi I would immediately reply, “Ofcourse we do- what an absurd question! Look at all the commandments that touch on ethical living, look at all the statements of our Talmudic sages that emphasize the importance of ethics in business and in one’s personal dealings, look at all the stories of the righteous past and present and the behavior they have modeled for generation after generation and look at the contemporary books on Jewish ethics available at Judaica stores.” Clearly, everything in the above statement is true, however, if we refine the question in light of the above rebuttal I believe the point that is seeking to be made will crystallize. I mean to ask, ”Do we ‘emphasize’ and ‘prioritize’ ethical living in the education of our children, adults and rabbis?” Now to this question the rebuttal does not come so simply. When I consider what the Orthodox community “emphasizes” and “prioritizes” in all honesty ethical living does not immediately appear to register as very high on the totem pole of concerns. If you will allow me to free associate the emphasis of our community seems to be: Daf Yomi, Daily Minyan, Shabbat, Kashrut, Berachot, Niddah, Eruv’s, Theology, Holidays, Tzniyut and Women’s Issues, Conversion, Carlebach davening and Israel. Our children spending the vast majority of their sacred studies school time focused on classical text study of Chumash, Nach, Mishna, Talmud and Mishna Berurah with a dose of Hebrew Language and Zionsim within the more Modern contexts and yes we will attend a Darfur rally as well.”

Now, a little voice inside me says, ”I know this may not sound like we emphasize and prioritize ethics but they are laden within all the Torah we are studying and in our communal way of living.” Now, this answer albeit sincere is what I will call the theory of ethical development through “osmosis”. This approach was once marshaled against Rabbi Yisrael Salanter zt’l the founder of the 19^th century Mussar movement who attempted with limited success to instill a particular focus on psychological awareness and ethical cultivation within the traditional Yeshiva system.  His rabbinic opponents then and now argued that Torah alone sufficed for generations and there was no special need for “wasting time” from Torah study for Mussar. His response was that while a spiritual diet of Torah alone may have sufficed for prior generations this was not viable in the historical situation they found themselves in -think late 19^th century! So, if we fast forward to the early 21^st century and we survey our receding moral landscape let us ask some very simple questions: Is there any Orthodox High School from Left to Right that offers its students a 6 month class 1 hr a week in “Ethical Living in the Modern World”? Are any of our rabbinical seminaries from the Left to Right preparing our rabbis to deal with the ethical and psychological challenges they will face in their professional capacities as teachers, counselors, mentors and fundraisers?

I believe the answer to these questions are as follows: There is no such High School program within Orthodoxy focusing on ethical living in a modern context according to Torah. To the extent that any rabbis are being prepared for the ethical and psychological challenges of the rabbinate this is at best limited to Modern Orthodox seminaries like Yeshiva University and Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and this is quite recent and what further questionable how well and thoroughly they are being prepared.

So if we are operating on an ethics by osmosis educational theory than we should not be surprised that some individuals even rabbis have less an ability to develop into ethical human beings via this method. Consequently, they produce the outrageous moral scandals and immoral wonders of the rabbinic world that we get to read about in the paper to our shock, indignation and horror. Alternatively, and what is more often the case these ethical failings are kept under wraps or are simply unknown until at times an all out catastrophe occurs. Then we all lament the gross desecration of God’s name for a week and then go back to “Torah life as usual” until the cycle repeats and the next ethicopath surfaces in the headlines. If we would take the “Salanterian approach” or the,” What would Rav Yisroel do?” We would make the focus on both psychological awareness and ethical cultivation a fundamental part of our schooling of both our children, adults and our rabbis. In my opinion we are not doing this. We are placing our emphasis on learning limited and narrow portions of Tanakh, Mishna, Talmud and Halakha- the halakhic portion of which mostly revolves around the holidays, shabbat, prayer and daily ritual life. In the Modern Orthodox community we also emphasize and prioritize that our children learn Modern Hebrew and get a “College” preparatory education. Make no mistake I would be very happy for my children to go to Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Princeton or Stanford and for them to make aliyah but like you I do not want any of them ending up with the moral profiles of some of the rabbis, political leaders or laymen that have been dis-gracing the newspapers and television networks.

Now, one could argue that if ethics are so dear to me than I should focus on this at home. However, this suggestion strikes me as prima fascia absurd as I do not believe it is asking very much (for 15-25k a year per pupil) for rabbis who are dedicating their lives to Torah education and in light of the recent and not so recent scandalous events to realize the importance of incorporating a contemporary moral and ethical curriculum into the very fabric of our Torah High Schools. If our Yeshivot were living and breathing an ethical vision and emphasis than those individuals who for whatever reason of nature and nurture are psychologically and morally challenged they will have a more supportive environment within which to grow and will feel more of a responsibility to live up to the standards we all hold dear. Our Torah curriculum cares primarily about mastering basic and intermediate Biblical, Talmudic and Post Talmudic textual skills, covering what are designated as essential Talmudic texts, getting into the routine of twice or thrice daily prayer with as much attention and meaning as possible, learning Modern Hebrew and learning about the holidays, basic Jewish thought and history. Again, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this curriculum, however please do not imagine that our schools are focused on creating ethically sensitive and educated young adults who are prepared for the ethical challenges of modern living- they are not and do not expect a university education even at Yeshiva University to be of much assistance either.    

Let me be clear, that attention to “Middot” (Character Development) while important, is necessary but not sufficient. Ethical living involves the application of Middot in highly charged real life contexts that transcend being nice to one’s classmates and not speaking Lashon Hara. Additionally, I do not believe that any school really makes even Middot a true focus (unless you consider derech eretz for teachers the summum bonum of ethics and being quiet on a bus or hallway a predictor or ethical refinement). Rather, even Middot are a side dish for the “meat, bread and potatoes” and is typically given tangential emphasis with a little story sent home in the bulletin or a tidbit of a story shared in class. Usually “Middot” only becomes a real focus when a child has real behavioral problems. Just because one’s child is not problematic does not mean that one’s child is being ethically cultivated and groomed.

It would be quite wrong to presume that holiness, devotional piety, Torah knowledge and observance of ritual law are identical with or somehow per force lead to ethical behavior. In reality, holiness, devotional piety, Torah knowledge and observance of ritual law are not only not identical to ethical behavior they sometimes can mislead a person into believing that they are beyond the need for ethical behavior! Additionally, the analytic and highly complex interpretive methodologies one is trained in, the rabbinic legal fictions one is exposed to and the endless divergence of opinions and divergences of opinions built on divergences of opinions can be enlisted to rationalize unethical behavior. Think this is the ramblings of a Modern mind who has studied too much Freud and Kant? The tradition itself points these concerns out, ”Once (Torah) wisdom enters a person cunning enters within them.” (Talmud Bavli Sotah 21b)  The sages warned against becoming a, ”Pervert with permission of the Torah.”(Rambam on Parashat Kedoshim 19:2)  They also shared with us a story of two Kohanim (the embodiments of holiness) racing up the altar (the embodiment of divine service) so that they could be first to perform the initial temple service of the day. What is the result of these holy aspirants eagerness to express their religious devotionalism? One Kohen stabs and kills the other! (The embodiment of a lack of ethics). Then the top concern of the Kohanim becomes preserving the ritual purity of the knife! (embodiment of observance of ritual Law). This is the knife that is still stuck in the heart of the dying Kohen who is withering around in pain and blood. This Aggadah is teaching us explicitly what distorted religious priorities and values look like. The rabbis in the Talmud reflecting on this story say that,”The purity of ritual vessels was greater to them in importance than murder!” (Talmud Bavli Yoma 23a) Just in case you are wondering what the end game was it was called the Destruction of the Second Temple. Of the rare individuals who are listed in the Mishna Sanhedrin (10:2)   as not having a portion in the World to Come a couple of them were among the greatest Torah scholars of their generation, were I imagine quite frum and ofcourse were prominent members of their rabbinic associations and their Yeshiva Alumni. There is a reason our rabbis tell us these stories and teachings- yet do we really collectively take them in? Do we allow them to change how we are educating?     

What would such an ethical preparatory Torah curriculum look like for a Torah High School? I will share a few ideas with the disclaimer that we have many great and creative Torah educators and if they put their minds to it I am sure it will be the finest program in the world. I would say that for High School students the course should include a combination of case study and text study using a multi- media approach incorporating news articles, T.V. clips and where available documentaries. We take a case of a person who violated a Torah ethic and we examine how this played out for them. What was their life like before and after? What were their likely motivations for doing this? How did their unethical behavior impact others and their families? After having gotten this real life exposure to a practical expression of unethical living and the ensuing disaster, now let us examine with classical texts what the Torah says on these ethical and psychological issues. This could then generate class discussion and creative writing assignments with an emphasis on how students potenially may feel at all challenged in similar ways and how they can in the present and future cope with such challenges. I would also dare suggest that the class take a visit to a minimum security prison for white collar criminals and meet with some of the Jewish inmates and have a frank discussion with them about how they view their choices and what was going on with them that led to such choices. We could also bring in various professionals from the community and have them share how they have been challenged ethically in their respective professional lives and how they have navigated these challenges. Lastly, even the core curriculum that we teach can be taught in a way that emphasizes the ethical insights, fundamentals and applications of what is being learned.  I am quite confident that this course if done correctly would be the most interesting and memorable course in Torah our students ever had!   

In regards to preparing rabbis for their many psychological and ethical challenges they will face I would say that two things are utterly necessary and easily doable. Firstly, rabbis who function inevitably as psychological counselors, mentors and confidants should be made to undergo at least two years of individual or group psychotherapy to become simply said, ”more aware of themselves.” It is very unwise to create rabbis who know the rabbinic tradition infinitely more than they know themselves. The depth of one’s Talmudic or Halakhic learning will not directly help a rabbi in certain trials that rabbis face whereas knowing one’s underlying motivations, typical defense mechanisms and character weaknesses will. In addition, rabbinical students should be presented with in crystal clear and graphic terms the ways that other rabbis have morally failed and this should be dissected for them psychologically and halakhically no different than they pour over a Tosafot, Shach or a Bet Yosef. It would be quite helpful for rabbinic seminaries to bring in as possible the moral failures of the rabbinate (the repentant varieties) and have them share how they made the mistakes they made, what they think they should have done different and how in their view these mistakes could have been avoided. I think the shock value of even one of these morbid and heartbreaking lectures would do a lot of good. If its not realistic that it be firsthand then let it be second hand from someone who was close to them and watch it go down. It is only, in my view, through these two methods in tandem that there is any hope that those individuals who may be prone to moral failure will be given a head start at preempting their eventual moral decline and debasement.

Ask yourself of any of the rabbis who have morally collapsed that you are aware of –did any of them have any preparation for the psychological and ethical challenges they were to face? I can tell you from personal experience of knowing more than half a dozen of them throughout my twenty year student/teacher career-the answer is NO. Unless you consider: Parashat Hashuvuah, Nach, Talmud, Rishonim, Tur, Bet Yosef, Kabbalah and Chassidut with a dose of Yirat Shamayim shmoozes and Mesilat Yesharim sufficient preparation. Rabbis who molest children, who are sexually promiscuous with their congregants or students, who embezzle charity funds …. These are highly complex, distorted and struggling souls who to make matters worse are often brilliant, charismatic, articulate and highly motivated to learn, teach, lead and change the world-it’s a morally hazardous combination. True, they are a small minority but it is hard for me to believe that the moral and relatively speaking psychologically healthy majority will be harmed by this curricular enhancement and the consequences of not including it are dire for those who fly beneath the radar of their rabbinic teachers which may not at all be attuned to these matters which can be quite psychologically subtle and beneath the surface.

Consider, if lawyers, medical doctors, psychologists and accountants must study the ethical issues that they will face as part and parcel of their studies should not rabbis? This is in today’s vernacular a “no-brainer.” Yet, tell me one Yeshivah outside of Modern Orthodoxy that does anything sophisticated and thorough to prepare its rabbis for these ethical conflicts and challenges. Let me save you some time there are NONE. While there are no guarantees there are precautions that can be taken and we have enough experience to know by now I would hope that precautionary measures are necessary.    

If we are at all serious of not producing more ethicopaths who: defraud, steal, molest, abuse their power as clergy, show utter disregard for the life of non-Jewish human beings and collectively do not really take in the implications of desecrating the name of God then we must evolve beyond the educational theory of ethics by “osmosis” to the educational theory of ethics by “active prioritization”. We need to initiate an ethical renewal within Orthodoxy, a renewal that will be welcomed by our fellow co-religionist’s in Judaism and can serve as a bridge where we can all meet on level playing ground. If the first question we are asked when we encounter the heavenly tribunal is, ”Did you conduct yourselves honesty and with faith in your business dealings?” (Talmud Bavli Shabbat 31a) Then, I would imagine that there is an esteemed place for a structured curriculum that seeks to actively and directly inculcate contemporary applications for psychological and ethical awareness and moral development in our children, adults and our rabbis.  

Being a light unto the nations and a holy people is quite a challenge but let us at least not be an utter disgrace.  The world village that is rapidly emerging and the mass media technologies that provide instant audio and visual communication make it absolutely imperative to our spiritual mission as a people that we become more ethically focused, refined and developed. Please accept this essay as a modest call to that sacred end.          

Located on a landbridge between Africa and the Middle East, Israel is a small country with a unique environmental landscape and a wide range of climates and ecosystems. Within the span of just a few hours, it is possible to drive from the lowest point on earth, where you can swim in the Dead Sea, to the top of Mt. Hermon, where you can go skiing.

Before the creation of the State of Israel, the land was mostly empty and barren. The population density was low. In the last 60 years, Israel has transformed into one of the most densely populated countries on earth.

Israel has been side-tracked by rapid development, consecutive wars, and civil unrest, which have led to wanton use of scare resources and full-scale environmental destruction. With so many people fighting over ownership of the land, very few of the players have actually made the protection of the land itself a priority. Although many people are concerned about the existential threat to Israel, many overlook the very real threat to the health of Israeli citizens by environmental hazards. Recent research has shown that the number of deaths per year from environmental-related illnesses—including respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer—is in the thousands.

It is easy to get depressed when working in the environmental field here in Israel. There are so many problems, and environmental issues are generally not taken seriously. The ramifications of ignoring environmental issues are dire—they include health problems, energy shortages, and water shortages. Israel is on the brink of numerous disasters. That said, I am not worried about Israel at all. For better or worse, Israelis thrive on emergencies. Long-term planning is basically non-existent. Israelis fly by the seat of their pants—and one way or another, they generally end up on top. That is why, faced with the unmitigated environmental mess that Israel has right now, I have hope. The challenge will not be whether or not Israel can handle the challenge; it will be proving to the government and the average Israeli that the threat is real, imminent, and requires immediate action.

Israel is a small country with few natural resources but enormous scientific, engineering, and academic resources. The miracle of this country is that the threats that I am writing about today can be a thing of the past in just a few years. Israel already has within its borders enough ingenuity to transform its environment from one on the brink of disaster to a light unto the nations (based on renewable energy, of course).

Although creating solutions to environmental problems is initially costly and challenging, the reward is also very high. Not only will such solutions create a healthier population and ecosystem; but due to the demand for new technologies to solve the global environmental crisis, they will lead to enduring economic prosperity.

Israel is already a world leader in the new field of clean technology. But like Israel's best fruits, the best technology is being exported to other countries. This is not the fault of the companies themselves, many of which would like to see their technologies adopted regardless of any profit. Unfortunately they cannot overcome the bureaucratic barriers in place by government agencies that do not recognize the importance or potential of adopting clean technology into their infrastructure.

Industry and economic prosperity are no longer at odds with environmental protection. The systematic solution to Israel's problems is the creation of a thriving industry in clean technology.

In this article, I will outline Israel's basic environmental challenges and potential solutions. I will also introduce readers to new concepts of Israeli ingenuity that can lead to dramatic differences in the Israeli ecosystem over the next few years. Because Israel is an ecosystem, all things are connected; so too, in this article each section is connected to the other. I have broken the article into topics of water, air quality, transportation, and energy. Each of these subjects overlaps with the others. It is impossible to separate pollution from poor public transportation and air quality in general; but for the purpose of coherency, I will try to tackle each topic one at a time.

There are two very different schools of thought that are currently emerging into today's Israeli environmental movement: the "old school" of traditional conservationists versus the new clean technology field. While they should not be at odds, they have yet to join together. Traditional conservationists focus mainly on protecting resources, preventing development, and acting as a regulatory force for industrial development. Clean technology is a term that has developed over the last five years to describe new technologies that produce solutions for environmental problems—specifically in the areas of energy, transportation, and water.

Water

Water is Israel's most pressing environmental challenge—and is indeed the area where Israel has made the most progress. The barren landscape provides very few natural water resources, and the explosions of industry and population have led to a major drain on the sparse water resources that already exist. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Israel's water situation is dire and that the future of the country (and some say the future of peace in the Middle East) is dependent on the management of this precious resource.

The mighty Jordan river has been reduced to a trickle, and many of Israel's other rivers have either dried up or become contaminated by industrial discharge, sewage, and agricultural pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizer. Due to five years of low rainfall, Israel is in the midst of a draught. The Kinneret, Israel's only freshwater lake, consistently sinks below the minimum level that it needs to maintain its integrity without turning into a swamp; and even the Dead Sea is reaching record lows and is at risk of drying up completely. Most drinking water comes from coastal and mountain aquifers, which are quickly being drained or polluted. Demand and consumption have been increasing steadily, and supplies are dwindling.

Israelis have worked to improve the water economy in numerous ways—desalinization, water-saving technologies, extensive use of recycled water, purification systems for aquifers and fresh water systems, and the institution and enforcement of stricter regulation. The government has set up a new tax that gives all residents an allotment of water per month for a reasonable price. Those who go over this amount pay a hefty fee, which rises proportionally to the amount of water used, with people who use the most paying more per cubic meter. This policy has just been put into place, and it remains to be seen what the effect will be. Officials are optimistic.

Although Israel has been developing these technologies for domestic use, the technologies are proving to be groundbreaking in both innovation and application. Oceans cover 70 percent of the world's surface and constitute 97 percent of the world's water. Of the 3 percent of the world's fresh water, an estimated 70 percent is contained in the polar ice caps and is not available for human consumption—leaving only approximately 1 percent of the world's water available for human use. Until recently, fresh water has been considered to be a finite resource; but Israel is proving that this is not the case. Israel has developed and implemented the process of desalinization, which extracts fresh water from ocean water. This is a major innovation. By the end of 2009, desalinization will produce about 40 percent of the country's domestic consumption; this is expected to rise to 80 percent by 2014.

International agencies are now seeking Israeli solutions for help to solve the global freshwater shortage. It is estimated that there are more than 1 billion people worldwide who do not have access to clean water on a regular basis. The World Health Organization claims that poor drinking water and inadequate sanitation claim the lives of approximately 5 million people per year due to water- related health issues, including dysentery, schistosomiasis, trachoma, or infestation with ascaris, guinea worm, or hookworm.

Water security is one of Israel's chief concerns and the environmental issue that Israel is most successfully tackling. Israel's commitment to ensuring clean water availability for the future will not only help the population of the country but also, it seems, will help people around the world.

Air Quality

Air quality represents one of Israel's the most immediate health concerns and is often called an "invisible killer.” It is one of the most serious problems—but also one of the easiest environmental problems to solve. Air flows from one region to the next, and there is no need to actually clean the air; simply stopping to pollute it will fix the problem. Air pollution is easy to pinpoint and must be dealt with at its source. Emission standards, which are set and enforced by the government, are the most important aspect of any clean-air initiative. At this point, Israel's official standards are good, but they are poorly enforced; in many cities, pollutant levels are approximately 65 percent above the levels set by the World Health Organization.

Israel's air quality is measured by a national network that has over 2,000 stations throughout the country. There are various problems, depending on the region. Most air pollution is created by transportation, energy production, and industry, and these have all increased dramatically over the last few years. The number of vehicles in Israel has almost doubled within the last ten years, as has electricity consumption. The major air pollutants are particle matter, nitrous oxides, ozone, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and lead.

Air pollution in Israel is aggravated by its very own landscape. The small land area, arid climate, lack of rain, and coastal industries near densely populated communities create increasingly poor air quality. Haifa Bay is one of the hardest-hit areas, as it combines intense industrial activity with difficult atmospheric dispersion conditions caused by the Mediterranean Sea and the topography of Mount Carmel. This leads to high levels of pollutants that are not easily dispersed. Despite efforts over the years to reduce air pollution levels, they have been mostly unsuccessful. A new approach is being implemented that will now focus more on emission standards as opposed to ambient toxin levels in hopes of regulating the creation of the problem.

There are a number of simple and effective solutions that Israel can put in place to preserve air quality. One of the most important is to regulate industry. Tight controls on emissions from factories will reduce the amount of toxic chemicals released into the atmosphere.

Another problem, which has social implications, is the uncontrolled burning of garbage. Pound for pound, an uncontrolled fire can produce thousands of times more toxins into the atmosphere than a high-temperature incinerator. Garbage burning is particularly commonplace in Arab areas. This leads to extremely bad air quality in the villages and contributes to air pollution in general leading to significant health problems for the entire population.

Transportation is another major cause of air pollution. It is effective to set higher standards on car emissions, but that is not the ideal. The ideal is to get combustion engine vehicles off the road by switching to public transportation that is environmentally sustainable, such as light rails and trains. For those who want to continue to own their own car but lower their carbon footprint, Israel is introducing a network for electric cars that will be online in the next few years. This will be discussed in greater detail in the transportation section of this article.

Finally, energy production, which will also be discussed in more detail, is a major air pollutant. Coal-burning plants and fossil fuels are the main sources of air pollution spreading poisonous gases into the air. As with transportation, regulation of emissions on the current use of energy production is helpful; but the ideal is to switch energy production to new, cleaner resources such as solar, wind, and water power.

Transportation

Israel has become an increasingly mobile society. It is not uncommon for Israelis to make long commutes, travelling from one city to the next—and at times, from one side of the country to the other—for work. In the early years of the State, public transportation was a priority, and many people relied on Egged, the national bus company, to get from place to place; but this is no longer the case. Public transportation lacks funding, and many bureaucrats have been following the poor example set by the United States of building more roads as opposed to light rails and trains, which are common in Europe.

The majority of Israelis still travel by public transportation, primarily on buses. Egged is still the largest bus company, but it is not as ubiquitous as it once was. Despite the rise in people's mobility and their need for transportation, there has not been a significant rise in the number of buses since the 1980s. Private cars in Israel used to be seen as a luxury item, but due to rapid economic growth and poor government planning, many Israelis now need private cars because they lack alternative means of transportation. High gas prices and associated costs make owning a car extremely expensive; and it is not unheard of for people to spend up to one third of their monthly salary on a car and its associated costs. In 1960 there were 70,000 vehicles in Israel, and the vehicle density was ten cars for every kilometer of road. Today there are an estimated 2.1 million cars on the road, and the vehicle density has risen to an average of 120 cars per kilometer.

A prime example of this is the Modi'in area (between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), which is touted as being one of the best planned cities in the country. Modi'in has been developed primarily over the past ten years, and the city is still under construction. The only public transportation is an inadequate bus system that does not connect to any of the outlying areas. In the center of Modi'in, there is a train station that connects to almost every major city in the country. Unfortunately, most bus lines do not stop at the train station, and surrounding villages have almost no access by public transportation at all. Extensive research has shown that for intercity public transportation to work there must be intracity public transportation as well. If people cannot easily travel from the train to their final destination, they will not take the train. This unfortunately leaves Modi'in with a beautiful new station and relatively few passengers.

Although public transportation is generally considered the ideal for environmental preservation, there are cleaner options for private transportation than the existing combustion engine car. Israel is about to become the first country in the world to have in place a national network of electric cars and charging stations. In a study done in 2009 (by Project Better Place), 57 percent of Israelis reported that they would make their next car purchase an electric vehicle if given the option.

Project Better Place is a private company based in Israel, with branches in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Canada, and Japan. They are the world's leading electric vehicle (EV) services provider, and they have already begun work on a series of charging stations throughout Israel. They have signed contracts with all of Israel's major malls, with train stations, and with Jerusalem's Mayor Nir Barkat, who will place charging stations throughout the city of Jerusalem for a pilot project starting this year.

Israel is currently the world leader in electric vehicle adoption, and it will be interesting to see how this develops in the near future. Electric cars are cleaner and better for the environment than gas guzzling combustion engines, but it begs the question: Where is Israel going to get the electricity to meet the country's transportation needs?

Energy

            As Israel develops technologically and the standard of living rises, its energy needs are also rising. From cars to air conditioners, Israelis are becoming used to amenities that were almost unheard of just a few years ago. This has led to electric blackouts in the summers when energy needs are highest, and is setting up a future energy crisis where Israel will not be able to meet the needs. Energy experts agree that Israel lacks the proper infrastructure to meet the growing demands. Immediate measures need to be taken to ensure the energy supply.

Israel is, unfortunately, dependent on fossil fuels for the production of electricity; but since it has no natural resources of fossil fuels, it has to depend mainly on long-term contracts with countries including Mexico, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Australia for oil. Israel is one of the only countries that has a power grid that is not connected to that of any other nation—making Israel into a virtual electric island. For security reasons, it is vital that Israel secure its power production. Due to the animosity of surrounding countries, Israel has no access to the copious amounts of oil from neighboring oil-rich nations. Because of that, Israel relies on coal, imported mainly from South Africa, for its electric power generating plants.

Coal is an extremely dirty source of fuel, creating hundreds of thousands of tons of ash per year. Burning coal releases mercury, selenium, boron, and dioxins, which are extremely dangerous, and the process also contributes to global warming by emitting carbon dioxide and methane (greenhouse gases). Burning coal also creates acid rain, which has harmful effects on plants, aquatic animals, and infrastructure. Environmental Minister Gilad Erdan has recently campaigned against the proposed coal power plant, which would increase existing emissions by more than 10 percent.

Last year, natural gas was found off the coast of Haifa, and plans are being made to use this resource for energy production. Although this could keep Israel running with its existing infrastructure, it will someday run out and leave the country in the same situation that it is in today.

New polices and alternative energy can help boost the level of energy available. A more intelligent use of existing resources can also help to avert the pending environmental crisis. This can be done by encouraging the use of energy-efficient appliances, doing things as simple as turning off lights in rooms that are not in use, and being selective about the use of air conditioners in the heat of summer. Simple actions such as planting trees can cut a house's energy usage by 15 percent due to the shade. Saving energy can be more effective than finding new (even "green”) ways to produce it.

Most important, Israel needs to change its source of energy to renewable sources such as solar, wind, wave, and bio fuels. Israeli companies are leading the way in technological innovation, but this innovation is being applied mainly in other countries. Prime Minister Netanyahu has claimed that the country is on a path toward energy independence, and Environmental Minister Gilad Erdan has expressed a commitment to following through on that claim.

Although it is a step in the right direction that the government has begun to see energy independence as a vital goal, it will be interesting to see how this will play out on the ground. As of now, there has been little progress to move this agenda forward.

Conclusion
 

Despite Israel's leap into the "first world" in regard to standards of living, Israel is still very much a third-world nation. Rampant pollution, poor resource management, and a government that has not taken environmental issues seriously have led Israel to the brink of major ecological crisis. Israeli citizens are paying the price for this with both their health and their financial resources. Israel can no longer afford to see the environment as an issue for the future; it must realize that now is the time to act.

The combination of lack of natural resources and political isolation has created the necessity for Israel to take its place as a world leader in clean technology and to lead by example. It is not enough for Israeli scientists and engineers to create companies for the Nasdaq. They must see their work in action, protecting both the environment in Israel and Israel's political interests.

The future of protecting the Israeli environment is a partnership between government, industry, clean-technology companies, and environmental protection agencies. Natural resources are finite, but renewable resources are not. The wind and the sun, plants and waves will continue to create energy long after the last oil mine has been tapped. If Israel chooses, it can lead the way not just in technology but also by example, creating a cleaner and better environment for its citizens and for the world.

Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism
by
Rabbi Marc D. Angel

has been selected as a finalist of the

2009 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD
in the category of
Scholarship

This book was selected after careful analysis by a panel of three judges who are all authorities in their field. The judges encountered a great deal of difficulty in making their decisions this year. Several categories offered many viable candidates, which made the selection even harder. It is gratifying to know there is a wide range of Jewish content books available. This book now joins the ranks of the hundreds of well-respected, classic Jewish books that have been National Jewish Book Award finalists. The National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 59th year, is the longest-running program of its kind in North America.

Copies of "Maimonides, Spinoza and Us" are available from the online store at www.jewishideas.org. Institute members receive a 20% discount. This book is not only a great addition to your home library, but will make an excellent gift.

The Underlying Question of Health Reform

The origins of the current acrimonious Health Reform debate of 2009 can be understood in the context of a comparison between two biblical brothers: Kayin and Yosef. As Jews and as human beings, we are expected to work for Tikkun Olam-to heal the world. We are provided with the means to do so: mitzvoth (commandments and acts of kindness) and tsedakah (acts of charity). Modern science has provided many tools to support these efforts, including epidemiology, which is the basic science of public health and health-care planning. Two inter-related issues that have not received adequate attention during the debates around health-care reform relate to public health and preventive medicine, and the underlying assumptions about whether health care is a universal right or a commodity purchasable in proportion to one's financial means.

This essay will explore some of the contributions to this discussion of epidemiology, and will seek insights from examples drawn from Torah and Ketubim. In particular, we will examine the different attitudes of Kayin and Yosef toward their brothers. This contrast can be best seen by examining Kayin's immortalized response, "Am I my brother's keeper?" to God's question, "Where is your brother, Hevel?" I believe that this is the fundamental question underlying the Health Reform debate, and unless we reveal and resolve these competing visions of health care-as a right and responsibility-or as a commodity-we will be unable to resolve this dilemma.

Kayin, who was described as an "oved adama," a servant of the land, refused to take care of his brother, and his actions were directly responsible for Hevel's death. In contrast, Yosef proposed and implemented food, land and crop management, and tax policies that took care of his brothers, their families, his adopted nation and all the nations of the world. Thus, Yosef serves as a model for public-health leadership and an exemplar of universal access to care and responsible environmental management. We need to look more closely at the two narratives [emphasis added]:

Kayin and Yosef: Two Models of Public-Health Leadership?

Kayin:
And God said to Kayin, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? Is it not so that if you improve, it will be forgiven you? If you do not improve, however, at the entrance, sin is lying, and to you is its longing, but you can rule over it.' (Genesis 4:6-7).
And God said to Kayin: 'Where is your brother, Hevel?' And [Kayin] said: 'I don't know; am I my brother's keeper?' And God said: 'What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries unto Me from the ground. (Genesis 4:9-11)

Yosef:
And [Yisrael] said to [Yosef]: Go now, look after your brothers' welfare, and the well-being of the flock; and bring me back word. (Genesis 37:14)
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Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint overseers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven years of plenty. And let them gather all the food of these good years that come, and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. And the food shall be for a store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine." (Genesis 41:34-36)
And Yosef went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went throughout all the land of Egypt. And in the seven years of plenty the earth brought forth in heaps. And he gathered up all the food of the seven years which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities; the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. And Yosef laid up corn as the sand of the sea, very much, until they left off numbering; for it was without number. (Genesis 41:46-49)
And the famine was over all the face of the earth; and Yosef opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians; and the famine was sore in the land of Egypt. And all countries came into Egypt to Yosef to buy corn; because the famine was sore in all the earth. (Genesis 41:56-57)
And it shall come to pass at the ingatherings, that you shall give a fifth unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones.' And they said: 'You have saved our lives.' (Genesis 49:24-25)
----------------------------------
And now be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me; for God did send me [to Egypt] before you to preserve life. For these two years there has been famine in the land; and there are still five years, in which there shall be neither plowing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to give you a remnant on the earth, and to save you alive for a great deliverance. So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God. (Genesis 45:5-8)
And Yosef sustained his father, and his brothers, and all his father's household with bread, according to the want of their little ones. (Genesis 47:12)
And Yosef said unto them: 'Do not be afraid for am I in the place of God? And as for you, you did mean evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. Now therefore do not be afraid; I will sustain you, and your little ones.' And he comforted them, and spoke kindly unto them. (Genesis 50:19-21)

Competing Visions of Health Reform

Perhaps the most heated political debates surround the topic of "Health Reform," where the different sides of the often agitated discussions argue over various visions of improving access to health-care services, controlling costs, improving health-care quality, and eliminating disparities in clinical and public-health (population-health) outcomes. Competing visions of health-care reform range from universal access with a single-payer system, to a hybrid of private insurance companies, either with or without the so-called "public option," which may take the form of a government-run insurance program that competes with private insurers. The inclusion of a public option has been one of the more controversial aspects of the debate. Critics of the public option suggest that government-run health care "will offer the level of service of the Department of Motor Vehicles and the level of quality of the U.S. Post Office," or is a "step on the way to socialized medicine." Supporters of the public option argue that this is a necessary element to provide sufficient competitive pressure for the private insurers to keep premium costs affordable, or alternatively, to provide coverage in markets where no private insurers offer coverage. In a U.S. population of approximately 308 million, it is estimated that at least 50 million people-one in six-are currently uninsured, and a significant multiple of that figure are underinsured or one paycheck away from being uninsured, with over 80 million having been without insurance at some point in the previous year. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of U.S. citizens are already covered by some form of public option. If we consider the combined U.S. populations already served by Medicare (age 65+ or disabled), Medicaid (poor children and adults), Child Health Plus (low-income children), Veterans Administration (former military), TriCare (Department of Defense), Indian Health Service (Native Americans), Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (Congress and Federal Employees), Prison Health Services (incarcerated) and Federally Qualified Health Centers (low-income uninsured/working poor), an estimated 150 million Americans or nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population of over 307 million are currently covered entirely or part by a public
insurance program supported through taxes.

A second area of dissent surrounds the decisions about coverage of specific services, and the fear of "health-care rationing," as if rationing is not already taking place -either by income, ethnicity, age or geography. The emerging scientific discipline of "comparative effectiveness research" has been offered as the basis to be used for identifying which health-care services to cover-and is really a scientific basis for rationing health-care services. The evolving definition of comparative effectiveness research describes this as "... the conduct and synthesis of systematic research comparing different interventions and strategies to prevent, diagnose, treat and monitor health conditions ... to inform patients, providers, and decision-makers... about which interventions are most effective for which patients under specific circumstances" (Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). The methodological infrastructure of clinical effectiveness research is drawn from the science of epidemiology.

Epidemiology, Clinical Trials, Comparative Effectiveness Research and the Book of Daniel
Epidemiology is variously defined as the study of health and illness in populations, and is both a tool for understanding the etiology (causes) of disease, and a body of methods for evaluating differences in the health-care status of groups of people (referred to as population subgroups), as well as differences in outcomes for people who receive various health-care interventions. Epidemiologic research can be purely descriptive or observational, and it can also be experimental, such as in randomized clinical trials or randomized controlled trials (RCTs). An important aspect of health reform draws upon epidemiologic methods in support of the evolving science of "comparative effective research," whereby experimental studies, in which people are assigned to two (or more) different treatments by the "flip of a coin" (randomization or random assignment), and then they are then followed up over time to one or more pre-determined clinical outcomes (for example, first heart attack, remission from cancer, disease-free survival, death, and so forth).
The key component of clinical trials is that they compare two or more treatments, usually a new, active treatment versus a comparison or control treatment, using structured observations following a formal and uniform schedule of observations and follow-up intervals. The differences in outcomes between the treatment groups are quantified and tested for statistical significance, and are described as the "effect size." The effect size is a comparative probabilistic statement, and is often reported as the "relative risk" (ratio of two risks) or "attributable risk" (difference between two risks). Relative risks that are significantly different from 1.0 and attributable risks that are significantly different from 0, and are clinically meaningful, are taken to be indicative of an association or even causality.

Randomization is necessary to reduce or eliminate the possibility of bias (or an alternative explanation) in selecting (or self-selecting) who receives which treatment, and is considered the "gold-standard" by which new treatments (drugs, devices, procedures, preventive services, bundles of services) are evaluated. RCTs are controlled human experiments based upon accumulated observational studies, and begin from the principle of "equipoise" which asserts that in order to conduct an ethical clinical trial, there must be insufficient existing evidence of either harm or benefit of one treatment over the other. Treatment is allocated purely by chance (randomization), rather than by the selection of either the physician or by patient, who has provided his/her "informed consent" to participate.

Informed consent is critical to any health-care treatment decision, including participation in a clinical trial, and the consent process (ideally) takes the form of an unpressured conversation, and presumes autonomy (the health-care provider needs to give the respect, time, and the opportunity for a potential participant to make an informed and non-coerced decision), beneficence (the health care provided should ensure the patient's well-being, do no harm, and should simultaneously maximize benefits and minimize risk of harm), and justice (ensure an equitable selection of participants-who is offered the opportunity to participate and who is not offered the opportunity to participate). The key element here requires the full disclosure of all risks and benefits of participation (including the risk of not receiving treatment), and the ability of the patient to make an independent decision to participate.

RCTs are designed to determine the effect(s) of exposure to treatment on the clinical outcome(s) that are being studied, and RCTs provide the strongest, most direct evidence of cause and effect by eliminating potential confounding variables which are other factors which may be the true cause of observed differences in outcomes. The theory behind randomization asserts that the random assignment of treatments evenly distributes all known and unknown "factors" or "causes" to the treatment groups. Many studies have demonstrated that in the absence of randomization, differences in outcomes are often associated with selections of treatments that may reflect more complex lifestyle decisions that result in selecting a given treatment (for example, taking vitamins; going for screening tests, deciding to smoke or to quit smoking) rather than the treatment itself.
Blinding of observers and participants is an important component of many (but not all) clinical trials, where often the participant is unaware as to which treatment he/she is receiving ("single-blinded"), or for an even stronger design, neither the health-care staff nor the patient know which treatment is being received ("double-blinded"). It is also important that the measurements are made by staff who are unaware of which treatment is actually being received by the patient ("blinded"). Blinding strategies are important for minimizing biases and subjective opinions about which treatment is better, and many RCTs compare a new drug either to an inert substance ("placebo-controlled studies") or to a standard, already approved medicine ("comparator"). However, blinding is not always feasible to implement in studies, particularly either where an invasive procedure is involved, or where a drug may have recognizable main effects or side effects (e.g., causing flushing, increased urination, fast or slow heart beat, etc.) that are easily identified by the patient and the staff. The designers of all clinical trials need to balance the need for methodological rigor with real-world considerations of safety and feasibility, and recognize that no perfect clinical trial exists. While experimental evidence is considered the most rigorous, there are ethical and practical situations that often require alternatives to randomization, all of which fall back on careful, well-structured observations and comparisons.

The Origin of Clinical Trials

Most medical historians attribute the first recorded clinical trial to Dr. James Lind of the British Royal Navy in 1753. Dr. Lind observed that scurvy "...killed thousands of people every year and had caused many more deaths in the Royal Navy than conflicts." So he selected twelve men from the ship, all of whom were suffering from scurvy, and divided them into six pairs, giving each group different additions to their basic diet (cider; seawater; garlic; mustard and horseradish; spoonfuls of vinegar; two oranges and lemons). Dr. Lind observed that "[t]hose fed citrus fruits (oranges and lemons) experienced a remarkable recovery" and concluded that, while there was nothing new about his discovery as the benefits of lime juice had been known for centuries, citrus fruits were better than all other "remedies" for the treatment of scurvy (and also for the prevention of Vitamin C deficiency). Although the importance of Lind's findings on scurvy were recognized at the time, it was not until more than 40 years later that the British Admiralty ordered the routine supply of lemon juice to all Naval ships, virtually eliminating scurvy from the Royal Navy (www.JamesLindLibrary.org & BBC History). About a century later, in 1847, the Hungarian-born obstetrician, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, tested the effects of physicians' hand-washing after leaving the autopsy room and before entering the labor and delivery room on reducing fatal puerperal fever (also called "childbed fever"-a fatal blood-borne infection) among pregnant women in Vienna. Although the statistical results of this clinical trial were entirely conclusive, there was significant resistance to adopting this innovation (so much that it eventually drove Semmelweis to insanity and a premature death at age 47).

While these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century examples provide a glimpse into the origins of modern clinical trials (and also illustrate the delays associated with translating research into practice), an earlier nutritional clinical trial of following a Kosher diet compared to the local food was recorded in the Book of Daniel (Chapter 1:1-20). This Babylonian clinical trial was conducted and reported some 2,400 years earlier (605-562 BCE), by Daniel, another adept dream-interpreter who, as was the case for Yosef and Pharaoh in Egypt, also won favor from the king who ruled over the Jews then living in exile in Babylonia. Daniel's clinical trial contains many of the elements of modern clinical trials, with many of the associated modern challenges to causal inference. The text follows here with the corresponding clinical trials elements indicated [in brackets]:

Daniel's Nutritional Clinical Trial (1:3-20)

3. Then the king said to Ashpenaz, his chief officer, to bring from the Children of Israel, from the royal seed, and from the nobles [population subgroup; eligibility criteria].
4. Youths in whom there is no blemish, of handsome appearance, who understand all wisdom, erudite in knowledge, who understand how to express their thoughts, and who have strength to stand in the king's palace [inclusion/exclusion criteria], and to teach them the script and the language of the Chaldeans.
5. The king allotted them a daily portion of the king's food and of the wine that he drank, and to train them for three years [trial duration], and at the end thereof, they would stand before the king [follow-up period; outcome evaluation].
8. Daniel resolved not to be defiled by the king's food or by the wine he drank; so he requested of the king's chief officer that he should not be defiled.
9. God granted Daniel kindness and mercy before the chief officer.
10. And the chief officer replied to Daniel, "I fear my lord the king, who allotted your food and your drink, for why should he see your [experimental group] faces troubled [clinical outcome] more than the youths like you [control group]? And you will forfeit my head to the king."
11. And Daniel answered the steward whom the chief officer had appointed for Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.
12. "Now test [pre-specified comparison] your servants for ten days [trial duration], and let them give us some vegetables that we should eat, and water that we should drink [experimental intervention].
13. And let our [experimental group] appearance [clinical outcome], and the appearance [clinical outcome], of the youths who eat the king's food [control group], be seen [follow-up; outcome evaluation] by you [not blinded] and as you will see, so do with your servants."
14. He heeded them in this matter and tested [experimental intervention] them for ten days [trial duration].
15. And at the end of the ten days [trial duration], they [experimental group] looked handsomer and fatter [clinical outcomes] than all the youths who ate the king's food [control group].
16. And the steward would carry away their food and the wine they were to drink and give them vegetables [experimental intervention].
17. And to these youths, the four of them [sample size], God gave knowledge and understanding in every script and wisdom, and Daniel understood all visions and dreams.
18. And at the end of the days that the king ordered to bring them, the chief officer brought them before Nebuchadnezzar.
19. And the king spoke with them, and of all of them, no one was found to equal Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah [effect size or relative risk]; and they stood before the king.
20. And in every matter of the wisdom of understanding that the king requested of them, he found them ten times better [effect size or relative risk], than all the necromancers and astrologers in all his kingdom.

The Problem of Translating Research into Practice

Thus, Daniel was responsible for the first recorded clinical trial, suggesting that the methodological template for clinical trials is considerably older than usually ascribed. In fact, the reporting of Daniel's (non-randomized) clinical trial conforms to modern standards (the "CONSORT criteria"), and in some ways is even more thorough than many contemporary trials published in rigorously peer-reviewed journals (perhaps because Daniel had to "... answer to a Higher Authority").
What is supposed to happen with the results of clinical trials? Decisions by physicians as to whether to adopt innovations, by insurers as to whether to pay for services, and by patients as to whether to follow their physicians' advice, are increasingly being made based on the results of these clinical trials, and the burgeoning field of "translational research" seeks to understand how scientific discoveries are moved from the laboratory to the patient ("bench to bedside") and beyond to the community. I would argue that the true measure of the effectiveness of translation of research into practice is reflected not only in utilization of services and individual health status outcomes, but also in public health statistics such as disability, disease incidence, and survival/mortality. Both the principles of social justice and Tikkun Olam would require that everybody benefit equally from access to improved health-care services.

The average duration of time it takes for scientific innovations to travel from research to practice is frequently cited to be 17 years, with many examples, such as those above, demonstrating even longer durations-and differential access to research results across groups defined by economic, ethnic, gender, and other parameters. The recent addition of hand-washing reminder signs and widespread placement of antibacterial liquids in health care and other public settings is a stark reminder that the adoption of even a simple innovation such as hand-washing can take decades or centuries. Even today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) primary recommendation for preventing the transmission of influenza, including the much-feared H1N1 flu (and other communicable infections), is hand-washing.

Epidemiologic methods are often criticized for failing to provide adequate (or any) mechanisms or explanations as to "why" differences are observed. However, effective policy can often be made merely based on the observation of differences, rather than on a true understanding of the underlying reasons (or causes) of those differences. The example most often cited was the removal of the Broad Street water pump handle by nineteenth-century British anesthesiologist/surgeon-turned-epidemiologist, Dr. John Snow, whose statistical analyses led him to conclude in 1854 that water played a significant role in the spread of cholera, and his direct actions resulted in controlling a severe cholera outbreak in London.

Epidemiology has been particularly effective in studies of lifestyle and behavior, and numerous long-term community-based observational and experimental studies have demonstrated the significant contributions of a variety of behaviors, including diet composition (for example, calories; fat content; types of fat; salt/sodium content), physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption, and even attendance at weekly religious services and prayer, to health and well-being. Although levels of biological evidence as to mechanisms are often lacking, and not all of these behaviors can be adequately studied in RCTs, these studies can still form the basis of informed government and health-care policies oriented toward improving public health.

Recent examples of such health and environmental policies in New York City include regulations to limit occupational and environmental exposures. These include increased tobacco taxes and bans on smoking in the workplace and other public settings. Other examples of current environmental public health legislation based on epidemiology include food labeling, which requires disclosure of food composition (calories, fat, salt/sodium content) at the point of sale in certain restaurants and for prepared foods, bans on trans-fats in food, and measures to reduce or eliminate the sale of soft drinks in public schools through bans and increased taxes.

One cannot help but be struck by these modern scientific analogues to the food labels of Kosher certification agencies or hekhsherim, and their designations of "meat" or "dairy (D)" or "pareve" and the parallels between the institutions of the mashgihim (Kosher food supervisors) and Food Inspectors of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Department of Agriculture (USDA), as well as local municipal Health Department restaurant inspectors. Both sets of institutions are intended to ensure high levels of food purity and accurate disclosure of food contents, handling and preparation. Many other similar examples exist. While the health benefits of the primary covenantal sign of Jews, the berit milah or (male) circumcision, have been debated in Europe and the United States for over a century, two recent large randomized clinical trials conducted in Africa have demonstrated the effectiveness of male circumcision on reduction of HIV transmission to such a degree that thousands of African men have undergone voluntary adult circumcision (and mohelim, or ritual circumcisers, from Israel and elsewhere are in great demand now both to provide circumcisions and to train local community circumcisers in Africa).

Reason Beyond Reason

So how we can draw upon two sets of behavioral recommendations, one faith-based and one evidence-based, from the foregoing discussion, and bring together evidence-based medicine and ethical behavior? An important parallel exists between epidemiology and Torah in behavioral recommendations that take the form of behaviors to engage in and behaviors to avoid. In a sense, behavioral risk factors (and protective factors) can be seen to correspond to mitzvoth aseh ("positive commandments" to perform specific acts) and mitzvoth lo ta'aseh ("negative commandments" to abstain from certain acts), and reduced further to mishpatim ("judgments"), which have a rational (and potentially an epidemiologic) explanation and hukim ("decrees"), which transcend apparent reason, and include commandments about justice toward others and to the environment.

We have a mandate to "heal the world." Whether it is for reasons of enlightened self-interest, or for truly eleemosynary purposes, Kayin should have answered God's question differently: vayomer Kayin ‘keyn' (and Kayin said "yes"), as did Yosef. So our vision for effective public health and environmental leadership must combine the responsibility of Kayin to be an oved adama (a servant of the land), with the wisdom and compassion of Yosef, through whose command all people were nourished. Daniel demonstrated the health benefits of food and beverage, and provides epidemiologic methods as a valid tool to combine evidence and faith. However, it was Yosef who is the model public-health leader, who set aside his own self-interest, and took care of his brothers, their families, his (adopted) country and the whole world, also serving as an oved adama, perhaps in a more generalized sense, as a servant of man and a servant of the land. So in the face of this current debate over the transformation of the U.S. health-care system, we must answer God's question as Yosef did and as Kayin should have. Health care and a clean environment must be a right for all people in order for us to heal the world. We do have the means and resources to provide both a high standard of health care and a clean environment for all. But do we have the will do so?

One Shabbat, on which we read parashat toledot, I heard a talk-and was duly educated. "Don't be misled"-the speaker warned-"by your English translations that render the Hebrew word beMirmah (Genesis 27:35) as ‘guile' or ‘deceit.' Instead, to correctly convey the meaning of beMirmah one must paraphrase it as ‘not entirely in sync with halakha.'" He went on to explain that the Torah's words expressing disapproval or vilification, such as sheker, ra‘, resha‘, ‘avel, and so forth were basically synonymous-all denoting greater or lesser degrees of non-conformity to halakha. Conversely, the Torah's approbatory epithets-emet, tov, tsedek, and their like-denoted conformity; and were on no account to be confused with such non-halakhic notions as truth, goodness, and righteousness. He wrapped up with a general admonition to the effect that we must beware of projecting alien, subjective values onto Torah whose sole value is obedience to halakha.

At the time, and for many moons thereafter, I puzzled over that d'var torah. Because if biblical tov refers to halakhic adherence, how to understand its occurrence in Genesis 1:4 that says "God saw that the light was tov"? And as for its antonym ra‘, what to do about its verbal form leRa‘ot (Exodus 23:2)-especially as understood by the Oral Torah (Sanhedrin 2a and Rashi ad loc.)? Similarly with emet; how should we construe its meaning in, say, Deuteronomy 13:15 or 17:4-or for that matter sheker's meaning at Deuteronomy19:18?

To be sure, here and there solutions to some of these perplexities would turn up. A book entitled Melakhim Omenayikh (Bene Beraq 1992) dropped a hint as to how tov's use in regard to light (and to other of God's creations, as in Genesis 1:10, 31) might connote conformity to halakha:

Perhaps, since as the Zohar teaches, God looked into the Torah and created the world it follows that the world was made to conform to Torah-not vice versa. Thus, it is not because people need food that birkat haMazon [grace after meals] was given; on the contrary, because one of the commandments is birkat haMazon therefore humans were created with a need to eat. Similarly, once it was said "A mother for the first thirty days after giving birth shall have her needs attended to by non-Jews" (Shabbat 129a)-the world being subservient to Torah-it became inevitable that non-Jews should be present in Jewish homes to tend mothers, their babes and other sick Jews.

Accordingly, the light will have been deemed tov inasmuch as it corresponded to its Torah blueprint. As to the Torah's commandment that courts of law seek diligently after emet, more than one disciple of the "obedience only" persuasion offered enlightenment. You see, they urged, you misunderstand the text because you approach it with prejudices such as the assumption that cross-examination of witnesses is merely a means to the end of getting at the facts of a case. That's erroneous; the Talmud categorically affirms the arbitrariness of the ‘ed zomem law (Deuteronomy19:16-19) in its famous dictum "‘Ed zomem [law] is an anomaly [hiddush]; for why otherwise do we [mechanically] rely on the second pair of witnesses and dismiss the first?" (Sanhedrin 27a). Surely that dictum proves that the halakhot of testimony, like all other halakhot, are to be followed to the letter without teleological considerations. Thus emet used by the Torah in connection with testimony, far from refuting the "halakhic-conformity" thesis, ratifies it-once you shed your biases and accept the inscrutability of the Torah's testimony laws as indicated at Sanhedrin 27a and confirmed by Rashi who defines hiddush as gezerat haKatub. This latter argument is of course specious. For in singling out ‘ed zomem as anomalous (hiddush), the dictum makes ‘ed zomem the exception that proves the rule. Yet whether sound or specious, one has to marvel at such special pleading whose only perceivable purpose is the elimination of concepts such as truth and falsehood from the Torah.
Some good folks suggested that these seemingly tortuous arguments should be viewed as mutations of the "jural" theory of moral law; or, alternatively, of Divine Command Theory. Hastings' entry on the ancient debate between the teleological and jural schools was duly consulted:

[The teleological] was characteristic of Greek theories; the latter became dominant in Christian times. Their essential difference is this... [U]nder the teleological conception moral law is looked upon as a matter of self-expression ... and its laws are regarded as rules for the attainment of a good which every man [i.e. person] naturally seeks. In the jural system, on the other hand, it is not the natural value of an act that renders it moral, but its value as commanded by the law. It is not commanded because it is good, but it is good because commanded ... In the theological systems moral law is regarded as a rule of conduct which has its ground in the nature or will of God and not in the nature of man or in the consequences involved in obedience or disobedience to the law. The rule may be for the good of man, but it is for his good because it is the divine will, and not the divine will because it is for his good. (Encyclopoedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 8 p. 833f.)

Obviously the jural shares with the anti-emet position its basic repudiation of the idea of right conduct being autonomously knowable. But beyond that point of convergence the two go their own sweet ways. For instance, the jural-even its theological version-does not preclude the possibility of a divine command recognizing human nature and working with it. Thus it would be quite feasible for a religious ‘juralist' to imagine God saying to human beings: "Behold I have created you with a capacity to distinguish life from death, truth from falsehood, good from evil, justice from injustice. Now unless I issue an explicit decree to the contrary, you are always to choose life over death, good over evil" and so on. On receiving such a divine command the religious "juralists" will diligently hone their God-given capabilities for distinguishing right from wrong. The scenario just described is not hypothetical, but rather the traditional Jewish understanding, from Abraham onwards, of what it means to accept Torah. Avraham avinu was so deeply convinced of God's demand for justice that he exclaimed "Will the Judge of all the earth not do justice!" Yet when equally convinced that the same God had told him explicitly, unequivocally and directly (not via another agent) to go and perform the out-of-character and seemingly unjust akeidah-he obeyed. In other words, there is no conflict in an Abrahamic-type faith between the belief in God's revealed "passion" for righteousness (see, for example, Deuteronomy16:20, Jeremiah 9:23, or Psalms 11:7) and a readiness to reverse course at God's specific and unmediated behest. Because for Judaism, God our Creator is also the Creator of Torah and its morality, all of which He can scrap or modify at will. Nevertheless, the suspension of Torah is not something even the most "jural" of Jews have to watch for on a daily basis. Instead, their focus is directed to making just and life-enhancing choices resignedly and joyously in submission to the divine will as they find it manifest in Torah. Those who would contrive to expunge truth and righteousness from Torah must be driven by something other than a commitment to jural theory.

As for Divine Command Theory (hereafter DCT), like the religious version of jural theory, it has no use for autonomous morality. Robert Merrihew Adams may seem to be pushing it, but is in reality only drawing the logical conclusions of a robust DCT: "Suppose God should ask me to make it my chief end in life to inflict suffering on other human beings, for no other reason than that he commanded it [...] Will it seriously be claimed that in that case it would be wrong for me not to practice cruelty...?" (The Virtue of Faith, 1987 pp. 98-99, quoted by Paul Rooney in Divine Command Morality, 1996, p. 102).

DCT is thought to have been adumbrated by William of Ockham (d. 1347), the earliest known philosopher to explicitly reject an immutable natural law on the grounds of its incompatibility with revelation. This is how Frederick Copleston summarizes Ockham:

A created free will is subject to moral obligation ... [man] is morally obliged to will what God orders him to will and not to will what God orders him not to will ... "Evil is nothing else than to do something when one is under an obligation to do the opposite..." For St. Thomas [Aquinas] ... there are acts which are intrinsically evil and which are forbidden because they are evil; they are not evil simply because they are forbidden. For Ockham, however, the divine will is the ultimate norm of morality: the moral law is founded on the free divine choice rather than ultimately on the divine essence. Moreover, he did not hesitate to draw the logical consequences from this position ... "By the very fact that God wills something, it is right for it to be done ... Hatred of God, stealing, committing adultery, are forbidden by God. But they could be ordered by God; and if they were, they would be meritorious acts." (A History of Philosophy, vol. 3, pp. 103-105)

Rabbi Michael J. Harris's 2003 Divine Command Ethics also deals with Ockham, but Harris' main enterprise is to discover DCT in Jewish sources. The only unambiguous examples he is able to muster come from the writings of Yeshayahu Leibowitz (d. 1994).

Leibowitz repeatedly emphasizes ... that human needs, interests and values have no legitimate place whatsoever in Judaism. Characteristic is the following statement: "Judaism is not a programme for the solution of the problems of humanity but [a programme for] the service of God." And in one of Leibowitz's sharpest formulations: "The essence of religion as service of God is that it conflicts with the needs and nature of man"... [He] frequently stresses that ‘the needs and nature of man' includes human moral needs. The service of God is at odds with human ethical perceptions. (Divine Command Ethics, p. 118)

These quotations encapsulate Leibowitz's definition of the Jewish faith-a definition he concocted dogmatically, making scant appeal to classical Jewish sources. So how, in fact, did he get round those countless sources that others take to be the ethical teachings of Scripture and Talmud? Harris does record that Leibowitz was once asked where "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) fit into his scheme. He quipped that the verse continues "I am the Lord," words that call for nothing more than servile compliance. Too bad he was not pressed on the emet and tsedek Scriptures that lack the phrase "I am the Lord"! In any case, there is no evidence that he invested them with the one-fits-all meaning of "halakhic compatibility."

With Leibowitz we have exhausted all the standard "suspects" at whose door might have been laid the severing of Torah from its moral moorings. Thus all eyes are turned to our last hope: the enigmatic, so-called Analytic System (also Method or Movement; hereafter AM). Originally developed by Rabbi Hayim Soloveitchik of Brisk (or Bresc, d. 1918), it is perpetuated, mutatis mutandis, in several American and Israeli yeshivot. The system's practical ramifications that relate to Talmud study are familiar enough and doubtless less recondite than its "metaphysics." But that too may be glimpsed thanks to the research of a number of scholars. Let us cite two of the most incisive studies. First, R. Norman Solomon's pioneering monograph The Analytic Movement: Hayyim Soloveitchik and his Circle (Atlanta, 1993):

The Analytic Movement is an important key for understanding contemporary Orthodoxy. The reification of halakha points directly to J. D. Soloveitchik's philosophy in which the world of halakha is seen as an a priori realm that confronts the worlds of science and religion. This underlies the absolutization of halakha and its sundering from its roots in social reality... (p. XI)

The basic requirement of this [the Analytic] approach is that the Law be upheld at all costs. If there is a contradiction between law and any other source of knowledge, the other source must yield. Thus we read of [R. Baruch Dov] Leibowitz that "he always said the Torah cannot be understood by the logic of human reason, but by the ways and principles of the Torah; therefore one should adapt one's understanding to the Torah, not the Torah to one's understanding." This is indeed a far cry from the contention of the medieval philosophers that the Divine will was in conformity with reason ... This attitude has recently been referred to by the appropriate name of "Pan-Halakhism"... Pan-Halakhism must be distinguished from the traditional Jewish belief in the comprehensiveness of Torah. It differs in two ways. 1) The Analytic concept of Torah is a far narrower one than that of earlier rabbis, or of the Hassidim. It is law in its most restrictive sense, the "four ells of Halakhah," which constitute Torah for most of the analysts... 2) As we have seen, the traditional belief in the infallibility and comprehensiveness of Torah did not imply mistrust of reason... Analytical Pan-Halakhism, however... is associated with the denigration of unaided human reason and a conviction, or at least a fear, that Reason and Revelation are contradictory. (pp. 227-228)

The second is Be-Torato Yehgeh by the late Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (ShaGaR), published in 5769 under the editorship of Zohar Maor. Roughly two chapters of the book are devoted to AM. The following excerpts seem signally germane and are therefore reproduced here in English translation.

For the Brisk method of study a healthy human reason is not a prerequisite. Neither is experience in the topic of study nor any particular concept of values. On the contrary, it totally negates any idea of the Torah giving vent to a moral message. Human evaluations of morality are irrelevant to Torah discourse. Taking as his starting point the midrashic-zoharic statement "God looked into the Torah and created the world," R. Hayim of Brisk commented: Behold, the Torah's laws appear to accord with a proper functioning of society. Thus, murder and theft ... that the Torah prohibits are destructive of society and one might assume the reason for this prohibition to be the preservation of society. However, that assumption would be wrong. The opposite is true: only because it is written in the Torah "Thou shalt not kill" did murder turn into a destructive act. (p. 86; cf. Melakhim Omenayikh cited earlier)

In the first place, he [R. Hayim of Brisk] purified halakha of everything external to itself. According to his method, all psychologizing and historicizing must be rejected totally ... halakhic thought travels on its own unique track. Its laws and principles are not psychological-existential but rather ideal and normative like logic and mathematics. (p.118)

The above characterization of halakha agrees entirely with the formalistic Brisk method of learning: it is not our duty to understand but to define because Torah is mind divine [and] super-human. Whoever studies the halakhic lectures (shiurim) of the GRY"D [Gaon R. Yoseph Dov Soloveitchik, grandson and intellectual heir of R. Hayim] discovers that this approach describes also his halakhic discourse. This is what enables the GRY"D to continue with his Brisk method of learning and to ignore in his lectures all talmudic research as well as the historic aspect of halakha. The concept of the halakha as a norm without meaning-being derived from the supreme will and existing as an a priori, ideal entity-means that it is immune to all criticism whether value-based, historical or any other. This [concept of halakha] constitutes Orthodoxy's main line of defence against modern enlightenment and scholarship. (ibid.)

The penultimate sentence of this last quotation is among ShaGaR's most probing, inasmuch as it identifies the system's overarching objective which is to shield halakha-or rather its own model of halakha-from potential criticism "whether value-based, historical or any other." Of course, the greatest threat to the system is posed by Scripture and Talmud's ostensibly moral exhortations-which would explain the compulsion of so many AM apologists to neutralize those exhortations. Just imagine what would happen were Torah understood to have truth in mind when it demands emet; or to have injustice in mind when it proscribes every kind of avel. It would undermine the entire Analytic edifice.

At last the pieces were falling into place. It was indeed due to our preconceptions that the beMirmah homily had dismayed so many of us. Had we grown up on an AM diet, the homily might have seemed, at maximum, caricatural. But, for better or worse, our education left no room for the notion of a Torah ‘beyond good and evil'. We were not taught how to anesthetize scriptures such as Deuteronomy 4:8, let alone instructed so to do. Deuteronomy 4:8 reads "What great nation is there whose statutes and laws are righteous as is all this Torah which I am setting before you today?" The beMirmah homilist and his school, for whom the word righteousness denotes conformity to halakha, would presumably make this verse say, tautologously, that the Torah's laws and statutes are consonant with halakha-or else they would have to face the intolerable prospect of Torah recognizing, or worse still appealing to, righteousness as Rambam believed Deuteronomy 4:8 to be doing (see Guide 3:26).

But to be fair to AM, in its day theories challenging halakha (directly or indirectly) were on the march and had to be met. Even in innocent looking remarks there might lurk a latent threat. Take, for example, a famous passage from Benjamin Cardozo's essay Paradoxes of Legal Science. "When faced with a new situation," he wrote, "it is most tempting to maintain continuity merely by refusing to change the forms or formulas of the law. To think that is continuity is, however, sheer illusion. The similarity is verbal only; it no longer has the same relationship to reality-and cannot have the same function in society" (published in Selected Writings, p. 257). Cardozo obviously treats "the forms or formulas of the law" as subservient to a higher goal. Thus he declares himself a proponent of the teleological theory that allows one to view legal procedures as means to an end. And in the case of law the end is, presumably, the attainment of justice.
Transferred into a Jewish context, what would Cardozo say about a procedure such as migo (to pick a random example)? Would he retire it? Now migo literally means "since"; but in its technical sense denotes the rationale for believing someone who makes a modest claim before the court when a bigger claim could have been made without loss of credibility. The court figures "since" the claimant did not go great guns, chances are he/she is telling the truth. Hence migo is usually understood as a tool available to the courts in their pursuit of justice (for more on migo see Menachem Elon's Jewish Law, Vol. 2 p. 995). The problem arises when the general public learns of the migo. Because once that happens unscrupulous claimants, banking on judges believing a lesser claim, could be tempted to make that claim falsely. Such potential for manipulation must surely render the migo ineffective and therefore questionable for indiscriminate use, as noted by Asher Gulak (see Yesode haMishpat haIvri, Vol. 4, pp. 108-109). Needless to say, an extreme anti-teleological position would not allow considerations of migo's loss of efficacy to enter the picture, because migo is no more a means to an end than testimony itself. And remember, where there is no "end" or telos there is no "means" either; or put Jewishly, everything ordained by halakha is an end in itself. Only those who continue to esteem equity and justice as cornerstones of the Torah Revelation, as did our ancient sages, agonize over the robotic use of tactics such as migo-devised originally to further justice not to hinder it (cf. R. Samuel Uceda's Midrash Shemuel to Avoth 1:1).

But then our sages of old did not disdain lidrosh ta‘ama dikra [to seek out the reason underlying, or implicit in, Scripture]. Admittedly, ta‘ama dikra is associated primarily with the tanna R. Shim‘on, but that is not to say other tannaim negated it. Indeed the Talmud (Sanhedrin 21a) shows R. Yehudah to have applied ta‘ama to the law prohibiting the king to multiply wives. R. Shim‘on merely carries it to greater lengths as demonstrated by R. Mordecai ben Hillel Ha-kohen (d. 1298): "How come Rabbah interprets the Torah's reason for imposing an oath upon the defendant who concedes part of the claim against him (B.Q. 107a) if nobody but R. Shim‘on seeks out the reasons underlying Scripture? The answer is that anything surprising, such as the oath taken on a partial confession, elicits ta‘ama on all sides. Another example may be seen in tractate Sotah (3a), where the reason proposed for a single witness sufficing in the case of sotah is universally adopted; likewise the reason given at Sanhedrin 76b for the omission of the word yad in connection with metal" (Mordecai to B. Q. para. 138. See also Melo ha-Ro‘im by R. Jacob Sebi Jolles, Zolkiew 1838 part 2, folios 9b-10b; Warsaw ed. 1911 [reprint NY 1962] pp. 298-301).

AM, on the other hand, abjures ta‘ama as a dynamic for accessing Torah. Of course, its teleological character must render ta‘ama anathema to any full-fledged DCT. However, Jewish constructs of DCT cannot ignore the Talmud's invocation of ta‘ama. But AM, undaunted, explains away ta‘ama's talmudic presence no less deftly that it does other teleological indicators that rear their menacing heads in our canonical sources. Ta‘ama in the Talmud belongs to the original fabric of Torah itself and, as such, is inimitable and certainly unavailable for use by mere mortals.

The question ‘why' leads to the search for meaning-something that the lamdan [one who applies lomdus, i.e. Lithuanian-stlyle methodology, to sacred texts] avoids like fire. Any attempt to look for meaning is doubly insidious. For one thing, such attempts would eliminate the infinite chasm that exists between Torah and ourselves. (When asked how come the gemara does not hold back from inquiring into ta‘ama dikra, R. Hayim replied that the gemara is itself Torah. But for us such inquiry is entirely precluded.) Secondly, looking for meaning is an attack on halakha's status as a system hermetically sealed against everything extrinsic to it. The dread of infringing on this absoluteness is what impelled R. Hayim to say that it is not for us to solve kushiot [difficulties arising from apparent contradictions within the Talmud etc.] but rather to demonstrate that there are no kushiot to begin with. For there must never be a situation, even momentary, when the Torah's impeccability is in doubt. (Be-Torato Yehgeh, p. 84)

Once on the eve of Succoth a guest returned to his hotel with a large and beautiful etrog. He asked the management for the safest spot to keep it, explaining that an etrog is a delicate fruit and its steeple-like protruberance or style (pittom) even more so. Indeed, so vital is the style, he continued, that were it to get damaged all would be lost. Some conscientious personnel began to worry lest the maintenance or cleaning crew knock it when they go into the etrog owner's room. So they nipped off the pittom from the etrog, wrapped it carefully and locked it away in the safe.

Insofar as it drives a wedge between halakha and the rest of Torah, one has to wonder whether Brisk's well-intentioned and ambitious apologetic has been worth the prodigious cost.