Two major challenges confront the Orthodox Jewish world today; yet the very engine that drives the first challenge could provide an important means for coping with the second.
This was the theme of the sixth annual Torah Academy of Milwaukee Lecture delivered Tuesday by Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for the Orthodox organization Agudath Israel of America.
In a talk titled “Empowering Judaism in a Media-Conscious World,” Shafran told an audience of about 100 gathered in the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center’s Ritz Theater that the two challenges are:
• “Keeping the larger society out as much as we can.”
• “We live in a time when the majority of our brothers and sisters, our fellow Jews, are not only unobservant but uninformed,” and their connection to Judaism and the community is “so tenuous [that] if they are not reached in some way they will be lost entirely.”
Shafran said that modern, pervasive news, entertainment and advertising media make keeping the larger society out difficult. “We are accosted constantly with words and images that are antithetical to Torah,” he said.
Some of these are inherently and blatantly offensive, biased, inaccurate and unfair, Shafran said. He cited as an example the way recent reporting on the Palestinian intifada “mindlessly equated” the death of a Palestinian infant as an accidental result of an Israeli retaliation for a violent attack with the deliberate Palestinian murder of two 14-year-old Jewish boys.
“Fairness, it seems, has a new meaning,” Shafran said. “It has come to mean considering evil to be the equivalent of good.”
Shafran also blasted the ways Orthodox Jews often are portrayed or reported on in news media, including the Jewish press, a topic on which he wrote the cover story for Moment magazine’s February 2000 issue.
But such words and images can also carry “more subtle and insidious” messages, as in the implicitly materialistic messages of advertising, which can be found in the Orthodox community as well as outside it, Shafran said.
Nevertheless, while the world of media can be “a wild and crazy beast,” it can also be “a powerful tool” for reaching unaffiliated and uninformed Jews, Shafran said.
“The most powerful thing of all is the human word,” said Shafran. “And the power of the word is magnified by the media.”
Shafran urged his audience, who came mostly from Milwaukee’s Orthodox community, to seek and grab opportunities to bring positive aspects of Orthodox Jewish life to the attention of news media and to present them in advertising.
He acknowledged that this might be difficult, partly because of inculcated Jewish principles of modesty — “We find it hard to promote ourselves [and] sing our own praises”; partly because much of the good things about Orthodox Jewish life are commonplace and taken for granted within the community.
“Things go on that we don’t give a second thought to that other Jews would be flabbergasted” to learn of, he said.
In an interview afterward, Shafran said he does understand, but disagrees with, why many non-Orthodox Jews regard his criticisms of their movements, like his critique of Conservative Judaism in the February 2001 issue of Moment magazine, as attacks on their validity as Jews.
He said non-Orthodox Jews have told him, “You can’t attack my belief system and my synagogue and rabbi without it being an attack on me.” But Shafran said it is “a cop-out if people say I’m rejecting them…. I say I’m not and you have to accept that from me.”
Shafran said that not only does he have many “close friends who are secular Jews,” but he had a “wonderful relationship” with a now deceased uncle who was an avowed socialist and whose beliefs “were anathema to me…. In no sense did he interpret my rejection of his socialism as rejection of him.”
While he has apologized for any “hurt feelings” that may have resulted from his Moment article, “I don’t regret writing it. I think it was a reasoned critique and no more negative than a movie review or a book review.”
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