Rubashkins: not winning any prizes anytime soonSince the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.

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Affirmative Action: or reverse discrimination?Home Center, an Israeli home wares chain, has been offering  a secret discount to Arabs. When customer Eli Chai discovered and reported this last week, a Home Center spokesperson explained, “Home Center offers a wide range of attractive discounts throughout the year. As part of a plan to target specific communities, the chain offers different discounts for different sectors from time to time.”

The situation does seem pretty odd, but not altogether uncalled for. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabs do more than 70% of the construction in Israel, and thus end up spending the most money at those sorts of stores. Why wouldn’t Home Center capitalize on that customer base by offering a good deal?

Of course, that’s not how it’s being framed in Israel. Chai is quoted as saying, “I didn't expect to get a discount, but I was appalled when I realized that had I been Arab I would have received one. I tried to think what would happen if it was a discount only for Jews, or Sephardim, or Ashkenazim.”

There's plenty of discrimination against Arabs in Israel, and Chai isn’t bothered by that. But when Arabs are favored, it’s a grave in justice!  It may feel inappropriate to offer a discount based on ethnicity, but it’s hardly shocking in a society that’s so clearly divided along those lines.

Home Alone: but less funnyLately there have been a number of high profile neglect cases in Israel. We’ve learned that many Holocaust survivors live in abject poverty. A woman revered as a spiritual authority was found to have abused and neglected many of her children. And in just the past few weeks, there have been three cases of children neglected in airports: A four-year-old girl was accidentally left in Ben Gurion Airport when her parents failed to keep track of all six of their children en route to Paris. An 8-year-old boy was accidentally flown to Brussels instead of Munich (this appears to be the fault of his El Al escort), and a 12-year-old was sent to the UK by her mother, with no one scheduled to meet her at the airport, and only the address—which turned out to be incorrect—of a family friend. When her mother was found and arrested, she explained that she couldn’t care for her kids and wanted them to find political asylum in the UK. Turns out she’d already sent her 9-year-old to Leeds.

There are plenty of cases of severe neglect reported in America every year (this story comes to mind), but in Israel it seems to be a symptom of the political situation. Israelis walk around all day trying to distract themselves from their own suffering and trauma. It seems to me that as a result of having to push their own personal grief below the surface, they also end up ignoring all kinds of suffering that they see around them, be it the suffering of Palestinians, Holocaust survivors, or even their own children. To a certain degree, we all push those thoughts aside in order to get through the day, but we try to maintain a sense of compassion. In Israel, because it’s nearly impossible to really ignore the suffering, society has developed a sort of flat affect. Neglect happens and everyone acts shocked but quickly moves on, not wanting to dwell on any more pain.

There’s something about the Israeli machismo that appealing, and that makes me proud to be Jewish. But there’s something ugly under that machismo -- a gaping hole where I’d expect to see compassion, and it’s horrifying.

Tisha B’Av begins tomorrow night, and Jews all over the world will be fasting, reading the book of Lamentations, and thinking about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem that took place almost two thousand years ago.First be nice: then kill me

But Tisha B’Av shouldn’t just be a commemoration of events that happened hundreds of years ago. Contemporary Jews have experienced plenty of major traumas, events that rocked the Jewish community, and changed the way we practice Judaism. Most recently, the raid on the AgriProcessors plant in Iowa, though certainly not as spiritually damaging as the destructions of the Temple, has had serious reverberations around the Jewish world. It has affected what we buy and serve and eat, and how we think about our treatment of our colleagues and those who work around us. It has changed our relationships with the world, both humiliating us -- as the poor behavior of our brethren is exposed to the world -- and forcing us to shape up and raise the standards we have for ourselves and those we support.

Ancient Jews brought sacrifices to the Temple: animals killed in the name of God. But the sacrifices were not enough. Prophets warned us that our behavior was as important as the sacrifices, and when we didn’t learn, the opportunity to bring sacrifices was taken away. Here we are, more than a thousand years on, and somehow we’ve fixated on kosher meat, and not on our own behavior. Maybe this experience, as difficult and upsetting as it is, will serve to remind us about what’s really important, and will reconfigure our priorities.

Eruv: wires on a telephone pole. not much to it.There’s a dispute brewing over whether a community in Long Island can build themselves an eruv. An eruv is an enclosed space in which it’s permissible for observant Jews to carry items (such as books, keys, and food) from place to place on Shabbat. MyJewishLearning has a great explanation of what exactly an eruv is supposed to be:

The term eruv refers to the act of mixing or combining, and is shorthand for eruv hazerot--the mixing of domains, in this case, the private (rashut hayahid) and the public (rashut harabim). An eruv does not allow for carrying items otherwise prohibited by Jewish law on Shabbat, such as money or cell phones.

Having an eruv does not mean that a city or neighborhood is enclosed entirely by a wall. Rather, the eruv can be comprised of a series of pre-existing structures (walls, fences, electrical poles and wires) and/or structures created expressly for the eruv, often a wire mounted on poles. In practice, then, the eruv is a symbolic demarcation of the private sphere, one that communities come together to create.

It sounds strange, but not hugely problematic, right? Wrong. Over the years, there have been a number of political controversies centered around the construction of eruvs (or, more accurately, eruvin). Major and minor disputes over eruvin have unfolded in New Jersey, London, Chicago, Washington Heights, and Venice Beach.

Meanwhile, even within the observant communities, there are those who don’t believe that eruvin are legitimate ways of getting around the prohibition of carrying. Chabad, for instance, doesn’t generally hold by any eruv.

For those who know about and use an eruv, the idea of it being controversial is absurd. In some cases, it can be as noninvasive as already existing train tracks, or highway barriers. At its most invasive, an eruv is a wire, or a piece of string. There is no holy gravitational pull inside an eruv, no religious force field, no magical powers. An eruv is literally a loophole, a way that the rabbis devised to get around the prohibition against carrying on Shabbat. The only way a non-Jew or non-observant Jew would be affected by the construction of an eruv is if the eruv caused a glut of observant Jews to move to the neighborhood. While one may have objections to living in a neighborhood full of frummies, it’s hard to cast those objections as anything but anti-Semitism.

The world has no shortage of genuine religious controversies. Why waste time on something as relatively petty as an eruv?