The NY Times and the Siyum of Daf Yomi

I think sometimes we get so used to our way of doing things that we forget just how different we are from the people around us.

Mr. Shick is obviously correct that the seating arrangement at Met Life the other night had very little to do with Daf Yomi and the amazing accomplishment of thousands upon thousands of tyere yidden finishing the Talmud Bavli. But, we have to understand just how strange, bizarre, awkward, and even chauvinistic it appears to the modern American to have a male-dominated event, or to have a study program in which 99.9999% of the participants are men. For us this is normal and the way it’s done, but for the outsider, it’s just plain weird, astonishing and outright offensive.

I don’t think this reporter was necessarily grinding an axe. She was viewing this event from the lenses that the majority of Americans wear, and this is what she saw.

We live in an age when, for whatever reason, the general media takes considerable interest in the Orthodox Jewish world and reports heavily on what goes on. It is to be expected that they will focus on what they find to be unusual. As much as we’ve blended in, we’re still different – very different, and that’s going to come across in the media’s reporting of our world.

I was supprised that the New York Times covered the event at all. *Fifteen* years ago, the siyum hashas made the fromt page of the New York Times. What’s new about the event that should make the Times want to cover it again Has the Shss changed since then. What differntiates the 12th seven and a half year cycle from the 10th seven and a half year cycle. Were the people less joyous last time than this? That this cycles’s event was centralized in one stadium rather thn spread out over three or more arenas is not earth shattering notwithstanding Agudah’s press releases.

Let’s face it. the Times needed a Chiddush to cover the story. It needed a new angle – the more controversial the better. Like it or not, Orthodoxy’s treatment of women is presently newsworthy . Spitting at eight year old girls, representing little girls as rectangular blocks rather than human beings in chassididhe loshen kodesh gramamr books, etc etc are all part of the equation. The Times went after that story, the siyum was just the background noise.

“Fifteen” I belive it was the tenth siyum that made the headlines. I could be wrong. It might have been the eleventh.

1. Another sign of the Times! Traditional, accurate reportage by liberals is so yesterday.

2. The more Jewishly enlightened readers of the Times may have the straight scoop on the Siyum from more reliable sources, so not all are clueless.

It’s the New York Times. Who ever expected more?

Yishar Koach! The one photo I recall in the article drove home the same point. Some frum women davening quite apart. The paper did not see fit to include even one photograph of the spontaneous eruption of simcha that brought thousands (including my wife) literally to tears.

Pity that millions of potentially interested Jews, and even larger numbers of decent non-Jews, could not be informed of the enormous importance of the sacred institution we call “The Talmud”, or its impact and influence on American law and jurisprudence (on that point Rabbi Adlerstein can speak far more than I). Instead, one woman’s bitter experience and feeling was allowed expression in the paper of record.

Wishful thinking though it may be, were the reporter to allow herself an intellectual foray into a leading study, a few years back, by Dr Sylvia Barak Fishman of Brandeis, herself a leader in Orthodox Feminism, she would discover that while one can respectfully disagree with the public position that ought to be the place of women in Jewish life, one cannot at the same time hold out any hope for the future of heterodox movements. Dare I make a foray into this most contentious of topics.

Dr. Fishman pointed out the massive fall-out taking place among American Jewish boys and men who hunger for Jewish leadership among men. Despite the impressive achievement of status and position that many Jewish women have made in heterodox movements, the massive bleeding in Jewish families and communities across the country is (at least partially) due to the increasing lack of male role-modeling in non-Orthodox Jewish life.

Of course, those of us attendees and non-attendees alike, can do our own painstaking share by adhering to the Chazal: That we love our wives as we do ourselves, but that we respect her/them “mechabdeha,” even more than we do ourselves. Were such behavior to be even more widespread than it already is, Baruch Hashem, perhaps, just perhaps, those who choose to place Feminisim ahead of traditional Judaism, would at least admit that we “walk the walk” as we continue to raise new doros of Klal Yisrael.

Again, Yishar Koach to Marvin Schick.

perhaps the Times should spend a yiddish speaking chareidi to report an uncommented play by play. guess what? the times has biases and it typically puts a spin on events. this story had a number of paragraphs of pretty plain (not very incisive) reporting, followed by what it thought might be of interest: the traditional role of women versus that adopted by others in the orthodox community. the early appearance of the mechitza in the event and the story kinda of told you where the article was headed.

my commentary on your piece, ala the times: is it under-reporting the event or the over-reporting the position of (some) women and spokemen in attendance? me thinks the latter; did you really read the times for its ability to report on the event? I think the times readership was informed of something that to them was of greater interest than details of the event.

on your issue, there is a middle ground. But given forced choice, i would tilt towards Rabbi Linzer’s position. Hope to see you at his siyyum; otherwise, you will miss some excellent divrei torah, a few by women scholars.

Dear Mr. Marvin Schick,

How would you feel if Yaser Arafat hugged you and kissed you? Repulsed? Rushing to decontaminate and cleanse yourself?

How would you feel if NY Times had your photo on the first page and wrote about you that you are a tzadik and a saint? Wouldn’t you be worried?

If the answers to all the above questions are YES, that NY Times’ article should only flatter us.

Have a wonderful week!

Pardon me if I seem presumptuous to even write about the Siyum Hashas.

There are hundreds of people in Baltimore far more qualified to comment.

When we arrived at MetLife Stadium and I saw the thousands of people entering the stadium from numerous entrances, one thought came to my mind. I wish my father, Meyer Oberstein, were able to see this. When I would come home from yeshiva with stringent practices, like not shaving during the summer mourning period, my father would invariably say ,”there is nobody in Montgomery who does this”. My father left a city full of Torah learning, Tiktin, Poland and came to the Deep South in 1924. He used to tell me when I was a little boy how his father, Elchonon, had been a “masmid,” who learned his whole life and was chosen to marry the daughter of a rich man who promised him lifetime support. He also told me that the rich man lost his money in the Russian Revolution, then his mother died of blood poisoning when my father was an infant, and how he and his siblings made their way to America to escape poverty and neglect

His father had tried America but decided it was impossible to be a frummer yid (an observant Jew) in the Treife America and sailed back to Poland where he re-married and lived out his days . One story that my father told me was how his father had challenged the Tiktiner Rov on some fine point of Talmudic reasoning in the midst of a shiur or drasha and it got so convoluted that they brought the argument before a godol, who said “The Tiktiner Rov is a great scholar ,but in this case, Reb Elchonon is correct”. My father had no idea of the details but he remembered the story.

His view of America and of the state of Jewry was Montgomery-centric. He didn’t know that stories of shiduchim arranged with “the best bochur in Lakewood” or baalei batim who were talmidei chachomim still existed. He thought that was the world of yesteryear. As I walked from the bus to the entrance of Met-Life Stadium, I thought “Daddy, look, there are tens of thousands of frummer yidden and they are coming to celebrate learning Gemara. It didn’t die in Tiktin, Yiddishkeit is alive.”

We, in Baltimore, are not used to the reality that New York area doesn’t look like Baltimore. When the speakers said that “gantz klal yisroel”, all segments of Jewry were present, they meant that there were mostly Yeshivish and Chassidish and some Modern Orthodox and some Baalei Teshuva. The large numbers of Chassidim present gave a color to the audience that maybe I will have to get used to. The Chassidim have increasingly become a major share of the orthodox population and their ideas of the place of women in public events and even of forbidding pictures of women in their media, is far from what I saw in the yeshiva world when I was a bochur. If one holds to a different derech in Torah observance it is hard to always concede on issues of gender and to keep quiet and submissive as their standards become more and more prevalent in our world.

On the other hand, this “shtarkeit”, stubborn adherence to their tradition, is one of the major reasons we have a renaissance of observant Judaism in this generation. After Rav Malkiel Kotler, shlita, made the siyum and Mr. Jay Schottenstein said the Kaddish, there was a huge simcha, people were dancing in the aisles and it brought tears of joy to me to see how alive and strong our Torah community has become.

I was seated next to my good friend, Jan Loeb , whose roots are closer to Germany than Romania and it took a while before he and I joined hands with those next to us and swayed with the beat, but we did. Those Chassidim know how to celebrate en mass. They are used to thousands of men in bleachers at a tisch and they are not shy about showing their joy. We have progressed in this country from a time when orthodox men wore baseball caps in public to a time when children with long payos and unique garb feel quite comfortable walking in the street. Never before have we Jews lived in a country with such freedom and opportunity and with so little discrimination. Things are so good that many of us forget we are in golus and go about our business as if we had nothing to be afraid of. But, that is a different issue.

The massive display of 100,000 people saying Shema together and answering “Yeheh Shmeih Rabboh” together was inspiring. I certainly would never have imagined it when I went to New York in 1959 to attend one of the very first NCSY conventions (in the Monsey Park Hotel) and saw people wearing yarmulkes on their heads walking in the street for the first time in my life. The rebirth of observant Judaism, the flourishing of learning , not only by rabbis, but by baalebatim, the vitality and assertiveness of orthodoxy is a far cry from the world that my father knew in Montgomery, Alabama in the first half of the previous century. Even a secular Jew, if he or she is honest, has to admire the counter-intuitive resurgence of Torah Judaism and admire the competence and effectiveness of its leadership.

Final thoughts. Our daughter Shira Bracha is marrying Yaakov Yitzchok Shugarman in a week. Our children have come from far and wide to share in the simcha. My father Meyer Oberstein, z’l, is no longer here, but his great grandson, Meir Simcha Oberstein came to the siyum with his other Zeidy, Rabbi Binyamin Friedman, all the way from Atlanta. i went to “cheder”, a/k/a Hebrew School, in Montgomery. Meir Simcha has gone to cheder in Yerushalayim where our son Avrohom Yeshaya has been a member of the Kollel of the Mir Yeshiva for many years. I have been blessed with many wonderful einiklach (grandchildren), four of whom are named Meir after my father. All of my grandchildren are growing up in homes of Torah and mitzvos. I am sure that my father is looking down from Heaven and shepping nachas that our people has been reborn and that Torah is being learned by greater numbers than in a very long time.

As Rabbi Frand distinguished at the siyum between real life and falsehood, something that is full of real life is not going to be interested in something that is bedavka made up of falsehood and fakeness.

thanks to Marvin for his comments. as always they are on point.

if we think of the hundreds of ou shuls that have massive daf yomi programs–i would think that the times would also have noted the lack of representation on the program of any leaders of that sub-division of the learning community. opportunity to reach the greater jewish population was indeed missed by the forum organizers.

perhaps that is why main media coverage was so limited in scope and depth. more than the “extreme” are stakeholders in the learning enterprise. reporters misssed the nuance.

Most coverage of the siyum hashas was perfectly adequate. It was only the New York Times, with its peculiar liberal obsessions, that chose to write about it in the laughable way it did. For those who defend that bias by saying orthodox’s position on women learning is “strange” and hence newsworthy – give me a break. It is not all that strange at all, as most news outlets in this country realized. Orthodox Judaism is not some brand new religion that suddenly fell from the skies. The Times itself has spent the last six months bashing it (trying to get Romney to distance himself from them and lose their advantage)and so it is nothing new to that paper’s readers. Moreover, a paper that trumpets “diversity!” at every given moment should seize the moment to write rapturously about orthodoxy’s differences, rather than try to pick fights with it, as one more element in the multi-cultural mosaic.

Bottom line – the Times’s day in the sun in over. On any given day, the Drudge Report alone is read by twenty times more people than New York Times subscribers (many of whom dont even read their delivered copy) and newstand purchases. Their diminished statutre is not entirely their fault, as surely a great chunk of the blame/credit goes to the Internet, which has devestated the media industry. But they have shot themselves in the foot with their noticeable biases, too. Their reporting and editorials preach exclusively to their choir, and are dismissed entirely by the other side. To the exent they are read by their idealogical opponents, it is only to be attacked. [A mistake, as I said before. The right should learn from the left, and spent the same amount of time indulging the left in debate as the left devotes to debating the right – none. You do nothing to advance your cause by worrying about the hypocrisy of those who disagree with you. For the most part, thankfully, the Agudah usually does focus on promoting its own cause withotu worrying what “yenem” says.]

A brief comparison of the Times coverage of previous siyum celebrations (see Mycroft’s August 4, 11:13 post, above) and the recent article make it clear that the Times writer largely ignored all aspects of the siyum except for her personal agenda. This violates all journalistic standards. Does anyone believe that it would be appropriate for a newspaper article covering a gathering of Catholic nuns or of homosexuals to focus on the fact that none of these people will be bringing children into the world? Can you imagine the outcry that would ensue if the Times did this?
But it’s OK. We are Jews. We are not entitled. So we’ll just quietly sit in the dark. And then criticize ourselves for even raising the issue.
Sorry. We deserve better. And the Times should be ashamed of itself.