Looking Away from Looming Disaster

I was in fourth grade in the fall of 1962 and I was in a good place: I liked my new school, P.S. 196, and I really liked my teacher, Mrs. Rose Drayson, who—in my nine-year-old opinion—was the ideal pedagogue: friendly, apparently all-knowing, encouraging, patient, and kind. I can’t quite recall what precisely we were learning or studying in the fall of that year, but the part I do remember totally clearly has to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded in October of that year just as we were settling into a classroom routine and I was getting used to my new class in my new school. (I attended P.S. 3 from kindergarten through third grade, then was obliged to move on and attend P.S. 196, which was much further from my parents’ apartment house, but which I was still allowed to walk all the way to and all the way back from on my own without parental supervision. It truly was a different world!)

And so there we were in Mrs. Drayson’s class, practicing daily the routine she taught us so that we would be safe in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. We all took it very seriously, but the procedure itself was not that complicated and mostly involved pulling our chairs out from under our desks and crawling under the desks ourselves with our hands clasped over the tops of our heads to wait for the all-clear to come, presumably either after the bomb had been dropped and it was again safe to move around or after the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm. The thought of New York being leveled, its residents either pulverized or contaminated with radiation, and its buildings demolished in the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated just seventeen years earlier was not part of our thinking at all: instead, the idea—as best I can recall—was that the Russian bomb we so feared, if it somehow managed to hit P.S. 196, would possibly make the roof of our school building collapse and so, to save ourselves from being hit by falling roof-debris, we were to remain safely ensconced in the space beneath our desks until we got the all-clear and could safely return to our studies.

How naïve that all sounds now! For a long time, I supposed it was just a sign of our relentless American optimism finding it simply unimaginable that a nuclear war would or even could truly make uninhabitable large parts of North America or, even less likely, that the effects of an all-out nuclear war could cost scores of millions their lives and permanently alter the course of our nation’s history. And so, preferring to imagine an all-out nuclear strike as nothing really more than a super-sized “regular” attack to which our brave soldiers would respond quickly and effectively, the nation apparently found it reasonable to protect American schoolchildren by having them hide under their desks with their hands tightly clasped over their innocent heads. If Mrs. Drayson knew better, she didn’t let on.

When I think back now on those strange days all those many years ago, however, it seems to me that our nation’s bizarrely casual response to the possibility of Russia using nuclear weaponry to advance its own aggressive agenda against the West had to do less with our native optimism and more with our fundamental assumption that, no matter how hostile the rhetoric, no nation—not even the evil Soviet Union—would really use nuclear weapons to advance its agenda. Our nation, of course, did do precisely that once…but that was before we truly understood the possibilities inherent in an all-out nuclear war between the world’s two superpowers. And also, of course, because President Truman was certain that Japan didn’t possess nuclear weapons that they could use in response to our attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the chances of an all-out nuclear war with Japan were precisely zero. Was the same true with respect to the Soviet Union? We told ourselves that it was, that even the Russians would never really risk the kind of mutually-assured devastation a nuclear war would inevitably bring in its radioactive wake. And so, finding comfort in the fantasy that the fear of nuclear attack was theoretically real but only barely so…we had our children hide under their desks and hoped for the best.

And now, all these many years later, we are back to square one, back to wondering if Vladimir Putin could possibly be crazy enough to use nuclear weaponry decisively to defeat Ukraine. Or cagey enough, since it almost goes without saying that—despite the deliberate vagueness our American leaders and their European counterparts have enshrouded their responses to Putin’s assertion the other day when he ordered the immediate mobilization of 300,000 fresh recruits that a full collapse of the Soviet front in Ukraine would not be permitted to occur even if that required the use of nuclear arms—it more or less goes without saying that the West would not respond by attacking Russia full-on with nuclear weaponry even if the Russians did use a nuclear device of some sort to attempt a last-ditch attempt to win in Ukraine.

But the results would be truly devastating for the world as we have come to know it. First and foremost for Ukraine, obviously. But also for Russia itself as the world mobilizes in a way not really seen since the Second World War. And for the nations of Europe as well as nuclear dust spreads over Europe, thus making the chances of the rest of the world consciously choosing to look away plummet to almost zero. And the Russian people themselves too, who have a long history of rising up successfully against tyranny, would surely also be heard from. Putin himself would be finished. A new Russia would emerge. But Ukraine would be still be devastated, as would large portions of Russia. There would be no winners at all, only losers.

Most of the scenarios I’ve read just lately—particularly in The Atlantic and in the Washington Post—have suggested that the use of some small nuclear devices against Ukraine would instantly trigger a concerted effort by Western nations to arm Ukraine with the most sophisticated non-nuclear weapons that exist, thus turning the tide of the war by pushing the Russians back across the border and then daring them to use “real” nuclear devices to seize back the territory they would have lost. Most of our officials are still supposing that Putin’s fiery threats are meant merely to terrify but not truly to signal his intent to use nuclear weaponry to win this war he himself started. I’d like to think that too. But I’ve learned over the years to take at face value even the most exaggerated threats when made by people whose basic commitment to decency and peaceful coexistence cannot be presumed. That was true of Hitler long before the Second World War and it was also true of Bin Laden before 9/11. That is why I take the regular threats by the Iranian leadership to attack Israel seriously…and why everybody should. And it is also why I take Vladimir Putin’s threats fully seriously…and why everybody also should.

As we approach Yom Kippur, Jews all over the world will be gearing up to spend a day in prayer and repentance. To be true to one’s own ideals and not to work at cross-purposes with one’s own better angels—these are the twin goals of the day’s work for those brave enough to adopt them for their own. This year, part of that work of self-analysis should include the painful question of whether we have underestimated the importance of Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons to defeat Ukraine and have therefore failed adequately to respond to it. Now I am a grown man but I was once a little boy hiding under a wooden desk in Mrs. Drayson’s classroom, so I feel qualified to answer that question clearly on behalf of both of us, boy-me and grown-up-me: we have, but we shouldn’t. To be amazed when irrational people do irrational things is, to say the least, irrational.

  

Rosh Hashanah 5783

I had an unfortunate encounter with a jellyfish in the ocean off Rockaway Beach when I was about eleven years old. I was there with my parents. (I was still too young to understand just how totally uncool it is to go to the beach with your parents.) The day was hot. The sky was blue. And the late-August Atlantic was lovely: salty, briny, and cold. I was in deep-enough water to swim and was focused on trying to do the crawl the way we had been taught at camp when I suddenly felt this intense stingy sensation on my calf. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but then I saw a whole school of jellyfish—or whatever the right word is for a crowd of them—in the water nearby and heard people on the beach yelling to people in the water to get out. I didn’t need to be told twice. In the end, nothing too bad happened. My calf swelled up and was sore and painful for a few days. Eventually the swelling went down and my leg stopped hurting. I did not go back into the ocean that season. So the episode concluded not badly, but I was left with what by now surely qualifies as a life-long aversion to jellyfish. When we heard on the radio that about twenty billion meduzot were headed for the waters off of Israel’s Mediterranean beaches last summer, we just turned the car around and headed back to Jerusalem to swim in the lovely municipal pool in East Talpiyot that day instead. Problem solved!

So why, as Rosh Hashanah is almost upon us, am I reminiscing about my childhood encounter with a jellyfish? You may be surprised. Or maybe not: it might depend on how diligently you read the Science Times section of the paper that comes out each Tuesday, because last week that section of the Times featured a story that was truly remarkable to consider as we approach the High Holiday season. And it’s about, of all things, jellyfish.

And, at that, not even a full-sized model, but a miniature version correctly called Turritopsis dohrnii. And they really are tiny, each one about the size of a lentil. Mostly, they behave like the larger models. They float around and use their dainty tentacles to bring even tinier sea creatures like plankton to their tiny mouths. But these teensy-weensy creatures can do something that, apparently, no other known living thing can do: when they become old and brittle, or when their bodies become damaged, they have the almost unbelievable ability to morph back into their adolescent selves. They lose their tentacles, then somehow attach themselves to an underwater rock (or something) and begin to develop. When they’re ready, they start out life again as youthful jellyfish. And although they are not invulnerable or indestructible, they do seem to be able never to die of old age.

I wrote to you about Turritopsis dohrnii a full decade ago (click here) when these apparently immortal creatures were first identified. But now, ten years on, scientists have finally decoded enough of the creature’s genome to begin to understand how this minuscule blob of whatever it is jellyfish are made of can possibly be the sole creature on earth that need never succumb to old age. Scientists at Kyoto University in Japan, for example, have managed to create a whole colony of these creatures and to extract enough genetic material to begin to map out their genetic backstory. (For a hysterical look at the lead scientist dressed up as a jellyfish and performing a song he wrote about his immortal jelly-friends, turn up your volume and click here.) Parallel research teams are at work in Spain at the Universidad de Oviedo and here in the U.S. at Texas A&M University in Galveston. The obvious point of all this interest in these tiny things can be summed up in one single and simple question: can we learn how to rework the human genome so as to mimic T. dornhii and thus make it possible for human beings too to skip the whole senescent frailty thing and just hit reset instead? Now how cool would that be?

Even better than Hollywood-style time travel that magically turns people back into the seventeen-year-olds they once were, altering the human genome in the manner that beckons to the scientists mentioned above would permit us to rejuvenate with our memory banks intact, thus offering us the best of both worlds: the bodies of healthy young people combined with the wisdom acquired over the decades we’ve all spent since we were actual teenagers. It’s hard to imagine a more desirable combination!

Or would life absent its awful brevity be something entirely different, something less good, less desirable, less precious? Does the prospect of growing old terrify or ennoble, unsettle or energize? If we knew we could turn back the clock again and again, thus living in our personal versions of the movie Groundhog Day—would that stimulate or paralyze us as we made our way through the years? My first inclination is to say that I would love to shed my current body and turn back into my nineteen-year-old self…and particularly if I was able to hold onto all I’ve learned since I was that age. But there’s another part of me that thinks otherwise, even that knows otherwise. It’s the passage of time that, above all else, stimulates us to action, reminds us to get to work, frames the whole concept of purposeful enterprise. (This is what Andie McDowell inspires Bill Murray to understand in the movie.) Knowing that we don’t have forever is what gets us to make peace with people we’ve wronged or who have wronged us…and it’s also what stimulates the urge to create and to do good in the world.

If we are fortunate enough to grow wiser as we grow older, we can then hope to gain the sure footing we all truly need to be ourselves in the world and to do the good we were meant all along to do. I used to fear the whole concept of growing older. But now I feel at peace with my age, with my stage, with who I’ve become. And part of that acquiescence has to do with also being at peace with the aging process. I don’t wish I were a jellyfish, not even an immortal one. (And for so many different reasons!) But I’ve made my peace with my own mortality and feel driven into the future by the fact that, unlike T. dohrnii, the time I’ve got is the time I’ve got and there ain’t no more. I am therefore impelled—even inspired—to do with it what I can! No more, perhaps. But also no less.

And that is the message I wish to share as Rosh Hashanah approaches. None of us relishes the thought of being evaluated in the heavenly tribunal by Judge God and found either worthy or wanting. And, equally surely, no one wants to take too seriously the notion that we shall all be written up in God’s great book in the course of the coming weeks. But regardless of whether we focus on that model of divine judgment or not, the bottom line is that the years slip by like dreams through sleep and none can halt the flow. (T. dohrnii is surely meant to be the exception that proves the rule.) As we prepare for the High Holiday season, therefore, the idea is not to be weighed down, let alone paralyzed, by remorse or regret regarding the past, but to be energized by the brevity of life to seize the time we do have on this earth to do good, to be kind, to seek justice, and to mend the tears in the fabric of society as best we can. None of us has forever. Therefore, best to get to work!

How the Munich Massacre Altered My Course in Life

 Some anniversaries mostly provoke incredulity: to think that a year from now we will be taking note of the sixtieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination seems just amazing to me. Like everybody alive then over the age of four or five, I remember just where I was when I heard about Dallas: in Mrs. D’Antona’s fifth-grade classroom in P.S. 196 on 113^th Street in Forest Hills. Nor do I find it even remotely possible to believe that that more than half a century has passed since that summery evening I was lying on my back on a blanket behind one of the dormitories at the University of Vermont in Burlington on July 20, 1969, while listening to Neil Armstrong say what he said as he took his first steps on the moon. Or that 9/11 is now more than two decades in the past.

But other anniversaries, I take more personally—not necessarily because I myself had something to do with the event under consideration, but because of the effect that event had on me, on my life. And foremost in that category is the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich in September of 1972.

I was on the far cusp of my life-long involvement with Jewish life in 1972. A mere lad of nineteen back then, I had spent more than a few summers working in Jewish summer camps and was loosely affiliated with the Forest Hills Jewish Center. (By “loosely affiliated,” I mean I went to shul there on Shabbat from time to time but without actually having gone so far as to join the congregation.) So I was still very much a work in progress in those days, at least Jewishly speaking, and had yet to formulate even a vague plan about the path I wished to take forward into the rest of my life.

I was beginning my junior year of college. I would have liked to spend that year studying in Israel—I remember sharing that thought with a few friends, but specifically not with my parents—but I didn’t qualify for the only program CUNY was offering in Israel because I hadn’t completed two years of Hebrew language instruction. (To be more specific, I hadn’t completed any.) The rule seemed foolish and counterproductive to me—the whole point of me going to Israel would have been to devote the year to working on my Hebrew—and I remember personally trying to get the sub-dean (or whoever he was) in charge of study abroad options to make an exception for me. I was unsuccessful—I don’t remember him being even remotely moved by my argument that it was crazy to deny me a chance to study Hebrew because I hadn’t studied enough Hebrew—and so had to choose between spending my junior year in France and spending it in Germany. (I had two years of both college French and college German under my belt, so was qualified for either program.) I opted for France, mostly because my parents would have had triple heart attacks if I had even suggested visiting Germany, let alone spending a year there. I understood how they felt. It was, after all, basically how everybody in my world felt back then, and certainly not just the survivor-families in our neighborhood. And I felt that way myself as well, although not entirely: I was very curious back then to see what Germany was like but unable to imagine settling in and actually living there. So it was France.

I spent a few days in Paris, then a week in Reims in some sort of preparatory course, then headed to Nancy, the city in eastern France in which the CUNY study-abroad program was located. My whole situation was strange from the get-go. I, who grew up in a neighborhood as close to 100% Jewish as they came, was suddenly living in a men’s dormitory inhabited mostly by visitors from French-speaking West Africa and Southeast Asia, most of whom were much older than I was. (There were other Queens College students in the program, but no other men. So I was on my own in the men’s dorm.) They were friendly, even very friendly, but I was clearly not in Kansas anymore: none of my three eventual best friends (one from Chad, one from Niger, and one from Laos) had ever even met a Jewish person before, let alone befriended one. And no one—literally no one at all—spoke English. (Eventually, some English guys from Leeds moved in too. But that was more than halfway through the year.) So it was clear from the start that that my life in Nancy was going to unfold in French or not at all. Eager not to have no one at all to talk to (and having no alternate plan anyway), I got to work on improving my conversational French quickly.

And so there I was on the morning of September 6, 1972, having a bowl of café crème (in the provincial French style) in the restaurant universitaire adjacent to the dormitory when I heard the news. My French was still very weak—two years of college French do not a fluent speaker or understander make—but I was able to glean enough from the chatter all around that there had been a terrible massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich and that none of the hostages had survived. Hearing this in a language I barely spoke, not being able at understand everything people were saying, lacking even the vocabulary to ask for more details, the one thing that was crystal clear to me was that I was the only person present who was taking this at all personally. For them—nice fellows from West Africa and Southeast Asia—this was another news item, something interesting, even shocking, that had happened, that made for interesting breakfast discussion. But no one was that engaged by the story. A radio had been playing, but the newscaster soon went on to other news, eventually to the sports and then to the weather. Breakfast ended. Everybody left and I left too. But something had happened to me in that coffee lounge, something stirring and decisive. I felt this odd mixture of alone and not-alone, of being the only Jew in the world and someone tied viscerally and profoundly to the Jewish people, of being outraged by the horror of the Munich massacre and deeply engaged by the thought that the Jewish people are as alone in the world as I personally was in that student dining hall on the Boulevard de la Libération in Nancy. It was, to say the least, a strange moment.

The next few days altered my life. I found my way downtown. I located a store on the Rue St. Dizier that sold international newspapers. I bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune and some French newspapers I could peruse at my leisure with a dictionary in my dorm room, plus—amazingly—a copy of Omer, an Israel newspapers printed specifically with lots of vowel signs and easy vocabulary for new immigrants. Why the Halle de la Presse carried such a thing or for whom, I have no idea. But they did carry it and I bought a copy, then headed back to my dorm room to try to decipher it. I only partially succeeded.

But the die was cast. Or at least for me it was. The next day, I dropped all the courses in French and German that I had been pre-registered for by my masters at CUNY, and registered instead for every Hebrew course offered by the university in Nancy. And that Friday night I found my way to the synagogue of Nancy on the Boulevard Joffre and—with some combination of trepidation and excitement—stepped inside. (The synagogue in Nancy, built in 1788, is the second oldest still-functioning synagogue in France. So it wasn’t even remotely like stepping into an American synagogue—even the smell of the place, not unpleasant but wholly unfamiliar—suggested its age to me.)

The synagogue was like nothing I had previously experienced. Men sat downstairs, women up in the balcony. The entire service was mumbled in Hebrew. The one or two hymns sung aloud were sung to melodies I hadn’t ever heard and didn’t know. No page numbers were announced. You either knew where we were or you didn’t. But I somehow didn’t feel as alone or at sea as you’d think I should have. And after the service, people—and lots of them—came up to me and introduced themselves, told me to feel welcome, did what they could to make me feel comfortable. One young man my age invited me to Shabbat dinner with his family a few blocks away. I went. (I had no other place to go and had at any rate missed dinner at the restaurant universitaire.) I came back the following morning and was given an aliyah. I could almost feel the ground shifting under my feet as my life plans subtly altered.

Eventually, I learned the whole horrific story of the massacre in Munich, about the ham-fisted German attempt to rescue the hostages that led to their deaths, about the in-retrospect-insufferably-arrogant refusal of the German authorities to let the Israeli security team take over. I learned the names of the victims too, taking each death as a personal loss. (I even cut a photograph of the twelve victims out of one of the French papers and taped it to the bulletin board over my desk, where it stayed for the whole year I lived in that room.) I became a regular at the synagogue. I took each of my classes enormously seriously. I stayed friends with my dorm-buddies, but acquired a parallel set of friends in the Jewish community. And when I returned to New York a year later, the path I wished to follow in life had opened up before me.

 

 

 

 

In the Matter of the YU Pride Alliance

My mother was apparently correct when she told me that, if you try hard enough, you can learn something new every day of your life. Just the other day, for example, I learned what a writ of certiorari is: the order of a higher court to a lower court that it, the lower court, provide its record in a given case so that the higher court may review it. Apparently, this is a regular feature of life at the Supreme Court and, indeed, I also learned that the Supreme Court issues writs of certiorari to select most of the cases it hears. Who knew?

The context in which I learned about certiorari is what I’d like to write about this week because it was just a few days ago that the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a legal advocacy group that promotes the free exercise of religion,  filed an emergency application with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Yeshiva University asking that it either issue a writ of certiorari and/or stay a ruling issued by the New York State Supreme Court last June instructing YU to treat the YU Pride Alliance, a group serving the LGBTQ+ community at Yeshiva, as any other student group, i.e., by providing it with funding and with an on-campus meeting place. YU’s argument that the ruling requires the school to go against its own religious principles and is thus a violation of its First Amendment rights sounds rational, at least at first, and that point was made forcefully.

It turns out, slightly amazingly, that Yeshiva specifically amended its charter in 1967 to describe itself, not as a religious institution at all, but rather specifically as an educational one. And that was the crucial detail that prompted the lower court’s ruling: although it is true that religious corporations, including ones “incorporated under the education law,” are exempt from compliance with the New York City human rights law, YU’s decision specifically not to describe itself as a religious institution means that that exclusion specifically does not apply to them. This, at least to me, is a mere detail: no one with even a passing acquaintanceship with Jewish life in the United States would seriously argue that YU is not a religious institution. Its name implies as much. It houses a rabbinical seminary that trains modern Orthodox rabbis and is widely regarded as the flagship institution of modern Orthodoxy in America. So let’s say that the New York court’s ruling turned on a detail that itself feels negligible and inconsonant with reality as we know it. What then? Should its ruling be overturned? Does a religious institution have the right to engage in overtly discriminatory practices if it finds justification for those practices in its traditions and traditional practices? May the government step in to protect citizens whose human rights are being violated even if the violation in question is being carried out by a religious institution? These are the questions that the whole kerfuffle about the YU Pride Alliance bring to my mind. And all of them circle around the single issue that churns and roils at the center of the matter: does the Constitution permit the government to determine what is and what isn’t legitimate religious practice protected by the First Amendment?

I broached this topic last October when I wrote about the case of John Henry Ramirez, a former Marine who murdered a convenience store worker in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 2004 and then fled to Mexico, where he was eventually apprehended four years later. He was tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. As the date of his execution drew closer, he sued the State of Texas over the fact that the state was refusing to grant his minister, the Reverend Dana Moore of the Second Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, the right not only to be present at his execution but also to lay his hands on Ramirez’s head and to pray with him as he was going to be put to death. When I wrote last year about this case, it was still undecided. But it is undecided no longer: Ramirez won in court and Texas was ordered to permit Reverend Moore to serve his congregant in whatever way his religious training dictates. Ramirez’s execution is scheduled to take place on October 5 of this year and will presumably take place as he prays with his minister’s hands set upon his head.

When I wrote about the Ramirez case (click here), I argued that the key issue here is not whether the laying-on of hands is or isn’t a legitimate part of the Baptist last-rites ceremony, but rather whether the government should have a voice in the discussion at all. I argued, I hope persuasively, that it should not. In my opinion, I wrote, the First Amendment should be understood not only to guarantee freedom of religion in the philosophical sense but also in the practical, and that the government should therefore never be empowered to decide what does or doesn’t constitute “authentic” religious behavior. I’m willing to accept exceptions to that rule in the extreme case: if a fundamentalist group were to embrace the biblical institution of slavery and argue that the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery was a violation of their civil rights, I would certainly not be supportive of that argument. But the Ramirez case was nothing like that and simply involved the State of Texas attempting to tell a Christian minister what does and doesn’t constitute a “real” Christian ritual. That is not something any American should find rational or reasonable.

Just lately, the Supreme Court has issued several rulings that seem, at least to me, to thin the famous wall between Church and State that is so foundational to our American republic.

In Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court determined that the State of Maine was acting illegally in refusing school vouchers to parents whose children attended religion-based private schools. The argument was simple: those parents pay taxes, their children attend the school of their choice, parents whose children attend “regular” private schools get government assistance, so why shouldn’t parents whose children attend parochial schools? That this decision eroded the barrier between church and state seems obvious. But the Court felt that the importance of not discriminating against citizens because of their religious affiliation was the greater good. I feel conflicted about the decision. On the one hand, I certainly understand how helpful that kind of assistance could be for Jewish parents who send their children to day schools. But, on the other, feeling that no ultimate good can ever come—not for Jews and not for anyone—from eroding what was once considered the impermeable wall between Church and State. But especially not for Jews and other members of minority faiths!

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court considered the case of a school district in Washington that fired a local football coach after he refused to abandon his practice of kneeling down in prayer at the end of every game and allowing students, if they wished, to join him. (Left unreported was whether he prayed after every game or only if his team won.) The school board felt that, since Coach Kennedy only engaged in Christian prayer, this practice was an offense against the Establishment Clause that forbids the government—in this case, a state-run public school—from endorsing one specific religion over any other. The Supreme Court felt otherwise, decreeing that the School District was wrong in, in effect, denying Coach Kennedy his right to speak freely. About this too, I have mixed emotions. Certainly, the coach’s practice must have appeared to most, or at least to some, to be a kind of official endorsement specifically of Christian prayer as opposed to the prayers of any other faith group. On the other hand, the notion that any citizen’s right to engage in prayer can or should be limited by governmental restrictions on religious activity in public places seems wrong to me. So here too I sit on both sides of the fence, wanting the wall between Church and State to be ironclad, but also wanting the government to keep its hands off religion entirely…and certainly not to dictate where and when individuals can say their prayers.

And that brings us back to the YU Pride Alliance. Should an American university—regardless of how it self-defines in terms of its theological or philosophical orientation—be permitted to engage in discriminatory practices against recognized groups that would be unequivocally illegal if that discrimination were to take place, say, in the workplace or in a public school? Or is the greater good served here by the government being prohibited from interfering in the behavior of religious institutions regardless of whether that involves behavior that would otherwise be illegal? (I reject as ridiculous the argument that Yeshiva University is not an Orthodox Jewish institution.) Is the greater good served here by allowing YU to sneer openly and, in my opinion, embarrassingly and unjustifiably prejudicially at its gay students if that is the price we must pay for religious institutions not having to answer to the government for their practices or standards? Or has society long since turned that corner with respect to the respect due gay people? We certainly wouldn’t tolerate the government looking away if a school, even a religious one, were to forbid its Black students or its Hispanic or Jewish ones to form affinity groups promoting their culture or history! To ask the question differently: is this really about the place of gay people in America or is really about the willingness of the government to regulate religion? In a sense, it’s about both.

In the end, I think the Supreme Court will probably endorse Yeshiva’s right to discriminate against its own gay students. But in such an instance, the challenge will then pass to the Jewish community itself: whether the government can or should regular religious institutions at all is one thing, after all, but it is another thing entirely to ask if the Jewish world will just shrug its shoulders and hope the issue just goes away…or stand up to speak with a united voice against YU’s misguided and unjustified decision to disenfranchise its own gay students for the sake of some unspecified religious principle. I suppose they must have one. But the one I suggest they adopt in its place come precisely from last week’s Torah portion: tzedek tzedek tirdof, Scripture enjoins the faithful: never ever tire in the pursuit of justice for all.