Stronger Relations

If Yeshiva University (YU) wants to be a vibrant presence in
the United States, it has to create stronger relationships with the Modern
Orthodox community, so said YU President Richard Joel during his keynote
address at the Orthodox Union’s (OU) 13th annual West Coast Torah Convention,
which was held Dec. 11-15 in Los Angeles. The theme of this year’s convention
was “The Secret to Jewish Survival: The Jewish Family.”

The OU is the central coordinating organization for Orthodox
communities in the United States and Canada. In Los Angeles, the OU has 14
member congregations. While it is well known for its kashrut supervision and
its youth organization, the National Council of Synagogue Youth, the OU has
recently started to focus on strengthening the Jewish family.

 Convention sessions took place at local synagogues and at
the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The sessions ranged from talks by psychologists on
“Keeping Our Marriages Spicy” and maintaining the balance between family
relationships and religion, to lectures by rabbis on the halachic (Jewish Law)
obligations of husbands, wives, parents and children.

In his speech, Joel said that in order for families to
survive, they need an environment of a community that defines itself as a
family of families.

“It can’t be cold, forbidding or exclusionary,” Joel said.
“It can’t build walls and needs to reinforce values and offer services to the
family.”

“I’m saying that we have a lot of work to do,” Joel
continued. “I am here to say that YU must fulfill a role of being in partnership
with the communities with a passion for our world view and our passion for
Torah.”

After his speech, Joel clarified his vision to The Journal,
saying that YU needs more community-based programs, because the Modern Orthodox
community feels under siege.

“They see a vigorous left and a vigorous right, and they are
feeling defensive, even though they know that the lifestyle that they have and
the life values that they have are relevant and strong, but they don’t
understand why,” he said.

“YU needs a speaker’s bureau,” he added. “We don’t have
organized ways to provide services to the day schools. We haven’t galvanized
the rabbis and the educators we have trained as a strike force.”

“We need to provide an engine to the broad Jewish community
for continuing training for Jewish professionals, for being a cauldron for
educational planning for people from all the day schools,” he said. “The vision
that we have to have is that we have to take some responsibility for the Jewish
future.”

Rabbi Dr. Moshe Tendler, a YU biology professor and the rosh
yeshiva of YU’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, also spoke at the
convention. Tendler is known as an expert on medical ethics and halacha. He
spoke on two subjects: “The Genome and the Jews: Responding to New Discoveries
and Tests” and “Providing Care/Withdrawing Care: Halacha in Conflict With
Changing Legal Doctrines.”

Tendler said that the Torah perspective is one that welcomes
genetic research. In an interview with The Journal, Tendler explained that stem
cell research is one of the most hopeful areas in disease therapy today. He
said President Bush’s intrusion in that area was tantamount to the destruction
of the separation of church and state, and the cause of the exodus of many U.S.
scientists.

“President Bush, under the influence of the fundamentalist
Christians, declared that humanhood begins at the time of fertilization,”
Tendler said. “Never in the history of humanity has that definition been
accepted.”

“Nobody could even think that something in a Petri [dish]
could be declared human, but President Bush did and then declared it abortion
at a time in America when abortion is your constitutional right [thus
prohibiting] all stem cell research,” he said. “In Torah law it is quite clear
what is humanhood and what is not humanhood.”

Tendler also criticized Republican Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida
for disregarding the separation of the legislative and judicial branches of
government, when he interfered in the case of a comatose woman and ordered her
feeding tube replaced. However, Tendler did say that ethically, Bush did the
right thing, and that halacha would require the woman to be kept alive and
receive care.

“Now the secular God in America is ‘autonomy'” Tendler said.
“You can refuse therapy if it pleases you. In Jewish law, it is my obligation
to provide health care for everybody.”

“If someone wants to refuse therapy, then you would say that
they are in violation of halacha,” he said. “We are coercive in providing
medical care [because] we have a far greater concern for the sanctity of life.”