October 30, 2013

Is Israel pulling down the shutters for business?

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Israel, Lead Story, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News / Jewish Journal

High-tech entrepreneur Eyal Waldman decided he had had enough of Israeli investors when they told him to choose between his titles of chairman and chief executive at the company he co-founded, Mellanox Technologies.

So in August, Waldman delisted the chip designer – Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's sixth-largest company, with a market value at the time of 6 billion shekels ($1.7 billion) – dealing a heavy blow to an ailing bourse that had already seen its chief executive and chairman resign a month earlier.

Waldman said the attitude of Israeli institutional investors, who had been empowered by changes to the Securities Law, was suffocating.

“Mellanox is not an impulsive company. (Delisting) is something we were thinking of, that we saw build up. This was not our place any more,” he told Reuters.

Since Mellanox delisted, a handful of Tel Aviv's largest companies have threatened to follow suit unless Israel becomes more business friendly.

The problem is the result of both more regulation and less.

Over the past decade, Israel has relaxed rules on overseas investments. Previously, Israeli pensions had to invest nearly 100 percent at home; now they can invest without limitation abroad. At the same time, over the past year the government has introduced securities regulations that Israeli companies complain make doing business far harder, including more stringent reporting requirements, pushing even more money out of the country.

The new regulations and other measures were an effort to help consumers and protect investors. Competition was subdued by the domination of a handful of conglomerates in the mobile phone, retail, construction and petrol distribution sectors, and consumers were struggling to keep up with bills.

In 2011, hundreds of young Israelis, angry they could not afford housing and bitter about the high price of groceries, set up a tent city in the heart of Tel Aviv's financial district and for weeks refused to move. This culminated in the largest demonstration in Israel's history, with 400,000 people demanding a more affordable cost of living.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted with a plan to break up the conglomerates that controlled vast swathes of the economy, opened up markets to competition and forced service providers to cut consumer fees.

The new regulations have brought consumers some relief – lower cell-phone bills and banking fees – but many investors and businesses say it is at a cost of dwindling profits and depressed share prices.

What upset Waldman most were amendments to the Securities Law that he could not have foreseen when he listed his company on TASE in 2007, several months after its offering on Nasdaq.

He was troubled by the empowerment of minority institutional investors, who previously had little influence at the companies in which they invested. New rules require majority approval by minority shareholders for issues such as executive salaries.

WILL OTHERS FOLLOW?

Officials at some of Israel's biggest firms have said that, like Mellanox, they are nearing a tipping point.

Potash producer Israel Chemicals (ICL), the most traded company on TASE, is seeking to list overseas. Though it has no intention at present to delist from Tel Aviv, CEO Stefan Borgas said in a conference call: “ICL must act seriously and take into account a situation of an additional worsening in the business climate of the Tel Aviv bourse.”

The same goes for Nice Systems, whose products analyze video and big data.

“It makes much more sense for us to trade only on Nasdaq,” CEO Zeevi Bregman told the Globes financial newspaper, but made clear a delisting was not on the agenda at this time.

Such talk has scared off investors. Daily trading volume on TASE averages around 1 billion shekels, 47 percent of the level in 2010. Other markets have had more moderate drops; since 2010 trade in London has fallen to 80 percent, on Nasdaq to 77 percent and Tokyo to 79 percent.

Only three small IPOs have taken place in Tel Aviv since late 2011, while about 100 firms, roughly 15 percent, have delisted since the end of 2009.

Investors are not pleased; one public relations firm, on behalf of clients, has launched a Facebook page called SaveTASE, blaming Israel's securities regulator, Shmuel Hauser, for the bourse's woes.

Part of the drop in volume followed a 2011 upgrade in Israel's status on the MSCI index from emerging market to developed. The move led to an exodus of passive money from foreign investors tied to the emerging market index.

Foreigners now account for only about 15 percent of trade on TASE in 2013, compared with up to 25 percent in 2010.

But the real drain has been the money that Israeli institutions have withdrawn as restrictions on overseas investments were lifted over the past decade.

“We are in the process of increasing our investment out of Israel, and this process … still has, in my opinion, a long way to go,” said Amir Hessel, chief investment officer of Harel Insurance and Finance, Israel's third-largest insurer.

Harel's pension, provident and life insurance funds have invested 34 percent of their 102 billion shekels in assets under management and 60 percent of their equities portfolio abroad, up from zero a decade ago.

Nir Moroz, CEO of Clal Amitim pension fund, said as much as 30 percent of his fund's assets were abroad, and that could hit 40-50 percent in the next few years due to a dearth of new local issuance.

Bank of Israel data shows pension funds hold 22 percent of their assets abroad, nearly double the level of 2009, while insurance funds hold 27 percent overseas.

FLOOD OF REGULATION

The protests of 2011 ushered in a flood of regulation that hurt profits in almost every sector – from cellular operators and food makers to institutional investors and gas producers.

Israel's three top mobile phone operators posted an average drop of 71 percent in net profit in the second quarter of 2013 compared with three years earlier, before new regulation and competition kicked in.

“There is a big risk of making business and investing in Israeli companies because of regulation,” said one investment manager who asked not to be named.

Hauser disputes that regulations alone have harmed the markets. Much of the regulation, he told Reuters, was aimed at curbing abuse of power by large stakeholders in companies at the expense of minority holders.

However, he said “the wave of regulation since the 2008 crisis may have gone too far”. He has proposed lowering the capital gains tax to 15 percent from 25, reducing fees for trading and clearing, and trading foreign currency.

With the public's cause taken up by the media, Hauser said it has become “illegitimate” to be rich these days, adding: “We have to stop with this populist atmosphere.”

Among the hardest hit by the new environment has been Israel Chemicals, which has made controlling shareholder Idan Ofer one of Israel's richest people.

ICL, which has an exclusive permit to extract minerals from the Dead Sea, paid 1.2 billion shekels in 2012 in taxes and royalties. A year after ICL reached a deal to double royalty payments to 10 percent, Finance Minister Yair Lapid, a former TV personality who rode the social protest to political power, set up a panel to review once more the level of royalties paid.

CEO Borgas said ICL was worried about the “extraordinary level of uncertainty” in the business environment that the committee's appointment has created.

“Our international shareholders acknowledge this at every encounter,” Borgas told Reuters in an email, adding that this was reflected in ICL's share price, which fell over 15 percent in reaction to the committee's establishment.

Its shares were also hit when Canada's Potash Corp in April abandoned efforts to take over ICL because of strong political opposition in Israel.

Borgas, a former CEO of Swiss chemicals group Lonza, said he was concerned by the scope of regulation and the way it was conducted in what seems to be a response to populism.

“In the current situation we have a negative incentive to invest in Israel,” he said.

Israel's economy relies heavily on foreign investment and, like many countries, it provides grants and tax breaks to attract companies.

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Israel's largest company and the world's biggest generic drugmaker, reaped close to 12 billion shekels in tax breaks between 2006 and 2011, according to the Tax Authority. It has come under huge pressure in recent weeks to review plans to shed 10 percent of its global workforce as part of a cost-cutting plan.

ICL was next at 2.2 billion shekels, followed By Check Point Software at 1.65 billion.

When these figures were published by the media in July, the public response was scathing.

Lapid has said he would reexamine the policy, but companies say the benefits are dwarfed by the jobs they provide and the money they contribute to the economy.

“Without this policy a lot of companies would have less business here and would pay less taxes,” Check Point CEO Gil Shwed told reporters in July.

Editing by Will Waterman

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LivingSocial apologizes for party decorations following anti-Semitism complaint

Leave a Comment / Culture / Jewish Journal

The LivingSocial website apologized for a Halloween party it sponsored in Washington following a complaint that some of the decorations were anti-Semitic.

LivingSocial, which offers discount deals at area businesses throughout the country, decorated its “greed” room with dreidels and gold coins at its “7 Deadly Sins Halloween Party” on Oct. 26.

“We have looked into it and determined that the inclusion of dreidels with the other games in the gaming room was not a smart choice, and we are very sorry to have upset anyone,” said Kevin Nolan of LivingSocial’s publicity department. “Certainly this behavior does not reflect who we are as a company.”

Nolan said the customer who complained was “offered a full refund and explained that any offense was unintended” and was given an apology.

That customer, who did not want her name used, said, “I was very offended. I just thought it was completely inappropriate.” She said she considered the room’s decorations “clearly anti-Semitic.”

For $59, guests were invited to “indulge in a silent disco, movie screening” and fun in seven different rooms. Each room’s theme revolved around the seven deadly sins: lust, pride, wrath, gluttony, envy, sloth and greed.

The greed room was described as “a shimmering room full of silver and gold” in which people “get greedy challenging friends to a plethora of games.”

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Paris Jew’s reburial in Israel ends legal battle

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Jewish Journal

A Jewish celebrity art dealer who died in 1870 in France was reburied in Israel after his body was exhumed from his Paris grave due to property laws.

The funeral for Jacob Giacomo Tedesco on Sunday in Beit Shemesh marked the end of a seven-year legal fight led by his relatives to receive his remains for reburial. Authorities exhumed his body under a French law that allows graves to be emptied 99 years after a burial.

Tedesco’s great-great-granddaughter discovered in 2006 that his remains had been exhumed from his grave in the Montparnasse Cemetery and placed at the Pere Lachaise depository.

“I found it had simply disappeared,” Debby Lifchitz, an Orthodox Jewish woman from Israel, was quoted as telling the Le Figaro newspaper of Tedesco’s grave.

The family then launched the legal battle to have his remains transferred to Israel, “where he would have an eternal resting place,” she was quoted as saying.

Tedesco, the owner of a major art gallery, also opened the first kosher butcher shop in Paris, founded an Orthodox synagogue and built a ritual bath that remained active until World War II.

Orthodox Jewish laws dictate Jewish graves be left undisturbed, except for unusual cases.

In 2011, France passed a law that allows authorities to cremate human remains they exhumed — a practice that also goes against Jewish customs.

Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, who attended Tedesco’s funeral in Israel, told the Israeli news site Ynet that the French laws on cremation and exhumation should be changed, as they “threaten to desecrate the dignity of the dead.”

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Me Too

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Lead Story, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Worldwide / Rabbi Ilana Grinblat

Last night, I gave my nine-year-old son, Jeremy a practice spelling test to prepare him for his spelling exam. “Me too,” said my six-year-old daughter Hannah, insisting that I give her a practice spelling test too. She says this refrain many times each day. Wherever Jeremy goes, Hannah wants to go. Whatever Jeremy has, Hannah wants. Perhaps, we should just call her, “Me Too.”

In light of Hannah’s habit, a passage from this week’s Torah portion resonated with me this year as never before. The portion is called Toledot, which means generations, and it recounts the transmission of blessing from one generation to the next. Elderly and blind Isaac decides that the time has come to bless his first-born son, Esau, and asks him to prepare a meal for him to eat before giving the blessing. Instead, Jacob comes with the meal disguised as Esau and receives the blessing. When both Esau and Isaac discover what has happened, Esau burst into “wild and bitter sobbing” and desperately asked his father, “Me too?!”

Esau said to his father, “Don’t you have a blessing reserved for me?” Isaac answered helplessly that he had already made Jacob master over him and given him grain and wine, “What can I do, my son?” Again, Esau heart-wrenchingly responds, “Have you only one blessing, father, me too, my father,” and he wept aloud. After this request, Jacob did give him a blessing, which wasn’t much of a blessing, and Esau was furious with his father.

In reading this story as a parent, I felt tremendous sympathy for Esau and disappointment with Isaac. Why couldn’t Isaac have honored his son’s, “Me too”? Why couldn’t he have composed a blessing for Esau which suited his own unique traits and capabilities? Why didn’t he feel that there was enough blessing to go around?

In her book, We Plan, God Laughs, Rabbi Sherre Hirsch writes that often: “we act like there is a limited supply of beauty, love, friendship, success, and meaning in the world.” She explains that “a mentality of scarcity” can lead to jealousy or feeling the need to belittle others’ success. However Hirsch argues that “when we are on our divine path, it no longer feels like there are a limited number of pieces in the pie.” In shifting to a mentality of abundance, we can celebrate rather than feeling threatened by other’s achievements. Isaac apparently suffered from a mindset of dearth which he transmitted to his sons.

As parents, we need to honor the “me too”s of our children. I understand Hannah’s longing not as a desire to copy her brother but rather as a commitment not to miss out on any joy. The Talmud states that in the world to come, a person will be called to account for having deprived oneself of the good things which the world offered. Like many younger siblings, Hannah instinctively understands this teaching. She refuses to be a wallflower but wants to grab onto all the wonders of life.

Inspired by Hannah, I also have to accept my own “me too”s – the moments where I need a little treat for me – whether that’s dinner out or an hour to unwind after a long day. Lately, I’ve been dancing in the backyard in the morning which has proven to be both good exercise and a way to begin my day in good spirits.

When life presents blessings, like Esau and Hannah, I say “Me too.”

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Obamacare: Glitches or death spiral?

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Is Featured?, Lead Story, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Opinion / David Suissa

It’s not easy to wrap your mind around a program as complex as Obamacare, which features 381,517 words in its actual bill and 11,588,500 more words in added regulations.

Thankfully and mercifully, in trying to understand this migraine-inducing puzzle, I found some relief in one simple idea: The system won’t work unless it entices enough young and healthy people to sign up.

Right now, the big news is that the launch of the HealthCare.gov Web site has been a flop, with countless horror stories of people who haven’t been able to enroll because they were lost in a digital and bureaucratic maze.

Many liberal supporters see this initial failure (wishfully, perhaps) as a case of annoying but fixable “glitches” on the way to a more humane universal health care system.

Many conservative critics see it (wishfully, perhaps) as the kind of “disaster” that happens when Big Government bites off more than it can chew.

As of now, the critics are on a roll.

“With the GOP’s antics now over,” Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal writes, “the only story now is the unrivaled disaster that is the president’s health care law. Hundreds of thousands of health insurance policies cancelled. Companies dumping coverage and cutting employees’ hours. Premiums skyrocketing. And a Web site that reprises the experience of a Commodore 64.”

Even a liberal, fair-minded policy wonk like Ezra Klein of the Washington Post admits that, so far, Obamacare “is not working well at all.”

Conservative wonk Yuval Levin of National Review Online goes as far as seeing a potential “death spiral,” which he describes as follows: “The fact that it is so difficult to sign up for exchange coverage may mean that only highly motivated consumers do sign up, and those are likely to be people with high expected health costs.

“If the exchanges end up containing too many people in poor health and not enough people in good health, insurers could take massive losses in 2014 and be forced to dramatically raise premiums for 2015 plans. … Those higher premiums would cause even more healthy people to avoid getting coverage … and the cycle would continue.”

The importance of getting young, healthy people to enroll is echoed by Klein, who, after interviewing White House officials and asking “repeatedly” how they defined success, reported that “everyone in the White House shared a singular definition: Success meant setting up the exchanges and attracting enough young people [so] that premiums stayed low.”

Let’s face it — no matter where you sit, this is a scary thought: The success of Obamacare depends on getting millions of young people with short attention spans to spend hours in front of an exasperating government Web site with zero entertainment value — and trying to enroll in something they’re not sure they want.

But enroll they must, if they want to save the president’s plan. As Klein reports, the administration figured that if they got 7 million people to sign up for the exchanges in the first year, about 2.7 million needed to be young.

That’s 5.4 million jaded eyeballs to entice.

You’d think that with the $600 million they budgeted for this Web site, the government could have splurged for a few creative types in Hollywood whose business is to keep people entertained. Put them together with the tech geniuses who built Amazon and you’d have at least the possibility of wooing these jaded eyeballs with something other than a threatened fine.

But the user-unfriendly Web site, as bad as it is, is only a symptom of deeper issues. As Klein explains, what’s causing “deep problems” for the health care law is the mess in the infrastructure of the program, which he describes metaphorically:

“In brick-and-mortar terms, it’s the road that leads to the store, the store itself, the payment systems between the store and the government and the manufacturers, the computer system the manufacturers use to fill the orders, the trucks that carry the product back to the store, the loading dock where the customers pick up the products, and so on.”

For the program to run smoothly, that whole infrastructure needs repair. The question is: Can the bureaucracy which created the mess do that repair work?

Many conservative critics believe that it can't, and that the program will fall under its own weight. Klein believes there’s still time to right the ship, but not much. He quotes health care experts who suggest that the Web site needs to be running smoothly by “Thanksgiving at the latest.”

It shouldn’t shock anyone that Obamacare has been at the center of one of the nastiest partisan battles in recent memory. When a government tries to take over one sixth of the U.S. economy as it pushes through a controversial and gargantuan entitlement program on a strictly partisan vote, it can’t expect smooth sailing.

In any event, as Klein notes, the president’s program “isn't a political abstraction any longer. Its success doesn't depend on spin or solidarity. What matters for the law — and for the people who are depending on it — is how well it actually works.”

There’s something refreshing about that. After years of fighting, spinning and promising, we’re down to results.

Even a well-meaning and eloquent president has to face this reality: Ultimately, government comes down to how effectively you can solve people's problems. Either you do or you don’t.

President Obama fought tooth and nail for his 12-million-word health care legacy. Now, he needs the government he believes in and the young people who voted for him to help him deliver on that legacy. It’s far from clear that this will happen.

David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.

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Vegan Seize-Her Salad [Recipe]

My last Halloween

Leave a Comment / Gina Nahai, Opinion / Gina Nahai

These days it creeps up on me like an ache — the occasional pumpkin in a front yard, the synthetic cobwebs in trees, the subtle turn in the weather and, yes, there’s that feeling in the pit of my stomach, the hollowness of those dreams in which you’re lost in a white tunnel, with nowhere to go but forward, though you know that every step will take you farther away from home.

I know why Lot’s wife looked back.

From early September, the discussions begin. What am I going to be this year, and when are you doing to decorate the house, and do we have enough candy for the trick-or-treaters, and why don’t you dress up as well — my friend’s mom wears a costume every year and my teacher painted her feet green. Throughout October, negotiations revolve around which stores we’re going to shop at and how many trips we’re going to make and how many hours in total we’ll spend looking for “the same as last year, but different.” My older son is a ninja redux, the younger one wants to dress up as a cowboy, even when it’s not Halloween. My daughter, who likes fine clothes and red lipstick, has been a ballerina three years in a row and wants to be a ballerina again, “only not the same kind of ballerina,” she says, and the boys join in the chorus, “and not a ballerina that has to wear a sweater if it’s cold.” Ninjas and cowboys, needless to say, don’t wear sweaters either.

Our neighbors are mostly young families with small children. The house directly across from ours is one of those haunted mansions that spits out fog and echoes of laughter, with the shadows of headless corpses popping out of open coffins every 60 seconds. The owners have the whole decorating thing down to an art, so they don’t have to start until the weekend before the big day, but the rest of us, bumbling pumpkin carvers and clumsy spider-web spinners, get to work in mid-October and are still “perfecting” the set at 5 o’clock on the 31st, when the first few kids with their parents appear at the door. By then, my little cowboy has been dressed and ready for a couple of hours already, and has posted himself, basket of candy in hand, in the foyer. The ballerina is waiting upstairs for her cousin, Cleopatra, to arrive for hair and makeup, and the ninja is setting boundaries for me as to how much of the evening’s spoils I’m allowed to take in the name of tooth decay.

So much of my remembrances of motherhood is traced with guilt — at the mistakes I made thinking I was doing the right thing, the chances I missed because I was focused on the wrong thing, my impatience and arrogance and just plain ignorance. So much of it, too, is condensed into a cluster of midnight feedings and birthday parties, school trips and beach outings and, “Alex, stop working and go to bed”; “Kevin do your homework and go to bed,” seven nights a week. Amid it all, those early Halloween memories sparkle — bright, fleeting, untainted, brimming with anticipation, rife with possibility.

When did I last put my children to bed with the makeup still on their faces and the candy tucked under their beds? Close the door behind the last trick-or-treater? See the back of that young woman with the long, pale hair and giant angel’s wings? The zombie impaled with a sword and still walking?

The next morning, the street is strangely quiet. The cobwebs have been cleared from the trees, and the doorbells no longer howl. The haunted mansion has been sold to a less theatrical family, and the basket full of candy remains, untouched, by the front door. The kids have grown up and left home. Oct. 31 is just another day on the calendar.

It’s not that I have nothing else to do with my time, now that the obligatory visits to the pumpkin patch have stopped. It’s not that I have no identity outside of being a mother. On any given day. I’m a good few months behind on a whole lot of work-related projects, my domestic talents still waiting to be discovered. I can attend to neglected friendships and an ailing social life, spend more time with my parents, travel again with only my husband to places that are not necessarily child-friendly. But even with all that, I feel like a typewriter in the age of Siri: still operational, but functionally obsolete.

I think that’s why Lot’s wife looked back: to see her daughters one last time and, through them, the part of herself she most liked.

I do have other things to do with my time, yes. I just can’t think of anything better to do on those October mornings when I drive by the little preschool on my way to the gym and see tall those little fairies and wizards march, single file and effervescent with joy and pixie dust, before their adoring, admiring parents.

Gina Nahai is an author and a professor of creative writing at USC. Her latest novel is “Caspian Rain” (MacAdam Cage, 2007). Her column appears monthly in the Journal.

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Serving G-d in every Moment –by Rabbi Hyim Shafner

Leave a Comment / Poetry / Rabbi Hyim Shafner

The Torah describes Sara our foremother’s death by enumerating the years of her life. Then the verse repeats, “…these were the years of Sara's life.” Rash”i is bothered by this repetition, and comments, “All of them were equally for good.”

The Rebbe of Tosh, Rabbi Meshulam Feish Segal, may he live and be well, writes in the name of the Ariza”l, the great mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria, that there are things in our world which hide the Divine light so deeply (klipah) that we can not utilize them at all to raise up their divine potential. These things are forbidden in the Torah, such as the meat of a non-kosher animal. But there is a large range of things which the Torah permits us. These have the sparks of the Divine embedded within them in such a way that if we use them (really this applies also to deeds, speech and even thoughts) in the right way, with the intent to bring them and ourselves through them, closer to G-d then they are holy and the act or speech or thought is a mitzvah. If we do them just to fill our own desires then they are unholy and a sin. Thus, writes the Tosher Rebbe, nothing is neutral. Everything is either a mitzvah or a sin. To eat kosher food is not ok, it is either holy or unholy depending on how we eat it, what our intent is, what our reasons for doing so are. And so it is with everything. Every moment in life, every step, is pregnant with spiritual power, for good or not.

He concludes that Sara was unique among people in that she was able to use everything- all her time, her actions, her thoughts and her speech to raise herself up spiritually; and so all of her days were “equally good.”

It is, I think, an important message for us living in today's world. I believe that we should be involved in the life of the world, bringing holiness and compassion to the people, culture and communities around us. Jews today have access to everything- the best restaurants, the best sports tickets, the best shows, the best cars, and the best vacations. But in all we do it is not enough to ask, “Is this forbidden or permitted?” We must ask, will this be a holy act, one that will bring me and the world to a better, more spiritual place, or not. May we merit, in great joy, to know G-d in all of our unique ways.

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Jewish ignorance is a disease, you are the cure

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Salvador Litvak

“Whoever does not visit the sick is as if he spilled blood.” — Rabbi Akiva (Nedarim 40a, B. Talmud)

Our fellow Jews are sick. They don’t admit it. They don’t even know it. Yet the malady is grave. “The most destructive, painful, most contagious disease of all,” Rabbi Noah Weinberg said, “is ignorance. Ignorance perverts people and leads to wasted, counterproductive lives. Ignorance causes untold suffering — mistreatment of children, marital strife and suffering in a dead-end job.”

Who are these ignorant Jews? The highly educated, socially conscious, comedy-loving, Holocaust-honoring 1.2 million American Jews who identify themselves as Jews of no religion, according to the Pew survey. This group has been steadily growing for four decades and now includes one-third of all adult Jews born after 1980. Four-fifths of this group marry non-Jews. Only 8 percent raise their kids to be Jewish. The majority of them feel little or no attachment to Israel.

I call them ignorant because they’ve turned their back on something they don’t even know. Many have never been exposed to Judaism at all; others have experienced a diluted, dumbed-down version, and understandably found it uninspiring. I don’t blame them for consequently writing off the whole religion, but it’s like writing off sushi after trying a rubbery tuna roll from 7-Eleven.

I know about this because I was one of them. For years, I was proud to be Jewish, but I thought Judaism had nothing to offer me. I had received two messages from my parents:

1) Be Jewish to preserve the Jewish people.

2) Be Jewish because your grandfather died in the Holocaust. My mother is a child survivor of Theresienstadt, with lifelong health problems occasioned by her treatment there. Her father was murdered at Dachau, and most of her extended family were killed at Auschwitz. My father is a Chilean Jew who had to fight his way out of several scrapes with anti-Semites. We never owned a German car. We rejoiced when Israeli commandos rescued the hostages at Entebbe on July 4, 1976.

And yet, Judaism was understood to be a chore. Temple was boring but obligatory a few times a year. My bar mitzvah was more of a performance than a meaningful experience. As I grew older, I sought spirituality in Eastern philosophy, meditation, endurance sports, jam bands, transcendental poetry and science fiction — everywhere but my own backyard.

Eventually I found my way back, thanks to a confluence of events. My grandmother died. I stumbled into the right shul. I got a taste of deep Judaism, and a constellation of secular myths exploded around me. I found that our ancient tradition spoke to me in innumerable ways, even while I remained scientifically oriented and modern. More to the point, I became a better husband, father, son, brother, friend and citizen when I became a practicing Jew.

As I learned from Arthur Kurzweil, there is a rope that connects every Jew to God. Sometimes these ropes break. When a broken rope gets retied, however, the distance between the Jew and God becomes shorter. Interestingly, I often feel I have more in common with practitioners of other faiths than I do with devoutly secular Jews who cringe at “God talk.” Among the former, there exist an amazing 1.2 million American non-Jews who identify themselves as people with Jewish affinity. They do so mostly because they share religious values with us, and because Jesus was Jewish. I find this support comforting — evidence of the great freedom we enjoy in America to practice our own religion. Ironically, it may be this very lack of persecution that leads so many of our brothers and sisters to devalue their own religious heritage, and eventually to abandon it altogether.

“Whoever does not visit the sick is as if he spilled blood,” said Rabbi Akiva. He spoke these words after visiting a sick man whom no other Sage would visit. He saw that the man lacked basic necessities, attended to him personally and saved his life. We bear the same obligation toward those who are spiritually sick today.

We who are connected to God through the rope of Judaism have a sacred duty to help the unconnected retie the knot. If they get a taste of quality Judaism, and still leave it behind, OK, they’ve made an informed choice. The vast majority of these folks, however, have no idea what they’re missing.

Our fellow Jews suffer from tragic levels of ignorance. They’ve never experienced a Carlebach service, they’ve never excavated layers of text with a great teacher, and they’ve never seen a relationship improve through mussar work. They simply don’t know that inspiring Judaism exists.

I think it’s fantastic that Jewish institutions are creating fun, welcoming, inspiring events to greet the curious when they show up. The group I’m talking about, however, will not show up. Chocolate fountain Shabbats, comedy club Yom Kippurs, and even halachah-bending compromises will not get them through the door.

So we need to knock on their doors. Call it crowd-sourced outreach. The connected have to do the connecting, starting with our closest friends. We have to invite our secular pals to our Shabbat dinners. When they come, we have to make it warm and festive, modeling the benefits we’ve gained from Torah Judaism. I’d like to give special props to my dear friends Rabbi Shlomo “Schwartzie” Schwartz and his wife, Olivia, who have hosted such Shabbats for 60 people at a time for 30 years.

If you’ve got a special ability to connect the unconnected, please use it. My own plan is ambitious, but God blessed me with a little miracle in 2005 when I became the Accidental Talmudist. As a result of that miracle, I have a huge opportunity to visit the sick, and I am seizing it. I post morsels of Jewish wisdom on ” target=”_blank”>jewishjournal.com.

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Will Santa bring Obama peace for Christmas?

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Jewish Journal

It is too early to tell what will emerge from talks among the new diplomatic triumvirate composed of the United States, Russia and Iran. But one thing is for certain: Even the worst of all agreements is far superior to the current situation.

Certainly, I understand the problems with Iran. I also know that the benefits, even if only the remote possibility of benefits, are better than the current conflict. Rapprochement, even just a little, between the United States and Iran, just enough to lift the U.S.-imposed sanctions against Iran, is a lot. It would be a positive move, a move in the right direction. It would break the stalemate that has handcuffed the world and dominated foreign policy for too long.

The world will be able to let out a collective breath of relief. The Iranians, the people, the citizens, will realize real relief in the form of an improved lifestyle and improved living conditions. If the only result is a happier Iranian population, it is worth it all.

The aggressive behavior, both diplomatically and politically, that has emanated from Iran, and which has resulted in their indignant and ferocious race to attain nuclear weapons, has been a response to the isolation that Iran has been feeling these past few years. Once Iran begins talking to the United States and Russia together, the signal will go out that it is all right to deal with them, that it is OK to publicly interact with them in the international community. And once Iran is received by the international community, the immediate nuclear threat will diminish. Iran will no longer fight the conditions that have already been set down for them — they will allow spot inspections and they will limit their uranium enrichment.

None of this means that Iran has already become or is on the road to becoming a peaceful nation, but rather, that their nuclear program and their weapons issues are no longer on their own front burner.

Not everyone will be happy, not every country will be satisfied by the agreement that will be forged by the United States, Russia and Iran no matter what that agreement is. The main bone of contention, for example, between Israel and the United States on the Iranian issue is that Israel wants sanctions to remain in place until the Iranians follow through and stop their enrichment. Israel asserts that if sanctions are lifted now, reinstituting them at a later time and Israel believes that that time will come can take years. Rescinding sanctions takes only a few seconds.

There have been whispers and there is speculation. We are being led to believe that the United States wants a plan in place by the end of December. That’s soon. A name has even been already assigned to the plan. They are calling it a “Christmas plan.”

The essence of the plan, as far as we who are not actually at the negotiating table drafting the plan can determine, would allow Iran to preserve their civilian nuclear development facilities. It permits the Iranians to enrich uranium up to 5 percent. It halts all 20 percent enrichment. It will halt all activity at the plutonium reactor in Arak. And it will transform the Fordo plant into a scientific and medical experimental facility.

That plan seems to have been agreed upon by all parties involved — the United States, which devised it; Russia, which agrees with it; and, most crucially, the Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.

Israel wants one more condition attached to the plan. Israel wants all underground plants brought above ground. As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, there is no reason for a peaceful plant to be underground. Only a secret military arms plant needs to be hidden. Netanyahu is correct.

Personally, I am more troubled by another issue. Iran is suddenly becoming a different kind of world player.

Suddenly, post agreement, the Iranians will hold much more power than they did before talks began. Then, they held us all in fear, but their actual power was limited. Of course it is still possible that the entire project may fall apart. Iran has its own agenda and objectives that have not changed one iota. Iran wants sanctions lifted at all costs. Iran wants to hold the reins over the entire Muslim world. But since meeting with the United States and Russia, Iran sees the possibility of having it all.

To turn a phrase, now that Iran has been sanctioned by both Russia and the United States, now that it has been given credibility by the great powers of the Western world, it is well on the road to achieving all its goals. If those goals are more important to Iran than the threat of sanctions and its own nuclear desires, the region will be a safer place to live.

Whatever emerges, it will be for the good.

Micah D. Halpern is a columnist and a social and political commentator. His latest book is “Thugs: How History’s Most Notorious Despots Transformed the World Through Terror, Tyranny, and Mass Murder” (Thomas Nelson).

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