November 4, 2022

Months ago I actually wrote that I felt that Oprah had a responsibility to repudiate Dr. Oz. Now that she has, having said yesterday that she strongly endorsed Oz’s opponent John Fetterman for Senate in Pennsylvania, I want to explain why.

For the last few months I have been struggling with my own conscience. Could I really come out against such a close friend as Dr. Oz in his campaign for Senate in Pennsylvania? Aren’t friends supposed to stick together.

First there was the fact that amid my taking Dr. Oz and his family on a private plane to Israel, he would barely make a single positive comment about Israel in his campaign and refused to do any events dedicated to Israel’s support.

Then there was the election denial, with Dr. Oz winning President Trump’s endorsement by denying the results of the 2020 election. Lest President Trump think that Oz would show any gratitude, the next thing was Dr. Oz deleting any mention of the former President the morning after the Republican primary.

The rotten values just kept on coming.

Next was Dr. Oz firing an AR-15 in a TV commercial, the same week as the Uvalde massacre. Oz would of course go on to even mock his opponent John Fetterman for having a near fatal stroke, even as Fetterman is the father of three young children.

But what persuaded me that I had to go public was when Dr. Oz denied the Armenian Genocide, probably because Oz seems terrified of Turkey’s head of State, of which he is a citizen, Recep Erdogan, one of the most evil dictators in the world. The US Senate had voted in 2019 unanimously to recognize the genocide, 100 to 0. Oz would be the first Senator, should he be elected, to be a genocide denier.

I am Jewish. Every day of my life I mourn the six million of the holocaust. I decided I would fight Oz and his genocide denial with every means at my disposal. The Armenians are my brothers and sisters. Would I not expect the same of them if a holocaust denier was running for office?

Dr. Oz and I met through Oprah. We both hosted daily shows on the Oprah and Friends Radio Network. Oz was a good man back then and an excellent physician. Through Oprah he became world famous and “America’s Doctor.”

But now, put yourself in Oprah’s shoes. OK, Dr. Oz is running as a Republican and Oprah is a Democrat. No big deal. The country needs two parties. Oprah said as much when she was first asked about Dr. Oz’s campaign.

But then comes Dr. Oz, whom Oprah promoted to the whole word as a caring physician, actually mocking a 53 year old father of three for having a stroke! That’s just nauseating. What kind of disgusting physician would ever do that?

I’m guessing, only one who puts the acquisition of power before anything else.

Next, Oprah watches a world famous Doctor whom she helped create running around on TV with an assault rifle? Are you kidding me? Is he mad?

It’s one thing to embrace the Second Amendment. I do. But an assault rifle? A surgeon? On TV?

Next, Oprah is entertained to the spectacle of Dr. Oz denying the 2020 election. What becomes of America if people don’t believe that their vote is real or that any candidate is legitimate? Answer, the country goes down the toilet. And Dr. Oz would even embrace the “Stop the Steal” stuff to get into the Senate?

Oh, and the coup de grace. Dr. Oz doing a fundraiser in California literally in front of Hitler’s Mercedes Benz.You can’t make this stuff up.

The list goes on and on. A campaign that is a values abomination.

So Oprah, being the extremely moral person she is, decides that she has to end this. Let Dr. Oz go in the direction in he wishes. But she will no longer be silent. She can’t watch something that she created and elevated trample on the values she holds dear.

She’s right.

And it’s exactly how I felt and why I took the same action.

It was one of the great honors of my life to work for Oprah. She is excellent in everything she does. She has the most exception moral core and she is a woman of dignity, grace, and goodness. Most of all, she’s authentic, which is how she has lasted all these decades at the center of the American heart.

I’m sure she found it extremely difficult to repudiate a good friend. But Dr. Oz alone is to blame. He made the choices to make his campaign all about power at any cost.

Our country deserves better.

God bless you Oprah.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi” whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the international best-selling author or 36 books including “Ten Conversations You Need to Have with Your Children” which he launched on the Oprah TV Show. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter RabbiShmuley.

“If, let’s say, you landed at the airport after Shabbat started, would you be able to drive home or would you have to walk?”

I assumed Dr. Oz was asking me theoretically, out of genuine curiosity about Jewish observance. We had stopped midway between Tel Aviv and New Jersey to fill the airplane with fuel. Perhaps he was concerned for us in case we got further delayed.

“Technically, we would have to walk,” I responded.

Dr Oz gave a thoughtful nod and walked back to the huddle of his family who all seemed to start talking at once.

We were on a tarmac somewhere in Ireland. The plane had been lent to my father, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, by a prominent Jewish donor for a trip to Israel he had organized for the Oz and Boteach families. It was the summer of 2013. At 19, I had just finished a gap year in seminary in Jerusalem and I had joined trip both as my father’s daughter and as a photographer.

After spending a week traveling through Israel, the plan was that my parents would stay on and that the plane would return me, my siblings, and the Oz’s to our home state of New Jersey. It was a Friday but we were scheduled to land well before the Sabbath began.

I couldn’t have known that Dr. Oz was asking because his family was pushing to extend their vacation on to Maine. And I would never have expected that he would approach the pilot to diverge knowing what it would mean for us as Orthodox Jews, namely, to violate the Sabbath for the first and only time – a time when, after spending the year in Jerusalem studying Torah, I had never been more pious.

To put me and my siblings, the youngest who was 4, in such a precarious situation now seems so thoughtless, so selfish. But back then I was simply shocked. Shocked when the pilot announced we were landing not in New Jersey, but in Maine. Shocked as I watched Dr. Oz and his family shuttle out of the plane excitedly, knowing well that the Sabbath was beginning imminently and that we were stranded, too ashamed to confront them, too paralyzed to make our next move.

Should we get off too? We knew no one in Maine. I scrambled to call synagogues and Rabbis in the area. There were none. “We can’t get off!” my sister Chana, one year older than me, pleaded. “We have no food and nowhere to stay.”

The plane took off again into a multi-colored sky. I remember looking out the window at a blood orange sunset and the sensations of physical pain that it elicited in my body. It was now Shabbat and I was on a plane. This was the first time I had ever violated the Sabbath, even if not by choice. It felt unbearably painful and strange. I could not stop crying from take off until landing.

After sending the little ones home in a car with non-Jewish friends, my sister and I proceeded to walk from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, our original intended destination with Dr. Oz and his family, to our home in Englewood using google maps directions printed for us by the staff. It took us almost 4 hours in the dead of night, two young women completely alone. It was terrifying.

The entire experience saddened and confused me. At the time, Dr. Oz was a good friend. He had joined my family for Shabbat dinner many times. We had visited his family at the Oz home in New Jersey. He had shown tremendous support for Israel with his visit, as I myself had witnessed, snapping photos as he danced with Israeli soldiers in Hebron. His behavior that day on the plane didn’t add up. Why would he have forced observant Jews to desecrate the Sabbath after he had expressly asked us about stopping in Maine? Why would he have forced two women to walk four hours in the middle of the night? And why, after my father and these Jewish donors had been so kind as to provide a private plane to visit Israel for the entire Oz family had they repaid their kindness this way?

My father was deeply disturbed when he heard. He thought about what to do but decided in the end not to bring it up. He felt that it had been an honest mistake. Here was a world-renowned celebrity doctor who had just shown tremendous support for Israel. We would let it slide.

Fast forward to January 2022 and my father has now organized a special night of Holocaust commendation at Carnegie Hall. The Gala was commemorating the Wannsee Conference, which planned the holocaust and and whose 80^th anniversary was January 20th, 2020. Very significant Jewish donors were scheduled to speak live that night but due to a huge Omicron surge that almost canceled the event, most of the major donors spoke by Skype in instead. It was obvious by his behavior that Dr Oz, who was a featured speaker, was furious. He stood disgruntled on the sidelines, eyes scouring the crowd for any sign of the Republican mega-donors he had come to court, and then, too angry to care that we could all see, began harassing my father by the stage, even as speakers like Marion Wiesel, Elie Wiesel’s wife, addressed the audience about the horrors of the holocaust.

Ironically, it was on our trip to Israel that I first heard whispers of Oz’s own political aspirations.

I overheard “Mehmet” and “presidency” between some of the people who accompanied us. I was stunned.

It will be for the people of Pennsylvania to decide on Dr. Oz’s political future. But regardless, two Jewish sisters who had a nightmarish Sabbath will never forget the Dr. Oz who must learn, if he is to become a successful public servant, to respect people’s traditions and observances.

Shterna Sara Glick is a graphic designer and artist who is the mother of three young children. Her husband, from Philadelphia, is currently doing his medical residency at a hospital in New York.

Israel has become a taboo topic in some synagogues. Before Rosh Hashanah, Daniel Gordis wrote an article entitled “If I Had a Sermon” about rabbis who had struggles when it came to including Israel in their High Holiday sermons:

If you were a rabbi of a congregation in the US, you’d be stressing now. Because there is a ton to do, and because if your sermons are not written, you know that you need to get cracking … To add to the complexity, you’d have, among other decisions to make, a difficult decision about Israel. Should I speak about Israel? Can it be done without creating divisiveness? Many rabbis think not. In fact, Israel’s a topic that many rabbis say they avoid speaking about from the pulpit.

Rabbis are afraid to talk about Israel from the pulpit! While this is not true of Orthodox congregations like my own, it is a worrying trend for anyone who cares about the American Jewish community.

Gordis outlines a model sermon, one that he argues would allow a rabbi to talk about Israel without triggering an angry debate. Love is complicated, he explains, and loving a country no less so. One can love, and love passionately, something of which they are critical. Israel does not have to be perfect to be beloved; profound disagreements with her political leadership don’t have to occasion a total divorce. The Bible simultaneously honors and criticizes its own heroes. We should be willing to do the same with Israel.

This is an important lesson. It is impossible to see clearly if one paints reality in stark black and white polarities. If all of our Israel education is mythical, young Jews will be unprepared for the messy, complex reality that the modern State of Israel is; learning that Israel is flawed will provoke a crisis of faith. At the same time, detractors often mistake the forest for the trees, fixated on endless, bitter criticisms that lack objectivity. How is it that the same young American Jews who attend rallies against Israel have next to nothing to say about the conduct of the American military in Afghanistan? The self-righteous sloganeering surrounding Israel is often the product of oedipal obsessions.

An endemic lack of nuance certainly leads to angry debates, but that isn’t the primary reason why Israel is such a contentious issue for American Jews. Instead, we have missed a major change in our community.

Today’s arguments over Israel begin with commitments held and withheld. American Jews, specifically young Jews, are substantially less attached to Israel than their elders. The 2020 Pew Research Center survey of Jewish identity in the United States found that “among Jews ages 50 and older … just 10% say that caring about Israel is not important to them. By contrast, among Jewish adults under 30 … one-quarter (27%) say it’s not important to what being Jewish means to them.” This is where Jewish criticism of Israel begins; people who don’t care about Israel will be far more likely to criticize her.

This change in attitude is part of a larger apathy. For example, the survey found that “Three-in-ten Jewish adults under the age of 30 (31%) say it would be ‘not at all’ important for their future grandchildren to be Jewish, which is significantly higher than the share who say this in any other age group.” The drop in young Jews’ identification with Israel goes hand in hand with a decline in commitment to Judaism in general.

At the same time, there is another element involved in this loss of identification. A small group of younger, progressive Jews, to assert that although they are Jewish, they are no longer “Zionists,” or even, are “anti-Zionists.” Some of these contemporary anti-Zionists take inspiration in anti-religious anti-Zionists of the past, such as Communists and Bundists. But others claim to make a religious case for anti-Zionism.

In the late-19th century, as Zionism was becoming a mass movement, two religious groups stood in opposition to it: Reform and Haredi Jews.

In actuality, Haredi Jews are not true anti-Zionists; they too desire a return to Zion, but want to wait for the arrival of the Messiah. They see Zionism as a lack of faith, a heretical desire to replace the Messianic redemption with a man-made enterprise. This concern was exacerbated by the fact many of the early Zionist leadership were secular, whose religious lifestyles the Haredim held in disdain.

Despite this, most Haredim today are not anti-Zionists. Representatives of Agudath Israel were signatories to Israel’s Declaration of Independence. And even Haredi anti-Zionists worry about the safety of the people of Israel; only a small fringe group, the Neturei Karta, march in pro-Palestinian rallies.

For 19th-century Reform Jews, Zionism was a painful challenge. Jews in Western countries were engaged in a struggle for equal rights; and they had to battle against the antisemitic canard that Jews couldn’t be trusted to be loyal citizens because they longed for a state of their own. In the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the Reform Movement declared “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine … nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”Zionism was considered a betrayal of patriotism. Jews, petitioning for rights that were long denied to them, did not want to appear as anything but loyal citizens. (A few decades later the Reform movement did adopt Zionism, and some of the most influential Zionists, such Abba Hillel Silver, were Reform rabbis.)

Today’s anti-Zionists take inspiration in an ideology shaped by long-forgotten challenges, and offer an alternative Judaism devoid of any national identity. But this is bound to fail; a Judaism without Zionism is impossible.

Abraham becomes a Jew and a Zionist at the same time. The first command he receives is “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.” Abraham’s religious journey begins with a pilgrimage to Israel. Israel is an ever-present theme in the text; when Abraham and Sarah abandon Israel in search of food, it is seen by some, such as the Ramban, as a “major sin.” Their entire lives focus on the dream of building a nation in the land. When Sarah dies, the Bible depicts the intense effort Abraham makes to bury her in Israel. As Ibn Ezra notes, the purchase of a burial plot for her marks the beginning of the future Jewish State.

Genesis makes it clear that Zionism is central to Abraham’s new religious mission.

Generations of Jews would follow in Abraham’s footsteps. Instead of offering hairsplitting arguments about “the spiritual essence of Judaism,” they turned their hearts toward Zion. Israel was a part of their prayers, part of their Tanakh, part of their studies and stories. At the Seder, they sang “l’shanah habaah b’yerushalayim,” “next year in Jerusalem,” with all of their hearts.

They simply couldn’t imagine a Judaism without Zionism.

Jews who knew little else still heard the call of “lech lecha,” and from the furthest reaches of exile would find their way home, just as Abraham and Sarah did so many generations before.

And they never let go of the dream of Israel, even in the worst of times.

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, in his autobiography, tells the remarkable story of how he survived the Holocaust as small child. For much of the time, his older brother Naftali Lau Lavie heroically protected him. Rabbi Lau relates an episode that occurred at the end of the war in Buchenwald.  Naftali was being taken away from Buchenwald, and he didn’t expect to survive. He ran over to his younger brother Yisrael Meir, who was then just seven, and had received virtually no Jewish education because of the war. Rabbi Lau describes their conversation:

[My brother] came to me and said, “They’re taking me away. I see no way out of this Gehinnom [hell]. This is the end of the world.” …”You’re going to be left alone now,” … “But you still have friends. Maybe a miracle will happen and you’ll survive. I just wanted to tell you: There’s a place called Eretz Yisrael. Repeat after me: Eretz Yisrael.” I repeated the words, which meant nothing to me. Naftali said: “Eretz Yisrael is the home of the Jews,” … You’re not going anyplace else. Only to Eretz Yisrael. We have an uncle there. Say that you’re Rabbi Lau’s son, and tell them to find your uncle. Goodbye (my brother). Remember: Eretz Yisrael.”

Remember Eretz Yisrael. Remember Eretz Yisrael.

For two thousand years, that is exactly what Jews did. We were determined to get back home.

Just like Abraham the Zionist.

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.