Today is the 41st day of the Omer. יסוד שביסוד!!! A day to focus on fixing all sexual sins!!
A new book just came about about "the meaning of life". It was written by a famous journalist and will doubtless be a best seller. The author argues that life on the “first mountain”—the mountain of personal goals, worldly success, career ambitions, and traveling in the right social circles—is transitory and ultimately unsatisfying. Eventually, though, if you’re fortunate, you find yourself on the “second mountain,” one characterized by other-centeredness and self-giving. (Often, though not always, the path to the second mountain is marked by hardships and failures.)
Men and women who live on the first mountain may find happiness, but people living on the second mountain find something deeper—joy. (He defines happiness as the victory and expansion of the self, while joy is found in transcending the self and serving others.)
When he was young, life was “a very intellectual thing, a material thing, and I just never had any sensation of anything that spiritual.” It was not that he was hostile to religion, he said, “but I grew up in a more or less secular world and its categories were my assumptions.”
As he got older, he experienced more of the vicissitudes of life. And the more attention he paid to people, the more he wrote about them, he realized “it didn’t make sense to me that they were just sacks of genetic material. It only made sense to me that they had souls. That some piece of them that had no material dimension, no size or shape but gave them infinite dignity, every single one of them. Once you start with the idea that each person has a soul, it’s an easy leap to [conclude] that there’s some connection there, there’s some flowing force.”
Once he came to believe people had souls, “it definitely changed the human anthropology.” He began to see “various glimpses of another layer of life”—and among those layers he began to see and take seriously is religious faith.
He spent his childhood “in the crossroads between two great moral ecologies [? funny word to use],” he writes. “But I didn’t grow up in a theology book; I grew up in the late-twentieth-century American version of Judaism, and the late-twentieth-century version of Christianity.” He adds, “I grew up either the most Christiany Jew on earth or the most Jewy Christian [because he went to non-Jewish schools], a plight made survivable by the fact that I was certain God did not exist.”
He describes himself these days as “a wandering Jew and a confused Christian.” He told me “Judaism seems more real to me than it ever did. On the other hand, celestial grandeur is found in the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes seem like a moral system that is pure goodness.” As he puts it in the book, “I can’t unread Matthew.” [Based a review of the book]
However, there is something the author doesn't share which sheds a lot of light on his present beliefs. A number of years ago, he wrote a book on "Character". What moral character is and examples of people who displayed moral character and courage. During the course of writing this book he fell in love with his research assistant, a Christian woman over 20 years his junior. One can see his infatuation for her in his introduction to that book. He then divorced his wife of 27 years [who converted to Judaism for him!! They also had a number of children, one of whom served in the Israeli Army] and ultimately married his assistant. A true act of character! So his flirtation with Christianity is also rooted [besides having been denied a proper Jewish education] in his flirtation with his assistant. [Also a warning to all those who have close working relationships with woman that it could end not well...].
The Torah is quite clear what happens when one goes after non-Jewish women - he will come to go after their Avoda Zara as well. It goes together. You want the girl - you will go to her church too ח"ו.
כִּי יָסִיר אֶת בִּנְךָ מֵאַחֲרַי וְעָבְדוּ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים וְחָרָה אַף יְהוָה בָּכֶם וְהִשְׁמִידְךָ מַהֵר
This is sad because society isn't bothered when somebody who displays such a lack of character writes a best seller pontificating about good character. Shouldn't people be expected to practice what they preach??
It is also sad because this has as much to do with sex as it does to do with religion. It is intellectually and spiritually untenable to be both a Jew and a Christian at the same time. Both religions can't be true. [One well known Modern Orthodox "thinker" who also writes popular books and makes loads of money and receives endless kavod, already made that absurd claim that we addressed on these pages]. But he is choosing that path for himself, probably in no small part because the woman he is presently in love with is a devout Christian [but not devout enough to prevent her from marrying a Jew with whom she started a relationship while he was already married and had no problem with a man leaving his wife and children to marry her]. Of course, maybe the next woman he falls for will be a Buddhist and then he will then say that he can't "unwrite the Sutras" [the Buddhist bible].
The Rambam says ['איסורי ביאה י"ב ו - always hard to post anything without quoting a Rambam😊😊. My autobiography - From Central Park To Brisk: A Journey That Always Had Two Paths]:
לא פגעו בו קנאים ולא הלקוהו ב"ד הרי עונשו מפורש בדברי קבלה שהוא בכרת שנאמר כי חלל יהודה קדש י"י אשר אהב ובעל בת אל נכר יכרת י"י לאיש אשר יעשנה ער ועונה אם ישראל הוא לא יהיה לו ער בחכמים ולא עונה בתלמידים ואם כהן הוא לא יהיה לו מגיש מנחה לי"י צבאות הנה למדת שהבועל כותית כאילו נתחתן לעכו"ם שנאמר ובעל בת אל נכר ונקרא מחלל קדש ה':
If the zealous did not strike him [who slept with a non-Jewish woman], nor did he receive lashes from the court, his punishment is explicitly stated in the words of the prophetic tradition. He is liable for karet, as [Malachi 2:11-12] states: "Judah desecrated that which is sacred to God, [by] loving and engaging in relations with the daughter of a foreign god. May God cut off from a man who does this any progeny and descendant." [Implied is] that if he is an Israelite, he will not have progeny among the wise who will raise issues, nor a descendant among the scholars who will respond. If he is a priest, he will not have [a descendant] who "presents an offering to the Lord of Hosts." Thus you have learned that a person who shares intimacy with a gentile woman is considered as if he married a false deity, as the verse states: "engaging in relations with the daughter of a foreign god." And he is called one who "desecrated that which is sacred to God."
Powerful!! Marrying a Christian is like marrying Yoshke himself!!!
That is the [sad] story behind the story.
What is our takeaway?
1] 70 percent of all Jews are intermarrying in America. What are we doing to stop it?
2] A tfilla that his confused and tormented soul returns to its roots. ולא ידח ממנו נידח!!
3] The power of love!! On the good side, Yael Kushner goes to shul on Shabbos and davens because she fell in love with a Yid named Jared and that has literally, in a very concrete non-mystical way, impacted the entire world political scene for the benefit of Am Yisrael. May all people fall in love with people with whom a relationship will result in more כבוד שמים!!
