Shul Cake

Shul cake, for those of you who haven’t had the experience of going to a Kiddush, is generally the cheapest sponge cake available next to the schnapps and herring. Sometimes one can sing “Happy Birthday” to the cake. Personally, I love Shul Cake. But not the kind I’m about to describe.

In this pages I’ve definitely been critical of all three of the “great” monotheisms. From the outset, I have not spared my own co-religionists, especially when it comes to “washing dirty laundry in public” when trying to give the impression that one’s laundry never gets dirty in the first place.

At the risk of employing another cliché, it seems certain groups of Rabbis want to eat their cake and have it too. [Talmudic of me; that actually is the way the statement is supposed to go]. Two incidents in the news this week underscore the salience of said cliché.

The first story has to do with the brouhaha surrounding the synagogue in Syracuse that had the “temerity”, as an Orthodox congregation, to appoint TWO women as president of the lay synagogue board. Not, mind you, Rabbis, or Rabbas, or any other perceived hidden equivalent: this was the lay board. It seems in response, the National Council of Young Israel has decided to expel the congregation, and in thesponse to THAT, there has been a vote of no confidence tabled by nearly 150 member congregations of the council.

Now, I’m not one to raise issues of Jewish law unless they seem to be absolutely clear, and this isn’t one of those cases. I personally believe there shouldn’t be a problem with this even from the perspective of Orthodox law, but I could be wrong. However, what the NCYI has done is to avoid the question and claim that the expulsion has to do with unpaid dues. This is one of those cases where, for whatever the reason, those in charge of the Council should be forced to stand up and state their position and not hide behind technicalities. If you believe this is wrong, you’ll endure the dissolution of your organization, like Rabbi Naftali Berlin did when the Russian authorities tried to take over the Volozhin Yeshiva; he closed it. You can’t eat your cake and have it too.

More disturbing was the next story, that the Rabbinical Board of Queens—the “Va’ad”—allowed a member under a cloud of suspicion that he has “inappropriate contact” with students was allowed to resign—in October!!!—without any reference to said “cloud” hanging over him. A prominent religious psychologist accurately called out the Va’ad on this by claiming that they had “protect[ed] one of their own” by “g[iving] him a hekhser and ma[king] him kosher”. No further explanation is necessary. No one should give credence to any reason given for allowing this rabbi to stay on; if the board wants to avoid a defamation suit, it can pay him to do nothing, like the rubber room teachers.

My reasons for publiczing events like this and contributing to the pressure upon these bodies—aside from possible personal reasons, as I was victimized as a child by staff in two different right-wing Orthodox settings—is that Orthodoxy MUST be morally consistent, and they MUST learn to adjust to the fact that their behavior will be placed under a microscope, because their way of life announces automatically that its adherents are held to an ostensibly “higher” standard of conduct.

There would be nothing wrong if there would be an admission that some of our co-religionists stray from even basic human standards; it happens. But when disingeuousness is the order of the day, the very goal of the religious behaviors are not only short-circuited, they are re-presented as the height of hypocrisy. Adding fuel to the fire are then accusation emanating from clerical quarters that the bad press is simply the result of a hostile culture and media, almost as if these issues would go away of the media and culture would go away. Well, they’re not, and in this case, they may be part of the solution if they force certain powers that be to pay attention.

No cake for you.