ARTICLES

I Get More & Respect From Gentiles

An Orthodox Catholic Chats with an Orthodox Jew

BY ROBERT KUMPEL

At 8:15 p.m., I'm in the parking lot at Chabad La Costa, a north county Orthodox synagogue, waiting to meet its rabbi. The synagogue is a dilapidated wooden structure, a combination of a small bungalow and a portable building like those used in public schools for extra classrooms. At 8:20, 38-year-old Rabbi Yeruchem Eilfort drives into the parking lot. He apologizes for the wait. It's Passover, a busy time for Jews, and for those who are Orthodox, a time when even picking up a telephone is forbidden until the sun goes down.

As we walk into the synagogue, several rows of chairs reveal enough seats for about 60 people. One side of the room is divided by a wooden screen, as the women sit apart from the men during worship. The rest of the building includes a kitchen and a well-worn library, most of the books having titles written in the Hebrew alphabet. Rabbi Eilfort asks a question about the Catholic Church. "I just read Hitler's Pope, the book about Pius XII and World War II. The author says that he could have done more to help the Jewish people, but then again, he was in a precarious position, living in Fascist Italy at the time. But I learned more about the Catholic Church in the last two weeks, than I've learned in my whole life. It was fascinating. Is it still the Pope who appoints the bishops?"

I answer as best I can, and then he asks why I want to talk to him. I explain that orthodox and traditional Catholics often feel that they have been marginalized by many of the priests and bishops running the Church, and I wanted to know if Orthodox Jews feel the same marginalization within Judaism.

The rabbi considers the question, then explains, "Within Orthodoxy itself, there are many sects or philosophies. What all of them share in common, and what differentiates them from the other groups, I can summarize in one sentence: We believe that the Bible, the Torah, or what you call the Old Testament, is infallible, is perfect, it's the Word of God, it's unchangeable. The other [Jewish] groups would say it's either man-made or divinely inspired or there were multiple authors. We believe there was one author, Almighty God. It's infallible. We have to bend our behavior to fit the Bible, not bend the Bible to fit our behavior."

He adds, "I don't like to say, 'He's a Reform Jew,' or 'He's a Conservative Jew.' There are Jews who are more observant and there are Jews who are less observant."

When I tell him that the Bishop of San Jose recently said that the Gospels cannot be considered merely as historical documents, he responds by describing the Jewish equivalent of a cultural Catholic. "The Enlightenment brought a lot of good things to the Jewish people, but it also brought a type of critical thinking where nothing was sacred anymore. But the Bible is absolutely true. We have to find a way to understand it, and not to change it or say, 'It's only a metaphor.' It's not a buffet where you can take what you want and throw away what you don't want for convenience."

It's my turn to ask him about Judaism, specifically Chabad. He explains, "CHABAD is an acronym for three Hebrew words: Chochmah (wisdom), Bina (understanding), and Daas (knowledge). The philosophy of our group is that we are meant to serve God with our entire being. Many people say that they serve God with their heart. They have an emotional attachment to God. They love God, they fear God and that's good. You should be emotionally involved in serving God. Our philosophy is that you have to build your emotions from the intellect -- you have to start from the top down. When you can have a love of God built on an intellectual relationship with God, that love will not waver. For instance, the other day I had a very frustrating day. We were supposed to have a service that morning for my father, where we recited the Kaddish. You need to have a quorum of ten males to say the Kaddish, but that morning we only had nine. I really wanted to say the Kaddish for my father and I got very frustrated. I could have said, 'Look here God, work with me! I'm not doing this for me, I'm doing it for you! Help me out here.' However, I know from the Chabad philosophy that everything happens for a reason. Nothing is coincidence in this world, therefore it's God's will. Because I have this understanding, my love for God did not waver, even though I had a frustrating day. Sometimes you can learn more from a negative than you can from a positive. So that's the philosophy, use your head to control your emotions."

Chabad falls under the umbrella of Hassidic Judaism. "Hassidic philosophy," Rabbi Eilfort explains, "says that we have to see the hand of God everywhere we look -- divine providence. But also, God must be served with joy, and joy breaks all boundaries. With joy, your prayers have wings. If you are a depressed person, you can't fix the world. And thirdly, we have a huge emphasis on loving our fellow man as we love ourselves. We recognize that every person has a Godly spark, a Neshama (soul). We are all God's children, which makes everyone a prince or princess. If we are all part of one whole, how can I not love myself?"

Hassidic/Chabad Judaism was not always a part of Eilfort's life. He was raised in Los Angeles by Reform Jewish parents, but everything changed when his mother died. "I was 12, and when I turned 13 we moved to Irvine. My father wanted me to go to a Jewish day camp in Westminster. I went there and started to see that everything I had heard about Orthodox Jews and the Torah was not true. I realized that Judaism was not a relic from the past, but it's dynamic. I saw that Judaism was much different than I had thought and I was fascinated by what I learned. Before I went to camp, my dad had a brochure about a private Jewish school for me to go to and I said, 'Don't even think about sending me there.' I was looking forward to the experience of public high school. After two weeks of camp, I asked him for the brochure and ended up going there for two years. The year after that I went to the Yeshiva -- a rabbinical seminary. I had five years of post high school studies before I was ordained at the Central Chabad Yeshiva in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. I met my wife, Nechama, there and we have been married for sixteen years, which is how long I've been a rabbi. We have seven kids, ranging from 14 to two-and-a-half years old. My wife and I founded this synagogue 14 years ago."

Rabbi Eilfort did not make his spiritual journey alone. His father also converted to Orthodox Judaism and lived with the rabbi and his wife until his death this year. "I was very happy to have the opportunity to fulfill the commandment to honor thy father. It was a great pleasure to have him with us and to see him with his grandchildren. Now my brother is four years older than me and he stayed on the liberal path. We have interesting political and religious discussions from time to time. He's respectful, but we're on opposite sides of the spectrum."

While Rabbi Eilfort has taken great care in the education of his children (they attend the Chabad Hebrew Academy in Scripps Ranch), he sees their education as an investment. "You get out of your children what you put in to them. I know that my children are so secure in their Judaism that it is literally part of their life. They don't view it as something separate. Everything they do identifies them as Jews. The Sabbath is sacrosanct. There is no chance they will leave the faith, because I've stacked the deck. They are very strong in their identity."

Are Orthodox Jews, I ask, as misunderstood by the media as Catholics are? Are there any spokesmen that embarrass Jews the way someone such as Father Andrew Greeley embarrasses Catholics? "Everyone says that Hollywood is Jewish," Rabbi Eilfort answers. "It is true that there are plenty of Jews in Hollywood, big producers, directors and studio heads, but what they are teaching and promulgating through the media and movies is not Jewish. If it were, there would be uplifting stories of moral integrity and decency. You wouldn't be seeing skin and hearing profanity. And when the media speaks to a rabbi, it's usually not from the Orthodox perspective. The only time this really upsets me is when it concerns Israel. The media always seems to have speakers speaking for Israel who are left-wingers or in agreement that there should be a Palestinian state in the land of Israel, while Orthodox and traditional Jews reject that notion. It's the Holy Land and it was given to the Jews."

The mention of left-wingers brings us to politics and the issue of abortion. "The traditional Jewish outlook on abortion," the rabbi explains, "is certainly not pro-choice, but it's not exactly the pro-life view either. If someone takes a fetus, it's not viewed as murder the same as murdering someone born already. However, it is absolutely forbidden under the vast majority of circumstances. The only time abortion would be allowed is if the mother's life is in danger. Other than that, it is considered highly immoral and a terrible thing to do. I would hope most Orthodox Jews would vote the pro-life position."

This presents the problem of politicians such as John Kerry (a Catholic) and Joseph Leiberman (a Jew), who profess to be personally opposed to abortion because of their religious convictions, yet claim they cannot impose their morality upon the voting populace. Rabbi Eilfort rejects such sophistry. "The Bible says, to 'Do not stand idly by the blood of your brothers.' We can't hide behind the notion of not imposing our will on others. We have to stand with a strong voice, as law-abiding citizens, and speak out for what is right. If someone cannot speak out for himself, it's our job to speak out for him. If you don't speak out against immorality, then you are part of the problem. That's why I admire what President Bush is doing in Iraq. He is not just standing by and saying, 'OK, maybe Iraq was a threat to us.' They were certainly a proclaimed enemy of the United States, they certainly had bad intentions for us, so there is nothing wrong with making a preemptive strike to defend oneself. In fact it's virtuous, It's a biblical imperative. He (Hussein) didn't follow the rules. He signed a treaty and he broke it time after time after time. The same thing holds true with the abortion. Our Bible should be our inspiration of how to live life and the Bible says that abortion is wrong unless the mother's life is in danger. We should proudly proclaim that. It's a travesty that children can get abortions without even informing their parents. They can't get their ears pierced before 18, yet they can get an abortion? What is this?"

"The ancient Greeks," Rabbi Eilfort continues, "did a lot for this world in science and philosophy, but they took sickly babies and put them on the hilltop to die. There was logic in their reasoning: It weakens society to take care of the sick, so let's get rid of the sick and the whole society will be stronger. And Hitler took it to another extreme. If you don't use the Bible as the arbiter of good and evil, what do you use? Who decides what's right and wrong? Anybody can justify anything if it's for himself. Hitler justified murder. It became a virtue to murder Jews and you were evil if you didn't. That's where human logic, if you leave the Bible out of it, can lead you. Night turns into day and good turns into evil. Right now in Israel, these homicide bombers are looked at as martyrs who are going up to heaven. They walked into a pizza restaurant and blew babies up and the world is not saying a thing about it. They're blaming Israel. When they killed the Hamas leader (Ahmed Yassin) my only question was why they waited so long. This man was a human monster. He would send his own children to blow up Israeli children. Children! They would take ten year-olds and have them strap bombs in their backpacks. There is nothing to negotiate. It is a cult of death in the Palestinian area. The Bible talks very clearly about what you are supposed to do with people who have a cult of death when people worshipped the idol Molech. They would take their own children and put them through fire."

The rabbi believes Catholics and Jews share a common enemy: moral relativism, which says, "Anybody who is more religious than I is a fanatic, an extremist. Religion is a crutch. You've heard it a million times. The truth is, someone who is religious, and I don't care what religion it is, is living a much more challenging life than someone who is living moral relativism. Relativism says, 'Whatever feels good to me is okay, because my heart tells me it's okay and I'll somehow fit it in with my moral and ethics. They make the rest us seem like we are crazy or way out there. They marginalize us by calling us 'rigid,' or 'extremist,' or 'ultra Orthodox'. But I am simply a traditional Jew, a Torah-observant Jew. To me, someone who won't compromise on their principles is very respectable, whether their principles are in accord with mine or not. I think that's wonderful. It shouldn't be marginalized, it should be celebrated."

Although Orthodox Jews are in the minority of Judaism, there is no shortage of places for them to worship in San Diego County. There are more than 30 synagogues," Rabbi Eilfort explains. "About half of them are Orthodox. Yet the vast majority of Jews in San Diego county are not even affiliated. But Orthodox synagogues are more neighborhood-based. They have to be, because we cannot drive on the Sabbath, so we have to walk to them. They also tend to be smaller. The larger Conservative and Reformed congregations have up to 1000 families, whereas the largest Orthodox congregation has maybe 250 or 300 families. But the families are bigger, because we have more children."

Rabbi Eilfort takes his turn as interviewer and asks me about Vatican II and its effects on Catholicism. I explain that most Catholics don't realize that Vatican II affirmed all the teachings and traditions of the Church's 2000 year history -- including the Latin Mass; that, instead, Vatican II has been erroneously cited as a reason to throw out tradition. He says he can relate. "The biggest problem for Orthodox Jews," he explains, "is overcoming the false impression held by many Jews who have not been educated about Orthodox Judaism. They would immediately assume that I am someone who is very judgmental of them, that I look askance at someone who does not practice as I practice, where nothing could be further from the truth. My philosophy is, I am here to teach traditional Judaism. I hope that it will resonate in your soul. I hope you'll hear a truth there that you will relate to and feel comfortable with. I am certainly not here to force my practice down anybody's throat. Most Jews, when they give it a chance, walk in with an open mind, feel very comfortable here. It's a loving atmosphere here and they take comfort that we don't deviate from the tradition as it's existed for 3300 years. We observe the Sabbath the same way today as when the Bible was given." There is not a Jew that I meet who will not say something like, 'I'm a Reform Jew, but my great, great grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi.' That's because it's the only kind of Judaism that initially existed."

The greatest misunderstanding, the rabbi says, comes from his brother Jews. "When I walk proudly as a Jew (he wears his yarmulke at all times) I feel that I get more respect from Gentiles. I appreciate it and feel very blessed. But some Jews resent it. Some may be embarrassed that I am still Orthodox and identifiable as a Jew, rather than trying to blend in with society."

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