”Rabbi Avi Weiss has conferred semikha upon a woman, has made her an Assistant Rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale where she carries out certain traditional rabbinical functions, and has now given her the title of Rabbah (formerly Maharat).  He has stated that the change in title is designed to “make it clear that Sara Hurwitz is a full member of our rabbinic staff, a rabbi with the additional quality of a distinct woman’s voice.
”These developments represent a radical and dangerous departure from Jewish tradition and the mesoras haTorah, and must be condemned in the strongest terms.  Any congregation with a woman in a rabbinical position of any sort cannot be considered Orthodox.” – press release from Agudath Israel

At a time when Orthodox Jews with names like Rubashkin, Kolko, Tropper, Elon, Dwek and Eisenmann and so many others don’t get this sort of condemnation. Leave it to the “Council of Torah Sages” to come down hard as if their world is going to become unrecognizable should a woman be given rabbinic ordination.
Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Ner Israel’s Rosh Yeshiva, didn’t sign the April 11, 2007 Rabbinical Council of Greater Baltimore statement entitled “Abuse in Our Community. But he was one of the 10 signatures on the bottom of the above Agudath press release. Mr. Eisenmann lives on his very campus. It’s as if sexual molestation or the out right embezzlement of Orthodox Jews doesn’t merit the condemnation of the “sages.”
Rabbi Weiss’s move is of course controversial. Isn’t it something to discuss instead of something to condemn? I mean, aren’t “sages” people who go back and forth with one another and discuss. Don’t we see even in Talmud where sages disagree at times with one another?
Orthodox Jews, including rabbis, are facing charges of molestation to hedge fund extortion. Yet, there are no press releases with signatures condemning these acts. An article in the New York Jewish Week reports that recent arrests and violations could harm the Orthodox community’s standing and power base.
That should be a worry. That should be the concern. The “sages” should sign a public memo calling on all of us to check our behavior, to live by the very midot we teach our children.
Instead, the focus goes overboard towards Rabbi Avi Weiss and Rabbah Sara Hurwitz.
Aren’t the problems we face of unemployment, agunot and trauma so much more important than a full-court public press for the ordination of a woman as an Orthodox rabbi? I know of a man with 11 children who worries each day about feeding them. I got an email this week from another man who is on the cusp of homelessness, about ready to be evicted, because he lost his job. I know of three Orthodox women, personally, who still haven’t gotten their gets. Why aren’t “sages” condemning that?
Not saying that a woman as an Orthodox rabbi isn’t the topic for a debate in process. And I can understand why it gets a visceral reaction. But the visceral reaction of the “sages” is inconsistent, and they should know that.
Condemnation?
Condemn hunger. Condemn unemployment. Condemn family violence. Condemn childhood sexual abuse. Sign your name to something of relevance.
Come on “sages,” we need more than this from you.
A woman as an Orthodox rabbi?
Men, we’ve had our chances to lead. So much abuse. So much arrogance.
Maybe it’s time to let a woman try.
Just saying.

How many stories of bomb carrying terrorists dressed up as Hareidim do we have read to not understand that the latest travel “innovation” coming from Israel is laden with a terrible potential.
Now, during a time when would-be killers are trying to detonate bombs in their shoes and underwear, we seemingly come up with an idea that would let them hide onboard in plain sight.
A young man a couple of months ago was putting on his tefillin, and that action alone, motivate an airline pilot to land the plane for fear of the safety of his passengers.
Along comes something called the personal mechitza, according to reports in the Jerusalem Post.
It allows its user to set up a white nylon protective shield and keep wandering eyes from seeing in-flight movies or a person deemed un-modest.
This is added to separate seating on certain bus lines and separate gender sidewalks in certain areas of Israel that is causing its own difficult conversation.
The last thing I want to see when I am 30,000 feet in the air is someone not in view of sky marshals, flight attendants and other airline authorities.
It’s difficult enough that the Hareidim are choosing to push their separation to uncomfortable extremes, but in this day of post 9-11, this idea should be a non-starter.
If I were to say to you in August of 2001, that planes would be hijacked, commandeered and flown into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, you would have looked at me askance. But the seemingly impossible was made possible.
Security is real and needs to be taken seriously and is for the protection of the man with the beard and the woman in the tank top on the same plane. Both their security and their lives are compromised by the desire of one group to not have to see the other.
At the very least, this is something that should be discussed further. It’s a dangerous cover-up.
Yes, flights can be long and boring.
But they have to be safe and secure and public.

So, my snow shovel was stolen from my front porch the day after the blizzard.
Snow equipment became the bikes and lawn mowers of the winter.
My bad, I left it out there, thinking that it would be safe on my front porch in broad daylight.
My wife and I had spent a couple of snow shoveling sessions with neighbors, digging one another out. So I guess I had this spirit of “silver lining” going for me.
After we realized we were shovel less, I started getting phone calls from friends. Most wanted to share stories they had heard or witnessed in the community during the blizzard. There were so many really nice acts of kindness going on all around us.
Indeed, the Chesed Fund, Hatzalah, Shomrim, CERT, Chaverim and just neighbors with neighbors. People were digging one another out, clearing paths, breaking through with four-wheel drive vehicles, transporting.
Friends of mine with names like Danny, Ronnie, Chaim, Frank, Brian and so many others were out there working in that cold, horrible weather to make life a little easier.
When this is all over, and the snow melts away, we’re going to all remember the blizzard of 2010.
I’m not going to remember that someone stole my snow shovel. My friend, Andy, loaned me one the next day. Instead, I’m going to remember the acts of kindness I learned of. They were all much deeper than the snow.
My only practical request is that we continue on with patience. In a couple of weeks, the intersection of Cross Country and Strathmore near Western Run is going to be clogged by neighbors delivering Purim mishloach manot to one another. Even when there is no snow, the intersection gets tricky. Assuming there are remnants of snow, please plan to be patient and respectful of one another’s safety there.
Oh, and if I could tell the person who stole the snow shovel anything, it would just be keep it, and help somebody with it.

Last Thursday night while I was out grocery shopping with about a thousand of my closest friends, I tried to take a step back every once in a while and listen to conversations people were having.
Generally speaking, everyone seemed in a good humor, leaning towards patience and understanding. Nobody was elbowing another going for the last container of low fat yogurt. The cashiers were understandably exhausted.
Then the visual struck me. I was gazing around, looking at the store aisles, how picked over they were and how empty there were as well.
Like a movie camera my vision did a double take.
There, in the middle of the pre-blizzard shopping spree, one could do his or her Passover shopping. The Passover food was out there. And it’s probably been out there this early in year’s past. I just noticed it, this year, and found it somehow ironic.
Foods celebrating the Exodus, our very freedom were out in aisles, and might be purchased to help all sorts of people get through the snow storms. Suddenly, instead of bread, milk and toilet paper, the paradigm had expanded for a Baltimore snow storm.
I didn’t realize that some people had cleaned already for Passover.
Stuck in the house, bored? We can have snowstorm seders.
Now, it could be matzah, milk and you know.
Or macaroons, milk and TP.
Customers of many different races and backgrounds were looking through Passover items. It wasn’t like the parting of the Red Sea came to mind, maybe more so the plowing of the side street.
When you think of it, perhaps it is entirely appropriate that the Passover items were available for blizzard survival. Digging one’s car out…freedom. Getting the children back to school…freedom. Getting out of the house…freedom.
Ah, and then there’s the opportunity in the middle of a snow storm to do mitzvot. That is a huge connection to spiritual freedom for all of us. I worry, like you, that there are frail, elderly among us who might be home without company, perhaps without food or power. We should all be responsible to knock on the doors of those elderly among us to make sure they are accounted for, fed and warm.
The number 4? As in Four Questions, Four Cups of Wine and Four Sons?
When all is said in done, the experts are predicting we’ll have about four feet of snow when we combine both storms.
Why are these days different than other days?
Because we’re living in an area where snow is a hair-trigger word.
People from states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota or from New England who move here aren’t accustomed to streets going unplowed or for that matter schools even closing.
I can remember the first snow fall we experienced as suburban Detroit residents. My wife turned on the radio at 5 a.m. to expect her school district to be closed. Everything was open.
We stay glued to the TV or Internet worrying about accumulations. Our children will be going to school well into the summer at this pace.
So, we’re over two weeks from Purim, and we’ve got Passover foods to purchase well in advance. Now we have yet another snow storm to concern ourselves with before we even get to Purim.
When it snows, get the four sons to shovel you out.
Pay em with a couple of zuzim.
Pass the wine.

Megan Estey described herself best.
“I’m a strong-willed teen whose life has changed and I don’t know what is going to happen. But everyone’s life is really like that. It would drive me crazy when I’d hear someone say, `I hate my life,’ or `My hair looks like crap,’ or `I hate school.’ I wish I could hate driver’s ed. I miss getting into trouble at school. I miss talking too much in class. I miss eating lunch with my friends. I miss going to the hair salon.”
And now we’re going to miss her.
Megan was on the cover of the December 11 Jewish Times. She told me her story, about living with brain cancer as a 15-year-old.
When I went to visit her at her home in Finksburg, where she lived with her mom and dad, Joanne and Jerry Eisenstadt, I didn’t know what to ask her. “So how’s it going or How do you feel?” aren’t questions really measuring up to the reality she knew.
But what Megan did was step in and ask me if she could just tell me what she was going through.
She gave us all a look at what cancer was in both a physical and mental sense.
Yet in December, in the remaining weeks of her life, she didn’t want pity. The cancer took her from her family in a physical sense. But the cancer didn’t win the battle of spirit and soul. Megan, through her poetry and her photography and the love of her parents and relatives, in her own way beat the disease.
She showed us how to live, how to make sense of things, how to look for even humor.
Indeed, she hated the fact that she was losing her hair to chemotherapy. But in that came an idea to write a book called “The Wig Diaries.”
She wore her Chai necklace and she loved to listen to music by artists such as Jack Johnson, John Mayer and Jason Mraz.
She photographed colorful humming birds in flight, flowers, ocean scenes and children, plenty of children.
Megan was a Westminster High School sophomore and a Baltimore Hebrew bat mitzvah. Most of all, she was her parents’ daughter. The three of them made for an unbeatable team. When many teens want little association with mom and dad, she called them her best friends.
Her parents, Joanne and Jerry threw themselves and every resource they had at the disease. They called doctors, and cried, and laughed, and spent hours in hospital rooms, and treatment centers or in their daughter’s room. They hugged their child, putting on a strong face and sometimes letting go into tears.
On the night I interviewed Megan, I found her house in a snow covered Finksburg neighborhood. The night was dark and clear with the moonlight reflecting off of the crystalline snow. It was like driving onto a postcard scene, stark but beautiful.
When I left the Megan’s home I thought that she’d love to photograph the snow against the rural sky.
Her funeral is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 3.
The landscape Wednesday will once again be bright white with forecasted accumulations.
Kids will be off from school, playing outside in the snow.
Making snow angels.
Megan would have taken their pictures.
Maybe she still is.