RELIGIOUS LIFE
TORAH STUDY
Sustainability away from home
PARSHAH VAYECHI:
GENESIS 47:28 - 50:26
RABBI DOVBER DECHTER
A braham, Isaac
and Jacob;
Sara, Rivkah, Rochel
and Leah.

Ask someone
Rabbi Dovber Dechter
for the names of
COURTESY OF RABBI DOVBER DECHTER
our forefathers
and mothers, and you’ll usually walk
away satisfied. Ask for the names of
the forefathers’ children and likewise
you should be able to get a pretty
quick answer. Ask for the names of the
grandchildren, and now you will be hard
pressed to get the correct answers.

Out of all the grandchildren, the ones
you would likely hear about would be
Menashe and Ephraim. These are Yosef’s
two sons who were born to him and his
wife, Asnat, in Egypt. They were not
educated in the land of their people, nor
with their family, yet they merited to have
a special place in our tradition for all time.

As Jacob said in his blessing to them,
“with your names shall the people bless.”
Many a tear has been shed by hopeful and
SILOW-CARROLL CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9
follow their religious convictions and maintain
their human dignity.”
Colleyville and synagogue safety
After a gunman held a rabbi and three
congregants hostage at a Colleyville, Texas
synagogue in January, Jewish institutions
called for even tighter security at buildings
that had already been hardened after the
Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in 2018. And
yet for some, the sight of armed guards and
locked doors undermines the spirit of a house
of worship. Raphael Magarik of the University
of Illinois Chicago argued that the Colleyville
incident shouldn’t lead to an overreaction,
especially when congregations are struggling
to come back together after the pandemic.

Rabbi Joshua Ladon warned about the
“impulse to allow fear to define our actions.”
Meanwhile, Jews of color said armed guards
and police patrols can make them feel unsafe.

In a powerful response, Mijal Bitton and Rabbi
Isaiah Rothstein of the Shalom Hartman
Center wrote that Jewish institutions must
think in “expansive and creative ways about
how to fight for our combined safety in a way
that takes into account the rich ethnic and
racial diversity of our communities.”
Anti-Zionism, antisemitism and
“Jew-free zones”
When nine student groups at UC Berkeley’s
law school adopted by-laws saying that they
10 JANUARY 6, 2023
praying parents bestowing their heartfelt
wishes on their children before Shabbat
or Yom Kippur; “Hamalach hagoel oisi
... may you be as Menashe and Ephraim
(and as Sara, Rivkah, Rachel and Leah).”
They were the hope of the people.

In their migration away from the Holy
Land, there was the vast unknown in
front of them. How would they fare, and
would they continue to inspire the next
generation in these more challenging
circumstances? Menashe and Ephraim
were all the proof and assurance they
needed. Here was a family that was torn
away from their land, from their family
and people, and these are their products.

Sons who held strong to their values and
traditions while in the bedazzled halls
of Pharaoh’s palace and the depravity of
Egypt. “You see,” the brothers whispered
to each other, “it can be done even
here.” We can still instill our families with
our beloved Judaism, while we engage
successfully with different cultures. There
is nothing to fear.

The secret to this success story is that
Yosef employed two tactics. Firstly, he
held strong to his family memory and
tradition. He made space for that to be
the founding blocks of his home and the
environment he created. Then, he got
active by impacting the environment
around him. Instead of being threatened
by what was around him, cowering and
hiding his secret background, his family
became influencers. Not the TikTok
type, but the leading by example type.

Displaying how a true Jewish home
operates, they shone their light all over
a dark Egypt. This was his weapon to
maintain connection with his heritage
even though he was so far away and alone.

To train his young family in the ways
of his father. And more importantly, to
thrive there as well.

And they did a fine job indeed. Still
today, we bless our families — be like
them! We are not in ancient Israel of old.

We are dispersed throughout the world,
and here in Arizona and downtown
Phoenix, of course as well. But if we
mimic that model, we can be assured
that our own families will be proud of
their identities, protect it, and proudly
display it for all to see. So, make Jewish
practice a bedrock of your home. Let your
family see you lay tefillin, gather them
as you light the Shabbat candles before
sundown, make kiddush out loud (don’t
forget to serve the matzah balls, the most
will not invite speakers who support Zionism,
the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles ran an
op-ed with the provocative headline, “Berkeley
Develops Jewish Free Zones.” In the essay,
Kenneth L. Marcus, who heads the Brandeis
Center for Human Rights Under Law, argued
that “Zionism is an integral aspect of the
identity of many Jews,” and that the bylaws act
as “racially restrictive covenants,” precluding
Jewish participation. Defenders of the pro-
Palestinian students countered that groups
often invite only like-minded speakers, and
that while being Jewish is an identity, Zionism
is a political viewpoint. Faculty, politicians and
activists weighed in on both sides of what has
become a central debate on campuses and
beyond: When does anti-Zionism become
antisemitism, and how do you balance free
speech rights against the claims by some
students that their personal safety hangs in
the balance?
kids.” Coverage of the ban misleadingly
depicted “Maus” as an introduction to the
Shoah for young adults, while Spiegelman
recently noted that he had become a reluctant
“metonym” for the book-banning issue.

Jennifer Caplan explained why the book is
indispensable: “‘Maus’ forces the reader to
bear witness in a way no written account can,
and the [illustrations] are especially good at
forcing the eye to see what the mind prefers
to glide past.”
“Maus” and school book bans
Caught up in an epidemic of book-banning
were Jewish books for children and young
adults, a list that includes “The Purim
Superhero,” “Family Fletcher” and “Chik
Chak Shabbat.” A Texas school board
removed a 2018 graphic novel adaptation of
Anne Frank’s diary. But perhaps the highest
profile case of a Jewish-interest book being
banned came when a Tennessee school board
voted to remove “Maus” — Art Spiegelman’s
epic cartoon memoir about the Holocaust —
from middle-school classrooms, citing its use
of profanity, nudity and depictions of “killing
Artificial intelligence and real-life dilemmas
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a fact
of corporate life, with computing advances that
power robotic automation, computer vision
and natural-language text generation. But
what captured the public imagination — and
dread — this year were sites like Dall-E, which
threatened the livelihood of graphic designers
by generating original, credible illustrations
with no more than a simple prompt, and
ChatGPT, which is able to expound cogently
and humanly on practically any topic. Beyond
everyday ethical dilemmas (“Can I write my
book report using ChatGPT?”) AI raised
profound questions about what it means to
be human. “Rabbis have historically been
very open to the idea of nonhuman sentience
and have tended to see parallels between
humans and nonhumans as an excuse to treat
nonhumans better,” wrote David Zvi Kalman
in an essay on the prospect of creating artificial
life. Similarly, Mois Navon suggested in JTA
that “if a machine is sentient, it is no longer
an inanimate object with no moral status or
JEWISH NEWS
SHABBAT CANDLE LIGHTING
JAN. 6 - 5:17 P.M.

JAN. 13 - 5:24 P.M.

SHABBAT ENDS
JAN. 7 - 6:16 P.M.

JAN. 14 - 6:22 P.M.

Find area congregations at jewishaz.com, where
you can also find our 2023 Community Directory.

important element in this all), study
Torah often, give charity generously,
display your menorah for all to see and
so on. Let’s proudly display our pride and
our connection to our Judaism — happily,
and with joy.

And then let’s change the world around
us. Lead by example. Do good and you
will be noticed. Do good and you will be
emulated. That is how we continue the
legacy. That is how we live as Menashe
and Ephraim. That is how we become
worthy of carrying that blessing forward.

Hamalach hagoel oisi — may G-d’s
angel deliver us from all harm and may we
truly be blessed, among all our brethren,
Amen! JN
Rabbi Dovber Dechter is the co-director of Chabad
of Downtown Phoenix.

‘rights’ … but rather an animate being with
the status of a ‘moral patient’ to whom we owe
consideration.” A Pulitzer for “The Netanyahus”
Joshua Cohen was the somewhat surprising
winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his
novel “The Netanyahus: An Account of a
Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode
in the History of a Very Famous Family.”
Or maybe not so surprising: The book is a
fictionalized treatment of a real-life visit in the
late 1950s by the Israeli historian Benzion
Netanyahu for a job interview at a university
very much like Cornell. With Benzion’s son
Benjamin angling for an ultimately successful
return to office in real life, a satire about Jewish
power, right-wing Zionism and Israeli self-
regard might have seemed to the judges very
much of the moment. As critic Adam Kirsch
wrote in a JTA essay, Cohen concludes that
both American and Israeli Jewish identities “are
absurd, crying out for the kind of satire that can
only come from intimate knowledge.” Others
weren’t amused. Jewish Currents criticized the
novel for being derivative of both Philip Roth
and Saul Bellow, and the Jewish Review of
Books said that the novel includes “a capsule
history of Zionism that is so blatant a distortion
that I just gave up.” JN
The views and opinions expressed in this article
are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70
Faces Media.

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