{"id":57702,"date":"2017-05-18T09:07:26","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T14:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=57702"},"modified":"2017-05-22T01:33:07","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T06:33:07","slug":"man-not-represent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/man-not-represent\/","title":{"rendered":"This Man Does Not Represent Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago, I worked as an extra in TV and films. One of the films where I can be found lurking in the background (and once dead center, during the opening scene) is called New York, I Love You.<\/i> (Don\u2019t look for it, it\u2019s terrible, though I\u2019m in a movie with Natalie Portman and you\u2019re probably not.) Anyway, we shot in the early morning in Manhattan\u2019s diamond district, after which we took a van to Williamsburg. The troupe was a combination of actual Orthodox Jews and actors dressed up like Orthodox Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the girls (an actress dressed up like an Orthodox Jew) was an avid animal lover. She struck up a conversation with the man in front of me, an actual Orthodox Jew from some Hasidic sect (I know not which). He explained to her that Jews can\u2019t own pets because we\u2019re are not allowed to touch non-kosher animals. As a dog owner, I clearly disagree with this position. \u201cThis man does not represent me,\u201d I chimed in.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d he asked, clearly surprised that I could think otherwise.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou said we\u2019re not allowed to touch non-kosher animals. Didn\u2019t Avraham saddle his donkey? Didn\u2019t King David ride a horse? Did you never take your kids for a pony ride?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI have to think about this,\u201d he said. And then he sat there, thinking about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, not touching non-kosher animals may well be his community\u2019s standard and if so, that\u2019s fine, but it\u2019s a far cry from \u201cJews aren\u2019t allowed to\u2026.\u201d And yet, there\u2019s a lot of this kind of overstatement going on. We all do it, usually unwittingly. I daresay it\u2019s virtually impossible to make any kind of statement about Judaism and have it be universally applicable. Let\u2019s start with something that may seem blatantly obvious to you and me. For example, \u201cJews don\u2019t eat rice on Passover.\u201d That\u2019s a statement that huge swaths of the population take for granted as a no-brainer but it\u2019s a completely ludicrous statement in other segments of the population. One community\u2019s statement does not reflect the other\u2019s practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is largely about one\u2019s exposure. My daughter once had a guest for Shabbos about whom I knew nothing. When we sat down to eat, I said, \u201cSo your family became religious through Chabad?\u201d Amazed at my Sherlock-like powers of deduction, she asked how I knew. It was no great trick, really. While washing, I happened to notice that she poured the water over her hands three times rather than twice. She was quite surprised to learn that the prevalent practice was to wash twice because three times was the entirety of her experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been on the receiving end of this phenomenon as well. Years ago, creating educational content for the NCSY web site, I got \u201ccalled out\u201d on such fairly innocuous statements as \u201cone should wash hands before eating a wet piece of fruit\u201d and \u201cthe bracha after rice is borei nefashos<\/i>.\u201d Apparently, there are people whose practice is different from my own. And you know what? That\u2019s okay.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a saying that there are shivim panim laTorah<\/i> \u2013 seventy different dimensions to the Torah (Bemidbar Rabbah<\/i> 13). There\u2019s not just one right way; it\u2019s a spectrum. People are perfectly capable of making statements about Judaism that may be correct for group A but incorrect for group B. We don\u2019t have pets. We don\u2019t eat rice on Pesach. We wash our hands three times for bread. These statements can be right or wrong depending on to whom they\u2019re applied. The danger is when we forget that Judaism isn\u2019t \u201cmy way or the highway.\u201d There are others who act differently and they can be just as correct.<\/span><\/p>\n

I field a lot of questions and I try to keep this in mind. If someone asks me the bracha on Pringles, I\u2019ll say, \u201cMost people say shehakol<\/i>; I happen to say ho\u2019adoma<\/i>.\u201d There\u2019s a reason I follow the opinion I do. I happen to think it\u2019s a correct opinion but I also recognize that it\u2019s a minority opinion. I\u2019m not trying to convert an army of hashkafic<\/i> clones.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the danger cuts both ways. When it comes to shivim panim laTorah<\/i>, I always point out that seventy may be a large number but it\u2019s not infinite. Not everything conceivable is included in one of the Torah\u2019s 70 dimensions. There are places where people eat without kosher supervision, advancing logical reasons why it couldn\u2019t possibly be non-kosher given the menu. That assertion doesn\u2019t make it so. There are \u201cconversions\u201d that are simply invalid. People are able to do things in every realm of Jewish life \u2013 from Sabbath and the synagogue to marriage and divorce \u2013 that are just wrong. Shivim panim laTorah<\/i> isn\u2019t carte blanche to do whatever one wants and slap a \u201cnew way of doing things\u201d label on it. There may be many different valid opinions and many different accepted practices in Judaism but there is still a finite set of valid opinions and accepted practices.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s remember that others may do things differently than we do and that\u2019s okay – eilu v\u2019eilu divrei Elokim chaim<\/i> (both opinions can represent halacha<\/i>). But if someone says something we just can\u2019t get behind, whether it\u2019s \u201cvegan restaurants don\u2019t require supervision\u201d or \u201c\u2018real\u2019 Jews don\u2019t support Israel,\u201d let\u2019s not hesitate to let people know that \u201cthis man does not represent me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Years ago, I worked as an extra in TV and films. One of the films where I can be found lurking in the background (and once dead center, during the opening scene) is called New York, I Love You. (Don\u2019t look for it, it\u2019s terrible, though I\u2019m in a movie with Natalie Portman and you\u2019re<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":57707,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\nThis Man Does Not Represent Me - OU Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Let\u2019s remember that others may do things differently than we do and that\u2019s okay \u2013 eilu v\u2019eilu divrei Elokim chaim (both opinions can represent halacha).\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/man-not-represent\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"This Man Does Not Represent Me - 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