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The recent Jewish World article about Jewish foster children in a non-Jewish home framed the situation in terms of a conflict between Reform and Orthodox communities here in Troy.  Here is the headline and opening paragraph:

Who can best rear these two foster children? Troy Jewish community has opposing thoughts

A battle over two Jewish children is brewing in the Rensselaer County Department of Social Services (RCDSS), the county’s family court and pitting the Troy Orthodox and Reform Jewish communities at odds over how Jewish children should be raised.

(NOTE: The on-line version used “rear” in the headline, while the print version said “raise.”  It comes out to the same thing.)

I replied (and also wrote a blog post) that I don’t think there’s actually any great difference between the positions of Leible Morrison, spiritual leader of Troy’s Orthodox Congregation Beth Tephila, and myself, rabbi of Reform Congregation Berith Sholom, about whether non-Jewish parents can raise Jewish children.  But I think I’ve figured out why it made sense to the reporter and headline-writer to highlight disagreement (besides making attention-grabbing copy):  There’s confusion over the word “raise.”

In foster care circles, we commonly use the phrase “to care for” when speaking of children who are “in care.” “Raising” a child more likely means children who are in a permanent placement, which ideally means adoption. Obviously a foster parent is doing the day-to-day job of raising foster children, but it’s a far cry from being their “forever family.”

So “the idea that a non-Jewish family can raise Jewish children” had only one meaning in my mind — being raised to adulthood by adoptive non-Jewish parents.   I’m sure that Leible Morrison and I agree that that’s absurd, no matter how sincere such parents might be.

If there is disagreement between the Troy Orthodox community (as represented by Leible) and the Reform community (as represented by my partner and me), it’s about foster care placement, not about adoption.  And it’s not coming from my position as a Reform rabbi, it’s coming from our over 5 years of experience as foster parents.

Enter Agudath Israel of America.  They don’t seem to have a website, but I found a couple of articles on-line presenting their point of view (see Cross-Currents and Matzav — exactly the same article).  Here’s the first paragraph:

Agudath Israel of America has accused the Rensselaer Department of Social Services of violating state law by working to have two Jewish children (a brother and sister) adopted by non-Jewish couples. Under New York State law, social service agencies and the courts are generally required to place children in foster and adoptive homes that share the religious faith of the child. But in the case of two children under the jurisdiction of Rensselaer Social Services, the law is being ignored and plans for their adoption by two non-Jewish couples are underway-even though their mother has requested that her children be kept together and placed in a Jewish home.

Give me a break!  These children are not free for adoption, and no plans can be made for their adoption for another year!  Here’s how it works:

Every child in foster care has a “permanency goal.”  The efforts of the county and all its support systems are directed toward making this permanency goal a reality. When children first come into foster care, the legally-mandated goal is reunification with birth parent(s).  To further that goal, birth parents are entitled to regular supervised visits with their children, usually weekly.  As it happens, Jewish Family Services provides supervision for these visits in Rensselaer County, and our synagogue was actually a visitation site for over a year.  So we’ve seen it from several angles.

Since there seem to be no Jewish (and certainly are no Orthodox Jewish) foster families available at this time in Rensselaer, Albany, or Schenectady County (this is based on conversations with other foster parents), placing these two children for foster care with a Jewish family — in, say, Boro Park — would mean that their mother probably would not be able to visit with them.

So Judge Cholakis, in keeping the children local, is not ignoring the religious and cultural needs of these children; she’s balancing that against the need to preserve the mother-child relationship and to promote family reunification as mandated by law.

And in any case, the conversation at this point can only be about foster care placement.  Adoption only becomes a possibility after a child has been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months; at that point, if the parents aren’t making progress toward providing a safe and adequate home, New York law requires that the county begin legal proceedings to terminate parental rights.  This gives the child the possibility of being adopted and growing up in a “forever family.”

So there’s no way that the county is making any “plans” for adoption just a few months into the foster placement.  Even if there have been conversations, conversations don’t equal legal plans, and it’s all governed by the legal requirements.  Foster parents falling in love with a baby in their care?  Sure, it happens all the time.  Baby leaves after many months and is adopted elsewhere?  Sure.  Happens.

Agudath Israel of America has been muddying the waters between foster care placement and pre-adoptive placement and smearing a hard-working Department of Social Services.  And what’s particularly sad is that their intervention is not needed.  As a former foster parent, I know that the birth mother could have a great deal of say over where her children are adopted, if she’s decided that she’s not going to be able to raise her children.  If she’s ready to relinquish her parental rights, rather than waiting for time to run out on her, she could do so conditionally:  On condition that the children are adopted together, that they’re adopted by an Orthodox family, by an ultra-Orthodox family, or even by a particular ultra-Orthodox family (who are certified as foster parents, of course). She has that power! I hope someone has told her that.

Agudath Israel of America should be ashamed of themselves.  Tochachah — reproof — is best given in private, but when the offending party is loudly libeling another party, I think they have forfeited their right to that courtesy.

And on re-reading the original article, I have to ask again:  Where was this young woman’s family and community before DSS stepped in?  There was a bris, there was a grandmother; didn’t anyone realize that there was a problem?

And I do, most sincerely, to Marc Gronich, who wrote the original Jewish World article about the two young Jewish children in foster care in Rensselaer County.  He wrote a balanced, thoughtful, and sensitive article, after a long conversation with Judy and conversations with many other people, and we especially appreciate that he wrote accurately about our family situation.  I didn’t acknowledge any of this in my letter to the editor or my previous blog post, and it should have been the first thing I said, before I laid out my criciticm.  It was indeed the first thing Judy and I said to each other — appreciating how well the article was written.  I apologize to Marc for putting him in a bad light.  This publishing thing is harder than it looks!

And I know that retractions and apologies are never read by all the people who read the original article.  So, I’m depending on you to spread the word if it comes up in conversation.

Marc Gronich also didn’t write the headline, which framed the situation in terms of a disagreement in the Troy Jewish community.   Nor did I write the headline for my letter to the editor (which is the core of my previous blog post).   Both headlines, plus the first paragraph of the original article (which says that the situation is “pitting the Troy Orthodox and Reform Jewish communities at odds over how Jewish children should be raised”), imply a conflict that I don’t think exists in Troy.

But I’ve figured out where the confusion comes from:  It hinges on the word “raise.”

In foster care circles, you don’t so much talk about “raising” foster children.  You talk about “caring” for them.  So “raising,” to me, implies permanence, which is exactly the thing that children in foster care don’t have.  “Rearing,” in the headline, seems to be a synonym for “raising” — perhaps it’s not, but it’s not a word in common usage, either.

“Raising” has two meanings.  “Raising children temporarily” is a description for the day-to-day work of foster care.  Then there’s “raising children permanently in their ‘forever family,’” which is adoption.  Marc and I and the headline writer, I think, confused these different meanings of “raising.”  Unintentionally.

But I think that Agudath Israel of America is confusing them deliberately.  And much of my letter and blog post in reply to the  original Jewish World article focused on a dismissive comment made  about me by that organization’s general counsel.  This led to the other mistake I made in my letter and blog post:  I segued from criticism of the paper (or the writer) to criticism of AIA’s representative, without making that distinction clear.  In retrospect, I see how that could leave a reader with the mistaken impression that this aspect, too, was reported incorrectly.  It wasn’t!  I was objecting to the content of the criticism from this third party, not to the reporting at all.

I’m going to write more about Agudath Israel of America and the difference between “being in foster care” and “being raised by your parents” in the next post.  This post is my apology to Marc Gronich.  Slichah, Marc.

A front-page article in the Feb. 24 edition of our local Jewish newspaper, The Jewish World, portrayed me — surely accidentally — in a poor light, and I’d like to correct a couple of misrepresentations.

In case you don’t feel like clicking on the link to the article, though I suggest that you do, here’s a bit of background: There are currently two children in foster care with Rensselaer County DSS (Department of Social Services), ages 2 and a few months.  Their mother identifies with the ultra-Orthodox community and has a connection with Leible Morrison, who has served as the leader of Cong. Beth Tephilah here in Troy for a few years.

My partner Judy and I were foster parents through Rensselaer County for over 5 years.  We’ve adopted 4 children, as many of you know — none of whom were born to Jewish parents, all of whom are being raised Jewish.  As far as we know, we were the only Jewish foster parents in Rensselaer County at the time, and when we let our certification lapse — having our hands full, as well as our house! — there remained no Jewish foster parents in the county.  (This is confirmed in the article.)

So when these two children came into foster care, the county placed them with experienced foster parents — and called us for guidance, being the only Jews that they knew.  There is a high level of privacy maintained in foster care circles concerning personal information, so we had no information about the children’s birth mother other than that she identifies as Orthodox.  That in itself was curious; the Orthodox community in Troy is aging, other than two families with children, and I was quite sure that these young children did not come from those families.

We did what we could, including trying to make connections between the foster parents and the Orthodox community.  Congregation Beth Tephilah in Troy does not employ a rabbi, so naturally I reached out to my Orthodox colleague in Albany, Rabbi Moshe Bomzer, who is Rav haMachshir of Va’ad haKashrut of the Capital District — in other words, he’s the certifying rabbi of our local kashrut supervising organization.  We have a mutually respectful relationship of many years’ duration.

The headline and first paragraph of the Jewish World article imply that there is some kind of opposition between my position, as a Reform rabbi, and that of the Orthodox Jews involved with these two children. That’s not accurate. First of all, we all agree that the idea that a non-Jewish family can raise Jewish children is patently absurd.  However, when children come into foster care, they need a place to stay immediately, and the goal is to keep them local so that they don’t lose touch with their birth parent(s); so it’s both normal and reasonable that they were placed immediately with non-Jewish foster parents in Rensselaer County.

An organization called Agudath Israel of America is now involved.  I can’t find a website for AIA, but the article describes it as “a Jewish communal organization representing sectors of Chasidic Judaism.”  Their general counsel, Mordecai Biser, is quoted talking about me, whom he doesn’t know and has never spoken to:

“A non-Jewish woman who is getting instruction from a reform rabbi is a far cry from what the biological mother wants,” says Modechai Biser, general counsel for the New York City-based Agudath Israel of America.

I am not so foolish as to try to instruct a non-Jewish woman (or anyone) on how to raise observant Jews!  We did three things only:

1. Gave the foster mother basic beginner’s information about kashrut. (We didn’t have to mention haircuts because that’s already in DSS regulations; foster parents are not permitted to cut foster children’s hair without permission from birth parents.  While this could be an issue for the baby boy in ultra-Orthodox circles, we had no way even of knowing at the time that their mother identifies as ultra-Orthodox.)
2. Directed the foster mother to call Rochel Bomzer for more information about kashrut and caring for these children.
3. Spoke with Rabbi Moshe Bomzer to alert him about the situation.  (NB: I should note that Judy made this call, since she had fielded the original call from DSS and had the information direct from them.)

I hope that your readers will concur that those were appropriate ways, respectful of the Orthodox community, for this Reform rabbi to be part of this situation.

I have always assumed, since we got involved in foster care, that one reason that very few Jewish children end up in foster care is that we have a level of communal concern and involvement that tends to intervene in difficult family situations before CPS (Child Protective Services) is called in.  I also remember, from our very first foster care placement, that there is a window of up to 72 hours after children are placed in foster care in which family or friends can step up and provide the safe and stable environment that parents are not providing at that time.  It’s sad that neither of these things happened for this young woman and her children.

= = = = = = =

NB:  This post, while it accurately expresses my discomfort with the headline and first paragraph of the story, failed to acknowledge that reporter Marc Gronich wrote a generally balanced, thoughtful, and sensitive article. He had a long conversation with Judy and many other people beforehand, and we especially appreciate that he wrote accurately about our family situation.  That should have been the first thing I said, before I laid out my criciticm.  I apologize to Marc for putting him in a bad light.  This publishing thing is harder than it looks!

I wrote a longer apology which also considers the different meanings of the phrase “raising children.”  The next one after that will address some of the realities of foster care and the unnecessary involvement of Agudath Israel of America in this case.

The shochet has come to do his workshop. And he said, no, one absolutely does not say Shehecheyanu over an occurrence that involves death. (See “Small Deaths” where I raised that question over a year ago.)

And I have to say, despite the truth of Barry’s assertion that life and death need each other, we as humans are actors on life’s stage with an intentionality and power that most other organisms don’t have. Our respect for death, our treating it seriously and respectfully, is only in part because of our fear of it. It is very much necessary because of our ability to cause it — intentionally or thoughtlessly, for the most carefully-thought-out of reasons or in a blind rage, or — and this is incredibly relevant to kashrut and ecology — simply because of our boundless desire.

Rabbi Kantor said yesterday that the Orthodox rabbi who is in charge of oversight of meat at the OU has said publicly that the ethical violations which occur in OU-supervised slaughter of animals are the result of a huge pressure from the (kashrut-observing) Jewish community for meat.  That’s just one example, within my fairly small community, of the rapaciousness and thoughtlessness with which we treat the earth.  We, meaning my fellow Americans.  Others too, surely, around the world, but we Americans do have a particular mythology of endless abundance (the rolling prairies, endless herds of bison, land for the taking, limitless forests, spacious skies, amber waves of grain undulating to the horizon …  You know what I’m talking about).  The way we live is not sustainable, and we cause small and large deaths, short-term and long-term, in ways that we are utterly oblivious to, all the time.  (See previous post about the deaths inherent in growing vegetable crops on a mechanized scale.)

So it is appropriate that we acknowledge life and life-giving events differently than we do events involving death. It is surely in recognition of our own fears, but also in order to take death seriously and not go around causing more of it than we ought — because we have the ability to do that on world-wrecking scale, whether the wreck comes slowly or fast.

INTRO: A local Jewish person wrote me to say that, in her opinion, it would be ethical and humane for rabbis to stop advocating slaughter altogether, rather than talking about humane, ethical, sustainable, kosher meat production.  I wrote back — but first I wrote to my workshop co-planner, Sharon Astyk, for her input.  Many of the words below are actually hers, and most of the details about ecosystems come from her knowledge and research.   She’s also the one who knew about the Cornell study.  I wrote about quality of life and inevitability of death, as well as about Temple Grandin (whom I have admired and been fascinated by for years).   This post, though it includes Sharon‘s words, should not be taken necessarily to reflect what she would have said, if asked.

You raise important issues.  The first is that the choice to be vegetarian is an ethical and humane one.  The Torah even suggests that vegan eating is the Edenic ideal.

But shortly thereafter, Torah gives explicit permission to eat meat — within limits.  It’s a compromise.  Not perfect.  And the issue of animal cruelty is also one that our tradition demands that we address.  Different people attempt to resolve it in different ways.

It is unlikely that the majority of humans will ever eat a vegan diet.  That’s not because of ethical failings on our part: Many of the world’s ecosystems — including upstate New York — are not well-adapted to be farmland.  Marginal land all over the world has been used for millenia to support livestock, who can utilize the scrub plants for food in a way that humans cannot.  A Cornell Agricultural College study from 2007 found that the state of NY could come closer to feeding itself if everyone was consuming a small amount of animal products, because these make good use of marginal land, turning what grows there into protein.

“Local” and “sustainable” mean feeding people on what their environment can continue to provide over the generations, rather than repeatedly trucking in food from far away.  These are important values to me, for long-term protection of the ecosystems on which we all depend.  The Native American people of this region were hunters, because that’s what the local ecosystem provides best.  Judaism rejects hunting as cruel; following the blood trail of a wounded animal to complete the kill requires that the animal suffers.  Instead, our tradition demands that we get close to the animals we eat. We’re supposed to raise them, know them, care for them, then slaughter them as quickly and painlessly as possible.  It’s not supposed to be easy or comfortable.   One of the purposes of the laws of kashrut is to focus us clearly on the fact that taking a life ought to be done with careful thought and attention.

The fact is, everybody dies — animals, you and me.  After we die, we go to feed the earth.  An animal that I eat makes a detour through me, feeding me too.  But in the not-too-distant future, we all end up in the same place.  This was all brought home to me by Barbara Kingsolver in her wonderful book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Life in nature is hard, often messy and painful — and so is death.  The animals that I raise live easy lives compared to wild animals: Food, shelter, water, and the company of their own kind are assured, along with medical treatment and limited pregnancies.  My concern, as a rabbi and as a farmer, is for the quality of their lives, including the quality of their deaths.

I think it’s less important exactly how long an animal lives than the quality of its life and death.  Dying in its own time doesn’t guarantee an instant and pain-free death; I have found chickens who had been picked apart by hawks.  In fact, the “perfect death” rarely occurs in nature — as we also know from watching people we love die.  A competent shochet who handles animals gently, after a life spent in the sun, can provide a death that is close to pain-free and fear-free. Not perfect.  But not as bad as being mauled to death by another animal.

And one wonders how animals experience time, too.  Clearly they have memories, but is that the same as having a sense of time passing?  Or do animals live in an eternal “now”?  If so, is length of life as important to them as it usually is to us?

And there are other issues to grapple with, too.  Anyone who eats dairy or eggs is part of a system which, of necessity, produces male animals who provide no value to the farmer.  Eggs hatch new chicks, and about half are roosters.  Dairy animals have to get pregnant every year to give milk, and about half their offspring are male.  One needs only a tiny fraction of the males, and one keeps the best ones only, for breeding purposes.  A farmer, whether subsistence or in business, can’t afford to feed the rest of the males for years; we’d go out of business, or starve.

The alternative is to be vegan.  That choice is possible in today’s developed world.  But many of the world’s ecosystems simply won’t support the production of the vast quantities of wheat, soybeans, etc that entire vegan societies would require.  And commercial agriculture, running combines over fields to harvest, leaves its own trail of blood, destroying ground-nesting birds, burrowing animals, etc.  Unless extensive monoculture has killed them off already by erasing their food supply.

So, as a farmer and as a rabbi, as someone concerned with the suffering of animals along with the health of the eco-system, I accept the compromise of eating some animals.  I raise my chickens primarily for eggs and my goats primarily for dairy; but I am ready to face the reality of where the meat I eat comes from, and to make a commitment that the animals have lived lives of safety and comfort, and that their deaths are as quick and pain-free and respectful as I can manage.

Interesting that you invoke Temple Grandin — she’s made her life-work the creation of slaughterhouses in which animals don’t experience unnecessary fear and pain.  Her website acknowledges that an animal may feel pain during or after kosher slaughter, but she states clearly that “From an animal welfare standpoint, the major concern during ritual slaughter are the stressful and cruel methods of restraint (holding) that are used in some plants.”  She is the number-one spokesman in the world for animal welfare, and identifies her own type of consciousness and thinking with those of higher mammals — but she does not believe that killing animals for food is something that must be avoided.

I hope this gives you some understanding of why, although I respect both vegetarians and vegans, I am involved in this project.

I’ve been waiting more than 4 years for this day. We finally found the remote control for one of our small CD player systems, and I can set the day and time, which have been blinking ever since we moved into this house.

It’s a small thing. There are plenty of other clocks. But it’s been frustrating, because as far as I can figure out, there’s no way to set the time from the controls on the actual machine, only using the remote. I had resigned myself to eternal (ok, long-term) blinking.

Alice Walker wrote, and I remember reading on a calendar I had in college:

I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.

(The original article appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1974.)

Astronomer Bob Berman and doctor Robert Lanza wrote a book in which they posit that time is just conscious beings’ way of organizing the universe. It’s a lovely idea, one I hope to have time to explore more in-depth in the future (assuming time actually exists).

In the meantime (there is is again), I shall appreciate the beauty and order of having the blinking day and time replaced with the orderly progression of minutes, hours, and days on my CD player’s display.

At the Brickner Seminar listening to Sean Thibault, the RAC‘s Communications Director.

Ever heard of HootSuite?  I hadn’t, and it’s a couple years old already.  Manage all your social networks and blogs from one place.  Not only is it a central location for publishing and listening, but it has a crucial tool:  A SCHEDULER.  How often have I written something but not wanted to send it yet?  (Or to remind myself later?)

One rabbi sits down and writes 2 weeks of daily “Torah gems” and they go out religiously.  (Of course, pun intended.)

One could send stuff out for Shabbat — the Torah portion, for instance — written whenever one has time.  One could send out stuff *on* Shabbat (when, apparently, Facebook traffic goes way down) and tag it “Written before Shabbat and scheduled for later delivery.”

Video yourself delivering a drash or invitation or talking about an exciting new thing, or do the “ShabbatCast” announcing what’s going on this Shabbat; schedule it to be posted close to the time of the event.  (Thank you R. Michael Latz of Shir Tikva in Minneapolis.)

I’m going to have to join Twitter, too — apparently quite popular with post-college to age 30.  If it’s good enough for His Holiness the Dalai Lama…  Though as someone across the room just pointed out, Buddhists tend to talk less than Jews, so getting it down to 140 characters might be a challenge for us…!  OK, I’ve joined Twitter.

If you are webstreaming services, you can tweet about it (pre-scheduled of course) …  (Here’s the web page for Congregation Bet Chayim Chadashim is Los Angeles which won a “Best Practices” award from the Reform Movement for its live streaming.  Hint hint.  We have two congregants who are very interested already; I think it’s just a matter of time.)