Parsha in 60 Seconds Presents Ekev
Parsha in 60 Seconds Presents Eikev
G-d’s Echo,Echo,Cho,Ho,o - Parshat Va'etchanan
Rabbi Benny’s Weekly Torah Thought… keeping it short, contemporary and meaningful.
Y-Studs - Evolution of Shabbat [Official Video]
In an email sent to observant Jews on campus, Cynthia Yang, the deputy chief of staff to the college president, and the head of the college’s pandemic response team, described the new technology protocols for reporting COVID-19 symptoms and participating in contact tracing.
Then, it all went south. Quickly. “We recognize that how you have practiced religious traditions in the past may not align with the use of technology during the high holidays or the Sabbath, but this year it is paramount for the community’s health and safety that you abide by the Barnard pledge and follow the college’s policies and procedures.” (emphasis added.)
The idea a university bureaucrat — and not Rabbis or other Jewish leaders — would instruct Jewish students on how to square their practical obligations to the college with their religious beliefs, is deeply offensive.
That this bureaucrat would specifically imply that the religious practices of Jews on campus are all “in the past,” and that despite their beliefs, their convictions, their faith, they need to abide by a system set up by people who have not considered their circumstances at all, is simply unacceptable.
Barnard was a bastion of liberalism before the word woke entered the lexicon. Anyone who works there has sat through countless sessions on diversity and inclusion. So I have to wonder: other than checking the box to prove progressive bona fides, what exactly is the purpose of a seminar on diversity and inclusion? If something as basic as whether a recognized religion has the right to practice its beliefs is something lost on a senior administrator at a liberal arts college, we can only draw two conclusions.
Either diversity and inclusion efforts are not crafted with Jews in mind at all — despite our multi-generation history of enslavement, oppression, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, our experience is bizarrely characterized as privileged by the vast majority of leftist caucus. Therefore, we don’t matter. At all. Or: diversity and inclusion trainings are meaningless attempts by cowed bureaucrats to signal that they and their institutions are just as woke as everybody else. That virtue signaling is a plea: please, inoculate us against cancellation. These choices are not mutually exclusive. As is often the case, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.
