Aug. 28, 2024: Most New Jobs Are Going to Illegal Immigrants

Dem Rep. sends pro- and anti-Israel letters; IDF rescues hostage, recovers body; Accounting for the PA's "pay-for-slay" program

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The Scroll will be on holiday Thursday and Friday. With Labor Day weekend approaching, that means we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday, Sept. 3. We suggest that in the meantime, you crack open an old book, go on a hike, spend time with loved ones, get a sunburn, or watch baseball until your eyes bleed—in short, take the opportunity to do anything but read the news. You’ll be sick of it by November.

The Big Story

Last week, while The Scroll was busy subjecting itself to the acute form of psychological torture known as the Democratic National Convention, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published its annual nonfarm payrolls benchmark revision. The headline: U.S. job growth had been overstated by 818,000 between March 2023 and March 2024—the largest downward revision since 2009, during the heart of the Great Financial Crisis. 

The jobs revision was belated confirmation of a “conspiracy theory” pushed primarily by Zero Hedge and repeated occasionally at The Scroll, among other publications: that the BLS has been systematically overstating jobs growth under the Biden-Harris administration, reporting gaudy monthly numbers taken from the BLS establishment survey that are then revised downward. As Zero Hedge has also consistently pointed out, there has been a large and growing gap over the past two years between the establishment survey, which polls employers and has generally shown a moderately healthy economy, and the household survey, which polls households and has consistently painted a more negative picture of employment. 

What accounts for that discrepancy? According to the “conspiracy theory,” it’s illegal immigration. Namely, businesses report hiring illegal immigrant workers (many of whom have received work authorization through the Biden administration), but illegal immigrants do not respond to the household surveys. As Zero Hedge concluded back in January, based on data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, since October 2019, U.S.-born workers have lost 1.4 million jobs, while foreign-born workers have gained more than 3 million jobs, with most of the job growth in the past year going to illegal immigrants. Indeed, on Aug. 20, Donald Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that “most new jobs under Biden went to illegal immigrants”—a statement that was immediately “debunked” by fact-checkers.

But last week, in response to the new BLS data, Goldman Sachs offered some support for the “conspiracy theory,” writing:

We think that the [BLS’] downward revision to payroll growth exaggerates the degree to which job growth has been overstated by about 500k, because the QCEW [Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages] likely excludes many unauthorized immigrants who are not in the unemployment insurance system but were correctly picked up in payrolls initially. 

And, in a Tuesday article for National Review, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies writes that when it comes to illegal immigrants enjoying the lion’s share of the jobs growth,  “Trump is probably right if we focus on the past two years.”

As Camarota writes:

While the [Current Population Survey] shows that the number of immigrants working is up 2.32 million in the past two years, the number of U.S.-born people employed is up just 653,000. Thus, an astonishing 78 percent of the total net increase in employment went to immigrants from July 2022 to July 2024. As already discussed, illegal immigrants account for some 60 percent of the increase in the total foreign-born. Among workers it is more likely 65 percent. This means that slightly more than half of total employment growth went to illegal immigrants. Of course, the inherent difficulty of estimating illegal immigration makes it possible that somewhat less than half of employment growth went to illegal immigrants. But even if that is the case, there is still no question that Trump’s basic point that illegal immigrants are among the primary beneficiaries of job growth is correct.

As we wrote back in January, this, more than anything, may account for the so-called “vibes recession”—the belief of a majority of American voters, frequently mocked in the media, that the economy is doing poorly, despite a host of statistics telling them otherwise. 

Read Camarota’s article here. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: A Tablet original short story from Eli Hirsch

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The Rest

→A Wednesday story in The Washington Free Beacon offers a clue as to why Kamala Harris has been so tight-lipped since assuming the Democratic presidential nomination: she doesn’t want to end up like Rep. Susan Wilds (D-PA). The Beacon reports that Wilds accidentally sent two different form letters to a mother-daughter pair who had written Wilds to ask that she support Israel: 

1. A pro-Israel letter, in which Wilds said she was “outraged, devastated, and heartbroken” over Hamas’ “vicious” attack and boasted of voting to “provide the assistance Israel needs to be able to defend itself against all threats to its security”; and

2. An anti-Israel letter, in which Wilds also wrote that she was “outraged, devastated, and heartbroken”—but this time over the “unspeakable tragedy continuing to unfold in Gaza.” Wilds noted that she had been urging the White House to use “all the tools at its disposal” to secure an “immediate ceasefire,” and “to act much more aggressively to convey to the Israeli government that its actions must be consistent with international and U.S. law.”

In Wilds’ defense, her apparently contradictory letters accurately convey the Biden-Harris’ administration’s policy: florid rhetorical support for Israel’s “right to self-defense” (especially when talking to Jewish audiences), combined with both rhetorical and concrete measures to delegitimize Israel, kneecap its war effort, and overthrow its government. For example: the administration’s creation of an interagency task force (featuring Harris Jewish liaison Ilan Goldenberg) to produce regular batches of sanctions against Israeli entities and individuals, which named its latest victim—the settler NGO Hashomer Yosh—on Wednesday. 

Read the story here. 

→On Tuesday, IDF special forces rescued an Israeli Bedouin hostage, Farhan al-Qadi, from a Hamas tunnel complex in southern Gaza, following 10 months of captivity. Although the IDF has been slow to release details, citing security concerns, we know that al-Qadi was rescued by elite troops from the Israeli Navy’s Shayetet 13 unit and the Yahalom combat engineering unit, and that the raid was based on “precise intelligence,” according to IDF statements reported in The Times of Israel. The operation was the fourth successful hostage rescue since Oct. 7, but the first to take place underground, inside a Hamas tunnel. The IDF also recovered the body of an Israeli soldier who was killed on Oct. 7, but has not released the soldier’s name. 103 hostages remain in Gaza, with 33 of those confirmed dead by the IDF. 

→The IDF also launched a major counterterrorism raid in Tulkarem and Jenin in the West Bank on Wednesday, targeting an area that the Israelis believe was used to plan a failed suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last week. At least nine Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids and drone strikes, with the Iran-backed terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirming in Wednesday statements that its forces were engaging the Israelis in Tulkarem and Jenin. Also on Wednesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz suggested that the IDF should consider a “temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians” in certain areas of the West Bank in order to give the IDF a free hand to operate against Iran-backed terror groups, including PIJ, Hamas, and elements of Fatah. “Iran is working to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank, according to the Gaza and Lebanon model, by financing and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons from Jordan,” Katz wrote in a Wednesday morning X post. 

→Stat of the Day: $945 million

That’s how much the Palestinian Authority spent on its “pay-for-slay” program—monthly payments to the families of prisoners and “martyrs” killed fighting the Israelis—between February 2019 and July 2024, according to the PA’s own calculations published in a recent article in its official news agency and cited by Palestinian Media Watch. Israel deducts an amount equal to the pay-for-slay payments from its monthly tax transfers to the PA, meaning that the PA has lost around $1.89 billion in revenue over the past five years as a result of the martyrdom payments. 

→Donald Trump has named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to his presidential transition team, following endorsements from the two former Democrats. Although their precise role on the transition team is unclear, they have been named “honorary co-chairs” alongside Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., and JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Kennedy recently told Tucker Carlson in an interview that he had been asked to “help pick the people who will be running the government”; in a Monday interview, Trump denied reports that he was planning to make Kennedy secretary of health and human services, but said that he “knows a lot about the subject and has been very well received by the party,” according to The New York Times.

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Collateral Damage

by Eli Hirsch

The joke in yeshiva about Reuven Izorsky was that he took so long saying asher yatzar, the prayer after relieving oneself, that by the time he finished he would have to go again. I can see him standing outside the bathroom in the downstairs vestibule that led directly into the main auditorium, the bais hamedrish. He is shuckling back and forth, his face all scrunched up as he focuses rapturously on the prayer of gratitude to God for “creating humanity wisely,” for wisely disseminating within us various orifices and, I will add, wisely restraining Himself from giving us more than we have.

Even back then, when I was devout, or claimed to myself to be, I could not nearly compete with the ferocious intensity of Reuven’s prayers. I will assume that Reuven was absorbed in asher yatzar on that occasion when Hannah Blatt accosted him in the vestibule and called off their wedding, shouting for all to hear, “You are an apikoros,” that is to say, a heretic, a deserter, a turncoat, before she ran weeping out of the building.

In fact, I had set up Reuven with Hannah, who was a close friend of my sister's, and even a friend of mine, if you could call it that. And it was I who informed the rosh yeshiva, the head man, about Reuven’s contact with the Arabs. Beyond that I was merely an observer of the events that ensued. Though not entirely, perhaps.

Reuven was my best friend and roommate in the dormitory. He was also my chavrusah, my Talmud partner in the bais hamedrish where about a hundred of us sat daily, each paired off with a partner, studying the Talmud and commentators, and arguing loudly and boisterously about the various traps and twists and turns and mind-bending puzzles in the text. Each pair of students had their small desk, but there were also lecterns around the room where people could stand. Often one pair of students would walk over to another pair to ask a question, and sometimes a group formed to tackle a difficult issue. There was always a distinctive buzz in the bais hamedrish, a noise not heard elsewhere, which an outsider might momentarily mistake for prayer because we chanted the texts we read, but it was mainly the noise from our discussions and disputations.

One morning before we began to delve into the passage we were up to, Reuven grabbed my arm and stammered, “It is never permitted to kill innocent people, Morty. In Halacha ...”—that is, Talmudic law—“... there can be no such thing as ‘collateral damage.’ It does not matter if they are Jewish, even if they are goyim.” That’s how it all started. This was around the time of the Six-Day War in 1967. Collateral damage was not a topic widely discussed in those days, but it was for Reuven a Talmudic problem that had to be addressed. “I’ll give you an example,” he said, his speech always punctuated by stammering pauses. “If a vicious criminal comes to kill you and your child and he holds in front of him a baby as a shield, can you defend your life and the life of your child at the expense of the baby’s life? No! That is not allowed!”

He was a stammerer. Sometimes he would open his mouth to speak and, for what seemed an interminable time, nothing came out. It was painful to watch. It looked like he was choking to death, his mouth wide open, his tongue and his eyes moving seemingly in panicky tandem from side to side. But not always. Often the words issued forth with ease. Especially when he prayed it was as if a stream of water broke through a dam and gushed forth unimpeded. He said to me, “Yes, Mordechai, it is just like that! It is because the Torah says to us, Shifchu lephunuv l’veychem,” quoting from the line in Psalms: “Pour out your heart before Him: God is a refuge for us.”

He was a stammerer like Moses in the Bible. Isn’t that a peculiar little tidbit to have gotten included in the biblical story? You will notice that this character detail was conspicuously absent from Charlton Heston’s portrayal of Moses in the movie. In my current apostatic guise as a professional philosopher I claim to believe that almost everything said of Moses in the Bible is mythical. But I’m struck by the fact that apart from his stammering, virtually the only other personal description of Moses in the Bible is that he was the most humble man in the world. A humble stammerer reluctantly thrust into heroism. So it also was for Reuven, but he had no magic staff that he could transform into a snake. He had only Talmudic arguments to lean on.

If you know little about the yeshiva world, you may have trouble understanding Reuven’s motivation in all that was about to transpire. You have to understand the mad passion with which we in the yeshiva loved the Torah, which was understood to include all of the canonical Talmudic commentary coming down through the ages. God was for us a mystery, an abstraction of smoke and mirrors, a blank something-we-know-not-what that was somehow responsible for the Torah. If we claimed to love God, this love was only a shadow of what we truly loved, the Torah, God’s stupendous gift to us. In the yeshiva the Torah was the bottom line, the first and last word, and there was therefore no plainer manifestation of intellectual and spiritual ineptitude than to try to reason from mere philosophy about right and wrong. That was not Reuven’s conscious intention.“ The Torah says that collateral damage is not permitted,” was his claim.

He went to speak to the rosh yeshiva, who was an internationally renowned Talmudic genius. The rosh yeshiva’s name was Avraham Shick. He was youthfully animated in his 50s, with a short gray beard and pale blue eyes, and a strangely perpetual flush on his face that seemed to us, his students, to radiate from the prodigious Torah engine burning inside him. He lectured to us on the Talmud with a signature beat and rhythm of his own, a kind of staccato of brief paragraphs, separate bursts and breaths of insight. The rosh yeshiva had been a close friend of Reuven’s father, as they had both belonged to a yeshiva cohort that escaped from Hungary just before the Nazis invaded. Reuven’s father had since died. The rosh yeshiva told Reuven to speak to Yoseph Koslow. It soon became known in the yeshiva that there was to be a Talmudic duel between Yoseph Koslow and Reuven Izorsky on the matter of collateral damage.

Let me try to explain a few things to you about Talmudic arguments. In “learning,” which is yeshiva parlance for Talmudic study, there are two basic virtues: A baki has breadth of knowledge, an amkin has depth of understanding. Reuven was a bigger baki than me, but I was at least as much of an amkin. This meant that in our day-to-day learning together I could hold my own, because going deeply into an issue was the central enterprise. But he knew many areas of the Talmud that I had no idea about. Laws of war and self-defense were discussed in tractates that I hadn’t gotten to yet, but he apparently had some knowledge of them. And he had somehow dug up an argument in the Chazon Ish, one of the stellar Talmudists of the 20th century. Many of the Talmudic luminaries from medieval times onward had a nom de guerre that was for some reason preceded by the definite article “the.” The Chazon Ish was in fact writing a commentary on the Rambam, better known as Maimonides.

According to Reuven, the Chazon Ish had concluded that collateral damage was never permissible. I had no idea whether that was so, and had little inclination to try to penetrate the issue. But Yoseph Koslow knew it inside and out. Koslow was formidable as both a baki and an amkin. He was viewed as the best student in the yeshiva. That was why the rosh yeshiva assigned him this task.

Reuven was hardly a pushover, though. In time he would become even an better student than Koslow, but he was at a disadvantage. Every student in this yeshiva was out of high school and advanced in learning, but some students were much older than others. Reuven and I were 19; Koslow was about five years older. Let’s figure it out. On a typical weekday a good student in this kind of advanced yeshiva spends about 10 hours learning. Allowing for less time spent on Sabbath and holidays, and occasional disruptions for weddings and the like, we can estimate very cautiously that the student learns on the average at last 50 hours a week, therefore more than 12,000 hours in five years. That’s how many hours of learning Koslow had over Reuven.

Yoseph Koslow had the peculiar habit of staring intently at your forehead as he drove home a Talmudic point, as if he was attempting to look directly into your brain. For some reason, maybe because of “mirror neurons,” you found yourself staring back at his forehead. Reuven in turn had the habit of getting up very close to you when he became Talmudically agitated. So you have to picture these two guys toe-to-toe staring at each other’s foreheads as they shot Talmudic arguments at each other, with occasional suspenseful pauses when Reuven could not control his stammering. It must have lasted about two hours. Many of the usual suspects were trotted out: Rashi, Tosafos, the Ran, the Rosh, the Ritvah, the Maharshah, and various others, including at the center the Rambam and the Chazon Ish. The details of the debate eluded me, but I quickly sensed what the basic issue was.

Koslow kept saying that the rules were different in the case of a milkhama, a war. Reuven wouldn’t accept that. He said, “What do you mean by a milkhama? I’ll give you an example. Ten lunatic thieves enter a bank intent on killing everyone there. There are a hundred people there, including a number of children. The thieves grab 10 children as shields. Are you permitted to kill those 10 children in an attempt to save the remaining 90 people.” No, said Koslow, that is not permitted, but that case doesn’t have the shem of a milkhama. The shem means the name, the category, the halachic legal status.

“Why not?” said Reuven, “How many people do you need? Suppose there are a thousand people in the bank.”

It’s not a matter of numbers, replied Koslow. In random cases of murder, you can’t kill innocent people to save other innocent people. But the case of a milkhama is different. Collateral damage in war is permitted, he said, of course within reasonable limits.

“And what are reasonable limits?” asked Reuven. There is no definite answer to that question, said Koslow. The gedolim, the Talmudic giants, must determine this on a case-by-case basis. But according to one Talmudic position, even in the case of combatants it is not permitted to kill more than one-sixth. For noncombatants, said Koslow, one must of course be very, very cautious.

Though it seemed clear to all of us that Reuven had lost that Talmudic battle, he remained adamant. Maybe what happened next was my fault. He told me he wanted to speak to some Arabs to find out how they felt about killing noncombatant Jews. I thought he was nuts. But I knew there were Arabs living on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and I mentioned this to him. Could I have anticipated that he would actually go there? It’s true that I always thought of him as being physically fearless. He was unnaturally tall for a yeshiva boy, probably over 6 feet 2, and he had the physique of a wrestler, but to actually go at night from New Jersey, where we were, to Brooklyn to seek out Arabs ...

When he returned from Brooklyn he seemed frantic and barely coherent. He kept saying, “A muddena zach”—a strange thing. “A muddena zach, Mordechai, a muddena zach. Good people, good, good people. A muddena zach.”

I said, “Who? The Arabs? What happened? Did you actually talk to anyone?”

“I met people. I spoke for a long time to one person. A good, good man.”

“An Arab?”’

“A man who cares, Mordechai. An Arab. A muddena zach.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dave.”

“Dave? The Arab is named Dave?”

“A good, good man.”

“The Arab.”

“A good, good man, Mordechai. He cares. A muddena zach.”

As utterly crazy as it sounded I had no doubt that it actually happened just as Reuven reported, including his encounter with this Arab named Dave. At one point in that conversation with Reuven, I shouted at him, “The Arabs have hurt us! They are a danger to us!”

I found out a few days later that one of the boys in an adjacent room heard me shouting but thought I said “the Rabins” rather than “the Arabs.” Rabbi Rabin was this guy who had a little shul in town and he would frequently visit the yeshiva with his two young daughters, cute kids who would run around the place. I was therefore dumbfounded the next day after lunch when he grabbed me on the way to the bais hamedrish and said, “I must speak to you immediately. ”I had never before exchanged a word with him. I blurted, “What’s going on?” but he was pulling me out the front door onto the sidewalk. He said, “I am a burden to you?”

I said, “What? No. I was just a bit startled.”

“You were startled? You have been startled by me?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, we’ve never talked before ...”

He was squeezing my arm and raising his voice, obviously trying to control himself.

He said, “You are sure that I am the one who startled you?” I said, “What do you mean?”

“When? When did I startle you? Tell me!”

“I don’t understand ...”

“There is nothing to understand. Listen to me very carefully. Neither I nor any member of my family has ever subjected you to being startled!”

He stood there glaring at me, then he finally let go of my arm and stormed off. Wittgenstein tells the joke of someone who says “hello” in the middle of a conversation. That’s not a greeting; it’s not anything. In language and in life everything depends on the context.

My sister phoned me from Brooklyn to ask if I could come home to talk to her and Hannah about Reuven. I had set them up. It was a good match because I knew Hannah would accept his stammering. She was always open and outgoing. When she frequently visited our home during my yeshiva high school days she would flirt with me. I tried to shock her by expressing religious doubts that I didn’t realize were as real as they turned out to be. She teased me: “You’re a flight risk, Morty” and “You know my parents won’t let me marry you if you’re not religious.” But more seriously: “The mitzvos are supposed to be a yoke, Morty. Just to throw it over is taking the easy way out.”

That reminds me of a true story I once saw on TV about this guy, an accountant, who was having a lot of financial and marital problems. So he drove home one day, removed the rifle that was hanging on his wall, went upstairs and shot his wife and mother-in-law. Then he went back downstairs and waited for his three kids to come home, and killed them one by one. Then he drove far away to another city and started over. When he was tracked down 15 years later he had a new family and a small accounting firm. The judge who sentenced him was furious: “You took the easy way out!” Well, actually, judge, it wasn’t that easy.

Reuven and Hannah had several good dates and decided to get married. Let me give you some idea of how it worked in the yeshiva world. A date consisted of finding a nice public place to sit and talk. Sometimes people drove out to the airport. A very popular venue was the lobby of some large hotel in New York. In the yeshiva counterpart of locker room talk the paradox often discussed was how it is possible to converse with a girl. The problem was that, since girls did not study the Talmud, how could you possibly relate to someone who didn’t know how to “talk in learning.” Over the years many young men wearing black hats have discovered in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria that given the right circumstances it’s possible to get by for a while without talking about the Talmud.

When I arrived home I found Hannah and my sister seated at the kitchen table waiting for me. I could see that Hannah had been crying. Once, with me present, my sister remarked to my mother, “When Hannah gets undressed you can see what a fantastic figure she has!” Think of it: that whole elaborate sartorial cover-up, the high collar, the long skirt and long sleeves, the loose sweater, after all of that, the underlying truth is casually leaked, no longer a secret, at least not to me.

As I entered the room my sister said, “So, is he crazy?” I said, “No, he’s not crazy.” He is a good man. A good, good man. Like Dave, the Arab. She said, “Look at what he has done to Hannah. You sent her to him!” It seemed to me that Hannah was trying not to make eye contact with me. Her glance bounced all around my body. She finally spoke: “He threw everything away. My parents know.” I said, “You told your parents.” My sister said, “Of course she told her parents! What did you expect? They were so, so upset, it was terrible. Her mother was crying. Her father called him a terrorist.” Hannah said, “What will happen now, Morty?” I said, “The wedding has to be called off.”

The next morning Hannah accosted Reuven in the vestibule of the yeshiva. While that was going on, I spoke to the rosh yeshiva and told him everything I knew. He did not say a word, didn’t ask a single question. At lunch it was announced that the rosh yeshiva was going to address us in the evening. That was completely unprecedented. He lectured once a week in the morning. The bais hamedrish was packed with students.

The rosh yeshiva always spoke to us in Yiddish. His talk lasted less than a minute. “It has come to our attention that a student in this yeshiva has comported himself in a manner that is not consonant with da’as Torah.” Da’as Torah. Torah insight, Torah understanding. Like mathematical intuition. He paused for probably half a minute. I thought that he might not say anything else. But then: “Reuven Izorsky has been banished from this yeshiva.” He strode off.

There was complete silence in the room. Everyone looked around for Reuven. But I had walked him to the station several hours earlier, where he took a train back to his home in Cleveland. He said the rosh yeshiva had spoken to him earlier in the day. “It’s OK. Don’t feel bad, Mordechai. It was me. I had too much gayva ...”—pride, arrogance—“... Anyway. C’asher avadity, avadity.” I looked over at him. “If I perish, I perish. ”It’s a line from the Book of Esther. The Talmud says that Esther’s main concern was the estrangement from Mordechai.

After the rosh yeshiva’s announcement, I wandered around in a daze. I somehow found myself in an isolated area on the second floor near the rosh yeshiva’s office. To my amazement I saw him out in the hall with his back to me leaning against the windowsill as if he were looking outside. Something was terribly wrong, because his body was shaking, convulsing. I started to run toward him, but stopped in my tracks when I sized up what was actually happening. The rosh yeshiva was crying; his body was heaving with sobs.

Kant explained that if the point of our lives was to be happy, God would have designed us to go about our business mindlessly in the manner of superintelligent bees or ants. We were provided with the kind of consciousness we have because the purpose of our lives is to struggle to do the right thing. But I really like best Dostoevsky’s formulation: To be acutely conscious is a disease.

If you suffer from that disease, you will no doubt have troubling questions about Reuven’s behavior, questions that can, ironically enough, be posed in terms of collateral damage. Was Reuven himself collateral damage resulting from the distortions and extremities of yeshiva life? Did the collateral damage to Hannah, who seemingly blameless in what transpired, result from Reuven’s unreasonable obsession with collateral damage, and should Reuven be deemed a hypocrite for that? And what about me? Was I half in love with Hannah, with my best friend’s fiancé, and, as collateral damage, let everything fall apart? I don’t know. As philosophers like to say, I leave these questions open.

Reuven went on to learn in an advanced yeshiva in Manchester, England, where he eventually married the daughter of a rabbi and found a job teaching Talmud in a very good yeshiva high school. Hannah wound up marrying a yeshiva guy from Baltimore, who I gather was pretty decent in learning, though I doubt at Reuven’s level. After Reuven left the yeshiva I stayed through that z’man, that “semester,” then moved back to Brooklyn and started college, and a couple of years later ditched the whole religious business.

I’ve completely lost contact with the yeshiva guys I knew back then, all of them except for Reuven. Occasionally I’ll run into one of them on the street, and it’s immediately awkward because of my bare head. My yarmulke is saliently absent from my head, saliently present in the mode of absence, as Heidegger would have said. To this day when I pull a sweater over my head I instinctively reach to hold onto my yarmulke, and am slightly amazed that there isn’t one.

But Reuven and I remained friends. When we sometimes find ourselves in the same part of the planet we try to meet, even if just to shake hands and confirm that we are both still alive. Every year before Yom Kippur he phones me. The custom in yeshiva on the eve of Yom Kippur was to approach each of your friends and beg forgiveness, for any slight or insult or other infelicity that you might have been guilty of.

This year was no different. “I ask your forgiveness, Mordechai," he said. There is a potential joke in there. A Torah transgression so basic that small children are taught about it is lashon hara, “evil speech”: You are not permitted to needlessly say bad things about people, even the truth. A corollary is that listening to lashon hara is itself a transgression and an offense to the person who is maligned. The joke in yeshiva was to say to a friend on the eve of Yom Kippur, “And I beg your forgiveness for all the lashon hara I heard about you during the year.” Who could quickly recover from that apology?