Torah Prohibits Tabaco

Reprinted from

THE FORWARD © Published in New York City
November 26, 1999, p. 1
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Torah Prohibits Tobacco, Faction of Rabbis Insists In Controversial Opinion _____________________________________________________________________________
Orthodox Group Publishes a Proposal Proscribing Use of the “Divine Herb’
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Tendler: Smoking Worse Than Eating Ham Sandwich
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By E.J. KESSLER
FORWARD STAFF

     NEW YORK – The “evil weed” – or “divine herb,” as tobacco was known to early Americans – is being declared illegal under Jewish law.
    Such is the ruling of a group of Orthodox rabbis that is arguing cigarette smoking is an “immediate and inevitable danger” to those who do it and an “assault” on the health and physical integrity of those who are forced to breathe secondhand smoke. In a “Proposal on Smoking” posted at the WorldWideWeb site of the centrist Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, the group is urging that smoking be banned “at all synagogues, synagogue functions, day schools, mikvaot [ritual baths] and all other institutions and events under the supervision” of rabbis, including homes and businesses.
     The proposal, the brainchild of several rabbis who used to meet under the name the RCA Roundtable, is drawing a lot of interest, particularly from Israel, where anti-tobacco rabbis are trying to form an association, according to the RCA’s executive vice-president, Rabbi Steven Dworkin. It is also timely, as the movie “The Insider,” still on many screens, is dramatizing the conduct of the tobacco industry, and as class action lawyers seek to enforce judgments against the tobacco companies. A cross between an answer to a question of Jewish law and a public-policy statement, the proposal has the backing of many Modern Orthodox rabbis, said a signer of the document, Rabbi Saul Berman, and it even has the support of others who describe themselves as right-wingers. That is because Torah law is strong in condemning anything that can injure health, one right-of-center Orthodox legal authority, Rabbi Moshe Tendler, said. Rabbi Tendler said he considers there to be a biblical prohibition against smoking.
    “Most likely, it is a greater sin to smoke a cigarette than to eat a ham sandwich,” Rabbi Tendler said, “because with ham you violate one rule, and with cigarettes you violate two prohibitions.”

    “Truthfully I don’t know of anybody who accepts Halacha as binding who nowadays smokes,” Rabbi Tendler said, using the Hebrew word for Jewish law. “The evil lies in Israel. Young kids in Yeshiva there smoke. The information isn’t common knowledge there. I wouldn’t let my son or congregant go to a teacher of Torah who smokes.”
     The proposal, signed by Rabbis Reuven Bulka of Toronto and Jeffrey Woolft and Daniel Landes of Israel, as well as Rabbi Berman, elaborates on a 1960s ruling of the great Orthodox sage Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who was Rabbi Tendler’s father-in-law. In that ruling, the rabbis write, Feinstein declined to ban smoking as a matter of Jewish law, even though smoking entailed a possible risk, on the theory that, as one talmudic dictum has it,” The Lord protects the simple.” (Others translate “the simple” as “fools” or “idiots.”)
     They argue that, owing to the studies on the dangers of smoking that have appeared since Feinstein’s ruling, the doctrine of “The Lord protects the simple” no longer obtains. “The danger involved in smoking is no longer merely possible, it is inevitable,” they write, because while lung cancer strikes only some smokers, “danger to the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems is immediate and inevitable. Thus, we have entered a situation where smoking is a definite danger.”
     The Reform and Conservative movements are long on record banning cigarette smoking in their synagogues and at their events as a matter of Jewish law, according to movement officials. The Reform responsum banning tobacco use, available at the web site of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, cites many of the same authorities and uses much of the same logic as the Orthodox RCA Roundtable group. The RCA passed a weaker anti-smoking resolution in 1991 but isn’t immediately planning any formal action on the rabbi’s proposal.
     One anti-tobacco activist, a wealthy businessman who supports many Jewish causes, Henry Everett, applauded the Orthodox effort. “As far as any benchmarks for criteria for treyf, tobacco has to stand at the top,” he said. “Any major religion cannot approve of tobacco smoking, because it’s a gradual form of suicide…. I admire this Orthodox group.”

Mr. Everett said he had been in contact with ferverently Orthodox groups in Israel that are agitating against cigarette advertising in the Orthodox press there and are trying to warn youngsters against smoking.
     He also led an unsuccessful battle to prevent the accession of James Tisch to the presidency of New York’s UNA-Federation, writing that
“it would be repugnant for a cigarette executive (pusher) to be cast as the chairman and role model of a Jewish federation.” Mr. Tisch is president of Loews Corp., which owns Lorillard, a tobacco company. He declined to comment for publication on the rabbis’ proposal.
    However, one libertarian advocate of the freedom to smoke, the author of “For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health” (Free Press), Jacob Sullum, said that the proposal starts Jewish law down a “slippery slope.”
   “There are lots of Jews who are overweight, and there are clear health risks attached to that,” he said. “Are we going to say it’s halachically impermissible to be fat – to overeat and not exercise? If not, why not.?…Is there a Jewish attitude toward drug use? What’s the Jewish position toward bungee jumping? Sky diving?”
     A spokesman for one of the nation’s largest cigarette manufacturers, the Phillip Morris Companies, Thomas Ryan, declined to comment on the rabbi’s proposal. “We support adult choice,” Mr. Ryan said. “Adults, based on their beliefs and preferences, should be free to make their own choice. We would not make any comment on religious policy.”
    Many rabbis say any proposal to ban cigarette smoking is as quixotic as banning latkes on Chanukah, to speak of one high-fat food that could endanger cardio-vascular health. Orthodox smokers have been known to blow smoke into bottles so as to be able to take a whiff on the Sabbath, when they are not allowed to light cigarettes.
     “In our circles, Modern Orthodox rabbis will state…unequivocally” that tobacco is banned, the rabbi of Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, N.J., Yosef Adler, said. “I don’t know that that’s the case among right-wing yeshivas. Unfortunately, many Jews there smoke.

If at the Agudath Israel convention the Novominsker rebbe would say “You are not allowed to smoke,” that would have an enormous impact. Rabbi Adler was a member of the RCA Roundtable and participated in discussions about the proposal.
A spokesman for Agudath Israel, Rabbi Avi Shafran, said that the Novominsker rebbe had no such plans for the convention, which takes place over the Thanksgiving weekend. Rabbi Shafran said the fervently Orthodox camp holds by Feinstein’s old ruling, in which tobacco use is described as “dangerous and foolhardy” but it not strictly prohibited. Then, too, there is a question as to whether people would heed any rabbinical edict against tobacco, Rabbi Shafran said. “People are so addicted,” Rabbi Shafran said, “I think that if Moses came down from the mountain and said it, they wouldn’t believe it either.”