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Excerpts from Torah Prohibits Tobacco, Faction of Rabbis Insists In Controversial Opinion

     Orthodox Group Publishes a Proposal Proscribing Use of the 'Divine  Herb'

     Tendler: Smoking Worse Than Eating Ham Sandwich

     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 World Wide Web 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 Dworken. 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 Woolf 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 cardio-vascular 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 rabbis' proposal.

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