frost and clouds

tznius and its discontents

2012-01-20T09:21:00.003-05:00

Imagine this story in the Talmud: A woman of great physical beauty waits outside the house of study on Friday evenings, so that she would be what men would see before they went home to spend Shabbat evening with their wives. How would she be treated by the text? Possibly as a demon, undoubtedly as a temptress.

I thought of this as I saw how excited so many friends of mine were about Rabbi Dov Linzer's recent writings on tznius, both his op-ed and his longer, more technical piece. I wish I, too, could be that excited, but I can’t avoid seeing them as apologetics that ignore a number of important issues:

* Rabbinic discourse about tznius is still about the problematic of how women’s bodies are seen by men. The Talmud tells of R. Yochanan displaying his physical beauty to women on their way home from mikvah (Berakhot 20a); what would be "provocative" (at best) for a woman is left unchallenged when it is done by a man.

* The rabbinic tradition is scandalized by women having public roles. That women on occasion did have public roles (increasingly so throughout history) is not because of the Talmud, but in spite of it.

* There is no distinction made between attractive and provocative.

* There is no way provided to appreciate someone’s beauty (even sexual beauty) without objectifying that person.

* Tznius is restricted to sex. Rather than come up with an approach to modesty in general (including, perhaps displays of wealth or status or learning) which might have been an original contribution to contemporary ethical thought and a useful critique of modern culture – including Jewish culture – we’re still left with an anxiety about sexual desire.

* Finally: at best it tells people who are committed to Talmudic culture, “Don’t worry, the Talmud is not as bad as those guys make it seem.” But at the end of the day, he doesn’t tell us anything about ethics we didn’t already know, and neither (in his reading) does the Talmud. But if he hadn’t found the texts he had, or if he hadn’t read them in the way he did, would it then be ok to blame male desire on women, to lock them up or cover them in veils? Of course not. But if the best we can get from the Talmud is a confirmation of the values we already have, why bother?

This pains me enormously. I write this as someone who is committed to Talmud study both personally and professionally; in fact, I’m writing this instead of working on a dissertation on Talmud education and the moral imagination. And I’m aware that Rabbi Linzer is more learned, wise, pious and courageous than I will ever be. Still, I can’t help feeling that something important is missing here. Perhaps it’s something missing in me. Perhaps not.

ask not (kol nidre 5772)

2011-10-09T15:41:00.001-04:00

The Talmud teaches that for all but the most grievous sins against God, if a person repents come Yom Kippur he or she will be forgiven. In fact, for some sins (the “thou shalts,” where you didn’t do something you were supposed to do), forgiveness comes immediately, before you’ve even had time to move. Whether or not you believe that, or whether or not you believe in a God who can forgive sin, or a God who can be sinned against, or a God at all, the possibility of that kind of forgiveness – that grace, really – is pretty damn compelling. That simply by feeling bad about the stuff I feel bad about, and saying so, I can be relived of having to feel bad about myself…well, who wouldn’t want that?

And so as Yom Kippur approaches, we seek it out, if not from a God we might not believe in, we ask one another for that grace. “I’m sorry that I hurt you,” we might say to a friend, neighbor, or colleague, “I hope you’ll forgive me.” Or, “If I hurt you, I hope you’ll forgive me.” We might even broadcast it, posting on our Facebook pages, or on our listserves, or tweeting it out: “If I’ve hurt any of you, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

But in doing that, we forget. We forget what the Talmud teaches, that if I hurt another person I’m responsible for all kind of reparations: for physical harm and emotional harm, for long-term effects as well as short-term ones. And we forget what we learn from the ketubah, that when someone becomes vulnerable to me, I become responsible for guarding that vulnerability. In short we forget that the business of atonement is not so that we won’t feel bad about what we’ve done, but so that we can make better what we’ve done.

When we do that, not only do we miss the point of atonement, and lose an opportunity to bring some healing, some repair to our screw-ups, we forget that we can bring some repair to our screw-ups. What we do is more deeply inscribe a story in which all we are, are helpless screw-ups in need of forgiveness.

So I wonder what if we focused less on the grace we want, and more on the healing that those we’ve hurt need; if we started saying “If I’ve done anything to hurt you, I hope you’ll tell me what you need from me to begin to be whole.” It might help us be a little less selfish. And it might actually help out some people who need it. And we might discover that while we may indeed be screw-ups, we are screw-ups who can do some good, who can still – in spite of our brokenness, in spite of our screw-ups – bring some healing, some repair to the world. Which realization is itself a kind of grace.

the costs

2011-08-05T08:53:00.005-04:00

[Another one from the files]

"Look, have fun but please," I asked her before she left for one of her teenage adventures, "don't do anything stupid.” She looked at me in awe. "Abba, you're right. If I find myself thinking, should I do something stupid? I promise to answer no."

She was right of course. We don't generally do things once we know them to be stupid; it's precisely because we don't recognize just how stupid our ideas might be that the advice is impossible to follow. The outsider can easily forget what the rabbis of the Talmud knew (Arachin 16b): that it is not enough for a directive, or teaching, or reproof, or piece of advice to be true, it must be accessible: advice isn't any good if the person can't follow it, and if you know the person won’t be able to follow it it’s better to be silent. No small thing when the Torah itself commands that you reprove your fellow who has done wrong, lest you come to “hate him in your heart.” (Lev. 19:17)

And the sages of the Talmud took hatred very seriously. They taught that while the first Temple was destroyed (ca 580 BCE) as a result of the Israelites' idolatry, the second Temple fell because of sinat hinam (generally translated as “gratuitous hatred”) among the Jews of that time. This was surely a radical teaching: that God would not live among people who could not live with each other. And it is a teaching that has enormous currency these days. Not a year goes by without some anguished reference to sinat hinam within Israel or the broader Jewish community. These anguished references are not usually confessions; the baseless hatred that causes so much concern is usually what someone else is up to. This is not really surprising. Hatred is such a powerful emotion that we rarely experience it as being anything but well-founded. Don't get caught up in gratuitous hatred? Ok, I won't. My hatred is only directed against those who really deserve it.

More: Even if one were able to recognize when his or her own passions were gratuitous, what about those those that aren't? If you believe that I pose a threat to the State of Israel, or that I am willfully leading others to sin, or that I am destroying the foundations of a just society - well, that hatred is certainly not gratuitous. I find this "earned" hatred even scarier than the baseless kind. Because hatred tends to be so powerful, so pure an emotion, the "justification" tends to become absolute and any kind of compromise, is itself a failing, and to look at the costs of maintaining or acting on that hatred is a kind of accommodation with evil.

But if this is so, where does that leave the ancient rabbis and their warning against sinat hinam? Perhaps more pertinent than ever. There is another meaning of the word "hinam", found as early as the Bible. After nearly forty years in the desert the Israelites romanticize their old slavery and complain about the diet of manna. "We remember," they say, "how we sat by the fleshpots of Egypt, and the leeks and the onions we ate hinam." "Hinam," you see, can also mean free. Without cost.

Perhaps we should understand sinat hinam not to be “hatred without cause” but “without cost,” a hatred that is thought to be without risks or losses or consequences. That is indeed dangerous, because hatred – even when it is justified – is never without cost, and certainly never without risks. The expression of hatred, whether in word or in action, releases a destructive force into the world, and one can never be certain of keeping it fully under control. And whether expressed or not, hatred takes a psychic toll on the individual, again: even when it is justified, even when it is the wisest and healthiest reaction it still has a cost.

Those costs are easiest to forget precisely when we are most sure of the righteousness of our feelings, and thus the danger: at the very moment when our feelings are at their most powerful and most likely to be destructive we are least likely to put a check on them. Sinat hinam, the belief that our hatred has no cost is like the belief that surgery has no risks; and a doctor with that attitude quickly becomes a killer. It is not hard to imagine how that kind of hatred could have brought down the Temple.

Don’t tell us not to hate, because that much self-control we don’t have. And don’t tell us not to hate gratuitously, because none of our rage feels anything but righteous. But if you remind us that even the most righteous hatred has a cost, well, we may stop and think. And if we think hard enough and clearly enough, perhaps we’ll decided more and more frequently that those are costs we don’t need to pay.

outsiders

2011-07-04T17:48:00.002-04:00

This one is for David Cobin, of blessed memory.

A recent essay by Robbie Gringras of Makom, a project of the Jewish Agency, has attracted admiring attention from friends of mine, both real and virtual. I confess I found it troubling. There's a facile comparison between the protestors of Tahrir Square and and the early (and contemporary!) Zionists, and a bizarre slip-slidey move that equates having a historical connection to a place and having a categorical right to sovereignty over that place*. But I don't know how much those issues really matter - Israel has the same rights to be free of attack as every other state, and its citizens have the same right to define its nature as the citizens of every other state, subject to the same legal and moral constraints governing the conduct of other civilized democracies. It is the simple fact of Israel's existence that provides it with all the legitimacy it needs - which is precisely the same legitimacy as any other state; such legitimacy is not threatened by the philosophical incoherence of its supporters.

What did bother me was this: It may be that we in the Jewish community have moved a little too far from the source. It may be that some of our arguments are more about Western values refracted through Israel, rather than about Israel itself. It's the old rhetorical move to delegitimize certain claims as coming from an outside source. Sometimes, as here, it's the Israel/West boundary that's being asserted; other times it's the distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish thought. In either case, it's wrong, and worse, it's dangerous.

First things first. A secular state is a Western idea. A constitutional democracy is a Western idea. National liberation is a Western idea. You can't exclude "Western ideas" from Israel without replacing the Zionism of Herzl and Ben Gurion with the weird ethno-fascist clericalism expressed most recently and most explicitly in the work Torat HaMelech.**

By all accounts, Torat HaMelech is vicious, terrible work, and emerges from the ideological stew as gave rise to the terrorist butcher of Hebron as well as Rabin's assassin. Now, I do not believe that everyone in the religious settler community supports terrorism. I don't even believe that all of those protesting the questioning of Rabbi Dov Lior are actually in favor of murdering non-Jewish babies. Of course, they're not protesting on behalf of a general "Freedom of Speech" either. Rather, they're insisting that "Torah" is not subject to critique from the secular state - from "non-Jewish values."

But here's the thing. If Torat HaMelech is indeed a terrible work, it's not because the authors got their sources wrong, misunderstanding a gemara here or ignoring the Beit Yosef there. If you have to wait to find the appropriate Jewish text before passing moral judgment on a passage that says that Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us” there is something profoundly wrong with you.

The late David Cobin was a legal scholar, and one of his interests was the history of slavery, and specifically Jewish attitudes towards that peculiar institution. One of the things he taught me was that Abolitionism arose first in the Quaker community. It was not until later that Jews joined the struggle against slavery, and there remained rabbis who supported slavery (just as leaders of other religions did) until after the Civil War.

Now, I trust all of us would agree that slavery is evil. Absolutely and categorically. And that any one, even a rabbi, who spoke otherwise would not just be wrong, but would in an entirely different moral universe. But as David Cobin pointed out, abolitionism was at first a non-Jewish value. Nevertheless, we have made it into a Jewish value not because traditional rabbinic sources say so, but because it is so powerfully true.

And so we are left with a choice. We can have a Judaism from which we try - like those defending Rabbi Lior and his friends - to exclude all "foreign thought;" all "Western values." Or we can have a Judaism that teaches that slavery is evil. We can't have both. I know which one I want.

*See under: Basques, Welsh, Hutus, Lapps, Samaritans, Kurds, Ainu...
** I am not ruling out the possibility that the current aggressive rejection of secular authority by both the so-called "Religious Zionists" and the Hareidi community is itself informed, if indirectly, by the triumph of militant Islam in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

those crazy jews

2011-06-20T22:51:00.006-04:00

I guess I should write a few words about how Israel, as a topic, is making the American Jewish community completely nuts. I mean, completely nuts. The Simon Weisenthal Center, whose primary mission is to hunt Nazis and fight anti-Semitism, in the person of its Associate Dean, read an op-ed on Fox News, in which he attacked "President Obama's outrageous demand that [Israelis] retreat to pre-1967 Six Day War lines, which were dubbed by the late Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, 'Auschwitz' borders." Now, put aside for a moment that Obama made no such demand - here's a group that has no particular geopolitical mandate or expertise, using Holocaust imagery to attack Obama, whose position on Israel's borders is essentially the same as Israel's own center-left, including much of its recent defense and diplomatic corps. That doesn't mean the position is right, of course, only that it's the kind of mainstream position that an ostensibly non-partisan organization has no business attacking (and especially not in shoah terms*) unless the machers have gone off their meds. But of course, if they were trying to make a reasoned argument, they wouldn't be quoting a "strategic assessment" made in 1969.

Or take the fuss about JStreet. Take a look at who their supporters are: they include leaders and former leaders of the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements. Again, they may be right and they may be wrong, but it just does not get any more mainstream. But suggest that they be treated as such, and folks go bonkers, whether in the measured tones of a Daniel Gordis or in the full-batshit-crazy mode that Jews normally only display in synagogue when the cantor introduces a new tune. Mainstream, loyal, affiliated Jews who advocate fairly moderate positions - positions that many Israelis believe are in Israel's best strategic interests - are treated as though they were a threat to the country's very existence.

Which I suppose we are. Talking about withdrawing from the Occupied Territories - hell, just calling them the Occupied Territories - suggests that the borders of the State have more to do with negotiations and politics and international law than the Bible. A willingness to accept the fact that Jerusalem is a divided city puts paid to the notion that one is living in the seat of the re-established Davidic monarchy. Concern that Israel may use force unjustly, and that the occupation may be more brutal than security needs mandate or that international law allows implies that Israel might be subject to moral scrutiny by the outside world.

Is any of that really so bad? It all seems kind of normal for a normal country. It's not a good thing to be accused of a war crime, let alone commit one, but to hold Britain accountable, or France, or the US, for unjust use of force is not to attack their legitimacy or demand their dismantling. To call for a state to accept international law is not to deny its sovereignty. None of the above are incompatible with concern, even love, for a country.

Not for a real country, anyway. And that's the point. The JStreet constituency treats Israel as a real, normal, country situated in the real, normal world. In doing so, it challenges - no, it rejects - the idea of Israel as a mythic place. That's the Israel that's threatened.

A lot of Jews, though, need to believe in that Israel just as children need to believe in their parents' perfection. [It's not just Jews, by the way, who have this kind of need. Look at the way Palin et al furiously demand that Obama swear allegiance to the idea of American exceptionalism]. Some, particularly the religious right, are explicit about this: As the reborn Zion, Israel has a claim on all of Cis-Jordan by virtue of the Divine Promise, period.

But most American Jews don't really believe that, not at least in their grown-up brains. They can't say, even to themselves, that they need to imagine Israel as messianic, or recognize their fury at those who would deny them their illusions. And so they insist that they're speaking about Israel's physical security, and that the very positions held by the former head of the Mossad are treasonous when coming from American Jews. But when you try to make a security case for a mythic belief, you end up sounding, well, crazy.

*Oh, by the way - waving around the word shoah is only the mirror image of waving around the word apartheid. The fight against bad historical analogies begins at home.

who cares?

2011-06-12T21:37:00.003-04:00

What should a good synagogue - or any Jewish institution - do?

Thought experiment:

Let's imagine that Judaism mattered. That is, it made a difference whether or not it were being done - and by extension, done well. What would it be about Judaism that was important?

Maybe it's the moral imperative. I hear that a lot; in fact, I heard it a number of times just today. A friend was telling me about a conversation a friend of his had had with her Orthodox parents about her mover away from observance. "Isn't the most important thing whether I'm a good person?" And then later today, I saw that a wise and influential rabbi had written "Jewishness is believing one person can transform the world."

Now, it is really, truly, desperately important that one try to be a good person. And there's no question that believing that one can transform the world - or should at least try - is crucial if there is to be any kind of justice done, any repair of the world. But. But. But. If being Jewish meant being a good person, then either all good people would be Jewish by definition, or only Jews would have the capacity for goodness (either through some inherent quality, or through a monopoly on moral teachings). And both alternatives are patently nonsense. But think of Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Dr. King. Of Florence Nightingale; of Harriet Tubman. Not a good Jew in the bunch.

So the Jewish part of being Jewish, the stuff that would matter if Judaism matters, has got to be different than just the moral imperative*.

To be sure, maybe it doesn't matter - not beyond a kind of ethnic pride, a desire for the kind of immortality that comes from being connected to something that lasts. In which case, who really cares what we do, or how? As long as you get people in the door, and get them to pin the "Hi, I'm Jewish" name tag on their psyche, you've succeeded.

But if it there was something, or a couple of somethings, that were really important on their own; if there was something there that the God or the world or your neighbor or you would be poorer without, then it seems that the institution would have two tasks:
1) Identify what it was that needed to be done - and what that thing looked like when done well;
2) Make sure it gets done well.

Actually, if we thought there was a core that really mattered - in the way that other stuff that matters matters - we'd be changing our relationship with our shuls and JCCs and the like. We wouldn't be so concerned about whether they entertained us or bored us - we'd want to know whether they helped us do the stuff we needed to do, well. We'd demand it.

Sounds simple, don't it? But I don't see that happening, by and large. Do you? I wonder what that means.

*That doesn't, doesn't, doesn't mean that one can be fully Jewish and be a schmuck; just that there's more to being Jewish than not being a schmuck. Did I really need to say that?

arts and crafts

2011-04-07T14:51:00.001-04:00

Anyone who has heard the expression, "Teaching is less a science than an art" raise your hands. All of you? Wonderful! And can any of you tell me what it means? Wow! So many hands. So many hands.

No wonder. It is one of the most common clichés about the work. And that, in turn, is probably because there is something about it that feels intuitively right. Which is not to say that a good teacher will not be informed by scientific research, especially in the fields of cognition and human development. That research, though, is only a tool to be made use of, the way a painter makes use of the rules of perspective or the properties of pigment on drying plaster. The act of planning a unit, or conducting a class, or designing a project is a highly personal one, engaging the teacher's intuitive, emotional, and aesthetic sides. Surely we have a right to consider ourselves artists.

I want to suggest, however, that there is a fundamental difference between teaching and making art, between what we might call (in a way that will be narrowly defined in a moment) the artistic temperament and the pedagogic temperament, a difference that expresses itself in every facet of life, not only the studio and the classroom. "Temperament" of course is a dangerous term, because it can suggest a kind of essentialism; one "is" an artist or one "is" an educator, as though that expressed a certain fundamental truth about the person. Perhaps instead of temperament we should say "stance," and at any given moment one chooses – consciously or not – to "stand" more or less as artist or as teacher.

But just what is an artist? Sometimes we use that term as an exclamation of skill: "She's no ordinary plumber. She's an artist." And often that sense of art-as-heightened-craft implies that the work has an aesthetic value beyond the needs of the task: "Did you see his suturing? That's not surgery, that's art."

The understanding that an artist is a master craftsman has an old and distinguished lineage. Aristotle taught that the ability of a work to appeal to our aesthetic or emotional sides was subject to certain principles, and an artist was "simply" someone who had mastered those principles and could put them to work. And John Ruskin, the 19th century critic, wrote movingly of anonymous masons and carpenters and glaziers whose craft made for the art of the Gothic cathedral.

At the same time, we know – we know – that that is not the whole story. Though there are advantages and disadvantages to both, no one would confuse being called an artist with being called a craftsman. The craftsman, after all, is subservient to the discipline while the true artist is subject to nothing save his or her own vision.

This approach has a respected pedigree as well. Plato insisted that whether one was or was not an artist had nothing to do with skill; an artist was simply a vehicle for a muse, much in the way that a biblical prophet was a vehicle for the spirit of God. And while the cult of real supernatural muses has been dormant for quite a while, the romantic image of the artist as someone who is in a kind of thrall to that inner voice is with us still. The understanding of that "voice" as something almost supernatural is so powerful that the trope of the artist not needing to follow ordinary manners or morals has been a cliché for well over a hundred years.

Although he was not writing about artists, Ahad HaAm understood the attraction of this model, and generations of young Jews have felt themselves inspired by his presentation of the prophet, committed to the pure and absolute Truth, in opposition to the Aaron the priest, the man of compromise and conciliation.

"My Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy?" (Amos 3:8) This experience, this urge, (or a non-religious version of it) is at the heart of what I call the artistic temperament or stance: I have a fire within me, and I must let it out; I am possessed of a singular vision, and I must express it. Not subject to the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" of ed school courses and "teacher-proof" curricula, the real educator as artist-as-prophet.

The problem is that the prophets were lousy teachers. Holy men? Undoubtedly. Vehicles for God's message? To be sure. But if we judge a teacher by the impact she or he makes on the students, well, I don't know how they would fare. Indeed, the only prophet who can be said to be truly successful is Jonah, and he is the one who is least taken with his role as prophet. (Nathan is an interesting exception, but as prophet to a king, and not the people, he is in a different category.) It seems as though there is something about being a good prophet (or in secular terms, a capital ‘A' artist) which is inimical to being a good educator.

Why should that be? What is it about the artistic stance that gets in the way of teaching? I want to play for a minute with Ahad HaAm's paradigm of Prophet v. Priest. Judaism doesn't have priests any more, but Catholics do, and the Catholic "High Priest" so to speak is known by a number of terms. One of them, pontiff, comes from the title of the cultic head of ancient pagan Rome, pontifex maximus. The Great Bridgebuilder.

"Bridgebuilder" is a fine metaphor for a priest, but I think it's an even better one for a teacher, not least because it can be understood in many ways. Do you span the gulf between student and information? Do you make it possible for the student to cross over the bridge from her current condition to a future one? Are you the bridge? The builder? The ledge? But however the image is understood, the point is that the bridge is about getting from here to there. The builder's attention has to be focused on that other side. It is only then that she can begin to think about the look of the bridge.

If you were to ask people to visit a classroom in their mind's eye and then asked who was speaking, most of them (even teachers) would say, "the teacher." And teachers do need to speak, and to write, and to dance about the room, because teachers need to teach. So it is tempting for us to claim that artistic stance, to find what it is we most want, most need, to say. But if we want to be teachers, not artists, our concern must be with that other side. Not what we most want to say, but what the student most needs to learn. It is a stance of listening, not speaking; of getting one's vision from the other, not from within.

Taking the stance of the educator is a humbling discipline, because what we might most want to say doesn't really matter that much. What matters is finding a way of saying what those others most need to hear, and finding a way of saying it that can be heard. It's surely not prophecy, and it's not even Art. But doing it well is the work of a master craftsman. It's the work of a teacher.

your amalek and mine

2011-03-18T16:57:00.001-04:00

Bear-in-mind what Amalek did to you on the way, at your going-out from Egypt, how he encountered you on the way and attacked-your-tail - all the beaten-down-ones at your rear - while you were weary and faint, and thus he did not stand-in-awe of God. So it shall be: when YHVH your God gives-you-rest from all your enemies round about in the land that YHVH your God is giving you as an inheritance, to possess it, you are to blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens; you are not to forget! (Deut. 25:17-19, trans. Fox)

Who is Amalek? We know that Amalek must be totally destroyed; that is, that Amalek is completely unredeemable. Our history knows of many villains, individuals and nations. What makes an enemy so dangerous that against it, and only it, the Torah demands eternal warfare, eternal vigilance? What makes the crime of Amalek worse than that of Egypt, the enslaver, or Moab, the seducer? The Philestine kingdom of Lebanon helped to build the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, but Amalek, and Amalek alone is to have no place on God's green earth.

What did Amalek do? The Torah tells us that he attacked the stragglers, those who had fallen outside the camp. But the very notion of stragglers should give us pause. As the Torah describes it, the Israelite community on the march was much like an army, with every tribe in its place, every clan intact. Who was there to be left behind? Surely even the old and weak had families to look after them. Amalek's victims, then, must have been those who were not only weary, but who were allowed to fall behind.

Is it hard to imagine that God's own chosen would let some fall by the wayside? It shouldn't be. For while in our stories we tend to romanticize the poor and the sick (whether it's the begger as Elijah of folklore or the saintly-homeless-man of so many movies) many of the weakest in our society are downright unattractive. They are the people we hope will not sit next to us on the subway, the people whose neighborhoods (if they are lucky enough to have neighborhoods) we avoid. They are hicks and yokels; racists, misogynists, and homophobes with primitive ideas. Filthy and dangerous, or just weird and unpleasant, we don’t actively persecute them (we’re way to progressive for that) but neither are they foremost in our hearts and minds.

This does not make us wicked; it is part of being human. We are limited beings and our capacity for compassion is likewise limited. Our areas of concern are a series of concentric circles - sometimes ill-defined, sometimes porous, but they are there. The Tradition acknowledges this, even mandates it. We are obligated to see to the needs of those closest to us (by kinship or geography) first. True, there are cases in which a need may be so pressing that it compels attention and jumps to the head of the line, so to speak, but generally the Torah is content to assume that everyone falls within someone’s inner circle. It is those who do not, the widow, orphan, and stranger that the text commends to our particular and communal care.

As well it should. Because we see in our own world what happens to those on the outskirts of our concern: they die. Their nutrition is worse, their shelter is worse, their medical care is worse and comes later. Having the least to spare they are more subject to violence, robbery, fraud. Whether it’s defined by “lifestyle” or skin color or status or general attractiveness, those at the margins are at the greatest risk. And though surely death comes to us all, it is equally sure that death comes most aggressively to those who have none to look after them. For Amalek waits to strike at those who fall behind.

The Torah tells us all we need to know. Amalek is the enemy that preys on those who are left behind. And Amalek must always be remembered because Amalek cannot be killed - not by the sword, at any rate, for Amalek is called into existence by his prey. For Amalek to be defeated, he must be starved. It is this aspect of the enemy which drives the almost desperate anxiety of our passage. Because Amalek will spring up wherever there are holes in the safety net, whenever our guard is down. If we forget to watch out, if we forget to take care, if we forget that everyone in the society must - must - be cared for, there will be an enemy waiting for them in the wilderness. Amalek will only be fully vanquished and his name blotted out when he becomes unimaginable; that is, when the very idea of stragglers will be as foreign to us as the idea of child sacrifice.

And one more thing. Our reading is not just a reminder, not just a warning. It is a command. The war against Amalek, victory over Amalek, is now our responsibility. If Amalek survives, it is because we allow it. If he takes victims, it is because we have failed. And when people die who didn’t have to because they were behind us, because they were beneath us, well, that blood is on our hands. Out here in the desert there is no other way.

the groom's tuxedo

2010-07-29T18:53:00.002-04:00

What I want to know is, will the groom wear shatnez?

I was not planning on writing about The Wedding. I wish them all the best, of course, but having said that, what’s left? To my surprise, though, it’s become a kind of McGuffin among some of the more interesting Jewish voices I read; by which I mean a narrative device that doesn’t matter that much in itself, but it provides an excuse for the real work.

The pieces I’ve read point to, indeed celebrate, the wedding as representative of a new era in which traditional boundaries are breaking down – boundaries between tribe and tribe, culture and culture, even religion and religion. Take a look at this, by Rabbi Irwin Kula, for one of the best presentations of the point. Irwin, and others like him, suggests that we are entering a new era, in which people will pick and choose the best pieces of wisdom from their traditions and bring them together in a new, compelling syncretism.

And so I wonder, would the traditional prohibition of shatnez, a mixture of wool and linen, be one of those pieces of wisdom that Chelsea and Marc bring into their new life, or might such a blend be absolutely perfect for summer formal wear?

Shatnez as one of the great examples of Jewish wisdom? It’s hard to imagine. In fact, it seems like a perfect example of that kind of picky, detail-obsessed, rule-bound Judaism that we’d like to escape. How could fretting about a fabric add any kind of holiness to your life?

Though if you know just a little bit of history it is kind of interesting to note that wool, which comes from sheep, and linen, w.c.f. flax, represent the two main forms of human society in antiquity – herdsmen and farmers, nomads and settlers – and that the two have always been in tension (thus the plot of Oklahoma). And you might even remember that the very first fight was between a shepherd and a farmer over whether flesh or grain was the better sacrifice.

If you know a little more you might be aware that both those cultures are brought together in early Judaism; Passover, for example, is tied to both the newborn lambs and the ripening of the first grain. You might be struck by how the prohibition on mixing wool and linen acknowledges the legitimacy of the two modes of life and their distinctiveness – and the fact that they are brought together in the garments of the priests, and even in the Tallit (when techeilet is used) points to the Sacred as the one space in which they come together; a union that is only meaningful because of the normal separation.

And you might go on to make a connection between the boundary-marking work of shatnez and the way a mezuzah marks the boundaries between inside and outside, and the way kiddush and havdalah function in time, etc., etc. You could, if you were of the mind, feel in these different practices the pulse of the very first story, in which God creates not by shaping or forming or hatching, but by establishing borders – making is out of chaos by establishing order, differentiating between light and dark, water and water, sea and land. And that pulse could call to you, if you paid attention to it, reminding you though each of these practices, that you are a partner in the work of creation.

What I’m suggesting is that Judaism is, or at least can be looked at as, a system, and the pieces and practices and teachings may gain their meaning in the context of that system. In doing so, I’m trying to avoid the dualistic way of thinking that offers a choice between a reactionary traditionalism and a progressive syncretism. The “whole” (and I don’t mean particularly an Orthodox whole) can be seen as having value because that’s where the parts have meaning; wrenched out of context they become incoherent, like Kachina dolls on the bookshelf or dreamcatchers above the bed.

I don’t think syncretism is evil; but I think it does threaten to turn expressions of wisdom into dreamcatchers, and they don’t really work for Anglos.

ancient modern poetry

2010-07-18T22:31:00.002-04:00

I will be honest: I do not look forward to the restoration of sacrifices, and neither does anyone I know. But I will fast tomorrow without a second thought. I understand that there are many for whom Tisha B’Av makes no sense any more, that it belongs to a long-departed mindset. I think, though, that the primary gulf between us and the ancient rabbis has to do less with what they believed than with how they spoke.

First: the Rabbis were not Greeks. We are heirs of the Western philosophical system, and as such we use a language of principles, generalities, categories. The Rabbis, on the other hand, used a language of the concrete and structured their discourse around cases, specifications, archetypes. We do the same thing in our day-to-day language: when we pine for the days in our fifth-floor walk-up it is not because the lack of space and the lousy plumbing made us a happier couple, or even that we always were a happier couple then; but that apartment has come to represent a way that we like to think we once were. So too with the Rabbis: “The Temple” is their way of speaking about a world in which God was experienced as directly and even intimately present, and “Destruction” is the language for the loss of that experience.

We are distanced from them, too, by our understanding of time. We moderns think and speak about historical time, understanding the difference between “then” and “now”; modernity itself is a product of the development of what we call history. And so the questions that we ask about an event are, “What were its causes?” “What were its effects?” and most important, “Did it really happen then?” The Rabbis, though, trafficked in sacred time, mythic time, for which the essential question was not whether something happened once, but whether it was eternally true. The Seder does not memorialize the Exodus, it reenacts it, because the Liberation is something we all experience. So too with Tisha B’Av. Although we recall a series of tragic events we do not mourn things that happened then but for the brokenness we live with every day.

One does not need to be wish for the sacrifices to know this brokenness, one does not even need to be Jewish to recognize that, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Yeats understood what the Rabbis called the "Exile of the Divine Presence," even if he would not have used that language any more than they would have spoken of the Spiritus Mundi or of “A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun…” The Rabbinic poetry was of altar and offering, and they acted it out through prayer and fasting. They invite us to recognize the Destruction that exists now, to mourn it, and to be poets with them.

it's the chickens; they're back

2010-07-13T22:01:00.004-04:00

I’ve been thinking about a bunch of news stories from Israel: the arrest of a woman for carrying a torah scroll by the Western Wall; the bill being pushed in the Knesset that would delegitimize non-Orthodox conversions; recent efforts to demonize the New Israel Fund and various Israeli NGOs; racist pamphlets by settlers at illegal outposts aimed at the Druze soldiers who had come to evict them. But this isn’t a screed against the right. Not too long ago, the then-dean of the Israeli Conservative Rabbinical School, a brilliant feminist scholar and pioneering rabbi herself, not only ruled against the ordination of gay and lesbian Jews, but claimed that homosexuality was a choice, and that heterosexual marriage was endangered by the movement for gay and lesbian rights, and there was not a lot of public outcry (at least, not that got much press here).

And I’m wondering if all of those stories might be really one story. Maybe what we should be worried about is not who gets access to the Wall, or who is the gatekeeper for conversions (even though both of those are serious issues), but whether Israel has developed a culture in which the way you respond to those you disagree with is by totally delegitimizing them, and by using what power you can to deny them even the right to their own story.

And that makes me wonder to what extent the long, and in some circles still extant, tradition of insisting that there is no such thing as a “Palestinian people,” that they have no legitimate national aspiration and no legitimate complaint against Israel – in short, the continued delegitimization of the Palestinians – has played into this dynamic. It seems to me that if you spend enough time insisting that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, and the very claim that there is, is a threat” it’s hard to keep from moving to “there is no such thing as non-Haredi Judaism…” or “no such thing as healthy gay and lesbians…”.

To be sure, in part I'm upset because I just find it unseemly that there is so much concern within the American Jewish community about who has access to the Wall and so little about the gross inequality in the Israeli government’s treatment of Arab and Jewish citizens. But more, I’m convinced that the only society in which my group will be treated with dignity is a society in which every group is treated with dignity. And I’m worried that what I’m hearing on the news is the squawking of Pastor Neimuller’s chickens coming home to roost.

a purely hypothetical question

2009-06-18T12:08:00.001-04:00

So here's what I'm wondering:

Do we believe, as a theoretical matter, that Israel might do wrong? Not tactical or strategic mistakes, but that the government could do something "bad" or illegal, something about which we'd agree that it shouldn't have done it. That is, in a disagreement between Israel and the non-Jewish world, is it possible that Israel might be wrong - or is it the case that Isreal is beyond censure? And if Israel is wrong in a particular instance, should we know about it? should we speak about it?

If Israel can be wrong, if it's possible for it to do something illegal, how would we know? It can't be that the only reliable sign that Israel did something wrong is when the State itself makes that declaration - that's just another way of saying that Isreal is above external reproach. Similarly, to say that official Jewish leaders and institutions are the only reliable judge of Israel's behavior is just to extend the blanket of infallibility from the State to the Jewish People at large.Moreover, if Israel can be wrong in a policy but that should not affect our public or private behavior - if it's not something we need to know - then we're telling ourselves, and our children, and our neighbors, that when it comes to Isreal we cannot be trusted as a source of sound legal, political, or moral judgment.

If we don't want that to be the case - if it's possible for Isreal to do wrong, and if it's important for us to know the truth - then there may be times when we need to pay attention to non-Jewish critiques. There's no way around that.What would be an good indication that Israel might be wrong, or a critique that we need to take seriously? If Syria says so? If OPEC says so? Probably not. But what if every country in the world, every major legal institution, said that Israel was wrong? Would that be an indication that there might be something worth paying attention to?

Or are we always right?

steal this seder

2009-04-01T23:20:00.004-04:00

The first few years of my working "adult" life I only had one set of good dishes for Passover, and they were dairy. The main course of the seder was usually salmon - maybe a smaller fish poached in foil in the oven, maybe a large whole filet roasted with potato crust. For desert, a pesachdik English Trifle. Nobody complained.

That was twenty years ago, and when I read Alex Witchel's surprise at a dairy seder I got a bit huffy. But when I read her surprise at a seder where people asked questions, I just got sad. If you look at the earliest discussions of the seder it's clear - clear - that the point of the meal is for there to be dialogue. Many of the practices we know today began is tricks, stunts, things done purely to get the children to wonder, What the hell is going on? And just as the question was supposed to be spontaneous, so too was the answer which was not supposed to be a recitation, but was a response geared to what the child could understand. All of which goes back to the biblical precident: "And when you enter the land the Lord will give you as He has promised, you shall observe this rite. And when your childeren ask you, 'What do you mean by this rite?' you shall say, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord...'" Exodus 12: 24-27

When the seder becomes merely a repetition, whether as a mind-numbing plod through the English or as a breathless race through the Hebrew, the participants - no, the witnesses - miss out on the original program. That's a shame, less because they're not doing what they're spozed to than that they're losing the opportunity to connect as active individual subjects with the text, with the ideas, and with each other.

It's a shame, but it's not a surprise. I think the experience Alex describes is what most Jews are used to. Which is pretty strange, because I don't think most Jews actually get much out of it. It's not that they don't like the larger gestalt of Seder. They like the family gathering, and the sense of history, and the food, and the songs, but they don't really connect to the telling part, the part that was once thought to be its reason to be. And yet, it's not like being at a High Holiday service, where a cantor is singing and a rabbi is talking and an usher is shushing and your role is to follow along. The seder belongs to the people. Every family gets to run their own, and many families simply run it down.

Now, it's quite possible that some families have such respect for the ancient rabbis that they wouldn't dare trifle with anything they said or prescribed, any more than they could imagine them joking or being ironic, and so they take their seder straight as a discipline, a form of obedience. But outside of the Orthodox community there are few Jews who feel that way.

I think that the real reason is that for all too many people Judaism is like some obscure musical instrument or piece of forgotten machinery. The idea that it could be helpful, that it could be used for one's own purposes and in one's own way has long been forgotten, let alone the knowledge of how to use it, and so it sits in its glass case while we look on.

There are rabbis and community leaders who see this as a yet another sign of the degraded state of the folk, but it's not the folk's fault. It's us, the rabbis, who are to blame because so many of us are so concerned with doing it right that we've never said, "Make Jewish practice yours, make it a tool to help you do the work you need to do." Partly because a lot of us are not so sure how to do that ourselves, and partly because then we'd lose some control. If the quality of your seder depends on how closely it follows my script, well, then I get to be the arbiter. But if it depends on how well it works, then my teaching is going to be tested in the crucible of your experience and that can be kind of scary. For me - but for you, too. Because if you're bored with my script you can happily blame me, but once you take it into your own hands you become responsible for its success.

Scary as it is, there is no other way. Not if Judaism is going to be alive, not if it is going to be a real participant in the world, a discipline for making holy art out of life, for finding one's place and one's task in the midst of the confusion. It's got to be used, and lived with, and played with, and experimented with, and if that means sometimes getting it wrong at least that's better than not getting it at all.

Most Jews, and certainly most Jews reading this, are in a pretty good condition, all things considered. There are dangers, there are anti-Semites, but by and large we're not oppressed; we're not impovrished; we're not enslaved. It's not Jews who need to be liberated this year - it's Judaism.

practice makes...better

2009-03-23T23:47:00.003-04:00

I've gained weight. Not that much perhaps, but some. There's no mystery about it; I haven't been to the gym in a while, and that's what happens to me . I'm given to understand that that's true even for those who seem to stay thin naturally - if you want to be fit, you've got to keep exercising. Even athletes, because otherwise all those things that provide the edge begin to go. There's no appeal from the second law of thermodynamics: what you don't work to maintain eventually goes to hell.

Which is true for all the virtues, of the mind and heart as well as of the abs. Particularly the heart. And so I find it, well, bizarre that as a response to claims ranging from war crimes to grotesque, systemic insensitivity there is the repeated insistence that Israel has the "most moral army in the world." First of all, it's irrelevant. Help me out here in case I've got the math wrong, but whether or not a person (or an army) is generally saintly doesn't make a bad act impossible, and it doesn't make that act good.

It's also a really lousy rhetorical turn, and that has nothing to do with the listeners being anti-Semites or not. It's safe to say that in the entire history of human discourse, the rejoinder "We are the most moral nation/army/institution/religion" has never convinced anyone who did not already believe it. Why would it? It's not really a response to a charge, it's a refusal to respond, a rejection of the possibility that the other could even make a claim. Fuck you, in other words.

It's not just the bad logic and it's not just the bad PR that make "we're the most moral" a strange thing to repeat; it's that it's self-defeating. Being moral, like being agile or being toned or being quick, takes constant practice and one of the key practices is self-examination. While that's true with all virtues - if you want to be excellent you have to look for your flaws - it's particularly true with morality because honesty, humility, openness are not just instrumental to moral growth, they are in themselves part of being moral.

When an army closes itself off from the possibility that its soldiers, or its officers, have committed crimes it loses whatever defenses it may have had against continued crimes; just as a people who close themselves off to any kind of moral criticism becomes corrupt.

good friends (a rant)

2009-03-15T18:50:00.007-04:00

No, I don't know when I'll be done and I don't know what I'll do with it when I'm done, but one of the pleasures of having a dissertation hanging over my head is that it every now and again I get to read something that I wouldn't have known about otherwise, but knowing it now, I wouldn't want to miss. Right now, I'm reading The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction by the very wonderful Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005). It's a big work, and I can't possibly do it justice in a line or two, but in brief he suggests that we think of our encounter with with books, stories, etc. as encounters with the "implied author." Not the flesh-and-blood person, but the sense of the author we get from the work.

Seen this way, reading is a "social act", a kind of friendship, and Booth suggests that we can evaluate books in the way we evaluate friends*, or potential friends/acquaintacnes. Some "friendships" provide us with certain specific goods: contacts, status, concert tickets, sex, the loan of a car. When the goods end, so does the friendship. Some friends are simply fun to be with; their company is a pleasure, and we make time for them for the sake of that pleasure, even though we might not particulary respect them. And there are some friends - if you're lucky - who are simply championship human beings, and in their friendship you experience the possibility of your own enoblement. Books can be like that, too, he suggests: some you read for profit, some you read for pleasure, and some for the privalege of being in the company of that "implied author."

Of course this sounds simplistic - I've given you a one-paragraph summation of an almost 600 page work. But when elaborated with nuance and skill it's a very powerful tool for helping us talk about what we mean by a good book, and that's one reason I like it so much.

The other reason is that I find Booth himself, the Booth whose presence I experience in the reading, is himself one of those great souled types. Wise, kind, good-humored' but wearing those characteristics lightly, like Trollope. Spending time with him makes me feel that I, too, might become a little more wise, a little more kind, a little better-humored.

Maybe you'll pick up the book, maybe not. But here's the thing: for all the talk we might do about becoming better at something - more skilled, more attractive, more successful, more energized, more calm, healthier, wealthier, whatever - we don't talk about becoming just better. Maybe in part that's because the whole discussion of character development has been seized by / ceded to the cultural conservatives. And maybe because of the whole Enlightenment shift to locating value in the individual's own self-actualization. And maybe because the logic of late capitalism demands that we spend our energy on getting goodies of some kind. Whatever. My observation - maybe I'm wrong, let me know - is that to the sense we speak at all about the issue, it's in terms of what is lacking in some "them" or other, and what "they" need to do to be better people.

There are few kinds of people as tedious as those who insist they know what I need to be a better person. And yet, there is a kind of soul-healing to be found in being with someone, whether on the page or in person, whose own - yes, I'll say it: virtue (in the classical sense) - makes me believe in the possibility of my own virtue. Damn it, it feels good. Better than good: it feels compelling.

So here's the question: When you look for people whose friendship (in person or on the page) might help you be more, I dunno, noble or good or menschlikh, or when you look for people to talk about what that even might mean, to talk about what kind of character you want to develop, where do you go and whom do you seek? And if those people and those pages and that conversation isn't somewhere near the center of the Jewish enterprise, then what the hell are we doing wrong?

*With a nod to the best blog name (and a damn good blog) on the Web, Please judge me.

Security Risk

2009-02-18T14:44:00.007-05:00

Two recent, and related, stories got a surprisingly small amount of press here, and even among the shmoozerati there hasn't been much notice about them. A short while ago, Haaretz publicized the Israeli data base of settlement activity in the West Bank. The punchline, presented nicely in the Times online, along with some neat other stuff, is not good: in some seventy-five percent of the settlements, construction took place without, or contrary to, official permits. In 30 settlements, construction took place on land owned by Palestinians (there's a word for this). Keep in mind, please, that these figures are not just about those settlements labled by the Israeli government as "illegal", but those claimed to be "in accordance with international law."

In thinking about the settlements, it's important to keep in mind the lessons of Gaza. Not the recent war, but the withdrawal. If it wasn't common sense before hand, it was proven by demonstration: settlers assume their homes are permanent.

"Well, duhhh" do I hear you say? Hardly. For years - for decades - there has been the official claim that the settlements are "bargaining chips," with their future status "pending negotiation." But if they're bargaining chips, if the status of the land they're on is uncertain, why establish permanent homes, with schools, synagouges, infrastructure, the whole nine yards, and fill those homes with people who don't plan to move? What the Speigel report demonstrates is that the Israeli government has been engaged in a project - illegal under it's own laws - to informally annex increasingly large chunks of the West Bank.

Now, it's true that lots of countries do and have done lots of illegal things, and many of them - including the USA - are enjoying the fruits of their own land grabs with impunity. The real problem, though, is one of Israel's own safety. Isreal's single greatest security need is a stable, Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, at least moderately prosperous and at least moderately democratic. That being the case, anything that hinders or delays the establishment of such a state endangers Israel and its citizens; threats to the creation of the State of Palestine are threats to continued existance of the State of Israel.

The argument is not whether the settlement project has hurt the prospects for peace, it is only whether it has killed it completely. And yet (and this is the second story) Israel continues to build, unable to face the true costs for what it needs as much as it needs an army.

The existential danger to Israel created by the continued occupation has got to become part of mainstream American Jewish discourse, whether in "insider" conversations synagogues and the meeting rooms of the major Jewish philanthropies, or in public addresses to the Administration. To do less would be disloyal.

gaza talk

2009-02-12T16:28:00.002-05:00

Gaza.

And then what do I say? I’ve been observing two entirely different discourses: there’s that of the organized Jewish community, and there’s that of, well, just about everyone else, and, well, you know, there’s not been a whole lot of contact between the two. It’s pretty clear to me that Hamas is a nasty organization, not just in regard to Israel, but in general; only the most naïve anti-Zionist would see a Hamas government as empowering to its residents. Clear, too, that lobbing mortars and rockets at Israeli civilian centers is inexcusable and criminal, not to mention mind-bogglingly stupid as a strategy to get Israel to lift the siege. These two facts are crucial to any discussion of the war.

Yet these two facts neither answer nor preclude two central questions:
1) Was the war a wise and appropriate approach to Israel’s legitimate long-term security needs?
2) Was the war prosecuted in accordance with international law?

You’re all as smart as I am, you have access to the same sources as I do, you can try to answer these for yourselves. But that’s the point – we need to get to a place where we can, indeed, try to answer them.

Concerning the first question, I’d like to note that “Because the bastards deserve it” while necessary, is not, by itself, a good reason to go to war – notwithstanding Bush’s attempt to retroactively apply it to Iraq. I’d also like to note that questioning the wisdom of a country’s policy, even arguing that a policy is wrongheaded and doomed to fail, is not an attack on the country. Nations, even democracies, do wrong-headed things, and it’s worth remembering that the official Israeli report described the second Lebanon war as a blunder, the result of an inadequate decision-making process. In the words of Justice Winograd, “Israel did not use its military power wisely or effectively," Would it have been anti-Israel to say this during the war?

As to war crimes, well, the accusation that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes is an ugly one, and it should be, because war crimes are bad things to do. But they’re bad things even if the good guys do them, and even if the bad guys are committing war crimes, too. This isn’t a zero-sum morality, where if one side is bad they’re entirely bad and the other side is entirely good. God knows (and God does know) that the US isn’t pure, nor is Britain, nor any other country. And we demand an accounting especially when the “good guys” commit them because we want them to remain the good guys – and that doesn’t happen if you begin to believe that goodness and justice are categorical attributes, not qualities that require ongoing commitment.

I’m worried about the long-term security of Israel, because Israel’s most pressing security need – a reasonably stable, reasonably democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza – seems further and further away. But I’m worried, too, about a Diaspora Jewish community that does not have a way of engaging in a serious, reasoned, discussion of Israel. Something, by the way, we’re going to need more and more in the coming years.

arnold jacob wolf z"l

2008-12-25T09:16:00.003-05:00

First, here's a story he was fond of telling:
He was a young man in the pulpit in Chicago - this was back in the late 60s or early 70s - and there was a man in town, a slumlord, who treated his tenants horribly. This was a matter of Torah, and Arnold had to preach about it. The thing was, the man was a congregant. Well, Arnold preached, and did everything but come out and name the man outright. After the service, the congregant came up to him. "Boy, Rabbi. You sure gave it to them!"

He marched with King, they said, though I would not hear him talk about until years later ("We weren't brave," he said of those days, "We were scared people doing brave things."). He had fought against the war in Vietnam, and against poverty in the United States, and he spoke - loudly - of the need for a Palestinian state in the West Bank when that was seen as close to treason by most of the organized Jewish community. He was one of the last of the great prophetic social-justice rabbis, and one of the last of the Hillel directors who made the the college campus the location of the most interesting Jewish teaching of the time.

There's a lot by and about him on the Web; zil g'mur, as they say, go and study. But what might not come across is what he taught by the way he taught. It's become a very groovy thing these days for rabbis to lead "discussions" which usually involve letting a couple of congregants say something, and then going blithely on to the point he or she wanted to make in the first place. But Arnold created a space in which every participant had equal access to the text, everyone listened to and responded to everyone else, and such authority as Arnold had came only from his ability to ask better questions and suggest more compelling answers than the rest of us. And so the overarching lesson was that what he did was (in theory) something we all could do, and the existential meaning of a religious teaching within the grasp of anyone who was prepared to do the work.

This belief in the radical competence of each student - which was merely the extension of an overall ethical stance - was combined with a deeply held faith that Torah was important, desperately. It wasn't a game, it wasn't an entertainment. It was about nothing less than repairing a profoundly broken world. More than anyone I've ever known, Arnold seemed to live out the dictum, "It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to stop trying" - only in his case the work involved breaking down a wall, and the only tool available was his high, hard forehead. And for some reason, there was something about that that made you want to join him. You got the sense that you, too, could make some justice happen, could make the world a little bit better. And you, too, wanted to be part of a Judaism that mattered.

I'm not even touching on who he was to me personally; but that I am a rabbi, and the kind of rabbi I've tried (usually unsuccessfully) to be, has a lot to do with him. I miss him.

you can't keep a good god down

2008-12-23T23:36:00.008-05:00

When the Young Heroine introduced me to Terry Pratchett's Discworld, the first book she gave me was Hogfather. It's hard to explain in a sentence if you're not familiar with the series, but it takes place in a cosmos that's very similar to, but not identical with, our own, and the Hogfather is that world's equivalent to Santa Claus. The book is quite wonderful for a number of reasons, oneof which is that you're reminded of how little of the Western Christmas has to do with Christianity and how much with paganism, but there's also this passage (and remember, read "Santa Claus" for "Hogfather")

Was the Hogfather a god? Why not? thought Susan. There were sacrifices, after all. All that sherry and pork pie [left on the table for him]. And he made commandments and rewarded the good and he knew what you were doing...

It's true: the Hogfather, er, Santa, is a god. And we know which one. Making a list and checking it twice? Going to find out who's naughty and nice? That's not a Christmas song; that's U'netaneh Tokef, the solemn prayer from the High Holy Days about the Book of Life. The god who punishes the naughty and rewards the nice, who listens to prayers and gives points for trying, but is ultimately concerned with behavior is, when you get down to it, the God of the Jews.

Ok, ok, we all worship the same God, so let's say, "the God as understood by the Jews". Which is different than the Christian understanding, because one of the main points of Christianity is the idea of "Justification by Faith," which is to say that one cannot get on God's good side through works or deeds; you are justified, or made right with God, through faith [Yes, I do know that this is a gross oversimplification, but still]. And so you have to ask, how does it happen that at one of the two foundational festivals of the God of Faith, the most popular character is an avatar of the God of Works. Or: how is it that in the middle of celebrating the obsolescence of Judaism, it keeps popping up?

And here's what I think: That as attractive as the doctrine might be that you don't have to "do" you just have to believe, and that God's grace is so great and given so freely that all one needs is be open to it, there is something about being human that needs the idea of justice. We can't help believing that it really does make a difference if you're naughty or nice independent of your personal faith. The official doctrine may say what it will about Grace being a totally free gift; there is something deep inside of us that is sure that the difference between a Wii and a lump of coal in your stocking depends on just how good a boy or girl you've been.

This does not necessarily mean that the Jews are saying anything true about God, but it does mean that we are saying something true about being human. Which is that the idea of justice is real, it is as much a part of us as love and beauty. And that there's much more of a universal sense of what counts as "naughty" and what as "nice" than we might otherwise think. Whatever we believe about God or gods or subatomic particles colliding, we are stuck sharing a common moral imagination, a capacity for recognizing the right, and an understanding that that's how we're supposed to live.

(Oh yes, Dick Cheney? If there were a Santa, you'd be in for some serious coal. Ho, ho, ho).

Unforgivable

2008-12-23T20:33:00.005-05:00

Just for Hanukkah fun, here's another quiz.

Which is worse: lying to a lot of people about
a) whether another country poses an immanent threat,
b) whether a product is addictive and will kill you, or
c) whether your money is safe.

No peeking, but if you said "c", you get to be in both the Atlantic and the New York Times.

Look, I'm not carrying a brief for Madoff; he's a liar and a thief on an unimaginable scale, and has hurt many, many people. But I find the idea that he's beyond the possibility of atonement, well, bizarre. First of all, I'd have thought that that kind of judgment involved an insight into the mind of both God and the sinner that's beyond most mortals. But let's get technical. This is probably a reflection of my own ignorance, but I'm not familiar with the text that says that God's forgiveness is dependent on making full restitution. The Talmud, after all, explicitly discusses the possibility of atonement for murderers, and even Maimonides talks about the possibility of effective deathbed repentence (when it's probably too late to make any kind of real recompense).

And if it were true that you could only gain forgiveness for what you've repaired, think of how many of us would truly be without hope. I know that there are people I've hurt whom I'll never see again to reconcile with; am I, too, beyond forgiveness? And wouldn't the "pay it all back first" clause privilege the rich over the poor? I mean, if rich man Deevies takes poor man Lazurus' one sheep, he can pay it back, but if Lazurus takes Deevies' Lamborgini to the chop shop, that could be well over a lifetime of earnings right there.

But of course this is silly. Real repentence isn't about what you do, it's about what you become. Of course, that has to lead to action, but the classic Jewish teaching is that teshuvah has to do with a rejection of the kind of self you were for a better kind of self. That begins with an honest appraisal of what you've done, an ownership of your actions and their consequences, and an honest attempt to repair the damage you've done to the world.

What would it be like to look on a life of lies and theft, on the wreckage of private lives and public institutions, to grieve for the choices you've made and pain and loss you've caused, and to know that it's up to you to try to bring healing to the pain you've caused. Near impossible to do, perhaps, but not to imagine. In fact, it's important to try to imagine it, because in that way we get an understanding of what repentence really requires, and what we have to do to deal with our own faults. And is it really unbelieveable that if Bernie spends the last years of his life as a true penitent, learning about the people he had hurt, trying humbly to good works, that God would have room for him?

After all, did subvert the Constitution? Did he promote torture? Did he teach hatred or inspire violence? Did he abuse children? It seems to me - again, without trying to mitigate the severity of Madoff's crimes - that if we're to have a focus for moral outrage that Bernie is a bar too low. After all, he will spend the rest of his life disgraced and in jail, while men like Kissinger and Rumsfeld will live out their days free, wealthy, and in the company of sycophants. And that is unforgiveable.

different from you and me

2008-12-10T23:10:00.003-05:00

So, I've been thinking about the bonus John Thain isn't getting, all ten million dollars of it. That's a lot of money. How much? Well, it's more than the total of everything I will earn in my entire life. Ok? His one year bonus on this side, my entire lifetime earnings on that, his wins. And maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen anything in the news that this is going to beggar him: pull the kids out of school, sell the house and move into an apartment in Queens, anything like that. My guess is that losing out on more than my gross lifetime domestic product in a single year will have no more than a symbolic impact on him. And ya know something? There are people a lot richer than him.

It strikes me that when you have that much more - I mean, that much more - money, your experience of the world must be vastly different. First, there are a whole range of anxieties or frustrations aren't there when there is nothing that is too expensive for you. I certainly don't mean that the rich have no frustrations and no anxieties, of course they do. But the ones that occupied a lot of the emotionaly energy of the people I know even before the recession - can I afford my child's school, can I afford the right doctor or dentist or shrink, will I be able to retire, what would I really like to do if I didn't have to make money - just aren't on their radar. But more broadly - and tell me if I'm wrong - I imagine their entire interface with the world is different. The things they see and do on a daily basis, the people they talk to, the questions life poses them, to what extent do they live in the same world as I do?

It's this that I'm really wondering about - in a society as economically polarized as our is, to what extent is any kind of shared discourse possible? Perhaps our common humanity is enough to make our fundamental experience of life essentially similar, or perhaps the expereinces we share more powerful, more numerous, more important than the ones we don't, so that we really do inhabit the same common space. But I'm not so sure. Someone who has never had an empty cab pass him by or never had to teach his son how to behave with a policeman will never quite get the black experience, and unless it's brought to his attention won't even think about the fact - he won't even know how different his expereince of America is from that of his black neighbor. Americans who think of the police as their protectors and Americans who think of the police as a kind of occupying army or security guards hired to protect a party they're not invited to are not sharing a "commonwealth," let alone a political or cultural discourse. Mightn't vast wealth differences work the same way?

I don't know what the implications might be if I'm right, but because Americans are so hung about about class we haven't begun to talk about it. I think, perhaps, we should.

enemies of the state

2008-12-04T23:54:00.002-05:00

Okay kids, here’s a quiz: They throw stones at Israeli soldiers, they deny the legitimacy of the Israeli government, they threaten the security of the Israeli state. The organized Jewish community should consider them

a) Friends of Israel

b) Enemies of Israel

You’ve got ten minutes.

This shouldn’t be too hard, but for far too long we’ve refused to take the radical settler community for the danger that they are. In fact, the Israeli government has frequently subsidized them, subsidizing even those actions that have broken Israeli law. Now, when the government spends money on building infrastructure supporting illegal settlements, or on the defense of illegal settlements, that’s money they’re not spending on social services, or settlement of immigrants, or the like. Which means that the money you and I give to support those services, well, we too are subsidizing those illegal settlers. Again, I’m making the easy case; I’m only talking about those settlers who are breaking Israel’s own law.

And for all kinds of reasons having to do with, I don’t know, the romantic hold of the story of the pioneers, or a belief that Jews should be nice to other Jews (a belief the settlers certainly do not hold), or a fear that at some level they are more authentic Jews than we, we continue to grant them a presumption of legitimacy. Even if they’re misguided, we say, they’re still living out the Zionist dream.

Enough of that nonsense. Zionism is a political movement that had at its heart the establishment of a state. The settlers have abandoned politics for a strange volkish messianism, and they have nothing but scorn for the state, its system of government, and its founding documents.

The settlers are anti-Zionists, and until we start insisting on that basic truth at least in our own internal discourse they will continue their stranglehold on the government.

no one can say you can't play

2008-12-02T00:28:00.002-05:00

In the recent issue of CJ, a publication of the Conservative movement, R. Brad Artson, Dean of the Ziegler School (and a classmate of mine back in the day), makes a powerful case for what might be called “strong pluralism”, a movement with room for both egalitarians and non-egalitarians; those in favor of normalizing lesbian and gay Jews, and those not. It sounds open and warm and all kinds of good things, but it’s also wrong in a way that ultimately betrays itself.

See, the deal with a tent of whatever size is that everyone inside it has to be welcome everywhere inside it. Right now, under the banner of “halachic pluralism” a rabbi has the option of counting women as witnesses to legal documents or not. Sounds fair – I should be able to choose who gets to sign a document I’m supervising. But it currently means that a person can be converted by one Conservative rabbi in full accordance with the standards of the Movement – can be fully observant, can be a Conservative rabbi for heaven’s sake – and can find that he or she isn’t considered a Jew by rabbis in other synagogues if a woman was one of the witnesses. That’s not pluralism, that’s nonsense. “Pluralism” is not a right to delegitimize other members. While we should embrace the idea that practices and beliefs in the Movement may vary from shul to shul and from Jew to Jew, there cannot be bubbles where one’s fundamental status is changed simply by being there. Relationship to God and the Covenant cannot be contingent on location.

Further: not only must every member of the Movement have the right to be recognized as a member throughout the Movement, each member living a path sanctioned by the CJLS has the right to be recognized as an observant Jew. That is, while one blade of pluralism may give the individual rabbi the right to decide who to marry or who to use as a witness, the other blade must constrain said rabbi from judging others who are living according to Conservative Halacha.

I don’t think anyone can know how this will play out with GLBT issues, but at the very least it must mean that gay and lesbian Jews cannot have their condition defined for them by someone else. By accepting a responsum that says that homosexual desire is neither chosen, nor pathological, nor immoral, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has given gay and lesbian Jews recognition as “normal,” and that recognition, it seems to me, cannot be negotiable.

Pluralism may allow for a lot of things, but even under the biggest tent, no one can say you can't play.

if we really controlled the media we wouldn't have this problem

2008-11-30T00:02:00.007-05:00

You know how completely nuts it made you to here people – maybe even people you knew, maybe even people you were related to, say things like Obama got half of his money from the Arabs, or that he was secretly a Moslem? Because there’s nothing you can say when people have so internalized a story written by the opposition that they don’t even realize that it’s not common knowledge, let alone that it’s not true. For them, there is no argument; you’ve lost before you’ve begun.
Well, I felt that way just the other day. But it had nothing to do with Obama, and it wasn’t from yokels. It was this:

In the Abrahamic tradition, our sense of God has evolved. For example, the Israelites, 4,500 years ago, had Yahweh, who was a ferocious warrior, a law-giving God. That's a very different god than the one that Jesus spoke of, a God of love. So our sense of God just in the Abrahamic tradition has evolved.

This is Stewart Hoffman, by way of Andrew Sullivan. It’s the standard story, the spin, created by Christian theologians as a slightly less inflammatory version of the deicide charge, but with the same message: Jewish religion bad, Christian religion, good.
It’s nonsense, of course, as anyone who’s spent time either with the original texts or modern scholars know – the images of God in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament are complex and multifaceted, each containing vengeance and love, justice and mercy. But because the spinners have been dominating the discourse, the spin has become taken for granted.
And so neither Hoffman nor Sullivan need to actually study the various scriptures, let alone read the scholarship; they “know” the story because it’s part of the common cultural baggage. And what makes it especially frustrating is that Hoffman has some really interesting things to say; he's a serious, creative thinker. But when it comes to the Bible the two of them are just repeating the partisan narrative: Obama is a closet Moslem, I mean, the Christians worship Love while the Jews worship Vengeance.

a day without spin

2008-11-27T22:59:00.002-05:00

Some years back the chaplains at a local college had organized a thanksgiving service for the school, and they'd invited various members of the administration to share a word or to about what they had to be thankful for. Whatever they were expecting, what they got was spin. "The athletic department is grateful for the opportunity to provide the best sports program to the greatest number of students..." well, you get the idea. It sort of missed the point.
As a Jew, I like it because it's the one meaningful holiday I can share with the rest of the country. While Christmas (even in its most deracinated, secularized form) always makes me feel like an outsider, Thanksgiving belongs to all of us. And as an observant Jew, having a festival meal with none of the festival restrictions is, as they say, a mechayah. I can shop at the last minute, I can use the Cuisinart - it's all good. But as an American what I've come to appreciate about it is the complete absence of triumphalism. So much of the public discourse about what it means to be an American revolves around the notion that we're so much better than everyone else, or at least our country is, that it's hard to take seriously. Whether it's the collectivley-enforced liturgy of "USA! USA!" at international sporting events, or genuflecting to the doctirine of American exceptionalism by politicians, there's an expectation that when American talks about itself, what it says is "We're number 1!"
Except at Thanksgiving. It's not a story of us beating anyone at anything, or triumphing over anything except perhaps winter, and even that was only through the help of others. We don't celebrate being better than anyone; we celebrate the simple miraculous fact of being, and of being together.
There is something liberating in the idea that we can celebrate in full awareness of our fragility and without pretending to an excellence we may not have; something of a gift in the idea that simply surviving with our humanity intact is cause enough for a holiday. It is a day to stop striving, and to take pleasure in the idea that whatever we are is enough, that whatever we have is a gift, and that what we give back to the universe is much less than what we recieve. We're not used to that, to allowing ourselves not to be the best. But it's restful, and even more than that it's largely true. And that's ok. And the ability to know that it's true, and to know that it's ok that it's true, and to be able to celebrate in light of that truth - that alone, I think, is something to be thankful for.

politically correct

2008-11-27T01:20:00.003-05:00

Nowadays, the term politically correct is usually used as part of an attempt to make one's obnoxiousness seem daring, or even heroic. "Oh I guess that wasn't terribly PC of me," we say with a mock-sheepish grin, as though using a slur was akin to insisting that the Earth does move, and to hell with the consequences. To be sure, it's only brave when it's someone else being poked; when you're the one being insulted, the other person isn't non-PC, just offensive.
But there was a time before PC was a pejorative term for "polite when I don't wanna be," when it meant being in thrall to some ideological orthodoxy. The poster boy for this was a man named Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko (1898-1976), a Soviet agronomist, rejected the bourgeois doctrine of genetics in favor of an idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited. This so delighted the Soviet hierarchy as being in line with Communist teaching that the classical Mendelian approach was banished. The only problem was that Lysenko was completely wrong, and the insistence on a politically correct science - instead of a scientifically correct science - set Soviet biology back by a generation.
The problem with politically correct science is that sometimes it kills people. A new study estimates (conservatively) that 365,000 people whose lives could have been prolonged by proper medication died prematurely in South Africa. Why? Because the president of South Africa insisted that AIDS was not caused by HIV, and that claims to the contrary were the work of racist Westerners.
Real racism would be to assume that the suppression of science for the sake of a doctrine could only happen in someplace truly backwards these days, like Africa. But those in search of true Politically Correct science need go no further than the White House. In areas ranging from earth science to medicine to developmental psychology, the Bush regime has replaced scholars and scientists with commissars. One of the many characteristics of Obama that give cause for hope is that he seems to genuinely believe that knowledge is a good thing, that, in fact, it should precede policy.
The stance of honestly wanting to know of accepting - even seeking - surprise, is not only a good scientific, or even policy stance, but it is fundamentally moral. Ethics begins with the idea that the other is a subject, self-defining and self-validating. That means my approach to an other is from a place of humility. I come to you aware of the fact that I don't (yet) know you, that you will confound my expectations. I must come to you looking to be surprised.
Which brings us to an interesting twist. If in modern discourse "PC" just indicates consideration or respect, it turns out that the most "PC" science is also the least politically correct.

Just a little cranky

2008-11-25T13:38:00.001-05:00

I'm back - thanks for waiting.

There’s a scene in Robert Greenfield’s novel, Temple (a book that was read by me and the two other people I told about it) where an elderly man returns home from morning prayers, and is asked, “Hostu gut gedavvent?” and it throws him into a reverie for a while: what does it mean to pray well?
I wondered the same thing the other day, when people asked me “how was it?” after my visit to a Famous Synagogue, well-known for the particular care it spends on orchestrating the Friday night liturgy. But hob ich gut gedavvent?, did I pray well? Hmmm. The singing was fine, thanks.
There seems to be more and more singing in synagogues these days. Rabbis like it, because it makes the customers – I’m sorry, the congregation – happy. It leads to joy, says one; it keeps them enthusiastic, says another. I still say, hmmmm.
It’s not that I’m such a purist about using the traditional melodies and modes, because I’m not really; or that I’m just cranky, which I kind of am. And it’s not only when there are some times when it seems to me that enthusiasm and joy are what you don’t want. Why, for example, do we sing what are essentially campfire songs on Tisha B’Av?
My deferral is that I’m not convinced that joy and enthusiasm are necessarily indicative of good prayer. Or that they’re even necessary to keep people involved.
People sit zazen, or work on their quads, or practice viola, or undergo psychoanalysis -they devote themselves to all kinds of activities, sometimes even paying money to do so, without looking for fun, as such. “How was your session?” “Great!! Dr. Rosenblatt had this great new Carlebach tune for ‘I think you’re avoiding thinking about your mother.’”
The thing is, we know more or less what we want from our meditation, or workout, or practice session, or even (sort of) the analysis. There is stuff we want to accomplish, and if we do, then it was a good session.
Whavtever else prayer has going against it, if you don’t know what it’s supposed to accomplish there’s no way to know if it’s being done well; there is no “done well” to measure it against. And then the liturgy will necessarily suck, because all it’s going to be is going through the motions. Not “prayer”, but “prayerism.”Singing is especially seductive because you can tell if you’ve sung well and if you’ve had a good time doing so, and the ‘service” can deliver on its promises. But not all singing is prayer, and not all prayer is singing, and if we don’t have a sense of what prayer ought to be, what it could be, that lets us know when we’re doing it right, then at some point we’re going to stop trying altogether. And we’ll look for the place with really good singing.

from the sidelines

2008-11-21T14:15:00.001-05:00

Surely the squabbling among the faithful as to whether or not Obama is a real Christian has been an important source of cheap entertainment in these otherwise bleak times. Not just because of the pleasure of watching yet another right-wing circular firing squad, but because it’s so darn fascinating. Arianism, Psilanthropism, Adoptianism. Just saying them makes you feel like a sort of Indiana Jones, and actually following the argument – is a “bridge” the same as a “mediator?” – is as much fun as any insider baseball around.

Some of the exotic attraction of this comes from the fact that there’s nothing similar in Judaism. It’s not that there aren’t a whole range of abstruse Jewish discussions on point of doctrine, it’s that no one gets particularly exercised about them. There is not going to be a discussion anywhere, for example, about whether or not Joe Lieberman’s beliefs concerning individual vs. communal judgment in the afterlife are sufficiently orthodox for him to be called Jewish.

This studied indifference isn’t just about the kinds of questions of interest only to scholars. Lubavitcher Hassidim believe that the late Rebbe is the living King Messiah, with some referring to him as “our Creator,” which puts it about as close to Christianity as you can get without the cross. Yet except for a rear-guard action among some Orthodox Jews, no one is going to start treating Chabad as beyond the pale.
Given the extent to which the Enlightenment project has succeeded, it’s inevitable that doctine doesn’t quite matter in the way it once did, and that’s undoubtedly for the good. Still, when I watch the passion of the debates over Obama’s beliefs I’m reminded of a passage from one of don marquis’ poems, in which Archy the cockroach describes watching a moth immolate itself.

myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

Monty Python and the Holy...Land

2008-11-20T14:25:00.000-05:00

You know that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Arthur has a run-in with Dennis, a politically astute peasant? I love that bit. Especially the part where Arthur is trying to explain the legitimacy of his kingship. We’ve all been brought up with the story, and we want to share in the enchantment so we kind of nod along as he describes the appearance of the Lady in the Lake, his eyes full of wonder at the memory. Sure. Magical call to rule. Works for us.

Dennis is having none of it. “If I went around saying I was an emperor because some watery bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away.”

It’s not that he’s calling Arthur’s story a lie, it’s just that it has nothing to do with him. If Arthur’s mystical vision sends him wandering around the countryside on a quest, that’s between him and the Lady. But once it involves others, there had better be a reason that makes sense to everyone. Otherwise, as Dennis says, “Come and see the violence inherent in the system.” And as much as we hate to give up the enchantment, we’ve got to agree that he has a point; a pretty clear one at that.

It’s not that clear in real life, certainly when it’s our stories at stake.

Those of us who’ll be in synagogue this week will read about Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah. This story, along with others before and after it, provides a kind of mythic compass or loadstone, aligning the Jewish imagination towards the magnetic North of sacred geography. We need our sacred stories to give us a sense of direction. So that’s cool.

But it’s not so cool when we try to use those stories the way Arthur invokes the gift of Excalabur. My teacher in these and many other things, Gershom Gorenberg, has shown what many have suspected: the entire settlement enterprise in the Territories is illegal. Not only that, but the Israeli Government has known it as long as it’s been doing it.

Imagine if we used that knowledge to frame the discussion. “Ok, here’s some land we’ve settled on that belongs to someone else. Should we build some more on it? Here are some settlements that break Israeli and international law. Should we expand them? Invest in the infrastructure.” But we don’t use that knowledge; we assert a mythic “right” to the land, which while it may be True and Certain and Holy, has the same legitimizing force as Excalabur. Is it any wonder that people look at us the way Dennis looked at Arthur?

Of course, when Arthur leaves, Dennis’ friend observes that he must, indeed, have been a king – he hadn’t got shit all over him. We should only be as lucky.

the importance of being playful

2008-11-18T23:19:00.009-05:00

As I've thought about my own teaching, and as I've watched the education my own Young Heroine has gotten, I've been more and more aware of the issue of playfulness. I'm not talking about "having fun", that should be a by-product of play. What I mean is that sense of exploration, of the negotiability of boundaries and definitions. When children play they try out possibilities, which is to say they're trying out possibilities of who they might be; and the more expansive and free-ranging their play, the greater the range of both freedom and control they have over their own identities.

And as an aside, this is not just for kids. This same sense of exploration, of messing with possibilities for the shear joy of seeing what you can come up with and trying it out, is one of the dominant features of a lot of rabbinic literature. And certainly liturgical prayer has an element of play - you try on someone else's words to see how they feel, and you try to imagine what it would be like if you were the one saying them.

Anyway, it made me really happy to read that there was a conference about the importance of play for children. With all the anxiety about scores and skills and schools, it's crucial that the schools remember that an important part of the work of being a kid is to play lishmah as they say, for the shear joy of it.

Which is why I didn't quite know where to turn when I read this:

"Among the speakers at last week's Wonderplay conference was Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a Temple University psychologist who contends that lack of play in early childhood education 'could be the next global warming.' Without ample opportunity for forms of play that foster innovation and creative thinking, she argues, America's children will be at a disadvantage in the global economy."(italics added)

That approach is, it seems to me, exactly and precisely wrong. And if one of the speakers at the conference doesn't get it, the kids are in Really Big Trouble.

Proposition 8

2008-11-17T23:11:00.003-05:00

That more people are not scandalized by the Conservative Movement's great silence on Proposition 8 is only a sign of how irrelevant we are: no one really expects to hear from us on any of the pressing moral issues. We've long since stopped making a differnce; why should anyone look to us for leadership now.

Still, the more I've thought about it the sadder I am that I didn't hear anything on it from my Chancellor or my Rabbi. And so I've been trying to imagine the sermon I would have like to have heard. I think this might have been part of it:

You know, my Judaism isn't threatened when people who have very different practices and beliefs call what they do "Jewish" and my marriage won't be threatened by my knowing that somewhere two men or two women are calling what they have a marriage. My marriage isn't threatened, my children aren't threatened, my family is not threatened by the presence of other adults trying to live as responsible caring partners. Their love will do my household no harm.

But what might threaten my marriage is my own fear. You need to be big-hearted to love well. You need to be open to your partner's strangeness, you need to be open to your children's weaknesses. To be a good lover, you have to love to be surprised.

I don't think that most of the people supporting Proposition 8 are evil people; but they are scared. They didn't ask for that fear, they didn't invite it in, but they have spread. They encourage their fear, they even celebrate it, because that's how fear works. But it's that fear that really poses a threat to our marriages, because fear tells us that surprise is bad, that difference is bad, that strangeness is bad. When we give into fear our hearts contract; they grow hard shells to keep the scary surprising strangeness out. And we become less able to love anyone with our shruken, heardened hearts.

I don't know exactly what it means to say "God wants;" I'm not even sure I know what it means to say "God". But I know that whatever it means, I have a hard time believing in a God who would rather us be small-souled. I think if God wants anything it is that we be big and as unafriad as possible, that we be brave and open and loving. And to welcome all those others who ask nothing more than to be allowed to be brave and open and loving as well.

the kindness of readers

2008-11-16T22:28:00.000-05:00

So I'm reading Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge for this dissertation I'm supposed to be working on. Her argument, briefly, is that (certain kinds of) novels have a unique role to play in moral education, in that their portrayal of finely-drawn characters in nuanced situations helps the reader develop that kind of vision necessary to a high moral imagination. Now, I'm drawn to that idea, not just because it would be helpful for my work, but because her location of the moral imagination in the ability to perceive and respond to the particular, the radically surprising nature of the individual, is one I'm very sympathetic to. But then you'd expect that novelists and critics and scholars - the closest, most careful readers - would be the kindest, or wisest, or possessed of the most generous hearts. But I've never heard that claim made. Have you? Has anyone ever said, "I was just at the MLA conference - what a bunch of sweeties" in the entire history of the Academy?
Of course I'm oversimplifying just about everything here, but still. It seems to me that calling a faculty "moral" means that it plays out in the world of human interaction. If you're still a shmuck, then whatever it is you've developed it ain't a moral imagination.

Avodah Aravit

2008-11-15T23:54:00.001-05:00

Benjamin Emanuel's outburst shouldn't end up being a problem for his son. I have this image, in fact, of Rahm and Mary Rose Oaker of the Arab-American Anti-Defamation League beginning to grow closer as they share stories about the various ways their parents have embarrassed them ("And then at my graduation party, he started making jokes about how professors never did any real work...to the dean"). It certainly doesn't reflect on Rahm, or on Obama, or really much of anything. By the time anyone even reads this post, the whole incident will be forgotten.
What should be the real story is the extent to which avodah aravit, "Arab work," has long been an Israeli idiom meaning work that was either so demeaning that only an Arab would do it, or had been so shoddily done that only an Arab could have done it. Now, this is by no means the most serious problem facing Israel, and it doesn't mean that Israel is an illegitimate colonialist puppet state or anything like that. But it means that there's a level of vulgar prejudice that his become normalized to more of an extent than most of us (= Jews of a certain kind of sensibility) would like to recognize.
Now, it's one thing for an oppressed minority to keep its spirits up, to maintain a level of self-esteem, by demeaning the oppressor. For Jews in Eastern Europe, jokes about "dumb goyim" may have had some value. But now things have changed, both in America and Israel, and cracks about non-Jews - we won't even talk about the "shv" word - have no excuse at all. Of course avodah aravit doesn't even have the excuse of being a post-ghetto atavism; it's oppressor language, pure and simple: a way of justifying exploitation by reinforcing the idea that the exploited don't deserve any better.
We've got no business talking like this. Let's cut it out.