arts and crafts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.