I'm giving a dvar Torah this Shabbos at my shul. I thought I would post the outline, since it includes some thoughts I'd like to work through.

צדק צדק תּרדף
Parshes Shoftim


I. Tsedek tsedek tirdof: Justice, justice shalt thou pursue!
צדק צדק תּרדף למען תּחיה וירשתּ את־הארץ אשר־ד´ אלוקיך נתן לך

A. רשי: צדק צדק תרדוף הלך אחר בית דין יפה. למען תחיה וירשת, כדאי הוא מינוי הדיינין הכשרים למען להחיות את ישראל ולהושיבן על אדמתן.
Rashi: Go after a fine beys-din . . . The appointment of proper judges is worthwhile in order to ensure life for the Jewish people and to return them to their land.

B. רמבן: . . .וטעם הכפל לומר הדיינין צריכים שישפטו את העם משפט צדק, וגם אתה צריך לרדוף הצדק תמיד שתלך ממקומך אל מקום חכמים גדולים, אחרי רבן יוחנן בן זכאי ליבנה, אחרי רבי לבית שערים. ור"א אמר צדק צדק פעמים, שירדוף אחרי הצדק שירויח בו או יפסיד, או פעם אחר פעם לחיזוק, אבל במדרשו של ר´ נחוניא בן הקנה ידרשו בו סוד, אמרו צדק זו מידת דינו של עולם . . . עם תדין עצמך תחיה, אם לאו הוא ידין עליך ותקיים בעל כרחך
Ramban: The reason for the double wording is to state that judges must judge the people with a fair judging, but you too must always pursue justice – so that you go to a place of great scholars, following after R’ Yokhanan ben Zakkai to Yavneh, or after Rabbi to Beit Shearim. . . . But in the school of R’ Nakhunya ben Hakane they commented upon this verse in the manner of “sod”, saying that “justice” is God’s attribute of justice with regard to the world . . .If you judge yourself, you will live, but if not He will judge you and the sentence will be carried out against your will.

II. The justice tug-of-war

A. On one side: the beys-din, i.e. the institutions of justice (the interpretations of Torah and its application).

i. Choose a good beys-din means both
1. constructing well-functioning institutions of justice and training administrators;
2. founding those institutions on well-grounded principles.

B. On the other side: the “you”, i.e. the community articulating these principles of justice.

i. If you judge yourself you will live, but if not . . .
1. Judging yourself means articulating principles of justice apart from administrative particulars, i.e. based on moral priorities.
2. If not: there are systems of justice (religious, national, and communal) that operate without reference to such principles (“that’s the way things are done”)

III. Conservative batei-dinim: not just for ritual purposes but for communal deliberation?

A. Led by (learned) laypeople and rabbis; egalitarian

B. Binding and non-binding decision-making

C. A Conservative but decentralized approach to halachic ajudication

Even good Homer sleeps

Though I am dust beneath the feet of Louise Glück, poetically speaking, sometimes it's good to know that even the colossian poets of our day make mistakes that are the daily burden of mere mortals. Take her poem "Prism" in the most recent issue of The New Yorker (no on-line version, I'm afraid). A long and very interesting piece, worth reading and re-reading. But in the middle is stuck the line

Marvelous things, stars.

Now, I don't mean to bark at the passing caravan of poetic greatness, carping over a misbegotten word choice, but I can come right out and call this a line begging for the eraser: it is not doing any intellectual work, nor is it bearing any of the poem's structural weight.

A friend of mine occasionally suggests to me that I read poets who are good, but not great, so that I am not overawed. Then I can notice the occasional cracks in the poetic structure or the awkward creaking of ill-chosen meter or rhyme. It's good to know, on occasion, that even the great poets can help out us lessers in that way.

Close the barn door -- the horse has run away!

It seems I squawked too late. Judging from the listing at the USCJ Book Service, the Tisha B'Av Siddur of the Rabbinical Assembly (which I wrote below was in proofs) is now a fresh-faced seyfer making its way in the world.

Does anyone want to let me know if my favorite poem figures among the contents? I know I should buy it myself, but I don't have the money to spend this week.

Buy my book!
Di Kats der Payats - The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, in Yiddish
If you prefer to read your Yiddish in Yiddish letters, as I do, go to my Yiddish blog.

The Cat is now here! Di Kats der Payats iz shoyn do!

DI KATS DER PAYATS, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss in a new
Yiddish translation, is available for purchase NOW at
www.yiddishcat.com for $15 plus shipping and handling.
Includes the eye-catching colors, illustrations, and rhyme
scheme of the original, in Yiddish letters and
transliteration (English letters), plus an alphabet chart in
the back.

See us this Sunday from 12 to 4 at the Klezmer Meets Jazz
street fair on Madison between 42nd and 57th!

DI KATS DER PAYATS, The Cat in the Hat af yidish, ken men
SHOYN koyfn af www.yiddishcat.com far 15 dolar plus
shikgelt. Dos bikhl nemt arayn di kolirn, ilustratsyes, un
gramen fun original, af yidishe un lataynishe oysyes, plus
an alef-beys-tabele bam sof.

Mir veln zayn afn "Klezmer Meets Jazz"-gasn-yarid dem
zuntik, fun 12 biz 4, af Medison-evenyu tsvishn 42ste un
57ste gasn. Khapt zikh tsu tsu undzer tish!

Di kats der payats
Iz shoyn do mit gramen.
Er vil me zol koyfn
un leynen tsuzamen.

There once was a Cat.
His hat was divine,
but Seuss-rhyming Yiddish?
He hadn't the time.

Vu koyft men? A shayle?
Ot zogt undz der lets:
"S'iz www.yiddishcat.com
afn oylem-hanets!"

But Di Kats der Payats?
Right out of the box
He speaks mame-loshn!
He changes your lox!

"S'iz nor fuftsn dolar
plus shikgelt. Ir hert?
A vilde metsie!
S'iz keday un s'iz vert!"

He ticks off your fish!
Your rake is long gone!
Just $15 plus shipping
at www.yiddishcat.com.

Git do oybn a klik.
Koyfts yidn, un koyft!
Nisht rut zikh, nor aylt zikh!
Nisht vart tsu, nor loyft!

Support feline Yiddish.
Come buy it! Why not?
You'll like it just fine.
You'll love it a lot.

DI KATS DER PAYATS
The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, in Yiddish

To: The Compilers of the Siddur Tisha-b'Av by the Rabbinical Assembly
Re: The awful poem "Poland", by Menachem Rosensaft, mistakenly included in the siddur

My synagogue has had the good fortune, over the past couple of years, to pilot the new Siddur Tisha-b'Av of the Rabbinical Assembly (the rabbis' guild of the Conservative movement). I say "good fortune" not just because the siddur is a worthwhile endeavor, with many good points, but because it gives me the chance to be a kol koyre, a voice crying in the wilderness, warning against certain parts of this new publication that are a Really Bad Idea. Since people are more likely, as a rule, to engage in lukewarm praise than in honest and well-founded criticism, I will try to confine myself to the latter in what follows.

The major innovation in the siddur is the section entitled "Contemporary Poetry." This is a great idea. While the particular styles of the medieval kinot are obsolescent (or, as I like to hope, merely dormant and waiting for their poetic redemption), the art of Jewish poetic dirge continues into the modern age. This makes it all the more important for a prayerbook to navigate the straits of poetic ignorance. On the one hand, there's the Scylla of Artscroll, confusing dignity with dullness and rendering every translation in a style reeking of must and mothballs. On the other hand, there are those translators (and poets) who seem to think that poetry is either chopped-up prose with bits of self-confession thrown in, or mawkish and fumbling attempts at rhyme.

Unfortunately, those of us who have idly leafed through Conservative siddurim and machzorim during the occasional sub-par derashah (sorry, rabbis!) know that the Rabbinical Assembly is the Charybdis hinted at above. A certain type of Conservative Jew (all right, me and my friends), who actually bothers to read the prayerbook, can recite some examples of the "art" of the Conservative siddur-translator, starting with the noble effort from the High Holiday machzor (paraphrased, I fear; where's an on-line version when you need one?):

Enemies have pursued me, fast and fleet,
But none pursue me faster than my own feet.

I could go through Sim Shalom and point out similar guffaw-inducing sins of perdition, but I need to get to bed eventually. What I want to talk about here are two mistakes in the new siddur: a small error of translation and an almost unforgivable sin of poetic selection.

After Tisha B'av minchah is inserted a small section dealing with Naomi Shemer's song Jerusalem of Gold. Very nice, except when you get to the song itself and its translation, the two words "meyayelot rukhot [the winds wail, or ululate]" is rendered as "Winds meow"! Unless it's supposed to rhyme with "Jericho" two lines later (which would be even worse), I don't understand this choice. Are winds ever said to meow? What does this word do for the style or sense? This seems to be the work of a translator who thinks that any quirky, well-meant word will do.

The greater and infuriating mistake is in the choice of poetry in the Contemporary Poetry section, the poems in which seem to have been slapped together without a unifying organization. There's the translation by Y.L. Gordon of a poem by Byron, raising two questions. First, what's the point of a Hebrew translation? To justify the poem's inclusion in a siddur? To show that Hebrew poets have translated Byron? Second, a friend of mine points out that the poem is really meant ironically, and its treatment of the Jewish elegy is perhaps not to be taken at face value.

After a selection from "Ir HaHareigah" by Bialik (a good and obvious choice) and a poem by Uri Tzvi Greenberg (another good choice, though the poet's Yiddish work is inexplicably ignored in the biographical note), we get a poem so bad it leaves one breathless with horror. Written by a fellow by the name of Menachem Rosensaft, irrelevantly identified as "founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors", the poem, called "Poland", is a crude obscenity with no place in any publication. I speak this strongly because a bad poem in a siddur, and especially a bad poem that purports to be "about" the Jewish experience in the Holocaust, is immoral. It cheapens the language that is the currency of prayer, pollutes the clarity of sentiment and thought that should motivate us on a fast day, and desecrates the memories that Rosensaft has exploited in the poem.

My theory (since you asked!) is that this poem was included in the section in lieu of a Yiddish poem. Indeed, the lack of any poetry in Yiddish in this siddur is deafening. I would love to give the Rabbinical Assembly the benefit of the doubt and explain away this mistake as due not to any anti-Yiddish hostility, but to simple ignorance. But I can't: did none of the compilers know about David Roskies, one of the world's foremost authorities on Yiddish literature, who works in the same building? He would have told them that the shelves of a Yiddish bookcase, to our great tragedy, groan with the volumes of catastrophe and Holocaust poetry by such masters as Sutskever, Glatshteyn, Katsnelson, and Grade, not to mention the work by poets of our own day.

I don't know who of the Conservative movement will read this blog. Perhaps no one. But there might be a chance that this cry of offense and aggrievement, if taken up by enough people, might convince the Rabbinical Assembly to remove this text from the siddur. I realize that few of the blogreaders have a copy of the siddur, which is still in proofs. However, I fear that the siddur is close to its final version, and therefore I am willing to take the risk of sounding the alarm as loud as possible.

Although I haven't had time to work on anything long and interesting enough to post, I would like to make a note about the sort of things I would like to write about in the future. (Though I love you all, blogreaders, I must admit that I would prefer to have my thoughts published in traditional print media.)

1. The mechanisms of prayer. What's really going on when a person prays? God can't reasonably be expected to change the natural order, or give presents, as tokens of his gratitude or in exchange for the act of prayer. Neither is prayer by itself a miraculous act sufficient to cause such non-transcendent actions by a Deity. Perhaps we can understand it psychologically, i.e. as a sort of disciplined, regular talking-to-oneself. For that we'd need to understand why talking to oneself might be valuable, and (if God enters sensibly into prayer) how God would enter into or respond to prayer as talking-to-oneself.

2. The mechanism of psak. What happens when a rabbi judges a question of Jewish law? According to the Orthodox conception, a rabbi has a connection to the Divine will through his adjudication in a way that another Jew does not. I don't find this reasonable, for various reasons I won't go into here. I think it's more likely that a rabbi's adjudications are acceptable because of his or her expertise in the field. How does this expertise differ from that of someone in another field, say a physician?

If anyone has any ideas on this score, shout them out. My thought processes operate pretty slowly.

My friend Rebecca Boggs sent me by e-mail another comment on my intermarriage piece. I've slightly edited it.

First of all, there's the question of what "intermarriage" means. If the non-Jewish partner converts before marriage, it's not intermarriage from the perspective of Jewish law, and the household created by that marriage is one committed unequivocally to Jewish life. At the same time, though, the larger family life of couples where one member was not born Jewish, whether or not that person has converted, demands that they and their non-Jewish relatives confront (and try to be sensitive to) differences in religion and observance among their family members. None of this necessarily has much of an effect on the Jewish continuity issue--the main hot-button one for those concerned with intermarriage--but for those of us with spouses, parents, and other family members not born Jewish, it's something we can't ignore.

Mike [Rebecca's husband] converted before we got married, so we're not intermarried; my father didn't, so my parents are intermarried. But in each case the bride's family is Jewish and the groom's family is not, so those family issues remain very similar. And, in fact, though Mike and I had known each other for 10 years before we got married, for the first 9 of those 10 years it had been clear that any family I had would be a Jewish one, but neither of us expected Mike to convert -- no doubt in large part because I had grown up with a well-functioning model of how to have a Jewish family with a supportive non-Jewish spouse.

I suppose it's also interesting to consider how little difference it has made on the halakhic/Jewish continuity level that Mike converted and my father didn't. (It's true that my Jewish life was radically changed by Mike's conversion, in that we both became much more knowledgeable, involved, and observant, but that's not to say it's the only road to those ends: my mother's Jewish life was comparably altered by going to synagogue daily to say kaddish for her father.) I can't say that would be the case if they'd been non-Jewish women marrying Jewish men, which I think points up an often-hidden double standard in considerations of both intermarriage and conversion: how is the matter treated differently depending on whether the non-Jewish partner is a man or a woman? Halakhically, there's much less pressure on men to convert, because their children will be Jewish whether or not they do so.

But this also goes back to Darcy's comments on the error of viewing the non-Jewish partner's conversion as an all-or-nothing one-time issue to be considered only before the wedding: there's no halakhic reason a non-Jewish woman who's ready to raise her children as Jews, but not necessarily ready to convert, can't have them taken to the mikvah to ensure their Jewish status in movements that don't recognize patrilineal descent, or, if that hasn't been done, that those children can't/shouldn't do so themselves when older. I think those sorts of matters would also be made easier if the American Jewish community were able to change the tone of its rhetoric on intermarriage, Jewish continuity, and "who is a Jew?". I feel that the language of citizenship rather than that of identity politics is both more appropriate and less inflammatory: instead of saying, "If you don't convert, your children won't really be Jewish," or "because your mother's not Jewish, you're not really Jewish," I wish we would recognize the connections you've suggested in your essay by saying "We understand that you are part of our community even if you have not halakhically become part of the Jewish people" (to a non-Jewish spouse) or "you have been raised as and living as a Jew, but you will need to take certain steps to normalize your status in movements that do not accept patrilineal descent" (to the child of a non-Jewish mother)...

I think I'll more or less leave it at that for now, but I can't resist adding the incident I found most ironic/least persuasive in my young life in convincing me of the evils of intermarriage--a classic case of treating it "as an excuse for institutionally pious rhetoric." You were spared it, since your parents wisely saw to it that you didn't have to have anything to do with AJ's "Confirmation Class" [AJ = Adath Jeshurun, my and Rebecca's home shul in Louisville, KY] (but don't get me started on "Confirmation" as an ersatz Jewish ritual...). The last few months of the Confirmation Class involved sessions on various topics where all of the students and their parents were supposed to meet together at someone's home. The session on interdating and intermarriage was the last one (as well as, in my book, the last straw...) and perhaps only five or six of the students (half or less of the total) had come. There I was, a product of intermarriage, sitting there with my intermarried parents, listening to other parents offer unconvincing platitudes about why you should only date or marry Jews: "relationships are hard enough; it's better to be with someone who's more like you." "More like you?" I thought, looking around the room. These people are not like me! Mike is like me! And he's not Jewish!

Basically, it made no sense whatsoever in my conception of myself to think of Jewishness as the most important category of likeness or difference. I made some comment to this effect to my mother when the group broke for snacks, and she asked, "But would you convert to another religion to marry someone?" I thought it was somewhere between ridiculous and offensive that she should even ask such a thing, even as a rhetorical question. Absolutely not! Being Jewish was important to me, and anyone who wanted to be with me would have to recognize that fact. But she of all people should know that such a person need not be Jewish himself.