What happens if the Sabbath is boring?

Judith Shulevitz says in her new book - and everywhere else she makes her thoughts known - that the Sabbath is an island of tranquility, balm to the torn soul, etc., etc. Yes, but what happens when the Sabbath is boring?

I wonder if the Sabbathian (that's the person who can operate within Shulevitz's permissive, suggested boundaries) has a better answer to the question than the Sabbatarian (that's a more law-bound Sabbath observer, like me). The Sabbathian can say: if you're bored, that's the point! Boredom is something modern people try to escape from, while the Sabbath reminds us that boredom is the absence of things that should not be there anyway. We should not be buzzed and pinged, and their absence should leave space for a mysterium tremendum, not a grande ennui.

But - on the other hand - maybe the Sabbatarians have a better answer. If the Sabbath is boring - well, that's your fault! (Im davar reik hu - mikem: if it's an empty thing, whose fault is that?) The point of the Sabbath is finally eschatological, not sociological. There can be societies which are just, pure, and balanced, and wholly secular, without any need whatsoever of some artificial day of rest. (Indeed, secularists in America and Israel might legitimately scoff at Shulevitz's Rousseauvian naivete.) But no society - on the mystical Jewish view - can have the piece of eternity which the Sabbath affords. Only eternity itself, which is entirely Sabbath.

If you are mystical enough, that eternity could be vouchsafed even if you are on Blogger and Twitter and all the rest of them all the time. As long as you have a direct connection Upstairs.

Life-saving duties and the "observant" doctor

In the Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society (LVII - love the classy Roman numerals!), Howard J. Apfel, a pediatric cardiologist, rabbi, and teacher at the boys' high school of Yeshiva University, presents a thoughtful and detailed article entitled "Life-saving duties on Shabbat: switching call with a nonobservant Jew."

This being an Orthodox journal, there are a number of premises I don't agree with. The first(implied but present nonetheless) is that all Jews are either "observant" or "non-observant." In reality, while Jewish religious observance is a spectrum, what the author means here by "observance" is membership in the [ultra-?]Orthodox community, which has certain sociological criteria. Thus, while I'm an observant doctor, I am not an "observant" doctor for the purposes of this article.

The second premise is that contemporary halachic decision-making must be attendant on the gnomic public pronouncements of great ultra-Orthodox rabbis. We've talked about this.

But putting those premises aside, there's something else to talk about:

"[W]hile the non-observant doctor or soldier fully intends to save life, they are also deliberately doing the prohibited actions involved [on the Sabbath] for personal gain (for example to receive their pay, or to avoid being fired or prosecuted) as well."

I won't go into the details of the halachic argument, but I will point out that the understanding of motivations here is deficient. Doctors, soldiers, and other people walk around with multiple motivations, some of them primary, some of them secondary. Some of these motivations recede into the background and on occasion cannot even be recognized by the person so motivated. But in the majority of cases, people aren't motivated this way at all! No one thinks, "I need to put in these medication orders or I won't get paid"; "if I don't go check on the patient, I'll get fired"; "if I don't put in this IV, someone will sue me successfully."

Well, maybe some doctors do, but not the good ones.

Super Jewish Historical Prediction Game, Extra-Exciting Medical Education Version
Or: Even on Saturday

Since this thread at Pensées de Gil is still inexplicably active, let me make a prediction.

If "shomer shabbos residencies" catch on within the Charedi community (the Modern Orthodox and the Conservatives really don't buy into this notion), within a short time (twenty-five years?) there won't be any primary care providers coming out of the community itself. When that happens, either the quality of primary care for Charedim will decline, or a sensible posek will discover a remarkable heter: since most internal medicine programs these days involve very sick patients (and lots of them!) for whom pikuach nefesh is always on the agenda during their hospital stay; and since not working on Shabbos would mean disorder for the medical care of that community, and since Jewish doctors are a desideratum for a Jewish community [just as every community should have at least some doctors taking care of it which share its assumptions] -- well, then somebody is going to have to try and save some people in the hospital, even on Saturday.

Shabbos Dinner

On cleaning out some files, I found this account of a memorable Shabbos dinner with some disaffected Jews, originally published in the now-defunct journal Response in 1999 or 2000. Given the recent publication of Unchosen, I thought it might of interest for some. I know you're not supposed to publish long blogposts, but I couldn't figure out what else to do with it. This is exceptionally long, though; my apologies.

I should also say that I wrote this a number of years ago; I'm posting it unedited, because it's beyond editing. I wouldn't write the same thing now, and I probably wouldn't even have the same opinions.

Let's meet some disaffected Orthodox youth.

I've been invited to a Shabbat dinner in Brooklyn Heights by my visiting friend Yosl, an ex-Hasid, nigunim instructor, and occasional pizza boy living until recently in Omaha, Nebraska.

Although language is more often context than cause, you can say that I got to know Yosl through Yiddish. I was introduced to the language in high school, when my senior English teacher – a brilliant diabetic with thick glasses, little tolerance for fools, and a limited interest in pedagogy – suggested I study Yiddish, which she knew from home, as a filler for one of my free periods. She didn’t instruct me per se, but her suggestion was enough to get me started. Some of my most productive hours of high school were spent in the back of Ms. Donsky’s German class (she knew a half-dozen languages, I think), reading the Yiddish Forward while my recalcitrant contemporaries broke their teeth on German verbs. I’m not sure what everyone else thought I was doing. (I don’t know what Ms. Donsky is doing now, either. The last I heard she was living in Ohio with her sister. I don’t think of her enough, considering the importance of what she introduced me to.)

Thus I started up the slope, wanting to learn a little bit more, then learning that extra little bit and finding that the unknown extended even farther than I had thought. I read Yiddish books voraciously through high school and college (although my academic studies were not in Yiddish). I started writing Yiddish poetry, which has been published in most of the depressingly small-circulation journals that still exist in the secular (non-Charedi) world. I am active in Yugntruf, a Yiddish-speaking young people’s organization. In short, Yiddish-language promotion and creativity is a large part of what I spend my time on.

I am not one of those who became attracted to Yiddish as a means of escape from the religious community. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there – in comfortable suburbia, away from the infighting and unreflective extremism that characterizes New York Jewry – I was exposed to a self-confident if unpunctilious brand of Conservative Judaism. My parents, themselves quite proficient in Hebrew and very knowledgeable Jews, gave me the grounding I needed pursue my Jewish education on my own.

Since high school I have become considerably more observant than my parents; in the inaccurate and obsolete taxonomy favored by mass-market Jewish publications, I am “Conservadox” – that is, on the right edge of the Conservative movement. Some might call me a “baal teshuvah” (a “returnee” to the faith), but I avoid the term due to its unpleasant connotations of blind religiosity. If I might be allowed a more flattering self-description, I try to remain within halachah – the system of Jewish law – while recognizing its inconsistencies and remaining open to necessary, modifying challenges from personal intellect and modern morality.
And that’s why I’m so involved with Yiddish. Not because the language itself embodies any exceptional qualities: Yiddish is no funnier than, say, Portugese, with all due respect to the popularity of Leo Rosten and his ilk; and it’s no guarantor of peace and love, either, having been used as a means to intolerance on both the left (Stalinist) and right (ultra-Orthodox) ends of the spectrum. But Yiddish and Yiddish-language creativity have in modern times been inextricably associated with those wrenching historical transformations which have most indelibly affected the soul and the society of the Jew: from all-encompassing religion to all-challenging urbanization; from certainty to radical doubt; from “God, Israel, and the Torah are one” to a smorgasbord of competing ideologies.

As I make my way as a Jew, I find in the history of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewry a mirror – the old kind, with a decorative frame and mottled glass – of my own doubts and internal conflicts. Knowing Yiddish also affords me an appreciation of those Jews who are modern, but in a different mode – those dissatisfied Charedim who must pass from one sort of self-denying modernity, heavily accessorized to pass for what some imagine to have been 19th-century Eastern European Orthodoxy, into another modernity, broader and more confident, stripped almost bare of myth and religion.

So I follow with eager attention the goings on of Charedi society, and the often labyrinthine tales of those who pass from it into the wider world. (Charedi is a less pejorative and foreign-sounding term for “ultra-Orthodox,” the word often favored in the press. “Chasidic” is inaccurate, since many Charedim are not adherents of Chasidic philosophy and teaching.) That’s the passage my friend Yosl is traversing. He was born in Williamsburg, studied in a number of yeshivas in Brooklyn and Israel, got married – and decided, as the culmination of many years of theological doubt, that he did not want to have kids, because he did not want to raise any children as Orthodox Jews. He left the marriage and Charedi society, moving to Omaha.

I met Yosl at a Yiddish conference in New Jersey which was held (need you ask?) on the grounds of a Catholic college. I was fascinated by his personal history and drawn even more by his flouting of the rules of polite society. At this conference there was a book fair, and a certain newly-published volume on women and Yiddish was being offered for sale and autographs by the authors. Although I ended up buying the book, I expressed to Yosl some (I thought) subtle and quiet reservations about one of the essays. Yosl turned to one of the women and said in a loud voice, “Sholem says this book is bullshit.” There are more examples.

For a time I accepted Yosl’s unsubtleties with an ignorant tolerance: he’s an ex-Charedi, and must have “trouble adjusting.” He must not “be accustomed” to the rules that we follow on this side of the Williamsburg Bridge. In short, I made allowances for him (to myself) much as I would for an autistic child.

But not too long ago a friend pointed out the obvious to me: that’s just the way he is. “He gives the rest of us ex-Os a bad name,” said my friend. “He’s only drifting because he wants to drift.” Indeed, another ex-Charedi acquaintance of mine (who left that society at 16) is a rising young film-maker, well connected to just about anyone in the world of the Jewish culturally hip. Dislocation does not mean what I thought it would mean: sometimes it’s the perfect route to creative transformation; sometimes it amplifies the banalities already present; and sometimes it makes bottomless canyons out of little cracks in the psyche.

Why did I come to this dinner? I find the ex-Charedi crowd entertaining, and I think I might learn something about today’s Jews, a group close to my heart. In the circles I travel in, I know precious few people on the fringe of Jewish society – and observing the fringe gives a sense of what makes up the whole cloth. There’s a personal reason, too. I became more observant than my parents – what is Shabbat (or Shabes) like for someone who has gone in the other direction? The back-and-forth flux from O(rthodoxy) to C(onservatism) to R(eform) is what occupies the thoughts of many American Jews. What are the facts on the well-traveled ground between them?

(Yosl’s one of those who has made the cleanest break with his past, although he does maintain contact with his parents. I’ve changed the names of everyone else I’ve mentioned here, because for some of them being mentioned in an essay like this would have serious consequences.)

I arrive before sunset (so I don’t break the Sabbath by traveling) and bring a bottle of wine. Rachel, who's a non-Jew, a German student in the YIVO Summer Program, says by way of greeting, "I'm sorry, but I'm stoned." She learned Yiddish by listening to Kol Yisrael on her shortwave radio in Berlin, and now waits tables at Tavern on the Green to earn money.

I wait for the other guests to arrive. They all have a lot in common: ex-O (for Orthodox), Yiddish-speaking, versed in the texts of traditional Jewish study (and some in worldly learning as well), jobless, and disaffected. In Yiddish you'd call them apikorsim, that is, apostates. In English you'd call them slackers.

As the guests filter in, a few of us sit in the living room. The ketoyres (pot) goes around. Yudl, who is permanently high, talks with fervent enthusiasm about last night's Bob Dylan-Paul Simon concert. "'The Boxer' is a real Chasidic song," he avers. Through the segue music-entertainment-frum entertainment the topic turns to"Handl erlekh [Deal Honestly]," a Hasidic version of "Monopoly": "You're wearing a loud red dress. Pay fifteen dollars." "You're watching television. Go to hell. Do not pass Go."

The dining room fills up. Someone starts to sing "Shalom Aleichem"; a few join in, but there are some suppressed groans, and many eyes roll. Mendl, from a Vizhnitzer family and a former student at NYU, starts opening the wine for kiddush, while Yisroel Meyer, who works in the Brooklyn public library, says, "Oh, God, I can't take this" -- meaning kiddush, which he can't handle, along with all other appurtenances of tradition.

Why is Mendl able to appropriate the ritual for his own use, while Yisroel Meyer is not? I don’t know. But I do notice that Mendl – after he executes an imperfect opening of the bottle– takes hold of a strainer and begins to extract the bits of cork that have ended up in the wine. Suddenly I speak up: “That’s borer [sorting, one of the types of labor forbidden on the Sabbath].” And Mendl in response, respectfully, even chastened: “You’re right. I forgot. Maybe you should be doing this,” he says, gesturing with the bottle towards the kiddush cup. Why did I say anything? I am not that careful with that category of forbidden labor in my own kitchen, on my own turf. Why do I feel the need to emphasize my observance, when I bear no ill will towards these Jews for leaving observance altogether?

Caleb makes hamotzi, the blessing over bread. If you hang around with Yiddishists, you know Caleb. He dresses sharp, tonight in an outfit out of a 40s' movie (white shoes, white suit, thick, black-rimmed glasses), speaks and writes a fluent Yiddish, and is a goy gomer
-- a complete non-Jew -- on both sides. Nine and a half out of ten American Jews could not make hamotzi with his poise. He teaches Yiddish and earns some money (not an independent living by any means) as a Yiddish actor and public reader of poetry and short stories.

Berl arrives, tall, thin-boned, and with the remnant of a beard, and begins to spin a tale about his supposed profession: armchair terrorism, supporting despots, counter-revolutionaries, and all those who maintain the status quo. He is clever and cynical in the nihilst mold: "The Dalai Lama is worse than the Chinese, otherwise how could he stand by and let millions of people think he's a god?" He does not expect or receive any response to this claim, nor are there any cries of outrage at his choice of “profession.” It’s like a comedy routine without the audience, or any attempt to elicit laughter. The black humor is accepted as a matter of course as the currency of the evening.

Binyomin -- a long-haired, shambling, gesticulating eccentric -- is fascinated by the work of Elias Canetti, the Nobel laureate in literature born into a Ladino-speaking family in Bulgaria, and in particular his book "Crowds and Power." In a high-pitched, excited voice, much like Yudl in ecstasy over Dylan, he starts making fun of the yeshiva students who have just returned from protest gatherings in Brooklyn or Jerusalem: "There were thousands of Jews there! Thousands of Jews!"

Says Berl about Canetti, "That's what all religion is -- a fear of dead crowds: the rebbeim, the gedolim. Men take that fear and call it tradition." This is a quintessentially Berl-like statement: cutting yet overgeneralized, dismissive, dismissable, but fascinating. What can be said against this by one whose relationship to tradition is more positive? “No, I disagree! Religion is not a transformed fear of dead crowds!”? If I were to say something like that, I would be laughed at: not out of scorn, but out of the irrelevance of an argument on the pros and cons of religion. Religion, to these Jews, is not a selection on the menu or a component of one’s ever-shifting moral autonomy, but a determinant of one’s entire surroundings. By accepting this dichotomy between “religious” and “not religious”, they are employing the worldview of the very Orthodoxy they have in greater or lesser measure escaped.

As if to underline the point, someone proposes a debate on the value of religion between the late Bertrand Russell and the late Lubavitcher Rebbe; this leads to a suggestion for an advertising campaign for Smirnoff Vodka, which the Rebbe did not live to endorse.

The conversation, whose coherence is already sorely taxed, breaks into fragments. Binyomin brings up the Kotsker Rebbe, the eighteenth-century Hasidic leader whose philosophy is considered a forerunner of existentialism. What happened on that night, the night before the Kotsker's twenty-year seclusion? Is it true that the Kotsker deliberately extinguished the Shabbat candles by throwing his hat at them from the other end of the table, crying “There is no law and no judge!”? In a long, uninterrupted monologue, Binyomin analyses the treatment of this story in the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel – a Yiddish poet, historian of Chassidism, theologian, and ideologue of the mid-20th-century Conservative movement – considers the story to be generally true, a reflection of the Kotsker’s growing internal unrest. Binyomin finds little support for Heschel’s belief.

I can’t help but see Binyomin as a gilgul of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Binyomin’s knowledge is clearly encyclopedic, and I have been told he is a marvelous writer, although I have not seen anything of his myself. He still lives with his father, in a separate room piled high with books. What sort of writer must he be? If I were to guess, I would not put him with the self-consciously rebellious, sex-obsessed “children of immigrants” (Roth et al.), nor with the modern generation (Goodman, Bukiet), surer in its Judaism but conflicted. He has the speech patterns and casts the brilliant sparks of a European master, of a Thomas Mann or a Canetti. If there were a Left Bank, a Vilna, or a Warsaw to support him, what monuments would he compose?

Or perhaps he is like Yosl, and does not wish to compose anything.

Berl says that if sleep is a sixtieth of death, and sleep is so great, then death must be a real blast. "All I need in life," he says, "is a place to sleep and some nicotine. All the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense."

Berl’s throwaway phrase (“all the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense”) means not at all what you might think it to mean out of context. “All the stuff in the Talmud” is not a dismissive wave of the hand from a college student who has taken a few “X in the Talmud” courses from the Jewish Studies professors, but a deeply felt if casually expressed declaration of rootlessness. “The stuff in the Talmud,” for much of Berl’s life, had been presented to him as “all” – and not long ago he realized that much of what he had learned did not make sense to him. It is this doubt that Berl expressed – a doubt that has been part of the Jewish makeup since Moses Mendelssohn.

I head towards the Brooklyn Bridge for the walk home to Manhattan, but somehow I get lost and fumble around in the dark byways near the bridge for the better part of an hour. By the time I get home and mount the nine flights of stairs to my dimly lit apartment (I don’t take the elevator tonight), I have lost all Sabbath rest.

I thought that Shabbat meal would be an entrée into a fascinating world of tortured, European-style struggle between the man on the street and the Jew at home. In my more self-centered moments, I even thought that we more secular-minded Yiddishists could light the flame of a Haskalah redux which would burn through the divisions between the Charedi and secular worlds. We’d produce Yiddish creativity on a par with the best of the past, lighting the way to a future both more modern and more Jewish.

It’s now been many months. Yosl lives in Moscow learning Russian and teaching some Yiddish. Mendl is back at NYU, and Caleb and I were among the teachers at a Yiddish program this past summer. I don’t know what Binyomin and Berl are doing, but I have an idea it’s about the same – working at regular jobs, finding no purchase for the traction of their intellects. I still write in Yiddish and promote the language, and I still try to follow what’s going on with the Charedim – not to enter into their world but to get a better handle on my own.

The resident at rest?
Saving lives: the Sabbath as a normal workday.

MEDICINE MENSCH: Good Shabbos, I'm Off to Work
By Zackary Sholem Berger

People outside the medical field don't understand the process by which beginning doctors are trained. Were I to start this column right off and say, "I'm interviewing for residencies now" (which happens to be true), many reading this would scratch their heads, wondering when, if ever, I'll finally finish my schooling. Let me explain.

Medical school is only the first step. A medical school graduate (which I will be this May, God and registrar willing) will get an M.D., but at that point the degree is only good for hanging on a wall, getting a nonclinical job or applying for further training. Any physician who wants to practice with a state license needs to undergo such training — in other words, a residency.

Residents are apprentices in the guild system that medicine still preserves: uniforms, vocabulary and work hours all set the doctor apart. To what extent these vestiges can be shed, without disrupting the core of the physician's identity, is a discussion that has lasted the past few decades. Uniforms (the white coats) haven't been abandoned, and medicalese is a thriving dialect. But my work hours as a resident will not be the same as the chain-gang days of old, when young doctors would stagger to and from the hospital — uphill both ways — at either end of a 36-hour shift. New York's "405 regulations," passed in the 1980s, placed restrictions on residents' total work hours and required minimum rest periods. These guidelines have now been adopted nationally, so that hospitals must now keep closer tabs on how long their residents work.

Work hours of a different sort will play a role in my decision of where to spend residency. (I'm in the middle of applying to residency programs in the subspecialty known as primary care, but I haven't yet come close to deciding where I want to be. What follows are just general principles, not pros or cons of any specific program.) The issue is this: Should I work on the Sabbath?

Most people's first response is: "But I thought doctors could work on the Sabbath." Without getting pedantic about the halachic or exegetical details of the principle, it's true that "saving a life sets aside the Sabbath," as does (broadly speaking) the treatment of a dangerously ill patient. But does doctors' work always entail saving lives? And are there Jewish reasons outside of Jewish law that might make it preferable for Jewish doctors to work on the Sabbath?

A resident doctor working in the hospital on the Sabbath does not spend all 25 hours, from Friday night to Saturday night, nimbly plucking the gravely ill from the mouth of death. Some of the time is spent dealing with busywork ("Sign this!" "Send that!" "Answer that intrusive page!"), while much of the rest is spent talking to patients, other caregivers and family members about matters that, while necessary, do not mean the difference between life and death. Not everything that a doctor does during a shift is lifesaving. This is a message reinforced by the changing work hours of medicine: If doctoring is a job like any other — with shifts, overtime and holiday bonuses — why shouldn't doctors get a regular weekend, or at least one day out of seven predictably free? In other words, the Jewish legal realities of the practice of medicine (the Sabbath "work" of the doctor is more often than not something less than lifesaving), coupled with the economic and family desiderata of the young doctor (it's nice to have some regular time off), has encouraged the development of the Sabbath-observant residency program in which residents work the same number of hours as their peers, but switch off their Friday-Saturday calls to others.

This development might be taken as a sign of the salutary tolerance that American institutions demonstrate for traditional Jewish observance, something that wasn't true in our grandparents' or even our parents' generation. I don't exactly disagree with this assessment; I find these programs to be quite attractive, and I'm applying to several of them.

But there's a downside here: Gaining your soul — not having to work on the Sabbath — might mean losing the world. Part of being a doctor is the relative cushiness of the profession itself, with its good salary and societal esteem. But part of being a Jewish doctor is something different: striking a balance between God's law and human law; between death, which might strike at any time, and the call to a life of rest and contemplation, which must be obeyed one day in every seven, lest it be snowed under by the detritus of the everyday. It's like being a religious Jew: Part of keeping the commandments is knowing when not to keep them, seeing where the boundaries are and when they might (or must not) be overstepped. How can you know what it means not to eat nonkosher food if you've never seen it on a menu? Spiritual concentration requires the rigorous exercise of contact with the nonspiritual; isolation can encourage a religiosity that does not allow itself contact with the outside world.

In short, being a Sabbath-observant resident might be the best of both worlds. But I'm not sure if a Jew is supposed to allow himself that.

Chicken soup and gefilte fish, preferably in vacuum-packed containers suitable for opening in trayf, unsanitary call rooms, may be sent, general delivery, to doctor@forward.com.

Thanksgiving leftovers
and Denver relations.

There were traditional family greetings: the opening gambit of my lawyer-philosopher uncle that he had (yet again) found a great proof for the non-existence of God (nice try!); discussions of poetry with the other uncle who was there (who also, in jovial greeting, pumped my baby's hand many times, pump-handle style, to her great amusement); my daughter's discovery of the fun that can be had with a pair of grandparents.

There were traditional activities done in non-traditional ways: a Shabbos spent at two shuls (Friday night at this shul, at whose previous incarnation my Mom and Dad were married -- it labels itself as traditional but seems to be moving ever-rightward, or, with the mechitzah height, upward; Shabbos morning with the Reconstructionists, the shul my grandmother attends).

There were activities afforded by opportunity: two Scotch-on-the-rocks at my aunt and uncle's place, part of my graduate-student mental-health regimen. (I suppose the only true guarantor of graduate-student mental health would be a fifth of Scotch, neat. But I digress.)

There was the brined turkey. I had read about brined turkeys but never yet consumed one, which I did in Denver with gusto, brio, and relish. (Not to mention panache and afan. And ganas.)

On the airplane from snowy Denver to chilly New York City, I gnawed at the turkey leftovers in satisfied fashion while our daughter slept. The woman on my left murmured, "Your baby's so good!" That was before Blanca woke up and fussed for the last forty-five minutes of the flight. Repeat after me, ma'am: Keyn eynore. Keyn eynore.

More driving on Shabbat

Last year, I wrote about the responsum of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (the law committee of the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly) which permitted driving to the synagogue on Shabbat as a method to combat the ignorance and non-observance then prevalent (in the opinion of the authors) among American Jews. My opinion, then as now, is that the teshuvah was halachically well-justified and understandable at the time, but events have not borne out the authors' approach.

A few months ago, Avi of Am Echad, in a comment which I just saw now, mentioned that he had scanned in and posted on his Web site the contents of the Spring, 2004, issue of Conservative Judaism, which includes a discussion of the teshuvah. Thanks, Avi!

So go and learn.

That was the place*

I'm back from Salt Lake City, where city blocks are 660 feet long and there's not much to do after nine o'clock at night other than send e-mail over the Internet-equipped TV in one's hotel room, a bit of backward technological wizardry that's like sending a fax by toaster. I was there for this conference. Some of the most interesting research presented there had to do with the epidemiology of New York. One abstract presented claims that educational (as opposed to, say, income) inequality is not associated with deleterious health effects at the neighborhood level. The theory, I suppose, is that a handful of PhDs benefit their environment in a way that a handful of rich folks do not. Again, this result is not to be hyped with abandon, merely chewed over and followed up on. Perhaps it might even turn out to be true.

Another study showed that high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets (and we all know which those are) might be associated with increased mortality. These and more juicy morsels of half-cooked scientific progress can be browsed (or ignored) here.

On Friday I went to Temple Square and let the Mormons try to convert me. I very much enjoyed it. How often does one have access to someone whose job it is to answer questions about their religion?

Where did I spend Shabbos, you ask? Thereby hangs a tale. I was a good boy, ideologically consistent to a fault, and called the Conservative synagogue in Salt Lake City. The friendly secretary let me know that the shul wasn't really "set up" for that sort of thing, and suggested I call Chabad. Instead, I had recourse to the hospitality of this very friendly community. Outside of New York, egalitarianism and Sabbath observance often seem to be mutually exclusive. (This is neither logically nor conceptually necessary, but it is the fact of the matter.)

Meanwhile, my friends have been keeping up their e-mails about the construction of modern Jewish culture. It's like a machine for the hands-free generation of blog posts! I'll get those out sometime, but maybe not until I'm back from Germany. (A wedding, mainly. Also, a talk in Hamburg, at the Salomo-Birnbaum-Gesellschaft, on June 30th, on today's Yiddish poetry. Books available for purchase too, of course. . .)

Didja know that folks are writing today in Yiddish? It's true, but not necessarily in the way you expected.

*"This is the place": What Brigham Young is supposed to have said as he leaned out his wagon to survey what would become Salt Lake City, otherwise known to Mormons as "Zion."

A useful mistake

The Conservative movement, or at least one of its leading figures, has characterized its most controversial psak (Jewish legal judgment) as a mistake. This is a classic case (beloved by the Jewish legal tradition) of lekhatkhilah (a priori) and bedieved (ex post facto). Given today's circumstances I would not have made such a decision, because I know how things turned out. Given the circumstances of the time, however, the decision was not unjustified. Can we call it a mistake, then? Yes, if we can do so without an air of superiority -- because it's a helpful and even an admirable mistake. The circumstances of that mistake, both at its commission and today, after the admission, can shed light on the positive and negative aspects of the Conservative movement. Perhaps if more mistakes like it were to be made, the direction of the Conservative movement could be changed for the better.

Conservative psakim are issued through the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, and it was this Committee (known to the "inside-baseball" crowd as the Law Committee, or the CJLS) which issues rulings -- and issued them in the 1950s, when the question of driving on Shabbat came up for judgment.

Only an excerpt of the psak is available on-line. (Isn't it ridiculous that the very movement which strives for a modern, open approach to halachah doesn't have the psakim of its Law Committee available on-line, in full and for free? One most console oneself with the Masorti movement's David Golinkin, whose sensible, well-researched teshuvot are worth destroying one's eyesight with PDFs that are not of the highest quality.) However, one can summarize as follows. The authors took into account the near-complete erosion of traditional Jewish religious life in considerable sections of the U.S., and in an attempt to make possible some modicum of Sabbath observance for those who would otherwise (through ignorance) be unable to observe individually, permitted them to drive to the synagogue, and there only, on the Sabbath.

From a halachic perspective, that is, if we focus our gaze only on a narrowly specified list of Shabbat prohibitions, it was a mistaken decision. (Those prohibitions are enumerated in detail in a recent Masorti responsum that comes to a different conclusion, unsurprisingly, based on the different conditions prevalent today in Israel.) But from a public-policy decision it was perfectly justified. Indeed, rare is the teshuvah (responsum) which does not have to balance Jewish laws of a smaller scale -- which is not to say minor -- against those which apply to greater numbers of people, or to entire communities. Many have said that the responsum made the mistake which Jewish law terms halakhah ve-eyn morin keyn: it is the law, but one does not rule that way. (Or as the limerick has it: "Don't shout / And wave it about / Or the rest will be wanting one too.") That is, the decision itself was justified -- it is, after all, better to drive to shul on Shabbos than to stay home and crank the stereo -- but one musn't disclose this permissibility in a public psak. This argument is unconvincing. While there was a danger -- presumably realized by the CJLS members of the time -- that the Conservative majority would interpret the ruling as permission to drive on the Sabbath, there was an equally clear and present countervailing danger: i.e. that thousands of Jews would languish in spiritual isolation for lack of means or ability to pray. The CJLS took both these sides into account, and ruled, quite reasonably, in favor of the latter consideration.

This is what happens in psak -- the delicate, tangible art of adjudication. Sometimes you get it wrong. Why is this mistake valuable? Because the Conservative movement is, I believe, the only institution which characterizes itself as halachic that can admit its mistakes. Though Orthodox rabbinical groups are wide-ranging, they are united in at least one particular: neither the adherents of Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik (the "Rav"), nor those of the Agudah, nor anyone in between would be able to say of a given psak: This is mistaken. Of course, one is allowed to follow one psak rather than other, but according to Orthodox theology (by and large) the posek (decisor) is guided by the hand of God in making his halachic decisions. That hand cannot err.

I don't know what metaphor to use for Conservative responsa -- perhaps God is the mentor rather than the guide, the parent whom the child must respect but part from in order to achieve full intellectual and spiritual development. In any case, however, Conservative rabbis are, or at least should be, more honest about the dangerous fallibility of the path they tread. The decision about driving on the Sabbath is one example. The mistake shows us what could have been achieved over the past fifty-some years, and what we should aim at in the future: self-sustaining, Sabbath-observant communities following an egalitarian, religiously open, culturally rich model, drawing from the experience of Jews from every place on the spectrum but not beholden to them. Perhaps there is still time for this in what is left of the millennium . . .

This is not to say, though, that the Conservative rabbinate is always quick to admit its mistakes. (One could of course argue that Rabbi Schorsch's speech cannot even be characterized as an institutional mea culpa, and that the CJLS, like Agudah, will never admit its own error.) But I hope that the Sabbath-driving example will be an influence on Conservative institutions to acknowledge their own fallibility. I am thinking in particular of the issue of homosexuality, which the Rabbinical Assembly and JTS have been woefully timid in addressing, for fear of offending their right wing. (Where is the halakhah that "carves through the mountain" without fear or favor?) But more on that another time.

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