A New York curiosity

Even though I know nothing about phonology, I enjoy reading phonoloblog. I e-mailed the proprietor with a question that's been bugging me, especially since I'm going to be moving to the Lower East Side sometime during the next few months.

I live in New York City, and there's a street on the Lower East Side called East Broadway. (This is not the same as the more famous Broadway, where "the neon lights are bright," etc.) I have noticed that most native Lower East Siders pronunce the name East BroadWAY, that is, with the accent on the second syllable of Broadway, while they pronounce the name of the Great White Way this way: BROADway, with the accent on the first syllable. Do you have any guesses why this might be so? Thanks.

I got the following prompt response:

Hi Zackary,

The word "broadway" is a two-syllable compound composed of a one-syllable adjective ("broad") and a one-syllable noun ("way"). Compounds like this are always accented on the first syllable in English, and this is one of the ways in which they are distinguished from regular adjective-noun combinations. For example, the phrase "black board" is accented more on the second word "board", and can refer to any board so long as it is black in color. The compound "blackboard", on the other hand, is accented more on the first syllable "black", and refers to a special type of board (the kind that you write on with chalk), and it may be of any color -- there are also green blackboards, for instance.

If the distinction between "East BroadWAY" and "BROADway" by Lower East Siders really is as consistent as you say, these speakers may just be using this as a way to clearly distinguish the two street names in their speech, since one is better known to them and the other is better known to most other people. I would think the extra word "East" would be sufficient to do that, but perhaps not.

That's just a guess. It's an interesting question, and probably one that is best answered by a Lower East Sider.

-- Eric

So how about it? Any LESers past or present want to chip in with agreements, disagreements, or folk etymologies?

*

By the way, I have another piece in the Forward, a short profile of Aaron Lansky on the occasion of his new book.

Pollution and cancer in China

The recent article in the Times is harrowing, starting from its title. But the scientific questions it raises are just as important as the sympathy and disquiet it evokes. There are two issues here. First, what is the relationship between the recent increased pollution in rural China and cancer rates (or death rates due to cancer) in those regions? Secondly, apart from the epidemiologic facts, why are the people interviewed in the article so sure that they have cancer?

A brief, incomplete survey of the epidemiologic literature (oh, let me come clean here: I just went to Medline, typed in "China+epidemiology+pollution," and read a bunch of abstracts. It's Google for epidemiologists!) indicates both rather more and less than is pointed to in the Times. The rural residents complain of gastric and other GI cancers, and the available literature (much of which is, not surprisingly, available only in translated abstracts of Chinese-language articles) points to increased rates of esophageal cancer after exposure to polluted water. (I should note that the tricky part of epidemiology is figuring out the contribution of many different factors. "Correlation does not imply causation" might be tattooed on the body of every epidemiologist.)But there are also a number of articles which point to a broader array of deleterious effects, from nasopharyngeal cancer to hepatitis B infection (which can lead to primary liver cancer). A few studies, as well as the Times article, mention what would seem to be a more acute endpoint: frank toxicity due to astronomical levels of various toxins, effluents, and general nasty chemicals in well- and riverwater.

The Times article implies that the rise in cancer rates due to pollution is a recent phenomenon, of the past couple of decades. I think this is true in a sense, but the sense was corrupted due to necessary abridgment for journalistic purposes. The course of events probably goes something like this: over the past few decades, maybe since the economic liberalization that was allowed during the 70s and 80s (my Chinese history is weak, but I think this is right), industrial activity has produced and allowed widespread pollution. This pollution has indeed led to increased cancer among rural Chinese -- but only because rural Chinese are living longer (due to improved nutrition and hygiene) and are thus able to develop cancer during their additional lifespan. In these polluted rural areas, it's only over the past decade or so that these cancer cases have reached a critical mass that can't be ignored.

Another possibility is that these diseases among rural Chinese, though probably to be laid at the feet of polluters (and the Chinese public-health establishment, necessarily weakened by totalitarianism -- cf. the recent SARS mess), are also caused by simple toxicity due to the ingestion of a high concentration of pollutants.

This is just rank speculation, of course, but it's speculation that I would bet Chinese public-health workers and epidemiologists have to engage in, to decide whether cancer is, in fact, pandemic in rural China and what to do about it (besides, obviously, cracking down on pollution).

* * *

It's not clear from the article in the Times that the people interviewed do in fact have cancer. (They are horribly ill, but it's not apparent from what.) I think that in some cases they might be extrapolating from changing causes of death among people they know. As the Chinese get richer, their causes of death may shift from infectious diseases (with which many rural Chinese may already be acquainted) to the so-called "diseases of affluence" -- heart disease, stroke, and cancer. As it turns out, the Chinese Red Cross recently released a study of widespread ill-health among urban Chinese. [Strangely enough, the study isn't mentioned on the CRC's Web site. Maybe it's on the Chinese site -- can anyone tell me?]

* * *

China's the most populous country in the world, with huge populations that are urban, rural, urbanizing, or migrating from city to country. I hope China deals with its public health problems in a way that will serve as a model for other systems.

Put the tsedek in tzedakah

My friend Mike Wenthe, a faithful reader of and sharp commenter on this blog, sends along a Darfur appeal:

Leslie Brisman, professor of English and a friend of ours, sent out a charity appeal in lieu of his usual Rosh ha-Shanah card, and I immediately thought of your series of posts about the situation in Darfur and the potential for your website to get the word out about relief efforts. Here's a quotation from Leslie's letter:

"Declarations are important. But is acknowledging genocide fulfilling our obligation to witness, to act in the spirit of 'Never Again!'? Who is doing something about this? Save the Children is there, has been there and is going to keep working in North, West, and South Darfur.

The organization has now launched an appeal for $4.6m to further its food, security, nutrition, health, child protection, water, and sanitation activities."

Leslie then says that he's appealing to 100 friends in hopes of getting at least 36 responses ("the traditional minimum, in Jewish tradition, to 'save the world,'" he writes). He's asked us to send checks to him, made out to Save the Children, before Yom Kippur if possible. Why do I tell you this? Because you're the only other person I know personally who has been talking about Darfur, believe it or not! And it may be that you, too, could send out a call for another group of lamed-vavniks to put the tsedek in tsedakah during these High Holy Days.

Besides Save the Children, there are a number of other organizations doing work in Sudan, or aiding other groups' work, including the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief and Concern. Anyone interested in contributing to Leslie's fund, please write me and I'll furnish you with his address.

And, with that, let me wish a gut gebentsht yor -- a wonderful 5765 to all regular readers, occasional guests, and misdirected Googlers! May you all be posted in the blog of life.

A hive of bloggers buzzing

A refreshing realization: the blogosphere can be as self-important as any other medium.

Putting words in his mouth

My latest for the Forward: Letting Loose the Golem on Society's Dilemmas.

How do you say "American" in Jewish?
It's Arrival Day, everybody! Unpack your luggage!

American Jewry is a many-layered thing. Even limiting myself to prescriptivism and staying away from historical prediction, I could still talk about any number of issues that are burning a hole in my tallis: tracing a route between assimilation and fundamentalism; Jewish poverty and public health; what sort of Jewish school I hope against hope will exist by the time my daughter's old enough to attend.

Today, though, I'll finish up by talking about Jewish languages.

Ashkenazic Jewry (of which most American Jews are descendants) has through its long history been characterized by what's been variously termed "internal bilingualism" (Weinreich) or trilingualism (Dovid Katz) - Yiddish as the vernacular, and both Yiddish and Hebrew/Aramaic as written (and to some extent spoken) languages.

Such diglossia is a thing of the past for American Jews. The Chasidim and us wacky Yiddishists aside, American Jews speak, read, and write only English. (Immigrants from Israel are a special case.) This is not surprising -- such language shift happened long ago in Western Europe, and (some argue) was in full swing in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

What's relevant to American Jews in particular is that the language to which most of us have assimilated is -- English. We speak the world's most widespread language, and, thus, the world's most widespread Jewish language. (Two Jews meeting on the street who know only that the other is Jewish, but not what language she speaks, would understand each other most reliably in English.)

What does this mean for us? Recall what I posted earlier from Michael Walzer on pluralism in America -- political allegiance is shared, while cultural specificity is manifold. I think the same model can and should be applied to us American Jews. English is our own much as it is the world's language, but it is not by any stretch our only language. It is in the best interests of the English speaking world to make it possible for smaller languages to continue to exist. Similarly, the Anglophone, American Jewish establishment should see that it is in our best interest as Jews to preserve a linguistic-cultural mix that has been our content and context since our earliest days.

This mix is difficult to specify, and it must, of course, change with the priorities of the community. But a mix should always be available. (This is something that was suggested by Amnon Ophir, the principal of Prozdor when I was teaching there. For various reasons he was not able to follow up on it.) American Jews should be able to receive education in a Jewish literary or spoken language, whether it be loshn-koydesh, Ivrit, Yiddish, Ladino, or some other tongue. Such availability should not depend on ideological stance or political fashion: if I want to learn any Jewish language, I should not be told (or signalled by the absence of institutional funding) that other languges are more appropriate for study. Of course, most will want to study loshn-koydesh or Ivrit, but who knows what sorts of broadening a greater spectrum might foster?

Apartment for sale!

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Great light; Juliet balconies; floor-to-ceiling windows; great closets; hardwood floors; remodeled kitchen; raised living room; dishwasher; 24-hour doorman; elevator; roof deck; laundry on every floor; bike storage area; potential for further storage in basement; no dogs

The seller reserves the right to accept or reject any offers. Floorplan available on request.

What Jewish culture is: a modest proposal

There have been a number of posts on this blog about Jewish culture -- it's high time we try to define it. (Yet another topic that's relevant in the run-up to Arrival Day 2004.)

0.1. Jews are those who define themselves as such.

0.2. Culture encompasses any product meant to inform, entertain, inspire, horrify, etc.

1.0. Jewish culture is culture produced by a Jew or meant predominantly for Jews.

Corollary 1. Not everything created by those of Jewish parentage, or those who others recognize as Jewish, is necessarily Jewish culture.

Corollary 2. Not everything created in a Jewish millieu, or in a Jewish state, is necessarily Jewish culture. For example, not every cultural product of the State of Israel is Jewish merely by virtue of being Israeli.

Corollary 3. Not everything that meets the criteria above for Jewish culture is necessarily Jewish themed, or concerns itself mainly with traditionally Jewish topics.

I don't mean to say that this is the best or even the only plausible definition of Jewish culture. Heck, people might prefer not to define it at all, since (I'm guessing) that might tamper with its indefinable whatness. Me, though, I think it's more helpful to try to stake out our positions on the issue. For example, the definition I suggest here is reasonably conservative, and possibly helpful, when treating 19th and 20th century cultural products: musical compositions, novels, poetry, political treatises, music-hall banter, and the like. Many of these can be traced to individuals, who in turn generally possess some sort of self-identity, Jewish or no. This definition fails when we ask, say, whether CNN is Jewish.

Perhaps I can rephrase. I'm trying to understand what it means when we talk about American Jewish culture. One popular route is to say that all American culture, since it has benefited so substantively from the Jews, is in some sense Jewish. I say, yes, but in a way that's so broad as to be rather unhelpful. Another is to say that Jewish culture necessarily involves Jewish languages or traditionally Jewish themes (Jewish religious texts, halachah, etc.). But I find this too narrow. To take a non-American example, many readers find Kafka to be "intuitively" Jewish (even if they have at best a foggy notion of his own ethnic allegiances).

This definition is not primarily meant to say who's in or who's out, but to help me draw comparisons and contrasts between similar sorts of cultural creations.

Postscript: I corrected a couple of egregious stylistic and factual errors on the basis of some helpful comments.

Soft-drink science

The JAMA site seems to be down, so I can't go read the much-ballyhooed (and disagreed-with) article about the influence of soda on type 2 diabetes. (Not that I particularly want to go read it; how many Nurses Health Study articles can one go through in a lifetime? Plus the hypothesis seems boring.)

Different claims about this research have been made by quarreling bloggers and media types. Without scrolling down to the bottom of this post, can you guess which of these claims are contradictory?

1. Soda is associated with an increased rate of type 2 diabetes.

2. Not all relevant confounders were controlled for in the study in question.

3. The current study contradicts a previous study.

4. The current study was properly conducted according to current standards of epidemiologic practice.

5. Soda should be avoided by those with other risk factors for diabetes.

6. Any number of other unhealthful foods would yield the same risk increase for type 2 diabetes.
7. The risk increase is small.

8. The risk increase is statistically significant.

9. The risk increase does not seem to warrant a broad-based campaign to stop soda drinking.

Do you want to know the answer to the trick question? It's not a surprise: none of these statements are mutually exclusive! In fact, I think all of them are true.

What should the American Jewish community look like?
Thoughts before Arrival Day

In the run-up to Arrival Day 2004, The Head Heeb has been productively speculating about the future of American Jewry. I think it’s also necessary to engage in some exhortation. How should the American Jewish community reframe itself in the next 350 years – or the next 50? Of course the next decades will bring uncontemplated changes, but that’s a truism. No one can foresee the future – even the Biblical prophets did not have that as their main charge. Rather than reacting to unforeseen changes, let’s imagine an American Jewish community we would like to live in.

To that end, I want to address something that’s been missing from Jonathan’s posts: some understanding of how Jews, or any other ethnic-religious group, fit into American society. With such an understanding we can more clearly lay out what we would want our community to look like.

My wife recently got me a copy of Michael Walzer’s What It Means To Be An American, a slim collection of eloquent essays which treats the relationship between our patriotism and civic virtue (national and public) and religious, ethnic, and cultural allegiances. In his essay “Pluralism: A Political Perspective,” first published in 1980, Walzer makes some observations worth quoting at length.

The growth of state power sets the stage for a new kind of pluralist politics. With increasing effect, the state does for all its citizens what the various groups do or try to do for their own adherents. It defends their rights, not only against foreign invasion and domestic violence, but also against persecution, harassment, libel, and discrimination. It celebrates their collective (American) history, establishing national holidays; building monuments, memorials, and museums; supplying educational materials. It acts to sustain their communal life, collecting taxes and providing a host of welfare services. The modern state nationalizes communal activity, and the more energetically it does this, the more taxes it collects, the more services it provides, the harder it becomes for groups to act on their own. State welfare undercuts private philanthropy, much of which was organized within ethnic and religious communities; it makes it harder to sustain private and parochial schools; it erodes the strength of cultural institutions.

All this is justified, and more than justified, by the fact that the various groups were radically unequal in strength and in their ability to provide services for their adherents. Moreover, the social coverage of the ethnic communities was uneven and incomplete. Many Americans never looked for services from any particular group, but turned instead to the state. It is not the case that state officials invaded the spheres of welfare and culture; they were invited in by disadvantaged or hardpressed or assimilated citizens. But now, it is said, pluralism cannot survive unless ethnic groups, as well as individuals, share directly in the benefits of state power. Once again, politics must follow ethnicity, recognizing and supporting communal structures.

What does this mean? First, that the state should defend collective as well as individual rights; second, that the state should expand its official celebrations, to include not only its own history but the history of all the peoples that make up the American people; third, that tax money should be fed into the ethnic communities to help in the financing of bilingual and bicultural education and of group-oriented welfare services. And if all this is to be done, and fairly done, then it is necessary also that ethnic groups be given, as a matter of right, some sort of representation within the state agencies that do it.

[. . .]

America’s immigrant [and religious-cultural: ZB] communities have a radically different character [than their counterparts in other countries]. Each of them has a center of active participants, some of them men and women who have been “born-again,” and a much larger periphery of individuals and families who are little more than occasional recipients of services generated at the center. They are communities without boundaries, shading off into a residual mass of people who think of themselves simply as Americans. Borders and border guards are among the first products of a successful national liberation movement, but ethnic assertiveness has no similar outcome. There is no way for the various groups to prevent or regulate individual crossings. Nor can the state do this without the most radical coercion of individuals. It cannot fix the population of the groups unless it forces each citizen to choose a single ethnic identity and establishes rigid designators among the different identities, of a sort that pluralism by itself has not produced.

[. . .]

The survival and flourishing of such groups depends largely upon the vitality of their centers. If that vitality cannot be sustained, pluralism will prove to be a temporary phenomenon, a way-station on the road to American nationalism. The early pluralists may have been naïve in their calm assurance that ethnic vitality would have an enduring life. But they were surely right to insist that it should not artificially be kept alive, any more than it should be repressed, by state power. On the other hand, there is an argument to be made, against the early pluralists, in favor of providing some sorts of public support for ethnic activity. It is an argument familiar from economic analysis, having to do with the character of ethnicity as a public good.

Individual mobility is the special value but also the characteristic weakness of American pluralism. It makes for loose relations between center and periphery; it generates a world without boundaries. In that world, the vitality of the center is tested by its ability to hold on to peripheral men and women and to shape their self-images and their convictions. These men and women, in turn, live off the strength of the center, which they to not have to pay for either in time or money. They are religious and cultural freeloaders, their lives enhanced by a community they do not actively support and by an identity they need not themselves cultivate. . . . Nor is there anything unjust in their freeloading. The people at the center are not being exploited; they want to hold the periphery. Freeloading of this sort is probably inevitable in a free society.

Some observations on this excerpt of Walzer’s essay. First, it seems unlikely that large-scale government support of ethnic-religious groups, such as the author envisions, will become a reality anytime soon. In the absence of this support, and accepting as plausible Walzer’s account of the “center” and “periphery” of the Jewish community (in our case), we should try to propose an American Jewish communal structure which broadly speaking does the following:

1. Funnel funds away from those Jewish communal services which, as Walzer points out, are better, more consistently, and more equitably provided by Federal, state, or local governments, including anti-discrimination and –defamation organizations; welfare; and education. (Not every school which defines itself as Jewish is equally worthy of Jewish communal support.)

As a corollary, the American Jewish community should try to sharply define the limits of its support of Israel, so that this support is justifiable in broader Jewish terms. That is to say, the American Jewish community should attempt to provide for Israelis services which are not being provided by the Israeli government, or which are not being provided in Jewishly defensible ways.

2. Use communal funds (and, it goes without saying, Jewish intellectual and spiritual creativity of the past and present) to emphasize those Jewish cultural and religious institutions which can reinforce the center while attracting, however intermittently, the periphery.

3. Construct a model of American Jewishness which recognizes that communal Jewish interests will not necessarily overlap, and might at times even contradict, broadly civic interests in the well-being of American society at large.

More on this in a future installment, starting with a stab at the notion of Jewish culture in general and American Jewish culture in particular: what they are and what they are not.

When you do things you don't mean to do
Or, the philosophy of Elul.

In this month preceding the Jewish High Holidays, when questions of responsibility and (lack of) deliberation come to the fore, a recent paper by two Australian philosophers is worth a look.

The authors attempt to justify our intuition that deliberative and non-deliberative acts should be morally evaluated in different ways. On their way there they suggest four classifications of human actions, "agency," in the language of philosophy. In deliberative agency, we reflect on what we ought to do. In conscious agency, we are aware of what we are doing, though not deliberative. Automatic agency involves a "reduction of the experience of doing," for example, as in over-learned actions like driving a car, in which one is fully conscious in general but not specifically conscious of the action itself. Automatistic agency, by contrast, involves a class of conditions in which one is not fully conscious of what one is doing, either "globally," involving the whole body, as in trance states, sleep walking, etc., or "locally," as in anarchic hand syndrome.

Is one to be held morally accountable only for deliberative acts? The answer is more complicated than a simple "yes." However, about the strong connection between accountability and deliberation that most of us intuitively know to be true, the authors say

"Even if deliberation (or the opportunity for it) were to correlate perfectly with moral accountability, we would want to know why this was so. One possibility is that deliberation is important in its own right. While this is a possible position, it seems implausible to us."

To this layperson it seems very plausible, especially this month. It is our reflective decision to act rightly which makes our right action traceable to us, our own unique moral creation.

A Mountain That One Cannot Fall Off
Bob Rosenthal, a poet and a fellow member of Town and Village Synagogue, had a ceremony this past Shabbat marking his adult bar-mitzvah. In his speech (below), Bob explains what it means to be an adult bar-mitzvah, how he became more observant, and his own continuing spiritual struggle as part of a community.

Today I am a family.

I am a family that gives comfort to one another. A family that meets for minyan. A family that prepares food. A family that visits the sick. A family that buys books for each other. A family that gathers on cold nights to learn the words of sages. A family that comes to your home when you grieve.

Today completes a vow I made in 1963 when I became 13. I vowed to someday become a bar mitzvah. Although synagogue life and Jewish home practice were unknown to me in my childhood, I experienced twinges to learn what Judaism was about. But I forgot about that vow. It was the vow ten years later that my new father-in-law, Aaron, made me give while we slipped under his dining room table. It was Seagram’s VO that put us there. He made me promise that my children would be more Jewish than I was. This was an easy promise to keep. Kids were not on the horizon. Again that vow was forgotten till kids did come and my wife said, “Let’s look for Hebrew schools.” I finally decided to come into this synagogue and found Kabalat Shabbat. I loved all the divine mumbling. The language was a family of sounds that tribally resonated and held me to their sway. Hit-or’ri Hit-or’ri -- “Awake and arise,” we sing to open Kaballat Shabbat in “L’kha Dodi.” Isaiah’s visions of Jerusalem clothed in splendor from today’s reading greeted me on my first visit to a service! I employed an oft-used method of learning called osmosis. I soaked up tunes and customs, and slowly made inroads into Hebrew and doing mitzvot. I have joy to be among family. Thank you -- all of you: Cantor Postman, Rabbis Siebert and Sosland, Teachers Pollack and Green, holy prodders Nauen and Oliver. I am grateful to my birth family who has traveled from afar and to my found family who is always here for me. And there is one someone who led to me her father’s challenge, and led me to this shul and bore us children who preceded me to this bima -- I could love no one if I did not love Rochelle Rose so.

As I began to feel the desire to read Torah and contemplated the possibility of becoming a bar mitzvah, I hesitated because of anger over my lack of Jewish education. However, as Jean Luc Goddard wrote in his recent movie Elegy for Love, “Sometimes we outlive our problems.” Today is my 54th Jewish birthday. My solar birthday is in the dog days of summer. Everyone is somewhere else. But the 4th of Elul is an appointment everyone has to keep. The Shofar blows and the time has come. Time to awaken the peacemakers in the family of who we are. Isaiah proclaims, “I am he I am he who consoles.”

The portion of Isaiah we read today is the fulcrum of the seven haftorot of consolation. The month of Elul has begun and heralds the high holidays in the next moon. Last month, Rochelle and I were hiking in Acadia National Park. We chose a cliffside climb. When we reached the point where the path could no longer hug the mountainside, there were iron rings pounded into the cliff to ascend to the next level. I thought of my bar mitzvah preparation as I grabbed onto the first ring. I realized that Torah learning is like climbing a mountain that one cannot fall off. Elul is the time to start that deep hike through your current life -- you step into the tenacious mud of hurts you’ve inflicted and sins you’ve committed. You climb the uneven path of worthy actions and love given and love received -- still you must go further along the sheer cliffs to reach a spiritual height. There is always a spot on that trail where you have to climb a ladder of rings pounded into the cliff. If you look down to the mess of existence you might not step up on the ring. Hand over hand, foot over foot, you can pull your self up. Those rings that support you and enable you are acts of contrition, the feeling of prayer, and earnest desire to live up on the heights.

Isaiah parallels this effort. His immediate view is the near end of the exile in Babylonia. He must ready the minds of the people Israel to let the suffering and pain of abuse fall away and return to Zion empowered and free. He recounts the horrors that befell us. We were made to drink the Cup of Reeling. We were made to lie down so that the other nations could trample across our back. Uri Uri -- Awake awake -- Isaiah calls out those words I heard at Kabbalat Shabbat. Shake off the dust and arise. He presents the wondrous picture of Jerusalem: “Awake Awake clothe yourself in strength, o Zion; array yourself in robes of splendor, O Holy City of Jerusalem!” And at the close he commands Israel -- Suru Suru -- Turn aside, Away -- Back to Zion. No longer are Israelites the pavement to be trod upon -- now they march with the Eternal leading the way and the Eternal following to catch up any stragglers.

This is what families do; they catch up the stragglers. I feel like I have been a straggler and I have not been left behind. This congregational family has kept its arms outstretched to me for almost a score of years. Making it to morning minyan has worked its slow appeal on me. Recently I started to take care of the yahrzeit plaques in the sanctuary. Lighting little lights and meeting the congregation’s families of blessed memory each week creates fresh constellations to keep us whole and vacate loneliness. It’s important to feel the myriad of ways we act as a family to support each other. Now the task is not just to catch up but also to lead. And help others who desire to find the path that leads to the trail, which becomes a climb. Does that climb end in glory? No, it starts with glory! Helping us to find the path are the prophets.

We just read in Shoftim: “The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet among your own people, like myself; him you shall heed.” (Deu. 18:15) This statement follows the restrictions on the occult arts. The need for communication with the Eternal and the need to get answers about what will happen will instead be provided by prophets. The Israelites elevated the prophet far higher than other ancient peoples. The prophet is one who will communicate God’s words. Moses reminds the people that they asked not to hear the actual voice of the Lord lest they die. God is pleased and states that he will raise up prophets: “I will put My words in his mouth and he will speak to them all that I command him.” (18:18) Jeffrey Tigay points out that the Prophet’s primary role was to speak on “all matters of national life: “Their role reflects the unprecedented seriousness with which Israelite religion believed that God and not the king was the true sovereign, and that human kingship was a man, and institution, established by prophetic mediation and hence subordinate to prophetic authority.” (Tigay 177)

The Lord has given the words and given us the path. “I have put My words in your mouth and sheltered you with my hand.” (Is 51:16) The age of pure prophecy is over. But, as Isaiah says, his Godly words are now in our mouths. This is the glory of the synagogue experience. God’s words are in our mouths. This means that new prophecy is not completely absent from our lives.

The adjective prophetic is also used to describe the ability to see inner truths before others do. Midrash says, “The dream is an unripe form of prophecy.” It is human to dream and human to carry the raw material of prophecy within us. I dare say we could use some old-school prophets to rebuke politicians and the body politic without concern for opinion polls. Prophets have never been popular. Another midrash says that Jeremiah was chosen to prophesize before he was conceived. He objected to the Holy one. “What prophet ever came before them whom they did not seek to slay? When you set up Moses and Aaron over them to act in their behalf, did they not wish to stone them? When you set up curly-haired Elijah over them to act in their own behalf, they mocked and ridiculed him, saying, ‘Look how he frizzes his locks, this fancy-haired fellow.’”

So too would a modern prophet be received. For twenty years, I was secretary to Allen Ginsberg, a poet widely described as prophetic. Today on my way to shul I saw his face hanging from the lampposts. I was not hallucinating -- there is a huge arts fair in the East Village inspired by his poem “Howl.” “Howl” has prophetic content in the classic sense. Look to the admonition of the Moloch section. Ginsberg equates the ancient Canaanite fire god to whom parents sacrificed children to the cannibalistic, money-based machinery of our age. In cadence and message, as terrible as Lamentations, Ginsberg wrote: “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!” Norman Mailer called Ginsberg “the bravest man in America.”

But Ginsberg never claimed to be an agent of a holy voice. He was a human voice of candor. As the ancient prophets did, he placed his messages in the language of the common person. We read the prophets for they are not mysterious. They paid the human price of their gift and burden. We honor them by chanting and contemplating the comfort and the challenge they still provide. For us, the first step of teshuvah is the bravest. Unripe dreams are within us all; the voices of prophets are on the street waiting to be heard. Our rabbis say: Ever since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from the prophets and given to fools and children.”

*

I am part fool and part child. I am the shlub in the back and these are my words:

We are on the road to Zion but there is no road
We are praying for directions but hear only our own voices
We suffer faults and the chains that bind us to them
Yet footfalls follow footfalls through the echoing night
The smallest match struck in the darkness
is a mighty illumination
So bright we must cover our eyes as with the Sh’ma
Listen for daybreak’s blasts
There is so much behind you
There is no reason not to go on -- to the summit
You will find a part of you already there
Patiently waiting to see your face

Shabbat Shalom

What makes a good blog, 2.
Politics and the English Language: 2004 Update
"[English] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

On rereading Orwell's essay I am struck by its relevance to political blogs on the wacky left and nutty right.

[A] mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

Such prefab phrases and unexamined concepts, repeated ad nauseum in the blogosphere, are called memes, as if technospeak redeems cliche.

[On meaningless words:] In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

[. . .]

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

One could add a number of terms from today's politiblogs to Orwell's list of mechanically repeated phrases, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Among many other reasons, bloggish self-promotion is exasperating because it fails to realize that its vaunted objectivity (if it does say so itself) and hair-trigger journalism is undermined by prose which ranges from puffed-up to callow. No one bothers to critique most blogs because no one expects them to be written in anything more than a staccato smirk. If editing is the sign of a grown-up genre, no prizes for guessing the median mental age of politibloggers.

In which I am both a negligent father and a happy reader of blogs

The first, because I gave my daughter both Ebola and the common cold.

The second, because Alina Adams, friend of ours, ice-skating expert, and writer of both romances and mysteries, turns out -- not surprisingly -- to be an entertaining guest blogger as well. Welcome to the dark side, Alina.

Housekeeping

Two readers have already sent me a few blogs they would like me to take a look at -- thanks, KH and EQJ. If anyone has found a blog they think is well written, let me know. (I would prefer to know about blogs that are not already among the most popular. I've already broken this rule with Dooce, but she writes too well to be ignored.)

Words Without Borders is a translation journal run on a shoestring grant by a team of selfless editors. In the new issue, devoted to religious literature, you can find three new translations of mine of Yiddish poems by Glatshteyn, Tseytlin, and Lyesin.

Next week I'll be at the Yidish-vokh, and thereafter I'll be trying to cut away everything from my draft that doesn't read like a dissertation. So I crave the Readership's indulgence as I enter what is called in Blogland a "hiatus." (Why we don't call it a "break" I dunno. Not dignified enough, I guess.) Or, at least, less frequent posting.

Riverboat philosophizing

I went to a wedding in Chicago. One of the pre-wedding events was a cruise along the Chicago River with an architecture expert as guide. Halfway through the cruise, my baby started screaming. (Perhaps she took offense at the guide's aesthetics.) I took her downstairs to the bar to calm her down, and there ran into my friend the groom himself, with his baby. Our two daughters commenced applying their mouths to every available surface, and the two of us started talking. My friend is a philosopher, and I am a philosophizer, so we get along well.

One of the questions we were talking about was this: What does it mean to hope, to have a certain sort of confidence that everything will work out all right? More specifically, there are two parts of this question we were ruminating on.

What does it mean to say "everything will work out all right"? Clearly the meaning of the phrase depends on the context, but in general, there are two sorts of things we could mean: a general sense that the world will not suffer major cataclysm or disorientation, and a narrower confidence that one's immediate interests (life, liberty, maybe property) will be preserved. Let's take a prominent worry these days, that terrorists may mount another major attack in New York sometime during, say, the next twenty-five years. (Insert appropriate "God forbid" here.) If I say, "The terrorists will attack," and you say, "Everything will work out all right," you could mean either (a) the general fabric of society will not collapse (e.g., the terrorists will not win; martial law will not reign on the streets of Manhattan; our copies of The Cat in the Hat in Yiddish will not be carried off by looters); or (b) one's friends and family will not be killed or maimed.

In less extreme circumstances, I think, one tends to mean (b) -- that is, the narrower result will be a positive one, suitably modified to the worry at hand. For example, take my dissertation. (Please!) When your Host's wife says, "Everything will work out all right," she does not mean that I will find professional satisfaction in some other field even if, say, my committee doubles over in laughter at my defense and uses my thesis as a wrapper for fish-and-chips. She means that I will finish, and my career will properly progress. But as the stakes are raised and more serious worries are confronted, our definition of "all right" needs to be recalibrated.

So let's consider again the case of a terrorist attack. The attack will happen, in all probability, and people will die. (Again, God forbid.) Is it morally proper to hope in such a situation? Our intuition is yes, because such large-scale confidence (called bitokhn in the Jewish tradition; see below) is something most people have, if only because it'd be impossible to get through the day without it. But how can we hope if we know that someone (though not necessarily us) will suffer? How can we legitimately say "everything will be all right"?

Roughly speaking, if we consider the possible realization of our worst worries, we need to ask whether the resultant world is predominantly "all right" or not. If our worst worries are realized and the world that results is somehow "all right," how does this square with our intuitive definitions of "rightness"? (This might be connected to a larger question. Given our intuitive sense that the world is not an awful place, how do we understand the frequency of suffering? [This is also a theological question, of course, but since the question is interesting whether or not God is involved, I'm not going to talk about Him here. I'm sure He'll understand.]) If the resultant world is not "all right," how can we justify the hope that most of us manage to sustain?

There are Jewish correlatives to most of these problems. (I like what Baraita had to say recently on the subject of Hebrew and Aramaic terms in one's blog, so I'm going to use the English equivalents.) According to the Talmud, after death (it's not entirely clear to me when), one will be asked a series of questions about the conduct of one's life. One of them is "Have you hoped [or: Did you hope] for salvation?" (What's meant here is something like the Messianic age, although, of course, the commentaries differ.) There are other often-cited phrases: "This too is for the good," and "Everything that God does He does for the good." The Jewish approach matters not because the afterlife, or the world to come, or God's goodness, elides the question of evil, but because that question is important whether or not we believe in God, and for the same reasons -- namely, the possibility that our worst fears may come to pass, which might undermine our hope.

(Just to put your mind at ease, we did not talk about these things at the wedding. We drank wine and sang; some of us danced. I don't dance, but it was fun to watch.)

The twelfth of August

At least thirteen prominent Yiddish writers were executed on August 12, 1952, among them Peretz Markish, Leib Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, Itsik Fefer, Dovid Bergelson, and Der Nister.

Russian Death
Leyb Kvitko

Russian death
is all deaths.

Russian pain
is all pain.

How is the world's heart now?
Its suppurating wound?

Ask a little child.
Ask a Jewish child.

1919
(my translation)

What makes a good blog?
My favorite blogs, 1.

Obscenity is refreshing, and when I say "obscenity" I mean taboo words in the context of well-aligned, clearly written prose, not words of four letters in every sentence. I had a long-running discussion with a college friend about my fear that true obscenity was disappearing: if everyone uses those words, where's their power to shock? Are f and s and a no longer to be the first words excitedly looked up in a new dictionary, or Googled in an idle hour? (Or perhaps racial slurs are the new cuss words?) If we've forgotten how to blush, who now knows to keep the fire in check so she can let it out to scorch the invaders in the hour of battle?

Then I click over to Dooce, and I am cheered by the highs and lows of the English language. Dooce is a narrator whose real name is Heather Armstrong. She is an ex-Mormon, a new mother, a Web designer, and a blogger. Little about the character Dooce makes her a great figure of fascination intellectual or spiritual: she's no Prince Hal, or Holden, or Emma. She's a quick-witted cynic, a whiskey-swilling junk-food-chomping mamma like thousands of others.

But there are a few things about Dooce which do set her apart and make her writing something to savor in small doses. First is what she rejected: Mormonism. This experience of the religious life, and the constant, bemusedly tolerant but disapproving presence of her family, gives her something to push against. It also gives her access to the Biblical and fundamentalist registers of speech which are not available to many bloggers. (In a recent post, she used the phrase "hot forks of displeasure." "Hot displeasure" is from the King James Version of the Bible, and I would love to know if that's where she got it. Incidentally -- not that Dooce would know or care -- this is from the Psalm that Jews recite at Tachanun.)

Second is her swearing. She does it in every post, but with such flexible power that I envy her willingness to be so foulmouthed in public. Obscenity is cathartic, and the combination of something as earthy as a good cuss word with the tender juiciness of Leta's cheeks -- well, that's something any restaurant critic would dine on with satisfaction.

Third is her psychological (and pharmaco-psychiatric) distress. I wish Heather Armstrong all the best, a speedy exorcism of her mental demons and a positive attitude for her to have and hold all the days of her life, amen. But such mental health can be death for a diarist, and I am guiltily glad, oh, so glad!, that Dooce has her up and down days.

Fourth, as mentioned, is Leta ("Her Screamness Who Screams A Lot All The Time Every Day With The Screaming") Armstrong, Dooce's daughter. Every post has at least one suspenseful moment: when will she start bleating? And when? Will Dooce freak out? How much? And in whose company?

Fifth is her drinking. A shot of whiskey's on me if we ever meet.

Now all of these qualities do not redeem Dooce's every failing. A blogger is not a novelist. She is not grappling with larger themes on the sprawling canvas of World and Life. She can be as insufferable as any new mother who doesn't know when to stop sharing her pictures. I'm glad she loves her husband, and (since by her account he is stable, considerate, attractive, a responsible father, and gainfully employed) he seems like a great guy to have around. But he's not the main attraction, so, if you please, Ms. Dooce, keep your kvelling to a minimum. And many's the entry that repeats something we've heard many times before.

But that's like criticizing a box of chocolates for having too much chocolate. Dooce is to be joyfully consumed in regular doses, like York peppermint patties -- or Maker's Mark.

Put your kayak down for a minute, we're late for shul!

Here is the information you requested about davening at the Religious Services Centre of the Olympic Village in Athens.

Saturday morning services begin at 8 o'clock. Please be on time.

You are also welcome to bring your own translations into Romaniote.

Thank you for your attention.

What would military intervention in Darfur look like?

That's the topic of an article in the New Republic by David Englin. He points out that apart from the no-fly zones and the safe areas necessary to protect aid workers and make their mission possible, any military force should be prepared to confront a well-trained and -equipped Sudanese army.