Darfur
first in a series

I have a friend here in New York who works at Concern, an Irish aid agency active in Darfur. I asked her what could be done to help the situation there, aside from giving money. She said, "Just keep talking about it."

Quantitative estimates of the number of dead and diseased are difficult but necessary.

Malaria, dysentery, and cholera are treatable diseases, dysentery less so. Establishing reasonable sanitation for the refugees is now a priority. Will the camps become permanent? Will the situation in Darfur, once the genocide is complete, yield to a even-more-ignored refugee problem?

If we take from Reeves' calculations the mortality rate of 4/10,000 per day, with an affected population of 2.3 million, it follows that nearly 1,000 people are dying daily from malnutrition and disease. This does not include casualties due to attacks on civilians. 

Light one candle

Just one year ago this blog begun
With hey, ho, some wish to entertain
It can be fun to polemicize some
And we'll strive to please you every day!

Words of praise, comment, advice and criticism are solicited as this blog enters its second twelvemonth.

Life and death by the numbers

If you have a basic fascination about the causes of disease and their distribution -- go get yourself a Ph.D. in epidemiology, and we can commiserate! Failing that, you can play around with the sortable statistics of the New York City Community Health Profiles.

I'm not actively involved in researching these issues (though I'd like to work for the Department of Health someday). Nevertheless, here are some observations I don't understand.

Highbridge and Morrisania (in the Bronx) has the dubious honor of the highest all-cause mortality rate of any city neighborhood. Mortality from heart disease is highest in the Rockaways, but stroke mortality is highest in East Harlem -- and each of these is found pretty far down the list for the other cause of death. Why is this?

Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen, sorry, I mean Clinton, in Manhattan, seem to have a higher infant morality rate than other neighborhoods in Manhattan (although there are no confidence intervals on the rates presented, so it's hard to tell). The infant hospitalization rate is also higher than many other boroughs. Again, why is this?

(Part of the answer is certainly the fact that Chelsea/Hell's Kitchen* is poorer than most other Manhattan neighborhoods, although how much longer this will stay the case is open to question.)

I could go on like this for hours. These general issues are more and more classified under what's called social epidemiology, an attempt to elucidate and interrelate the different strata of causal factors that affect disease in the individual and society. (The latest issue of Epidemiologic Reviews is devoted to this subfield, and the rigor of some articles made me feel somehwat less skeptical toward social epidemiology in general.)

*Yes, I could write "Chelsea/Clinton," but I won't. So there.

Compelled to disagree
 
I recently wrote about R. Josh Yuter's review of R. Steven Greenberg's new book. Yuter has now taken me to task for classifying his as a "slippery slope" argument.  He writes: 

In the example of oness, R. Greenberg argued that since homosexuals are born with the desire, then we should treat them in the legal category of being exempt if they commit a biblical prohibition. However, if the mere innate desire is sufficient to exempt one type of sin, then the logical consequence would be to apply that logic to other desires as well. Once all desires are outside of one's control, then all transgressions may be dismissed. This is not an issue of what is moral or immoral, but of the ramifications of assigning legal categories. 

 
Yuter is incorrect on two counts.
 
First of all, homosexuality is not a "mere innate desire," but a sexual orientation. The difference is significant. Homosexuals are able to pursue Godly, dignified, and Jewishly worthly relationships, while this is not true of every realized "innate desire."
 
Secondly, even if we were to call homosexuality, broadly and inaccurately, an "innate desire," it would not follow that "the logical consequence would be to apply that logic to other desires as well." Legal categories are not applied with a broad brush across all cases.
 
To put it another way, Yuter would have us believe that ones, applied to the case of homosexuality, must also ("logically") be applied to any other case. Let's assume that's true. Presumably because of time constraints (the blogger's curse), or leaving it as an exercise for the reader, Yuter neglected to mention what logical criteria connect homosexuality to other cases in which ones might be applied. (He does say "once all desires are out of our control," but I find it difficult to equate the acceptance of homosexual relationships with the legitimization of "all desires." Another slippery slope I don't want to slide down without snow cover.) Near the end of his post, he does mention statutory rape. Presumably Yuter finds some logical connection between homosexuality and statutory rape, so that (he imagines) one might say in either case "I was annus [psychologically or otherwise compelled] to perform that act."
 
But the differences between homosexuality and (lehavdil) rape are quite obvious. One is a non-consensual, violent impingement, the other a relationship between loving adults. These differences seem quite relevant to the application of ones, so that one might reasonably apply it in one case, and not in the other. What other connection does Yuter see between these that I'm missing?

Yuter bristles at the label "slippery slope." In that case, he is bound to explain to us the logical connection which so strongly binds homosexuality to every sort of "innate desire." Why can one not make halachic distinctions between ones in a positive relationship and ones in harmful, immoral acts? One can fairly request of Yuter what Andrew Sullivan demanded from opponents of homosexual marriage:  

The precise challenge for morally serious people is to make rational distinctions between what is arbitrary and what is essential in important social institutions. ... If you want to argue that a lifetime of loving, faithful commitment between two women is equivalent to incest or child abuse, then please argue it. It would make for fascinating reading. But spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage—or else everything is up for grabs and, before we know where we are, men will be marrying their dogs.

In the same way, I think a line can be drawn in the application of ones, the criterion being whether the compelled party is acting in accordance with larger Jewish (i.e. halachic-moral) values, whether the "compulsion" is "mere innate desire" or a different, non-heterosexual sort of loving, permanent relationship. Yuter thinks this line is impossible, apparently on strictly logical grounds which are unclear to me.
 
Yuter also asks: 

[W]hat is wrong with "swinging right" on this or any issue? Furthermore, why shouldn't we be able to discriminate against whomever we chose?

There's nothing wrong per se with being right-wing. But the growing success (or popularity) of Orthodoxy gives rise to some unforeseen consequences. As the community of observant Jews tilts ever rightward, it begins to be affected by the imperfections of the Orthodox community. I don't want to get into these in detail here, but some of them I've mentioned before: e.g. the assumptions that "true" Torah dwells only in the tents of the Orthodox, and that observant Jewish life must somehow conform to ideal, ahistorical, amoral [sic!] halachic frameworks without sacrificing axiomatic consistency. (Keep in mind that each major denomination of Judaism has its own imperfections; I'm certainly not saying that dominance by, say, Conservative Judaism would be ideal either.)
 
As for discrimination: differences are at the heart of the religious life, but they must be justified. Discrimination generally refers to invidious distinctions, and should be avoided.  

Dray-eyns-eyns

If anyone reading this works for the city, I'd love to know how to get a copy of this 311 poster. (No prizes for knowing which language it's in.)

Postscript: So I called 311, and the woman on the other end said, "We have posters in the call center, but we don't give them out."
 
Does this make sense to anyone? What's the point of making a Yiddish poster if it's not in use?
 
Has anyone seen this poster in action, i.e. out on the street somewhere?
 
(The "fine print" says something like Regirung-badinung on emerdzhensi [sic!] far shtot Nyu-york.)

Gays everywhere!
(Conservosexuality part six, I think. Let me go count . . .)

When I was trying to define earlier why I disagree so strongly with Rabbi Joel Roth's misguided teshuvah on homosexuality [the link to which is chronically broken], I somehow missed this point-by-point refutation by Jay Michaelson, prolific editor of Zeek and writer on things gay and Jewish. (Jay taught at Prozdor when I did, and I think he still teaches there.) His style here is hyperbolic, if not hysterical, not so much argumentative as hectoring, but the main points are there:

1. Homosexuality, as a concept for the understanding of same-sex relationships, is not congruent with the mishkav zakhur of Leviticus.

2. Defining homosexuality as "unnatural," or using "naturalness" as a criterion for halachic acceptability, is an illegitimate endeavor.

3. It is not true that gays and lesbians can be "cured" of their sexual inclinations.

His conclusion, then, is that

4. There is nothing a priori un-Jewish about a loving same-sex relationship, if we are to understand our God as compassionate and desirous of mutually supporting, consensual partners. (Ma hu, . . . af atah. If He is compassionate, so too should you be compassionate.)

Also on the GLH* front, Simcha, of Hirhurim, pointed out a recent review by Rabbi Josh Yuter of the new book by Rabbi Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men. I haven't read the book, and to be honest I don't plan to. But Rabbi Yuter's review advances some points which need to be addressed.

With regard to Greenberg's idea that homosexuals are under psychological compulsion (ones) to follow their sexual inclinations, Yuter writes:

[T]here is no reason not to apply the principle of oness to every biblical or rabbinic prohibition. Anyone could claim that their sin was merely the result of the way that God created them, and this would be why they committed adultery, murder, or any other transgression.

This smacks of the slippery slope argument used against same-sex marriage. If gays can marry, why not polygamy? or incest? or bestiality? The idea, I suppose, is that homosexuality is basically the same thing as everything else outside the bounds of traditional understanding, and homosexuality is traditionally condemned for the same reason as these other activities. Neither of these is true. The same can be said of ones: homosexuality is different from adultery and murder, I should think, in important ways - namely that homosexuality is not, a priori, immoral, while adultery breaches a relationship and murder takes life.

In addition, it is strange to suggest that "there is no reason not to apply . . . oness to every biblical or rabbinical prohibition." Is the halachic process not concerned precisely with such distinctions?

Yuter's other main objection is that Greenberg, in suggesting that his interpretation of the relevant verses in Leviticus should influence halachic change, is somehow overstepping the bounds of the halachic process. His argument is unclear to me, so I won't try to summarize it here. As far as I can make out, the main thrust is that halachic change within Orthodoxy can only take place under certain conditions. No rabbi would be so bold, says Yuter, as to make Greenberg's suggestion. Therefore (it seems) the very boldness of Greenberg's suggestion invalidates the proposal for halachic change. QED, I guess.

The other possible understanding of Yuter's argument is this: there are certain criteria of halachic change, and Greenberg's proposed application of ones to homosexuality fails to meet them.

Here I need to admit something ("Today I admit my sins"!). I've never seen a logically consistent exposition of the Orthodox philosophy of halachic change. Maybe I'm ignorant (which is likely), but another possibility is that much of Orthodox resistance to halachic change has to do with a general conservatism rather than a hewing to a set of halachic axioms. (If you show me Rambam's laws of halachic judgment, please tell me how they correspond to today's methods of Orthodox jurisprudence.) There is nothing wrong with this: small-c conservatism is a necessary thing within every religious movement. But such conservatism does not imply an axiomatic consistency. It is this which I think Orthodoxy lacks, no matter how loudly its academicians do protest.

However, since I'm not Orthodox, and I have no dog in this hunt (if I may wax Clintonian), I am happy to be proven wrong. As a liberal Jew, however, I do sometimes feel like a passenger on a cruise ship, who asks himself, "How much longer do we have to be swinging right on this thing?"

*GLH: Gays, lesbians, and halachah.

Authorial intent: Still more construction of Jewish culture

Alan Brill, author of the Edah article we've been picking at, shares his comments.
[Typo now corrected - my apologies.]

A shaynem dank for the close reading of my article, but as the scene in Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan shows up to explain himself, the internet allows me to comment and exert authorial intent.

First of all, I was not writing to invent anything new nor was I writing to teach anything to professors. I was writing for a modern orthodox audience, a small enclave. Yes, some of the ideas go back to Bialik and Scholem among many others, but those ideas were not considered in modern Orthodoxy because of its acceptance of the German milieu definitions. I wanted my modern Orthodox reader to consider a broader palette for
defining culture. I wanted the reader to consider (1) that culture is not outside of Judaism (2) that Judaism is richer than the bifurcation model allows (3) that halakhic analysis is a thin description (4) that we are constructing using the past (5) and that Judaism plays itself out in a concrete way. While these ideas may be self-evident to some, they are less evident to a community that treats ideal halakhic frameworks as
reality.

Second, Marc grasped my intent better than Ken. I do not endorse any all-encompassing approach. I am not relinquishing the positive gains of the Enlightenment project in either ethics or science for an Evangelical worldview. I am closer to Robert Christigau (wow, what a long forgotten influence) than German essentialism. I have no problem letting things remain fragmentary, unresolved, and mediated. And when we construct, I
have no problem with different rubrics for the narrative, communal, and universal levels.

Marc, I do not think we live in an unauthentic age. I do not work with the before and after scenarios of Enlightenment, modernity, or reform. I do not consider contemporary Rabbinic Judaism less authentic than those of 19th century Vilna, 17th century Padua, or 15th century Posen.

Marc, the integration of popular culture within high culture was already accepted by 1992 when the New Republic had an important article accepting the social link between Rilke and Elvis Costello, both are considered as high culture, or in your terms Rabbi Soloveitchik and Lou Reed (see Herbert Gans or Michael Kammen, American Culture American Tastes). My questions were more geared for accepting these weaves in our lives and then asking how a Rabbi Soloveitchik/Lou Reed weave differs from a Rabbi Soloveitchik/ Mordechai ben David weave. And on the utopian quest in popular culture, while I did not pursue a Walter Benjamin utopia, it is worth discussing.

For Marc and Zackary, I treat the Rabbinic culture as authentic. I accept the standard orthodox criteria of the halakhah as the definition of authenticity as an a-priori. My goal was just to give it a greater inclusiveness and to treat halakhah in a less rarified way. There are a wide range of Rabbinic texts, (including rabbinic, ashkenaz,
mediteranian medieval, early modern, ottoman empire and Eastern Europe) and the communities that created them to serve as guides and models. These texts have statements on psychology, politics, and cosmology that need to be placed in conjunction with modern Western texts. I do not have a preconceived notion of which elements from either corpus will be accepted, rejected, mediated, or reinterpreted. But, I would like the discussion to occur.

Finally, while Yiddish authors in interbellum Warsaw may have had an expansive view of Judaism, my concern was only with Orthodoxy, which did not have an articulated expansive view in Warsaw, Tel Aviv, or the West side.

Yours,

Alan Brill

Testing, testing

Amanda Schaffer, who is smart and writes well (and is apparently an M.D., not that this is necessarily a contradiction) says what every epidemiologist has been thinking about one of today's medical trends: over-screening for a host of maladies. One thing she doesn't discuss in detail, though she does mention it, is the controversy over prostate-cancer screening and PSA.

Over at the New Yorker, Dan Baum's article "The Price of Valor" [not available on-line] examines the mental price paid by soldiers for doing their job: killing the enemy. He convincingly shows the need for a thorough study of psychological problems due to killing enemy combatants, and, in a feat of terminological avoidance, he does it all without once using the word epidemiology.

One comment on the article. Baum cites figures showing that the rate of suicide among active-duty servicemen is lower than among the general population, and ascribes this to the fact that "it's difficult for a soldier to be a loner" (I'm paraphrasing). I think this difference is more likely due to something epidemiologists call the healthy worker effect (HWE) -- people with a steady job tend to have lower rates of most diseases than do the (non-employed) general population, because the chronically ill and disabled tend to be screened out of the employment pool. The same is even more true of soldiers.

This raises some interesting questions about psychological sequelae among active-duty servicemen, and whether there is an HWE for mental health among those in the military. Hey, that's a journal-club topic. (I don't mean this, though it seems interesting.)

Excuse our dust: More construction of Jewish culture (IV)

Another round of comments on the Jewish tradition as applicable to the present day. The next - and last - post in this series will be Alan Brill's comments.

Dear Benyomin,

Thanks for your answer. But as a historian, you have, I believe, overlooked one of my points: of course both the Germans and German Jews like Hirsch thought that Culture meant Schiller and Religion meant Maimonides. All I'm suggesting is that we are not limited by their categories. Hirsch had more in common with Rambam than with Schiller in the sense that both kept mitzvot and learned Torah, while at the same time he had more in common with Schiller than with the Rambam in that he spoke, wrote, and lived in German. Which connection is more important, more authentic - it's not relevant. He had a great number of connections and influences, as we all do, and I propose we emphasize the multiconnectedness itself.

So I don't understand exactly what you mean when you say that our tradition is weak in democratic thought in comparison to the European humanists. Our tradition also begat Moses Hess, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Peretz himself. And because our tradition also gave birth to Spinoza, the Humanists are in debt to us as much as we are to them.

One more thing: since you mention Kant, I'm right to answer that he believed that Judaism isn't a religion because Jews lack a metaphysical system, and that he wrote that blacks are intellectually incapable of formulating abstract thoughts. This doesn't mean that I'm proposing to "oppress" the Enlightenment (as some of figures of the Enlightenment wanted to keep down the Jews, never mind the inheritors of Kant's thought in Germany itself) and say "good night, world." I'm just saying that mentioning what Jews - and Africans - made out of the Enlightenment, how we made a Haskalah out of the Aufklarung, is a way to repair the errors of the Enlightenment itself . . .

I'm sure that you are as disappointed as I am when non-Jews talk about their interest in Jewish culture as far as Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx, but fall asleep when you start talking to them about Peretz, Avraham ben Hananiah Yagel, or Rashi. And I'm even more sure that you get as upset as I do when a frum person says that yidishkeit only has to do with the Gra, the Besht, and Hirsch, thereby dismissing Kafka, Scholem, and Mendele. I think it's our responsibility, as researchers and just plain Jews, to bring Rashi together with Kafka, Benjamin together with Mendele, and so on . . .

See you later,

Marc

Dear Marc,

Regarding your broader objections to my first note: on the one hand I accept them, but on the other I have to retain my skepticism. That is, if you have the confidence in yourself and in the power of [Jewish] "particularity" to make Spinoza or Marx (and why not Jesus Christ, who had a lot more interest in Judaism than those two did!) "ours," in spite of how weak their own connection with any sort of historically concrete Judaism actually was, then more power to you. But I ask myself, in a sociopolitical sense, if the people who have influence today (if only it were you and not them!), however "liberal" they might be, would be able to include Marx + Spinoza in the framework of the "tradition" which according to them should serve as a resource for modern Jewish politics or ethics. Considering the situation in Israel -- and this is finally the main thing if we are talking about the political/all-encompassing uses of tradition -- I would wonder what the very idea of a Jewish political tradition has done for the State. Unfortunately, it has been harmful more than anything: no constitution, no full civil rights in certain areas of life, and its influence will be even worse in the quite near future if Mafdal or Shas or the settlers take control (because these groups say clearly and openly on the basis of their not-at-all ignorant constructions of tradition that democracy itself is not of importance. And it's something of an irony that you cite Leibowitz, isn't it? Because he himself clearly stated that the State must be secular, based on Kant, if I'm not mistaken.

Said differently: it might be that creative and progressive people like you would be able to make our tradition into firm ground on which to build a democratic system. But first of all, why do we need to make these somersaults of "recombination" when we could just derive the system from modern political thought? Secondly, and more important, there's a danger in the idea that we must have a Jewish tradition to construct our politics, precisely because we have so many undemocratic and unprogressive elements in our tradition (as in all religious traditions), and one could easily construct just the opposite, an ugly, authoritarian-theocratic system according to the same principle of "our own sources." You wouldn't want that, and Brill wouldn't either, probably, and Ben-Gurion didn't either, thank God -- I don't want to suggest that fault lies only with the "religious" because it also definitely lies with the very secular nationalists (like me, actually) who play even to this very day with ideas about "authentic" national traditions -- but the great rabbis and rebbeim and leaders who really have the power of influence, what have they done and what will they still do?

Special meals

My trip to Berlin was joyous (the wedding that brought us there), productive (two talks I gave), and emotionally resonant in profound and contradictory ways (I was, after all, a Jew in Germany). But I shy away from blogging the personal.

In the latter-day-Pepysian spirit of blogs everywhere, then, let the record show that on our KLM flight to Germany and on our Delta flight back I ate the two best kosher meals I have ever had on an airplane - one provided by Hermolis, the other by Weiss' Kosher Catering [no link, but I found this while searching]. Both meals were accompanied by cards in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish that are a J-poyglot's nerd dream.

In other news, Allan Brill himself, the author of the Edah article whose horse we've been beating, has sent me his comments on our comments on his article. Heady stuff, this meta-ness. I'll post his thoughts when I get back from another wedding. Happy Fourth!

Oh, and: goodness gracious.

Upstate anti-Semitism

An editorial in the Times Herald-Record (the newspaper which covers much of upstate New York, including Kiryas Joel and Monroe) condemns a supervisor in Blooming Grove, an opponent of the KJ pipeline plan, for his remarks about KJ's Chasidim. Among other things, he called them "parasites" and a "racial splinter group."

(Registration required, or at least some of the time - it's a weird setup - but if you're at all interested in KJ news it's well worth it.)

Constructing Jewish culture, III

Just to refresh your memory, we're talking about the article by Alan Brill in Edah. (See the original post.) My friends are dissecting and ruminating like the humanities professors (or assistant professors) they are. Today it's the turn of Ken Moss (whom I know by his Jewish name, Binyomen), a member of the history faculty at Johns Hopkins.

Oh, and to repeat: any stiltedness is due to my translation (we correspond in Yiddish).

Well, I'm not so thrilled by the article. But:

First of all, it's a little bit like reinventing the wheel, because the very idea of creating an all-encompassing Jewish culture is the leading idea of Jewish thought in the 20th century, from Peretz (Vos felt in undzer literatur [What's Missing in Our Literature]) and Bialik (Ha-sefer ha-ivri [The Hebrew Book]) to Rosenzweig and Scholem. The modern Orthodox and the Reform are only today coming to an old idea because they both (and here I disagree with Marc) grow out of the same German milieu in which Kultur had to mean Deutschtum, Schiller, Goethe, and Beethoven, and Judentum meant only "religion." But if this article can lead to your more creative ideas, I'll thank Brill too! It might also be true that we here in America need to rediscover what was already known in Eastern Europe in 1910 and in Germany in 1920, and that we need to discover it by means of "religion," however frum or fray that religion might be.

But there's a more basic objection which I should mention: the fact that Brill sees among the evangelical Protestants a model for the creation of culture outside the framework of "liberalism." His entire style, at the end of the day, with all his theories of anthropology and cultural practice, is to construct "culture" as an all-encompassing concept, in which one can fit all fields and areas of human creativity, among them the natural sciences, ethics, etc.

But in this way he's deliberately removing the division between "is" and "ought." Empirically speaking it's true, of course, that every individual and society swims, so to speak, in a sea of culture, and that there's no field of life which is beyond or over culture (in the sense of a system of discourse, or of communal meaning). But -- and here I'm demonstrating that I'm an adherent of Englightenment a la Kant -- I would say that ethically and philosophically one must make a distinction between different areas of culture which have very different demands and rules.

Ethics and science, for example, in a concrete context, are empirically speaking culturally specific. But cultural specificity should not dominate them - quite the opposite. Science must be brought under the control of rational, trasnparent, human reason, and ethics (and politics as well) must derive from general human grounds. Otherwise we have barbarism, "Deutsche Wissenschaft," "democracy isn't suited to the Chinese," etc.

To say it differently, I will teach my child that one mustn't rob or kill not because our tradition teaches this, but because humanity teaches it. We should familiarize ourselves with the Jewish ethical tradition in its various forms, but our ethics is not dominated by this or that tradition, by this or that culture. Or let's talk about politics: politically speaking, the democratic foundations of our tradition are quite poor no matter how creative you get, and even poorer with regard to non-Jews (an urgent matter in the State of Israel) -- but this is only a problem for those, like Brill, who want an all-encompassing Jewish culture.

In this sense, I'm stuck in the 19th century, but with the point that if "civilization" must belong to all humanity, culture (everything, that is, which has to do with the development of taste, esthetic, and distinction outside the framework of politics, ethics, and culture) must not be German, nor French, but a Jewish culture which is both well-established and open.

Yours,

B.

Q: What's that copepod doing in my water?
A: The backstroke, rabbi.

If copepods live "almost everywhere where water is available," and it's reasonable to imagine that their distribution has not appreciably changed since the time of Chazal, I would like to know if anyone has difficulty with the following argument. If so, what?

1. The rabbis of the Talmud, and many other righteous Jews of past generations, drank (at least some) presumably unfiltered water.

2. We do not find in the previous halachic literature much discussion of the bugs-in-water issue.

3. The recent "revelations" about copepods are based on observations with a microscope and not naked-eye examination. (To the naked eye, "specks" are just that.)

Therefore,

4. This is (yet another) newfangled stringency made possible by the mistaken application of technology to the realm of ordinary experience and common sense.

5. Prominent Orthodox rabbis and organizations are examining this issue for two reasons, among others.

A. An assumption that even the littlest details of life are to be subjected to halachic analysis. This assumption is problematic.

B. Communal pressures.

6. As these rabbis and organizations devote time and energy to copepods, more and more of them will provide services, products, etc., with their imprimatur, leading to a perception that copepods-in-the-water is a significant halachic problem that an ordinary Jew should concern himself with.

7. This is regrettable.

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."

Constructing Jewish culture, II

I forwarded the article by Brill to two friends of mine, and we've been back-and-forthing about it over e-mail. Today's comments are from Marc Caplan, now a faculty member at Indiana University, soon to be a post-doc at Penn. His dissertation compared Yiddish and African literatures. Also relevant is that he (and his wife) are both modern Orthodox, and were members of KOE, a modern Orthodox synagogue, when they lived in New York. Oh: we correspond in Yiddish, so any spelling errors are due to my translation.

Thanks to you both for involving me in this imprtant and interesting discussion.

Let me begin by saying that I'm not a disinterested party, since Edah is ideologically connected to the shuls I davened at in New York [. . .]

I believe the first thinker who first truly considered these questions is the rock critic Robert Christigau, who at the beginning of his career, about thirty years ago, wrote that we must create a theory of modern esthetics which includes both Marcel Proust and Chuck Berry—culture with a big C and culture with a small c (though Christigau would never say that Berry represents small-c culture!).

But to create such a concept of culture for (or among) Jews, one must overcome quite a few conceptual difficulties:

1) The divisions between frum and non-frum, tradition and modernity, and even Jewish and non-Jewish are imaginary. The Rambam derives from Aristotle no less than he derives
from Saadia Gaon; Samson Raphael Hirsch probably took more from Schiller than from the Rambam, and so on. Both "the Rav" and A.J. Heschel read philosophy in Berlin (!)
while the Lubavitcher rebbe studied science in Paris. Ovadia Yosef demonstrates his North African roots no less than his Sefardic and Kabbalistic influences, and the fact that he never studied in Berlin or Paris is the first sign not of an "authentic" Sefardic Judaism, but rather of the political situation of the North African populace in his generation . . . Admitting that we're all connected to the eternity of human civilization is no mystical fantasy, it's just a fact of living in the world [. . .]

2) Although there's no authentic culture in the world - though all cultures are a sum of purposeful decisions by people, and so don't develop organically in nature - the problem of "authenticity" for modern Jews is even sharper because both frum and Yiddishist cultures are both separated not from their "natural" roots, but their historical roots, which were torn out by immigration to America and Israel and by the Holocaust.

3) Since our culture is particularly unauthentic, we must deal with ideological and historical influences which come between us and the culture which we would like to reconstruct. Therefore there is no true reconstruction which we could accomplish. Everything is starting from square one, both for modern Orthodox Jews and for the so-called secular Yiddishistrs. Considering how underdeveloped both cultures are to this very day, this "beginning" must begin more or less with our own generation.

If we understand the liberating possibilities of our inauthenticity, we can recognize that modern Jewish culture can really be what we make of it, and say that the purpose of building such a culture is not either on the foundation of Torah u-mitzvot, nor on Yiddish language or humanism, that is, a parallel development, but that the two are connected goals. As the rabbi said to the "weak man": everything is in the Torah. If so, the question for us is no different than for Christigau: creating a Jewish culture which comprises both Rabbi Soloveitchik and Lou Reed - with Barnett Newman, Irving Howe, and
Malke Heifetz-Tussman somewhere in the middle. What would we call this? I suggest "utopia"...

This is all by way of introduction [. . .]

By the way, it's very ironic that Brill writes in his article: "Modern Orthodoxy has adopted a Protestant division between faith and culture” (apparently on the side of Faith against Culture). Reform Jews also adopted a Protestant differentiation between Faith and Culture, mostly on the side of Culture! This reminds me precisely of what my professor Arthur Hertzberg once said about Yeshiva University itself - it's not a true Orthodox institution, but the radical-right wing of the Reform movement!

A disease widespread elsewhere

As a cholera epidemic ends in Mozambique, another flares in Cameroon. And Haiti braces for an outbreak after its flood. (Info on the first two thanks, of course, to ProMed.)

Under construction: Modern Jewish culture as understood by Alan Brill

The Iyyar issue of Edah includes an important article by Rabbi (and Dr.) Alan Brill which tries to navigate the relationship between Judaism and culture.

Its point of departure is the modern Orthodox concept of Torah u-Madda (Torah and science, where "science" is used its older sense of general knowledge). According to Brill, this ideology is predicated on nineteenth-century notions of culture as something external to religion. But in reality, according to modern theorists, culture is by definition the substratum in which all life, the life of Jews included, is embedded. Jews have always been creators and consumers of culture - asking whether the Jewish community should be "engaged" or "distant" from non-Jewish culture misses the point entirely. The question is: what sort of culture should be sought by American Jews? More specifically, Brill asks: how should one understand the Judaism of the lay, suburban Jew in America?

Simply put: what sort of culture do we, American Jews, want? (Note that Brill uses "Orthodoxy" throughout his essay, but I think his line of thinking is relevant to many American Jews. In fact, this is exactly the sort of topic which should be the bread-and-butter of, say, Conservative Judaism, both the movement and the journal. But stop me before I complain again . . .)

Brill's essay is more devoted to the problem than its solutions, but he does, near the end, advance a certain approach. Other religious communities in America, he says, have "reconstructed" various fields of intellectual thought (physics, literature, philosophy, psychology) in their own image. Just as we construct our religious approach ("there is no given of Torah," says Brill), so we construct our intellectual sphere in concert with the spiritual.

There is much to think about here, but two difficulties come to mind.

1. What criteria are to be used in "rewriting" those parts of "liberal culture" which do not conform to Judaism? What does it mean to say, as Brill does, that "[w]e can criticize Romanticism as having values against the Torah"? Which part of Romanticism, Don Juan or "Ozymandias"? And which values? Certainly some views of divine inspiration (to take one example) held by the Romantics are not wholly alien to Jewish notions, I would think. To say the following is very bold indeed, and I wonder how it is to be done:

Jews need the creation of Jewish psychology, education, philosophy, political science, and sociology similar to the works produced by Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims.

The problem with such a "rewriting" is that it requires criteria for what a "Jewish psychology" is. I have my own ideas - which I hope to post about in the future - but this leads me to the second difficulty, viz.:

2. Brill understands the creation of Jewish religious culture as, in essence, a rabbinic project - not only for rabbis, that is, but based on rabbinic literature. His examples of the broad spectrum of Jewish culture are thus drawn from the many rabbis and religious leaders who have written works of literature and science. But Brill overlooks a fruitful source for the construction of a (sub)urban Jewish culture which is both religious and modern: our predecessors and contemporaries, who have created, and are engaged in creating, precisely that! In an important sense, Jewish modernity as an embedded cultural endeavor began in Eastern Europe and continued in the State of Israel, while American Jewry has become afflicted by what Brill points out is the Protestant, nineteenth-century view of culture as opposed to, or a seducer of, the religious tendency.

Unfortunately, in what I think might be an overreaction to ultra-Orthodoxy, Brill tends to characterize Eastern European Judaism as "narrow" or "simple." I find this imprecision perplexing in what is otherwise a thoughtful and important essay. Even the rabbinic culture of Eastern Europe, it should go without saying, is not faithfully represented by the minimally thin cross-section that has survived and thrived as modern-day Haredism.

The project of Jewish cultural construction must draw on a number of sources, both rabbinic and non-rabbinic. Medieval sources seem far afield when one can look deeply into the Jewish culture of Vilna, Warsaw, and Berlin, not to mention modern-day Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

What is Jewish culture? How will we know we're constructing it? I'll get to that in my next post - not to solve the matter but to tilt at it.

Yemenites out of Monsey: smuggling, rescue, or both?

I don't begin to understand the recent news story about the cloak-and-dagger doings of the Jewish Agency for Israel (aka the Sokhnut), which, according to the Agency, smuggled out of Monsey part of a family of Yemenite Jews, supposedly taken there by Satmar Chassidim against their will. (Not by force, but rather, claims the Sokhnut, by false promises and deception.)

I don't doubt that such kidnappings occur, but I also wonder how many Yemen families, or parts thereof, find satisfactory lives among the Satmar. Which of these outcomes is more common? What happened in this case?

You won't find even an attempt at an answer in the articles I read. Haaretz, as well as some other newspapers, basically reprint the press release of the Jewish Agency. (Whoops - that last link is to an article in the Jerusalem Post, but it reads like a press release from the Sokhnut, and it's reprinted on the Jewish Agency's Web site.)

The article in the [Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam] Journal News is quite a bit better in some respects. For example, at least the headline ("Agency claims it rescued family") acknowledges that some facts might need to be clarified, and the newspaper goes to the trouble to interview some Satmar sources. There's also the following interesting tidbit: "A Israeli Consulate official in New York would neither confirm nor deny the report, but said smuggling is definitely not something Israel is not involved in under any circumstances."

The most important point, and maybe the most accurate take on the situation, is buried in the middle of the article:

Asrim Issak, president of the Yemenite Jewish Federation of New York, said yesterday that the Satmars respect the Yemenite Jews' devout Judaism and ancient traditions. But, he said, the Satmars don't want the Yemenites immigrating to Israel. He said Satmar schools that accept Yemenite children force them to speak Yiddish and take up Satmar religious customs.

"I am critical of the Satmars and anyone else that bring Jews out of Yemen without a plan to help them," Issak said. "They take them out of Yemen and throw them into the streets without housing, education and jobs."

The question is this: what is meant by that phrase "the Satmars [sic] don't want the Yemenites immigrating to Israel"? Were the children's passports taken from them - i.e., were they kidnapped? No one seems to bring any facts to answer the question. As was asked on the Volokh Conspiracy a couple of days ago, why weren't the police called in by the Sokhnut?

Before I start making fun of the obvious errors, I should again emphasize that this is the best article that I've read on the story. It emphasizes the important fact that the Yemenites are being exploited in a mini-Kulturkampf. What really happened, and what the Yemenites agreed to, is still unclear - but we're closer to knowing now.

Here are the idiotic parts of the article. We hear from Michael Landsberg, who runs the Jewish Agency's Aliyah Delegation in North America. "Landsberg's family died in the Holocaust," says the reporter. A fascinating and relevant fact, to be sure! Certainly there are no Holocaust victims among the Satmar ancestors. Neither were the Yemenite families persecuted in the not-so-distant past . . .

Here's another wall-pounder:

"The Satmar promised to take them to a 'golden land,' but when they got here they found themselves in more of a Yiddish-speaking shtetl," Landsberg said, using the Yiddish word for small, insular town. "I am serving my people."

"Shtetl" means "small, insular town"? I guess "suburb" must mean "confining, lawn-lined site of Cheever short stories." I suppose also that the speaking of Yiddish (mirabile dictu!) is prima-facie evidence that the Yemenites were being exploited.

Yet another one:

Many of the Yemenite Jews have maintained their ultra-Orthodox traditions going back 2,500 years.

I wouldn't have used the word "ultra-Orthodox", especially in an article featuring both the Yemenites and the Satmar Chasidim.

Update: The Forward has an article this week. Things are still murky, with each side accusing the other of kidnapping. Given, however, that the Yemenite family was moved to an immigrant-absorption center, it seems unlikely that they merely wanted to visit an ailing mother. The real question is now getting clearer: if the Yemenites were in fact kidnapped, why didn't they or the Jewish Agency say anything to the police? Perhaps the Sokhnut kept things under wraps, for fear that the murkiness of the story might create difficulties for their mission.

The JTA has a good article, in which Samuel Heilman expounds on the obvious mini-Kulturkampf that's behind the story.

Here are the results, never mind the study

This sounds interesting, but I hope I remember to read the actual study so I can figure out if the results mean anything.

Happy Bloc Vote Day!

Tomorrow is the Kiryas Joel election for village trustee. I figured I should post something about it, because most if not all of the on-line material is in Yiddish, incluidng an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago for the Forverts.

The contest, as with everything else in KJ*, revolves around the internal Satmar dispute between Zalmen Leib and Aharon, sons of the current rebbe. The Zaloynim support Zalman Leib, the Satmar rebbe's favored successor who's regnant in Williamsburg, while the Aroynim stand behind Aharon, known as the Kiryas Yoel rov (a term used sarcastically by the Zaloynim). The Zaloynim's self-described "dissident group," the Kiryas Joel Alliance, engages in active political pot-stirring in KJ.

The two out of four incumbent trustees whose seats are up are not running for re-election. They are both associated with the KJ Alliance, and claimed that they had to withdraw because Gedalye Szegedin, the top KJ administrator, could not guarantee a free election. (Szegedin denied this in an interview with the Forverts.) In 2001, a court found that several dozen ballots, out of 600 or so cast, were tampered with. No indictments were handed down, though a critical report was issued. (See the Times Herald-Record for the full story.)

The two candidates put forward by the Alliance for the open seats didn't have much to say for their candidacy when I interviewed them for the Forverts. Shloyme Feder said, "The community picked me to run, so I ran." In the intervening weeks, however, the departing incumbents have apparently decided they need to speak on behalf of the Alliance's candidates, and of the job they did during their three years in office, so they sent a letter to a number of KJ residents.

Given the problems of the last contested election, the polarization of the KJ political climate, and the bad blood between the two sides, I would guess that the election will be decided by competing blocs, perhaps yeshive-bokhrim bused to polling places. Katle Kanye suggested I go up to KJ and cover the story, but I have a thesis to finish. Steven I. Weiss (or someone else at the Forward), where are you?

Meanwhile, the non-Jews (i.e. the Times Herald-Record, which does a good job of covering KJ) is on top of things, despite their curious notion that Jews fast on Shavues. It turns out, according to their article, that the Alliance is challenging the legitimacy of several hundred voters on the registration rolls, and demanding equal numbers of poll workers. (A strange byproduct of the Times Herald-Record's non-Jewishness: they never mention the Zalman Leib/Aharon background to the KJ dispute.)

For continuous Yiddish shouting from both sides, check out Hyde Park News - Kiryas Joel.

*As I wrote earlier, the new library that some want in KJ is an idea of the Aroynim, to which the KJ Alliance is opposed. What the KJ Alliance thinks about the aqueduct is another matter, which I don't know the answer to yet.

Update: Says a certain pseudonymous "KJFireman" on Hyde Park (my translation):

"Today, Tuesday afternoon, the Kiryas Joel Alliance scored a victory in court, when the judge confirmed that [the Alliance] will have an equal number of poll watchers and inspectors. Though the Village [i.e. the Aroynim, who control the KJ government] will still have more people in the [voting] hall, this is [still] a big difference, and the Alliance voters will feel a lot more comfortable than they did three years ago when the Village had 50 people in the hall and the Alliance fewer than 10.

"This doesn't mean that they'll win the elections, but it's a big step forward. Little by little, little by little, progress is made."

None of this can be confirmed by blog time. Then again, I'm not going to call the court or the Orange County Board of Elections right now, so it's not going to get confirmed before the election. I'm hankering for some eyewitness reportage. Maybe I'll go beg for some on my Yiddish blog.

Double Super Extra Update: Or perhaps the court settlement (as it seems to have been) was only a compromise, which the Alliance accepted begrudgingly.

Please Stop the Updates, for the Love of Aharon! The Alliance got clobbered.