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?

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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.

Good news from Sudan
(or, at least, the end of some bad news)

From: ProMED-mail
Source: Reuters News online, Fri 6 Aug 2004 [edited]

Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever in Sudan Declared Over by WHO

The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in southern Sudan, which infected 17 people and killed 7, appears to have been halted, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday 6 Aug 2004. A WHO official said the outbreak, first reported in Yambio country of Sudan's Equatoria province in May 2004, would be officially declared over on Sat 7 Aug 2004, 42 days after the death of the last person confirmed infected by the virus.

The incubation period for the disease, whose origin is still unknown despite years of research, is 21 days, and the United Nations agency says an outbreak can be considered over when no new cases have been reported for twice that length of time.

Ebola hemorrhagic fever, which in its worst form causes massive internal bleeding and is one of the most deadly diseases in the world, was first identified in the Sudan in 1976, but has claimed most victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

Although largely confined to tropical regions of Africa, it has also been reported in rain forest areas in the Western Pacific. The most virulent of its 4 known [genotypes] occurs in the Congo where, in the first known outbreak in 1976, 88 percent of the 318 reported victims died, and in 1995 it killed 81 percent of 315 infected people. Over the last 2 years in the Congo, it killed between 75 percent and 89 percent of all victims, a total of 199, in 3 separate outbreaks.

But death rates in Sudan, which has its own [genotype] and where there had been 2 other outbreaks before 2004, have been much lower, averaging around 50 percent of victims.

A large outbreak caused by the Sudanese [genotype] in Uganda in 2000-2001 affected 425 people but only about half, a total of 224, died. The only other significant outbreaks have been in Gabon -- another country with heavy tropical forest cover.

Health officials say there is still no known cure for the disease which is spread through body fluids, including blood. In 1995 it killed many doctors and nurses in the Congo outbreak. The WHO says its effects can be contained by prompt mobilization of local communities and the strict isolation of victims from physical contact with other people.

"Words are not involved in this"
(another poem by Larissa Szporluk)

Yellow, Singing at Night

the bird, wound-up,
looks almost like a lemon being shot,

the piston in its body
pumping back and forth into a blur,

like a tide that won't retire,
but hovers in remembrance of its high,

or a legendary bottle,
wrenched with genius, in the sand

where mussels secrete
amethyst tones, and the very thin rain

is a wall falling loose
at the crypt, and the song in the throat,

not rendered to stir,
stirs somehow, like a trick-maneuver

of fate, reminding him,
the boy whose palm it rivets in,

that words are not involved in this,
nor life, nor aim.

The politics of obesity and Medicare

A good summary by Jon Bonné of MSNBC points out that the much-ballyhooed change in Medicare policy amounts to somewhat less than a hill of beans in treatment coverage. The upshot, it turns out, is that a lone sentence will be removed from the Coverage Issues Manual (which details what is covered by the agency): “Obesity itself cannot be considered an illness.” No treatments will be explicitly added to the manual as eligible.

But here's a strange twist. There is, in fact, one treatment for obesity which is up for consideration. Not the friendlier, cheaper, possibly more effective (and certainly more sensical, from a public-health standpoint) anti-obesity treatments called diet, exercise, and nutrition, but fantastically expensive gastric surgery! Bonné writes:

The Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee, which recommends what the agency should pay for, may consider bariatric surgery this fall. But the agency has not scheduled discussion of other, less drastic treatments, such as nutrition counseling and structured weight-loss programs, though Tunis told MSNBC.com those treatments could be considered if the agency is asked to review them by outside petitioners.

Stranger still, the technical assessment (TA) mentioned in the article, a solid review of the epidemiologic evidence ("Diagnosis and Treatment of Obesity in the Elderly"), actually focuses on such treatment programs, which try to encourage voluntary weight loss. To quote the TA:

Obesity therapies with good evidence for improving health outcomes in the elderly incorporate both dietary and behavioral components; therefore, we consider these modes jointly here. All successful studies included exercise and used intensive counseling protocols. Effective interventions typically used diets based on reduced caloric intake, often in the setting of low-saturated-fat and low-cholesterol intake goals. . . . Weight loss showed clinical utility, particularly for cardiovascular-related benefits such as oral glucose tolerance testing or diabetes incidence.

Which "outside petitioners" got bariatric surgery on the agenda while treatment programs are not? Do the obesity groups prefer one treatment to another, and why? I would hope that the relevant petitioners (maybe I'll find out who they are) will approach the bar and ask that public health be covered before surgery.

Obesity and Medicare

It was recently announced that obesity treatments will now be eligible for Medicare coverage. I remember reading a number of objections to this decision, both in the blogosphere and elsewhere, though I can't find them now. One of the most plausible objections, phrased in the form of a defensible argument, goes something like this.

1. Obese people are obese (at least in part) by virtue of their own free will.
2. If these people became obese of their own free will, it is likely that anti-obesity treatments will be less effective, since the patients are not behaving in a way that would reduce their obesity.
3. Less effective treatments should not be covered by Medicare.

This is, I think, a utilitarian argument (though very rough and underdeveloped). There is a certain, limited amount of money available for health-care expenditures, so using some of it on less effective treatments is inadvisable.

Another argument goes like this:

1. Obese people are obese (at least in part) by virtue of their own free will.
2. This means that their obesity is (at least in part) their own fault.
3. Medical care should not be provided to those who harm themselves.

I can't see any way to defend this second argument, though it is also underdeveloped. In fact (and this shouldn't come as any surprise), I think physicians have a positive moral duty to heal and not to try and establish the fault (or lack thereof) of their patients.

Both arguments, though, have to come to terms with the following objection. How does one differentiate between personal decision and outside factors in the etiology of disease? It would be even more complicated to apply such differentiation (were it possible) to rationing of medical care.

To put it in more concrete terms: which of the following diseases make a patient more or less "blameworthy"? Cirrhosis of the liver; AIDS; obesity; lung cancer; heart disease; trauma sustained in an automobile accident (with a seat belt? without a seat belt?); etc., etc., etc. Keep in mind that these are some of the most common causes of morbidity and mortality in the U.S.
(Another way of going about it is to ask the question: are there other government programs which encourage patients to stop unhealthy behavior? At what point would a patient become ineligible for help in quitting smoking?)

This train of thought is inspired by a post over at Close Range. I'm not a philosopher (although I do read and enjoy philosophy), and these thoughts lack rigor. But maybe Marc can give me some advice.

John Kerry on Darfur

His Plan for America says the following about Darfur (pp. 33-34):

We must also work with the United Nations and Africa's regional organizations to address Africa's persistent, disproportionate share of the world's weak, failing states and chronic armed conflicts, and promote sustainable economic development. We support extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides a door to a brighter future for many of the continent's poorest countries. We will also support effective relief efforts when there is a humanitarian crisis--particularly at this moment in Darfur, Sudan, where genocide is underway.

Although Kerry does use the word "genocide," there's no indication he would do more than what Bush is doing: relying on the U.N. to gum the Sudanese government into submission with its toothless resolutions. In particular, this paragraph bespeaks a deafening absence of readiness to help with an international peacekeeping force. Add to this Kerry's hasty promises to pull the troops out of Iraq, and isolationism comes to mind.

What makes a good blog?

The post-game analyses of the DNC blogs have been made elsewhere, so suffice it to say that (a) most of them were banal; and (b) a select few were worth reading. It comes as no surprise that the most valuable convention blogs were those written not by amateurs, but by people with at least some experience thinking and writing about politics; I'm thinking here about Mickey Kaus and Oxblog. David Adesnik, on Oxblog, points out, reasonably enough, that blogs are useful if they share with the reader a certain store of expertise. (That's why Andrew Sullivan didn't need to go to the convention. He knew what he was looking for, and helped me find the weak spots in Kerry's speech that I overlooked even though we both watched the same thing on TV.)

That's one criterion that can be used to assess a blog: usefulness. A blog can provide the interested reader with an entree to liberal-hawkish (or Christian-rightish) politics, linguistics, Jewish academia, cooking, Holywood gossip, Torah, or any one of a number of spicy, tangy, or wonky subfields.

But most people, shocked by the new, tend to ignore the fact that blogs are also (primarily?) a literary medium, stuck midway between the essay and the epistle, awkward despite its shiny newness and still trying to find its own way to eloquence. That is, a blog can be worthwhile even when it's not backed by expertise, and the je ne sais quoi which confers this worthiness is something old-fashioned folk call good writing.

A civic-minded citizen of the blogosphere should gird his or her loins to become the Michiko of the blogs, wielding a sharp red pen to sort out the reading matter from the packing material. (Note that literary quality is separate from blog popularity. Any fool can see that Instapundit has the most readers in the universe, but your fool here still fails to understand how anyone can bear up under his constant, uninflected staccato.)

Such a critic would ask a few basic questions. Which blogs are written with more than a modicum of style, energy, innovation, intelligence, worldliness, refreshing obscenity, plot-driven suspense, or colorful characters? Who manages to stick their identifiably quirky nose above the unending blizzard of daily posts required of a committed blogger? Who has created a memorable literary personality, or a set of concerns that manage to challenge and infect the reader? If the entire blogosphere were to disappear tomorrow, whom would we miss?

A blog critic would review a different blog every week. They could sing the praises of an already well-known blog, or pluck a gem from obscurity and hold it up to the light of public acclamation. No, I don't want to play the role of Kakutani. I'm not Micheeky enough. But maybe I can start with writing about those blogs I like a lot, and why I like them -- and that might in some small way encourage more thorough blog criticism done on a wider scale by more popular blogs.

More on this later, dear readers, if you'd find it interesting. (If so, let me know!)

The Dead Leader and the Living Father

Naftali Gliksberg writes in Haaretz:

The death of Moses in the desert is the embodiment of the paradoxical
relationship of the people Israel and the Land of Israel. In order to enter the
Land one needs the faith of Abraham, a faith that perseveres even in
opposition to all reality and human logic. But in order to exist as a people one
needs a leader like Moses - the seeker of revelation, the
rational actor according to a system of laws, the leader who didn't enter the
Land.

4.5 million gallons of water a day . . .
for 67,000 KJ residents

That's what's envisioned for a controversial pipeline which would divert water from New York City's Catskill Aqueduct. (The project is hotly disputed by neighboring communities, but it's probably the only thing supported by both the KJ village government and the dissident KJ Alliance.)

Get the facts and figures from another excellent article by the Times Herald-Record's Chris McKenna.

One of the more interesting tidbits:

The village has asked Congress for $20 million to cover much of the
cost.

The UN and Darfur

This is exactly what is meant by us liberal hawks when we wonder what Kerry means by his talk of rounding up the allies. The U.S. has roundly and forcefully condemned the killings in Sudan (though only the Congress, not the White House, has called it genocide). And then there's the Security Council, which passes resolutions in a sort of perpetual diplomatic inertia.

Today, the Council is voting on a revised resolution on the "situation [diplomatese for war] in Sudan." I can't find the text of the revised version, but here is the version immediately previous to that currently being considered. Salient points include the use of the phrase "acts of violence of an ethnic dimension" (a phrase used, I suppose, when "genocide" is considered too strong), and the lack of any estimates of the number of dead to this point. The main difference between the current version and the previous version? The one being voted on today lacks teeth, namely the sanctions that had been suggested by the U.S. as an incentive for action by the government of Sudan against the Janjaweed.

In its place (or so I've read), a statement that actions will be taken according to Article 41 of the UN Charter:

The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.

In an interview with the BBC, Britain's ambassador to the UN tried to put the best face on the weakening of the resolution -- there's no difference, he says, between the words "sanctions" and reference to Article 41. I think not. There's always more power to direct statement than to bureaucratic language, and, it appears, Article 41 allows action weaker than direct sanctions: in fact, anything the Security Council decides. So the new resolution, in effect, is threatening that the UNSC will take measures that the UNSC will decide upon. Bold, this.

Where now is the incentive for an international team of military observers, much less a significant force of peacekeepers to help stop the conflict? The resolution places full responsibility on the Sudanese government, which might be happy to take responsibility but do nothing, or rather, continue to mislead international aid organizations.

A recent article in the New York Review of Books reviews the history. I'll try to read it. Maybe it will give me an answer to the question: What could have been done earlier? When should the U.S., or the U.N., have foreseen what would happen in Darfur? Why did the previous killing in the south of Darfur not merit as much attention in the press, and why was that massacre not prevented (or not preventable)?

Postscript: The Forward has a good summary on the inability of the U.N. (or any subset of the international community, the U.S. included) to commit a peacekeeping force to the Sudan or to agree on the threat of sanctions. According to human rights observers quoted in the article,

bitterness over Iraq has stymied the America's push for
sanctions.

"The bad feelings that have occurred because of U.S. unilateral action in
Iraq have lessened the receptivity of other countries to the U.S. now talking
about multilateral action," said Roberta Cohen, a fellow at the Brookings
Institution.

France and Germany skeptically eyed the United States's efforts, slowing
down the process until recently. While European countries have begun of late to
act more aggressively, China, Pakistan and Algeria continue to hold out against
any resolution calling for sanctions against the Sudanese government.

However, the article doesn't cite any evidence to show that France, Germany, et al. are refusing to back sanctions because of U.S. unilateral action in Iraq. It could very plausibly be that France and Germany are reluctant a priori to get involved (I don't think we've heard much from their respective prime ministers). China and Pakistan have their own reasons for not rocking the Sudan boat.

A turn to the internal (rhyme)

Jesus, Master of the Sea

Come, swim, under.
The summer flounder compound's
in a thunder, clouds of castoff
tissue, vicious sea-cat
mother--I'm here to bless
the carnage. I'm here to answer
questions. Take my hand.
Limbs submerged
turn profoundly moving.
Bodies fugue
like lost balloons,
their indecisive down-time.
Among the bottom scour,
flora flicker off and on,
fish resemble fowl.
What's your question, Violetta?
Walking on the water?
Yes, it's fun, like perfect skin
that hides internal candy--
who hasn't tried a pomegranate
and not belied their tongue?
But when it's done,
the breach lives on--a simple
step on solid ground
and I'm laid out, a grand capon,
trussed in my own tether.

The above is by Larissa Szporluk, from her book The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind, which Aimee Nezhukumatathil has been talking up on her friendly and good-natured blog. (Szporluk owes Aimee Nez a thank-you note.) So I bought it, and I haven't regretted my purchase: I'm only on the second page, and the first two poems both demand re-reading.

This poem's chock-full of alliterative wordplay, sometimes a little too obvious ("Limbs submerged/turn profoundly moving" is, I think, nearly groan-inducing). What I've had difficulty understanding is why this playfulness is not at odds with the sea-floor mayhem and redemptive character of this Jesus poem.

After thinking about it, I understand that the mayhem, too, must be meant playfully, or at least not in full seriousness. "I'm here to bless the carnage" is not, after all, a weightly theological statement, but almost an aside, since the very word "carnage" is more or less captive to irony. (When was the last time you heard it used in all seriousness of condemnation?) I think this is right when I consider the turning point of the poem: "What's your question, Violetta?/Walking on the water?" Jesus has an audience, but it's a schoolgirl, or at least someone with schoolgirlish awe. The sing-song iamb of the next two lines reinforce the playfulness.

I find puzzling the contradictory tone of the poem's end. "But when it's done/the breach lives on" is a sweeping-but-concrete summary of the permanence of the divide, whether it's between the outside and inside of the fruit or between water and dry land. 

What happens next? Jesus himself falls flat on his face, a trussed capon, fish become fowl. I enjoy slapstick as much as the next guy, but I can't help but think that the true heart of the poem is buried somewhere beneath the whimsicality. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise, though, if anyone else has a different take.

"Cape," a poem by Dana Goodyear in Slate, also shoves all its rhymes into the middle of its lines, as if nothing so orotund as end-rhyming were allowed by free-verse law.  It's a summery piece of blasé fluff (no, I didn't know what "Swiss dot" meant, either, until I Googled it). The problem with calling the shore "boring, boring" is that the reader is likely to agree with your description.

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.