Taking off

This coming Friday will be the third where I leave the hospital early to observe Shabbos. I don't do this without mixed feelings. Observing Shabbos is one thing when one is a tradesman and puts down the tools of one's trade (or picks them up) on one's own recognizance. But the modern workplace, where one is part of a team (or a cog in a machine, depending on how you look at it) is something else again. One's actions affect others. In fact, entire chapters of Jewish socioeconomic history have been written on the turmoil which ensued when Jewish factory owners (never mind the non-Jews) collided with the Sabbath observance of their Jewish workers.

The fact that I have been able, more or less, to pursue my Sabbath observance without undue harm to my career or earning power says not so much about my religious asceticism or Will to Frumkeit, and more about the benefits accruing to me by virtue of my class (by birth) and the expenditure in my education invested by my parents. The fact that hyper-rigorous Sabbath observance has become the norm of the American Orthodox community, by the same token, says a lot about the economic success of that community.

But that's by the way. What I wanted to point out is that the issues in my case (that of a medical student) are slightly more complicated. Most folks in my vast readership (no longer the Daily Dozen, but certainly not yet the Daily Century, either) know that saving a life, in Jewish law, takes precedence over the Sabbath. (This statement is rough; there are many exceptions; but the general idea is valid.) I'm just a student, and not involved (yet) in saving any lives, so one might think that I could leave early with a light heart. But an inner doubter asks: isn't it possible that the extra clinical exposure, available to me if I worked Shabbos, is necessary to train me to be the best life-saver I can be?

Possible, but not actually the case, I think, in the current system of medical education, or at least the one I'm part of. The inner doubter raises an important point, though. After some stage of one's medical education, the activity of medical care must be construed as some sort of gross life-saving even if one is not actually saving lives at every moment. Otherwise medical practice for the Shabbos observer would be impracticable and a shayle would have to be asked every minute of every Saturday. That is to say, once I become a resident, I will have to act like a doctor -- cause I'll be one. And doctors can't get out of working Saturdays if they are the primary caregivers for their patients.

There are, I know, residency programs which do not require the students to work on Shabbos. How this functions I don't know; perhaps the patients are helpful enough to get sick Sunday through Friday?

Qualifications, hems and haws, and corrections to this are sure to follow.

Why I Can Daven At All Those Cool Ortho Shuls on East Broadway
. . . only until my daughter is old enough to daven

Naomi Chana explains it all.

The Boy Knows the Truth
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

First printed in the Yiddish journal Di Tsukunft, October, 1972. Reprinted in Di Tsukunft, October, 2004, on the 100th anniversary of Singer's birth. The Tsukunft editors point out that the story has not been included in any anthology in Yiddish, and has never been translated. I'll try to translate a paragraph at a time, whenever I have the time. Expect the translation to be finished, oh, never. Still, it can't hurt to start.

When Reb Gavriel-Takhne became the Klintover rebbe on the death of his father, he told his attendants that he would not receive women. It was true that his own father and grandfather, and many other rebbes, like Reb Sholem of Belz and Reb Khayim of Sanz, did receive women, but he couldn't compare himself to those righteous men. They were angels; he, Gavriel-Takhne, was a man of bodily needs. His blood boiled in him. In the middle of prayer inappropriate thoughts would attack him like locusts. Fasts and cold mikvahs didn't help. The evil inclination spoke to him without any scruples: anything goes, get some while you still can. From anguish the rebbe bit his nails to the quick. He pounded his head with his fists, tore his sidelocks, called himself an evil man, disgusting, a sinner. He looked for advice in religious works, but it turned out, strangely enough, that an evil spirit had attached himself to him. How ridiculous! Young men visited him to learn how to be God-fearing; scholars copied his words of Torah; he taught Talmud daily to yeshivah students; was ashamed before other people more than before God . . .

"This is a world of falsehood, anyway," said the rebbe to himself. Here, in the world of demons, everything was backwards. Countless times Reb Gavriel-Takhne had wanted to call together those close to him and tell them the truth: he couldn't be a leader of Jews. But the rebbe knew that as soon as he took off the spodik and the felt coat, he would immediately come under the Devil's control. The way things were, at least, he hadn't progressed to any actual sin.

He kept having the same thought. A man like him, Gavriel-Takhne, is ashamed before other people more than before God.

The rebbe would look into "The Beginning of Wisdom" and think about Rahab the prostitute; he would study the Zohar and lust after Avishag the Shunamite and Queen Esther. It said in works of Kabbalah that new personalities would spring up between Adam and Eve, Jacob and Rachel, David and Batsheba. In this case, they meant souls, not bodies. But as soon as the rebbe fell asleep, the bodies of those righteous women would reveal themselves to him naked. He would cavort with them like a he-goat. They'd sing different songs and uncover their shame. The rebbe got up trembling.

"Help, please help! I can't take it any more!"

The rebbe had a wife, a descendant of the Roptshitser rebbe, Menukhe-Alte. But as much as he was a man of lust, she was someone of whom it's said "even her pregnancy and giving birth are in holiness." He, Gavriel-Takhne, is tall, broad, with the voice of a strongman and the appetite of an animal. At fifty-seven his beard was still as red as fire, without a thread of gray. He had all his teeth. He could crack walnuts with them. One time, during a fire in his courtyard, Gavriel-Takhne tore locks open with his bare hands, carried out whole cases of holy books. He grabbed Avigdor the sexton, who had passed out from the smoke, and carried him down two flights of stairs. Then the rebbe went out to the well and for two hours straight drew buckets of water which the firefighters used to put out the fire.

Imperfect Understanding

Gregg Easterbrook, in his Daily Express column at The New Republic [I think this is the link, but it seems to be broken right now], says there should be fewer languages. In presenting his claim, he manages to conflate a number of issues while misunderstanding them. There are too many inaccuracies and howlers to go over individually, but we'll start with the main ones:

"The fewer the tongues, the more easily societies communicate." This is an argument by assertion. Easterbrook does not understand that we have both a global English-language culture and, at the same time, many minority languages which may or may not correspond to political entities. For example, all countries involved in the recent war in Iraq communicated in English among themselves, while their citizens speak languages other than English. Surely Easterbrook does not maintain that these countries would have "communicated more easily" if only all of their citizens spoke English. (Presumably our colonial mother, the United Kingdom, spoke something other than English in the late eighteenth century; otherwise we would not have had so basic a miscommunication as a war.)

Furthermore, not every minority language is an "indigenous language." Easterbrook is laboring under the misconception that there are two kinds of languages: global powerhouses, like English, and minority languages spoken only by the primitive inhabitants of an isolated territory. But there are many sorts of non-global languages, ranging from national vernaculars (Ukrainian, Belgian) to state-supported languages(Irish, Frisian) to stateless languages (Yiddish, Romani).

"For citizens of the developing world, speaking a top ten language opens doors to a better life." No one denies that English, or any other language of global commerce, is a route to economic success. This is trivial. There are two questions here: (a) how one is to define economic success. One can always make more money. Is it really true that all other languages besides English (or Mandarin) should be jettisoned as long as speaking them reduces one's income by some non-zero amount? Secondly, (b) how is one to define "a better life"? This is the non-trivial question which cannot be answered in daily-express fashion.

"Multiple languages arose because throughout history, many groups of people lived in isolation, interacting only with others like themselves." I've read this sentence a dozen times and I'm still not sure what it means. Does it mean that, ideally, there would only be one language, but that due to "many groups of people liv[ing] in isolation," multiple languages sprung up? (In that case, Easterbrook's knowledge of sociolinguistics stopped at the Tower of Babel.) But we know that many languages, if not all, arose precisely out of a process of contact and exchange between different groups. This certainly describes the genesis of English, Spanish, and Yiddish, and I bet lots of other languages too. Even the Romance languages (which Easterbrook might be thinking of) arose out of contact between Latin and coterritorial vernaculars, not out of inbreeding. I'm not sure what languages Easterbrook was thinking of when he wrote this sentence (if "wrote" is the word). He probably thinks that the indigenous languages he blesses with his disapproval somehow blossomed ready-made from the earth, without contact with any other language. This isn't true either.

"[. . .] when a rare language dies out, the culture it served can continue, just in some other tongue[.]" I admire Easterbrook's confidence, but I disagree. Cultures change when they are translated. Such translation is not a sin, and is not to be avoided -- it's necessary, after all, to help Jews understand what is said in the Yiddish most of them no longer speak. But this does not mean that all of Yiddish culture is readily translatable into English. Translation does not mean continuation.

"And of course if members of a small-language culture want to work to keep their tongue in use, that's great, so long as they know a major language as well." Now he tells us this, in the third-to-last paragraph? O editor, where is thy saving pencil?

Why there aren't (m)any blogs by third- and fourth-year medical students
Or: What's the recommended treatment for a blogger hiatus?

In case you haven't guessed, I am spending a lot of time doing other things than blogging, mostly experiencing various varieties of humiliation and quasi-pedagogic force-feeding. Some interesting learning and patient contact in there, too. Stay tuned for coming articles and for blog posts at irregular intervals.

The riv-haleshonot made local
More Tales from Down Under on the LES.

[Scene: A kosher bakery. Two Jewish men are leaning on the counter and talking to each other in Yiddish in confident, ownerly fashion.]

One of the women behind the counter, to another woman: They can talk to each other in Yiddish, but we're not allowed to speak Spanish!

ZShB [in Spanish]: They don't let you speak Spanish?

[He is ignored.]

*Riv-haleshonot (Hebrew): Language war (literally, "quarrel"). A phrase usually referring to the often-strained relations between Hebraists and Yiddishists in the Diaspora and the Land of Israel.

Sowing nostalgia
Loisaida stories, 1.

[Scene: Interior of a small store on a street near ZShB's new apartment. The very apotheosis of disorder. Shelves covered with dust, bits of recognizable leathery Judaica -- mezuzot, tefillin, etc. -- and other various merchandise. There's another store, somewhat less dusty and more ordered, down the block, but your narrator is not in a hurry and has chosen to wander on in here as well. At the counter in the front sits an old Jew in his seventies or eighties, with a white beard and a slanted, black "Litvish" yarmulke. His name is Rabbi E.* An open Talmud lies a few feet away. The conversation, of course, is in Yiddish.]

ZShB: Two havdalah candles, please.

[There's a pleasant conversation about ZShB's employment, marital status, and number of children. He is welcomed to the neighborhood.]

ZShB: Didn't there use to be a seforim ["Hebrew" book] store around here?

Rabbi E: Yes, but it closed last year.

ZShB: [Momentarily forgetting that he just went into another Judaica store a few blocks back] Is yours the only store around like this?

Rabbi E: Yes! [bangs fist on table] I'm the only one who sells good, kosher mezuzot and tefillin!

*He has more than an initial, obviously.

Shampoo, soap, and psychiatry

Feigning Sanity at Bellevue, my second article in the Medicine Mensch series.

And here it is in full:

MEDICINE MENSCH: Feigning Sanity at Bellevue
By Zackary Sholem Berger
February 4, 2005

My first rotation as a medical student is psychiatry, that branch of medicine that patrols the border between sane and insane. But as is well known to any observer of human behavior, the sane are sane up until the point when you start looking at them with an analytic eye. Then everyone seems to need treatment, doctors and students included.

At 9:15 every morning, our psychiatry ward has a "community meeting," a chance for everyone — patients, doctors and staff (the "community") — to thrash out problems that are relevant to life on our unit. A sociologist would have a wonderful time here. Everyone sits in large, colorful, uncomfortable plastic chairs, like booster seats for grownups. We're reminded daily that at the meeting, personal issues are out of bounds. But without fail, one of the patients always starts with the question, "When do I get out of here?" Or, "Quiero irme ya." ("I want to leave right now.") (The meetings are translated into Spanish.) "That's a personal issue," a staff member always answers, "but we can try to discuss it generally. We're only talking about community issues now."

(On the other hand, our staff meeting is a freewheeling chance to bitch and moan in the most personal of terms. Without coming to blows and, miraculously, without psychotropic medication, the issues are somehow solved, helped by the powerful motivation of getting enough work done by lunchtime.)

But let's get back to the first meeting. What does the "community" complain about? Someone gets tea instead of coffee at lunch, or vice versa. The meeting room (normally the patient lounge) hasn't had its floor washed in days. One of the patients won't take showers. "Hey, where's the shampoo?" Men are using women's bathrooms. And so on. If this list of problems sounds familiar, it's because they show up at all stages of life whenever people stay in close proximity: in the suburban home, summer camp, resort, homeless shelter or Elderhostel. We all have the same problems when staying three to a room.

Even in an emergency, the sickest mental patients have more in common with us than we might like to admit. A couple of weeks ago, I spent midnight to7 a.m. at Bellevue Hospital's Comprehensive Psychiatry Emergency Program — the psychiatric emergency room. The orientation packet emphasizes a number of safety precautions: Never be alone in a room with a patient; always have an exit route in mind; don't promise a patient, even in the name of politeness, anything that you can't deliver. From these caveats, I imagined a cross between a cellblock at Alcatraz and a chaotic thrill ride of the insane. (Never mind the prime rule of medical-student safety, on any ward, psychiatric or not: Get out of the way as fast as you can; someone larger than you knows exactly what to do in this situation.)

I saw five or six patients, and of those, only one needed urgent psychiatric care. Why did the others come to CPEP that night? It was rough outside, rainy and cold, with a brisk wind off the East River — not a good time to be kicked out by your mother because you've had a fight with her new husband. It also wasn't the best night (from another patient's point of view) to have taken a bus to New York from Michigan to "hang out with some friends" who turned out not to be so hospitable.

The attending physician on call that night decided that none of these other cases could be admitted. There were those who didn't have psychiatric problems at all, and just wanted a warm bed for the night. Others were indeed mentally ill, but not sick enough to stay in the hospital. Some fell into both categories. It's not trivializing the plight of the mentally ill to say that the daily lives of the sane are also ruled by institutions that cannot admit just anyone; the problem of limited resources is a general one. (Have you ever tried to find an apartment in the city, or get your kid into school, or find a job?) Even so, I kept asking myself the question: Shouldn't there be an institution that is ready to help these people, no matter what the cost? And here's the answer: Yes, and you're working in it. But you still can't do everything.

The next morning at 9:15 I did my little bit, filling in as a Spanish translator because a couple of people were out sick. Among other things, I helped make sure everyone understood an important fact: how packets of sweetener are distributed at lunch and why. Life on the wards, like life outside, is measured in shampoo and sugar.

Moving

Tonight will be our last spent on East 24th Street; tomorrow will be our first spent on East Broadway. (As I pointed out earlier, pronounced East Broadway, accent on the second syllable, by most natives of New York that I've heard.) Downtown: more Cantonese, more Yiddish, still within striking distance of our shul. A return to the Lower East Side, a neighborhood our families (probably) didn't come over to and one we don't feel any nostalgia for. But we're sure looking forward to getting to know it.

Abundant kibitzing
In which I half-articulate what might be wrong with the Conservative movement.

This Shefa list I talked about earlier is turning out to be pretty interesting: a lot less personal bellyaching and a lot more considered and creative thought about where the Conservative movement should go from here. Here's an e-mail I sent to the list that might not make the moderator's cut:

1. One distinction which might be helpful is between LIBERAL and LAX. Conservative Judaism is very much a liberal movement, for the following reasons (all of which are discussed, or at least adumbrated/hat-tipped, in Emet veEmunah): recognition of the importance of individual decision-making as something which can't be coerced into homogeneity by communal institutions; or, relatedly, the notion of religious responsibility (mitsves) as intertwined with individual religious progress cum exploration and contingency. There is a connection to be made between the looser, layperson's meaning of "liberal" and liberal political theory, but "this is no place to be lengthy."

In general, C. Judaism is liberal because it tends to be meykil rather than makhmir. It is important to understand what "meykil" does not mean; it is NOT to be equated with laxity, lack of stringency for its own sake. (Those who equate laxity with the term "kule" [leniency] do not understand the latter.) Ideally, the C. movement should be a rigorous application of both liberal and (this is where we've differed
from our friends on the left) halachic ideas. Liberal *and* rigorous Judaism -- isn't this what we want?

2. However (and this is perhaps where rubber meets road, or theory meets Action Plans), this liberal stringency (or stringent liberality) must be based on a wide range of possibilities for vibrant Jewish life. For the past few years, I have harbored a suspicion that dare not speak its name: that the C. movement's loud protestations of its "halachic" nature are meant as a response to our critics on the right. Of course, halachah is the blood of our Jewish being, but it is not the all. There is much more in addition to halachah which goes into living a God-fearing and humane Jewish life. A convenient term for it is "culture." I don't just mean books on Jewish topics, or Woody Allen, or Jewish music (though all these have some role to play). I'm talking about the ways in which a Conservative sensibility can inform a Jewish religious culture. In other words: the Orthodox have their sub-culture, so why don't we have one? Why are we satisfied to participate in secular Jewish culture when Conservative Judaism has something both religious and worldly to bring to the table?

Let me give an example of where culture can play a role. (There are many other ways, of course.) Mishnah Yomit is a worthwhile initiative of the USCJ. But where's the promotion? Where's the advertising? Where is the pop-culture soupcon of kitsch which has made Daf Yomi a "smash hit" phenomenon among the Orthodox? (To head off an expected comment: adopting this strategy of the Orthodox does not at all mean agreeing with their religious approach.) Or another example: what does Conservative Judaism have to say about American secular Jewish culture? Is there any alternative to provide? I think our answers might be at once more congenial and more convincing than those provided by modern Orthodoxy.

Inauguration Day
Or: Double entendre, intentional variety.

As I was interviewing one of my patients, a schizophrenic, he was watching the proceedings on TV. His speech was delusional and disorganized.

By the Waters of Manhattan: Talks by/on Jewish Poets

Rocked myself today on the strap in the El
In time with the worn out Jews
The night was black, spirit enslaved.

Karen Weiser
on
Anna Margolin: Yiddish Poet of the Lower East Side
Tuesday
January 18, 2005
7PM

Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 5 Union Square West -- 7th Floor (above Staples)
Talks are Free to the Public
Committee On Poetry and Jewish Below Fourteenth Street
212 358 9534 (information)

These talks are made possible by a grant from Educational Alliance’s Jewish below Fourteenth Street Project, which is funded by the UJA-Federation of New York to enrich Jewish life in Downtown Manhattan.

Don't do Ragu!

Sighted at the Gristedes (a grocery store, for those of you living outside the Holy City of Five Boroughs): two women, probably from India or Pakistan going by their language and dress, in the pasta-and-sauce aisle. Even though I didn't understand their language, it was clear that one of them was learnedly explaining to the other exactly how one uses Ragu spaghetti sauce.

Now, on the one hand, everyone is free to make their own choices, the immigrant experience is something difficult and labyrinthine, I'm sure Ragu and pasta are cheaper than just about anything else you could buy (except for Ramen, maybe), etceteblah. On the other hand, I wanted to shake the Ragu-lover hard by the shoulders and cry out, "My God, woman! Your own food is so much better!"

And the ban played on

It's not surprising that some Orthodox Jews want to ban books. Every group has criteria of inclusion and exclusion; there are even some books which could put you outside the pale of Conservative or Reform Judaism by reading them (or believing in their contents). This is not just a matter of the lax left versus the stringent right; it also has to do with differing philosophies and criteria of acceptability.

The interesting thing about a given ban is whether the group, by and large, agrees with it. If a ban is controversial, the book touches on a fissure within the community. In short, the ban says more about the banner than the banned.

The language of medicine
Or, Escape from Planet Jargon.

There are some words I wish I weren't using now on the wards, but they seem to be part of the language here; any deviation would waste time or be misinterpreted as pretension. In this category are abbreviations like "meds [medications]," "ped onc [pediatric oncology]," and the like. I'll deal with them.

There are other expressions which I've promised myself I'll do my level best not to use. When a patient does not report the symptom the doctor is asking about, it is the practice to use the word "denies." E.g., "Mr. Campos denies chest pain." This is so distant from the ordinary meaning of "denies" that it attributes ulterior motives to the patient where none exist. (The twin of "denies" is "endorses," which in medspeak means "reports something." The same problem arises here. In normal English, could anyone really be said to "endorse" symptoms of depression?)

When a patient does not take his or her medication, the word used in medical jargon is "noncompliant." There's a similar problem here, because in normal English, "noncompliant" connotes defiance or noncooperation, while in medspeak, a noncompliant patient can simply be forgetful or confused.

Nurses: the importance of the (relatively) powerless

In response to the first installment of Medicine Mensch, I've received two e-mails from doctors aggrieved at what they see is a slight upon nurses. Owing to their misreading of the article or the unclarity of my prose, they mistook the term "hierarchy" for a ranking of importance. According to such a reading, I would hold that medical students are more important [sic!] than nurses, who in turn are more important than cafeteria workers, transporters, and the like.

Of course, nothing could be further than the truth. The hierarchy in the article was meant to be (and, in fact, my impression is that most readers understood it as) an informal characterization of the power and control each profession is vouchsafed within the hospital's many labyrinths. My iimportance to patients' medical care is approximately nil compared to the hospital's lifeblood which flows through the veins of every nurse. But who's going to get paid more in the future, and who has more access, even at this early stage in his career, to the decision-making apparatus of the medical center? Me. There are fair and unfair aspects of this sociological fact, but representing a state of affairs in prose should not be taken as an endorsement.

To any nurses who might have read the article: if you did take offense, feel free to assume that I know absolutely nothing about medicine and am a snotnose short white coat bumbling along the wards. After all, that was the point.

Next article, a month from now: all about psychiatry. In a thousand words or less.

Medicine Mensch

This new series of articles in the Forward follows me through my medical training and, I hope, out the other side. I hope to talk about Jewish and medical topics which are sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, and often interrelated with each other. The first installment is here.

Here it is below, as well:

MEDICINE MENSCH: Today I Am a Short White Coat
By Zackary Sholem Berger
January 7, 2005
My first day as a medical underling.

Today I am a short, white coat.

Until last week, I was locked up in the ivory tower to finish my doctorate in epidemiology. But now it's finally time to learn how to be a medical student. I'm going on the wards, where I'll learn all manner of things: how to put in an I.V., how to build a rapport with annoying patients and how to avoid rampaging gurneys. To understand a hospital, you need to understand its hierarchy: when it's followed, when it's hallowed and when it's violated. I'll try to explain it all, but forgive me if we get lost. It's my first day.

The dilemma of the medical student with the short white coat — am I wearing it, or is it wearing me? — is as important to the person as it is to her wardrobe. On the first day of a new job, or in a new school, it's hard to know where to fit. All the more so in the topsy-turvy hospital hierarchy, where the most important person, the patient, has none of the economic or directive influence that powers the huge institution.

Starting from the very bottom, we first have the janitors, the cafeteria ladies, the orderlies, the "transporters" (gurney pushers) — anyone who makes sure that the huge hospital organism can fulfill its basic needs. Those of you who watch the television show "Scrubs" are familiar with the show's wisecracking, joke-playing janitor. He's completely in control, and jerks around J.D. (the medical resident who's the show's main character) to his heart's content. But if you've ever been inside a real hospital, you've never met a janitor like that. Sure, the janitors are friendly; sure, there's a modicum of genial give-and-take between upper (doctor) and lower (custodian). But at the same time, there's the uneasy reality that one is Over and one is Under, and never the twain shall meet. There is no magical moment of cross-understanding that one finds in Hasidic stories, when the rebbe realizes that the coachman greasing his wheels is just as spiritually attuned as he is. They are janitors, and that's that; no enlightenment is expected from them.

There are two kinds of uniforms in the hospital: medical and nonmedical. Janitors wear the second variety. Orderlies often wear scrubs of a laughably loud color, to point out just how removed they are from the medical hierarchy — the same reason that clowns wear the getup they do, to signal their freedom from normal rules.

Moving up a step, we find one of the most necessary groups of people in the hospital, aside from the administrators and money wranglers (who are sometimes known, unsurprisingly, as "the suits"). These are the nurses. It used to be the custom for them to wear white, but as uniforms everywhere become more and more casual, they've chosen the minimum amount of white to look a little bit like angels: white coats, white pants, perhaps a pair of white sneakers. The sneakers make them look like they're always on the way to or from Kol Nidre, which makes sense: If you'd like to build a community that's compassionate and practical, you could do worse than to convince the nurses to join you. It's smart to be nice to nurses in the same way that it's advisable to be on good terms with God.

One step above nurses is the medical student. That's me over here, not waving but drowning, trying to find in this rambling hospital the bathrooms, the library, the cafeteria and, most important, the stairs (the elevators are crowded and slow). While a long white coat looks dignified, flowing and somewhat old fashioned — a kind of medical kittel — a short white coat makes anyone look like a barber or an ice-cream scooper. Whether to counteract or exacerbate this effect, every medical student fills the pockets of her coat with a bewildering array of slips of paper, handbooks, equipment, tongue depressors, alcohol pads, pens, pencils, Palm Pilots and the odd bit of snack food. The rationale here is, I guess, "If I don't know anything, at least the pockets of my coat can be stuffed with facts."

On top, of course, is the physician himself. (I would write "herself," but it would be unrepresentative. The top rungs of the hierarchy are mostly male, even at this late date.) Their coats are long, with pockets that don't have to be filled with anything (the clinical experience and diagnostic certitude are all kept in the head at this stage, not on PDAs or in quick-reference books). Some doctors don't even wear coats — their rank is obvious.

The above hierarchy is just an approximation. There are enough exceptions and exceptions-to-the-exceptions to impress any devotee of the Talmud. For instance, at my medical school, at least until recently, surgeons wore scrubs and no one else did. Then, in a heroic mass movement, medical students decided that scrubs were comfy. They wanted to wear them, too! Now everyone can have his own pair. For some reason, though, only a surgeon wearing scrubs looks like a surgeon wearing scrubs. Anyone else looks like an escaped convict or someone whose last set of sweats is in the laundry.

The sick person wears no coat at all — aside from the robes that open in the back, like misappropriated evening gowns — and can feel as ashamed as Adam and Eve, the first naked couple. The rabbis of the Talmud said that the prototypical act of loving-kindness was God's providing loincloths to cover their nakedness. Even if I don't know anything about medicine yet, maybe I still can help patients feel better, no matter how short and overloaded my coat is.

Zackary Sholem Berger finished his doctorate in epidemiology from New York University this month, and will complete medical school in 2006. This is the first column in a series tracing his transformation into that mythical figure: The Jewish Doctor. Comments and questions encouraged at doctor@forward.com. No medical advice given!

Confidential in Bellevue

I'm swimming in stories and outlandish speech, but I can't repeat any of it. Interviewing patients is a short-story writer's dream, with the layers of lives coming at you faster than you can write them down. (Said an attending to me today as I was doing one of my first interviews with a psychiatric patient: "Don't write so much down. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud starting out. Just try to talk to them as people.") But these are patients, and so their details must be kept confidential. Even if I disguised their names, it wouldn't be enough.

The most I can render, therefore, are general impressions of where I am and what I'm doing. I hope to have some time to do that over the next few days. On the 11th, I will be on-call (the whole night long) at Bellevue's psychiatric emergency room; I assume that something I see or learn there will be worth writing about.

If you'd like to know anything in particular about what medical training is like, please ask away. It will help me sharpen my eye and ear.

Postscript: My dad asks if "talking to [the patients] as people" is really enough; aren't I supposed to be trained in specific medical knowledge? Sure, but sometimes an over-eager medical student can narrow things down too quickly, when what's needed is a more open-ended inventory of the patient's state. This is particularly true in psychiatry, I think, where the pathologies are open-ended structural flaws rather than acute medical problems.

Yiddish in Spanish

A clear overview of Yiddish culture, without the distortions and crudities that characterize such things in most English-language publications, is to be found in a new article by Mercedes Cebrian in the Spanish-language, Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia [subscription required]. There's a paragraph in there about me, too.

Big day tomorrow

I shouldn't be up this late. You see, last week I finished my PhD. This coming week, I return to my former identity as an MD student. My first rotation is psychiatry.

I will tell you all about it in fits, starts, dribs, and drabs over the coming weeks and months. But please stay tuned for my new series of articles for the Forward, tentatively titled The Making of a Jewish Doctor, about my adventures on the wards. The first article appears in this Friday's issue, and I'll link to all of them here.

He signed my title page!

If you know what this means, then you probably are a current or former graduate student, or related to one.

Feel free to leave appropriate sentiments in the comments. (If you don't know what the appropriate ones are, guess.)

More later on my continuing academic odyssey.

The Fig Tree
A poem by Israel Eliraz (b. 1936)


This fig tree's growing just as big as it can
as if it already grew here once.
That's the nature of this beauty, this tree growing with supreme sureness
inestimably greater than any sureness of mine,
looking at it this evening and eating its sweet fruit
of which only the honeyed idea of the infinite is sweeter,
that with all its attempts to come by and grow this tree
finally grew it, ring upon ring
fire within fire inexhaustible


Translated from the Hebrew by Z.Sh.B.

The Rabbinical Assembly and Rubashkin Meat Dependence

I wrote Rabbi Rafi Rank of the Rabbinical Assembly with my suggestion (well, rather more than a suggestion, but let's pretend I wrote with proper humility) that the RA forbid Conservative Jews to eat meat under the Rubashkin or Aaron's Best brand names, since the factory which produces these makes use of inhumane practices.

Rabbi Rank responds:

Zackary,

Thanks for your note to me and I applaud your desire for strength and bold moves. But let me tell you why the statement did not include a forthright prohibition of the meat. We did not render the meat assur because out in the hinterlands, there are many Jewish communities whose soul source of kosher meat is Rubashkins. I was not going to tell them that this meat was assur in light of the fact that there were no alternatives available to them. That would have placed such communities in a terrible bind and so when the issue of prohibiting the meat was discussed—and it was!—we eventually rejected it as a bad idea.

On the other hand, the statement does give my colleagues a great deal of latitude in how they might wish to treat the meat in their own congregations. And so, in my own congregation, here on Long Island (Syosset—have you heard of us?), I did tell my congregation not to buy that brand. But, of course, out here, I did not leave them without an alternative. This is, after all, Long Island.

I believe that I am not alone in telling my congregation not to buy the meat. The Rabbinical Assembly puts a great deal of trust in its rabbis and their bold yet reasoned decisions in behalf of their own communities. We produced a statement that would help them make their decisions and inform our laypeople exactly where we stand.

As for my under-publicized statement, it was under-publicized in the press, but it sure is making the rounds in the Cyber world!

Be well and Shalom—

Rafi Rank
President, The Rabbinical Assembly

I suppose the decision is a wise one. That's why I'm not a rabbi, I guess (together with many other reasons!), because I don't think through the communal impact of such things. Still, one would hope the RA would be rather more directive in its statements; it is not (merely) a guild for Conservative rabbis, after all, but also, whether it wants to be or not, a policy-making body for the Conservative movement. Surely there could be some information-gathering and
-dissemination, if not by the RA, then certainly the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, about which brands of meat use humane slaughter? My rabbi said he would look into it, but wouldn't such research be more efficient if done centrally?

Grande em Portugal

The Portuguese Jewish blog Rua de Judiaria ("Jews' Street") has named this humble site one of the Melhores Blogs de 2004. Well, shucks!

Abundance, worth, and greatness*

The Conservative Activists' Network is a grandly named e-mail list that Avi let me know about. Still too young for a bris, it already bears the Jewish name of Shefa (שפע, abundance). Its aim is no less than the "spiritual rebirth of the Conservative movement." (I'd settle for an interesting conversation.) Maybe it'll live up to its own pre-hype; in any case, I've signed up, and if anything of interest happens there I'll let you know.

Update: Maybe a financial rebirth is in order, along with leadership who knows where the money went.

*A phrase from the Sabbath liturgy (שפע, יקר וגדולה)
Correction: No it's not. It's שבח, יקר וגדולה -- praise, not abundance. I think I knew what I was writing was wrong, but I pressed on anyway! Nothing like exuberance in the commission of error. Thanks to anon for pointing it out.

The language of Cervantes

The service elevator is down the hall from my office. Here's what I heard this afternoon from two guys struggling with a large something-or-other (I didn't poke my head out to see what it was):

Puta. Mete fuerza, ¡coño!

I love Spanish.

(No, I'm not going to translate it. It's hypocritical, I know -- I'm sure these words will offend some Spanish speakers -- but there you are. I contain multitudes.)

Well, it's a start

The Rabbinical Assembly, in its finite wisdom, has made some fraction of its teshuvot finally available on its Web site. What fraction, and why, is kind of hard to puzzle out. Most of the recent volumes (from 1981 to 2000) seem to be represented -- but not completely. And there's a tantalizing division between the "public" and "non-public" teshuvot. It's a good thing some of these responsa are being kept private; wouldn't want to flood the public with too much Torah, after all.

Thanks to Am Echad's Avi for the heads-up. (Or Am Ehad, or something. Figure out how you're spelling it!)

Update: My wife points out that I had to hear about this from a fellow blogger, and not from something so grubby as a press release or news article. That's the ticket; try to make sure no one knows about this!

How dumb are academics? No dumber than bloggers. Part XXIV

Mickey Kaus, in the permalink-free magic kingdom that is Slate, tries his hand at public-health research:

How dumb are academics? Part XXIII: Today's N.Y. Post reports on a Harvard School of Public Health Study that found "men tend to do less exercise and put on weight" after they remarry, even though they eat healthier diets. The
explanation, offered by Dr. Patricia Mona Eng:

Time demands of a new spousal role may preclude routine exercise.

Alternative non-Harvard-approved explanation for why they exercised
more before they remarried: They wanted to get laid. ... On second
thought, that theory may be crude and inappropriate. Sex isn't a big factor in
male motivation. We all know that. Stick with the "time demands of a
spousal role" business. Yes, that's the ticket. ... 4:37 P.M.

Down, Mickey, down! To use your own prose tics, shouldn't you (a) read the study itself, in what many speakers of English call "research" (or maybe the NY Post is good enough?), (b) figure out if sex was actually asked about in the study itself, if you're too busy trashing gay marriage to do (a), and (c) check your own super-size reverse snobbery at the door? Why, it might be that public health researchers understand their own research better than you do! Could that be possible? [No, never! --ed.] I await Kaus's refereed papers addressing these issues, executed, I am sure, with his own acute knowledge of research methodology. [Stop using big words! --ed.] ...6:35 P.M.

Sholom-aleichem, Gentlemen
The original version of this hymn.
[Excerpt]

Sholom-aleichem, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
Though some the custom still observe,
And don't learn on Christmas Day,
I find a blat gemore
Makes the carols go away.

Refrain:
O Jesus was a nice Jewish boy
Jewish boy;
O Jesus was a nice Jewish boy!

Killing them softly

The blog Am Echad posts a letter from Rabbi Perry Rank, the head of the Rabbinical Assembly, about the relationship between shekhite [kosher slaughter] and tsar-baley-khayim [(avoiding) cruelty to animals], written in response to the controversy surrounding the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, which provides meat sold under the brands Rubashkin and Aaron's Best. (Of course, why would the RA letter be published on the RA's Web site? That might lead to public discussion and debate, and we wouldn't want that!)

The connection between slaughter and avoiding cruelty is not a simple one, as our rabbi, Laurence Sebert of Town and Village Synagogue, pointed out yesterday in a derashah. Shekhite per se does not involve (as far as I'm aware) explicitly humanitarian judgments, but rather a combination of diagnostic criteria (so to speak), to ensure that the animal is whole of limb and not at death's door, and mechanical criteria, i.e. with what equipment and process the slaughter is to be performed. Some would say that the definition of shekhite and related kashrus [kosher status] should be expanded so as to include tsar-baley-khayim as a criterion. This, I think, would be a mistake for a number of reasons. In short, I think that this would lessen the usefulness of both categories rather than strengthen the committment to tsar-baley-khayim on the part of kashrus organizations and overseers. (Another reason for not conflating the two categories is that it does not seem to be clear whether tsar-baley-khayim is doyrayse, of Torah law, or derabonen, Rabbinic law -- though I haven't studied the issue yet myself; however, from the Talmud it seems to be the former)

The OU, which responded to the original controversy, has now confirmed that Rubashkin meat is kosher. That is, the violations of tsar-baley-khayim at the plant in question were not deemed sufficient to place the kashrus of the shekhite under suspicion; see Simcha's post which I linked to above.

I agree with Simcha that this is a public-policy issue and not strictly a kashrus issue. But I strongly disagree that we can now say "problem solved." Just the opposite. The letter from the RA refers to a responsum from the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards published in 2000 (on-line thanks to Avi of Am Echad; also available in the 1991-2000 compendium of those responsa). Though the original teshuvah dealt with shackling and hoisting, an inhumane method of slaughter-associated animal handling now thankfully abandoned by most kosher slaughterhouses, the responsum notes in passing that certain sorts of animal pens are presumed to be inhumane, or, in the words of the Rankin letter, "inconsistent with our understanding of what it means to humanely treat an animal." There are humane alternatives, including what are called the Grandin pen and the ASPCA pen. (For more on this issue than you might ever have wanted to know, see this article by Dr. Temple Grandin.) It is one of the inhumane pens (called the Facomia pen) which is used by Agriprocessors, and will still be used even after this controversy (since the OU does not see any problem at the moment with the use of this pen itself).

I think the RA needs to go one step further than the OU. Conservative Jews need to be makhmir on tsar-baley-khayim -- or, in English: we need to be stringent in ensuring that animals to be slaughtered are treated humanely. Both the 2000 responsum and Rabbi Rank's letter place the onus on the slaughterhouses themselves. The teshuvah reads: "We rule that shackling and hoisting should be stopped." (Notice the absent clause. Who in particular is directed to do the stopping?) Similarly, the letter from Rabbi Rank urges "all those involved in shehitah to invest in and install those technologies that assure that the animal’s life is terminated speedily and with the humanity that Jewish law demands."

But this is not enough. As our rabbi pointed out, the issue will only be solved with consumer pressure, with strong and consistent behavior from individual buyers of kosher meat. They, that is, we, should tell our butchers, caterers, and groceries that we should not buy meat that is slaughtered in an inhumane fashion. Where do we start -- with what companies? Perhaps Rubashkin, if they use an inhumane pen.

In any case, the onus should be placed on the individual. For that reason, the RA should issue a psak, a legal judgment, forbidding (not recommending against, not suggesting, not hectoring, but forbidding) Conservative Jews to eat meat slaughtered in inhumane fashion, whether or not the meat is kosher. Such a psak would not conflate tsar-baley-khayim and shekhite, but would emphasize the importance of each. (What the halachic mechanism would be -- that I'm not sure about. Perhaps a takone, a rabbinic edict, or perhaps no explicit mechanism need be given, according to the way the CJLS works. There would also need to be a clear statement of the kashrus ramifications of such a psak: ideally, consumption of such meat from this time forward would be forbidden, but the meat eaten previously would not be rendered non-kosher retroactively; i.e. one would not have to kasher one's utensils.) Such an issur, act of prohibition, would be a powerful act in the service of the humane treatment of animals and (of lesser but still significant importance) the public face of Conservative rabbinics.

I plan on writing to Rabbi Rank to raise this issue; if any readers have any further suggestions on moving this proposal forward, I would welcome them.

P.S.: Another good source, in Hebrew, for discussions of shekhite is the long responsum by the Seridei Eish on stunning animals before slaughter, which he allowed. (It turns out, according to sources I've spoken to in the Conservative Movement, that Hebrew National uses the most humane methods of slaughter, since they stun the animals after shekhite.)

P.P.S.: Other sources (compiled some time ago by Dr. Josh Backon) relevant to tsar-baley-khayim:

Based on a biblical verse (Exodus 23:5), the Talmud (Shabbat 128b; Bava Metzia 32b) prohibits cruelty to animals and this prohibition was codified by the Rambam (Hilchot Rotzeach 13:1) [although it's not so clear that that's what he's codifying: ZShB] and the Shulchan Aruch (Choshen Mishpat 272:9). However, the Rema (Even HaEzer 5:14) indicates that if there is any human need, the prohibition is overturned (see also:Biur haGRA there s"k 40, and the Noda B'Yehuda Mahadura Tinyana Yoreh Deah 10 as brought in the Pitchei Tshuva YD 28 s"k 10). See also: Shvut Yaakov III 71, Chelkat Yaakov I 30, Sridei Eish III 7, Chiddushei Chatam Sofer on Messechet Shabbat 154b, Binyan Tzion 108, Tzitz Eliezer XIV 68,and the Trumat haDeshen Psakim uKtavim 105.

Update: Avi of Am Echad comes through again (at this point I have to assume he's a Conservative rabbi, or a close relative or personal friend of one) with two CJLS responsa on stunning/bolting after slaughter.

Chanukah "Gelt"

I'm not much for frum music, most of which is covered in a thin layer of smarm (synthesizers, children's choirs just a little bit flat, holier-than-thou quoting of psukim [verses from the Bible] out of any context). But I'm a sucker for Yiddish music, especially Yiddish music written in my lifetime. And Yiddish rap? Well, sign me up. (I've tried my hand at some ersatz Yiddish rap, but it's a long story. We weren't as bad as you think we were.)

Lipa Schmeltzer, a badkhn (roughly speaking, a Yiddish MC), has a great rap called Gelt which is already old news among Charedim everywhere. I heard it a month or so ago for the first time, and my friend just sent me an MP3 of it. If you want to hear it, I'll send you a copy, though it's a large file, 5 megs or so. (I wish I could transcribe the words, but I haven't the time. Here's a parody in English, though, for the Yiddish-impaired.)

(Perhaps you might like to read about Lipa Schmeltzer in Arabic?)

Culture's bustin' out all over

If you're a student of Arabic, you know how few and far between Arabic blogs are. A free Arabic blog host might be an efficient way to spread democracy (what strength democracy, and of what kind, I dunno. But it can't hurt, I guess!).

Meanwhile, in Israel, Ashkenazic culture, including Yiddish, have been generally denigrated and ignored ever since independence. It doesn't help that the elite are of Ashkenazic heritage. This puts Ashkenazic culture in a double bind: it's relegated to an Nth-class status by Ashkenazim themselves -- remind me to tell you sometime how ill-run and money-wasting the "Yiddish Culture Authority" of Israel is, or how much little spoken Yiddish it promotes -- while becoming associated in the minds of the underclasses with the despised elite. The worst of both worlds.

There's a movement for Ashkenazic identity trying to point out the idiocy of this denigration (known in Hebrew as shlilat-hagolut, which one might translate as Diaspora denial). While I don't support this group's every ideological tendency (they're too "post-Zionist" for my taste), nor do I share their quasi-romantic and -mythological view of Eastern European Jewish culture, I think Ashkenazic culture and Yiddish are necessary elements of an Israel that's representative of a wide spectrum of Judaisms.

No-name poetry

I don't know how many of you are poets who enter book contests. (For those who don't: it's a convenient system for paying strangers to throw away your manuscript.) If you are, you've probably heard of Foetry, a Web site (run, appropriately enough, by a group of anonymous muckrakers) that finds behind every poetry contest a web of nepotism and conspiracy: judges awarding publishing contracts to their own students; workshop buddies selecting each other for Best Poet. After spending a few minutes in this heady atmosphere of paranoia and accusation, you might start thinking that poetry publishing depends on personal relationships as much as it does on the quality of the work. That's crazy talk!

Some of the accusations are serious and seemingly true, some overblown. (One editor is said to have awarded a prize to a poet whose [anonymous] poems he recognized from a workshop they had both taken together. So a poet recognizes the work of another poet. And?) Perhaps, though, the most well-grounded problems might be solved by a simple application of the Magic of the Internet.

What I mean is this: these days I am preparing a scientific paper to submit to the American Journal of Epidemiology, which requires that all submissions be blind. (I don't know how it works yet, but I imagine you provide an e-mail which the automatic system, but not the first readers, keep track of.) Why can't all poetry submissions, not just for contests but for journal publication as well, be handled in a similar fashion? If Foetry, or the Academy of American Poets, or Poetry Magazine/The Poetry Foundation wanted to do a public service, they could present a beta version of such a system. Poems would be submitted without any names or addresses, which would then be provided only upon acceptance.

The main objection would be the one currently made by many editors against e-mail submissions: they're already flooded, so why make it any easier to send them poetry? If that's the case, think up some bureaucratic busywork to go along with the poem. Require the submitter to fill out a trial-subscription form for the magazine or journal she's submitting to (the form would be on-line, but separate from the submission system -- that is, the busywork would have to be completed, but its information wouldn't be connected to the submission). Or -- if we're thinking scandalous thoughts -- why not charge a submission fee, of, say, a dollar a poem?

If we had truly anonymous on-line submission, coupled with some small hurdles to keep the volume of submissions manageable -- while that wouldn't guarantee good poetry, it might keep out some more of the bad stuff.

I Heart Richard Dawkins

Did you catch the fawning interview of Richard Dawkins in Slate by the ordinarily sober and skeptical Jim Holt (whose writings on contemporary physics I quite look forward to)?

"[If] one finds oneself smiling frequently in the presence of this Oxford don," we're told, "it is out of sheer enjoyment at his gift for rendering the most subtle evolutionary ideas absolutely lucid." Okey-doke. Let's hear it!

"Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection," Dawkins said. Hairlessness advertises your health to potential mates, he explained. The less hair you have on your body, the less real estate you make available to lice and other ectoparasites. Of course, it was worth keeping the hair on our heads to protect against sunstroke, which can be very dangerous in Africa, where we evolved. As for the hair in our armpits and pubic regions, that was probably retained because it helps disseminate "pheromones," airborne scent signals that still play a bigger role in our sex lives than most of us realize.

I'm no creationist, and I understand that evolutionary biologists have to rely on speculation (running time backward, after all, is not in their experimental toolbox), but I fail to see how this is any way "subtle," or anything more than a just-so story of the sort peddled by E.O. Wilson et al. Consider the counterfactual alternative: "The more hair you have on your body, the more protection you have against sunstroke, which can be very dangerous in Africa, where we evolved. As for the lack of hair in our armpits and pubic regions, that probably evolved because it helps limit the number of lice and other ectoparasites in our pheronomone-producing regions; pheromones are airbone scent signals that play a bigger role in our sex lives than most of us realize." Compare the stories, and I doubt that one is more believable than the other. Except that we happen to be mostly hairless -- and we fit an "absolutely lucid," data-free narrative to the facts. QED. Or something. (And what about the hair on [some of] our arms?) I'm sure there is an evolutionary path to our current hair distribution, but I think the truly lucid (or at least true) explanation has more to do with genetic distributions and physiologic limitations than any hand-waving about pheromones.

The big head-pounder comes at the end, though:

At this point, Dawkins' wife, the actress Lalla Ward, shimmered into the lobby to collect him. One could not help noticing that, in her radiant blondness, she is even more attractive than her husband. Book tours are hard work, so I regretfully relinquished the celebrated author. Still, I could not forbear asking one more question as he walked away.

"You've called religion a 'dangerous collective delusion' and a 'malignant infection,' " I said. "Don't you think you're underplaying it a bit?"

Dawkins turned, smiled a small fox smile, and said, "Yes!"

Let's share a chuckle (but not before we've admired Dawkins's beautiful wife) over the "delusion" and "infection" that is religion. Perhaps Dawkins, with his great gift and vulpine smile, or Holt, for that matter, could "render absolutely lucid" why these claims are true. Or is it just too "subtle"?

Hurrah for completely anarchical minds!
The Khazars at mealtime.

A description by the "cranky 10th-century Armenian historian Movses Dasxuranci, from History of the Caucasian Albanians":

bestial, gold-loving tribes of hairy men.... an ugly, insolent, broadfaced, eyelashless mob in the shape of women with flowing hair....demented in their satanically deluded tree-worshipping errors in accordance with their northern dull-witted stupidity, addicted to their fictitious and deceptive religion....There we observed them on their couches like rows of heavily laden camels. Each had a bowl full of the flesh of unclean animals, and dishes containing salt water into which they dipped their food, and brimming silver cups and beakers chased with gold which had been taken from the plunder from Tiflis. They also had drinking horns and gourd-shaped utensils from which they lapped their broth and similar greasy, congealed, unwashed abominations. Two or three of them to one cup, they greedily and bestially poured neat wine into their insatiable bellies which had the appearance of bloated goatskins..... Possessing completely anarchical minds, they stumble into every sort of error, beating drums and whistling over corpses, inflicting bloody sabre and dagger cuts on their cheeks and limbs, and engaging naked in sword fights – oh hellish sight! – at the graves, man against man and troop against troop, all stripped for battle..... They danced their dances with obscene acts, sunk in benighted filth and deprived of the sight of the light of the creator.... They were also incontinent sexually, and in accordance with their heathen, barbarous customs they married their father's wife, shared one wife between two brothers, and married several women.

(Funny, I don't remember Yehuda HaLevi including a scene like that.)

From Idiocentrism, a/k/a John J. Emerson, formerly known as the ubiquitous commenter Zizka. Via Language Hat.

An EPYC web site

The next time someone wants to learn about Eastern European Jews, their lives, towns, and the language and culture they created, I'm sending them here.

(This doesn't mean that the site is error free. For example, one page about "internal bilingualism" -- the complementary use of Hebrew and Yiddish in traditional Ashkenazic culture -- displays the covers of two translations of Tolstoy's "War and Peace," one in Hebrew, Milkhama ve-shalom, and one in Yiddish, Milkhome un sholem. The two images are mixed up, though. Something else puzzled me: at the top of the site, the Hebrew title reads Tokhnit khinukhit lelimud tarbut yehudit. Why not tarbut yidish or yidit?)

Thanksgiving leftovers
and Denver relations.

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

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

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

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

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

A Vigil to Protest the Darfur Genocide

Candlelight Vigil to Protest the Ongoing Genocide in Darfur

Monday, December 13, 6:30pm

Washington Square Park, NYC (Fountain Plaza)

This multi-denominational event is co-sponsored by the students of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, NYU Law Students for Human Rights, the Darfur Rehabilitation Project and the American Anti-Slavery Group's New York Chapter.

Let's talk about . . . pipelines, baby

Let's talk about you and me
Let's talk about all the good things
And the bad things
That can be
Let's talk about pipelines.
Let's talk about pipelines!

Those interested in the continuing saga of The Thirsty Chasidim Of South Orange County should hie their way to an on-line chat (now concluded, but read the transcript) at the Times Herald Record, where Chris McKenna, their crack reporter on the story and all things Satmar, fielded questions from readers. It turns out that the good people of Kiryas Joel do pay taxes after all! (And no, they don't have horns.)

Yuschenko and the Jews

Who did the Ukrainian Jews vote for?

Beats me. This nicely detailed JPost article gives context and background, but the facts don't lead to any clear conclusion. (1) A large chunk of people won't say who they voted for. (2) The young Jews, those tending more to Western Europe, might plausibly have voted for Yuschenko. (3) The older Jews, those preferring stability, might plausibly have voted for Yanukovitch. In conclusion, who knows? The most interesting point in the article is buried in the last paragraph: "Only 3,106 out of nearly 40,000 eligible Ukrainian voters in Israel cast their ballots." First of all, the turnout's low, but that's not what caught my eye. Forty thousand? That's all the Ukrainian Jews there are in Israel? There have to be more than that, don't there, if a million-plus Jews have immigrated to Israel in the past ten to fifteen years? I guess they don't care enough to register to vote in Ukraine.

Question two: is Yuschenko an anti-Semite? Beats me. The JPost article mentions the worry of some Ukrainian Jews that in the past he "has allied himself with politicians openly expressing anti-Semitic views." In another incident mentioned in the press, a leading Ukrainian newspaper, Silski Visti, published the slanderous, anti-Semitic claim that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews joined the S.S. during the German invasion of 1941. Yuschenko joined with other Ukrainian politicians opposing government efforts to shut down the newspaper.

On the other hand, Yuschenko visited a Ukrainian Jewish group before the election and promised to combat anti-Semitism. And who's to say how many anti-Semites his opponent, Yanukovitch, has associated with?

Another troublesome aspect of contemporary Ukrainian anti-Semitism is its anti-Israel roots (shared by a number of liberal politicians in Western Europe). From the article linked to above about the anti-Semitic Ukrainian newspaper:

The wave of anti-Semitic agitation in the Ukrainian media began in 2002 with the publication of defamatory articles in the magazine Personnel, published by the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management, a university-like institution offering leadership training to 35,000 students on more than 10 campuses across the country.

Although the school's board includes such respected figures as former President Leonid Kravchuk and former Foreign Minister Boris Tarasyuk, its academic leaders have taken a strongly anti-Western political line, fostering close ties with Russia and the Islamic world. The academy's president, Georgi Schokin, has addressed three conferences in Saudi Arabia, and the American anti-Semite David Duke has appeared at three of the school's conferences in Kiev.

The Interregional Academy, which financed Silski Visti's publication of Yaremenko's article as a paid advertisement, has published his books and aggressively promoted his writings.

What this has to do with any anti-Semitism from Yuschenko himself -- again, I don't know.

I asked the opinion of a writer from the Forverts, who pointed out that opposing Jewish oligarchs (who have supported Kuchma and Yanukovitch) is not necessarily the same thing as anti-Semitism.

Update: Jonathan Edelstein, over at The Head Heeb, has followed up on this issue with his customary thoroughness. The accusations of anti-Semitism on Yuschenko's part seem more and more to be unfounded. Also worth reading is the editorial in this week's Forward, reminding us why the Ukraine is important to Jewish history yet not often remembered by name, and why Ukrainian nationalism is not something that Jews should uncritically embrace.

Consequential imagination

Nor are rigour and precision enemies of the imagination, any more than they are in mathematics. Rather, they increase the demands on the imagination, not least by forcing one to imagine examples with exactly the right structure to challenge a generalization; cloudiness will not suffice. They make imagination consequential in a way in which it is not in their absence.

Some words meant to apply to philosophy, but equally applicable to poetry, epidemiology, or any endeavor of the mind. From the essay "Must Do Better," by the philosopher Timothy Williamson. (Via the euphoniously named Glaikit Feartie.)

A Tour of Jewtown
Backsliding from my blog silence only after a few days. But I couldn't resist...

Nelly Rosario on hip-hop Hasids and other Willie phenomena.

Me Against The Thesis: Round Zillion

I am not allowing myself any non-dissertational thoughts (well, davening. And eating. And the more-or-less daily more-or-less blat of Gemore. And poetry. But not blogging!) until Thanksgiving.

So: wish me luck!

*Your Host's head disappears and the manhole shuts down tight.*

More driving on Shabbat

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

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

So go and learn.

Miscellany!

This post will hearken back to the early days of traditional blogging which I never participated in: snatches of colorful life experience scrawled hurriedly with a chunk of blackened stick, in between chaws of campfire-warmed mutton thigh. How simple we were then! How uncorrupted!

* * *

On Shabbos, I heard a representative from Ukraine talk about Project Kesher, a group of Jewish women in the former Soviet Union furthering Jewish education, promoting women's health, and fighting anti-Semitism and domestic abuse. (A propos of nothing, one of the testimonials on the home page makes reference to Birobidzhan: "My grandfather was a revolutionary sent to Siberia . . . I see the need to organize the Jewish community. I hope to be a revolutionary of another kind." I would bet the speaker's grandfather was sent to Birobidzhan against his will.)

At kiddush, I suggested to one of the speakers that some women's health researchers (e.g. breast-cancer epidemiologists) might enthusiastically welcome access to an Eastern European cohort of mostly Ashkenazic Jewish women. Although there are an awful lot of studies of breast cancer among American Ashkenazim (see here for a review of BRCA1 -- the "breast cancer gene" -- and its influence on public health [I hope the link works; you might have to be part of the Medical Library Cabal]), in an admittedly cursory search, I only found one such study among Russian Ashkenazi women. As you can see from the abstract, it was more a small-scale genetic typing project than a large-scale epidemiologic study. (Warning: Jargon-heavy excerpt follows.)

We have screened index cases from 25 Russian breast/ovarian cancer families for germ-line mutations in all coding exons of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. In addition we tested 22 patients with breast cancer diagnosed before age 40 without family history and 6 patients with bilateral breast cancer. The frequency of families with germline mutations in BRCA was 16% (4/25). One BRCA1 mutation, 5382insC, was found in three families. The results of present study, and those of a separate study of 19 breast-ovarian cancer families, suggest that BRCA1 5382insC is a founder mutation in the Russian population. Three BRCA2 mutations were found in patients with breast cancer without family history: two in young patients and one in patients with bilateral breast cancer. Four novel BRCA2 mutations were identified. (Tereschenko IV et al. Human Mutation 2002;19(2):184.)

Anyway, if any breast-cancer epidemiologists are reading this, first: hi! Second, maybe you'd like to take a look at this cohort.

Postscript: I know, it's not a cohort, just a group of Russian Jewish women. But someone could make a cohort out of it.

* * *

On Saturday night we (me, my wife, and a blogger friend visiting from out of town) made the acquaintance of a fresh-faced idiot, a veteran of the Great War. Our new friend, appearing on stage at the Theater for the New Audience, is no other than the hero of Jaroslav Hašek's unfinished comic novel Good Soldier Švejk (1923). (Since the novel itself was never finished, I don't feel bad admitting that I picked it up and never finished it. Not because it wasn't entertaining; my attention span is just undergrown.) Though the first act sags a little, the play is by turns witty, funny, stupid, profound, moving, and whimsical. You should go see it.

Would you like to see the little hat on the "s" again? Šure thing!

Postscript: Of course, Švejk (or one of his translators) has a blog.

* * *

I have to go keep finishing my thesis. Back later.

* * *

I'm back!

How do you like the sound of this merry little tune? Psychiatry, obstetrics/gynecology, neurology, surgery, medicine, pediatrics, advanced medicine, ambulatory care, critical care medicine. Those are the rotations I will be starting, God willing, in January, assuming I successfully defend my thesis next month.

Perhaps I might blog in the future about the spicy & engaging elements of medical education. Or perhaps not.

* * *

I should mention in passing two more reviews of mine, in the on-line version of Verse magazine, of a couple of poetry journals: Skanky Possum #10 and Fence 7.1.

Arcana and Actualities

The art of poetry is the art of knowing language and people equally well. It is an art whose focus is in two directions at once: toward the inert technical arcana of syllables and sounds and syntax and metaphor as well as toward the animated actualities of human nature and human expectation. The knowledge of the way a reader will react when a technical something is done to him is what controls the poet's manipulation of his technique. To do something to the reader is the end of poetry: a poem is less a notation on a page or a sequence of uttered sounds than a shaped or measured formal effect that impinges upon a reader or hearer. The reality of the poem is its impingement. [. . .] No element of the poem is more basic--and I mean physical--in its effect upon the reader than the metrical element, and perhaps no technical triumphs reveal more readily than the metrical the poet's sympathy with that universal human nature--conceived as a system of physiological and psychological uniformity--which exists outside his own, and to which the fullest understanding of his own is the key. The poet whose metrical effects actually work upon a reader reveals that he has attained an understanding of what man in general is like. It is thus possible to suggest that a great metrical achievement is more than the mark of a good technician: it is something like the signature of a great man.

from Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

Honesty underground

What MTA subway drivers used to say when the train had to stop for some reason:

We apologize for the unavoidable delay.

What they say now:

We apologize for the delay.

We are not wrong

The New Republic has two post-mortems of Tuesday's anti-liberal revolution worth reading and quoting. One, though anonymous, is written (I confidently aver) in the hyper-literary, sometimes tortured style of Leon Wieseltier, though it does at times manage to stumble over eloquence on its way to the heights of purple prose:

There is honor, moreover, in a certain kind of loss. In our distracted and accelerated and gamed society, with its religion of winning, we sometimes forget this. But the many millions of Americans who believe that the tax code should be more fair; and that one of the ends of government is to bother itself about its neediest and least fortunate citizens; and that the morality of the market is not all the morality that a society requires; and that the Bible is not the basis of a democratic political order, or of our political order; and that robust stem-cell research, and science more generally, is a primary social good; and that gay marriage is a question of equality and not the beginning of the end of civilization; and that American troops must not be sent to war ignorantly or dogmatically, or without the means to win; and that the good reputation of the United States in the world is one of its most powerful historical instruments--the many millions of Americans who believe these things are not wrong. They are merely not a majority. But they are a very large minority.

The other is by TNR's editor, Peter Beinart:

[C]ultural sensitivity is one thing; principle is another. In their attempts to win rural voters, Democrats have already essentially abandoned gun control. That doesn't keep me up at night. But gay marriage is different. The fact that it is widely unpopular cannot obscure the fact that it is morally momentous and morally right. Liberals once lost elections for supporting civil rights as well and now look back on those losses as badges of honor. Eventually, since young people are far more tolerant of homosexuality than their parents, gay marriage will stop hurting Democrats at the polls. Until then, the party should try to win elections on other issues--and look forward to the day when conservatives apologize for trying to deny yet another group of Americans their full human rights.

Postscript: I've read in some liberal blogs (this suggestion is usually made by right-wing commenters, but let's take it in good faith) that we should embrace federalism in the service of gay marriage and other causes we hold dear. Let New York, Massachusetts, and the Blue Brethren move forward, and Wyoming will . . .catch up, or something. ("Heterosexuality forever!" at the courthouse door?) A historian friend, "DRF," made the following comment, which is worth posting separately:

I'm going to tackle the issue of a new federalism that was raised by elf and Zack. I, too, have been wondering if we are headed for a new federalism on social issues, and I'm not yet certain about how I feel about that, if indeed we are. But I adamantly disagree that antebellum federalism on slavery was a bad thing. It's true that antebellum federalism meant that there was a period of two generations (roughly, 1802-1865) in which slavery wa illegal in most circumstances in the states north of the Mason-Dixon line and legal in the states south of it. But the alternative to this was NOT to make slavery illegal throughout the U.S. If the framers of the Constitution had attempted to resolve the issue of slavery at a national level in 1787, the result would have been either (a) no federal union at all; or (b) the continuing legality of slavery throughout the U.S. And if slavery had remained legal throughout the U.S. in the early 19c, I doubt that northerners would have gathered the courage to push effectively for its abolition at a national level. Many northerners who opposed slavery in the slavery 1780s and 1790s were nevertheless anxious about the prospect of living in a multi-racial society; specifically, many feared that a large-scale "race war" would break out if slavery ended abruptly without a national plan for shipping ex-slaves back to Africa. When numerous states abolished slavery within their borders and managed to create peaceful (albeit segregated) multi-racial societies, those who witnessed the process gathered the moral courage and political confidence to push for an end to slavery elsewhere. On balance, then, I would argue that diversity in states' social legislation has often been a liberalizing influence, whether or not it's "fair" in the short run.

The "religious Jewish" voter

What does it mean that a quarter of the Jewish vote went to Bush in Florida and Ohio, and that most of these Jews seem to have been the religious ones? What is it about their religiosity (or their frumkayt, however you'd like to term it) which brought about their vote for Bush? Is it a true reflection, connecting their vote to their religious life? A sociological epiphenomenon? Both?

What should a religious Jew who didn't vote for Bush (don't know any of those around here!) think in the future about the relationship between his politics and his religion? What sort of role should be played by him and those like him? In the Democratic party? the Republican party? Where does the liberal, frum Jew go?

More musings to come.

Jews love a losing cause . . .

. . . so most of them seemed to go Kerry at about the same rate they went for Gore. At least, if you believe the exit polls quoted by this Jerusalem Post article. (These are the same exit polls, mind you, which told us Kerry was going to win. It's them we have to blame!)

But what about the Charedi vote? I have no idea. Here's a fun speculation, though.

Look at the presidential returns from Orange County, New York, where Kiryas Joel is located. In 2000, the county went for Bush/Cheney over Gore/Lieberman by 50% to 46% (total votes: 126,080). This year, though, B/C won out over Kerry/Edwards by 55%-44%. I guess there's probably an awful lot of factors that account for the difference, among them the same factors that made Kerry lose the whole deal, but: this year's vote total in Orange County is 134,966. Increased registration, or the ongoing KJ baby boom? You decide.

Not that Orange County is deciding any statewide election anytime soon. But if it keeps growing?

Postscript: Of course, I need to mention these posts by E.J. Kessler of the Forward, who actually knows what she's talking about. It turns out there was a shift in the Jewish vote to Bush, among the Orthodox in particular.

It's coming from the feel that it ain't exactly real
. . .or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.

It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Hello from Darfur, II
The second of the e-mails my friend Laura wrote from Darfur.

Hello all.... Had a few free minutes so I wanted to say hello. All's well here.

I feel like I've been here for weeks...and it's only just over a week now! I love speaking to people in the camps and hearing their stories -- I've become a bit braver about asking them personal questions about what's happened to them and their families. It's a confusing 'emergency' because you look at people and it doesn't look like they're starving. But they're living in appalling conditions, under constant fear of attack. Actually, the fear varies from camp to camp. Some feel relatively safe. But yesterday we were in a camp up north, where 3 women had been beaten the night before. Men came looking for their husbands, but they had fled. One of our Sudanese staff members said that they then beat the women to try to lure the men back. Even after that experience, the women told me they feel safer in the camp then they would at home.

I think it's even more confusing here, because Sudanese are so amazingly warm and hospitable. They smile and wave almost all the time. The day before yesterday, at the same camp where the women were beaten, we were shooting some video of the...I don't know what word to use to describe them...huts? shacks? Piles of sticks maybe 5 x 5 in which families live without shelter from the sun or rain. (The people who've been there long enough to have registered with [my organization] have been given tarps to cover their homes...but those who've come more recently haven't been registered, so they have nothing.) Siobhan, Dominic and I were waiting in the shade while Jimmy (cameraman) shot. (It's over 100 degrees here every day...40-45 degrees celsius, they keep saying.) As we rose to leave and walk back through the sand to the car, a woman came up to Siobhan holding out a pen. It seems Siobhan had dropped the pen in the sand at some point, and the woman wanted to return it to her. It was unbelievable. One of the moments I think I'll carry with me.

In Haiti, there is so much anger, it's palpable. Here, most people seem to smile and wave. They seem to appreciate my attempts at Arabic -- in fact, the Sudanese staff here are amazingly good teachers! And yet hundreds of thousands of people here were forced to leave their homes, watched their brothers, sons, fathers, husbands taken, beaten or killed, are subsisting on next to nothing (yet I'm told the reason that there hasn't been mass starvation is that those who get rations from aid agencies share them with those relatives or former neighbors who don't, or people with relatives in relatively unaffected areas are being supported at least in part by their families), and are living in the dehumanizing conditions of an IDP (internally displaced person) camp. Anger and frustration are growing. But from my brief visit, it appears that people are maintaining their culture of hospitality.

Obviously, I'm just a visitor to a culture as complex as any other. I'm so aware that I don't even know what I'm not seeing...what's absent from the landscape, what I can't see. Side by side with the smiles and waves I see are men raping women who go out at 2am to gather wood. Who have ridden their horses into villages and taken land and livestock, poisoned the water systems, and killed the men. It may sound dramatic, but it just reminds me of how all humans seem to have such a capacity for evil, for cruelty.

Hello from Darfur, I
The first of a couple of e-mails written by my friend Laura, who was in Darfur a couple of weeks ago with the aid agency she works for.

Hello all, Here I am in El Geneina. I've been in Sudan about 6 days now...in El Geneina for 4. I can't believe it's been so short! Feels like I've been here for weeks.

Darfur is a dry, forbidding land. There's green brush and short trees...and, near the wadis(which are now basically dry) some larger trees. We had a lovely picnic out by a wadi last Friday -- Friday is the day of rest here, so our Sudanese staff were having the traditional celebration the week before Ramadan begins. They invited all of us to come celebrate and feast with them. It was a lovely afternoon...so cool and breezy under the trees (shade is something much in demand here!) and they made an incredible meal.

As for the humanitarian emergency -- I've been trying to get a handle on what I've been seeing. I've visited 2 camps so far. Mornay, to the south of us, which is home to somewhere between 68,000 and 80,000 people (they've been having trouble getting accurate numbers because so many people are still moving), and Ardamata, just outside Geneina, which is a much smaller camp. There are many, many people who've been displaced -- more than 1 million -- but those who are living in the camps don't seem to be in such terrible shape. The malnutrition rates are not terribly high, so, somehow, people who've been on the move for 6 months to a year have had coping mechanisms that have sustained them. I've been trying to investigate this -- it seems the a combination of food stores from last year's harvest and very strong communities that share resources averted a disaster in the initial months. And now there is tons of food aid coming from the outside world. The problem is that now these people are almost entirely dependent on food aid, as their stores have run out. So the situation is quite precarious. If security diminishes, or the food aid dries up, there could be a very serious crisis.

Right now, there seems to be a bit more of a public health/hygiene danger. There has already been Hep E in Mornay, and with so many people concentrated in small spaces, we're focusing on hygiene education and sanitation facilities.

I have spoken to people in both camps, and they've told me terrible stories of having to flee their homes. One woman told me that her two oldest sons were killed when the janjaweed came. She had her youngest, @ age 2 or 3 in her arms as she spoke. All have told me that they have no plans to go home until they believe they will be safe there. And none of them believe they will be safe.

The Sudanese people are amazingly warm...the children run after us (after all whites) shouting 'hwaja' wherever we go, and their mothers walk behind waving hello. I haven't felt any hostility, although I imagine it when I see men in fatigues (police) or janjaweed on their camels. But, in truth, I haven't felt uncomfortable at all. I am, of course, in a very protected environment. Not to mention that sharia law is in place in Sudan, so no one steals anything -- even a pen used and not returned is returned the next day (I'm told that's not always the case, but that's been my experience).