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26 Jul 2007 — Denial is not just where Moses got the frogs

Several folks on my LJ friends list have mentioned this charming piece, in which Noah Feldman, a Maimonides School alumnus, reflects on his school experience and the “Modern Orthodox” community surrounding it. I put scare quotes around “Modern Orthodox” because while he attributes certain attitudes to people he calls “Modern Orthodox”, and perhaps those people would call themselves “Modern Orthodox”, he does not mention the long string of Jewish thinkers, starting with Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch זצ״ל, who defined Modern Orthodox Judaism. Feldman refers to Senator Joe Lieberman; he refers to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein זצ״ל; he refers to Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein. But he never cites the life or works of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik זצ״ל, the pre-eminent Modern Orthodox philosopher of the 20th century, who founded of the Maimonides School and who was still alive while Feldman was a student there. That should tell you something about the lens through which Feldman sees the Orthodox world.

Feldman seems to believe that the most authentic expressions of Judaism are the most illiberal ones. Now, if I believed that, I would either join the charedi world, or I would never set foot in a synagogue again. But Feldman is married to a non-Jewish woman and takes his children to hear the Book of Esther read on Purim. “Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions?” he says.

The “Modern Orthodox” community offends Feldman because instead of letting us all bask in postmodern “I am large, I contain multitudes” playfulness, it tries to resolve the contradictions. At Maimonides, learning the theory of evolution is OK, but marrying a non-Jew is not OK. The Maimonides approach is certainly open to critique. Different schools of Jewish thought (charedi Orthodox, classical Reform, etc.) can argue for different approaches to being a Jew in the 21st century. But Feldman does not have a school of thought; he has emotions that he treats as entitlements. It is not enough for him to marry a non-Jew and continue to feel connected with his Jewish upbringing; he wants his Orthodox alma mater to endorse his marriage. And so he does not argue; he insinuates that there is something false about Modern Orthodoxy, that instead of teaching Jews a way of engaging with the modern world, it teaches Jews to disguise themselves for the sake of getting along in that world.

Feh.

It’s bad enough that the most reactionary elements of the Jewish world have appointed themselves the final arbiters of my religion and have declared that my own community’s practice is, at best, Frumkeit Lite. But why do people with no interest in accepting “the yoke of the commandments” give the reactionaries the same license?

27 May 2007 — Who is this God person anyway?

Thanks to Michael and Nomi, Jen and I got to see the PBS four-hour special on the Mormons. It was a fascinating documentary, but I found one omission curious: there was almost nothing about the church’s theology.

Compared with most other sects that call themselves Christian, the Mormons have (at least) two striking differences in their conception of the divine. One is that they see God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost as three separate individuals, rather than three persons sharing a single divine essence. Another is that the belief ח״ו that God was once a person and that a good Mormon may get his (or her?) own world to rule as a god in the afterlife: former LDS president Lorenzo Snow summarized this principle by saying “As man is God once was, and as God is man may become”. (Cf. D&C 132:20.) In other words, Mormons are polytheists.

The documentary only refers to this belief elliptically and in passing, but I think it sheds an important light on the Mormon persecutions of the early nineteenth century (which precede Mormon polygamy by at least a decade). A number of other American Christian sects (e.g., the churches of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the Seventh-Day Adventists) were also inspired by the “Second Great Awakening” of 1800–1830, but they did not get such a violent reaction from the mainstream. Even the Oneida Community, whose doctrine of “complex marriage” made Mormon polygamy look downright prudish, did not face the same degree of persecution.

I was reminded of Devil’s Playground, a documentary on the Amish that I saw a while back, because in that film, too, the doctrinal differences between the Amish and other Christian sects were glossed over. One of the Amish boys interviewed mentioned in passing that attending a Baptist church service was one of the “bad” things that Amish teenagers might indulge in during their rumspringa. One of the girls eventually decided not to join the Amish church and decided to go to college instead—to a sectarian Christian college. But these subjects’ thoughts on the difference between the Amish faith and other forms of Christianity were not explored any further.

Back when I was doing my bachelor’s thesis, one of my advisors—Lisa Rofel, an anthropology professor—warned me that I had to make sure to describe my subjects from “the native’s point of view”. In that respect, I fear that both of these documentaries fell a little short. To truly understand an exotic religious group (or interactions between several exotic religious groups), it helps to understand the aspects of their beliefs and practices that are most important to them, and not simply the ones that are most important to the stereotypical liberal documentary-watcher.

27 May 2007 — 0.2 score years ago...

Hey, look, it’s my fourth blogiversary!

According to my clever parsing of my HTTP logs, roughly 200 people (well, roughly 200 distinct IP addresses that are unlikely to belong to bots) read this blog directly over the Web; LiveJournal reports that 40 users are subscribed to its syndication feed over there; a smattering of other people might be reading this through other syndication services.

So who are y’all? Pull up some virtual chairs, introduce yourselves, advertise your own blogs. See, I even made the comment box bigger, so you can get comfortable.

17 May 2007 — Converting the unfaithful: a primer

Once upon a time when I was an undergraduate, I wrote a series of articles for the school paper (I, II, III, IV) about the Boston Church of Christ (BCC), a religious cult that had spread like dandelions across local campuses. Two key points of their doctrine were that the only real Christians were the ones baptized into their network of churches, and that the quality of a Christian’s relationship with God is directly proportional to his or her success at making converts. Motivated by those beliefs, organized in an Amway-style pyramid system, and using some high-pressure sales tactics, the church racked up exponential growth for about ten years, until attrition caught up with them.

One of the folks I interviewed for the series was a dean and a Christian pastor, who said that the BCC’s approach to making converts was all wrong. The early Christians, he said, attracted people by example. Flavius would see that Marcellus was good to his family, honest in business, etc., etc., and also hear that Marcellus worshipped some strange new god called “Jesus”; thus, Flavius became interested in Christianity. Imagine that—converting other people to your religion by your own exemplary behavior. What a tedious chore! You can’t just spend a few hours a week lecturing the heathen about how you are right and they are wrong, rattling off the talking points that you have carefully memorized in response to their well-meaning but ignorant questions. You have to earn respect from the people around you, and hope that respect for you as a person will lead to respect for your faith.

But, friends and neighbors, I am here to testify that the dean’s strategy actually works. I am an Orthodox Jew today, in part, because of some of the Orthodox and frum-Conservative folks I met: people I liked, people I respected, people whom I identified with. And none of those folks were stumping for Chabad, Aish ha-Torah, or any other “bring non-Orthodox Jews to frumkeit” organization.

By contrast, let me present a case study in how not to proselytize:

U.S. Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.

Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.

He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.

...

Over the past two years, Miller said, he has been asked over and over by the Iowa City VA medical center’s staff within its offices, clinics and wards, “You mean you don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah?” and “Is it just Orthodox Jews who deny Jesus?” He said one staffer told him, “I don’t understand; how can you not believe in Jesus; he’s the Messiah of the Jews, too, you know.”

If any of the Christians who made these comments think they were bringing Miller closer to their religion, they are deluding themselves. At best, they were annoying busybodies, like folks who lecture overweight strangers about what to eat. At worst, they were showing one another their loyalty to the “Christian” tribe by harrassing someone who was not a member. (And if Miller’s case ever turns into a lawsuit, we are sure to hear other members of this tribe wail and gnash their teeth about how they are being “persecuted”.)

It is not my place, of course, to tell those Christians how to interpret the tenets of their own religion. I’d just like to encourage my fellow frummies to hold themselves to a higher standard. If it’s too much work to act in a way that conspicuously brings credit to your religion, at least try not to make it look bad, OK?

via .common sense

03 May 2007 — Selling little plastic shovels to the Gold Rush prospectors

I have to admire the chutzpah of whoever conceived of this publication.

01 May 2007 — Maybe if I wrote it in Hebrew...?

My wife, who is frum and supports the State of Israel but is in no way a “religious Zionist”, gets her dander up every time she sees a bumper sticker saying “The Bible Says the Land of Israel Belongs to the Jews” and such-like. So I had an idea the other day for a bumper sticker:

GOD GAVE THE LAND OF ISRAEL TO
(insert current occupants here)

From a Torah point of view, I think this statement is unassailable. As Yeshiahu Leibowitz ztz”l pointed out, just as God took the land from the Canaanites and gave it to us (cf. Rashi s.v. Genesis 1:1), He took it from us and gave it to the Assyrians, took it from the Assyrians and gave it to the Persians, etc., etc.

But from a “not getting our tires slashed in the parking lot next to the kosher grocery store” point of view, I’m not sure I’d want that sentiment on our car.

26 Apr 2007 — Another kind of bug you can get in the hospital

As I have previously noted, most people who use spreadsheets don’t appreciate that spreadsheets are programs, and that when you have programs, you have bugs. And when you rely on spreadsheets in the emergency room, those bugs can have severe consequences:

20 Apr 2007 — Priceless

We got a brochure in the mail for a Chinese auction sponsored by Oorah. Two of the slots in the auction caught my eye:

• Eretz Yisroel—round-trip airfare to Israel, seven-night hotel stay for two, and a one-week car rental.
• Priceless Bracha—round-trip airfare to Israel, seven-night hotel stay for two, and a blessing from a Gadol.

I must therefore conclude that a Gadol’s blessing has a market value equivalent to a one-week Israeli car rental. Who knew?

19 Apr 2007 — The agenda

A few weeks ago, teacher/author/blogger Kathy Sierra announced that she had received death threats as comments on some blogs run by other prominent figures in the tech-blogging community. (The blogs were soon shut down. The fellow who posted the comments that Kathy¹ interpreted as death threats has denied any malicious intent.) This led to an outpouring of sympathy from her readers, fellow-bloggers, and other people in the IT field.

One thing that surprised me about the response was the number of other women bloggers who said that they, too, had received death threats. (See, for example, Reclusive Leftist, Min Jung Kim, and apophenia.)

At any rate, most of the follow-up postings on IT blogs that I read shifted focus from the assault against Kathy to the general issue of “civility”, or the lack thereof, in blogs. Credible threats to commit murder and rape were subsumed in a more general category, one which included hyperbole, personal insults, and general bad language.

Then Tim O’Reilly, Kathy’s friend and publisher, drafted a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, posting it just in time for the New York Times to write about it. In the Times article, Tim gets first mentioned in the third paragraph; likewise for Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Kathy, “a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly”, makes her debut in the eleventh paragraph, as a member of “the insular community of dedicated technology bloggers²”.

And since then, I’ve seen just scads and scads of commentary on Tim’s proposed code. Meanwhile, Kathy is no longer doing speaking engagements and is wondering what she can do to attract less negative attention.

One of the less-obvious signs of social privilege is the ability to set the agenda. Even the bloggers who have fervently denounced the very concept of a Blogger’s Code of Conduct have, by posting their criticisms, accepted the agenda that Tim set.

I don’t want to impugn Tim’s integrity and I don’t doubt his good intentions. But notice how this is no longer a discussion of online threats to murder, maim, or rape, which (as previously noted) seem to predominantly be issued by men against women. It’s a discussion of online incivility, defined to include a wide range of peccadilloes that both men and women commit. It’s no longer a story about Kathy; it’s a story about Tim. Indeed, in his most recent blog posting on the subject, Tim remarked: “It concerns me that Kathy Sierra, whose bad experience triggered this discussion, thinks that a code of conduct such as I proposed would do no good.”

The agenda has been reset. That’s the patriarchy in action.

Fortunately, there are some people interested in re-resetting the agenda. April 28 will be the day for a…

Take Back the Blog! Blogswarm in support of the rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging but indeed everywhere and at all times, day and night, without fear of harassment, intimidation, sexual harassment, online stalking and slander, predation or violence of any sort.

Sounds good to me.

Amid all the other commentary sparked by what happened to Kathy, I was pleased to discover siderea’s comparison of misogyny with Martians-are-out-to-get-me psychosis, Seth Godin on misogynous bullying by a New York Times author, Liz Henry’s call to action, and…hell, I can’t keep track of them all. So I’m glad there’s a chance for people to write more on this subject and a place where it can all be brought together.

¹ Are all bloggers, even those who have never met, on a first-name basis with one another?

² Insular? What are we, Amish? When the Times manages to write about blogs without status anxiety dripping from the paper, the same issue will have a banner headline on page one saying “MESSIAH ANOINTED IN JERUSALEM”.

18 Apr 2007 — He also told the NAACP that he was a great dancer

Every once in a while, I hear someone remark, with sadness or frustration, that the GOP is more Good For The Jews™ than the Democratic Party, so why do Jews still overwhelmingly vote for Democrats?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Exhibit DCXXII: Tommy Thompson, Republican, former Governor of Wisconsin, former Secretary of Health and Human Services, currently running for President, speaking to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism:

I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition.

PS: Tommy Thompson, the former Governor of Wisconsin, should not be confused with Fred Thompson, the former Senator from Tennessee who plays the DA on Law and Order.

via Matthew Yglesias and TAPPED

28 Mar 2007 — The other "aish ha-Torah"

I know that the Chumra of the Month club always works overtime around Passover, but this just goes too far. According to the Jerusalem Post, some rabbis are considering treating marijuana as kitniyot. Israel’s Green Leaf party, which ran on a pro-pot-legalization platform, is advising its frum members to put away their stashes for the holiday.

Is there really a concern that people might mistake marijuana leaves (or even seeds) for chametz grains? Is it customary to grow or store marijuana in places where it might get mixed with chametz? And even if marijuana were classified as kitniyot—I thought the kitniyot ban applied to eating, but not to other forms of benefit. So smoking kitniyot should be OK, right? (At least, inasmuch as smoking anything is OK, what with the health risks and all. Not to mention that whole dina d’malchutna dina issue.)

I hope that our rabbi will devote some time on Shabbat ha-Gadol to expound on these matters. I will donate some brownies for the kiddush.

13 Mar 2007 — Lack o’ the Irish

Four years ago, the Boston Globe distinguished itself by its bombshell revelation that John Kerry (our junior senator; you may have heard of him) wasn’t really Irish. Had Kerry ever claimed to be Irish? Umm… no. But a few people (reporters? aides?) could be found who had accidentally claimed that Kerry was Irish, and the senator hadn’t corrected them.

Thank God we have newspapers like the Globe that stand ready to protect voters from such sinister fraud. Perhaps those crusading reporters will take an interest in this.

Pandering or deception? We report; you decide.

via TAPPED

for a related story, see Digby

12 Mar 2007 — Creative problem-solving — NOT

So you’re a probation officer, and you have to find a place for slome just-paroled sex offenders to live. But there are laws about sex offenders living too close to schools, parks, day care centers, etc., and every residence you look at turns out to be in violations. No homeless shelter will take them, either. So what do you do? If you’re in Miami, you direct the fellows to live in a cardboard box under a bridge. Really. Literally.

Money quote #1:

They live a block away from Kristi House, a treatment center for victims of child sexual assault. They’re also within 1000 feet of two day-care centers — a violation of state law — and less than 2500 feet from eight schools, a breach of county ordinance.

Whoops.

Money quote #2:

Carrasquillo claims that Circuit Court Judge Cristina Pereyra-Shuminer, who didn’t return phone messages, knew he was being sent to the muddy location. “I told the judge to let me back into prison,” Carrasquillo says. “If I’d have known this was going to happen, I’d have finished my eight years there.”

The obvious solution to this problem is to make rape of a minor and similarly scary crimes punishable by life in prison. Of course, if the prisons filled up with pedophiles, there wouldn’t be any room left for our captives from the War On [Some People Who Use Certain] Drugs…

via Michael Froomkin, invoking Anatole France

12 Mar 2007 — A timely observation

Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Naggum:

We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.

02 Mar 2007 — The life of a repo man is always intense...

...especially when he specializes in repossessing cargo ships.

via rmd

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