Monthly Archives: February 2010

Rabbi Morgenstern and Meditation

Posted on February 9, 2010 by | 31 comments

When someone mentions Jewish meditation to me the first thing I think of are the Haredi Kabbalitic mediators. I think of Y.M Erlanger who in his Sheva Eynayim and in classes in Heimishe Yeshivos is teaching Hasidut combined with Abulafia and I think of Yitzhak Meir Moregenstern who is reorganizing early Kabbalah, Ramak, Ari, and Abulafia as Hasidut. Erlanger’s starts with the statements in Sefer Habesht al Hatorah and introduces ever more esoteric material and at the end of the last volume, he introduces Abulafia with a warning that the material that he is about to teach is not for everyone, and not everyone should enter the Pardes, and even if you do enter this may not be for you. In contrast, Rabbi Morgenstern called Rav Itchie Mayer Morgenstern starts everyone on the real stuff.

R. Morgenstern is a Haredi descendant of the Kotzker and lived most of his life in England and has moved to Jerusalem and set up a Beit Midrash. You can find videos of him teaching and singing with Anglos on the web. See here, here and here.
He has attached a real following. He gives weekly public shiurim in kavvanot, in Komarno, and Ramhal. He has an email list serve for his Torah, his kabbalah, and for assorted teachings (Hebrew, English, and Yiddish). Send an email here to subscribe tc7@neto.bezeqint.net

He seems to have read some generic books on “How to Meditate” or “Meditation for Everyone” and in his work Derekh Yihud he reorganizes traditional kabbalistic practices into an order that reflects the general mediation world. The topics are sitting, breathing, visualizing, creating an avir in front of one, colors, and a unified vision. He freely takes pieces of Abulafia, Ramak, and early kabbalah to create a Jewish meditation manual in line with the non-Jewish ones. The work Derekh Yihud opens up a new path of reorganizing the older materials based on modern principles.

I see him as potentially the future. Rav Ashlag wrote in the 1930’s and took the meditation, medieval worldview and fantasy out of the Kabbalah and replaced it was science, communism, Schopenhauer, and a closed system. Now everything from the Kabbalah Centre to Bnai Baruch to Michael Leitman are his spiritual descendents. Rabbi Morgensten is teaching the young grandchildren of the Rebbes and many in Kolel and he also accepts the varied pneumatics of Jerusalem as his students. When all those students take their positions as Rebbes, Ramim, and teachers then the meditation format of breathing and visualization will be the tradition. If the trend continues, in 2050 this will be mainstream Kabbalah.

I had originally planned this post before my computer crash when I received the following two weeks ago. It offers a concise taste of Derekh Yihud. Morgenstern advises to close the eyes and see the hidden lights in order to achieve bliss. One turns from this world to the airspace and achieves a vision of the Throne. Lights, then hidden mind, and finally the source of the soul and the Throne.

When a Jew spends time in hisbodedus before his Creator, he closes his eyes so as not to be enticed by the illusory pleasures of this world because he doesn’t want to be connected to them.
When he closes his eyes in this way, he is able to see the brilliant hues that are rooted in the “hidden mind” of Mocha Sesima’ah, and he begins to derive pleasure from spiritual reality, from the fact that Hashem is revealed through a myriad of shades and hues of dveikus. He starts to feel Hashem’s light and glory within himself, and how all of the pleasures of this world are null and void, are like a mere sliver of light, compared with the delight of dveikus that is a composite of all possible forms of bliss.

So when a person seals his vision against the illusory nature of this world, he rises to the place of the “airspace” and its “membrane,” which is really the source of the human soul and its throne of glory. In that place it can be said, “From my flesh, I see G-d.” One begins to enjoy a vision of the ultimate Kisei HaKavod upon which the “form of a person sat.”
The final three plagues parallel these three states of dveikus:
First, a person must meditate and be misboded on the expansive Binah light of Hashem.
Then he must ascend to the place of the “hidden mind” which is the counterpart of the holy darkness of turning aside from this-worldly concerns to receive “light in all his dwellings.” With this, he destroys the klippah of the impure firstborn and rises further to the place of the “membrane of the airspace” and the “airspace” itself which correlates to the level of the Da’as of Atik and which reveals to him the source of his neshamah that “sits upon the throne.”
“It is revealed and known before Your Kisei HaKavod…” Meaning, through coming to the level of the Kisei HaKavod, we are able to subdue all of the klippos and utterly “smite Egypt through their firstborns.”

This past week he sent out a special Tu beShevat essay. He opens the essay stating that was asked why Hayyim Vital did not mention TuBeshevat and answers in the name of R. Haayim Cohen that it is a hidden quality. And when pressed why does everyone do it today? He turns to R. Aharon Halevi of Strashelye explaining that since we are lesser today everyone learns Kabbalah since they do not grasp the real depth anyway. The essay is a running account of his Torah and the questions he received Tu Beshevat-Shabbat Shrah. There are many interesting points in it including -We are told of the joy from the recent publishing of Vital’s alchemy and magic.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Post-Orthodoxy and loss of the 20th century definition of Orthodoxy.

Posted on February 7, 2010 by | 8 comments

Since it has reached my attention from people in real life -not online- that the term post-orthodoxy has gone from a meme to a buzz word, I will devote a few more posts to the term. Unlike my original post on the term among gen –y, I have been told that some people 35 years older are finding it a meaningful buzz word. I am not sure what we will have in the end of these posts, but here goes.

Let us now consider the term from the perspective of a thesis ‘POST ORTHODOXY’: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE THEOLOGICAL AND SOCIO-CULTURAL BOUNDARIES OF CONTEMPORARY ORTHODOX JUDAISM NEHEMIA STERN (unpublished MA, SUNY Binghamton, 2006.) Stern is studying for a PhD in anthropology and I assume that someday he will be a fine scholar. I thank him for providing me with a copy. However, the thesis was a journeyman’s work and he should not be judged on it. I will be reorganizing the material, providing a tighter framework than the original and a stronger conceptual scheme.

Stern claims that the clear sense of Orthodoxy as a fixed denomination as defined by the era of Rav Moshe Feinstein is over. Now we have a wide variety of practices and many lines to divide people formerly under a common banner of the term Orthodoxy. Meaning that the working definitions of the 1970’s and 1980’s are gone and people are now without a fixed order and have to work things out afresh.

Stern claims that lay people are now figuring out what it means to be Orthodox through their discussions on the internet, in turn this creates the formation of many micro cultural identities. The micro-cultures are the many echo chambers, group thinks, and blogging communities that have created new cultural boundaries.

Stern insightful point is that topics that once had a variety of accepted rabbinic opinions, in which one knew that there were liberal and strict opinions has now been reframed as whether one is a heretic, outside orthodoxy and whether one accepts rabbinic authority. Inside/outside has replaced strict/lenient. The topic that is mediated is no longer the halakhah as found in the Rabbinic books rather the topci debated is Rabbinic authority. Topics are no longer debates of two rabbinic authorities in which a practitioner accepts one position. Now, there is only one correct position and those who disagree are heretics.

Even very small decisions in the grand scheme of things, such as a decision whether to eat Hebrew National franks is not decided as a Kashrut question, but as a snowball discussion about gedolim, science, rabbinic authority, and obedience. Rather than a strict and lenient position questions open up a Pandora’s box of issues of boundary issues.

Finally, these changes are incomprehensible using older models so the baby-boomers are clueless. Stern claims that those whose model is still from an earlier decade have trouble with the new shifts and mixing of older categories. There are dozens of patterns of belief and practice, few of which continue the recognized older patterns.

In sum, Post- Orthodoxy is the sense that the older definition has faded, that everything is now pitched as question of boundary and heresy. In this new era, lay people create their own boundaries using blogs and newspapers and are thereby creating a post-Orthodox world of new identities.

In a post Orthodox world the choice of practices and rituals one performs or takes part in, tell more about a person then his/or her choice of denomination. Separations are made through practices and not so much through beliefs. This paradigm of praxis differs markedly from the ways in which Rabbi Moshe Feinstein attempted to shape Jewish Orthodoxy within the twentieth century. For Feinstein the boundary of that which is intolerable rested on ones denomination. For example, Feinstein could recognize one who desecrates the Sabbath as being within the
frame of Orthodoxy, so long as that desecration occurs out of a sense of teyavon (desire). Thus, if one is required to work on the Sabbath to feed ones family that is considered ‘desire’. If one watches television on the Sabbath out of a sense of loving television, that
too is desire. However, the instant that desecration turns into an ideology, an intolerable deviation suddenly occurs. Thus, Reform and Conservative Judaism’s acted as intolerable deviations (from the stand point of Orthodoxy) because they ignored or negated (from the Orthodox perspective) various practices and rituals out of a sense of ideology, and not desire.

In the post Orthodox era of the twenty-first century, individuals gather either on the internet, in groups, or via letters to the editor, and discuss this wave of ‘crime’. In the process of discussion, various sensibilities and ideologies are being negotiated. These negotiations pierce the philosophical heart of what it means to be ‘Orthodox’ in the twenty-first century. The definition of rabbinic authority, the role of rabbinic authority, the delineations between Science and Torah, between governmental control and communal practice, are under a constant process of negotiation and mediation. Some individuals may discuss these themes in an effort to forge definitive answers. Yet in many ways, these efforts are irrelevant. Answers have never been reached. These discussions however, serve a social function. They operate to demarcate and define social and religious boundaries between people. By discussing that which is intolerable, by questioning the very notion of the intolerable, an Orthodox group, “supplies the framework within which the people of the group develop an orderly sense of their own
cultural identity”

Whereas in the previous century the discourse rested on the interpretation of the opinions of the cultural broker (indeed there existed a plurality of mutually respected interpretations), in the 21st century the discourse has shifted slightly to the authority of the culture broker (Da’as Torah) and subsequently to the creation of theological boundaries and separations.

Thus over two packages of heretical franks…The conversation that ensued was ethnographically fascinating in that we could not discuss the legal topic of Kashruth without discussing the meta-thematic issues of Rabbinic authority.

Individuals who were primarily educated in the previous century may have difficulty comprehending religious conceptions that question classical boundaries… Where once two or three delineations were enough to categorize ones Orthodoxy, today a plethora of different delineations are being made.

Stern offers lists of the controversies of the last few years, all well known to those who are keeping up with the world of blogs. The controversies include Slifkin, metizah bepeh, organ donation, bugs in the water, shidduch crisis, Hindu temple hair, and Chabad messainism, Much of the MA is devoted to a collection of snippets about these topics.

Stern claims that these controversies eroded the fixed positions of religion and science, religious authority, and education. There are five new criteria that have destabilized the older definition: Jewish outreach, Gedolei Yisroel, the semiotics of holiness and purity, and invoking of acceptance of rabbinic authority They created unclear lines of who is on what side. And most importantly, they have served among lay people, who inhabit blogs, newspapers, and eat at pizza shops, as a means for them to argue, debate, and reach new understandings of Orthodoxy.

The new positions created in these popular venues are not intellectual or even ideological positions but cognitive frameworks for dealing with change. Reactions are in crisis mode and emotionally charged because of the need to regain a stable world order. For Stern, these new restructures, even when speaking about Rabbinic authority, are highly personal. An Orthodoxy “that is constructed of our own experiences, language, culture, and temperament”

A feeling of ‘dramatic crisis’ is created, as the boundaries and definitions of Orthodoxy are called into question…. Controversies and newly found religious stringencies are used to help reinterpret a definition of and a boundary for Orthodox Judaism.

For the purposes of this thesis, religious fundamentalism occurs when an individual (or a group of individuals) reflexively reinterpret their theological assumptions. In this paradigm, modernity acts as a backdrop to this reinterpretation. Fundamentalism then acts as more of a cognitive then an ideological framework. Martin Reisbrodt in his essay Fundamentalism and its Resurgence in Religion (2000)… For Reisbrodt religious fundamentalism refers to a“type of religious revival movement which reacts to social changes perceived as a dramatic crisis. In such movements people attempt restructure their life worlds cognitively, emotionally, and practically, reinvent their social identities and regain a sense of dignity, honor, and respect (2000. 271).

The physical sites of such controversies may be a pizza store, a kitchen, the internet, or the pages of a newspaper
The standard Orthodox meta narratives that deal with, denominationalism, rabbinic authority, and secular knowledge are no longer enshrined in stone when viewed in the light of a world “that is constructed of our own experiences, language, culture, and temperament”

Post-Orthodoxy is a term for those drawn into the vortex of ever new controversies, those who feel an urgency to deal with them, and those who use them to help create new lines.

To be continued in a Part Two with some of Stern’s examples of the new varieties and my own reaction to Stern attempt at providing historical causality. But do you think his analysis rings true?

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self

Posted on February 6, 2010 by | Leave a comment

People on the outside, or with a polemic bone to pick, tend to view interfaith dialogue as discussions that continue the medieval theological positions. As if people debate about when the Messiah will come or use 13th century definitions An example some of the new activity in interfaith dialogue is a paper first delivered at the Jesuit-Jewish Dialogue Conference held at Fordham University, is the new book by Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe University of Chicago Press, 208 page.

The book was reviewed in this week’s Forward. Boyarin comes from the field of anthropology, not theology, and asks how did the concept of the “other” become constructed? What was the role of the Jew as the “other” compared to the native American.

The book rejects “The conventional wisdom is that Europe found its “other,” its supposed opposite against which it could define itself, when it found the indigenous peoples of the New World. Rather, “European Christians had been dealing with “others” — namely, Jews and Muslims — long before that greedy Italian navigator met the Arawaks of the Caribbean.”

The review points out that the book assumes a great deal of prior knowledge about earlier categories. “He assumes, therefore, a familiarity with Spain’s limpieza de sangre (blood purity laws first enacted in the late 15th century) and the ideas of Bartolomé de las Casas (a 16th-century missionary who quaintly suggested not brutalizing Africans and indigenous Americans).”

My question is to ask his observations back at the Jewish categories. How do Jews use blood purity laws to view gentiles? In the famous The Las Casas-Sepúlveda Controversy, which side would Jews take? I am grossly over simplifying since there debate involved detailed knowledge of Aristotelian commentaries and medieval thought, but the basis controversy is that Las Casas thought that there is a concept of humanity and Sepulveda believed in a hierarchy, so that Christians are superior to indigenous people. Do Jews create a hierarchy?

The reviewer reacts to the idea of imposing one’s definitions of rationality onto another.

One of the more interesting (and disturbing) sections of “The Unconverted Self” concerns how Christians defined what it meant to be human. In the 12th century, reason was supposedly the criterion — and if Jews did not demonstrate their capacity for reason by becoming Christian, then they must be something less than human.

Do Jews define reason in specific Jewish ways and then proclaim that the other side has a goyiche kop? Do Jews think that Judaism is more rational than other faiths and still assume that they are using universal criteria for rationality? If an anthropologist were to ask how Jews view the world would there be anthropological categories of the other that have little to do with Rabbinic concepts of chosen people and books of Jewish thought and more to do with self definitions and hierarchical perceptions of the other?

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Contemporary Orthodox Death

Posted on February 6, 2010 by | 2 comments

Doreen Rosman in her book The Evolution of the English Churches: 1500-2000 describes the early modern concern of religion as death centered. She asserts, “People’s passage from this life to the next and their entry to heaven were…matters of major concern.” Inherent in Rosman’s assertion is the idea that since people thought that most believers did not enter heaven, they had to work very hard to earn their eternal reward through belonging to con-fraternities, appealing to saints and to the beyond, engaging in magical rites, and practicing esoteric wisdom. Modernity changed that major preoccupation.

Michel Vovelle in his La mort et l’occident de 1300 à nos jours (1983) and Ideologies and Mentalities (1990) traces the slow process by which people in the 19th century stopped referring to the afterlife, how tombstones stopped having acute references to the next stage, and people no longer related to the next life as the longer part of one’s existence. Shadal in the beginning of the 19th century was already of a modern mind, yet the American Reform movement was still producing English guides to the afterlife based on Maavar Yabok at the end of the 19th century. Maurice Lamm’s The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning oriented modern Orthodoxy away from the traditional concern with the afterlife and claimed that there are no Jewish teaching on the afterlife.

Recently, I went to a funeral and the rabbi spoke about how the deceased will return to be at the wedding of the children and at the wedding we will invite the deceased back.

The formulation for this idea is the Zohar.

Even though the father and mother have left this world, the joy of the [wedding] is attended by all of its partners.. Because we have learned, when a person joins Hakadosh Baruch Hu to the joy of his [wedding], then Hakadosh Baruch Hu comes to Gan Eden and takes from there the other partners, the father and mother and brings them with Him to the joyous event. All are in attendance, and the people are unaware.

But modern circles do not generally follow the traditional Kabbalistic customs; they are not listed in Maurice Lamm’s Jewish Way in Love and Marriage. I emailed a number of my older, and more rationalist, pulpit rabbi friends to find out how customary this was. The general response that I received was that this started at modern weddings in the 1980’s and at that time it seemed surprising to them. It has grown more prevalent since then. Let me know if anyone has any more information about whether it would have been heard at a wedding in the 1970’s or how it came back in.

This comes back because of our current vision of the family staying together after death. There were several studies a decade ago that the American vision of the afterlife is where the family stays together. This was one of the attractions of Mormonism in 1980’s and 1990’s because that is a specific part of their teaching and firmly grounds the idea of family values.

It also comes from our acceptance of the long and complex process of mourning, beyond anything in the halakhah, where mourning becomes a process of temporary magical thinking. People continue to relate to their deceased long after the death. The most poignant reckoning with our current worldview is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).

We claim to be rational and project magical thinking onto other religious groups, but we should first look at ourselves and the function the irrational has in our lives. (This may come up again when we return to Habermas’ critics who state that he does not give enough credit to the irrational.) The Zohar did not return because of the study of Kabbalah or haredi influence, rather from our own need to make sense of our losses.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Habermas and Halakhah -Guest post from AS

Posted on February 4, 2010 by | 1 comment

[My intended posts for this week are still on an external hard-drive, but I was lucky enough to have a guest post from AS]

AS writes in a comment:

Right now I can only offer the following brief comment that overly compresses what could be at least a book chapter. Those not familiar with Habermas should note that he talks about communicative rationality as an aspect of modernity. Therefore this constitutes a consciously external and modern critique of halakhah – although one that perhaps reveals the paradoxes in modern apologetics.

Before starting we need to ask how to characterize halakhic claims. More specifically we must ask where the binding normative force of halakhic claims come from. Sociology could adequately describe a community in which a certain species of claims were taken to be binding, along with the varieties of social coercion that are employed to ensure compliance, but this would not but this would not account for internal rules of justification that are capable of shaping beliefs.

One obviously wrong answer is to assume that halakhic claims aspire to truth, and that the truth conditions are correspondence to the revealed will of God. The binding force of halakhah in both ritual and moral domains derives solely from the authority of a just God.

This is the wrong picture for a few reasons, mostly because halakhah is “not in heaven.” The correctness of a halakhah derives not from its correspondence with a revealed word, but at least in part because it comes to be regarded as the correct interpretation of a text by means of a rational, internally consistent, discourse. The metatheory of halakhah, were it ever to be carefully explained, would not need to make any reference to God whatsoever in describing how halakhah functions to determine its correctness. At best there is some God-granted authority to interpret at the very root, but within the discourse this authority is neither appealed to or contested (except rhetorically), so it is moot.

Halakhah can therefore be construed as a species of rational communicative discourse. Indeed, in its internal dialectics it seems to aspire to be a rational discourse in that it follows rules of interpretation, precedent, etc. that are universally recognizable by all participants. If this is the case then a Habermasian would likely say that halakhic claims, like moral claims, aspire not to truth (having conditions of rightness constituted independent of the halakhic community) but rather to validity.

In general Habermas thinks that normative validity claims implicitly contains not merely the intersubjective ought, but to the universal/deontological. The deontological nature and binding force of normative claims stems from the idea the very participation in a discursive practice presupposes the acceptance of certain normative principles. In other words, we could not exist as a community of language-users capable of achieving basic communicative rationality (like coordinating behavior) without background normative assumptions which everyone implicitly relies upon in any discursive practice.

Now clearly halakhic claims cannot be “redeemed” in the same way that Habermas thinks that regular normative claims can – nor would we expect as much. We would liken halakhic discourse in many ways to legal discourse. But Habermas claims (and here it is simply easier to quote) that:

“Discourse theory explains the legitimacy of law by means of procedures and communicative presuppositions that, once they are legally institutionalized, ground the supposition that the process of making and applying the law lead to rational outcomes.” This rationality is proved not by the outcomes themselves, but procedurally “by the fact that addressees are treated as free and equal members of an association of legal subjects.”

Because halakhah is an exclusionary discourse that does not even aspire to procedural equality, because addressees are not treated as equal, and because this inequality, instead of bearing a very high burden of rational justification is claimed to lie in a revealed metaphysical ontology, its claim to communicative rationality breaks down.

Halakhic discourse does not devolve into literal incoherence, and anyone familiar with legal discourse will not find it entirely foreign. But this is precisely because rabbis address each other, and sometimes learned laypersons, as equals (it by no means breaks from communicative rationality simply by appeal to various metaphysical processes or the like). On Habermasian grounds it breaks from communicative rationality when it treats its subjects unequally who themselves have no part in shaping the discourse.

At this point halakhah either makes a sharp premodern return to a mythical worldview, or remains modern but employs an instrumental rationality in its treatment of some of its subjects (I don’t think it’s quite strategic rationality because it lacks the pretense of equal participation). I think that both of these are in play. Sometimes in contemporary halakhah difference and exclusion are justified naturalistically (in a sense because some subjects do not transcend nature, they are regarded as a part of the natural world to be intervened upon) and sometimes by appeal to a premodern mythology. And sometimes it is a rather interesting hybrid. [end of AS guest post]

For those who are less familiar with Habermas, I [AB] add some links and definitions. Basic wiki biography , communicative action, and the public sphere, as well as the SEP on Habermas. Even from the links and the short definitions below, it may be enough to have some serious discussion. For those, who need a translation, a deontological claim, in this context, means something is assur or muttar.

From Wiki on rationality
Jürgen Habermas considers his major contribution to be the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of either the cosmos or the knowing subject.

From Wiki on the the public sphere
The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.” The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.

Habermas stipulates that, due to specific historical circumstances, a new civic society emerged in the eighteenth century. Driven by a need for open commercial arenas where news and matters of common concern could be freely exchanged and discussed – accompanied by growing rates of literacy, accessibility to literature, and a new kind of critical journalism – a separate domain from ruling authorities started to evolve across Europe. “In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people”.

In his historical analysis, Habermas points out three so-called “institutional criteria” as preconditions for the emergence of the new public sphere.

1. Disregard of status: Preservation of “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether. […] Not that this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses, salons, and the societies; but as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realized, it was at least consequential.” (loc.cit.)
2. Domain of common concern: “… discussion within such a public presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned. The domain of ‘common concern’ which was the object of public critical attention remained a preserve in which church and state authorities had the monopoly of interpretation. […] The private people for whom the cultural product became available as a commodity profaned it inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of rational communication with one another), verbalize it, and thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long could assert its authority.” (loc.cit.)
3. Inclusivity: However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who – insofar as they were propertied and educated – as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate. […] Wherever the public established itself institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its educator – the new form of bourgeois representation” (loc.cit.).

On Rationality and Communication:

Communicative action for Habermas is possible given human capacity for rationality. This rationality, however, is “no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory.”[1] Instead, Habermas situates rationality as a capacity inherent within language, especially in the form of argumentation. “We use the term argumentation for that type of speech in which participants thematize contested validity claims and attempt to vindicate or criticize them through argumentation.”[2] The structures of argumentative speech, which Habermas identifies as the absence of coercive force, the mutual search for understanding, and the compelling power of the better argument, form the key features from which intersubjective rationality can make communication possible. Action undertaken by participants to a process of such argumentative communication can be assessed as to their rationality to the extent which they fulfill those criteria.

And for those who in their ignorance call anything they have not read post-modern- Here is Habermas’ rejection of post-modernism in a nutshell.

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Temporary Slow Down- Blue Screen

Posted on February 3, 2010 by | 2 comments

My computer gave me a blue screen of death last night, Bad-Pool Caller, today the hard drive was reformatted and memory checked, and it still did not work. So I am on a good loaner (it will probably become my new computer).
My data is backed up but I have a lot of transferring to do. Ninite made the first phase much quicker. But many files to go before I sleep.

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Do not make the Torah into an Idol

Posted on February 2, 2010 by | 4 comments

While on the topic of Yitro, here is a classic homily from Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbitz about not making the Torah into an idol. Moses’ Torah was only known by Moses, the rest of us only grasp the Torah incompletely, in moments and parts. The Torah is experiential, looking back toward the experience at Sinai.
Note how saving a life on the Sabbath is presented in Poland, as a revelation of the moment that over rides the ordinary norm. Saving a life is treated as an event that gives a deeper insight into the law and not just an act of legal triage.

“I (anokhi) am the Lord (the Tetragrammaton) your God.” It does not say “I (ani)” because then it would imply that God revealed Himself completely to Israel all His light. One would not be able afterward to deepen His words because everything has already been revealed.. The kaf [implying comparison], however teaches that it was not complete, but only an image, a resemblance to the light, which in the future God will reveal.
The more a person grasps the depths of Torah the more he sees that he was previously walking in darkness… Therefore, “do not make any hewn god” in order not to make the Torah into a habit. Hewn means cut, measured, and fixed — complete without any lack.
Only Moses’ Torah was perfect, but the human intellect it is impossible to attain complete perfection…
Our law, according to the Torah, permits violating the Sabbath in order to save a life. Yet, it is against the Torah to violate the Sabbath not in order to save a life. Similarly, in every place in which there is “a time to act for God” there is a commandment of “overturning Your Torah.”
The Torah includes all events that will arise and its light encompasses all situations and all possible experiences. No one person may achieve this level. This is explained in the holy Zohar on the phrase “do not make for yourself a graven image” which are understood as referring to positive commandments, “and any picture” connotes negative commandments. Nothing is revealed to anyone in its infinite nature.(Mei HaShiloah . I:25a.)

Here is another one for this week about not blaming things on one’s parents. One has to take responsibility for the present.

“Honor your father and mother” One should not ascribe one’s faults to one’s upbringing… rather, ascribe the fault to one’s self and bring a sacrifice to atone. (Mei HaShiloah . I:26a.)

From the same continuity of homilies:
“Make no god of silver and god of gold for yourself, but an altar of earth build me” Silver represents love and burning fervor greater than human capability.
Gold stands for fear and awe greater than human capability.
But earth stands for simplicity within the heart. (Mei Hashiloah I: 26a).

Now, what do these homilies mean? How do we apply them? I have know them so long that their novel effect has worn off. On one hand, asking what they mean could serve as a Rorschach test for the interpreter. But if we can get beyond the first thoughts, what do they mean today?
People turned in the 1970’s to Kotzk to find disestablishmentarian statements, they turn to the school of the Maggid for ecstatic prayer, to Chabad for non-duality, and to Rav Nahman for acknowledging emotions and faults. What do we acknowledge or seek to gain when we turn to the Mei Hashiloah of Izbitza?

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Hasidism and George Harrison: Living in the Material World

Posted on February 2, 2010 by | 5 comments

Hasidism, which is currently 270 years old, has gone through many changes over that long period of time.

Modern types look to Hasidism for new age and then find something else completely different when they look the eighteenth century texts. For example, the main literary disciple of the Baal Shem Tov Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonoye wrote the classic volume of Hasidic Torah, the Toldot Yaakov Yosef.
He presents the story of Yitro as our fight against materiality, luxury, and excess. I do not tend to hear many homilies against the physical anymore, and barely any against excess. Torah is no longer a means to get beyond the material world. Now, we get Hasidic homilies about the need to embrace the physical world and the earthly part of our lives.

“Yitro heard,” then he came to meet the children of Israel at Mt. Sinai. “What was it that Yitro heard that caused him to come?” “He heard about two things: the splitting of the Red Sea and the war against Amalek” (Zevachim 116 cf. Mikhilta and Rashi).
First, why should he have been impressed by these two miracles in particular? Second, why should that have led him to come to the Jews? [Third, why do we care what happened “What was was” The Torah is not a story. This verse has a moral lesson for every individual at all times.—- I will deal with this below]

A human being is composed of materiality and form: the body and soul. Our soul is constantly aflame to cling to our Maker. But our physicality interrupts that clinging with its desires for physical things, such as sex and food…. The influence of our physicality creates an obstruction between ourselves and God. When we sin, an additional barrier is formed since the physical grows stronger than the form and seeks excesses of luxuries, more than a person needs in order to sanctify himself.
Yitro represents the state of withholding ourselves from the excess (Play on the word yitro for additional). To remove the obstruction of our physicality and the barrier of our sins, we need the splitting of the Red Sea and the war against Amalek.
[Rest of homily is from Alsheikh and Olalot Ephraim on splitting of Red Sea and defeat of Amelek as representing a splitting of materiality and a defeat of our evil inclination.]
When we hold ourselves back from unnecessary pleasures, represented by Yitro–we overcome the two obstacles that divide us from God. Our physicality, which is represented by the splitting of the Red Sea, and we overcome our sins, which is represented by the victory over Amalek.

In contrast, 180 years later the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Basi Legani spoke about using physicality to serve God, there should be dirah batahtonim. As an example of the new type of homily on Yitro, here is one by my friend Professor Tali Loewenthal.

The Midrash is intriguing. It says this first word Anokhi is Egyptian, because G-d wanted to speak with us in the language we had learnt while we were in Egypt. G-d does not want to relate to us only on the sacred, spiritual level of our lives, represented by Hebrew, the holy language. He wants to reach the earthly “Egyptian” dimension as well. We should not try to pretend that we do not have this lower aspect. Rather, we should try to control it, then elevate it and ultimately transform it into something holy.

I could have done this post equally well with Mitnagdut. We do not give the homilies of the Vilna Gaon and other eighteenth century Lithuanians who were puritanical or ascetic, other-worldly, fasting often, avoiding sleeping and eating, hiding from the sunlight and seeking inner angelic guides. Herman Wouk stated that we are clearly not the Vilna Gaon anymore. Currently we seen to have effaced this difference and portray a GRA of our own presentism.

What happened to our tradition of transcending the physical? Maybe serving God with the physical has reached its limits for our age and we need to return to the Jewish tradition of getting beyond our physicality?

George Harrison: Living in the material world

I’m living in the material world
Living in the material world
can’t say what I’m doing here
But I hope to see much clearer,
after living in the material world

I got born into the material world
Getting worn out in the material world
Use my body like a car,
[skipped the middle of the song]

While I’m living in the material world
Not much ‘giving’ in the material world
Got a lot of work to do
Try to get a message through
And get back out of this material world

My salvation from the material world

To return to what I skipped above in the homily by R. Yaakov Yosef:
Third, why do we care what happened “What was, was.” The Torah is not a story: “The Torah of Hashem is complete” This verse has a moral lesson for every individual at all times.

Rabbi Yaakov Yosef .does not value treating the Torah as an accounts of the past or as a story of earthy matters. What was, was! The past is past. To matter the Torah has to be eternal and not in the past. The Torah is eternal wisdom beyond its story. In this, he undercuts those who treat the Bible as literary narrative or as history. Rather than fit the Bible into a modern category, it is treated as eternal wisdom for the adept. I do not hear much of that anymore either. But I do find a serious rejection of history.

This past Sukkot, while sitting in a Sukkah with many people, I mentioned that I can date a hasidic story to within about ten years. Especially since most of them are 20th century inventions, reflecting the issues of that decade. In an instant, someone sitting at the other end of the Sukkah declared: “That is just like a Bible critic. You cannot date Hasidic texts because that is what Biblical critic do.”

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