Monthly Archives: November 2011

Justin Jaron Lewis. Imagining Holiness: Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. x + 351 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-3519-0.
Gedalyah Nigal. The Hasidic Tale. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008. viii + 383 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-904113-07-2.

Reviewed by Alan Brill (Seton Hall University)
Published on H-Judaic (November, 2011)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

The Hasidic Tale Revisited pdf here

Martin Buber created a genre called the “Hasidic Tale,” which consisted of folktales told of Hasidic rabbis teaching the hallowing of the everyday and living in the ineffable moment. In his important book Imagining Holiness, Justin Jaron Lewis argues against the very existence of such a genre. In the past, critics of Buber took issue mainly with his romantic rereading of the stories. In contrast, Lewis points out that the correct genre was “praises of rabbis and holy men,” a genre of hagiography that incorporated stories and teachings of non-Hasidic rabbinic figures, including Rabbi Moshe Isserles, Rabbi Shlomo Luria, the Vilna Gaon, and other halakhic greats.Lewis shows that these stories do not reflect folk wisdom or the ineffable moment. Rather, they spring from a world that Lewis could refer to as “Hasidic-maskil.” The authors were communal rabbis raised in the Talmudic world of Gur, Belz, and Satmar who practiced scrupulous ritual performance, but who read Haskole, Yiddish, and German literature on the side.

Lewis focuses on two authors whose works served as major sources for Buber. Rabbi Israel Berger, born in 1855, served as rabbi in Bucharest and Rabbi Abraham Hayim Simhah Bunem Michelson, born in 1886, served as rabbi in Plotzk. Both served on rabbinic courts and had to deal with rapid secularization, fractional differences, and relinquishment of observance among youth raised in traditional communities. Rather than focus solely on traditional values, their books both resisted and mediated modernity, positioned Hasidism as authentic even as they integrated modern themes, and were part of a literature for the rabbinic class that incorporated modern literacy trends. Berger even took liberties to occasionally explicitly mention such Enlightened books as Eliezer Zweifel’s Shalom al Yisrael (Peace in Israel [1873]) and Aron Marcus’s German volume Der Chassidismus (Hassidism [1901]). Lewis approvingly cites Karl Erich Grozinger, who argues that the source of the stories is pre-Hasidic folklore; therefore, the stories can still address broader cultural themes

The first part of Lewis’s book, consisting of thirty-five pages of translated, selected, and explained stories and poems, would have better served as an appendix. The second part consists of a discussion of previous scholarly literature on historical, literary, and editorial questions on Hasidic tales asked by Gershon Scholem, Jospeh Dan, Chone Shmurek, David Assaf, Gedalyah Nigal, and others. The basic thesis of the book is that these stories were literary constructs portraying the way the authors imagined holiness. They convey an imaginary sense of unity among the Jewish rabbinic leadership and suggest overcoming ideological difference. The stories clearly had a very different status than holy books. They were the popular literature of a disempowered minority, not true folklore nor scholarship. The same stories could be told, or imagined, about different rebbes because there was a single ideal of the holiness. It is only in later generations of retellings that there is an emphasis on the individuality of each rebbe.

As authors, both began publishing at the start of the twentieth century. And the motivation seems to have been financial. There was a market among the newly literate for popular literature. Lewis compares it to the penny literature or chapbooks in England and India, where the masses consumed poorly edited tales of murder and the supernatural. Here too, the Hasidic tale has blurred lines of vulgar Yiddish literature (shund), romance, and Hasidic teachings. Berger and Michelson solicited their rabbinic acquaintances to mail them stories of great rabbis to be printed. The editors did not concern themselves with prior publication of the stories or modernist elements added to the collected stories. Lewis notes that both authors were still writing from this perspective despite the major ideological changes of their era. They were looking backwards to the older order, the great era of oligarchic, rabbinic families and not to the new answers of Zionists, Bundists, the civil rights party, or communists.

Lewis considers stories that denigrate enlightened Jews or that strain credibility in the use of unbelievable miracles as proof that the stories still addressed a religiously observant audience. In contrast, we should consider how similar miracle tales served Catholics as nostalgia points for modernizing believers eager to affirm that they still believed in miracles despite dropping religious practice or adopting a scientific worldview that precludes miracles. In this case, the miracle tale spoke to the Jews who wanted to show that their secularism was not as a brazen skeptic rather as one who retains yiddishkeit (Jewishness) in their hearts.

This introduction is followed by eight short chapters on themes useful for dispelling the genre of Hasidic stories, overcoming myths of Hasidic culture as equalitarian, this-worldly, or anti-rabbinic. Lewis offers three chapters showing the importance of Torah study, halakhah, and the rabbinic orthodox culture for the stories. He also shows that the stories are vehement in their denouncement of the nonreligious and the nonobservant. He spends four chapters showing that rabbis are not similar to Buber’s portrayal of them as life affirming and living in the present moment. In Hasidic stories, materiality or corporeality (gashmius) “is one of the most negatively laden words” (p. 207). It is “a particular kind of engagement with material existence, aiming for transformation of one’s sensory being, in line with a profoundly vertical, hierarchal cosmology and a judgmental stance toward human activities and emotions” (p. 263).

Hasidic rabbis are portrayed as using food for magical and supernatural purposes. They sought an otherworldly purity and engaged in “bodily action which produce[d] a physical result through mysterious means” (p. 215). Since the Hasidic stories model themselves on Talmudic tales, it was natural for Lewis to make use of Daniel Boyarin’s method for explaining them.

Lewis points out that the stories portray a male-dominated world in which women were of a lower order. In the same vein, the attitude in the stories toward non-Jews was hostile and dismissive. It is important to note also that “the Hasidic imagination accepts some level of cruelty to children” (p. 253). In addition, Lewis shows that Hasidic rebbes acted toward each other with anger, spite, rivalry, and controversy.

One of the more interesting chapters in this section includes stories reflecting on anxiety about circumcision and the views of it as dangerous. They dealt with their doubts and tensions about circumcision, which could scarcely be expressed openly in Hasidic culture through stories. Lewis cites anthropologists who claim stories can express doubts in a community without causing a religious crisis.

Lewis’s book is a valuable study, however, as a revised dissertation there is little follow-up on the many ideas proposed in the book. Lewis works from a folkloric perspective and, unfortunately, does not have the background in the thick forest of Polish Orthodox rabbinic culture to fully and accurately document his ideas. These same authors wrote responsa and sermons, and were engaged in community work at the rabbinic court.

In contrast to Lewis’s work, Nigal’s book The Hasidic Tale has the needed erudition in Eastern European culture and can also provide parallels in earlier Jewish literature. Nigal, emeritus professor at Bar-Ilan University, has already edited several annotated editions of early twentieth-century collections of Hasidic tales. His book was originally published in Hebrew (2005) and expanded into an English edition.

The majority of the work is the index card collection of a senior scholar who has clearly devoted his life to the topic, combing the treasures of the Jewish National and University Library. The minutia in the text even includes discussions of how the copies are bound together in the Jerusalem National library. The introduction on the nature of Hasidic storytelling and chapter 1, which is concerned with the history of the Hasidic story, are the sole theoretical sections of the large book.

In the introduction, Nigal devotes himself to defining the genre of Hasidic tales. He defines the innovation of the Hasidic tale as “the first Jewish literary genre to focus on exemplary individuals and their followers” (p. 1). These stories are about the Hasidic zaddik, who is held in sanctified status by the masses for his ability to help simple folk. For Nigal, the important parts of these stories are the wondrous acts and powers of the rebbe. Simple people come with a problem and it is thus solved by the zaddik. These stories brought hope to the common people who could not see a way out of their predicaments. Tales about Hasidic leaders and their mystical powers attracted followers to the Hasidic court and maintained their devotion. Since the focus is on the rebbe, the stories contain no landscape or nature. They do, however, contain universal human desires and a quest for returning wonder to those skeptical of the rebbes.

In general, Nigal leaves it to the early twentieth-century editors of the volumes to provide their own internal definitions. The editors thought these volumes of stories contained profound ideas, caused repentance, strengthened the service of God, and fortified belief in miracles. Nigal cites those editors who rejected any connection of these stories to the haskole (Enlightenment) or Yiddish literature, and those who even rejected seeing an analogous collection process. Yet he also cites Abraham Hazan, the collector of Breslov traditions, who stated about the other early twentieth-century collections that “most of the stories were told while drinking wine with the teller standing between the third and fourth cup–nine parts are false” (p. 69). Nigal simply cites the criticism and does not investigate or weigh claims about stories because “it is difficult to identify innovations” (p. 75). Nigal seems to favor the explanation given by the twentieth-century editor, Menachem Mendel Bodek, that these stories offer a remedy for sadness, giving hope and solace to those suffering economic or social calamity.

The first chapter is on the history of the Hasidic tale. Rather than viewing the stories as an urban literary invention, Nigal sees an ideology already implicit in early Hasidism of the holiness of mundane talk, preachers using parables, and the influence of the stories of the Besht and Rav Nahman. Nigal also emphasizes the stories told in the courts of Rizhin, and Komarno, as well as the reliability of the modern genre created by Michael Levi Rodkinsohn (Frumkin). Nigal casts his net wider among twentieth-century collectors than Lewis by including among others Menachem Mendel Sofer, Berger, Michelson, Abraham Isaac Sobelman, Shlomo Gavriel Rosenberg, and Aaron Walden. Nigal leaves out biographies of the editors and bibliography of tales from Chabad and Breslov even though he freely cites them in the notes.

Nigal repeatedly writes that he takes these stories as true, especially if the editors stated that they personally heard it. Nigal takes these professions of veracity at face value, then proceeds to provide copious references showing the parallels and almost word-for-word similarities in Midrashic texts, Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), Maaseh Books (Judeo-German books of tales), Christian folktales, tales of Isaac Luria, or Yiddish literature. He acknowledges direct and indirect influence of narrative material from Jewish and non-Jewish sources, but he does not think that this deflects from their veracity. Nigal ignores his own footnotes on the percentage of stories told about non-Hasidic rabbis in these collections.

The majority of the book consists of thematic studies reflecting the social reality. Chapter 2 is on the prophetic powers of the zaddik. Chapter 3 is on matchmakers, marriage, and collecting for bridal dowries. Chapter 4 is on the blessing of having children including the difficulties of labor, and chapter 5 is on agunot, women chained by the abandonment of their husbands. The other fifteen chapters are on topics as diverse as the life of sin, illness, the dead and transmigrations, apostasy, converts, ritual slaughterers, hidden zaddikim, and Elijah. Since Nigal likes these stories and trusts these stories, he relies on the later retellings and topical arrangements of S. Y. Zevin and S. A. Horodetsky without seeing any methodological problems.

On a negative note about the usually fine job done by Littman Library, Nigal’s volume is an exception. In a word-processing age, there was no excuse for having over twenty pages of additions to the original footnotes of the Hebrew edition as an appendix. They should have been cut and pasted into the correct location.

Both volumes are valuable contributions needed to make an assessment of Hasidic stories. Lewis considers the stories as literary creations and Nigal considers them authentic. Nigal accepts Buber’s category of the Hasidic story but leaves us with a more pious version, whereas Lewis completely shatters the category. Lewis directly takes issue with Nigal who rarefies out the stories from these books and does not mention that these collections also contained magic spells, personal letters, sermonic material, halakhah, and events in the community.

Jack Zipes, an important scholar of folklore cited by neither author, thought that tales reflect the conditions, ideas, tastes, and values of the societies in which they were created. They show the ideals and utopias to which they aspired and they “reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society.”[1] The stories of the holy ones, the Hasidic tales, are still an untapped gold mine for those seeking to understand Eastern European Jewish society and more so for their imagined utopias. To truly evaluate Hasidic stories, more books will need to be written on the subject.

Note

[1]. Jack Zipes, “The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale,” The Lion and the Unicorn 12, no. 2 (December 1988): 29.

Last spring a book came out about the history of boredom entitled BOREDOM: A Lively History by Peter Toohey. The reviews in the NYT and elsewhere mainly dealt with the coming to be of the word and its usages in earlier centuries as a form of melancholia, as ennui, or as repetition. But this week the NYT reported on an academic paper at a local conference on the topic of intellectual history that showed how the usage of the word spiked in the 1970’s and that the meaning meant something not interesting enough for one to do. Until the 1970’s no one said “how do we prevent our employees from getting bored?’ How do we prevent school kids from getting bored?” When you were in a situation of duty or requirement then one did what one was supposed to do.
The purpose of the NYT article and the academic lists on which I saw it was to cheer the return to intellectual history of contextualizing popular and influential books. The return to intellectual history was why it caught my eye but the discussion of boredom is more significant. My historian sources are also pointing out that historians are beginning to turn to the 1970’s and its culture.

I did my own google books search (as well as Ngram) and found that in its pedestrian usages it meant impatience, like boredom due to a delayed train. When it is used in Horton Hears a Who in mid-century, it means impatience with the speck. In philosophic literature it meant ennui. Our usage of it is a post-1950’s usage when authors like Erich Fromm brought European thought of ennui to mass America situational repetition. The word boredom was also used by sociologists of suburbia like Herbert Ganz. In the 1970’s it spikes in its usage. We start finding statements advocating not to be bored at work or not to be bored in ones marriage. And if you are, then leave them. The term boredom was part of a wave of bad popular-psych of the era that encouraged people never to be bored. If things are not going your way then life is too short to stay there. Work-psychologists, marriage therapists, and toy makers all started solving the problem of boredom. Boredom was seen as leading to drugs, cults, and divorce. By 2011, every preschooler knows how to whine “I’m bored.” In order to overcome boredom prior ages spoke of hard work, character, or the sin of acadia.

Now what about religion? Starting in the late 1970’s we find sermons on the problem of people bored in shul and in the 1980’s we find books. Before that we have discussions on the meaning of synagogue for modern man or how the yetzar hara makes you want to leave shul. Boredom is not an valid excuse or concern. The connection the word synagogue and boredom before 1980 included Jacob Neusner, Dennis Prager, reports of the AJC and Bnai Brith and Jospeh Heller of Catch-22 fame and the cult leader Osho. (Modechai Kaplan uses the word in the context of new music so it wont have sameness not it the context of participants). People did not think that you walked away from boredom, rather only from irrelevance.

By the early 1980’s we find a second tier discovering boredom in the synagogue, Sam Heilman, Reuven Bulka, and the Jewish magazines. I found one Orthodox rabbi in a suburban congregation adamant in claiming that the youth in his synagogue and day school are not bored. I attended the school for a year so I consider this an amusing find. In the late 1980’s and 1990’s, we have an entire literature of outreach and kiruv works showing their zeitgeist by addressing synagogue boredom through explaining the service or giving tips on greater involvement.

The mussar approach to overcome such feeling which they considered laziness was habituation and motivating one’s inner emotions either through sermon and song or hell-fire images. Ramchal starts with the need for alacrity and scrupulousness. Rav Soloveitchik uses the word in the Existential sense of ennui and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in his last book of 1966 speaks only of the boredom of old-age and the need for a higher purpose not senior-center activities. Lots of Polish Hasidism is translated as if the original spoke of boredom and not achieving greatness.

A quick search shows that only since about 2003 have books about congregational life written by upbeat clergy and not sociologists have considered the need to have a section on boredom. We now have religious pop-psych books by congregation professionals explaining this “perennial problem of the laity with boredom,” unaware of recent boredom is as a concern. These upbeat versions take boredom as a natural part of life, not something only with us for a few decades and with changing meaning. It is not worth it to discuss how these post-2003 versions (mis)use their sources. In the post-2003 versions we are no longer worried about defection or encouraging one to leave.

For an interesting example of how the concept changes, in the recent work The Men’s Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World by Elana Maryles Sztokman, she discusses how men are bored in synagogue, they are not really into prayer and they have spiritually bored lives seek refuge in cerebral pursuits of the the sermon, Torah study, and reading. This is part of the recent post-2003 trend to accept boredom as a issue to deal with on a regular basis. Men learning in shul is not explained as a habituation toward study or a lack of habituation in prayer. Nor is their a call for revival, either kiruv or renewal movement, as in the 1980’s. And unlike the 1980’s, the rabbi no longer get blamed for irrelevance.

There are probably lots of other applications to the religious literature of our age. Any other good examples or avenues of the effect of the concept of boredom on the religion of our age? How else has Judaism been constructed around boredom in the last 30 years that was not there beforehand?

There is a really nice article about the generational shift in American Buddhism. The younger generation is more DIY and catering to people’s needs. They also dont see a need to live a sever life in a monastery as part of their training. The gen-x backlashed against the baby-boomer’s spirituality. The older generation were an elite that sought Enlightenment, the younger generation create a wellness and solution for stress.The article is longer and has a nice video by three elders reluctantly acknowledging the change.

American Buddhism facing generational shift
By Rachel Zell, Associated Press, July 17, 2011

The meditation hall, also used as a meeting space, is where the luminaries of Buddhism in the West recently gathered to debate.
The issue they were facing had been percolating for years on blogs, in Buddhist magazines and on the sidelines of spiritual retreats. It often played out as a clash of elders versus young people, the preservers of spiritual depth versus the alleged purveyors of “Buddhism-lite.” Organizers of the gathering wanted the finger-pointing to end. The future of American Buddhism was at stake, they said.
So on a sweltering day at the Garrison Institute, a Buddhist retreat overlooking the Hudson River, the baby boomers who had popularized the tradition in the West met with younger leaders to tackle their differences.

“How can those of us who were pioneers in the ’60s and ’70s, support them without getting in their way and let them know that they have our blessings and support?” said Jack Kornfield, a prominent Buddhist teacher who helped introduce mindfulness, or insight, meditation to the U.S. four decades ago.

Buddhism in America is at a crossroads. The best-known Buddhist leaders, mostly white converts who emerged from the counterculture and protest movements of the Vietnam era, are nearing retirement or dying. Charlotte Joko Beck, a pioneer of Zen practice in America, passed away in June.

The next generation of teachers is pushing in new directions, shaped by the do-it-yourself ethos of the Internet age and a desire to make Buddhism more accessible. Informal study groups are in; organizing around a single teacher is out. Unsettled elders worry that the changes could go too far and lose touch with tradition.

“It seems to be one of the facts of life right now, not only in Buddhism, but in religion in general: it’s about mixing and matching,” said Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a longtime Zen priest, scholar and poet affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center. “The freedom people feel that they have to experiment — how do you prevent that from becoming consumerist or completely superficial or dangerous?”
In Asia, monastics generally lead Buddhism in roles shaped partly by their monarchical societies; in the U.S., the teachers are mostly lay people. Beyond the Dalai Lama, Buddhism is best known in the United States not for any particular clergyman, ritual or liturgy, but through mindfulness-based stress reduction, which adapts strategies from vipassana, or insight medi tation.

Yet, a vein of conservatism runs through American Buddhist communities.

Many American Buddhist pioneers spent a decade or more studying with masters in Thailand, India, Burma and Nepal before returning home to take on students. On their websites, U.S. teachers post photos of themselves as young women in saris, or young men draped in robes, their heads cleanly shaven, on the steps of overseas monasteries. They are handing over leadership to the first convert Buddhist generation that was trained almost entirely in the West.

“The prior generation was modeled after the monastic model, where the old guy was the abbot,” said the Rev. Jay Rinsen Weik, a recently ordained Zen priest, who leads the Toledo Zen Center in Ohio with his wife, Karen, who is also a Zen priest. “The last generation suffered from not being able to distinguish the personality of the guy and his dharma (teachings).”

For younger Americans, spending several years cloistered abroad, absorbing the cultural traditions of another country, seems not only unnecessary but counterproductive for reaching Westerners. Spring Washam, 37, a founding teacher of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, which has brought Buddhism to poorer, more diverse neighborhoods, said the attendees at her center want support, connection and friendship.

“These people want to be happy in their lives,” Washam said. “They’re not going to be monastics.”

One of the most startling developments for elders has been the formation of the Dharma Punx, who participated in the conference. The relatively new, popular movement mixes punk rock-inspired rebellion and Buddhism, seeing both as seeking freedom from suffering. Amid the grey hair and muted clothes of the attendees, the Dharma Punx stood out, with their tattoo-covered arms and T-shirts the color of traffic cones. The movement emerged from the work of Noah Levine, the son of American Buddhist author Stephen Levine. The younger Levine rediscovered Buddhism after a troubled youth; he and his colleagues have built a reputation for successfully bringing Buddhist practices into juvenile detention centers — a sign of the social activism that young Buddhists tie to their meditation practice.

“I’m all about adaptability,” said Vinny Ferraro, a Dharma Punx teacher, who said it would make no sense for him to “go off to a cave” and meditate for years.

“What attracts people is relevance,” he said. “Youth is suffering. These are prime suffering years, but I need it in my language.”
Whatever the elders think of these new approaches, they know they need the energy young innovators are bringing to the communities.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, few twenty- and thirty somethings took up Buddhism. Leaders attributed the problem to a 1980s’ backlash against spiritual seeking and society’s focus in that era on accumulating wealth. (One Western convert at the Garrison Institute, who became a Tibetan monk, said that when he wore his robes in North America in the 1980s, he was treated like “a nut case.”)

For some religion is a private affair or one done in devotion to textual study, but increasingly religious identity is connected to lobbying in Washington. I have mentioned many times that in a single row in synagogue – one can find one person interested in halkhic minutia in their life, another into Rav Nachman and a third interested in Lobbying in Washington.The three congregants have three different moral orders to their religion. This article is an indication that many of the significant clergy in our decade are into lobbying and politicking. I see many Roshei Yeshiva comfortable in this role as well as many pulpit rabbis – their commitment shares much with Archbishop Dolan’s political lobbying.

Religion-related lobby groups thrive in Washington, grew 5 times in 40 years
The number of religion-related lobbying groups in Washington has grown five-fold in the past 40 years, with their spending reaching almost $400 million annually, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life latest study showed. It identified 212 groups, up from 158 a decade ago and 40 in 1970.
Their collective budgets for lobbing efforts in Washington were estimated at $390 million a year. For 131 of the groups for which data could be obtained, median spending was $890,000 in 2009, down from $970,000 the year before.
Forty groups accounted for the bulk of the spending, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent nearly $88 million in 2008, the last year for which data was provided.
Also in 2008, the Family Research Council spent $14 million and the American Jewish Committee $13 million.
In 2009, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops spent $27 million, Concerned Women for America $13 million, Bread for the World $11 million, the National Right to Life Committee $11 million and the Home School Legal Defense Association $11 million.
Issues the various groups lobbied on included support of Israel, church-state issues, and religious rights.
The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life said in the report on Monday that other topics were bioethics, abortion, capital punishment, and end-of-life and family-marriage issues. Many of the groups also addressed international issues such as poverty.

The Princetonian had two interesting articles this week. One an interview with Prof. Martha Himmelfarb and tha nnouncement of the Rhodes scholarchip to Miriam Rosenbaum

The following is the third installment of “Keeping Faith,” a six-part series of conversations between politics professor Robert George and University professors of various faiths.

Moshe Idel gave a interesting series of lectures last winter on the power of language, specifically arts combinatoria, a ability to create a universal knowledge from language. The audio was recently posted. The second lecture on Derrida, Eco, and Culiano give insight into Idel himself. Idel’s use of a single line of Derrida to show affinity to his own project is an old theme for him. But new is Idel’s highlighting that Culiano at the end of his life turned from the study of phenomena to theory, with an implication that this lecture of his was his own turn to theory. These “theory lectures” seem to have already been implicit in his recent work on Kabbalah in Italy.

But were these three thinkers his inspiration right from the start in the 1980’s? It seems they were, but not explicitly. Does anyone remember any relevant passages? If Idel now lists himself and Kabbalah as the study of (the power of) language and magic- Is this a change or implicit already in his PhD? His work from a few years ago Absorbing Perfections still used the words mysticism and esotericism. Can we reread the entire Idel project as disconnected from mysticism and see that it was originally language and magic (as well as esotericism and ecstatic techniques)?

Idel’s first self-written book was the published version of his dissertation on Abulafia where he wrote as an opening paragraph:

The method for attaining wisdom proposed by Abulafia as an alternative to philosophical speculation is essentially a linguistic one.Language is conceived by him as a universe in itself, which yields aricher and superior domain for contemplation than does the natural world

He was telling us right from the start that he is concerned with language as a means to wisdom. Can his project be re-read as knowledge through language? As a side point, am I the only one bothered that Idel ignores how Leibnitz criticized the medieval attempts as arbitrary and not scientific, while Idel glides from the modern to the medieval without a break?

In the same recent lecture Idel claimed that history and causality is over-rated; there are other sources of knowledge. He dismisses Thomas Kuhn & Feyerabend for not recognizing the role of Ars Combinatoria, the recombination of letters as a valid source of knowledge. Eco and Derrida through their interest in ars combinatoria have transcended the Enlightenment interest in science and “clear and distinct ideas.” Idel applauds this. Unlike the limited knowledge offered by theosophic kabbalah such as the Zohar or Ari, or the limited knowledge offered through science, the knowledge of the magical recombination of letters contains all the knowledge of the universe.This would explain why he has never attempted any historical narrative or intellectual history. But it also seems to assume that Idel thinks contemporary readers will resonate with Abulafia, or at least Idel’s books, since Eco is on the best-seller list. And if Eco if read itis because people are beyond history and science.

Lecture 1:
“Sefer Yetzirah and its Commentaries: A major source for ars combinatoria”
Tuesday 8 February 2011, 5 pm, at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.

Lecture 2:
“Ars Combinatoria in Modern Times: Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Ioan P. Culianu”
Wednesday 9 February 2011, 8pm, at the David Patterson Seminar at Yarnton Manor.

Lecture 3:
“The Transition of Ars Combinatoria from Kabbalah to European Culture:
Ramon Llull, Pseudo-Llull, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola”
Thursday 10 February 2011, 5 pm, at Merton College.

In the Rietbeg Museum in Zurich they are having an exhibit on mysticism, including Jewish mysticism. The website has lots of uploaded pictures and video, however only some of them have English subtitles.

MYSTICISM – YEARNING FOR THE ABSOLUTE
23 SEPTEMBER 2011 TO 15 JANUARY 2012
The Museum Rietberg is proud to present the world’s first culturally comparative exhibition on mysticism.

This elusive religious phenomenon will be illustrated by the example of forty male and female mystics: their lives and writings demonstrate just how richly varied spiritual experience can be. The mystics chosen for the exhibition come from the great religions of the world – Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity – and span the period from the 6th century BC until the 19th century.

Here are two of the Jewish exhibits, the one for the Besht has the same display as the Ramak.
ABRAHAM ABULAFIA (1240-1291) EXPERIENCE OF GOD IN THE HOLY LANGUAGE

MOSES CORDOVERO (1522-1570) RE-ESTABLISHING UNITY

Some of the other one’s that are interesting is the little film for Dionysios THE AREOPAGITE and the recording of Rumi in Persian.

H/T AviSolo

Broadcasts on Jewish Philosophy at PHILOSOPHER’S ZONE.
Australian Radio Series on Jewish Philosophy with transcripts

Yesterday morning, I received by email the new issue of Bookjed. Steve Bayme of the AJC wrote a review of a book and in the middle of the review inserts the following paragraph explaining what he thinks are the limits of Modern Orthodoxy. It seemed like a ready-made argument that can apply to a lot of topics.

More generally, this small volume stands as a significant document illustrating the tenuous place Modern Orthodoxy occupies on the Jewish communal map. To invoke a metaphor, Modern Orthodox leaders frequently approach the edge of the water but fail to wade into it. The authors comprehend the significance and beauty of sexuality and articulate it quite well. They are informed by secular sources of knowledge and culture. They understand fully that there are significant points of tension between Judaic heritage and modern culture. But they appear unwilling to confront those tensions openly. I should add, in fairness to the authors, that the same might be said for Orthodox leaders with respect to questions of Biblical scholarship, cooperation with the non-Orthodox movements, Jewish gentile relations, problems of reason and faith, the meaning of revelation for moderns, and doubtless one could easily add to this list. My personal favorite concerned a leading Modern Orthodox professor of Judaic Studies, who developed a popular lecture for synagogue scholar in residence programs in which he claimed that archeological research corroborated the Biblical narrative as if there were no conflicts between archeology and Torah. One only hopes he has abandoned the lecture given the weight of recent archeological research!
Instructors willing to go beyond the book and “enter the waters” fully will be doing themselves and their students a great service. They may even create models that Modern Orthodox leaders would do well to emulate.

Steven Bayme serves as National Director, Contemporary Jewish Life Department for the American Jewish Committee (AJC)

There is a new article in Modern Judaism “When Orthodoxy was not as chic as it is today”: The Jewish Forum and American Modern Orthodoxy By Ira Robinson and Maxine Jacobson. It nicely shows the different sub-communities of modern Orthodoxy and the change in issues over the decades. It is actually a nice summery article for those who need an introduction to 20th century issues in modern Orthodoxy. The article is not ideological, rather social history. Maxine Jacobson has a wonderful unpublished PhD on Rabbi Leo Jung, which should be published.

The article is behind a subscription wall.

The article shows how modern Orthodoxy had to prove it can accept science, democracy, women’s education, and labor rights. It also nicely documents the very slow separation of the Conservative and modern Orthodox movements. An Orthodox journal could still debate the use of the mechitza into the early 1960’s. The article highlights one aspect of the division that others neglect, that is the emphasis on day schools over public schools for modern Orthodoxy. The reason for the commandments are hygienic and having medical insight. One gets a nice summary of how important Mordechai Kaplan was in the formation of Orthodoxy’s reaction. Rabbi Leo Jung, Kaplan replacement, at the Jewish Center formed his identity in reaction.

The article shows where the change in language occurred between Torah-tradition to modern Orthodoxy with the shift from the generation of Jung to that of Tradition magazine – Lamm and Rackman. The article also provides a backdrop of why figures like Lamm were so adamant against producing popular literature in the 70’s and 80’s, allowing Artscroll to take the market. They felt that they were dealing with philosophy and therefore above the prior generation. Unfortunately the article is marred by a few anachronism of using 2011 Orthodox language when explaining older positions.

The article discusses the anonymous Dayyan alYehud who in 1962 wanted to remove the Conservative movement from Orthodoxy, and criticizes Lieberman and Finkelstein. Yet fails to discuss that in 1952 the same Dayyan alYehud gloated and exalted over Abraham Joshua Heschel as the new and true voice of modern Orthodoxy, combining piety with worldliness. The same anonymous author elsewhere praised Rav Tzair and his method. Lieberman had little respect for Heschel or Rav Tzair, so there is a greater back-story- probably more of an in-house debate.

The Jewish Forum was an American Orthodox monthly published from 1918 to 1962. It reflected issues and developments affecting Orthodox Judaism in America, from the twenties to the sixties. In these decades,
Orthodoxy went from being a threatened entity on the American scene to a well-recognized, respected force in Judaism and The Jewish Forum played a role in this transformation.

The concept of Modern Orthodoxy was not well defined at The Jewish Forum’s inception. Indeed, the very term ‘‘Modern Orthodoxy’’ for the journal’s philosophy only appears for the first time, in August 1937, in an article entitled ‘‘Neo and Modern Orthodox Judaism,’’ written by Phineas Israeli, a 1902 graduate of The Jewish Theological Seminary. Modern Orthodoxy, according to Israeli, is solely an American phenomenon. The first two aspects of Modern Orthodoxy were established by Moses Mendelssohn and Samson Raphael Hirsch, and consist of a combination of loyalty to Jewish tradition and love for general culture and rationalism. It is the innovations in practice and more up to date interpretations of Jewish doctrine, appealing to the rising generation, that Israeli felt were distinctive to American Modern Orthodoxy. In the absence of ‘‘Modern Orthodoxy,’’ writers in The Jewish Forum used various terms to denote the Judaism they supported, including ‘‘Traditional Judaism,’’ ‘‘Torah-true Judaism’’, ‘‘Authentic Judaism,’’ and ‘‘Jewish Jews.’’

One difficulty in defining The Jewish Forum’s ideal Orthodoxy was the presence of the Conservative movement. Competition was clearly evident between Conservative Judaism and Orthodoxy in the early part of the twentieth century precisely because Conservative Judaism was widely perceived to be similar to Orthodoxy. The journal’s relationship with Conservative Judaism further demonstrated Modern Orthodoxy’s lack of clear boundaries.Dr Meyer Waxman wrote in 1924 that there was a tendency for Conservative Judaism to identify with traditional Judaism and he discussed the widespread view that the Conservative synagogue did ‘‘border very closely upon the Orthodox.’’ Rabbi Leo Jung also referred to Conservatism as, ‘‘the other kind of Orthodoxy.’’

The relationship between Conservative and Orthodox in The Jewish Forum was thus quite complex. There were articles in The Jewish Forum written by Conservative authors and there were a few Conservative rabbis, over the years, who served on its board.

When Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan presented his program for the reconstruction of Judaism, accompanied by his condemnation of Orthodox Judaism, as out of date, in The Menorah Journal of August 1920, The Jewish Forum was one of the first Orthodox media to face his challenge and to enter the debate about what Orthodoxy stood for. Rabbi Leo Jung thus issued his rebuttal to Kaplan in The Jewish Forum of April 1921. In light of Kaplan’s challenge, Orthodox rabbis were obliged to take stock and consider methods and approaches that would become characteristic of Modern Orthodoxy. Kaplan’s program was their call to action. As Rabbi Jung stated:

The only answer to Kaplanism is: the immediate convention of a living Orthodox body to work out a systematic educational scheme for the re-assertion of Orthodoxy, absolutely faithful in principle, absolutely fresh in method.

The contemporary relevance of the Bible was demonstrated in the journal in terms of its congruence with the principles of contemporary medicine. Judaic Laws were shown to be healthy and humane in accord with the wisdom of the Torah. Mosaic law and modern medical science were represented as blending harmoniously and being identical in basic concepts and tenets. Thus, Jacob B. Glenn, a medical doctor and contributing editor to The Jewish Forum presented a series of articles, in 1958, called ‘‘Modern Medicine in the Light of Mosaic Law’’ dealing with the relevance of the Bible with respect to contemporary medicine. Many examples were given: shell fish and pork, prohibited to Jews, caused disease; cleanliness of the body, dealt with in minute details in Jewish law, such as the laws of Niddah [marital purity laws] and washing hands before touching food, kept the body healthy and prevented infectious diseases. The author wrote that modern medicine has shown that hereditary diseases resulted from inbreeding or incestuous marriages, which were prohibited in Jewish Law. Dr Glenn further wrote that medicine demonstrates that the laws of Sabbath are conducive to a healthier existence both mentally and physically. Dietary laws were also explained as a protection against unhealthy food.

Education for women was a cause The Jewish Forum promoted as early as the twenties. In 1930 it published an article, ‘‘The Place of Woman in Jewish Education’’ in which its author, Freda Fine wrote:

Gone is the day when the male child was the center of the Jewish household: when he alone was to carry on the tradition of the Talmud. Today the young Jewess shares the classroom with her brother.
We therefore stress the education of the daughters, so that they, as well as the sons, may be leaders in Jewish education movements.

In the forties and fifties the Orthodox and Conservative movements became better defined and gradually became more separate entities. In 1961, a guest editor, calling himself, ‘‘Dayyan Al-Yehud,’’ pointed out that the Orthodox movement had moved in a different direction than the Conservative movement:

There is a definite trend in American Jewish life, . . . toward a recognition of Halakhic authority as enunciated by the heads of Yeshibhoth . . .We regret, however, to state without fear of contradiction, that such is not the case in the rank and file of Conservative Judaism in America.

He accused the Conservatives of lack of consistent loyalty to Torah-tradition:
Witness . . . tampering with the inviolability of the sanctity and purity of family life, and the basic changes in the ketubah document, sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly of America under the guidance of its prime mover and careerist, Saul Lieberman, professor of Talmud.

Whereas previously The Jewish Forum had been somewhat ambiguous in its relationship to Conservative scholars and the rabbinic authorities of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in the fifties ‘‘Dayyan Al-Yehud’’ openly questioned the decisions of Louis Finkelstein and Saul Lieberman.

The Jewish Forum, in the late fifties, published an article by a Conservative rabbi claiming that in modern times a mechitza was not valid; ‘‘but in the good and great America of ours, the mixed pew system seems to be just a natural thing . . .’’ While this was not the general stance of the journal, it certainly demonstrated the presence of Conservative writers in the journal, as well as a degree of editorial freedom in The Jewish Forum. However, it also marked the growing division of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. Robert Gordis, a leading Conservative rabbi and scholar, had been on the board of The Jewish Forum since the forties, his first appearance in The Jewish Forum having been in 1925. However, in the early sixties the journal was criticized by some of its readers for having a Conservative rabbi like Gordis on the editorial board. Gordis resigned in 1962 because he was unhappy with editor Charles Raddock’s response to this criticism.

By the 1950s, a new English-speaking Orthodox leadership had come to the fore, prominent among whom were Rabbis Norman Lamm, Emmanuel Rackman, Solomon Scharfman and Joseph Soloveitchik. Increasingly, there were people who did not really identify with The Jewish Forum. The 1958 founding of a new Modern Orthodox journal, Tradition, reflected a significant development in American Modern Orthodoxy.
The demise of The Jewish Forum and the concomitant rise of Tradition seems to be indicative of a generational gap in Orthodoxy circa 1960, and highlights a tension that existed between different generations of American Orthodox rabbis.

By the fifties and sixties, Rabbi Soloveitchik and many younger Modern Orthodox rabbis emphasized research and scholarship and promoted the ideal of the ‘‘scholar rabbi’’ who was trained to interpret the texts, thus leading to a more vigorous Judaism based on more detailed study of Jewish texts and the Jewish past. It had set out to be a journal containing ‘‘reliable studies prepared for popular digestion,’’ but Orthodox readers were no longer as interested in its version of ‘‘popular’’ presentation.

I received an email notice this morning for a brand new Har’EL Yeshiva that will combine the traditional Beit midrash with being a seeker. It will bring Hasidut, creative writing, Moreh Nevukhim, and great books in the Beit Midrash.The Rosh Yeshiva will be Rabbi Herzl Hefter (no ad hominem). Any thoughts?

From the Website -only some of this was in the email.

Over the past 200 years, the world has seen more change than in the previous 5000. These changes pose acute challenges for our faith and traditional way of life, as we hold tenaciously to our sacred traditions while fearlessly engaging a new reality. To deal with those challenges, I am excited to announce the opening of Har’El Yeshiva, a new program for sincere and motivated young men between the ages of 21 and 30 in the Old City of Jerusalem.

(1) What we believe:
The Torah teaches that God created the world and human beings with imperfections. Facing our individual and communal imperfections honestly is the necessary first step to any sort of authentic relationship with ourselves (as individuals), with each other and with God.

We are driven by the conviction that love and devotion to Torah study transforms the individual into a more perfect reflection of Godliness.
At Har’El Yeshiva, we seek to confront challenges openly because we believe that this is our unique responsibility. We believe that love of Torah should develop love of truth and personal growth.

“Existential” Torah
In the post modern era where all authority is suspect, it is insufficient to base religious observance upon obedience alone. Morning seder will commence with the study of Hasidic teachings. This is designed to provide meaningful context for the activities of the rest of the day. We will study the powerful and transformative works of the Mei haShiloah, R. Zadok Hakohen of Lublin and the Sefat Emet. These masters teach that God is present in the human heart. The immediacy of the Divine in the human heart feeds a sense of urgency to facilitate its revelation through the study of Torah, prayer and fear of Heaven. The consciousness of radical Divine immanence provides an authentic traditional framework to absorb the far reaching changes in human society over the last two hundred years.

Students will be inspired to internalize the Torah and make it their own, learning to express themselves creatively. We will encourage our students to draw upon their life experiences to develop their avodat hashem and yir’at shamayim.

Guide to the Perplexed
The Yeshiva will combine intellectual rigor and God-consciousness. This approach is embodied in Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Generally, mysticism has a complete disdain for the dry demands of logic and language. But, in his work, Maimonides starts from a place of cool Aristotelian rationalism, and follows a course of rigid reasoning about God’s perfection and about the nature of language. Eventually, he comes to the realization that language and logic do have their limits; that reality and religious experience do outstrip the descriptive powers of language; and that silent reverence of a God that cannot be described is the only appropriate attitude. This course will concentrate on these themes, and on Maimonides’ rationalization of the commandments. In his work, we will see an old-fashioned Aristotelianism that nevertheless reaches the same conclusions that Kant and Wittgenstein would later reach.

Writing workshop
In the creative writing workshop, we will deepen our religious and Jewish identity through the medium of creativity. Each session will begin with learning a short passage from one of the traditional Jewish texts: a midrash, a Hasidic story, a short passage from the Guide to the Perplexed, etc. This text will then be the springboard for the actual writing exercise, which will always try to focus on a Jewish theme. Rabbi Nachman wrote that “the imagination is the cornerstone of faith.” We believe that the imagination can be a gateway for a person to enter the palace of devekut and faith.

Great books
Pursuant to our intention to prepare our students to engage the world, we will integrate the following subjects into the yeshiva curriculum in a way which will not compromise the intensity of the Torah studies. We will produce a reading list of essential books on these subjects. The students will meet regularly to discuss these books. At times students themselves will be responsible to moderate the discussion.
A partial list of great books:
Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy”
John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”
Sigmund Freud, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”
Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”
John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Affluent Society”
Ian Barbour, “Science and Religion”
Mircea Eliade, “The Myth of the Eternal Return”
Students will be expected to present to their peers. They will write their presentation for posting on our website.

Read more about Yeshivat Har’El here.

Here is the first dvar Torah that they placed on their web- about the need for a personal calling.

The Sefat Emet says that G-d is continuously calling to each and every one of us: “Lech lecha! – ‘Get thee out!” What differentiates Avraham is that he heard the call.

When we reflect upon the Biblical personalities who hear the voice of God, our first instinct is to think of the call in a literal way, sound waves echoing in the prophet’s inner ear. The Sefat Emet says that this is not so. Rather, God’s voice resonates within each of us, calling us to our spiritual journey. As creatures created in the Divine image, we are charged to attune ourselves to the Divine calling that echoes in our hearts and minds.

There is a nice article in today’s Tablet on Camus and the Jews. It shows his closeness to the Jewish Resistance, his support of Israel, and his Biblical philosophy of absurdity. A study of the influence of major influence of Camus on modern Jewish thought is a desideratum. Much of Holocaust thought -Amery, Wiesel, Fackenheim- is based on Camus. Camus is mixed with Buber in Berkovits, Soloveitchik, and others. And there is a nice volume of Camus Biblical exegesis written by Andre Neher, Exile of the Word. Long term, I am working on an article on Camus in Wiesel’s Hasidic stories.

At the same time, he began to reach out to Jewish friends. To one, Irène Djian, he denounced these “despicable” laws and reassured her: “This wind cannot last if each and every one of us calmly affirmed that the wind smells rotten.” He reminded her he would always stand by her—a remarkable position for a Frenchman to take in 1940, when the vast majority of his compatriots either embraced or accepted the new laws.

Among the few visitors he had was his friend the historian André Chouraqui, a French Algerian Jew whom Camus peppered with questions about the Old Testament, all the while taking notes for the book he was then writing, The Plague.

By then, Chouraqui was already risking his life in the French Resistance, particularly in the critical work of finding homes for Jewish refugee children. Much of this activity centered on Chambon, where the pastor, André Trocmé, had already mobilized the village in the work of welcoming, housing, and hiding these children. By the end of the war, the people of Chambon had saved the lives of at least 3,000 Jewish children and adults.

Indeed, it is the theme of absurdity that most powerfully underscores Camus’ understanding of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. At the political and existential level, Camus felt a visceral connection with the absurd predicament of the young Jewish state. It was a political bond insofar as many on the French left, from whom Camus was estranged, had grown deeply anti-Zionist in the wake of the Suez War. In 1957, he publicly affirmed his sympathy and support for Israel. His reasons still echo today: Not only must Europe accept Israel’s existence as the only possible response to the continent’s complicity in the Final Solution, but Israel must also exist as a counter-example to the oppressive rule of Arab leaders. The Arab people, he declared, wished for deserts covered with olive trees, not canons. Let Israel show the way.

His plea for cooperation and collaboration between Jews and Arabs in Israel echoed his pleas to his fellow pied-noirs and Arabs in Algeria.

Yet Camus’ deepest and most intriguing bond to Judaism is revealed in his philosophy of the absurd. In early 1941, when Vichy was preparing a second round of anti-Semitic legislation and the papers in France and Algeria were giving free rein to anti-Semitic rhetoric, Camus completed his philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The opening lines are among the best known written by Camus: “There is just one truly important philosophical question: suicide. To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else … is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Of course that question needed to be answered in 1941. How could it be otherwise, given the dire predicament in which the French and French Jews, along with Camus, found themselves?

Job and Sisyphus, in short, are heaved into a world shorn of transcendence and meaning. In response to their demand for answers, they get only silence. Herein lies the absurdity, Camus writes: It is “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.”

The silence of the world, in effect, only becomes silence when human beings enter the equation. All too absurdly, Job demands meaning. “Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard/ I cry aloud, but there is no judgment.” And no less absurdly, Job must ask himself what he must do if meaning is not to be found? What is our next step if meaning fails to show up at our appointed rendezvous? “But where shall wisdom be found?/ And where is the place of understanding?”

He is a Job who answers God’s deafening and dismal effort at self-justification with scornful silence.
Read the Rest Here

This comes from a CFP for an upcoming conference in philosophy of religion. I found it a nice list of what’s currently discussed and relevant in philosophy of religion. I thought some of my readers may be looking for reading for the summer or the winter break. What made this list list especially useful was the list of both authors and topics.

Phenomenology of Religion
The thought of Chrétien, Henry, Lacoste, Levinas, Marion, and Ricoeur
Topics: the gift; the work of art; appearance and transcendence; call and response

Religion and Politics
The thought of Agamben, Asad, Connolly, Derrida, de Vries, Girard, Habermas, Schmitt, and Taylor
Topics: political theology; the post-secular; sovereignty; religion and violence; pluralism

Religion and Speculative Realism
The thought of Brassier, Harman, Laruelle, and Meillassoux
Topics: materialism; correlationism; nihilism; the things themselves; divine inexistence; ‘future Christ’

Beyond Theism and Atheism
The thought of Caputo, Kearney, Kristeva, Milbank, Vattimo
Topics: kenosis; anatheism; weak theology; a/theology; radical orthodoxy

Continental Thought, Religion, and Aesthetics
The artwork of Bresson, Caravaggio, Celan, Chagall, Dostoyevsky, Dumont, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kahlo, Kapoor, Kiarostami, Kiefer, Malick, Newman, O’Keefe, and Stevens
The thought of Cavell, Cixous, Critchley, Irigaray, Marion, Nancy, and Rancière
Topics: transcendence in art; image and icon; creativity and creation; representation and idolatry

Immanentism and Religion
Agamben, Badiou, Bergson, Deleuze, James, Foucault, Keller, and Žižek
Topics: self-organization; the event; plurality; bio-power; polydoxy

From Here

A Guest Post by Rabbi Avraham Bronstein- He is considering a year of Occupy Parsha.
Rabbi Avraham Bronstein currently serves as Program Director of the Great Neck Synagogue. He previously served as Assistant Rabbi of The Hampton Synagogue where he developed and coordinated the extensive Cultural and Adult-Educational Program.

Sermon: Occupy Noah

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote on Parshat Noach:

The Flood tells us what happens to civilization when individuals rule and there is no collective…It was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the thinker who laid the foundations of modern politics in his classic Leviathan (1651), who – without referring to the Flood – gave it its best interpretation. Before there were political institutions, said Hobbes, human beings were in a “state of nature.” They were individuals, packs, bands. Lacking a stable ruler, an effective government and enforceable laws, people would be in a state of permanent and violent chaos – “a war of every man against every man” – as they competed for scarce resources. There would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Such situations exist today in a whole series of failed or failing states. That is precisely the Torah’s description of life before the Flood. When there is no rule of law to constrain individuals, the world is filled with violence.

As I read Sack’s piece, I got the sense that making his point about failed states or chaotic, violent societies really takes the bite out of the narrative. It teaches us a lesson we already know about, say, Rwanda, but it doesn’t necessarily teach us about ourselves. If anything, we come away with a false assurance, almost a cultural triumphalism.

Instead, I would argue that the pre-Flood landscape Sacks calls “Hobbesian” is actually much closer to Wall Street, 2011 than Iraq, 2005. Our new Guilded Age, with its vast wealth and innovation but gaping chasm between haves and have-nots, is the direct result of an unregulated “war of every many against every man,” where the winners wield the political process itself as a weapon, using their resources to ensure that it represents their interests as opposed to those of society at large.

The Rabbis were eerily sensitive to this in their own depiction of the pre-Flood society. They describe a remarkable situation where, despite an environment of amazing prosperity, people were robbed of the opportunity to succeed:

The wantonness of this generation was in a measure due to the ideal conditions under which mankind lived before the flood. They knew neither toil nor care, and as a consequence of their extraordinary prosperity they grew insolent….So cunningly were their depredations planned that the law could not touch them. If a countryman brought a basket of vegetables to market, they would edge up to it, one after the other, and abstract a bit, each in itself of petty value, but in a little while the dealer would have none left to sell.

It doesn’t take a great imagination to make the jump to deceptive ATM fees, crippling student loans, punitive foreclosure procedures, and taxpayer bailouts of “too big to fail” financial institutions. The laws on the books that provide no protection to the weak nor accountability for the powerful ring strikingly familiar as well.

The amount of overall wealth in our society is truly staggering, yet our culture’s blinding focus on individualism has resulted in both the rich getting richer and social mobility becoming harder. In short, the “hamas/corruption” that doomed the world to the Flood was not Bernie Madoff – it was AIG and Goldman Sachs.

The Rabbis, as is well known, were ambivalent about Noah as a character:

“These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a righteous, innocent man in his generation” (Gen 6:9). Rashi: “in his generations.” Some of our Sages expound this to his praise: all the more so had he lived in a generation of righteous people, he would have been even more righteous. And there are those who expound it to his defamation: by the standard of his generation he was righteous, but had he lived in the generation of Abraham he would have been considered as nothing.

The most damning critique of Noah for those who thought less highly of him was his silent acceptance of the Flood without protest. In contrast to Abraham who forcefully resisted God’s plan to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gemorah, at possible risk to himself, Noah quietly built his Ark, content to save himself. He may have assured himself that his neighbors and associates deserved their fate, or he may not have really thought about it much at all.

I would argue that, according to this reading, Noah perfectly embodied the harshly individualistic culture of his generation. The same lack of shared responsibility than enabled Noah’s peers to steal each others vegetables blinded him to his responsibility to society at large. In fact, his success came at their expense. Noah may well have been righteous, but he was certainly “in his generation.” There are surely many Noahs in our world today, people who live privately decent lives but do not address the systemic failures and injustices of the system. Noah demonstrates a passive “hamas” by accepting the world as presented to him, by trying to succeed within the prevailing system and not making himself fully aware of its ramifications and larger costs.

The Midrash maintains that the extended period it took Noah to build the Ark was intended to attract the interest of those around him, so as to make them aware of what was going on so that they would reform their behavior. It could well have also been to sensitize Noah to the implications of his own lifestyle, to demonstrate to him that by continuing to passively live his life, he was condemning everyone around him to the coming flood.

Perhaps a question we need to ask ourselves is: what are the Arks that we build in our own lives to secure our own prosperity, and what are the costs (social, economic, moral) to the world at large?

Meet the new Shabbat- Same as the old Shabbat.
One Generation got old…Got a revolution Got to revolution

Forty years ago, the Jewish Catalog gave instructions for creating a pot-luck local Shabbat as a way of bringing the spirit of the Havurah to your own community. Unlike the stuffy organized synagogue, this shabbat would be participatory, celebratory, and have a counter-culture ethos. At the same time NCSY put out a little mustard colored pamphlet on how to run a circa 1972 shabbaton of asking to use the basement of a synagogue, invite friends, photocopy benchers, find a kosher take-out store for food. Unlike the stuffy organized synagogue, this shabbat would be ruah, singing, and participatory. The ethos would be counter counter-culture, how you dont need the counter-culture.

Now we have a wave of social-action, occupy {insert location here}, and feeling the establishment is against social -justice. They feel that Judaism has become injustice and libertarianism. There is a new blog called Occupy Judaism with the byline “Bringing Occupy Wall Street to the Jews.” In it we have an important document to recreate Shabbat as an Occupy Shabbat. Unlike the stuffy organized synagogue, this one will be social action oriented. The 1970’s rejected the organizational man of the 1950’s and this one rejects the organizational man of the 1990’s. As I read it, it looks and sounds like many documents of the early 1970’s, except for the absence of the faux-Hasidic ideal. It could almost have been written by NJOP of Effie Buchwald circa 1980 (except for the egalitarianism.)
For those old enough to remember, substitute at the right places “Save Soviet Jewry” “Russia is not healthy for Jews and other living things” “Free Biafra” “Never Again”

Want to Occupy Shabbat in your community? Here’s how to get started!

Start planning a week in advance.
Decide whether you want to do Kabbalat Shabbat and a potluck dinner, or just a potluck dinner.
Check in with your local occupation’s relevant working groups to make sure you won’t be creating a disturbance and find a good location to hold your event. Aim for a place that’s relatively quiet and decently lit at night.
Create an online sign-up sheet where people can volunteer to take on responsibilities for different pieces of the service or dinner. We recommended either Google Docs or Etherpad.
For Kabbalat Shabbat:
Determine what kind of service you want to have. Aim for the highest level of inclusivity as possible according to the needs of your community.
Aim for gender neutrality – welcoming people of all genders to lead and participate in services, without division.
You will want to find experienced volunteers to lead services – preferably one for Kabbalat Shabbat and one for Maariv.
If you expect a larger crowd, you may want to have several people with strong voices supporting the service leader.
If you need help learning the liturgy, check out Siddur Audio.
You may want to bring extra siddurim (prayer books), kippot/yarlmulkes, and instruments (if applicable) for those that do not have or who forget to bring their own.
For Shabbat dinner:
You will need volunteers to say the blessings over grape juice and challah, as well as birkat hamazon (grace after meals).
Make sure that potluck participants sign-up to bring a kiddush cup, grape juice, challah, a challah cover, water for people to wash with, a towel for hand drying, and some bentshers (prayerbooks containing grace after meals and Shabbat songs). You will also need bags for trash and recycling.
If it will be cold and/or wet outside, consider bringing a folding table.
Try to ensure an even mix of appetizers, entrees and desserts.
Encourage people to bring either their own reusable plates and utensils from home, or biodegradable plates, utensils and napkins to share with others. Don’t forget serving utensils!
For either Kabbalat Shabbat or Shabbat dinner:
You should find someone to give a d’var tzdek – a short Torah teaching that connects the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement back to either the current Torah portion or to Jewish values more broadly. Check out AJWS and Jewcology for ideas.
Create a Facebook, Tumblr or Eventbrite page calling for a Kabbalat Shabbat service and/or Shabbat potluck dinner at your local occupation.
Set the start-time for shortly after sundown.
Specify the location where you’ll be meeting.
Be sure to include the link to your volunteer sign-up sheet.
Tell people to bring their own prayer books or to download and print out their own prayer sheets (Kabbalat Shabbat | Shabbat Meal).
If the space is not terribly well-lit, let folks know who are non-halakhic to bring flashlights or headlamps to read by.
Let people know your event is open to non-Jewish observers and participants.
Invite every Jew you know in your local area! Ask your friends who say ‘Yes’ to invite their friends as well.
Share the event with Facebook and Google groups frequented by Jews in your local community.
Reach out to progressive Jewish congregations and Jewish social justice organizations in your community and ask them to partner with or promote your event.
Share the event on your local occupation’s Facebook page, as well as tweeting it at them.
Post your event to the Occupy Judaism Facebook page and tweet it at us as well. Use the hashtag #occupyshabbat.
Let your local Jewish newspaper and blogs know!
Consider having an email sign-up sheet the day of your event for people who are comfortable writing on Shabbat. Try to have a clipboard handy.
If your event is a success, consider building on the momentum by setting up an Occupy Judaism Facebook or Google group for your local community. Use the group to plan future actions: those that bring more Jews out to your local occupation and those that bring the values of the occupation back to your Jewish community.
Consider having members of your group join the working group at your local occupation that deals with outreach to the spiritual/religious community.
Have your group’s key organizers join the Occupy Judaism National Working Group (which is far less daunting than it sounds). Email us at info at occupyjudaism dot org.
Source is here