Author Archives: Alan Brill

This post is continued from Part I here. I will start from the middle of the book where he deals with the change to religion even when embedded in a territorial enclave. This thread will be 4-5 posts. I am delighted to have Prof. Ferziger reading along to help discuss whether Roy’s theories match the Orthodox community. My comments are limited to the American community. So after reading it, does it apply to Orthodoxy? Which parts?

Roy thinks that in the 1970s-1980’s there was a turn to religion that could be considered a mass conversion, people re-affirmed their faith. People now become reborn, re-committed, and choose to stay religious even when their peers or siblings did not. In the Jewish case, people become Orthodox as choosing Orthodox over their Conservative upbringing, as BT, as actual converts, and as finding the Shabbos table or the learning appealing. The category of sociological believer disappeared for those who became religious. No longer were you Orthodox just because your parents belonged to an Orthodox synagogue. (It may be returning and I will deal with that in a later post.)

Roy thinks that there are four elements to religion and culture: religious markers, norms, religiosity, and theology.
Religious Markers are movable sign that show one’s allegiance to one group and rejection of another. Many of the debates of dress code or whose kosher supervision are demarcation of one’s community.
Norms are the ethics, morals, and values. Roy discusses how in the 19th century – even when France was becoming atheistic – the Christian and secular schools had the same basic values. There was a convergence on sexual abstinence, hard work and discipline. Now we have divergent values on sexuality where abstinence is no longer preached in secular culture, so sexuality becomes the marker of secular versus religious communities. The marker is more important than actual statistics. A secular math major is more likely abstinent than the revivalist teen who is likely to have children out of wedlock.
Religiosity is the lived inner world of religious feeling and the way believers define themselves with outside world. Threat of the outside or need for salvation. Are they separatist, good neighbor or humanistic.
Theology- are the beliefs, doctrines, laws, and edicts as passed down by the millennium as they are discussed in the classic books, interpretive communities are created and texts are interpreted. For Roy, most of the flashpoints and controversial issues discussed are not in the theology/halakhah group but in the religious marker group. Specific practices are isolated and used to demarcate, when they never had that function in the past.

Roy thinks that culture always has the marginal and deviances. Even religious communities had the misfits, the fools, the brothel, the period of carnival, homosexual behavior, and addiction. There were always outlets for mockery without upsetting system, places and times to sin without questioning the bigger system. The community, diocese or kehillah knew that it needed to be managed not restricted. People were also not expected to police the private life. Hypo-crisy is the sense of a low critical sense of the margins was always tolerated.

Roy’s new point is that the new religious societies of the last few decades suppress the marginal elements and deviations – they seek a purity of standard because one has converted or joined the group. If one did not want to keep the rules then one did not have to join. According to Roy, therefore the new communities , if they stay the way they are, are permanently instable because there will always be deviants. On the simple level- the meme of half-shabbos went viral because Orthodox Jews assumed or fantasied that once they choice to be frum then all future decedents will share their 1975 or 1990 moment of commitment to purity. Roy has more to say: “the conviction that all members of a society must explicitly share one belief system is absurd and can only result in permanent coercion.” If one is seeking purity then there will be doubt and suspicion of other people. Traditional society avoided an all or nothing approach by accepting sin. Think of the mussar books or Rav Nahman. One can no longer give a sermon that everyone is sinner even though that is the reality, but because we focus on religious marker of belonging or exclusion. There is a greater Calvinism even in Orthodox Judaism in that one is either saved or not; I cannot give a speech calling everyone a sinner or a sheketz anymore and preach that mussar is the means to right oneself. Sin is only outside the religious community. And virtue is only in the community. (111)

Roy thinks that secularization by itself does not change values. Even if one loses one’s belief then one can continue to have the same values. Roy thinks that this recent wave of religion has lead to an exculturation – when the religious no longer identify with the surrounding culture. It is no longer a place of synthesis but of fighting to keep the values of culture out.

In the past, the religious and the secular as well as the government shared values of a good life, good neighbors, educated and prosperous community. Roy arguing from his area of expertise shows how Islamic law did not negate the well-being of the social, intellectual, and economic realms. Islamic rulers reigned in shaariah by restricting it in certain areas, giving it loose interpretations, and by modeling it on and working with western law. In contrast, the new demand for shaariah is an abstraction w/o history and culture and without the actual working of community and law. You can say the law is whatever you want when it has no direct application to ruling a country. Islamic law becomes an alternative value system to outside pagan culture; a religious marker and not a religious law. If a religious law does not have a common horizon with society in a synthesis way then it is a religious marker and alternative value system. Much of this has similarities to the new formulations of halakhah. (113-115)

This return to religion separates religion and culture and creates religious markers isolated from any historical context, and a sharp break of believers and non-believers. Roy argues that real religion was never pure or isolated. Secular, other faiths, and deviants could define terms and give expression to religious words. The Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish literature, academia, and romantic appropriations were all once readily accepted. The meanings of Jewish thought, Halakhah, Hasidism, Midrash, or Talmud were defined by Buber, Agnon, Scholem, Yerushalmi, Idel or Menachem Alon- now there is a trend to limit the true meaning to those in the religious camp. They own the words. They can even ban the other side from using their proprietary words. For example Muslims in Malaysia are banning the use of the word Allah by Christians and Buddhists even though it was a linguistic or cultural use. I am sure that many Orthodox would ban the use of words such as halakhah by Reform Jews and they would not, if they knew, want to get their Hasidism from Buber. (118-119)

Chastity and abstinence were the religious norm in the Middle Ages and therefore the actual transgressions were a marginal problem because they did not challenge the system. People who transgressed knew they were deviants. In contrast, in the contemporary era sexuality is now a positive value for everyone. The ideals of marriage have changed for everyone and media and the internet keeps culture and religion on the same page. So in this current world, the Catholic Church’s voice and the haredi voice is inaudible. Therefore they are incongruent with current values against asceticism and abstinence. Roy claims that what used to be on the margins is now out in public. People display and coming out about their sexual orientation, there are pressure groups for acceptance of people’s orientations, and a shrinking of the private sphere.

Currently, people demand acceptance of their individuality and authenticity of their decisions. The same argument used by contemporary religion to argue for its acceptance. On the questions of the new sexual ethic and gay marriage, religion blames the pagan culture-it blames materialism, pornography, and selfish pleasure. In contrast, Roy argues that this is a fallout from the split of culture and religion, therefore the scandal is permanent. There is no realm of deviance in religion anymore to tolerate these changes, religious society always had its sinners. So when there are religious markers against sexuality or gay marriage they appear not as references from a past culture or the glory of noble traditions rather, they appear as dictates from a religious hierarchy devoid of pedagogy.

Roy gives two cases: The first case is that of a rural priest with family, which is clearly against the Church’s celibacy laws. But the local parishioners were all in favor of keeping him as their clergy because he was good at the job, they wanted an allowance for deviance. His second case are chastity rings or vows of abstinence that do not and cannot work to attain purity because of the gap of religion and the new culture.

On a more controversial note, Roy sees the problem of gay marriage not as a result of secularism but of religion’s removal of culture, there is no longer any realm for deviance. According to Roy, homosexuality made one of the greatest cultural shifts. It went from criminalized in the 1960’s to currently protected and to consider rejection of it as hate speech. It is now out in the open so this new religious world cannot assimilate it so it becomes a major religious marker. There are homophobic campaigns and anti-feminist campaigns. (125-6) These become the major signs of us versus them and religious demarcation. They are now used a the sign of purity of community more than prayer, study, or kindness. (128-129)

On a completely different note, Roy cites an Italian proverb that “a translator is a traitor” Judiasm has similar quotes on translation as kissing through a veil. Roy thinks that the new religiosity loves translation because it allows one to dodge the historical and cultural resonances of the text. The sacred text is now outside the cultural realm. Historical, linguistic, and literary knowledge is unnecessary if one has the correct religious purity of doctrine. The cultural realm of the clarity of writing is lost. In addition, one can portray past eras of history as entirely in conformity with the current vision of religious purity. (138)

To be continued in Part III

I am so far behind in blogging that I am just getting to a book that I announced back in May that I would be discussing. The book is Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance and if you read one new social science book on religion in 2011, then this is it. He deals with the rise of evangelicals, Islamists, and Haredim in the last quarter century. He pushes the field forward for the 21st century by writing from a post-Certeau and Bourdieu perspective.

This post has linked to the major popular reviews and a post later this week will deal with my opinions on him. I am not sure if I agree with everything he says but he is worth the read.

Roy offers a unique explanation of the rise of fundamentalism. He thinks that fundamentalism grew because of secularism. The more secularism grew and emptied civil society of common values then the more religion grew disenchanted with society. Once religion was not concerned with society, then there is no more a quest for synthesis or integration of religion and culture. The more that secular society can be portrayed as materialistic, hedonistic, licentious and pagan then the more people flee into the hands of religion, a religion that owes no allegiance to the culture at large.

In the past, there were three ways of treating the world of culture: (1) the profane -where it did not affect or impinge on the holy (2)the secular- where it can be combined with religion (3) the pagan, where it need to be kept out of our life’s. Roy’s point is that in the last few decades the world moved from the category of the secular to that of the pagan. Synthesis of Torah and secular has given was to a view that religion is a safeguard and savior from the secular.

The new faith of fundamentalism is outside of the former world of traditional texts, study, and religious cultural. Now it is an empty series of religious markers to show one has allegiance to the correct group. Hence, the title of the book Holy Ignorance, without culture then one is ignorant. The truth is direct from God, without knowledge, outside of theology, linguistics, or culture. Language conventionally brings culture, but in this rejection of profane culture, even religious knowledge is suspected.

At the same time, Roy thinks fundamentalist religion is all about the self since the decision to be pure as a salafi or baal teshuvah is autonomous self and not submission to a traditional culture. No one is concerned with the classic issues of a transcendent deity – the God of creation, reward, or revelation, or morals. People want the psychological feeling of absolute purity of doctrine.
Roy shows that with the lack of concern with culture, then the religion is a trans-national, age of globalization abstraction. The vision of the local clergy, the community, and the tradition are negated before an abstracted true religion. The new religious fervor claims the rights of multi-culturalism and freedom to impose fundamentalism as their post-moderns secular right. Religions have “reformatted” themselves as global faiths rather than expressions of national culture or as an outgrowth of a community.

The concepts of Jewish culture or Reform Judaism as well as cultural and political Muslims, and cultural Catholics has lead the faithful to exculturate- to leave culture or to leave it to these half-baked religious. Religion is now a small sect removing itself from the cultural versions of itself. For example, the halakhic observer of Hanukah is in many cases rarified away from the many cultural forms of Chunukah in NY. The cultural forms are no longer seen as religious. Mediating cultural and religion is now seen as secular before a pure halakhic faith.

A strong example of Roy’s perspective is that we have lost the medieval sense of the need for celibacy and chastity. Culture now has an anything goes attitude but religion rather than arguing to return to the medieval virtues is instead creating flashpoint wedge issues like gay marriage. The religious believers are not based on the original puritanical texts but instead are creating new and ungrounded ways to remove themselves from pagan culture. One fights sinful culture but does not seek to create a new religious theology of the body. “the Haredim of Jerusalem invent a kosher Internet even as they try to shut down the last movie theater in their neighborhood.” But no thoughtful approach to the internet.

Roy has much on conversion to faith, a category that for him includes those who chose to stay religious, those who are BT’s, and those creating new institutions to attract people to the new global faith. His entire conclusion to the book is to question how a returnee to faith can pass it to his children. “How can one be born from a born-again?”, Roy wonders. (This may get it’s own post.)

Alan Wolfe, an expert in Evangelicals, reviewed it favorably in the NYT.

Actually, as the brilliant French social scientist Olivier Roy points out in “Holy Ignorance,” it is those defending Christmas who are not being true to their traditions and teachings. There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts.

Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue.

Over the past few years, a number of theories have been offered about the rise of fundamentalism. Roy proposes the most original — and the most persuasive. Fundamentalism, in his view, is a symptom of, rather than a reaction against, the increasing secularization of society. Whether it takes the form of the Christian right in the United States or Salafist purity in the Muslim world, fundamentalism is not about restoring a more authentic and deeply spiritual religious experience. It is instead a manifestation of holy ignorance, Roy’s biting term meant to characterize the worldview of those who, having lost both their theology and their roots, subscribe to ideas as incoherent as they are ultimately futile. The most important thing to know about those urging the restoration of a lost religious authenticity is that they are sustained by the very forces they denounce.

It is true, he concedes, that conservative religion is growing. But any talk of a religious revival is “an optical illusion.” Religion, he writes, “is both more visible and at the same time frequently in decline.” It cedes so much to the secular world that it can no longer offer a transcendental alternative to it.

If religion is in decline in the modern world, Roy argues, so is culture. On the one hand, we have multiculturalism, celebrations of diversity that somehow wind up making all cultures look and feel alike. More important, we face globalization, today’s true universal faith, which subjects all local customs to the laws of the market. Under the influence of both, religion loses whatever affinities it may once have had with the cultures that sustained it.

With the rise of Pentecostalism, one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, followers are encouraged to speak in tongues, which requires no language at all. Meanwhile television and the Internet contribute to fundamentalism’s appeal; both make it possible for Egyptian imams (preaching no doubt in “globish,” the pidgin form of English that emerges wherever globalization takes root) to reach their followers in Europe. One does not know whether to be in awe of faith’s capacity to adapt or distraught by the hodgepodge that enables it to do so. “The Holy Spirit,” Roy writes, “is anywhere and everywhere. There is no need to have a real rock on which to build the Church.”

(In subsequent work, Roy argues, I believe convincingly, that the ideology currently governing Iran or motivating Hamas has more to do with nationalism than with religion.)

UK Times discusses Roy’s distinction between Catholics and Protestants in the new era. Catholics still try for incultuation and synthesis, but the more successful Evangelicals see belief as entirely above culture in any sense.

But as Olivier Roy argues in Holy Ignorance, religious fundamentalism and secularising modernity are much more closely linked than is often appreciated. In fact, it is not just that “secularization has not eradicated religion”, he argues, but that secularisation has worked as “we are witnessing … the militant reformulation of religion in a secularized space that has given religion its autonomy”.

The contrast between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism is particularly instructive for Roy. Catholicism has historically made concerted attempts to respond to new cultures, as in the development of syncretic practices through South American and African missionary work. This has not been a uniform process but the general tendency has been in the direction of “inculturation”, creating a very close connection between, for example, Brazilian culture and Catholicism. In contrast, Protestantism has tended to emphasise a universalist kind of missionary activity, creating a much more uniform practice.

Holy Ignorance does not rely on an essentialist view of particular religions, but on a wider argument about the place of religion in a secularising modernity.

As religion breaks free from its local manifestations, it becomes more easily transplanted to other locations. Fundamentalist forms of religion do this most successfully. Unanchored in the constraints of tradition and local culture, fundamentalism recognises no limitation and hence comes to view everything outside itself as pagan and impure. This is the “holy ignorance” that Roy identifies and warns us of.
But, if nothing else, this extraordinary book’s disturbing message – that secularism may be religious fundamentalism’s best friend – is worth taking very seriously.

Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways
By John L. Murphy 18 March 2011

Roy sums up the challenge: “Either religion is reduced to culture, or it has to separate itself from culture (in any case from Western culture) to assert its universality.”

Cultural diversity, therefore, competes against religious claims to lift a message (as in Islam or Christianity) above its origins to save all men and women. Judaism and Hinduism mingle the ethnic and religious identities, so an atheist Jew may not be surprising, but if an atheist Muslim wishes to declare himself such, as at least one author listed here has, the fact of his Tunisian birth may be the reason that he has proclaimed his status only after moving to France. In turn, that nation, Roy reminds us, has 70 percent of its citizens claiming Catholicism, but only five percent practice the faith traditionally associated with its dominant culture for over 1,500 years.

Four reactions define historic and current responses by religion as it seeks to survive within its milieu. First, deculturation occurs when Christians try to wipe out indigenous faiths, or when orthodox Islam dominates the Indian subcontinent. Acculturation happens when the Jews of the Enlightenment adapt mainstream European values, or as India’s natives integrate Christian or Islamic influences. Inculturation places liberation theology at the center of Latin American’s indigenous ideologies. Finally, exculturation marks the Catholic or evangelical reactions we witness, as these powers fight a rearguard action against a worldly set of values that are now on the ascendant.

Roy intersperses case studies from across the world, mostly in the Eurasian realms, to show the situations that illustrate these changes. Christmas as celebrated with a Yule log by the hearth was not the old custom, but a new one invented in the wake of Dickens, and this “traditional” festival replaced the churchgoing that drew worshipers out into the cold air to walk down to their local church. Central Asians may demand to become Christians within an Islamic society; African-Americans may adopt Arab names while Arab immigrants may shed theirs when settling into America. Outcries over priestly celibacy and pedophilia and homosexuality and abortion command so much attention now because the core values that Catholicism proclaimed had, until recently, pushed opposing views on sexuality, individual freedom, and fidelity to the margins. In the heartlands of Islam, as Roy documents, similar protests remain marginalized, and therefore weaker.

Religious defenders react in three ways. First, they may regard the competing culture as “profane”, and look down upon it. The ultra-orthodox Jewish man may speak to God in Hebrew and to his family in Yiddish; the religious signifier separates from the everyday means of communication. Next, the religious movement may see the state as “secular”, and regard it as parallel in function, as in the model of the First Amendment’s separation of powers. The third approach treats the secular society as did the early Christians that of Rome: as the “pagan” enemy.

Nowadays, these “pagans” may enact, as in Western Europe, Canada, or the United States, laws that tolerate but supervise religions as to be accommodated without state favoritism. Religious adherents, from their dissenting perspective, get treated by secular, non-discriminatory laws as a sub-culture, perhaps relegated alongside other “minorities”, such as the gays or feminists whom they often oppose.

This social downsizing spurs religious proponents into an assault on “materialism, pornography, and selfish pleasure” as the new idols. The reaction to California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in 2008, or the trials of gays in Cairo in 2001, marks as deviant those authorities or subversives trying to impose secular, ‘godless’, and so-called ‘sinful’ practices upon the community of believers. While such breaks from tradition tend to be perceived as sudden, Roy locates them in earlier disconnections between the majority in a culture who in fact lose interest in the dominant religion well before the exculturation process erupts into a radical-reactionary counter-movement. Reform Jews, mainstream Protestants, and assimilating Catholics, for instance, had already been lapsing from strict doctrinal interpretation decades before Prop. 8 galvanized conservatives to rally within those denominations.

Puritanical sects resent the dominant culture. Early Protestants sought separation, as this represented first a fall from Eden into the world, and second the taint of an imaginative Catholic sensibility that had piled up non-Biblical accretions that shoved an individual away from an encounter with Scripture. Roy notes how the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas, as it was not sanctioned in Holy Writ. Their spiritual heirs now flocking to evangelical storefront churches in the barrios or to suburban megachurches share a wish to separate from the immoral majority. Salafi Muslims long to revive the community as it was with the Prophet, before even theology arrived to dilute Islam. The Taliban ban television and videos; the Haredim of Jerusalem invent a kosher Internet even as they try to shut down the last movie theater in their neighborhood.

How does the title of this book align with Roy’s viewpoint? “Holy ignorance” recalls the Pentecostal “speaking in tongues”, as this obliterates the language and favors the unmediated, untranslatable Word. The Word inhabits the believer, and its truth transmits directly from God to penitent, without knowledge, outside of theology, linguistics, or culture. Language conventionally brings culture, but in this rejection of profane culture, even religious knowledge is suspected of interference with the primary need for an individual’s salvation.

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