Author Archives: Alan Brill

There is a new book on the critique of Kabbalah by Leon Modena situating the work in its 17th century context.
Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah:Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton University Press, 2011)

From the Blurb

The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition.

Drawing on a range of previously unexamined sources, this book tells the story of the first criticism of Kabbalah, Ari Nohem, written by Leon Modena in Venice in 1639. In this scathing indictment of Venetian Jews who had embraced Kabbalah as an authentic form of ancient esotericism, Modena proved the recent origins of Kabbalah and sought to convince his readers to return to the spiritualized rationalism of Maimonides.

Dweck situates Modena in the 17th century world in which Kabbalah was the all encompassing focus of traditional culture and how Modena was part of a bigger trend of subjecting classics to historical scrutiny. Dweck points out how int he 17th cnetury both manuscripts and books were in play. Dweck notes that Scholem viewed himself as the first critical human sit toward kabbalah and did not discuss his antecedents in figures such as Modena. Personally, I am interested in the last chapter on the reception of the work in the 19th century.

From The Introduction

Leon Modena’s world was inundated with Kabbalah. his greatest student, Joseph hamiz, his beloved son-in-law, Jacob levi, his cousin, Aaron Berekhya of Modena, and his aged mentor, Menahem azariah da fano, were all passionate devotees. with his Venetian colleagues and with foreign visi¬tors, with his rivals and inside his own family, Modena encountered Kab¬balah at every turn. whether reading in the cacophony of his overcrowded home or celebrating a circumcision, Modena confronted Kabbalah as a vital force in Jewish life.

Modena criticized Kabbalah to diminish its status, not to destroy it. he paid kabbalists the devastating compliment of taking their arguments seriously and refuting them one by one. To the claim that Kabbalah represented an ancient esoteric tradition dating back to Moses at Sinai, Modena responded with a systematic analy¬sis of the historical origins of kabbalistic texts. he sought to distinguish between Kabbalah and the oral Torah, a concept that he maintained did have its origins in revelation. Kabbalah and its core documents, he demon¬strated, had emerged only in the late Middle ages.

Kabbalists maintained that belief in the sefirot constituted a crucial element of Jewish faith and branded as heretics anyone who denied their centrality to Judaism. Modena repudiated this claim and leveled a severe countercharge of his own: after an examination of the sefirot as a concept, he concluded that it pointed to a plurality within God similar to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

But Ari Nohem was hardly a detached quest for truth. Much as it was a counterhistory, it was also a countertheology. Modena explicitly addressed his epistolary treatise to his student hamiz, a kabbalist and philosopher who had studied medicine at the university of Padua and had been Mode¬na’s disciple for many years.36 he attempted to persuade hamiz, whom he loved like a son, to abandon his assiduous devotion to Kabbalah and to return to the Guide of the Perplexed.

I seek to answer a basic question in the study of early modern Jewish history: what did it mean to oppose Kabbalah in the very period when it had come to dominate Jewish life?

This book challenges this scholarly emphasis on rupture as characteris¬tic of the turn toward the modern. Several of the elements that ostensibly constitute modern Judaism are clearly present in Modena’s treatment of Kabbalah in the early seventeenth century: a critical attitude toward sacred texts and their origins, a skepticism about received wisdom and doctrine, and an acute awareness of the difference between the Jewish past and the Jewish present.

In highlighting these factors, i do not wish to argue that modern Juda¬ism originated in the ghetto of Venice or to cast Modena as the first mod¬ern Jew.
Ari Nohem offers a telling and dis¬tinctly Jewish example of the marriage between textual criticism and reli¬gious dissent that characterized so much of european intellectual life in the early seventeenth century. whether or not one relies on a historical model of crisis for this period, european intellectuals in the decades before and after Modena wrote Ari Nohem subjected almost all certitudes—religious, theological, scientific—to sustained skepticism.47 The products of their thought were electrifying. By the time Modena composed Ari Nohem, his slightly elder contemporary isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) had demolished the antiquity of much of renaissance ancient theology. Casaubon proved that the Sibylline oracles and the hermetic corpus were late antique forg¬eries rather than works contemporary to the Bible.48 Modena’s Ari Nohem did much the same for the core texts of Kabbalah, the Jewish component of ancient theology. when viewed cumulatively, Casaubon’s and Modena’s work stripped many of the core texts that had constituted ancient theol¬ogy in the renaissance of their pretensions to antiquity.

Building upon these arguments, i reposition the history of Ari Nohem at the juncture between print and manuscript. The story of Modena’s book— both its composition and its later circulation—offers a vivid example of the persistence of manuscript production well into the age of print.

While Modena was keenly aware of the power of the printed word, many of his own writings, particularly his polemical works, circulated in manu¬script throughout the early modern period. This phenomenon was hardly unique to Modena and constitutes a principal feature of written culture in early modern Venice.56 for a number of reasons—fear of censorship, threat of persecution, desire to maintain proximity to a reader—an author might articulate a given argument in manuscript rather than in print. Modena understood print as a public medium that he could not completely control; he wanted to proclaim his arguments, but not too loudly.
Building upon these arguments, i reposition the history of Ari Nohem at the juncture between print and manuscript. The story of Modena’s book— both its composition and its later circulation—offers a vivid example of the persistence of manuscript production well into the age of print.

For all the lurid details it offers about Modena’s gambling habits, dysfunctional marriage, and failing health, Hayyei Yehudah offers little if any insight into his thought.

Modena’s criticism and its subsequent history constituted some of the very ruins evoked by Scholem at the outset of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, ruins that Scholem himself recovered with such magnificent and ruthless efficiency in the construction of his own narrative. Ari Nohem and its history were profoundly inconvenient to the integrity of Scholem’s story. it undercut two of the central and contradictory claims upon which he built his scholarly edifice: the marginality of Kabbalah and its ostensible neglect as the subject of critical inquiry. Scholem was of two minds about the place of Kabbalah within Judaism: at times he insisted upon Kabbalah as a vibrant but subterranean force within Jewish history; at other times he insisted on its absolute centrality. But he was piercingly clear about its neglect as an academic subject before he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Sefer ha-Bahir.

I wish to be clear about what i am not doing: Modena was not Scholem in Baroque Venice. in one of his late pieces, Scholem perceptively pointed to Reuchlin as his intellectual ancestor.80 Scholem may not have been a kabbalist, as he repeatedly insisted, but like Reuchlin before him he was clearly sympathetic to Kabbalah. for all his insight, Modena lacked such sympathy.

Chapter 7, by contrast, reconstructs the competing efforts of a group of scholars in the early nineteenth century, including isaac reggio, Solomon rosenthal, and Julius fürst, to print the first edition of Ari Nohem. it turns to the mixed reception given to the work by two nineteenth-century kabbalists, elijah Benamozegh and isaac haver wildmann. Read the Rest of the Introduction Here.

A mere 13 years ago, Christian Smith wrote American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. That was the book that explained why people were becoming Evangelical and Orthodox Jews in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It also explained how modern and engaged Evangelicals are not the same as Fundamentalists. It allowed one to differentiate Centrist Orthodoxy, Engaged Yeshivish Orthodoxy, Kiruv, and Chabad from old-time Ultra-Orthodoxy and from liberalism. It rejected as non –empirical both secularization theory and those nostalgic for old time 1950’s Orthodoxy.

Six years ago, he published Soul Searching: The Religious And Spiritual Lives Of American Teenagers. Oxford University Press,2005 read by many Orthodox educators. Several mehanchim offered in 2008-2009 to lend me their copies as a way of showing me they are in the know. And in 2009, he wrote the book about twenty somethings – that led to articles in the Jewish papers last year about the new affiliating patterns of college and post-college students, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. Oxford University Press. Smith just issued a new book and if the reception of his other books are any indication, it will be much discussed in the newspapers next year and the year after. The new book is The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, in which he deals with the hopelessly un-intellectual and non-empirical way that religious texts are dealt with in evangelical circles.

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. When he wrote the prior volumes, he was a committed Evangelical teaching in a religious setting. Recently, he converted to Catholicism because he believes in a more complex tradition; he also just published a book on his conversion. So his book will have a greater knee-jerk rejection by less thoughtful Protestants.

Smith opens his book stating that his book is not an attack on authority or the Bible and that he is not a skeptic nor a liberal so he will not be referring to them. He is writing is within the non-liberal spectrum of the religious community. “The goal of the book is not to detract from the plausibility, reliability, or authority of the Christian faith or from scripture.”

He identifies a number of traits that he calls Biblicism and finds them lacking. Jews should not get caught up on the fact that Evangelicals have a high view of the Bible while Orthodox Jews use the interpretive tradition of the Talmud and Halakhah because most of his comments apply equally well to the way the halakhah is used by Orthodoxy and the Orthodox high view of the Talmud. If it helps you – substitute the word Talmudism, Halakhah or Hazalicism for the word Biblicism. Or think of his book as if called “Halakhah made Impossible.” Judaism and Christianity are not the same, an Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism are not the same – so there are differences that we should note. But the commonalities of group think, fighting liberalism, and lack of self-awareness are similar (see below for details).

Here are his basic tenets of this univocal approach.

• Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the detail of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language.
• Total Representation: The Bible (or halakhah) represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humans, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.
• Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to belief and life are contained in the Bible (halakhah).
• Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible (halakhah) in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.
• Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts (and Rabbbinic and halakhic tetxs) is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
• Solo Scriptura: The significance of any given biblical (halakhic) text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible (halakhah)from scratch.
• Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible (halakhah)on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors.
• Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid at every other time..
• Handbook Model: The Bible (halakhah) teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.
Smith understands that this is not a “formal” position held by evangelicals, and that different people and groups hold and emphasize various aspects of these points differently.

Smith sees that Biblicists minimize differences between people, texts, and interpretations. – Most “real” believers all believe the same thing, due to error they may disagree slightly. Smith says that is wrong.

Evangelicals turn necessity into virtue and they create books like “four views on x belief” or “the debate between r and s on that belief. Jews do the Rashi-Rambam or the Rambam-Ramban debate. For Smith, even that is illusory, there are way more opinions out there, the reception of texts has greater variance, and there are wide debates over the meaning of a text. On important matters the texts and tradition are not “clear, consistent, or univocal enough to enable the best-intentioned most highly skilled readers to come to an agreement…: That is an empirical, historical, undeniable, and ever present reality.” We have massive fragmentation of opinions. The fact that believers have worked for centuries to sort through these differences does not change empirical reality.

Many of those Biblicists establishing certainty are doing it with pre-interpretive assumptions not supported by any univocal text. They debate divergences constantly but assume the other side is just wrong or influenced by sociology. They never realize there may be other readings of the tradition. They do not connect the social splitting, factionalism, and controversies to the very complexity of the tradition. When divergent groups come together it is because they found common ground and avoiding discussing secondary issues.

What of thinking that the Divine word is so complex and multidimensional that it is greater than one interpretation, but there is a higher synthesis? It does not take away from the interpretive pluralism of the text.

Can there be so many misreads by others if the text is harmonious and self-sufficient? According to Smith, what are the common causes of routinely divergent readings? Texts have a vast array of terms, concepts, genres, styles, narratives and statements. Then the reader applies paradigms, essential themes, and organizing frameworks to create a single statement. Biblicist groups ignore leftover texts and think the left over texts can be explained away if rightly understood. Biblicists contend that there is really only one meaning and it is found in the words.
Smith argues for a multi-vocality, polyseme of meaning, diversity, and divisions. Multiple possible meanings are NOT from reader’s subjectivity, but rather the texts give rise to more than one possibility and that there is more than one (or even more then 3,4, 5) legitimate interpretations.

Smith shows that the goal of Evangelicals (and Orthodox Jews ) and their Biblicism was to resist liberalism

Texts are read through common sense realism treating texts as a realistic picture of the world. Meaning is from collecting facts and texts are treated as if religious texts were the same as civil engineering or gardening. Words are seen as offering direct meaning.

This Evangelical reading works because people live in “small worlds,” echo chambers of their own denomination. The more homogeneous the social network, the more the given position is taken for granted.

Biblicists can give sermons on scripture’s view of dating, the economy, TV, or childrearing without any self-awareness that the conenction between the tetx and contemporary reality was not explicit in the text. They do not acknowledge the large amount of outside information they brought to bear in their interpenetration and the latitude of interpretation from the same tetxs.

In addition, Smith thinks that people establish their religious group identities and priorities through establishing difference. Organizations thrive on competition and rivalry; skirmishes and conflicts generate energy. Therefore they don’t take the substantive claims and positions of the other group seriously. Groups blatantly ignore texts and passages used by other groups to cheer their own position. And in the rhetoric of America, they make arbitrary determination of another group’s cultural relativism.

These are some highlights of the first half of the book, which deals with data and sociology. The second half tries to offer solutions from a religious perspective and to think theologically. Maybe I might deal with some of the second half.

Any thoughts on the application of this book to Judaism? Is Talmud or halakhah in contemporary hands different?

Since there are over 40 centers of Judaism-Christian Studies, mainly at Catholic and Lutheran institutions. I was waiting for an Evangelical college to open a center, especially with all the interest in Christian Zionism. Or if Rabbi Riskin was looking for a dialogue partner, he needed to set up such a center with Evangelicals. It turns out that one started two years ago. The Center for Judaic Studies was established in 2009 at Liberty University, which was founded by Jerry Falwell, with Randall Price as its director. Judaism for them is part of their Christian Zionist vision.

Liberty University’s late founder and chancellor Dr. Jerry Falwell had a vision for a school that would promote the recognition that Israel and the Jewish people are part of God’s global will. As a Christian Zionist, Dr. Falwell was both lauded by the Jewish community for his unqualified support for the Jewish state and feared for his uncompromising evangelical commitment (which they rightly interpreted as calling for Jewish conversion to Christ).

The need for the Center for Judaic Studies is both biblical and practical. Biblically, the divine program revealed in scripture is centered on Israel and the importance of the Jewish mission (the choice of one people to bless the rest of mankind). The proclamation of the Gospel to the Jewish people is bound up in the very nature of the gospel itself: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile” (Romans 1:16).

The theological perspective of the Center for Judaic Studies conforms to and upholds the Liberty University statement of faith. It also upholds the biblical teaching that the Abrahamic Covenant with the Jewish people (Genesis 12:3) has continuing validity, while understanding that both Jew and Gentile share in the spiritual blessings of the New Covenant made with Israel (Jeremiah 31:31) and inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah (Hebrews 9:15).

The director Randell Price has an earned PhD and appears to be like an OU or Targum type scholar. He has credible books like an introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls in simple language, apologetic books that present Biblical Archeology that only present the data that supports the Bible and none of the data that does not, as well as not very academic works seeing the Bible played out in Israeli politics.

One blogger picked up on the last element as non-academic. But does that effect the rest of his scholarship at the center? So I decided to look at his online syllabi and his course list.

The courses in Jewish History and Israeli History are like the reading lists of an old rabbi, using the textbooks of the 1960’s as the basis along with some very new material such as Post-Zionism and cultural history, as well as arbitrary biographies. I have had to evaluate worse syllabi from Jewish schools.

Biblical Archeology is, as to be expected, highly conservative and apologetic running the gambit from K. Kitchen to William Dever.

The course on Antisemitism seems to lay the blame at the Catholic Church and disassociates Evangelicals from their Lutheran and Huguenot ancestry as well as skipping over Protestant and Evangelical Antisemitism in the US. But it may be worth it for assignments worth one quarter of their grade to accept that Antisemitism must be stopped and in their other reading to learn that there is no Biblical support for Antisemitism. They read works like Barry Horner, Future Israel: Why Christian Anti-Judaism Must Be Challenged. Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2007, which assumes that Armageddon is coming and Jews will not convert until after the battle so respect them now by fighting Antisemitism.

Is this good for the Jews? Should I take it seriously? Should I contact them and offer to help their students continue their education in Judaic Studies?
Ah, but it might start something serious if one of the graduates of this Center for Judaic Studies would graduate to an MA in Jewish Studies from an accredited program or spent a year at Hebrew University…

Synagogue was packed tightly – no empty seats and all aisles filed- at least 500 in attendance. It was a big Orthodox synagogue where the head of the OU and head of the CJF attend. This post only reflects the crowded corner in which I sat and the people around me. People seemed to be there to fulfill the formal requirement to hear Eicha, less so to lament.

The synagogue had set out all their kiddie chairs from play groups and nursery and many people brought their own little kiddie chairs. When I last attended Eicha at this synagogue two years ago, there were no kiddie chairs. I am told that they put them out for the first time last year. This second year many people brought their own.

The mood was set by the fall of the stock market and people came in bewailing their investments.

The rabbi of the congregation deserves regard for knowing his congregation. He proclaimed that hurban is tragedy, the holocaust is tragedy, tragedy is death nad massacre, mothers eating their children is tragedy. Downgrading of the US from AAA to AA or a dip in the stock market is not. I thought it was good and appropriate talk by the rabbi. But others near me thought: no! it is a tragedy.

The rabbi said that of course we know that we cannot add or change the liturgy but on Tisha beAv we are lenient. He then recited a kinah for Gilad Shalit before we started.

He also said Ashkenazim need a kinah for the expulsion from Spain. He distributed the kinah from the Isaac Lesser’s Sefardi Kinot dedicated to the expulsion from Spain that will be recited in the day but discussed tonight in a shiur after kinot. I think the origin of this custom was one of the web based kinot from 2005 or 2006.

The Rabbi concluded that special miracle of the Jewish people is that no matter how bad the tragedy or how devastating the destruction they continue to call out and pray to Hashem.

As we waited to start a person across from me- forties, tanned, polo shirt and jeans- kept leaning over to the person to my left and offered the following thoughts in short bobbing outbursts.

Ya, gotta kill him,
Gotta get rid of him.
After today, he needs to be gone.
Obama needs to be killed
Before he runs off to Puerto Rico
I hear he is getting dread locks
And if he gets re-elected it is time to pack our bags because he is socialist and will do whatever he wants.
And you better stay dry and sell everything in the morning.

During Eicha the person to the right of me was on his iphone. He checked his email during the first chapter, his feeds during the second chapter. He put his iphone away for the third chapter, but took it out again for chapters 4 and 5 to recheck his email and feeds.

Many older men left after Eicha before kinot, they said that they are not into kinot and had already filled their requirement.

When kinot started many stood up and remained standing for kinot- it seems they confused kinot with selichot and have forgotten what to do.

Unlike during Eicha, many checked their email during kinot. On the way out, one of those who was on his blackberry throughout kinot said to his friend who started to speak to him: “It is tisha beAV- we should not speak”

Many of the women wore jewelry – expensive necklaces, bracelets and earrings-not usually worn on Tisha beAv. This was even by people who come to synagogue every week and cover their hair. Everyone had non-leather shoes.

Outside on the way to the car, a father, who has been coming to synagogue all his life, asks his two teenage sons- “Did the Rabbi say that all the kinot tonight were all to commemorate the expulsion from Spain?

Books generally become translated when there is an assumed readership in the new language. Buddhism into English for Americans who are interested in spirituality, Talmud into Japanese, Chinese and Korean for Buddhists interested in Protestant capitalism. Latin Classics when Britain saw itself as a stoic military empire.
Recently, I received an email that Irvin D Yalom was being translated in Hebrew made perfect sense. Israel is just discovering the world of therapy and personal problems as shown in the TV show BaTipul -In Treatment. Yalom is one of the premiere practitioners of Existential analysis and group therapy, so he needs to be translated decades after his integration in the US. But at the end of last week, I got an email that they had just translated into Hebrew Plutarch’s Sparta and Xenophon’s Spartan Society, published as two volumes. Why now? There are so many other classics that have not been translated. Does it say something?
In addition, it seems dependent on the Penguin paperback since Plutarch wrote “Lives Of The Noble Grecians And Romans” and Penguin culled out four of the lives and culled out the “sayings” from the other lives.
Is there a reason that Israeli’s would want Sparta sayings now?

In anticipation of October’s grand interfaith day of prayer in Assisi, Cardinal Koch points out of each faith has high holy days of repentance and atonement. This was appropriate background since the Assisi day does not consist of dialogue but of parallel prayer in separate spaces. So Koch’s message was that we all have commonalities. Rabbi di Segni complained when the Cardinal said that Jews have Yom Kippur for atonement and Christians have Easter and the Cross. This was similar to the way Pope Benedict compare Passover and Easter when visiting Park East Synagogue. In Koch’s speech, di Segni hears a supersessionalist fulfillment scheme, but Koch thought he was presenting parallels. In general, di Segni has idiosyncratic views as an exclusivist believer in Toldot Yeshu who believes in dialogue -see the prior post- and where Jews and Christians have a link of particular closeness.
This commonality has yet to fully be integrated, since during the time of patristics and rabbinics, parallels meant one was correct and one was incorrect, as sibling rivalry. Now, it is just comparative charts.
For those who have not been following, Cardinal Koch replaced Cardinal Kasper as liaison to the Jewish People. He will be making his first major speech on Jewish-Christian Relations at my place on Oct 30. There will be an open-to the public lecture and a closed discussion.

La Stampa 07/28/2011
Assisi: Controversy breaks out between Jews and Christians over religious symbols
The Holy See’s official newspaper, “L’Osservatore Romano” has reported a heated argument between Cardinal Koch and Riccardo di Segni, following the rabbi’s contest of a comparison between the Cross and Yom Kippur

“If the terms of this dialogue are based on Christians leading the Jews towards the path of the Cross, then what is the point of dialogue? What is the point of Assisi?” Rome’s head rabbi, Riccardo di Segni wrote in “L’Osservatore Romano”, warning that those who encourage dialogue between Catholics and Jews should avoid comparing symbols that the two faiths simply do not share.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, head of the Vatican dicastery for ecumenical dialogue, made a comparison between the Christian Cross and the Jewish celebration of atonement, known as Yom Kippur, which did not go down well with Rome’s head rabbi, Riccardo di Segni.

What sparked the confrontation was an article written by Cardinal Koch on last 7 July, and published by the Holy See’s newspaper, on the different meanings of the Interreligious Day of prayer for Peace due to take place in Assisi on 27 October this year. In the article, the Swiss cardinal said that Jesus’ Cross “stands over us as the eternal and universal Yom Kippur does,” and “therefore, Jesus’ Cross does not stand as an obstacle to interreligious dialogue; rather, it points to the right path that Jews and Christians (…) above all, should follow, in a deep, inner reconciliation, in order to spread peace and justice in the world.”

According to di Segni, however, “he ends on a message of the shared objectives of peace and justice.” “Although [these words] are inspired by a sense of fraternity and good will, if they are not explained further, could lead to Christians not knowing where the limit is in terms of fostering dialogue.” In particular, di Segni contested Koch’s suggestion that “Jewish interlocutors should let themselves be guided by symbols they do not share. Especially when these symbols are presented as substitutions, with the added value of rites and symbols that the person speaking believes in.”

“Christian believers, Rome’s head rabbi explained, may very well believe that the Cross can substitute the day of Kippur permanently and universally, but if they really wish to engage in a respectful dialogue with Jewish people who in turn believe that Kippur has an equally universal and permanent value, they should not propose their own beliefs and Christian interpretations as indicative of the “right path” for Jews to follow.

“Because the, he continued, there is a risk of going back into theology of substitution turf, with the Cross becoming an obstacle. The Christian-Jewish dialogue inevitably runs this risk, because the idea of Jewish promises being fulfilled is at the basis of Christian faith; therefore the affirmation made by Christianity implicitly involves the idea of integration and of being above the Jewish faith.”

Di Segni added that “the language of dialogue must be a common language and parties must share in the same project. “If the terms of this dialogue are based on Christians leading the Jews towards the path of the Cross, then what is the point of dialogue? What is the point of Assisi?”

Cardinal Koch replied that “he was not suggesting that Christ’s Cross should substitute Yom Kippur, even though Christians see a permanent and universal Yom Kippur in the Cross.” The question, however, “is certainly not an obstacle to the efforts of Christians and Jews, in their expression of mutual respect for each other’s faiths, in promoting peace and reconciliation, joining each other in the walk towards Assisi.”

Ramadan Karim to my Muslim readers (I have some regular Muslim readers.)

Ramadan this year corresponds to the Hebrew month of Av. There is an interesting blog Jihadi Jew, by a Breslov Baal Teshuvah who teaches in a community day school, who asks the question: Why should a Jew care about Ramadan? He discusses why he is comfortable wishing Ramadan greeting when he is quite uncomfortable and has compunctions about Christmas. Ramadan is not Hukkat Hagoyim, the ways of the gentiles because the message of Ramadan is about Jewish values and that the Koran already acknowledged this.

I have no such qualms about saying “Ramadan Mubarak!” On the contrary, I hunt down nifty e-cards on the internet. I even include personalized messages. In person, I give handshakes, hugs (or for women- a decorous nod) and those words come easily, “Ramadan Mubarak” a Blessed Ramadan! I keep a mental Ramadan countdown. I get enthusiastic. It is admittedly very weird for a Jewish guy. It is even weirder for an observant Jewish guy. I get that.

Ramadan is very “Jewish.” In Ramadan, we have a practice that promotes monotheistic worship in the world while employing practices that are specifically endorsed by Jewish tradition (prayer, fasting, charity and ethical restraint). The continuity of Ramadan with previous Jewish practice is actually acknowledged by the Qur’an itself. Even the Qur’an says it’s very “Jewish.”

O you who have attained to faith! Fasting is ordained for you as it was ordained for those before you, so that you might remain conscious of God.
– 2:183 (Muhummad Asad trans.)

“Those before you.” That would be US. Indeed there are obvious parallels to specific and well-known Jewish practices. The dedication of the month of Elul as a period of repentance and spiritual focus and the standard Sephardic practice of doing special early morning selichot (“forgiveness”) prayers for the 40 day period from the beginning of Elul until Yom Kipppur is a clear parallel to the Muslim practice. That this period corresponds to the period in which Moses received the Torah is paralleled by Ramadan’s commemoration of the receiving of the Qur’an. Similarly there are fasting practices associated with this period in the Jewish year for the 10 days of repentance. There is even a kabalistic custom… to refrain from food during the daytime for the entire 40-day period (Shabbat and Rosh Hashana exempted). The Qur’an’s comment that the practice of Ramadan is based on previous practice can and should be taken at face value. Ramadan has Jewish roots.

Ramadan also supports Jewish values. Perhaps most important is the intention of Ramadan as laid out in the Qur’an “the awareness of G-d.” It is precisely the awareness of G-d which the Tur explains is the absolute purpose of the entirety of Jewish practice. There is no worthier goal for a human being and it makes sense that we would support others in their attempts to achieve it through prayer and fasting, means which are so clearly approved by our own tradition.

Ramadan also has a deeper ethical dimension. A hadith relates this as follows.

Abu Huraira related that the Prophet said: If a person does not avoid false talk and false conduct during the fast, then Allah does not care if he abstains from food and drink (Bukhari, Muslim).

Indeed the great Muslim theologian Imam al-Ghazali divides fasting into two dimensions: ordinary and special fasting.

Ordinary fasting means abstaining from food, drink and sexual satisfaction.
Special Fasting means keeping one’s ears, eyes, tongue, hands and feet — and all other organs — free from sin.

Ramadan is a time for developing emotional and impulse control.

Ultimately, Ramadan is part of a process of repentance (taubah / teshuvah) of facing oneself, altering ones behavior and facing G-d to ask for forgiveness of sins from G-d in His infinite mercy. It is all about returning to G-d after our own self-imposed alienation knowing that he will accept us if we are sincere.

In a well-known hadith relates G-d’s address to mankind,

O son of Adam, so long as you call upon Me and ask of Me, I shall forgive you for what you have done, and I shall not mind. O son of Adam, were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask forgiveness of Me, I would forgive you. O son of Adam, were you to come to Me with sins nearly as great as the earth and were you then to face Me, ascribing no partner to Me, I would bring you forgiveness nearly as great as it.
Hadith Qudsi 34 (Tirmidhi , Sahih)

The message of the greatnesses and far-reaching consequences of this return to G-d is again familiar enough to Jews. The Talmud (Yoma 86b) in a beautiful litany of the greatness of repentance writes:

Rav Meir used to say Great is repentance, that because of an individual who repents, the entire world is forgiven, as the verse says (Hoshea 14:5) I will rectify their waywardness, I will love them gratuitously, for My anger has turned away from them.

In a broken world, desperately in need of redemption, I don’t know whose repentance is going to tip the scales. If my warm “Ramadan Kareem!” or my warm “Ramadan Mubarak!” or my little e-card encourages a moment of genuine return to G-d, if it inspires a Muslim friend to be good and to do good, I make myself into a partner in their holy endeavor. As a result, all of us, Jews and Muslims reap the benefits of a more peaceful world that better reflects the glory of the One true G-d. Read the Rest Here.

For those Jews wanting to know more about Ramadan, Here is an article on the spirituality and here is one on etiquette.

Here is a related post that I once ran on Passover Seder Through Muslim Eyes.

Islamophobes dont bother commenting!!

Seventeen years ago, Agnon’ s classic work on the giving of the Torah was finally translated into English.
S. Y. Agnon, Present at Sinai: The Giving of the Law translated by Michael Swirsky (Jewish Publication Society, 1994). Originally published in Hebrew as “Atem Re’item” by Schocken Books, 1959

But it is out of print and sold few copies. In another month, there will be more copies of my recent book floating around that this classic.

I wonder why?

Is it just a bad marketing job by JPS?

Agnon’s Days of Awe for the high holy days remains in print and widely used. Is it that American Jewry cares about the High Holidays and not Shavuot?

Is it that American Jews have no interest in rabbinics that emphasized the event of Sinai? Is it because Agnon is not liberal or Orthodox? Is it because Modernity and Orthodoxy have each eroded our attitude to reading the Sages? The Sages cared about the event of Sinai where the earth shook, mountains flew, and eyesight was given to the blind more than infallibly, reliability or relevance. Does concern with contemporary doctrinal formulation overturn the very words of the Rabbis?

As the introduction by Judah Goldin put it, Agnon was concerned with “Geist not Zeitgeist,” he wanted to capture the spirit of the Rabbis not to contextualize them historically. (That is the same way the Hebrew reviews are treating Benny Lau’s works).

The book is not arranged chronologically rather by the unfolding of the event, eyesight to the blind, synesthesia, our eternal love relationship with God, and how everyone understood the revelation according to their capacity- separate understandings for young & old, wise & foolish, pregnant & infirm. (The insane were healed.)

The Hebrew title of the book is Atem Reitem –You saw! You saw, you were eyewitnesses, for Agnon all Jews have an immediacy of Sinai For him, Jewish thinking about God must include a discussion of the experience of Sinai (not the reliability).

In the author’s “The making of this book,” he describes that the book is based on the four levels of meaning” “The words of the Torah are both revealed and hidden, and however much one examines them one never penetrates more than a small part of their mystery.”

“I have cited only the words of believers in God, concerning whom, and concerning the like of whom, it is said, “That which the veteran scholar shall someday teach… was already told to Moses at Sinai” (PT Peah 2). —Bialek was counted among the believers.

Agnon quotes approvingly the introduction to Bava Kama by Rabbi Shlomo Luria (late 16th century), the Maharasha that Sinai produces contradictory conclusions. Each person seeing and comprehending in an individualistic way.

The sages in their study of the text drew different and sometimes contradictory conclusions, either through the exercise of logic or on the basis of tradition handed down from Moses to Sinai, one to another.
All souls were at Mt Sinai and received through forty nine conduits… heavenly voices they not only heard but also saw. And all Israel saw the voices, meaning the proclamations disseminated through the conduits, each seeing through his own conduit according to his ability to comprehend and according to the capacity of his higher soul to be elevated or diminished, one widely differing from another.

The original purpose of the famous introduction was to reject the wave of codification that the Shulkhan Arukh was ushering in. Luria wanted [qualified] rabbis to go back to the text afresh and use their own logic and their won traditions because Sinai itself, with its synesthesia, fiery letters, and effects on the soul, could not be pinned down. Agnon makes it his individualistic reception of revelation, sharing the romantic and individualistic concerns of Rav Zadok, Rav Kook, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Pisetzna, Gershom Scholem, and Hillel Zeitlein.

He cites Isaiah Horowitz’s Shnei Luhot Habrit, that the Torah has 600, 000 interpretations, corresponding to the 600, 000 souls each of whom received one interpretation as his portion.

Agnon confesses that “each day, I personally fulfilled the commandment to remember the Sinai Event.”
He states that “throughout my work I kept in mind the injunction of the Guide of the Perplexed that it is not proper to break through the bounds and say too much about the secrets of Mt Sinai… for it is among the hidden aspects of the Torah.”

Maybe Agnon was not claimed because neither Orthodoxy nor Liberal positions, nor scholars emphasize Agnon’s sources? For Aggadah through living eyes, he used Damesek ELiezer 1880, Torah Temimah 1904, Torah shelemah by MM Kasher 1954, Yefeh Eynaim 1880; For collections of Aggadah he used Yalkut Reuveni 170, Yalkut Eliezer 1864-71, Bialek –Rawnitzki Sefer haAggadah 1948; and for Kabbalistic Midrash he used Mekor Hokhmah Yissakher Baer 1611, Maftekhot haZohar 1744.

The only serious review that Agnon’s book received was by a Sefardi Rabbi in LA, who also contributed to a teacher’s guide for using Agnon in day schools.

As a side point, Judah Goldin the editor of the volume notes how Agnon breaks up of verses in each section. Many years ago, Prof Zussman of Hebrew University taught an “undergraduate” class on the midrashim of Mt Sinai. Now, Zussman’s goal at the start of every semester was to have 4-5 students left in the class by scaring off all non Tal-mood-ists. He would give on the first classes major assignments like read through many Rabbinic works and check all variant versions, until the roster descended from 35 to 5 students. Anyway, one semester he offered midrashim on Mt Sinai and assigned the first class to look at a list of 30 midrash collections and find out when they thought Har Sinai ended? Exodus 20 Verse 21? The whole chapter? All of Mishpatim? Exodus 25? Beyond? It was a good lesson in method. Agnon obviously reflected his Midrashic sources.

But to return to the original question: Why did Agnon on Sinai not catch on like his work on the high holy days?

Marc Saperstein in his superb Your Voice is like a Ram’s Horn: themes and texts in traditional Jewish preaching, points out that sermons are the most important genre for social history. Halakhah, kabbalah, and exegesis often only reflect the imagination and concerns of the author, while sermons delivered in public are more likely to actually reflect the issues of the era. H.H. Ben Sasson, Azriel Schochat B. Z. Dinur and others successfully mined them for the religious behavior and deviance of Jewish societies. Saperstein points out that unlike the other genres which allow projection by the author, sermons are usually more critical of the congregants when delivered and are cleaned up of much of the detail for publication.

This post continues to look at the sermons of Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky delivered last year at the Jewish Center. In the following sermon can offer the future historian a glimpse into the social world of the early 21st century. The sermon opens with a TV Evangelical family that is in the process of disintegration. Then notes that many in the community are not scrupulous in their observance. He offer direct observation of the deviance in the realm of Kashrut, Shabbat and Negiah. Congregants are loose about where they eat out, they find the laws of cooking on shabbos beyond their ken, and justification for not following negiah.

Rackovsky does not use the language of following the halakhic system that needs to be followed as an ideal halakhic aspiration or submission to the halakhic discipline. Rather, he refreshingly returns us to Rav Dessler’s idea of point of choice, our current religious fault line or current struggle. In this model, our piety is judged by our individual striving to succeed in the battle to do the mizvah and our lapses are judged by our indifference to choosing correctly. Those who only use the language of halakhic system tend to sort the behavior of people like grades of eggs. This person is makil, this one is mahmir, this one is right and this one is left. But to use the mussar language of struggle and choice makes it personal, volitional, and about avoiding self-deception and rationalization. (Whereas Rav Dessler had a modernist concern for self-perfection, I hear faint echoes of Evangelical Neo-Calvinist struggle with sin and failings in Rackovsky’s usage).

Lax observance of kashrut, shabbos, and negiah by overworked UWS lawyers. What else do these contemporary sermons teach us?

Who is “frum”?
Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky
The Jewish Center 5769

It seems that all anyone is talking about these days is on and Kate plus Eight, the TLC show chronicling the life of on and Kate Goselin and their twins and sextuplets.

Let me ask you a question: What are the actions that make someone an observant Jew, someone we might call ‘frum’?

• Another definition might be that observant Jewish man or woman attends minyan, keeps Shabbos carefully and knowledgeably, studies Torah regularly, is scrupulous in observance of kashrus inside the home and out and is careful to observe the laws of taharas hamishpacha and negiah. This may be a more technically correct definition, but it is not reflective of our sociological reality here on the West Side. If we are honest, we will admit there are plenty of people among us who do not do some-or any-of these things yet call themselves “observant.” Besides, even people who are meticulous in their observance make mistakes on occasion. So what does it mean to be frum in our community?

Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler Z”l mashgiah of the Gateshead and Ponavitch yeshivos, wrote his masterpiece, Miktav MeEliyhau in which he coined the term nekudat habehirah the point of choice. Each person has a point at which struggles take place and willpower and commitment are tested. No two people have the same nekudat habehirah, and our task is to work on ourselves and constantly push our own upward. We live in a community in which people are in a transitional, experimental phase, and often find themselves violating that which was previously a red line, whether in the area of Shabbos, boundaries in relationships or kashrus observance. Perhaps a more accurate and productive definition of observance-of frumkeit for our community is one based on the lesson of the nekudat habehirah.. We are guided by a halachic system regardless of what we do; being observant means that we are challenged to struggle to maintain and increase standards of observance regardless of our previous shortcomings. The moment we start to rationalize that certain rules don’t apply to us personally, or say they are archaic, too difficult to observe and prevent us from having a good time, we are railing against the maintenance of a strong moral framework.

In our social construct, we are often faced with nekudat habehirah moments. For some people, it may be in the realm of Kashrus. Of course, there are people whose jobs depend on going to non-kosher restaurants on business lunches, and who exercise the proper precautions in these situations, and those are not what we are discussing. I refer to the questions I often get from people about eating in non-kosher vegetarian restaurants, or establishments under represent a nekudat habehirah for people, as it allows for greater opportunities for socializing and there is a certain illicit thrill involved as well.

Secondly, an area that may test our commitment is the area of Shabbos. Most people in our community are not willfully violating Shabbos, but many are doing so due to ignorance or apathy. I have seen numerous instances in which people heat food on Shabbos in ways that are definitely prohibited. It seems that this is not even an area of nekudat habehirah, but rather an area people avoid because they are scared of doing it wrong, or feel it is too difficult for them to follow.

Another area that can severely test one’s willpower is the area of negi’ah physical contact with the opposite gender. It is easy to decide that the laws of negi’ah are too difficult, unfair or do not apply to us, but this is the response of the path of least resistance. Read the rest here (The quotes have been slightly altered because the Hebrew did not transfer.).

Here is yet another sermon by Rackovsky that was delivered Kol Nidrei last year. Once again it reflects the social reality. Olam Haba is spiritualized to mean freeing us from what hinders us in life. He briefly opens up on imprisonment through addictions and bad relationships, but the peak of the Yom kippur speech is how our professions are imprisoning us. Striving for the law firm causes people to lose their ability to make choices, they are imprisoned to the paycheck. They subject themselves to a life of turmoil.

The second ingredient in entry into Olam Haba is the restoration of freedom and release from imprisonment. But there are many kinds of prisons that are unrelated to actual incarceration, and which rob us of the ultimate freedom- the freedom to make our own decisions.

For others still, it is money that is the prison. In the legal profession, there is a slang term called “Golden Handcuffs.” This is when someone has a demanding, stultifying and soul crushing yet lucrative job in a law firm, and leaving it would be too costly, especially when considering debts to be paid and lifestyle choices that have to be supported. This term is now used with irony; given the sad state of employment in the legal profession, most lawyers are thankful to have any kind of job, let alone one with golden handcuffs. But in truth, this applies to any unrewarding profession that imprisons its practitioners, who are afraid to leave due to finances- especially because having a job these days is such a blessing. If having a job is a source of imprisonment, think about the imprisonment of the all encompassing worry and emotional turmoil that can be experienced- constantly bythose who are unemployed.
Read the Rest Here

Please keep sending me synagogue websites that have the sermons of Orthodox rabbis. I am especially looking for younger rabbis in important congregations, not the usual self-promoters and institutional speeches. These are less likely to reflect social realities. I am not looking for OU/YUTorah sanitized sermons, or those by ideologues and tools. I am looking for those under the radar and in the real world like this one. I was given two synagogues so far.

I was doing my usual work and was fact checking something and google delivered this sermon by Ariel Rackovsky, assistant rabbi of the Jewish Center. I have never met him and do not know anything about him. But I found this recent sermon quite interesting.

Rackovsky asks about our comfort level in the adoption of Jewish ritual by Christians. He thinks we are bothered because they know things about Judaism that we as Jews don’t; we are bothered that they are trying to proselytize; and we are reticent to talk about our faith and doctrine compared to them. He defends Evangelicals as not engaged in proselytizing. This is a great piece for a social history of the current era.

Rackovsky uses Evangelicals as paradigms that we can learn from. We learn to know our own tradition better, we can missionize our own people, and we need to know more about our own principles of faith and learn to articulate and express them.As a contrast to seeing contemporary Christians as knowing Bible, active outreach and expressing theology, R. Yosef Karo saw their ascetic piety and mortifications as worthy of emulation.

Go and learn from the Gentiles: Think of the tortures and mortifications which they suffer. How much more then should you be ready to suffer tortures and mortifications… (Magid Mesharim 38a)

He knows about replacement theology and dispensational premillenialists, and expects his congregants to know those terms. (This is more those who did interfaith work in the 1960’s knew and it is way beyond the meager knowledge gained from the sharing of pulpits in the 1960’s!)

The Challenge of Evangelism
Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky
The Jewish Center 5771

If we are honest with ourselves, all this love of Jewish rituals and Jews in general, particularly by devout Christians, makes us more than a little nervous and uncomfortable, and there are a number of good reasons for this,
besides politics alone. First, it is discomfiting when others know more about important aspects of our heritage than we do. Even if they profoundly misinterpret a number of key passages, many devout Christians can quote chapter and verse in the Bible better than many of us can (I include myself in this).

Another reason we may be concerned is the legitimate worry that many of these groups are actually interested in proselytizing to us. We are wary of philo-Semitism, because we are concerned of the ulterior motive involved therein. After all, many fundamentalist, evangelical groups make no secret of their belief that salvation can only be attained through accepting their belief system. Indeed, some of the Sedarim carried out in Churches substitute Christianized themes for those uniquely Jewish elements of the Seder, and it is not God who saves the Jewish people.

The truth, though, is that many evangelical denominations have officially disavowed replacement theology and have stopped proselytizing to Jews, while the Presbyterian Church, one of the most pernicious and implacable opponents of the State of Israel, still funds messianic congregations.
.
A related concern… Centuries of the most horrific persecution, from the Crusades to the pogroms to the Holocaust to
institutionalized anti Semitism in the United States have made us deeply wary of the motives of those around us.

A third reason that these kinds of imitations of our rituals and fascination with Judaism and the Jewish people make us nervous is that like our forebears in Egypt who were reticent about declaring God’s dominion, we in the Modern Orthodox community are more than a little wary of public proclamations of faith and expressions of religiosity. It’s understandable; many Christian groups express great certitude about ideas that we struggle with, or are afraid to talk about, like the Messiah (even though they disagree with us on his identity), Jewish chosenness, and, most notably, the spiritual significance of the Land (and State) of Israel as the God given home of the Jewish people.

Christian advocacy for Israel especially makes us nervous because of our perception that they are doing it to agitate events in the middle East, and thereby hasten an Apocalyptic outcome, even though many Christian Zionists are dispensational premillenialists who don’t believe they can do anything to hasten the arrival of the Messiah-
So, is Christian love of Jews and Jewish rituals good for the Jews? I don’t know, but I think our nervousness about it is, as it presents us with a powerful challenge.

*If we are uncomfortable with Christian knowledge of our scriptures and co-opting of our rituals, this should spur us to become more Jewishly literate, and take greater ownership over the traditions that are a critical part of our spiritual heritage.

*If we are uncomfortable with proselytizing, that should be a powerful challenge for us to proselytize as well. Not to members of other religions, of course; Judaism is not that kind of religion. Rather, our challenge is to reach out to our brothers and sisters who are unconnected to the beauty of our tradition and their heritage, by showing them that it is something beautiful and exciting for us that we want to share, and that they need not look outside their own heritage for authentic religious experiences and inspiration.

*Finally, if we are uncomfortable with public professions of certitude and faith by others about the things we are not sure if we believe, that is a challenge to us to review and study classic texts of Jewish thought and belief, acquainting ourselves with the rich tradition in this area, and to arrive at a serious and well thought out articulation of faith. Moreover, we should not be afraid to express the aspects of Jewish faith we do believe, and do so resolutely.
Read the rest here

I have asked before for people to submit sermons of Rabbis. Let me rephrase the request. Let me know of synagogue websites that have the sermons of the rabbis. I am especially looking for younger rabbis in important congregations, not the usual self-promoters and institutional speeches. Which other Orthodox synagogues post the rabbi’s recent sermons besides the Jewish Center? I am not looking for OU/YUTorah sanitized sermons, I am looking for those under the radar and in the real world like this one.

Here is a great collection of sermons by Conservative Rabbis. From those under the radar we see that Scholarship and historicism is out while the word covenantal is in.

I just finished the first of the many books in my summer pile of reading. Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755-1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) There are already a variety of good reviews on the web already so I will not repeat them. I will deal with some things that struck me.

First of all, the book is done using solid British historical methods and offers a contrast to many of the concerns of Jewish narratives. (On the author. and his works.) The book is also not a continuous biography or a theology work, rather flash points in 60 years of a movement. Major conclusions is that one has to separate Jacob Frank from Scholem’s Sabbatian setting, Shabbatai or Kabbalah. Frank was a heretical 18th century charlatan and had much in common with his younger contemporaries Wolf Eybeschutz and Casanova, inventing royal titles, seducing women, and crossing back and forth between religious lines. A significant excerpt of the book with most of the conclusions is available here.

Now to the interesting questions for today. During most of the Early Modern period, those who left Judaism or sinned or considered the eruv rav- the mixed multitude who should be wiped out or left to rot. It is an important point for understanding how Judaism saw the laity. The Vilna Gaon and his intellectual followers had deep misgivings about the masses whom they termed the eruv rav. One still finds this attitude in 1920’s Haredi circles in which the masses of Jews are the evil mixed multitude. 20th century views of people hood owe much to Graetz, Reines, Kook, Schechter, Rebbe Riyatz, Dinur and other modernists. (For the current emptiness of the term, see Daniel Septimus’s recent piece.) How do see the collective today? What if one wants to be Catholic and Jewish like Frank? Would we celebrate if a messianic Jew properly converts to Christianity? I have always been amazed that many communities in Jewish have assimilated and we find few mentions. If one converts or assimilates then one has proved one is the mixed multitude. (We find some of this invoked in the statements and teshuvot in the recent conversion controversies.)

In late summer and early autumn 1759, a sizable group of Jews-thousands, by most accounts-led by one Jacob Frank embraced Roman Catholicism in the city of Lwów. The conversion was unique not only in its sheer size. It was also-or at least appeared to be-voluntary: whatever caused Frank and his followers to approach the baptismal font, they were not facing a choice between baptism and expulsion or violent death like their brethren in medieval German lands or Portugal. What was most unusual, however, was the reaction of most Jewish contemporaries. In contrast to typical reactions of sadness, anger, or despair, many Jews saw the conversion of Frank and his group as a God-given miracle and a great victory for Judaism. Entire communities celebrated.

Among early Jewish accounts of the 1759 conversion, only one departed from the prevailing triumphant mood and expressed radically different sentiments. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, known as the BeSh”T (1698-1760), who was the founder of Hasidism, the most important spiritual movement in Judaism of the period, was said to have bemoaned the Lwów mass apostasy or even to have died of pain caused by it. According to the story recorded in the hagiographic collection Shivhe ha-BeSh”T, the Ba’al Shem Tov laid the blame for the eruption of the entire affair on the Jewish establishment; he was “very angry with the rabbis and said that it was because of them, since they invented lies of their own.” The leader of Hasidism saw Frank and his group as part of the mystical body of Israel and presented their baptism as the amputation of a limb from the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence on earth: “I heard from the rabbi of our community that concerning those who converted [in Lwów], the Besht said: As long as the member is connected, there is some hope that it will recover, but when the member is cut off, there is no repair possible. Each person of Israel is a member of the Shekhinah.”

In recounting the BeSh”T’s reaction to Frank’s conversion, Agnon alluded to the symbolism of the “mixed rabble” or “mixed multitude,” the erev rav. The concept appears in the Hebrew Bible in the narrative account of the Exodus (Exod. 12:37-38): “And the People of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot, who were men, beside children. And a mixed multitude [erev rav] went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, and very many cattle.” Jewish tradition interpreted the phrase erev rav as denoting a group of foreigners who joined the Israelites following Moses from Egypt.

the majority of rabbinic exegetes saw in the mixed multitude the source of corruption, sin, and discord: accustomed to idolatry, the erev rav enticed Israelites to make the Golden Calf and angered God by demanding the abolition of the prohibition of incest. Thus, the emblem of the erev rav came to evoke the image of unwelcome strangers present in the very midst of the Holy People; the mixed multitude were not true “children of Abraham” but Egyptian rabble who mingled with Israelites, contaminated their purity, incited them to sin, and caused them to stray from the right path in the wilderness.

The Zohar universalized the midrashic image by removing it from its original place in the sequence of biblical narrative: the presence and activity of the mixed multitude were not restricted to the generation of the Exodus but extended over the entire history of humanity. The erev rav were the impurity that the serpent injected into Eve; they were the descendants of Cain; the nefilim, “sons of God” who procreated with the daughters of men (Gen. 6:2-4); the wicked ones who survived the deluge. They were progeny of the demonic rulers, Samael and Lilith. They contributed to the building of the Tower of Babel and caused the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. They practiced incest, idolatry, and witchcraft. They were the cause of the imprisonment of the Divine Presence in the demonic realm of the “husks” (kelippot) and, likewise, the exile of Israel among the nations.

In the Zohar’s narrative, the activity of the mixed multitude was by no means restricted to the past. Rather, the erev rav represented the ever-present force of destruction, whose aim was to bring the world back to the state of biblical “waste and void,”… : in accordance with its wider mythology of metempsychosis, the Zohar depicted present-day Jewish sinners as Jews the “roots of whose souls” originated among the erev rav.

Rabbi Jacob Sasportas, the preeminent adversary of early Sabbatianism, heard about Nathan’s statements. Angered by the preposterous claims that the very cream of the cream of the rabbinic elite consisted of descendants of the mixed multitude, Sasportas proclaimed that it was not the leaders of the generation but the Sabbatians themselves whose souls originated among the erev rav. In a short time, the symbolic opposition of the “mixed multitude” and the “true Israelites” permanently entered the lexicon of the debate between the Sabbatians and their opponents.

The book has a nice section on the impact that the 27 years Podolian spent under the Ottomans had on the Jews of the region. It created a sense of ideological and social separatism in the region in that they where considered a new Polish land and became the place where Hasidism started.

In the late seventeenth century, the situation of Podolian Jewry went through a significant change. Following the disastrous war with the Porte and the Crimean Khanate, the Commonwealth signed a humiliating peace treaty in Buczacz in 1672, ceding the Palatinates of Podolia and Braclaw to the Ottoman Empire. Poland-Lithuania had regained part of its territories by the following year, and all of them after the treaty of Karlowitz (1699); yet the impact upon the province’s Jewish communities of twenty-seven years of practical independence from the central administrative bodies of Polish Jewry was profound. Podolian Jews developed close ties with their brethren in Turkey, and for over twenty years, Turkish, Wallachian, and Moldavian Jews settled in the region. Even after the province was returned to Poland in 1699, the Council of Four Lands did not regain full control: local Jews often voiced their dissent from the decisions of the council or the rabbi of the Ruthenian Land in Lwów, and many disgruntled individuals moved to Podolia to seek a measure of freedom from the scrutiny imposed by the rabbinate in other parts of the Commonwealth.

After their return to Poland, the Podolian communities refused to pay their poll tax to the Land of Ruthenia, and the tax evasion in Podolia severely increased the fiscal burden placed on other regions. On 1 June 1713, King Augustus II ordered the creation of a separate, fifth Land, with the seat of the presiding rabbi in Satanów.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Podolia became for Judaism what twelfth-century Languedoc was for Christianity: a seditious province where dissenters gathered and heterodoxy was practiced openly and publicly. Podolia was the only place in the world where-almost a hundred years after Sabbatai Tsevi’s conversion to Islam-many Jews openly adhered to Sabbatianism. A number of communal rabbis belonged to the sect and drew in their entire communities. Many Podolian Sabbatians were scholars: among some twenty sectarians identified by name in Ber Birkenthal’s Divre binah, the names of eight of them are preceded by the title morenu (“our teacher”),

Pawel Maciejko, “The Jews’ Entry into the Public Sphere: the Emden-Eibeschuetz Controversy Reconsidered”, Jahrbuch of the Simon Dubnow Insitute for Jewish History. Special Issue: Early Modern Culture and Haskalah, 6 (2007)is an great article by the same author on how and why the Emden-Eybeschutz debate went public and why Eybeschutz was suspected of being a Crypto-Christian. Maciejko took the discussion way beyond the usual antiquarianism.(I was able to find it before online, and now I cannot.)

Here is a little rant by an Evangelical over at Pantheos. First, a little background for my Jewish readers. After the public defeat of Fundamentalism in the 1930’s, they recoiled and became sectarian. Starting in the late 1940’s and 50’s, there was a new era of modern Evangelicals who rejected sectarianism went out into the world, they took on modern education, politics, and society. In the 1980’s and 1990’s they became the dominant religious force in the US of A and they are evangelicals, the F word is reserved for those who don’t engage with the modern world.

Here, Roger Olsen who calls himself a post-conservative evangelical decries that the evangelicals are beginning to sound like fundamentalists in these are intellectually inbred and spend all their time trying to correct drifts and mistakes in the community. He sees them as defensive of the received tradition and obsessed with fighting perceived liberals (whose existence he thinks is chimerical). He concludes by asking them to try their hand at something constructive.

Read it and let me know if anyone sees any Jewish parallels here? Do we have anyone or any groups that fit this bill?

rogereolson, July 6, 2011 3:53 pm
One hallmark I don’t think I’ve talked about here before is the neo-fundamentalists’ tendency to publish ONLY scholarship aimed at “correcting” doctrinal drift or declension among fellow evangelicals. For them, theology should not be creative or engage in reconstruction. Apparently, anyway, God does NOT (for them) have new light to break forth from his word. They are defensive of whatever they perceive as “the received evangelical tradition” and pump out books and articles attacking those evangelicals they regard as somehow departing from it. It always turns out that they see all those straying evangelicals as “on a liberal trajectory.” They (the neo-fundamentalists) are obsessed with liberal theology–as if it still poses a huge threat. (In fact, although it is still around, it has almost no real influence except in some of the mainline Protestant denominations.)

But what puzzles me is why these seemingly brilliant neo-fundamentalist scholars, many of who teach in very respectable evangelical institutions, don’t get to work on something more constructive theologically than criticism of fellow evangelicals. They seem always to be waiting and watching for an evangelical to write or publish something they consider less than fully orthodox so they can jump on it and write another book attacking it.

We have too many “morosely gloomy” evangelical theologians today. I’d like to challenge them to take a year off from their inquisitions to write something positive and constructive.
Read the Full Version Here

Tomer who runs two excellent blogs in Israel, – one and two- called this a US blog. Is that true? I am trying to wrap my head around that one.
NYC has the largest group of my readers but the next city is the region of Gush Dan. Most of the people I interview are Anglos living in Israel-Buckholtz, Joshua Berman. I write reviews of Yair Sheleg and Eliaz Cohen. The paper I quote most often is Haaretz and that is for culture not politics! I review Jewish studies produced in Israel- Daniel Abrams, Avi Sagi, Moshe Idel. I cover kabbalists who live in Jerusalem- Rav Morgenstern. On the other hand, this blog does not reflect the majority of American Jews- the happenings of Reform and most Renewal, no representation at the CCAR, NHC, or at 92nd st Y. I dont share the concerns of Mah Rabu, Velveteen Rabbi, or Jewlicious. I dont cover the majority of great stuff happening in American Jewry.

Is this blog American? Would you call the Talmud Blog US or Israeli? Would you call JID or even the Jerusalem Post US or Israel?

My blog tends to discuss things from a vantage point relating to intellectual formation that included the cultural world of Israeli Yeshivot and Universities. I think Tomer can relate to the blog specifically because it is not too American, he is not quoting the more American blogs.

This is not a new phenomena, Safed piety was created not just in Safed but in Cairo, Venice, Damascus, Saloniki- there was a network of interests and trade routes. So too in Colonial America, Boston was culturally connected to London, but not to Virginia. Or Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem still writing in German and attending the German conferences. So in that sense I am reporting on how a certain set of ideas play themselves out in my location, like R. Gedaliah Cordovero living in Venice and writing back to Safed about his new siddur.

But is there more to this story? Is it a story of globalization.

Globalization assumes that large numbers of people are in flux and information is in flux. People do not define themselves in 19th century territorial national terms. People and ideas keep moving.
Fifteen years ago, Arjun Appadurai published Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization explaining some of the new dimensions of mobilization through small vignettes.

Appadurai describes a trip he and his wife made to a Hindu temple in Bombay. His wife asked about a Hindu priest that she had known before, and they were told that he was in Houston. The point isn’t just that they went there and he came here. He’s talking about trans-locality, and the production of locality beyond mere connection to a place. Not all Hindus live in India, and not all Indians have to live in India to maintain their Indianness.

The conjunction of media and migration means that what is imagined is no longer the “imagined community” of the nation-state, but numerous “diasporic public spheres.” Appadurai writes that “[a]s Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers”

The US can be represented in Israel and Israel in America. Appadurai coins words like ethnoscape and mediascape. To give a relevant application of the former. Anglosaxon Israeli culture is related in Raananah, Jerusalem, Teaneck or Miami. People come and go and the culture of the Anglosaxim in Israeli is not Israeli or US. Rather a specific ethno-scape, not landscape. Charlie Buckholtz and David Hartman could be in NY or J-M, as well as their readers. The Anglo-Israeli world of JID or J-Post does not depend where the authors live. And do you feel comfortable saying that David Hartman or Shlomo Riskin are Israeli thinkers? American thinkers? or part of an ethno-scape of Anglos in Israel.

And this works because of the amazing fluidity in which people go back and forth with regularity and have spent years of their lives working in more than one country. They can even come and visit the other country for 5 trips of 3-4 weeks each. Or if you spend every summer for 20 years in the other country, besides being 5 years of time it allows one to live in both countries. I certainly see the gap year programs, the yeshivot as Anglo-Israeli products, a specific ethno-scape that transcends boundaries. Or we joke about the many people that we know, we make “aliyah” as an ideal and then return to live for many years in the US after only a year or two in Israel. They return for business, doctors, their kids education, but after a year in Israel they get to live in the US for the next decade as an “oleh,” there are even those Anglos who commute bi-weekly between Israel and the US. These are post territorial demarcations of globalization.

In terms of the media-scape, there is a realm of cultural production that occurs in more than one country but is not localized to one country. Rav Aharon Lichtenstein writings are produced in Israel but more copies are sold here. The writings of Rav Shagar or Moshe Idel (There are many names to insert) live in a mediascape that is used in an ethnoscape more than an national landscape. Many of my neighbors, watched Serugim on their computer before the DVD came out. I have probably given more papers in Van Leer in J-M than anywhere else.

Appadurai whose book mainly deals with the Indian diaspora has many insights that apply to other groups as well. For example he points out how some Indians can be universalist and tolerant in the US setting but fiercely nationalistic when they discuss politics in India. (Think of the American Jew who is universal here and fiercely nationalistic about Israel.) In the age of nationalism, people wanted to fit into the land they lived in and did not have two elements.
He also points out that in the age of media, flashpoints and images on TV can count more than your own neighborhoods. Here he gives examples of Kashmir, and Hebron overriding concern for Delhi and J-M. Or a more halakhic example, the media makes Torat Hamelekh more important than all the other responsa being written by the Religious Zionists.

So are we an American Blog?

We’re an American blog
We’re an American blog
We’re comin’ to your town
We’ll help you party it down
We’re an American blog
(With apologies to Grand Funk Railroad)

I have been silent for the last two weeks not because I was on vacation but because I needed to finally finish the manuscript for my book Judaism and World Religions. The publisher had eighty pages of instructions on editing, publicity, production, marketing and submission. My deadline was Friday and it took more than few days of concentrated attention, crossing t’s and dotting i’s, to finish it for submission.

If any of you ever read the ABOUT page on this blog, I started this blog in Sept 2009 as a way to stay focused on the book. This way I forced myself to sit down regularly and write. It also allowed me to blog things that caught my notice so as to get the distraction out of my way to continue, to put it out of my mind. It also allowed me to work on formulations of certain selections in the book, hence all the interfaith material on the blog. They ideally wanted the book in 14 months and I did it in 23 months.
It was by average about a page a day. (I dont count blog writing.) In contrast, Joseph Dan at his height of productivity once said he averaged 3 pages a day. And Moshe Idel is averaging way more than that.

During the year I asked to produce an Orthodox Forum paper on popular culture, I wound up writing that article as a series of blog posts. Along the way, new phrases such as Post-Orthodoxy, Half-Shabbos, and cruise ship Orthodoxy took on lives of their own. When I worked on a paper on Maharal, it never made any appearance on the blog. And over time, I posted less on Kabbalah.

At this point, my ABOUT page is no longer true. I will no longer be forcing myself to write to make my deadline. The blog needs a new purpose and About statement. I am not sure of its new purpose. I will continue blogging but my hours and topics may change. I am not sure how they will change.I will take much longer breaks from my computer but still post things that interest me or first drafts of reviews. This past year even trips to Norway, Poland, and Turkey did not take me too far away from the computer.

My book Judaism and World Religions comes out in March 2012, once again by the very efficient Palgrave-McMillan. We have not set the exact production schedule yet. But I assume that I get the edited manuscript back in OCT and then proofs a month later.

My 2010 book Judaism and Other Religions will be out in inexpensive paperback in 2012. It has already been assigned in three courses and there are already 150 pre-publication copies of the paperback ordered. People are sending me their corrections because I get to revise it for a second edition. It is interesting to note that the digital version did not sell well.

I thank Thanbo for responding to one of the blog posts soliciting a cover by providing a .gif scan that will be used on the cover.

I have to determine which should be my next manuscript to pitch to a publisher: Varieties of Modern Orthodoxy? Kabbalistic Meditation? A popular book on Judaism and Christianity: The Differences in the 21st Century?

Immediate focus – what do I do with Google+? Necessary Plug-ins? Does anyone have better circle arrangements that don’t sound like an MCI plan of friends and family? Should I arrange it as Academics, Interfaith, Orthodox chatter, Kabbalah, Former student still into Jewish stuff, Former Students, and Online acquaintances, and then family and friends? How many incoming streams and feeds are people setting up? And other than announcing my posts, is there any purpose in Twitter for those of us who don’t comment in less than 500 words.