I have been home and busy writing this week but what did I get from the comments so far? I got some useful comments from EJ, Aryeh Tepper, and Lipchitz (a pseudonym of an author who may go public). I have also received private emails from people who did not comment but write on both sides of the divide. This may go very public soon. Let’s see if we can gain any further clarity? Is there an editorial policy to trash renewal/indie/neo-hasidism? Why are both sides talking past each other? Is there a real fault line that transcends denominational lines?

EJ wrote:

R. Landes seems to be someone who has left the neighborhood of his childhood, and if you accept the importance of small differences has stretched considerably from his initial upbringing. But from what I see, he has a mindset where Orthodoxy, both Charedi and Modern are looking over his shoulder.

With R. Arthur Green it’s different; he got on the bus in a secular neighborhood, a place which for many looks like close to the end of the line. .. The place his trajectory never visited was Orthodoxy. As a result he has no feel for living Chasidim,.. His Chasidim are all dead, known primarily through their books. He owes Orthodoxy nothing, he doesn’t care much what Orthodox Jews think, and most importantly he is not addressing those who look to Orthodoxy as an essential starting point for their Judaism.

Part of Arthur Green’s continued surprise at the Landes criticism is that he is being given no credit for attempting to keep the outer rings of American Jewry connected to its origins, when they have no memories or experience of Jewish life. If his teaching is to be credible he must include a universalist element.

I do think that ej is correct and perceptive on many of his points.

Lipchitz (may he speedily lose his anon) wrote:

The connecting, instigating, controlling link is the Tivkah Fund [and Neal Kozodoy (who used to run Commentary)].
The Tikvah Fund is a very wealthy, rightwing philanthropy with deep corporate pockects and neoconservative roots.
If you do a bit of digging online, the person you’ll find most interesting is Roger Hertog, who is Chairman of the Board at Tikvah.

Many out there in the community of academics, rabbis, and journalists share Lipchitz’s perspective.

Aryeh Tepper wrote

To set the record straight, there is absolutely no editorial policy at Jewish Ideas Daily when it comes to these issues
I did not present the issue – or at least I didn’t intend to present the issue – as an either/or. I am in deep sympathy with certain dimensions of post-denominational Judaism precisely because revitalizing the tradition is far more important than defining it, which is what usually happens within institutional frameworks
I find the notion of zohar=universal eros to be compelling, and it is in tune with certain notions emerging from the Renewal Movement regarding the ‘meaning’ of Divinity.
Landes attacks a non-personal God, but as a student of the Rambam, not to mention the mystical tradition, I don’t see a non-personal God as a problem
I think the common denominator is that all the pieces critique Jewish Renewal, Indie minyanim, etc., for their lack of clarity as well as an immature sense of communal responsibility. Those values – clarity and a mature sense of communal responsibility.
you’ll see that I’m more than willing to engage in dialogue. For Waskow, however, I, and those like me, are a-priori disqualified as interlocutors because we question whether the historical process that he considers to be progress and that issues in Jewish Renewal, is, in fact, progress.
And this I think helps answer your question as to why defenders of Jewish Renewal argue so emotionally.. one only opposes what is clearly true out of willful blindness.

Aryeh likes Zohar, piyyut and all the other avenues of renewal. But what really gets his goat is the a-priori progressiveness, as if their positions superseded other positions. I can accept that as someone who does not want to be a-priori superseded.

Lipchitz responds:

Like so many of the negative critiques that appear in Jewish Ideas Daily and in the Jewish Review of Books. Instead of substantive disagreement, we get a lot of ad-hominem invective, name-calling, sniping and snide innuendo about Jewish Renewal, or Independent Minyanim, or Arthur Green, or Liberalism, or secular forms of Judaism, or J Street.
As for “clarity,” Aryeh, I simply cannot take at face value your assurance that there are no hidden neoconservative orthodoxies dictating editorial policy at Jewsih Ideas Daily (or for that matter at the Jewish Review of Books); certainly not if Neal Kozodoy, the old editor in chief from Commentary, is running things on staff at JID
Please understand that there are many people out there who are very upset by this uncivil tone and lack of transparency.

OK, we are now back to the starting point of my post. Even if one side thinks they superseeded the other and is emotional, nevertheless, why the seeming editorial direction? Why the uncivil tone in some of the reviews? (Editors are responsible for editing for tone)

The Art Green – Danny Landes Debate Continues with a new post at Jewschool. I re-posted it here. This debate is taking on the elements of a specific fault line in the Jewish community. The editorial policy at Jewish Review of Books and Jewish Ideas Daily seems to be criticize anything having to do with a loosely defined other side of the indie minyanim, Art Green, Renewal, Neo-Hasidism. They are lining up all sorts of people to criticize, but those criticized just find the criticism uninformed and misguided. They do seem to be talking past each other. The fault line is not Conservative- Orthodox but two different visions.

In the 1950’s Commentary magazine (Rosenberg, Fiedler, Potok, see the statements by former editor Cohen) criticized Buber, Neo-Hasidism and other modern religious options in order to say it was an either/or choice of Orthodoxy or secularism; Commentary magazine chose secularism. From their reviews of Buber’s Hasidic tales, one would never have imagined they would return as a pillar of Judaism for the last 25 years. Some of this criticism is similar to the that of Gertrude Himmelfarb of the 1970’s; Judaism is moral and historical not experiential. Much of it is similar to the critique penned in 1980’s by the pork eating sabbath violating Hillel Halkin who wrote that one must choose secularism in Israel or to be Haredi. People that I speak to speculate that he is the editorial instigator behind these reviews. I dont know if it is true but he does seek out those who will unite with him behind a common foe. He still introduces himself as Orthodox and then 20 minutes into his talk tells his audience that he hasn’t kept mizvot since he was 15, which was 56 years ago.

But what is infuriating on the other side of Art Green is that they are too defensive and do not reply intellectually. They also confuse their modern/post-modern readings with the historical texts themselves. Both sides treat this as an either/or debate. I will have more to say in a future post.

This was taken from Jewschool- here.They give the links to the prior episodes of the Green-Landes debate. For the discussion at this blog, see here for Green statement in Oct. and here for Landes response in Jan. This is a live issue because after half-shabbos, the posts on Art Green get the most hits. I get a sense that people are grappling and the issues they are grappling with lie with neither formulation.
My question is not figure out why both sides are currently blind to the other side. So dont comment by taking sides as much as figuring out why this is personal and not intellectual.

Friday, March 4th, 2011
Last year, R. Art Green published a book, and R. Daniel Landes wrote a critical review of it in the Jewish Review of books. Green then responded to the review, and Landes responded to the response (on the same link). This is now Green’s next response. Underlying all of this are some interesting questions about the possibilities and limits of Jewish theology. (One could say “questions about Orthodoxy and Neo-Hasidism,” but perhaps it’s more complicated than that.) We welcome more discussion and debate on these issues, and not only from the two men involved. Green’s next letter is below.

Dear Danny,

Let’ s continue this public conversation, which is not over, in a face-to-face second person form, without the barrier of an intervening magazine. Internet interest will provide more than sufficient readership.

I find your tone, in your latest response as well as the initial review of my Radical Judaism, to be significantly annoying, ranging between dismissive and condescending. This is particularly bothersome because you continue to distort my views, either because you have not read me carefully or because a straw-man Art Green better suits your purpose.

You distinguish my views from earlier Jewish notions of an abstract deity by saying that I “flatly deny” divine transcendence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Please re-read page 18:

“Transcendence” in the context of such a faith [my mystical panentheism] does not refer to a God “out there” or “over there” somewhere beyond the universe, since I do not know the existence of such a “there.” Transcendence means rather that God – or Being – is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence.

Now you may not like the monistic theology of the succeeding sentences (“There is no ultimate duality here…” ), but my theology does not deny transcendence. In saying that the mystery of divine presence can never be fathomed, I am seeking a religious language that retains the essential element of transcendence while linking it to a real part of human religious experience, rather than simply asserting it as tradition-enforced dogma. My insistence (ibid.) that “the whole is mysteriously and infinitely greater than the sum of its parts” is intended (see n. 4 to that page) to distinguish my view from that of the sort of reductionist pantheism with which you choose to identify me.

You similarly claim that my “God (like Mordecai Kaplan’s) has been divested of all personality.” We should probably leave Kaplan aside. The Kaplan scholars will probably tell you that Kaplan’s views over his long lifetime were inconsistent. See especially Jack Cohen’ s book on Kaplan and Rav Kook, and some of the sources quoted there. (I hope you and I both live long enough to be celebrated for similar inconsistencies!) But I do not divest God of all personality. I painstakingly try to show, through the long course of Chapter Two, how our images of God as divine person developed, including ancient Near Eastern and other historical influences. I trust that you do not deny these. When I finally come to express my own views (p. 73), I say the following:

Here too I turn to Kabbalah for a way to say this within the context of Judaism. The Zohar understands well that the personal God-figure, in both its male and female articulations (tif’ eret and malkhut) is a series of symbolic constructions, less than the divine absolute…the mystics were creating a theological position that they rarely dared to articulate clearly. The personal God is a symbolic bridge between transcendent mystery (that which by definition the mind cannot grasp) and a humanity that constantly reaches forth toward it. Because that “ :reaching” needs to be undertaken by the whole human self, including emotion and body as well as mind, the “ bridge” needs to be one to which we can most wholly respond, a projection of our own form.

I go on, in the ensuing two pages, to talk about my own use of such personalistic language, despite my essentially monistic theology. I even insist (p. 74: “ But to be fully at home in Judaism…” ) on the importance of personalistic language. Now you may say, of course, that this is disingenuous, that my love of such language is inconsistent with my true position. But here I give you the RaMBaM, about whom the very same claim is rightly made. I am, if anything, less elitist in my view. I think it is not only the unwashed masses who need such language, but even we who seek to enter the doors to the palace’ s inner chamber. As long as we remain human, we live in a dualistic outer universe, and thus need the language of “ I” and “ Thou.”

As for my “ unsophisticated” way of reading evolution as a matrix for discovering the sacred, let me say that here I am trying intentionally to re-weave a contemporary understanding of our biological origins with elements of Jewish mythic speech. My goal is a bold re-assertion of the sacred dimension in our modern account of origins. I ultimately believe that the sacred needs to be expressed in mythic language; to denude it of that would result in a prosaic impoverishment of consciousness, the opposite of my intent. But in order to go forward with a renewed use of myth, we sometimes do need to step outside it and to say exactly what we do and don’ t mean by employing it. I do alternate between those two stances (de- and re-mythologizing, you may call them) in this book. Confusing, perhaps, but “ unsophisticated?”

Now we turn to “ pluralism” and “ criticism.” I welcome criticism, especially if it suggests constructive alternatives, which I have not seen you offer. I precisely want to stimulate thought and open-ended discussion of theology among Jews, as I hope we are indeed doing here. But to say of my views, despite the extensive history I offer, simply “ This is not the God of Israel” and “ This is not the Torah of Israel” feels rather little like “ pluralism.” You may not like the word “ heretic,” but this does feel (from the recipient’ s end) like heresy-hunting. Those statements are more like R. Yaakov Emden, shall we say, than like the earlier elu ve-elu divrey elokim hayyim.

Finally, I still fail to understand vos hakt ir a chainik about a “ doctrine of ahavat yisra’ el.” I say quite clearly (p. 138ff.) that I remain a part of klal yisra’ el, requiring fellowship with those with whom I disagree, for reasons both historical and theological. I also say, and I think I have a right to, that “ this does not establish my only religious landscape.” Is that what so disturbs you? Believe me, reb yid, I know quite well that you and I “ are inextricably bound to (and stuck with) each other.” To me that’ s both bad news and good. I hope that’ s true for you as well.

Shalom u-Verakhah,
Art
ARTHUR GREEN IS RECTOR OF THE RABBINICAL SCHOOL AND IRVING BRUDNICK PROFESSOR OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION AT HEBREW COLLEGE IN NEWTON MA

I had posted a discussion with a palliative nurse a while ago and she spoke of a great Chabad seminar that she attended. Rabbi Bryan Kinzbrunner posted a long comment about his father Dr Barry Kinzbrunner work in palliative care and that he spoke for a Chabad convention.

I then received an email from a Chabad rabbi.

You may have been hearing reports about the recent JLI course Medicine and Morals that I authored.
Rabbi Yehuda Pink MSc
Solihull & District Hebrew Congregation

I asked for more information and he responded “If there are any specific issues you would like me to address please let me know.” To this I responded Since you are the one who contacted me and took credit and responsibility for what the palliative nurse told me, then I would like some basic information.”

I received a further email in response that showed that Chabad had no special wisdom, rather it was all due to Dr Kinzbrunner,

I chaired a session in November presented by Dr Barry Kinzbrunner, the Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Vitas that examined the interface between Halacha and Medicine in the area of Palliative Care and End of Life Issues that gave a detailed overview of the areas of terefah, goses etc. She might have been referring to that.

I asked some further questions hoping to at least find out about other aspects of the Chabad approach- I basically only received vague generalities. But I did ask one question that received a direct reply.

Who are the poskim with the Chabad community for medical halakhah?
The Chabad Community has its own Rabbonim who are experts in Medical Halacha, Rabbi Feitel Levin of Melbourne is an expert in End of Life Issues,Rabbi Feigelstock of Buenos Aires is an expert in Artificial Reproduction,

As a side point Rabbi Bryan Kinzbrunner, son of Dr Kinzbrunner has a blog- RabbiChaplain. He likes to blog on whatever interest him in reading, hasidus, or politics. I have been trying to encourage him to limit his scope to issues of chaplaincy, hospice, death and palliative care. Leave the politics to others.

Here is a good post of his post from two weeks ago:

The Mind of the Mourner by R. Joel Wolowesky. R. Wolowesky’s goal is to present the psychological underpinnings behind Jewish mourning practices.
As someone who deals with death and dying on a daily basis, I am always looking for a new insight, a new way of thinking about how people experiencing the loss might be feeling. While that usually comes from the bereaved themselves, it is often helpful to have a knowledge base to further draw upon, not for the purpose of categorizing, but as a means of offering support if that is what the bereaved needs at the time.
R. Wolowesky’s book does not fulfill this need. Instead, it is a good summary of the thought of Rav Soloveitchik on areas of mourning and halacha. However, R. Wolowesky misses the underpinning of Rav Soloveitchik’s thought, namely that Rav Soloveitchik was writing and sharing his experiences in the form of philosophical treatises. His words were meant to describe his own suffering and difficulties in his losses, not necessarily as a means of conveying a psychology of the halachic systems view of grief and bereavement. Further, it is difficult to accept based on my experience his underlying theme, that if one fulfills the Jewish method of mourning, the grieving process will not be complicated. In fact, for many people, the ideas in this book would be counter to providing them with a halachic grieving experience.
Overall, I feel this work was disappointing and still leaves a hole for a work on how the Jewish methods of grieving may or may not provide a strong base for someone to experience a normal grieving process.

This post continues from post #1 on Peter Schaffer’s new here. Now that I got the negative out of the way, to turn to the positive. In short, the book is positive for the first serious survey from the Biblical book Ezekiel to the Heikhalot in short incremental stages. Some of the material on the heikhalot is from his earlier book The Hidden and Manifest God. Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism, SUNY Press, 1992, but the majority is new.

Schaffer follows the new trends of not using the word mysticism anymore and instead follows the Chicago school’s term presence of God- in this case including becoming angels, becoming divine, ascents to heaven, visions, and various forms of magic.

Scholem considered the first stage of Jewish mysticism to be merkavah stretching from the 1st century BCE to the 10th century CE. For Scholem who defined mysticism as a romantic reaction against law, then Merkavah has to clearly occur after the classic period of law. Scholem does acknowledge three period without delineation – Apocalyptic – merkavah of mishnah, and heikalot. Back in 1980, Itamar Gruenwald showed all three periods are connected. He is still a good read for dealing with the Rabbinic literature and the responding to the anti-mystical Yekkes and Litvaks of Abeck, Epstein, Lieberman, Urbach. Martha Himmelfarb disconnected the Apocalyptic material in 1988.

As student of Schaffer wrote the following summery of the field from a Schaffer perspective-The Study of Heikhalot Literature: Between Mystical Experience and Textual Artifact. Ra’Anan S. Boustan 2007. Everyone considers Elior incorrect (to put it mildly), so don’t bother commenting about it. Schaffer has an inside dispute with Wolfson about which texts one is singing like angels and which have a process of angelization of the human through heavenly ascent. He also disputes the connection of becoming an angel and deification.

Schaffer creates seven periods and here are his basic conclusions.

The scope of my inquiry in the chapters to follow is delimited on the one hand by the book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible as the starting point, and on the other by the Hekhalot literature as the first unchallenged manifestation of Jewish mysticism. Therefore, I am not interested in illuminating the relationship between Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah, a problem that has been so inadequately addressed and even conspicuously glossed over by Scholem and his heirs. Kabbalah as a distinctly medieval phenomenon that presumably begins in the twelfth century ce in Provence and extends well into our present day remains outside the parameters of my survey.

I begin with the famous first chapter of the book of Ezekiel – Ezekiel’s vision of the open heavens with the four creatures carrying God’s throne and the “figure with the appearance of a human being” seated upon this throne (chapter 1). Ezekiel’s vision sets the tone for the subsequent traditions: a fourfold relation-ship between and among a somehow accessible heaven, a human seer or visionary who has a vision, God as the object of this vision, and a revelation as the purpose of the vision. As to God, the object of the vision, the description goes remarkably far in Ezekiel’s case. He sees a human-like figure that still bears little resemblance to an ordinary man.

The second chapter turns to those ascent apocalypses that revolve around the enigmatic antediluvian patriarch Enoch, who, according to the tradition, did not die a natural death but was taken up by God into heaven. The first and oldest Enoch narrative, derived from the biblical Vorlage, is that of the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36: late third century bce?), in which Enoch experiences a vision of God in heaven (ch. 14). Unlike his precursor Ezekiel, Enoch ascends to heaven, more precisely to the heavenly Temple, to see God on his throne; from now on the ascent becomes the predominant mode of human approach to the God who is enthroned in heaven.

The third chapter also deals with ascent apocalypses, but now Enoch is replaced by a variety of heroes. The chapter begins with the Apocalypse of Abraham (after 70 ce), which still follows the older Temple-critical motif and lacks the explicit physical transformation of the seer. Instead, it grants the angel Iaoel, who accompanies Abraham on his journey, a God-like state, a kind of compensation for the fact that Abraham is not allowed to see God. However, the climax of Abraham’s vision is his participation in the angelic liturgy, which may well imply his transformation into an angel. But again, this angelification of the seer is no mere end in itself: God reveals to Abraham the future history of Israel, with the desecration of the Temple and the necessity of its destruction at that history’s center.

In chapter 4, I continue with the literature preserved in the Qumran community.

I use the word “communion” here deliberately, since it must remain an open question as to whether or not the members of the community envision themselves, during their joint worship with the angels, as being transformed into angels.

Contrary to the prevailing trend in research on Jewish mysticism (or even in Qumran scholarship) I contend that the vision of God plays a strikingly marginal role in the Qumran texts and much less of one than in the ascent apocalypses,

With the fifth chapter treating Philo, we enter a completely new realm, the realm of a Jewish philosopher who was deeply imbued with the ideas of Plato and their Middle Platonic offspring.

The first of these, chapter 6, begins with the public exposition of Ezekiel 1 in the synagogue and with the famous restriction in m Hagigah 2:1
But there can be no doubt, in my view, that these rabbis understood the respective biblical texts as material for exegetical exercises and not for ecstatic experiences that aim at an ascent to the Merkavah in heaven.

With chapter 8, we finally tackle the Hekhalot literature, that is, the literature that for almost every scholar embodies the first climax of the fledgling mystical movement within Judaism: Merkavah mysticism.
I demonstrate that in Hekhalot Rabbati we encounter a clear tendency to disappoint or even frustrate our expectation of the depiction of God on his throne (to be sure, an expectation cunningly fueled by the editor), wishing instead to impress us with endless and exhausting descriptions of the heavenly liturgy, of which the adept becomes part. But as I will argue, this strategy seems to be quite deliberate, since it is not a unio mystica that our editor wishes to convey but rather a unio liturgica, a liturgical union of the Merkavah mystic with God through his participation in the heavenly liturgy that surrounds God’s throne. Moreover, and more important, I posit that this liturgical union is again, as in some of the ascent apocalypses, no end in itself; rather, within the narrative composed by the editor of Hekhalot Rabbati, it serves to convey the message that God continues to love his people of Israel on earth, even though the Temple is destroyed and the Merkavah mystic must undertake his dangerous heavenly journey to visit God on his throne in the heavenly Temple. It is this message that God wants the Merkavah mystic – the new Messiah – to bring down to his fellow Jews as the ultimate sign of salvation.

Quite in contrast to Hekhalot Rabbati, the text labeled Hekhalot Zutarti in some later manuscripts puts great emphasis on the magical use of the divine names.

Next follows a survey of the Shi‘ur Qomah fragments preserved in the Hekhalot literature; that is, the traditions that assign God gigantic body dimensions to which hundreds of unintelligible names are attached. My analysis of the respective texts in the Hekhalot literature goes against the grain of the thesis augurated by Scholem and accepted by many scholars, namely, that the mystic’s vision of the gigantic body of God serves as the climax of his ascent. Quite in contrast to this still prevalent trend in research, I hold that what is at stake here is not the dimensions of God’s body but the knowledge of the appropriate names attached to the limbs of God’s body and, consequently, the magical use of these names. Furthermore, I argue against the suggestion made by Scholem and others that the Shi‘ur Qomah traditions are essential for the Merkavah mystical speculations, that they are a particularly old layer of the Hekhalot literature, and that they emerged out of the exegesis of the biblical Song of Songs. Finally, I compare the Shi‘ur Qomah traditions in the Hekhalot literature with some related evidence that has been adduced from Jewish, Gnostic, and Christian sources, and I propose that it was originally angels in the Jewish tradition to whom gigantic dimensions were attributed. Only when the idea of vast angelic dimensions was usurped by the Christians did the (later) Jewish traditions – as they are preserved in the Shi‘ur Qomah – transfer these gigantic dimensions to God and claim that they were suitable for God alone, and not for angels or other figures that might dispute God’s position as the one and only God.

Reb Yudel formerly of the JTA is now back in journalism at the Jewish Standard. Besides his articles and the sidebar to the article, Reb Yudel has a corresponding blog where he gets to put the interesting stuff that does not go in the mail article.

This week his article was on Rabbi Ethan Tucker. But in his blog he got to ask a few interesting questions.

Q: What are your favorite halachic works?
A: Yosef Karo’s Beit Yosef. It is amazing in its ability to gather everything together. And the modern day analogue, the collected writings of Ovadia Yosef, is simply amazing. I love both of them in being able to see in them the full picture of what goes on halachicly.
The Aruch HaShulchan is also a masterful attempt at synthesis. That’s another one of my favorites.
Finally, a very obscure one I was introduced to by Rabbi Ovadia’s writings, Erech Lechem by Rabbi Jacob Castro (ca. 1525–1610). He went and made little glosses on the Shulchan Aruch, often kind of correcting for what he thought was the Rama’s overstepping in certain areas.

How is Mechon Hadar different than the Pardes Institute?
Some of the things are similar. A lot of faculty who teach here studied there. Some students studied in both places. Both Pardes and Mechon Hadar create a culture of Torah being exciting and relevant and a critical part of the contemporary Jewish conversation, and capable of shedding light on important issues in the Jewish community. Both have co-ed bet midrash.
At Mechon Hadar, one of values is complete and total equal participation of all the men and women who make up our community, whereas in Pardes the core minyan is not egalitarian.
Another distinction is that Pardes sees itself as a pluralistic institution that doesn’t take stands on the interpretation of halacha and doesn’t have expectations of it students, whereas Hadar has an expectation of its fellows of shmrat mitzvot, of observance, that assumes a normative vision of Jewish life. Someone who comes as as a fellow is expected to be living out daily life of Jewish commitment. The basic elements of shmirat Shabbat, kashrut, regularly giving money to tzedakah — Our fellows spend three hours one afternoon a week visiting the sick– all the various aspects of a life lived in the presence of Torah, a Torah that commands and directs us. Part of being a fellow in the yeshiva is being in the minyan for tefilot three times a day.”

It’s an interesting set of distinctions, and it points to the failure of using a single “left-right” religious spectrum to categorize contemporary Judaisms. Is Hadar more “left” for being egalitarian? Or more “right” for demanding minyan attendance?

From the “Front Page Article”

Tucker acknowledges the good and important work that denominational organizations do for the Jewish people, but says that “denominational labels threaten to make Torah sectarian. I think the Torah paints on a broader canvas. The Torah is the property of the entire Jewish people and speaks to the entire Jewish people. That means that all Jews, irrespective of their background, have the right to demand that the Torah speak to them and address who they are and give them guidance based on the lives they actually lead. It also means that the Torah commands and has expectations for all Jewish people.”

Reb Yudel a life long Dylan enthusiast has found a new focus on singer –songwriter Dan Bern.

Dan Bern can’t escape the Bob Dylan comparisons:
Songwriter who plays guitar and harmonica, solo or with a backing band – check.
Sardonic songs about love and ambiguous relationships – check.
Lyrics ripped from the headlines – check.
Name-dropping of cultural icons – check.
Small town Midwestern Jewish upbringing – check.
Lyrics that aren’t always fit to reprint in this paper – wait, that’s the ghost of Lenny Bruce, whom Bern also channels.
And where Dylan’s Jewish identity has been obscure – he changed his name, after all, from Robert Zimmerman to the decidedly un-Jewish Dylan; publicly embraced Christianity; and now attends Chabad on Yom Kippur – Dan Bern never hid from his Jewish heritage.

In one song he has played in concert but not released (Bern’s 18 albums include only a fraction of the more than 1,000 songs the prolific songwriter has composed), he sings with a twang:

I nosh me a kishke with grits and cole slaw
I blow that ol’ shofar on Rosh Hashana
I sing from the Torah while my dog chases wood sticks
The neighbors don’t like it, but they all are nudniks I’m a Jew from Kentucky that’s what I am
The good Lord foresaw it with his infinte plan
Wherever I wander
Wherever I roam
Forever a Jew with Kentucky my home

Actually, Bern, who lives in Los Angeles, is a Jew from Iowa, where he and his sister were the only Jewish kids in their school. His parents were Jews from Europe. His mother left Germany on the kindertransport; his father fled Lithuania in 1939, one of two survivors of his family; the rest were massacred with the other Jews of Lithuania in 1941. The couple met in Israel in 1950, before moving to Iowa where Bern’s father, a classical pianist and composer, taught music.

As he sings in a song addressed to his sister: You explained me to our parents
English wasn’t their first language

They spoke German
Hated Germans
Confusing times

In “Lithuania,” he summarizes the lesson of history’s shadow:

I saw my dad tell jokes, and teach me how to laugh,
Thirty years after his parents, brothers, and sister were
all shot,
Murdered in the streets of Lithuania

Back in 1995, I began to notice that people who had attended day school became to sound like Evangelicals in that they were referring to the Bible, Talmud, and halakhah as directly accessible to the common sense reader and that the Jewish texts answer questions of daily life. In 1998, I specifically remember someone making a cultural argument from the Jewish sources that had no connection whatsoever to the traditional interpretation and his claim of direct access to the truth through his reading. It was a pre-blog era but it needed to be noted then. In the subsequent decade this grew into an avalanche in the community.

Increasingly, one heard pithy wisdom like the Torah teaches “God helps those who help themselves’ and that God wants one to achieve ones best or that the Torah has answers to the challenges of life. Now there is a whole bookcases in the seforim store of watered-down easy answers from a Torah perspective.People treat them as Jewish philosophy.

There are two elements here. People want to Torah to offer wisdom for everyday life. They do feel a tension to all the castles in the air and abstract answers found in the traditional commentators. They never really wanted that much Talmud or Nachmanides on the Torah. So they found a Torah that speaks to them directly. The second element is that Torah is not in the hands of those trained in rabbinic interpretation, rather is available and close to all.

The New Republic reviewer is as clueless as usual about the Jewish community and thinks Jews never speak like this, but they do. How did the community get here? As a tentative observation
(1) The pop-psych books produced by the Engaged Yeshivish and kiruv world speak like this and make one feel that Torah feels your pain and answers daily life.
(2) The natural needs of suburbia for a moral instruction manual and self-help work. Jews responded to the same needs. This ignorant drivel was actually seen as the most real and relevant and was appreciated by a broad spectrum on the traditional side of the spectrum
(3) The widespread gap-year in Israel empowered people to speak in the name of Torah, but they don’t really relate to agricultural and sacrificial world of the Bible and Mishnah, nor the jurisprudence of the halakhah. Students stopped saying that they know nothing, rather they now have all the ready made answers.
(4) It was the great era of the cultural wars and one needed talking points from one’s own tradition.

The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book
by Timothy Beal Houghton (Mifflin Harcourt) 256 pp.,
that the Bible was “the go-to book for any serious question we might have, from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to heaven, hell, and why bad things happen to good people.” The Bible was “God’s book of answers, which if opened and read rightly would speak directly to me with concrete, divinely authored advice about my life and how to live it.”

The Rise and Fall of the Bible is Beal’s attempt to shatter this popular understanding of the Bible as a combination of divine instruction manual and self-help book. While there is no denying that the Bible remains central—Beal quotes polls indicating that “65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible ‘answers all or most of the basic questions of life,’ ”—he notes simultaneously that Americans are surprisingly ignorant of what is actually in it.

“More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse,” he writes. Less than half of all adults can name the four Gospels; only one-third can name five of the Ten Commandments. In his own experience as a college teacher, Beal says, students “come to class on the first day with more ideas about the Bible derived from … The Da Vinci Code than from actual Biblical texts.”

What explains this disparity between Americans’ absolute faith in the Bible and their evident ignorance of it? To Beal, the problem lies with the notion that the Bible is “a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life.” For as soon as you open it and start reading, it becomes troublingly apparent that the Bible is no such thing. It does not offer answers to problems, especially not to twenty-first-century problems.
Depending on where you read in it, the Bible might give the impression that it is mainly composed of genealogies and agricultural regulations.

The gulf between what readers expect to find in the Bible and what they are actually given produces a kind of paralysis, Beal explains. “For many Christians, this experience of feeling flummoxed by the Bible … [produces] not only frustration but also guilt for doubting the Bible’s integrity.” The Bible-publishing industry feeds on this anxiety, he argues, by endlessly repackaging the Biblical text in ever more watered-down and over-explained forms.

What troubles Beal about these publications is not just the way they dumb down the Bible——but the way they translate and interpret the text according to an undeclared social and political agenda. Read the rest of the New Republic Review here.

There is a new book by Peter Schafer of Princeton University The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Princeton UP, 2011) in the book he traces Jewish mysticism from the Bible to the Heikhalot in about seven stages of development.

The Origins of Jewish Mysticism offers the first in-depth look at the history of Jewish mysticism from the book of Ezekiel to the Merkavah mysticism of late antiquity. The Merkavah movement is widely recognized as the first full-fledged expression of Jewish mysticism, one that had important ramifications for classical rabbinic Judaism and the emergence of the Kabbalah in twelfth-century Europe. Yet until now, the origins and development of still earlier forms of Jewish mysticism have been largely overlooked.

This post was originally going to be a summery of his approach and his periodization. Instead, I have been hijacked by Schaffer’s agenda of demolishing the Jerusalem School of Kabbalah Studies. I am posting this material not to indicate that I agree with his critique but to note that this will be an topic in upcoming months in the review literature. Not all of these critiques are original to Schafer, but he seems to have gone out of his way to collect them.There will be follow-up post(s) on the more substantive elements.

1] On Idel’s Method

In fact, despite his rather moderate and modest definition, Idel’s phenomenological approach runs the risk of dehistoricizing the phenomena it is looking at and establishing an ahistorical, ideal, and essentialist construct.The most recent example of this approach is Idel’s Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (London: Continuum, 2007). It offers many new and creative insights, but methodologically it presents a breathtakingly ahistorical hodgepodge of this and that, quotations from many different periods and literatures, pressed into scholarly sounding categories such as “apotheotic” and “theophanic” but in fact lumped together by sentences like “Let me discuss now …,” “Let me/ us turn to …” (the preferred phrase), “Interestingly enough,” “I would like to now address,” “In this context it should be mentioned,” and so forth. Constantly arguing against the usual suspects who, in his view, impose a wrong and simplistic logic on the texts, in this book Idel has developed his method of leaps in logic and intuition to the extreme. For a critique of Idel’s approach, see Lawrence Kaplan, “Adam, Enoch, and Metatron Revisited: A Critical Analysis of Moshe Idel’s Method of Reconstruction,” Kabbalah 6 (2001), pp. 73–119, and see furthermore Y. Tzvi Langermann’s critique of Yehudah Liebes, below, n. 94.

2] On Liebes

For a devastating critique of the school of “Jewish thought” in Jerusalem – its neglect of history as a discipline and its exclusive reliance on “parallels” (maqbilot) – see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature and on Studying History Through ‘Maqbilot’ (Parallels),” Aleph 2 (2002), pp. 169–189. Reviewing Yehudah Liebes’s Torat ha- Yetzirah shel Sefer Yetzirah (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2000), Langermann concludes that Liebes “merely juxtaposes the sources; rather than constructing arguments, he relies on innuendo. Although he sometimes explains why he believes that a certain parallel is or is not significant, Liebes applies no consistent method of analysis to the parallels adduced” (ibid., pp. 177 f.). “Nevertheless it seems to me that Liebes’ exclusive attention to maqbilot – along with his obliviousness to the limits of this method – stems from the relative neglect of the particular demands of historical writing” (ibid., p. 188).

3] Against those who emphasize vision of God

Contrary to the prevailing trend in research on Jewish mysticism (or even in Qumran scholarship) I contend that the vision of God plays a strikingly marginal role in the Qumran texts and much less of one than in the ascent apocalypses, where the vision at least is the goal of the ascent (although its details often remain rather vague). I demonstrate that in all of the analyzed texts, the visual aspect of the enterprise is almost completely neglected.

4] Shiur Komah as magical and originally angelic

My analysis of the respective texts in the Hekhalot literature goes against the grain of the thesis inaugurated by Scholem and accepted by many scholars, namely, that the mystic’s vision of the gigantic body of God serves as the climax of his ascent.
I hold that what is at stake here is not the dimensions of God’s body but the knowledge of the appropriate names attached to the limbs of God’s body and, consequently, the magical use of these names. Furthermore, I argue against the suggestion made by Scholem and others that the Shi‘ur Qomah traditions are essential for the Merkavah mystical speculations, that they are a particularly old layer of the Hekhalot literature, and that they emerged out of the exegesis of the biblical Song of Songs. Finally, I compare the Shi‘ur Qomah traditions in the Hekhalot literature with some related evidence that has been adduced from Jewish, Gnostic, and Christian sources, and I propose that it was originally angels in the Jewish tradition to whom gigantic dimensions were attributed. Only when the idea of vast angelic dimensions was usurped by the Christians did the (later) Jewish traditions – as they are preserved in the Shi‘ur Qomah – transfer these gigantic dimensions to God and claim that they were suitable for God alone, and not for angels or other figures that might dispute God’s position as the one and only God.

5] Mysticism is not a reaction to the halakhah- contra Scholem

only when the Halakhah becomes too rigid (this is the underlying premise) is it time for mysticism to break through and inaugurate a new era. As has been observed by several scholars, this definition of rabbinic Judaism is in itself problematic. To portray rabbinic Judaism as entrapped within the rigidity of the Halakhah and therefore in need of the liberating forces of mysticism smacks ominously of certain Christian prejudices. Also, if mysticism is a reaction to rabbinic Halakhah, one would expect the emergence of mysticism to occur at the peak of halakhic development (let’s say with the appearance of the Bavli) and not at its beginnings (with the appearance of the Mishnah).

Here is the latest column from the Evangelical leader Richard Mouw, president of Fuller theological. He asks why we do not do outreach in prisons? And why we do not worry about the souls of our sinners? Any thought?

Why Don’t Jews “Evangelize” Jews?
from Mouw’s Musings – The President’s Blog by support

Bernie Madoff finally gave a public interview of sorts recently. Basically, he argued that bankers and others in the financial world were complicit in his crimes. I have nothing interesting to say on that subject, but the very occasion of his speaking out raised an important question for me: Who is talking these days to Bernie Madoff about the state of his soul?

My Jewish friends—especially rabbis and others who are serious about their faith—resent the way evangelicals go about “Jewish evangelism.” This is a big subject, and one we don’t often address calmly in our interfaith dialogues. And while I have my own criticisms of the way we evangelicals have sometimes gone about our witnessing about Christ to the Jewish community, I also have serious questions for my Jewish friends about their own views about “Jewish evangelism.” To put it bluntly, I wonder why they are not showing a deeper concern for the souls of those folks in their own community who by any Jewish standard are clearly wandering from the paths of righteousness.

Bernie Madoff is a case in point. He has done horrible things, engaging in a long-term deceptive project that has brought misery to many Jewish lives. It seems to me to be clear from a Jewish perspective that Bernie Madoff should repent of his sins and make a public confession. And—even if he cannot do the Zacchaeus thing, making restitution by repaying his victims fourfold—he can at least let them know that he is profoundly sorry for his sins and is praying for his victims’ well being.

Is anyone in the Jewish community talking to him about such things? Am I wrong in thinking that this kind of “prison ministry” is as much a Jewish obligation as it is a Christian one?

Here is my challenge to the Jewish community: If they don’t go after the likes of Bernie Madoff… do they have any objection to our doing so? Can’t we agree on at least this minimal attempt at “Jewish evangelism”?

How long is an era? When the old seem untenable? After the enlightenment, Jews felt that the prior era was over. When the 1960’s came, people proclaimed a new liberal era that evolved beyond the past. When the 1990’s came, religious conservatives had a triumphalism that the past was over. Here is a two minute clip from the show Portlandia that mocks this sense that one must be the new. The clip makes fun of hipsters and technology junkies but works for many who think they are the whiggish conclusion or evolutionary end.

Yesterday, I received two views on abortion within an hour of each other. I found the juxtaposition disturbing. In the first, Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson an abortion advocate who in the 1970’s repented of his ways by becoming an anti-abortion advocate and converting from Judaism to the Catholic Church. In the second, a copy of Rabbi Aviner’s know position that abortion for birth defects is fine. I am not sure why it bothered me so much. I know that there are rabbinic positions against abortion and I am not advocating that. There was something in Aviner’s tone that made the Nathanson story more poignant. Maybe it was his eugenic vision of producing strong vital large families. I know that Modern Orthodox rabbis regularly permit abortion for medical reasons. My nagging question is by what criteria? What is their view of science, the nature of the soul, sanctity of life? I do not think they answer just by legal formalism, but is there vision of the meaning of it all?

Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, a campaigner for abortion rights who, after experiencing a change of heart in the 1970s became a prominent opponent of abortion and the on-screen narrator of the anti-abortion film “The Silent Scream,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. . Dr. Nathanson, an obstetrician-gynecologist practicing in Manhattan, helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now NARAL Pro-Choice America) in 1969 and served as its medical adviser.
After abortion was legalized in New York in 1970, he became the director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, which, in his talks as an abortion opponent, he often called “the largest abortion clinic in the Western world.”
In a widely reported 1974 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, “Deeper into Abortion,” Dr. Nathanson described his growing moral and medical qualms about abortion. “I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”

His unease was intensified by the images made available by the new technologies of fetoscopy and ultrasound.
“For the first time, we could really see the human fetus, measure it, observe it, watch it, and indeed bond with it and love it,” he later wrote in “The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind” (Regnery Publishing, 1996). “I began to do that.”
In addition to the 60,000 abortions performed at the clinic, which he ran from 1970 to 1972, he took responsibility for 5,000 abortions he performed himself, and 10,000 abortions performed by residents under his supervision when he was the chief of obstetrical services at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan from 1972 to 1978.
He did his last procedure in late 1978 or early 1979… and soon embarked on a new career lecturing and writing against abortion.

“The Silent Scream,” a 28-minute film produced by Crusade for Life, was released in early 1985. In it, Dr. Nathanson described the stages of fetal development and offered commentary as a sonogram showed, in graphic detail, the abortion of a 12-week-old fetus by the suction method.
“We see the child’s mouth open in a silent scream,” he said, as the ultrasound image, slowed for dramatic impact, showed a fetus seeming to shrink from surgical instruments. “This is the silent scream of a child threatened imminently with extinction.”
Supporters of abortion rights and many physicians, however, criticized it as misleading and manipulative. Some medical experts argued that a 12-week-old fetus cannot feel pain since it does not have a brain or developed neural pathways, and that what the film showed was a purely involuntary reaction to a stimulus.

Dr. Nathanson earned a degree in bioethics from Vanderbilt University in 1996 and that year was baptized as a Roman Catholic — he described himself up to that time as a Jewish atheist — in a private ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by Cardinal John J. O’Connor, the archbishop of New York.

About his baptism, he said, “I was in a real whirlpool of emotion, and then there was this healing, cooling water on me, and soft voices, and an inexpressible sense of peace. I had found a safe place.”
“He was a pro-life prophet,” Father McCloskey said in a recent Register interview. “He saw the whole culture of death coming, and knew that abortion was just the tip of the iceberg.”

Testing a Fetus for Abnormalities:
The Responsum which Hangs on Hospital Walls
[Shut She’eilat Shlomo vol.2 #312]

Question: Should older women be counseled to have a prenatal exam to reveal an abnormality with the fetus? If a problem is detected, what benefit is there if it is not permissible to have an abortion? Furthermore, since these exams can endanger the life of the fetus, is it permissible to check if the fetus has an abnormality?

Answer: 1. It is a good idea to have this exam, since either way – if the exam is positive and there is no problem, the pregnancy will continue with calm and contentment for the benefit of the mother and perhaps also for the benefit of the fetus. If, however – G-d forbid, the exam is negative and there is a problem, they can turn to a rabbi and ask him if it is permissible to abort in such a case. If he rules that it is permissible – since there are cases where it is permissible, and indeed abortions have been performed in practice by the rulings of great authorities – the parents can responsibly decide what they want to do. If they decide to keep the child, it will be out of free will, and they will accept him lovingly with a full heart, and they will raise him lovingly with a full heart.

2. Regarding man interfering with Hashem’s actions, there is absolutely no interference here. Everything is included in the light of Hashem which illuminates the path of the scientific intellect of man, which acts in a manner permissible according to the word of Hashem, which was revealed to us by Moshe Rabbenu. If this were not so, all medicine and all science in general, would be invalid. And on the contrary, wisdom gives strength to the wise man.

3. Regarding the claim which is heard against abortion being permitted according to Halachah, that it prevents a soul from entering the world, we do not engage in the hidden in order to decide Halachah.. On the contrary, the Halachah must be decided according to what is revealed to us and our children for eternity, and anything which is intended by the Halachah is in any case intended by the secrets of the Torah which are more hidden. If according to Halachah there is room to perform an abortion, we rely and trust that this soul will find a correction in other ways and the hand of Hashem will not shorten.

4. Regarding the test being dangerous, besides the fact that there are tests which are devoid of any danger, such as blood tests; according to Halachah, it is permissible to enter into a remote chance of danger when there is a need, such as making a living – engaging in a profession which has a certain danger involved in it or for a mitzvah. Endangering oneself in a minimal way is called as “an infrequent damage” in Halachah. This is the law in our case, since giving birth to a disabled baby can sometimes destroy an entire family, and all the more so when we are discussing the danger of a fetus which is yet to be born.
We must certainly clarify, however, if it is permissible to have a test with a minimal chance of danger. It does not make sense to enter into details here, since Blessed be Hashem, science continues to advance, and in each individual case, one must take counsel with a G-d-fearing doctor and with an halachic authority.

5. The last is the most precious. The reality is that many women, who are not young, refrain from becoming pregnant, even though they very much have such a desire, because of a fear of giving birth to a disabled baby, and they live with a broken heart. When an halachic authority permits, and even encourages them, to arrange a prenatal exam, and also promises that in the case of a problem, G-d forbid, he will stand by their side in finding an halachic solution with responsible thought given to the effects on the family, this will take a huge burden off of their heart, and they will give birth to more children who will fill their lives with joy and happiness, and add more servants to the world for the sake of increasing the sanctification of Hashem’s Great Name.

It seems the topic of Rock and Orthodoxy is on people’s minds. I think people want it discussed and are thankful for the chance. Similar to the interest in Yoga & Judaism, we do not usually directly discuss the conjunctives.
I received from Jon his appreciation of heavy metal. For interested, here is a summary article with bibliography of some of the heavy metal and relgion issues. Here is more scholarly study of heavy metal and Church showing the limits of integration and a sharp section on the difference between outreach and institution, Christ and the Heavy Metal Subculture: Applying Qualitative Analysis to the Contemporary Debate about H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture

Here is Jon’s email to me.

What role does popular culture like heavy metal play in your life?

Recreation in a certain sense, I guess. Something to do. If I watch a movie or tv, it’s because I need a break from more mentally exhausting pursuits. That’s the role of popular culture in general, for me, but for my part I’m not the heaviest participant in popular culture. Heavy metal in particular is music, so it plays a deeper role than most pop culture, and it provides for the sort of vicarious expression that art generally does.

How does it relate to your religiosity?

That’s an interesting question. With regard to pop culture in general, not much. I think even if more of my time was spent on things that could be called pop culture, it wouldn’t have very much of a relationship with my religiosity. I think pop culture and religion don’t have a lot of common ground to begin with – not because the Torah forbids it, or because pop culture encourages activities that are assur or something, but because the attitudes of participants in each have very little to do with each other. Religion demands service and engagement, whereas pop culture is a place for detachment and having the culture serve you. Regarding to your rock ‘n roll Orthodoxy posts and such, I’d be one of those people who worries that Orthodoxy is being watered down and made less meaningful for the next generation.

With regard to heavy metal music specifically, there’s a more complicated relationship. There’s a greater possibility for common ground than with pop culture in general, insofar as someone who listens to music seriously is engaged by it, and does not listen detached from it. But the music itself speaks to an aspect of the human condition that probably aren’t too compatible with religiosity – depression, anger, arrogance. The music I listen to more or less often changes with my moods, and sometimes I consider the possibility that my listening to metal more frequently indicates that I’m in a less desirable spiritual state – but leading into the next question, I don’t think stopping the music is going to do anything more than generate frustration.

How would you want educators and rabbi to treat, or relate to, your musical taste?

Not to. I can’t remember a specific instance of a rabbi and/or educator telling me that I shouldn’t listen to certain kinds of music. The most I can think of is a vague semi-formed memory of middle school – where we had more yeshivish rabbis and educators – and some teacher hinting that certain kinds of music aren’t ok Halakhically. But if I’m not just making the memory up, I never paid it any attention, because it sounded like one of those machmir things that I didn’t grow up doing anyway.

Before I had a chance to post Jon, I received a new article by Mordy published in the Forward on Matisyahu, wanting him to be more Philip Roth than Jewface/blackface.

Why Matisyahu Is More Interesting Than His Music

The first Stubb’s album came out right after his debut “Shake Off the Dust… Arise,” when his music was still predominately and ostentatiously Jewish. His big single, “King Without a Crown,” namedropped Hashem and Mashiach. It was arguably all downhill from there…“Live at Stubb’s” came close to capturing what Matisyahu originally had going for him — an exciting melaveh malka show and a demo tape where he spit an exuberant early version of “Close My Eyes.”

Slate’s Jody Rosen accused him of the simultaneous crimes of Jewfacing and Blackfacing..

For those of us less than impressed with his music (indie tastemaker website pitchfork put him on a list of “15 Worst Releases of 2005”), this background religious psychodrama was always more interesting than the records themselves. His lyrics may have been upbeat reggae-praise-hymns to God, but he always seemed uncertain. In a 2006 interview with the Dutch magazine Revu he looked depressed and exhausted and answered a question about whether religion makes him happy with, “No, it does not.” If anything, the admission made him seem more Jewish than ever, like a hasidic reggae version of Philip Roth’s Seymour “Swede” Levov in “American Pastoral.”

Now, ignoring the platitude that you can’t go home again, Matisyahu has tried to do just that on “Live at Stubb’s Vol. II.” The album opens with “Kodesh,” where Matisyahu rhymes, “Soar into shamayim where the angels call in love / and the glory of Hashem fits like a glove.” This is much more explicitly Jewish material,

At the conclusion of “Time of Your Song,” Matisyahu repeats the line, “You might get caught in a temple of doom.” It is sung buoyantly, without a trace of self-consciousness or fear, and will do nothing to convince you that it is worth your time to pay attention to Matisyahu’s music again. It may, however, convince you that it’s time to pay attention to Matisyahu himself — the character and persona always more interesting than the music.

Unlike Drake, or Bob Dylan, Matisyahu’s Judaism will never seem light and comfortable. The day his oblique lyrical references to his spiritual conflicts become explicit is the day I’ll be back onboard. In “American Pastoral,” Roth writes, “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.” Read more

Jonathan M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity. Stanford University Press, 2010 was reviewed when it came out by a literature professor Ritchie Robertson (St. John’s College, Oxford) and I originally did not take much notice. But having just read the book, I found it a gold mine of information on the cultural world of German Orthodoxy. The entire last chapter is on the popular middlebrow books written by Rabbi SR Hirsch’s daughter- Sarah Guggenheim and those by Rabbi Markus Lehrman.

Robertson wrote:

As German Jews, from the eighteenth century on, entered the world of German culture, they became strongly attached to the literature of the Enlightenment and classicism (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), which often expressed universal and humane ideals and were central to _Bildung (cultivation). Indeed, as David Sorkin argued in a landmark work of scholarship (The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 [1987]), their continuing attachment to Bildung while the Gentile society around them lowered its cultural standards made them, without realizing it, a distinctive subculture that was only nominally assimilated.
Hess recognizes the need to complicate the outdated German binary distinction between “high” literature and Trivialliteratur.Middlebrow literature is situated between the two

Hess’s approach is well illustrated by his first chapter, on the nineteenth-century German-Jewish historical novel. [The second chapter is on] the “ghetto novel,” pioneered by Leopold Kompert, aimed to reach two audiences. In writing about the enclosed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe that were on the verge of dissolution, Kompert wanted to awake among his Jewish readers nostalgia for their own past and an appreciation of the often tragic conflict of tradition with modernity. Among his Gentile readers, he wanted to arouse sympathy for Jewish communal life and for the tragic isolation experienced by those who first broke away from it.

[The third chapter is on ]The self-appointed guardians of Jewish literature, such as Ludwig Philippson, were ambivalent about another genre, that of romantic fiction. Continuing the eighteenth-century polemic against undisciplined reading, they denounced such books as inducing the spiritual equivalent of curvature of the spine.

Literature is naturally subversive: it questions and undercuts the simplistic ideologies for which people try to instrumentalize it. By that standard, the fiction of orthodoxy discussed in Hess’s final chapter is barely literature. He reveals a lost continent of fiction which tried to show that orthodox Judaism was compatible with modern Western culture. This genre was founded by Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, daughter of the leading neoorthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. To enforce its message that orthodoxy is the key to happy family life, it defines itself against the classics of high culture, deploring the temptations to immorality offered by Heinrich Heine and Schiller, and isolating itself firmly from the literary mainstream.
Read the full Review here.

When I actually read the book, I found an enlightening, funny, and highly critical analysis of Orthodox popular literature and may be first time that Bourdieu and Baudrillard were used to discuss Orthodoxy. I gained lots of little tidbits about the journal Jeshuran and the Orthodox world of it readers.

Mordechai Breuer wrote about orthodox middlebrow literature “By reading classical drama and modern novels in their armchairs people imagined that they were full-fledged participants in German cultural life.” (cited on 167) Hess’s attitude toward Orthodox literature expands this statement.People may affirm high culture but are really formulating a particularistic derivative version. They carved out a minority niche within a contemporary field to give Jews a means of acquiring cultural capital that was necessary for social integration. The literature was an imagined identity of “a harmonious union between modern culture and a self-consciously orthodox Judaism” built on differentiation of themselves from those orthodox who did not read the middlebrow literature. (167)

The middle class life of a blissful marriage and financial success are credited to keeping the traditional practices.

Hess points out the self-serving hubris in Orthodox statements that reveled their self-perception in which they thought that Orthodoxy allows one to offer critical assessments of the greatest authors in literature unavailable to public at large. In their mind, they thought that the secular world only takes the worst of the romantic authors but Orthodoxy is uniquely situated to appreciate the best. Orthodoxy was situated to exist in perfect harmony with German literature in ways that the broader culture could not.

Orthodox fiction portrays itself in its introductions “orthodox fiction harbors the potential to be an art form superior to European high culture.” (185) In self-praise the orthodox protagonists are shown to know Schiller while the reformers are counterfactually portrayed as mixing up Goethe, Shakespeare and Schiller. Reformers are characterized as following the ignoble characters in literature while orthodoxy learns from the noble characters. Rabbis in the stories can always quote the best of the high culture even as they are warning people not to let it lead people astray.

Most minority literature seeks to reframe center and periphery and extol the virtues of the periphery. This literature “enshrines itself as the epitome of high culture in its own insular sphere, with grand gestures that were of little interest to the non-orthodox- and that would have alienated non-Jewish devotees of Schiller, Heine, and other classical writers.” (188)

The long shelf life of this literature shows that these tensions continued for many decades.

Despite proclaiming its superiority, the orthodox literature was clearly derivative from secular works And the fact that the audience did not mind that the works were unoriginal copies shows that this literature led few back to the original classical works. They were proud to be derivative because it showed that their own works expressed the classical sentiments in an orthodox manner better than the originals. Their works were derivative in borrowing plots, themes, and subject matter and most in the community thought that it was a good thing because it made the community aware of these important literary plots and themes.In their mind these Orthodox works looked and read the same way the classical works did.

It created a simulacrum as described by Baudrilliard of being a secular fiction when in reality it was entirely orthodox. “Needless to say, there never was an orthodox Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary.” (192) A self-conscious embracing of orthodoxy becomes a panacea to all social ills and social tensions and commitment to orthodoxy concurrently offers the simularcrum of possessing secularity and secular erudition.

A few weeks ago there was an announcement that the 2003 Van Leer conference on Rav Soloveitchik was finally published by Magnes Press as

רב בעולם החדש

Rabbi in the New World: The Influence of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on Culture, Education and Jewish Thought Edited By Avinoam Rosenak and Naftali Rothenberg

The book is entirely in Hebrew.
The table of contents and introduction are available. (in Hebrew)

More important from my perspective is that my article has finally appeared. It is in Hebrew.
“Triumph without Battle: The Dialectic Approach to Culture in the Thought of Harav Soloveitchik” – Soloveitchik Article 8 בריל

I gave a run down of what actually was taught and discussed in an earlier post. He did not present his books.
For those not familiar with his work. Lorberbaum has his doctorate in Jewish thought from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a professor at Bar-Ilan University’s Faculty of Law.

His book: Image of God: Halakha and Aggadah [Hebrew] Schocken: Tel Aviv and Jerusalem 2004 His recent book is: Subordinated King, Kingship in Classical Judaism, Bar Ilan Press: Ramat Gan, 2008 (forthcoming in English: Continuum [2011]).

His first book showed that the mythic ideas of the Talmud about the human person as literally the image of God in which the human was also in the physical image of God and that human were raised to a divine status. In turn, these ideas were continued and developed in diverse ways by Maimonides and Nahmanides.

From a review by Joshua Kulp

The central thesis of Lorberbaum’s book is that according to the rabbis, the meaning of imago dei is that there is tangible divine presence within every human being. This concept impacted primarily upon two areas of halakhah: the death penalty and procreation. Since humans are physical representations of God, execution is equivalent in some ways to deicide. Conversely, procreation is strongly mandated because it increases God’s physical manifestation in the world by creating more vehicles in which to embody God’s presence.

Importantly, as “images” of the divine, human beings function as icons in a manner similar to the way idols function in the pagan world; they draw God’s presence into themselves, blurring the borders between representation and form. Finally, the drawing of God’s presence into the human body dictates that human beings are embodied with significant theurgic powers.

God’s presence in man pertains, according to the Tannaim, to all the components of his psyche, as to the physical ones” (Image of God, p. 19).

A central image that nurtures the halakhic process and provides a basis for the tangible bond between God and man is the “King and His imagery” model. Thus, for example, the midrash from Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael:

How were the Ten Commandments given? Five on one tablet, and five on the other. By writing “I am the Lord your God,” and opposite it, “You shall not murder,” Scripture states that if anyone sheds blood, Scripture regards this as if he diminishes the image of the King. This is comparable to a flesh-and-blood king who entered a province, and portraits of him were set up, images were made of him, and coins of him were minted. Some time later, his portraits were overthrown, his images were smashed, his coins were canceled, and thus diminished the image of the king. So, too, if anyone sheds blood, Scripture accounts it for him as if he diminishes the image of the King, as it is said [Genesis 9:6]: “Whoever sheds the blood of man … for in His image did God make man” (Image of God, p. 301).

Lorberbaum takes note of the manner in which a single idea is explicated in different circumstances, thereby functioning as a sort of curator of works of art whose depth is realized when they are placed one next to the other. This is a breathtaking act, that enables us to follow the series of interpretive processes from which the Rabbis’ worldview was built.

The book ends with a chapter that describes the transition from the focal point of sanctity in the Temple to the conception that man is the location of the current domicile of the Godhead on earth. This process, that began in the early Pharisaic literature, intensified upon the destruction of the Temple: “Although God had left the Temple, He did not desert the earth. To the contrary, in many senses He is much closer, because He is present in man (in every man), who is made in His image” (Image of God, p. 468).

The second conclusion is halakhic. In one of the key sentences in his book, Lorberbaum argues that the idea of the image of god is not the personification of God, but a claim of the divine dimension in man. Patently, any fundamental myth (whatever it may be) does not exempt us from the mission, the Sisyphean effort, to establish the image of God in man in our actions: in the activity of educators and medical staff, who cope on a daily basis with the patient’s flawed image of God; in the courts, the media, the army.

His forthcoming book Disempowered King Monarchy in Classical Jewish Literature studies the conception of kingship, and its status, powers and authority in Talmudic literature. The book deals with the conception of kingship against the background of the different approaches to kingship both in Biblical literature and in the political views prevalent in the Roman Empire. In the Bible one finds three (exclusive) approaches to kingship: rejection of the king as a legitimate political institution – since God is the (political) king; a version of royal theology according to which the king is divine (or sacral); and a view that God is not a political king yet the king has no divine or sacral dimension. The king is flesh and blood; hence his authority and power are limited. He is a ‘subordinated king’.

Many attend synagogue for social reasons such as to see their friends and catch up on community news. Our Modern Orthodox synagogues were designed with Durkheim in mind. Here is an interesting thesis that the gen y is not leaving because of shallowness and hypocrisy but because they have an online community. The loss of third spaces is also relevant. The rise of religion in the last decades almost killed the Moose lodge, the Freemasons, and the bowling league.

The difference between Generations X and Y isn’t in their views of the church. It’s about those cellphones. It’s about relationships and connectivity. Most Gen X’ers didn’t have cell phones, text messaging or Facebook. These things were creeping in during their college years but the explosive onset of mobile devices and social computing had yet to truly take off.

So why has mobile social computing affected church attendance? Well, if church has always been kind of lame and irritating why did people go in the first place? Easy, social relationships. Church has always been about social affiliation. You met your friends, discussed your week, talked football, shared information about good schools, talked local politics, got the scoop, and made social plans (“Let’s get together for dinner this week!”). Even if you hated church you could feel lonely without it. Particularly with the loss of “third places” in America.

But Millennials are in a different social situation. They don’t need physical locations for social affiliation. They can make dinner plans via text, cell phone call or Facebook. In short, the thing that kept young people going to church, despite their irritations, has been effectively replaced.

Sure, Millennials will report that the “reason” they are leaving the church is due to its perceived hypocrisy or shallowness. My argument is that while this might be the proximate cause the more distal cause is social computing. Already connected Millennials have the luxury to kick the church to the curb. This is the position of strength that other generations did not have. We fussed about the church but, at the end of the day, you went to stay connected. For us, church was Facebook!

The pushback here will be that all this Millennial social computing, all this Facebooking, isn’t real, authentic relationship. I’d disagree with that assessment. It goes to the point I made earlier: Most of our Facebook interactions are with people we know, love, and are in daily contact with. Facebook isn’t replacing “real” relationships with “virtual” relationships. It’s simply connecting us to our real friends. And if you can do this without getting up early on Sunday morning why go to church? Particularly if the church is hypocritical and shallow? Why mess with it?

Why are Millennials leaving the church? It’s simple. Mobile social computing has replaced the main draw of the traditional church: Social connection and affiliation.
Here is the full post at Experimental Theology.

Here is the h/t at Mirror of Justice, which added:

To the extent that this argument has merit, I’m guessing it holds more truth for Protestants than for Catholics. In general, my experience of Protestant churches is that the churchgoing experience is more social, especially for young people, than the experience at most Catholic churches, where the experience is more centered on the individual, and where folks tend to flee as soon as Mass is finished (or sooner, in many cases)