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Quarreling with Orthodoxy- more post-orthodoxy

Posted on July 26, 2010 by | 6 comments

Here is a book review from internetmonk.com, the blog from which I first adapted the term post-evangelical to post-orthodox. The problems of emphasis on body count and any technique or argument is good is it makes someone religious are obvious in the Orthodox community. The sentimentality and materialism of the community are standard critiques of Orthodoxy. His first problem of provincialism takes a bit more imagination to understand. Provincialism means that Orthodoxy means following the opinions of Teaneck, Riverdale, or YU and not the full gamut of the tradition. It also means that Orthodoxy is following the social enclave and mores of frum neighborhoods more than following God. The blog notes that now we need a book of solutions.

From internetmonk: A Lover’s Quarrel with the Evangelical Church

By Chaplain Mike
Warren Cole Smith’s book, A Lover’s Quarrel with the Evangelical Church has a title with which I resonate. If you’ve been reading Internet Monk for any length of time, you’ll know that we describe ourselves in two ways: We are evangelicals. We’re having struggles with the church. We are engaged in a critique of the church which bears Jesus’ name. We have become convinced that it is not very Jesus-shaped these days.

Many of us call ourselves “post-evangelical”—that is, we no longer feel comfortable within the system known as the American evangelical church.
In this book, Warren Cole Smith sets forth the question many of us are asking: What is it about evangelical theology or evangelical practice that is both so appealing and so troubling? (p.8 )

One of the great contributions Smith makes is that he gives names to the chains that bind us in cultural captivity. These are:
• The New Provincialism: Evangelicalism has so cut itself off from history and Biblical and church tradition that, “the evangelical church risks ceasing to be a Christian church at all.” (p. 60)

• The Triumph of Sentimentality: “Sentimentality is the result of our unwillingness to realign our desires with the reality of the world, but rather to remake the world in accordance with our desires” (p. 67). Having rejected history and our theological legacy, today’s evangelicalism is all about creating an alternate reality—through highly efficient, full-service megachurches, through technologically-generated “worship experiences,” through therapeutic, positive-thinking, and prosperity-Gospel preaching.

• The Christian-Industrial Complex: The “Christian market” has expanded so dramatically over the past generation, that a vast industry has grown up to supply products to satisfy its desires. It’s the American way. Now, many aspects of church life are driven by target marketing rather than by theologically-informed, pastorally-sensitive ordained and accountable leaders.

• Body-Count Evangelism: As any evangelical will tell you—size matters. Smith shows how today’s evangelicalism, fueled by such trends as the growth of the parachurch movement, has bought fully into the revivalist tradition with its emphasis on numbers, scale, and spectacle.

• The Great Stereopticon: Rejecting the long understood fact that “the medium is the message,” evangelicalism has adopted the philosophy that any means is OK as long as one is communicating the right message. However, as Smith observes, “When you change the medium, you change the message, whether you intend to or not and though the words remain exactly the same. It is a lesson the evangelical church has not yet learned.”

I would love to see Warren Cole Smith write a second book for us—A Lover’s Proposal for the Evangelical Church—in which he might flesh out these suggestive ideas and help guide evangelicalism back to a more Jesus-shaped way.

From the Amazon review
Smith argues that we evangelicals are just as prone to being power-hungry, materialistic and being builders of our own empires as anybody else, to the detriment of community.
Evangelicals are also often guilty of a new provincialism. Provincialism usually means our outlook is narrowly determined by our small localized setting. For evangelicals, our narrowness is due to being stuck only in the “now.”

Now how would we solve each of these? What would be the chapters of the book about orthodoxy?

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Rabbi Ethan Tucker at Davar

Posted on July 25, 2010 by | 18 comments

A variety of Shabbat conversations and statements.

Conversation #1
Person #1 to me- We were discussing at lunch your opinion that Orthodoxy is about to change rapidly. Some of the people did not see it.
Me- Here we are at an event where an egalitarian rabbi is invited to teach in an Orthodox Teaneck institution and the people in this room are encouraging their kids to go to Hadar.
Person #1 – Oh, I see.

Conversation #2
Person #2 (educator in Beit Shemesh) You cant believe how Haredi Beit Shemesh has become. And it is amazing that the American Olim are going along with it.
Me- Is that what everyone expected when they moved there 20 years?
Person #2 – I don’t know, actually no they did not. They came as YU orthodoxy and now they are all Haredi, send their kids to Haredi schools and even the “modern” ones steer toward haredi. It seems they really just drifted and did not know what was going on.
Me- Why?
Person #2 It seems they did not realize how much they were new immigrants in a foreign country. They did not know the ideologies, they were out of the loop, and they lived in their expectation of presenting Yu of the 1980’s not israeli reality. Now their kids are either dat’lash or Haredi. They did not realize how much their kids would see them as immigrant foreigners who have little to teach. The system corrected the kids despite the deviance of the parents.

Ethan Tucker
If you are keeping mizvot only as an act of submission then they don’t trust the values of the Talmud and it is no different than someone who rejects the halakhah. If someone says the Talmud is against modern values and rejects the halakhah they are saying the halakhah rubs against human moral sense. But if you have an orthodoxy that emphasizes “teleological suspension of the ethical” or submission even if the halakhah feels intuitively wrong they are also showing that the Halakhah violates their natural feelings and their natural ethical sensibility. Both sides are the same, only that one side choices ethics over halakhah while the other side choices halakhah over ethics. We need a reading of Hazal that makes sense to us and the world. “For this is your wisdom, and understanding in the sight of nations.” The approach of submission shows that orthodoxy is alienated from the values of the halakhah, they can only be cynical, skeptical, estranged. (AB- ironic also)

Rabbi Tucker recounted that he was at Gush for five weeks and while there he hear a story praising the role of submission in the case of a couple where they discover one is a kohen and the other is a convert. The magid shiur emphasized repeatedly the need for submission to the halakhah. Then I knew this place is not for me. … Instead it could have been presented as the importance of preserving zera kohen as a sign of true lineage of Israel; it could have been a discussion of what is a kohen today to let me know Hazal’s values. Instead the story assumed that the listener is alienated from Hazal and can only submit despite his better sense.
For more on Rabbi Tucker- see this prior post.

Found at Mincha
When I went to get my stashed copy of the new Sifri Zuta, I found a full printout of the orthopraxrabbiblog. This group usually buys books hardcover and does not have web printouts lying around. They also dont keep up on the Orthodox blogs.

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Only Zaddikim can Save us

Posted on July 23, 2010 by | 22 comments

I just read an article about Catholicism that with only a few changes could apply to Judaism. Everyday we read about people disillusioned with the financial, moral, and political scandals in the community. There are not many great rabbis that are not involved in scandals. Almost (not all) any Orthodox rabbi of authority has web pages dedicated to his scandals. Even though the defenders will argue otherwise, the rabbinate is more associated with misuse of power than role models of Torah lives. Many have been turned off by fundamentalist interpretations of the Torah. Yet, greater cultural engagement – history, philosophy, social science- wont bring people back. Vague mottos for modern Orthodoxy that do not require actual aspiration will not help. We need a real sense of before and after. We are proud of the materialism and careerism of Centrism without discussing the cultural trade offs. At best, there is moralism about a specific fetishized practices, but no core drive for values. This article thinks that only a new set of saints will help. New zaddikim are needed to enliven people and to show value. People I know have wanted a new mussar movement for a long time- maybe that can help. But real mussar is foreign. The early Hasidic Rebbes helped revive Ukrainian Jewry from its community decadence only to have their grandchildren be caught themselves in the morase. Telling Hasidic Torah wearing a bekeshe wont save us from moral decadence and misuse of funds, power, and authority.
What would a Jewish saint of the 21st century look like? What moral problems would be addressed? What virtues would be preached? What sort of saint could, or would, be followed in suburbia?

Only the Saints Can Save Us– J. Peter Nixon is an award-winning Catholic writer whose work has appeared in America, Commonweal, U.S. Catholic, and elsewhere

As Ross Douthat noted in a recent essay in the Atlantic, this was the year when the clerical sexual abuse crisis truly became global, reaching even into the Vatican itself. Douthat observed that “for millions in Europe and America, Catholicism is probably permanently associated with sexual scandal, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Most of the solutions offered are unlikely to have much of an impact. The liberal path of greater rapprochement between Church and culture has not proven successful for those denominations that have tried it. But an embittered and joyless defense of orthodoxy — the kind on display in far too many quarters of the Catholic internet — repels far more people than it attracts.

Our children and grandchildren are abandoning the faith because they perceive — rightly — that its demands are at fundamental variance with the lives we have prepared them to lead. We have raised them to seek lives characterized by material comfort, sexual fulfillment, and freedom from any obligations that they have not personally chosen. Should it surprise us that they fail to take seriously our claims to follow one who embraced poverty, chastity, and obedience to the will of God?

A revival of the Church in our time will require believers who are willing to take risks on behalf of the Gospel. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Cardinal Law, rather than retiring to his sinecure in Rome, had instead made a penitential journey to Haiti and lived out his days in a hospital cleaning toilets and picking maggots from the wounds of street people. Some might have seen such a penance as inadequate to the offense, but it could not have been dismissed as an empty gesture.

The future of the Church is not in the hands of its leaders, whose exhortations seem increasingly to fall on deaf ears… In the end, it is only the saints who can save us.

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Interview with James Kugel in il Sussidiario

Posted on July 20, 2010 by | Leave a comment

In your book On Being a Jew you make an argument in support of the value of orthodoxy. What is orthodoxy? What value does it have for contemporary people and societies?

I suppose orthodoxy in general can refer to all sorts of things – sticking to tradition (and, hence, a reluctance or unwillingness to change); fundamentalism or literalism, especially in regard to Scripture; a devotion to established doctrines and rituals, and along with this a certain mistrust of spontaneity or the lack of framework. Any of these can be valuable or harmful in contemporary societies – sometimes both at the same time. I think one of the things that orthodoxy in religion provides is a feeling of stability and continuity, and of belonging to something ongoing that is bigger than oneself.

Speaking in particular of the Jewish situation: Jewish orthodoxy is a broad topic. What is it? Who are the authors of the official line? Who are your points of reference?

Strictly speaking, Orthodox Judaism is a modern invention. This term was first used in the early nineteenth century as a rallying cry against Reform Judaism and the other forces that threatened traditional Jewish ways of worship and Jewish self-definition. But in a broader sense, Orthodoxy today sees itself as the heir to centuries and centuries of earlier tradition; it is the form of Judaism today that most directly and meaningfully continues the Judaism of the ages.

In this sense, its “authors” are the classical texts of Judaism: the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and later codifications of Jewish law. Since Judaism is all about serving God and occupying oneself with doing the things that God commanded, these texts are crucial for Orthodox Jews. They try to keep all the laws of ritual and ethical behavior scrupulously – this is sometimes a point of distinction between them and other Jews.

But the “who” of Orthodox Judaism is not an easy matter to define.

Today, the old Orthodoxy (sometimes styled “modern Orthodoxy”) continues, but the line between it and the Haredim has been somewhat blurred. What is more, the rise of the state of Israel, along with the entrance of non-European, Sephardic Jews into the broader religious picture in Israel, has made this matter of “who” far more complicated than it used to be.

Critics of organized religion assert that religion has been a cause, at least ostensibly, of war and division. Indeed, much of the world is involved in a war now that is, in many ways, a religious one. How do you think orthodoxy stands up to this charge?

It depends whose orthodoxy you mean. I do not think that there are many conflicts currently going on that could be blamed on Christian orthodoxy. Jewish orthodoxy, I am sorry to say, is not an entirely innocent bystander in the current crisis in the Middle East, but I hardly think that it is a main factor.

What do you think of Zionism as a project, and what does that have to do with your view of orthodoxy? Do you see the Jewish state as a Messianic project and expression of orthodoxy?

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. It began in earnest in the nineteenth century. Its original aim was to allow Jews to settle in the multi-national, multi-cultural Ottoman empire, along various tracts of land purchased in parts of Palestine, the Jews’ historic homeland. This movement soon came to focus on the hope for a Jewish state,

As for the role of Jewish orthodoxy in Zionism, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was rather negligible; Zionism was an overwhelmingly secular movement. As its goals came closer to realization, however, religious Jews found it more congenial, and especially following the Six Day War in 1967, many such Jews saw Israel as nothing less than the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and even the forerunner of Messianic redemption.

I personally support the state of Israel – I am an Israeli citizen and have lived there for more than twenty years – but I am a bit uncomfortable with the identification of the state with any eschatology, Orthodox or otherwise. I’m glad Israel exists, but I await somewhat nervously the judgment of history.

Full version here

dont forget h/t

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Three personal announcements

Posted on July 20, 2010 by | 14 comments

1] My book has sold out its first edition but the publisher wont meet to discuss paperback until 12 months from publication. So no paperback until late Fall 2011. Both Barnes & Noble and Amazon have it at $57. If you come to my home or school then I have copies for 12 dollars less.

2] If anyone is interested in taking graduate courses with me in NJ (Monday and Tuesday eve) then contact me by personal email. If you are in any way an educator (including most clergy) then it is full scholarship. I should have posted this in the Spring so if you are interested then email ASAP. At least one person comes in from NYC and one from Phila.

3] If anyone is interested in a guest post and has something appropriate, then email me.

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Marilynne Robinson and James Kugel 2 of 3 posts

Posted on July 20, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Several months ago, I posted a critique of Kugel.

Well lo and behold Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind has a similar critique in her book pp 24-29. I was not expecting to find it here. Robinson had the same sense that I did that Kugel’s book was equally non-humanistic.

Robinson’s version of the critique is that Kugel assigns “primitively” on the Bible, “this most seminal text”  Kugel states that all meaning in the book is eisegetical and that any lessons for our life would be greeted by the Biblical authors with incomprehension. The book is not even religion but etiology for political and social realities.

In contrast, Robinson declares that no one would be reading the Bible today if it did not have what to teach.

Kugel states that books from Mesopotamia like Gilgamesh written 3000 years ago has no messages-so too the Bible has no messages

Robinson writes that: on the contrary, Gilgamesh is one of the great stories of human civilization and its quest for immortality is eternal. There was brilliance to Babylonia. “The low estimate of Babylonia becomes the basis for a lowered estimate of the Hebrew Bible – the modernist declension.” Gilgamesh is not part of a religious canon and does not have exegesis and is still a great contribution to civilization

Robinson says that China, India, and Greece all have ancient works that allow us glimpses into how humanity deals with theodicy, anthropology, and catastrophe. If the Upanishads, Gilgamesh, and Homer have what to teach then so does the Bible

In this case, Robinson claims that we can learn from the monotheistic changes to the story. We cant assume Gilgamesh was just patched into Genesis and no one noticed the plagiarism- It was reworked to teach a specific message.

She thinks that Kugel assumes ancients had no culture and he has a low estimate of their creativity.

Kugel backs himself into the same false dichotomy as the fundamentalists and the new atheists. For Kugel, if the Bible is not that of the Scribes and their midrashic traditions, where texts are read intertextually and contemporaneously, then it is not religion.

Robinson also points out the conceit of moderns to think they are first to notice the ancient near east background in the bIble and the use of Gilgamesh. Grotius used Biblical similarities to Gilgamesh to argue for truth of Bible because they provided external confirmation!! She says, of course Moses used the fables and religions of antiquity – so what?

She concludes that Kugel’s claim that anyone who disagrees with him is dishonest is a modernist goal of showing others wrong. His need or anyone’s need for debunking the past as an urgent crusade without concern for the wealth of pre-modern knowledge, she rejects simply as a conceit.

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Absence of Mind- Marilynne Robinson 1 of 3 posts

Posted on July 20, 2010 by | 3 comments

Friends recommended that I read Marilynne Robinson’s writings, especially her Pulitzer winning novels. She is touted as a master craftsmith of the written word, theological believer, and creating her own form of Neo-Calvinism. So I decided to pick up her recent response to the skeptics.

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, by Marilynne Robinson, Yale 158 pages

The book is her answer to the new atheists in which she argues that we have humanism, subjective self, and human experience. She does not respond to their claims as much as say that there is more to the world. She claims that they are creating a lack of mind, a lack of self. And that they are only creating a “para-scientific literature”

She quotes Dennett’s definition of religion “as about social systems avow with a belief in a supernatural agent.” Dennett is not talking about private religion, religious experience, religion as meaning in life or creation of moral order. Maimonidean rationalism, Buberian dialogue, and new age renewal is not religion for Dennett.

Robinson shows that the problem of materialism, scientism, and behaviorism are not new problems. She claims that the Materialist position is separated from the wealth of human insight. The subjective human mind is what gives us knowledge of the human experience.

She opens her book with a description of how scientists feel a sense of discovery, accomplishment, and fulfillment when they solve a scientific problem. From a human point of view, science is not just facts in a text book.

She is an advocate of the writings of William James and his radical empiricism. And treats the new atheists as rejecting James. She reduces much of their materialism and the selfish gene to the nineteenth arguments of T. H. Huxley. (more on this in later post- post #3) And she uses Freud as her example of psychological reductionism.She finds ever new ways of showing that these new writings do not add anything to the debate of the last two centuries. (Except that a generation of science trained religious fundamentalists are discovering them for a first time. They trade the absolute claims of their material religious fundamentalism for a secular version.)

She thinks they are bypassing Donne, Bach, the Sufi poets and Socrates. She considers as essential to human life metaphysics, imagination, human experience, and in turn these are to be considered a revelation from God

Even in the social realm, she finds their obsession with Fundamentalists misleading. She asks: what of the religion of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or her own cultured Calvinism?  She does accept  from the new atheists that some of the fundamnetalists were equally bad for the soul since they are just as materialist and not concerned with the self as the new atheists.  They are also obscurantist and anti-education. She suggests and I agree, “that some of the new atheism is a reaction to militant religious fundamentalism.”

She agrees with Harvard popularize of science Stephen Gould, that religion and science have nothing to do with each other. Gould used to be assigned at YU and the subject of frequent public lectures by the Bio dept.

Pinker considers that religion offers the answers to the ultimate questions, but since the ultimate questions are unanswerable then we dismiss the whole activity. To this  she answers, no, no, no. Questions that are deemed unanswerable has driven the thoughts of humanity. The history of civilization  answers these questions in ever new answers and forms. From the Library at Alexandria  to the Library of Congress we have collections that enrich our lives- ideas, texts, human experiences, quests for meaning.

She is defiantly preaching the choir. She assumes her reader has read, or at least can read, Grotius, Calvin, Spenser, Emerson, Jung, Searle and Putnam. Those who cannot are the very materialists swayed by the new rhetoric. And those who defend against the new atheists through materialist apologetics and trying to refute scientific method wont find comfort here either.  Religion is not in the scientific realm. Yet, Robinison as a committed non-liberal Calvinist does point in the direction that future discussions of a viable religion position needs to take.

Quotes from reviews:

Robinson makes a strong, unapologetic case, not for mystery but for self-respect.

We look in the mirror, Marilynne Robinson writes in “Absence of Mind,” and we see an untrustworthy, self-interested creature with an untrustworthy mind. No wonder a philosopher such as Tolle, for instance, who offers the idea that we aren’t so bad after all, that we have a right to believe in the value of experience and the mystery of the universe, might be clung to like a floe that a polar bear has finally found to rest upon.

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Gilead,” Robinson in this new nonfiction work questions the authority of science, not its methods, which she sees as evidence for the capacity and beauty of the human mind. She is annoyed by the arrogance of modernist thought, which has entrapped us for so many generations: “After Darwin, after Nietzsche, after Freud, after structuralism and post-structuralism, after Crick and Watson and the death of God, some assumptions were to be regarded as fixed and inevitable and others as exposed for all time and for all purposes as naïve and untenable.”

Robinson, however, affirms her own “very high estimate of human nature”: “We have had a place in the universe since it occurred to the first of our species to ask what our place might be.”

But positivism and modernist thought have had the opposite effect: They encourage the “exclusion of felt life”: We are discouraged from making explanations about our place in the universe. Subjectivity is not allowed; instead, there is what Robinson calls an “absence of mind.”

Guardian Review by Karen Armstrong

Washington Post Review

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Yehuda Amichai on Jerusalem- for tisha be-av

Posted on July 20, 2010 by | Leave a comment

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Then let my right be forgotten.
Let my right be forgotten, and my left remember.
Let my left remember, and your right close
And your mouth open near the gate.

I shall remember Jerusalem
And forget the forest — my love will remember,
Will open her hair, will close my window,
will forget my right,
Will forget my left.

If the west wind does not come
I’ll never forgive the walls,
Or the sea, or myself.
Should my right forget
My left shall forgive,
I shall forget all water,
I shall forget my mother.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Let my blood be forgotten.
I shall touch your forehead,
Forget my own,
My voice change
For the second and last time
To the most terrible of voices —
Or silence.

Let the memorial hill remember

Let the memorial hill remember instead of me,
that’s what it’s here for. Let the par in-memory-of remember,
let the street that’s-named-for remember,
let the well-known building remember,
let the synagogue that’s named after God remember
let the rolling Torah scroll remember, let the prayer
for the memory of the dead remember. Let the flags remember
those multicolored shrouds of history: the bodies they wrapped
have long since turned to dust. Let the dust remember.
Let the dung remember at the gate. Let the afterbirth remember.
Let the beasts of the field and birds of the heavens eat and remember.
Let all of them remember so that I can rest.

A Touch of Grace:

At times Jerusalem is a city of knives,
And even the hopes for peace are sharp enough to slice into
The harsh reality and they become dulled or broken.
The church bells try so hard to ring out calm, round tones,
But they become heavy like a pestle pounding on a mortar,
Heavy, muffled, downtrodding voices. And the cantor
And the muezzin try to sing sweetly
But in the end the sharp wail bursts forth:
O Lord, God of us all, The Lord is One
One, one, one, one.
(The Hebrew word for “one” also means “sharp” in Hebrew)

Love of the Land
by Yehuda Amichai / Translated by Linda Zisquit

And the land is divided
into districts of memory and regions of hope,
and the residents mingle with each other,
like people returning from a wedding
with those returning from a funeral.

And the land isn’t divided into war zones and peace zones.
And whoever digs a trench against cannon shells,
will return and lie in it with his girl,
if he lives till peace comes.

And the land is pretty.
Even surrounding enemies decorate it
with weapons shining in the sun
like beads on a neck.

And the lands a package-land:
and its well-tied and everything is in it,
and its tightly bound
and the strings sometimes hurt.

The land is very small
and I can contain it inside me.
The erosion of the land also erodes my rest
and the level of the Kinneret is always on my mind.
Therefore I am able to feel it entirely
by shutting an eye: sea-valley-mountain.
And therefore I am able to remember
all that’s happened in it
at once, like a person remembering
his entire life at the moment of death.

Poem #12 Eicha

“How doth the city sit solitary,” the prophet
lamented over Jerusalem.

If Jerusalem is a woman, does she know desire?
When she cries out, is it from pleasure
or pain? What is the secret of her appeal?
When does she open her gates willingly and when is it rape?

All her lovers abandon her, leaving her
with the wages of love necklaces earrings,
towers and houses of prayer
in the English, Italian, Russian, Greek, Arab styles,
wood and stone, turrets and gables, wrought-iron gates,
rings of gold and silver, riots of color. They all give her
something to remember her by, then abandon her.

I would have liked to talk to her again, but I lost her
among the dancers. Dance is total abandon.
Jerusalem sees only the skies above her
and whoever sees only the skies above–not
the face of her lover–truly does lie solitary,
sit solitary, stand solitary, and dance all alone.

“Songs of Zion the Beautiful #21”

Jerusalem’s a place where everyone remembers he’s forgotten something
but doesn’t remember what it is.
And for the sake of remembering I wear my father’s face over mine.
This is the city where my dream-containers fill up like a diver’s oxygen tanks.
Its holiness sometimes turns into love.
And the questions that are asked in these hills
are the same as they’ve always been: “Have you
seen my sheep?” “Have you seen my shepherd?”
And the door of my house stands open
like a tomb where someone was resurrected.

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Relativism Debated

Posted on July 16, 2010 by | Leave a comment

We had a nice debate going between Kevin and Arie on relativism. Here was the original discussion that got me interested. It was on the Legal blog Mirror of Justice between July 2 and July 10. Here are some of the positions. There were thousands of words on the topic. These are some of the less semantic and less technical responces. I must note that Leslie Green himself tweeted the discussion here. I alternate blockquote and italics to differentiate. I did not write any of the material below.

Green inadvertently affirms the future Pope’s thesis when he argues that we do have minimum moral standards and that they are determined by the ever changing whims the majority. To this country bumpkin, that sure sounds like relativism. But, what do I know? Michael S

The point that Pope Benedict is trying to communicate, I believe, is that many people, including many influential people, appeal (sometimes only implicitly, but sometimes quite explicitly) to relativism in the face of demanding moral claims. People want to do what they want to do. As the socially liberal movie maker Woody Allen famously said, “the heart wants what the heart wants.” So, when morality gets in the way, many are tempted to say (sincerely enough, even if often inconsistently) that morality lacks any objective basis. Robert George

The serious disagreement between Pope Benedict and Robby (and Catholic moral-theological traditionalists generally) on the one side, and some Catholic moral-theological dissidents on the other, with respect to the issue of same-sex sexual conduct, is a disagreement about the requirements of human well-being. This is a disagreement between two groups neither of whom is relativist (or subjectivist), both of whom are fiercely anti-relativist. Michael Perry

When I was young, innocent, and hopeful, a conversation broke out among several friends and myself about the old ‘Nazis marching in Skokie’ case, which I had read about in connection with a history of the ACLU. Some of my friends, with whom I was inclined to agree, thought if fitting for the city to prohibit the march. Other friends, with whom I was inclined to disagree, argued that the prohibition was a violation of the Nazis’ First Amendment rights. I recall feeling great irritation with this latter observation, and I said as much. It just couldn’t be licit, I thought…For in ‘tolerating everything’ one would be tolerating, among other things, intolerance — toleration’s contrary.

I hit upon a tentative solution that I later recognized to have been a primitive grope in the direction of Kripke’s response to the Epimenides (the ‘paradox of the liar’). The Epimenides, as many here will recall, is the paradox occasioned by a statement’s apparent self-denial — a statement of the form ‘this statement is false.’ The putative paradox stems from the statement’s being false if it is true, and true if it is false — assuming, of course, that it must be one or the other and not both. (That assumption turns out to be false.)
Now intuitively, Kripke’s response to paradoxes of this form, if I’m remembering it rightly, involves distinguishing between what he calls ‘grounded’ and ‘ungrounded’ statements. A grounded statement, again if I recall this correctly, is about something other than a statement. It’s about dogs, or cats, or what ever, anything other than statements. So long as you have one of those, then any statement about that statement, or about a statement about the statement about the (grounded) statement, or … , will itself be grounded as well. Otherwise, not. If one then stipulates that only a grounded statement is possessed of a truth value, one defuses the Epimenides by observing that the self-denying proposition in question is ungrounded, hence possessed of no truth value at all, true or false, hence not paradoxical in the ‘both true and false’ sense.

Now my own youthful proto-Kripkean response to the ‘tolerance’ conundrum worked in much the same way as Kripke’s response to the Epimenides: ‘Tolerance,’ I speculated, always carried what I then called a sort of ‘argument place’ with it. It always implicates what the grammarians call a ‘direct object.’ One does not simply ‘tolerate.’ One ‘tolerates x,’ or ‘tolerates y,’ etc. Further, assuming some x that it is right to tolerate and wrong not to tolerate, it surely will often be right not to tolerate intolerance of that x. At any rate it will need not be incoherent to deny toleration to such instances of intolerance.

Now, how does this bear on the conversation here? I think in this way: There seems to be much intolerance afoot in some quarters, for example, of girls and women who wish to participate on equal terms with boys and men in educational and vocational settings. My guess is that most of us in ‘the West,’ be we generally ‘leftward’- or ‘rightward’-leaning where political questions are concerned, agree that instances of this form of intolerance are not to be tolerated, either as an ethical or as a legal matter. And there is no incoherence, nor need there be any bigotry or relativism, in any such judgment.

All of us, ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘in between,’ who find sexism of the specified type intolerable are simply taking a universally applicable human right seriously — ‘absolutely’ seriously. We are not thinking as ‘bigots’ or ‘relativists.’ And we might even be right, moreover, in some cases, to describe certain instances of the particular form of intolerance itself as bigoted or relativist — if prompted or defended, say, by reference to a putatively relevant ‘fundamental difference’ between women and men, or to a putative ‘religious’ or ‘cultural’ right to subordinate women.

There are some, for example, who appear to take sexual orientation to be more a matter of behavior or ‘lifestyle choice’ than of genetically determined or deeply-psychologically-rooted identity. There are others who appear to see things the other way round.

To those who see sexual orientation as merely a ‘lifestyle choice,’ by contrast, it will sometimes be tempting, again in careless moments, to view defenders of ‘gay rights’ or ‘gay marriage’ as ‘relativists.’ For it will sometimes seem to them, again prior to reflection, that their opponents think ‘anything goes’ where behavior and ‘lifestyle choice’ are concerned. But in fact bigotry and relativism are apt to be neither here nor there in these cases. For in fact most on both sides will be absolutists about moral and ethical matters, and in agreement that it is ethically wrongful to view persons as subordinate on the basis of ineluctable attributes.

And it is only by keeping one’s eye on the real ball — that is, by fixing attention on the act or attribute in question — that we keep the door open to real progress. I fear that labeling, as ‘bigots’ or ‘relativists,’ those who view the ball differently than we do is, all too often, an indicator that our eyes have strayed from the ball, and that the discussion has accordingly become ungrounded. Posted by Robert Hockett

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Dictatorship of Relativism

Posted on July 13, 2010 by | 10 comments

Last month on the BBC there was an all-star discussion of Cardinal Ratzinger’s phrase “Dictatorship of Relativism.” Discussants included the philosophers Simon Blackburn and Stephen Wang, Archbishop Williams, and members of Parliament. Williams was even keel and noted how fundamentalism and relativism are flip sides of each other – both are absolute and close down discussion. Williams also noted how easily people move from fundamentalism to non-belief.

However, Leslie Green Professor of Philosophy of Law, Balliol College, Cambridge launched into a biting critique seeing that those who throw around the word skepticism are scapegoating ones anxieties. The Nazis blamed the Jews, the Pope blamed the relativists. This is important because many Rabbis use buzz words like relativist, following zeitgeist, or post-modern in the same way to designate whatever they don’t like. Green also denies that people are relativist or that they think anything goes. Finally, he asks how much should we tolerate the demands of religious groups that go against public welfare? He offers a note that religious groups are good at arguing from pseudo-sociological data.

On the blogs that I read this interview has been generating much discussion. I will give some of the conflicting reactions in a later post- along with more of my comments. But in the meantime, if you got a chance to enter the discussion- What would you say after Leslie Green?

In April 2005 Joseph Ratzinger, the most powerful
theologian in the Roman Catholic Church, delivered a homily to the cardinals preparing for the conclave that was to elect him Pope.

RATZINGER (Source: Vatican Radio): Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are
building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.

WILLIAMS: To the extent I think that people are a bit threatened and a bit impatient about real engagement and argument, then the odd thing is that fundamentalism is the mirror image of a kind of
inflexible relativism. People want the arguments to be over. Just as the relativist or the junior official in the Foreign Office – we want the arguments to be over, let’s just you know treat everyone equally
– so the fundamentalist says I want the arguments to be over. And what one philosopher who matters quite a lot to me said about thelabour and the patience and the pain of real thinking just disappears.

GREEN: In the 1930s, in Germany, anything that was bad in the eyes of the German state – 32, 39 – was caused by who? The Jews. Why? They didn’t like the Jews. America – 1952, 55. Anything that
was bad in America was caused by well who? The Communists. Well why? Because they didn’t like the Communists. And so now here we are – 2005. Benedict I of course invents this concept of the dictatorship of relativism. There’s a bunch/clutch of bad things
happening and he doesn’t like them. Who’s it caused by? Caused by the relativists, you know.

GREEN: No-one in this country or in America or in Europe thinks that anything goes. So let’s take sexual morality. Sadly, to my way of thinking, since there’s so much that’s rich and important in Catholic moral theology, the Church has transformed itself into a
kind of fertility cult, so that what it really cares about now is making sure that you know men aren’t having sex with men and nobody’s having abortions and there are no condoms in the JCR around the corner here and that there aren’t any divorces. Well even in a fairly liberal, tolerant sexual morality, there’s nobody
that argues that anything goes. The people that Pope Benedict deplores don’t think that rape is okay, and they certainly don’tthink that the sexual abuse of children is okay. Everybody agrees
there is a bottom line minimum to which we all must conform. And the thing is of course that some folks disagree about where theminimums should be drawn. That’s democracy.

GREEN: So that if I can say well I’m a member of a church and the view in my church happens to be that all children have to participate in animal
sacrifice and so we’re not allowing children to be adopted out to families that don’t tolerate the sacrifice of rams on the full moon every month – we would say “No, this is preposterous” even although it’s only a sheep. Now people can disagree about this, and obviously many religious people disagree because they have very firm – dare I say – absolutist, fundamentalist and mostly uninformed views about the nature of human sexuality that are overlain on top of their religious views. They’re entitled to those.
But if you’re providing a service to the public – you’re not talking about your little congregation, you’re
talking about the fates of children, their welfare and their wellbeing – you have an obligation to respect the minimum.

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Rav Morgenstern on Komarno

Posted on July 12, 2010 by | 5 comments

For an earlier posting on Rav Morgenstern’s teaching of meditation –see here

The Komarno Rebbe has yet to merit a scholarly treatment or even a Wikipedia entry.
In the meantime you can read about his uncle Tzvi Hirsh of Zidichov or a general overview at the Komarno article. You can also read
Turn Aside from Evil and Do Good: An Introduction and a Way to the Tree of Life, by Zevi Hirsch Eichenstein, translation and introduction by Louis Jacobs,

I remember when Moshe Idel offered Komarno as an undergraduate seminar, there were only four of us in the room- two undergraduates, myself, and another YU grad. Idel spend most of his time showing how the autobiography-diary can be used to unpack discussions about experience. In the diary, he writes “I did” and in his theoretical writings he writes “One should” or “It was done by some.” Idel also pointed out that the three most erudite Kabbalists among Hasidic rebbes were the Komarno, Hayim of Chernowitz, and the Koznitzer.

The Komaro wrote dozens of works and at least ten of them major works, a commentary on the Zohar –Zohar Hai, a commentary on Humash- Heikhal Ha-Berachah, a mystical diary, commentaries on Mizvot, on mishneh, and much more. The Komarno Rebbe practiced the Lurianic-Vital Yihudim, actively sought the presence of the shekhinah, and had conversations with deceased saints. His introduction to Humash mentions how Moshe received an out of body ex-static experience. His was a Hasidism of doing, a religious life of performing yihudim, tikuniim, and segulot. He and his uncle had a special disdain for Chabad because they turned chasidus into a form of hakirah- philosophic investigation.

When I received two shiurim from Rav Morgenstern on Komarno I was pleased and looked forward to studying them. They are based on his shiur in Yiddish 8 pm on Tuesday nights – ohalei yosef #4. On other nights he gives shiur on Breslov, Ashlag, and Chabad. The shiurim are ostensively on Netiv Mitzvotekha by the Komarno rebbe. From the nature of shiur one gets a sense that it is to relative beginners who want a smattering of all things in Kabbalah. He reads a passage in Komarno and then proceeds to tell his listener what it means in the Ramak, Ramchal, Baal ha-Tanya, Rav Nahman, and Ashlag. Mostly, it is Chabad material- he turns Komarno sodot into theoretical discussions of the higher and lower unity, tzimzum, egul ve yosher. It is the very approach that Komarno warns against.

He does discuss how according to Komarno mitzvoth have deep secrets leading to devekus, but he connects it to theoretical discussions from Chabad rather than the hands -on Kabbalistic approach that uses Chayyim Vital’s Shaar Ha-Mizvot and Shaar Hakavvanot
Yihudah tataah is defined as sensing that nothing is random – all things that occur are part of Hashem’s plan. We need to feel God’s omnipresence in our lives and that everything is providence.
Rav Morgenstern repeatedly quotes Ramchal and Nefesh Hahayyim- that all of this is mashal and it is all from our human perspective. This is quite non-Komarno.

Shiur Two is on sweetening of judgment (hamtakat hadinim) Rav Morgenstern emphasizes our sins and less the cosmic judgments from the shvirah.
In this shiur he defines the path of the Besht as devekut, emunah, and yichud. The first is the secrets of the commandments, the second is see that all is providence, and the third is meditation. This is not the way most groups define the Besht. Compare any introduction to the Besht to see the difference.
The major new point here is the emphasis on working on Emunah – this places Rav Morgenstern in a set with Rav Moshe Wolfson, and Rabbi Itamar Schwartz –there are require emunah more than knowledge of kabbalah or religious experience . Not a quietist negation of the self and only think about God as usually taught in Hasidut rather a goal to believe that all is God and His providence.

I recommend as a baseline for understanding the recent material Benjamin Brown – Initial Faith and Final Faith – Three 20th Century Haredi Thinkers’ Concepts of Faith [1998] (Hebrew) Akdamot 4 where he deals with the Hazon Ish, the Rebbe Riyatz, Miktav MiEliyahu, Chofets Chaim and others.

Rav Morgenstern explains the Shema as teaching that God is an eyn sof; that is exactly the sort of Chabad approach avoided in the original call to follow the Arizal.
Rav Morgenstern explains yihudim as Letters of the divine name serving as a symbol or parable for Hashem. He then adds his own interest, “So too light…most ephemeral thing.” On p 15 we get one of his give aways that he has read a meditation manual when he writes that one needs to reign in one thoughts and stop them from flitting from one subject to another – one needs to learn to focus.

The Komarno states that he explained a topic fully in Notzer Hessed, but Rav Morgenstern’s shiur does not give the parallel material.
Rav Morgenstern’s message is that Those who learn deep secrets of the torah are confronted with trials and tribulations. We should see all suffering as divine providence (It is interesting that he is willing to return to this in a post holocaust world.)

The end of the second shiur has a full page based on Ashlag’s shamati. He quotes Ramchal Tikkunim Hadashim on the concept of providential mishpat – but does not discuss the counter balance of melukhah.
He concludes that our main worship is to reveal Divinity as taught by Tanya.
If one wants a shiur closer to the text of Komarno, I have been told that several of the einiklach give shiur including R. Netanel Safrin in J-M.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Missing Source

Posted on July 12, 2010 by | 5 comments

A pulpit rabbi send the following out as his message for AV.
What Talmud is he looking at?

According to the Talmud the 2nd Temple was destroyed because we didn’t practice what we studied. We knew how to learn, but we didn’t know what its message meant for us on a practical level.

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David Shasha on Kellner, Idel, and Nationalism

Posted on July 8, 2010 by | 10 comments

David Shasha is a proponent of all things Sefardi and a radical follower of Jose Faur who envisions a Levantine synthesis of Jewish and Arabic humanism. Shasha offers a critique of Kellner, Idel and others as destroying the humanistic foundations of Judaism. He claims that they destroy the foundation of Maimonidean humanism even if they accept Maimonides. Kellner advocates for the rationalism of Maimonides but back-handedly considers the Maimonideans as too demanding for the common person, as rejecting folk religion, and as not the Jewish tradition. Shasha demands that Maimonides be considered the tradition or else Maimonideans would always be in a defensive position. If one does not live in a rational world then all the power is in the magical hand of the rabbis.

Shasha places blame at the feet of Moshe Idel who explores the magical, irrational, and mythic forces in Judaism but who also maintains that this theurgic world is the world of the Talmudic Rabbis. For Idel, the Rabbinic tradition is magical. Kabbalah is not a Gnostic intruder into Judaism but the very meaning of the commandments for the Rabbis. Once Jews studied Saadyah, Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Gersonides as the traditon, now they read Abulafia and Zohar. For Shasha, this is tantamount to a return to idolatry and the source of militant nationalism. Full Version here.

Shasha writes:
At the center of this controversy is the vexing question of Jewish authenticity.
In his 2006 study “Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism,” Menachem Kellner adopts an approach that has become standard in most Jewish circles, writing:

“The Jewish world in which Maimonides lived was uncongenial to the austere, abstract, demanding vision of Torah which he preached. Evidence from a wide variety of sources shows that Jews in Maimonides’ day – common folk and scholars alike – accepted astrology, the magical use of divine names, appeals to angels, etc.”

In a noble attempt to elevate the thinking of Maimonides, Kellner’s arguments bizarrely lend credence to the positions of the anti-Maimonideans.
In the book’s conclusion he states:

The world favored by Maimonides’ opponents, on the other hand, is an “enchanted” world. Many of Maimonides’ opponents, in his day and ours, do indeed accept the efficacy of charms and amulets, and fear the harm of demons and the evil eye. But it is not in that sense that I maintain that they live in an enchanted world. Theirs is not a world which can be explained in terms of the unvarying workings of divinely ordered laws of nature; it is not a world which can be rationally understood. It is a world in which the notion of miracle loses all meaning, since everything that happens is a miracle. In such a world instructions from God, and contact with the divine in general, must be mediated by a religious elite who alone can see the true reality masked by nature. This is the opposite of an empowering religion, since it takes their fate out of the hands of Jews, and, in effect, puts it into the hands of the rabbis.

We can see the tension at the heart of Kellner’s argument, a tension that forces his hand in accepting the absolute authenticity of the mystical-occult tradition of the Kabbalah and rejecting the Jewish validity of Maimonidean rationalism.

Kellner’s book contains a forward by Hebrew University professor Moshe Idel, perhaps the single most influential academic in the world of Judaica, a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize and a ubiquitous presence in the world of Jewish studies. Idel has relentlessly promoted the pro-magic, neo-pagan, anti-rational strain of Jewish tradition also called Kabbalah.

Idel’s scholarly project has been designed to affirm the authenticity of the mystical-occult Kabbalah and undermine the validity of the rational standards of Religious Humanism. As we see in a representative passage in his seminal 1988 work “Kabbalah: New Perspectives”:

Kabbalah can be viewed as part of a restructuring of those aspects of rabbinic thought that were denied authenticity by Maimonides’ system. Far from being a total innovation, historical Kabbalah represented an ongoing effort to systematize existing elements of Jewish theurgy, myth, and mysticism into a full-fledged response to the rationalistic challenge.
It is, however, possible to assume that, if the motifs transmitted in those unknown [Kabbalistic] circles formed part of an ancient weltanschauung, their affinities to the rabbinic mentality would be more organic and easily absorbed into the mystic cast of Judaism.
According to this hypothesis, we do not need to account for why ancient Jews took over Gnostic doctrines, why they transmitted them, and, finally, how this ‘Gnostic’ Judaism was revived in the Middle Ages by conservative Jewish authorities.

Shasha concludes:

This has led to the rejection of Sephardic Jewish Humanism as formulated by Maimonides and an affirmation of an ethnocentric Jewish chauvinism based on the magical mysticism of Kabbalistic theurgy. It is a Judaism that rejects the tenets of a critical reading of the Jewish past and has led us to the sort of ideological purity and militant nationalism that has become characteristic of the intractable impasse in the Middle East. Though this occult process has been secularized by Zionism, it is apparent that the ideological values of the mystical continue to animate the Jewish self-perception in a nationalistic sense.

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Wild Strawberries for Tisha B’Av

Posted on July 8, 2010 by | 1 comment

I just received an email that Drisha will be screening and discussing the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries at 4pm on Tisha beAv. I take this as another indication of our relating to God as a therapeutic deity.

In the 1970’s Conservative congregations spoke of Jewish history and the Holocaust on Tisha Be-av. Reading of Josephus and Ghetto diaries. During this time period, Rav Soloveitchik spoke of the ontic catastrophe of the destruction of the Temple and the existential state of acquiring emotions in a case of “old mourning” and turned it into a day of shiurim on mourning and the mikdash.
Flashy Rabbis gave lectures on “why do we still mourn now that we have a state of Israel?”

By the 1990’s Centrist Orthodoxy used the talks of Rav Soloveitchik to speak of Jewish History and the Holocaust, or discussing the halakhot of the land of Israel. Holocaust films were shown and protests are held at the UN and embassies. The halakhic God of Lonely Man of Faith gave way to a God of History, Land, and War.
On the more yeshivish side, there are lectures on hastening the geulah- either through not talking lashon hara or not doing any of the activities that hasten it.

In the last few years, there has been a shift to the brokenness of the world. Renewal announcements ask: How do we deal with the brokenness, trauma, and injustice in the world. Yeshivish announcements offer sessions on the destruction in our lives and restoring family and teens in trouble. And now Drisha is leading a discussion about Wild Strawberries, a movie in which the protagonist a retired medical professor sees his life as loveless and without meaning. He is haunted by memories, brought on by dreams and by people he meets, about the chances for love, family, and forgiveness that he messed up. Tisha Be-Av is a chance to undo psychic damage.

One path that is not being continued is the Tisha BeAv rally held several years ago in Jerusalem in which Rabbis Lichtenstein, Cherlow, Lau, and others as an occasion for justice. They denounced the lack of in Israel of worker’s rights, the human trafficking, the oppression of the poor, of the Arab other, of unfair business practices. The event did not have continuity. (Can someone send me the links from Haaretz, Ynet or the speeches?)
Rabbi SR Hirsch also emphasized the ethical since the prophets denounced Israel for its immorality.

As a side topic- Here is Reb Shlomo from 1992 asking for intimacy with God, to heal from the pain of the Holocaust, to rebuild the Temple. It’s longing is palpable.

It is possible to do everything G-d wants you to do and not to be intimate with G-d. You know, beautiful friends, Mount Sinai is where G-d told us what to do. But Jerusalem, the Holy Temple, is where we are intimate with G-d. The Holy Temple is the headquarters for being close to G-d and to each other. But when the house is destroyed, there is no place to be intimate anymore. And gevalt! Are we longing and crying to be intimate with G-d, with every Jew, with every word of the Torah, and, one day, with the whole world…On Tisha b’Av the Messiah comes. On Tisha b’Av until the Six Million you only heard the sound of the destruction of the Temple; you could not hear the footsteps of the Messiah. Today, the voice of destruction gets further and further away, the voice of the coming of the Messiah gets closer and closer. Let it be this year that the whole world will be fixed and G-d’s holy intimacy comes back into the world and into our lives. You know, beautiful friends, I’m so proud of our moshav and our shul because they are filled with prayers, with so much dancing and joy, but also with so many tears begging G-d for intimacy with every word of the Torah with every Jew, with every human being, with all of nature. I have a feeling it will be this year.

Shlomo offers an undifferentiated healing love- primordial and oceanic.
Viewing Wild Strawberries offers self-scrutiny of one’s wrong choices and how does one let go of hindrances that prevent healing. One sees that one’s choices are the cause of one’s meaninglessness, therefore a person needs to take responsibility, a therapeutic mussar.

Updated- One week later Drisha sent out an announcement that they will be showing a Holocaust movie and not Wild Strawberries.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Sufi Story in Breslov: Transmigration of a Mystical Story

Posted on July 8, 2010 by | 3 comments

Here is a guest post, using his pseudonym Eiver LaNahar. He is a renowned Haredi teacher of Breslov Chassidus. Here he lets his hair down and starts with a trans-personal psychology quotation from the 1975 classic of Charles Tart. From my historical approach this dates his approach to a pre-new age, pre-spirituality era- when it was still countercultural and transpersonal. The goal is to awaken to the richness of experience despite our 1960’s culture having no ability to discuss these experiences. (Courtney Bender’s New Metaphysics don’t have these problems). Our blog post is willing to let down his hair and note a similarity to a Sufi story, quote Aryeh Kaplan on LSD imagery in Hasidic texts, and explain Breslov as offering non-dual states of perception.

I (AB) have a worksheet where I show how a single line of Breslov gets interpreted in the last 20 years as transpersonal psych, as 12 step, as primal emotions of depression, and as postmodernism. The story is indeed sufi, but that is a topic for another post.

Transmigration of a Mystical Story by Eiver LaNahar

Transpersonal psychologist Charles T. Tart observes:
“…[A]ttention/awareness energy is constantly flowing back and forth, around and around in familiar, habitual paths. This means that much of the variety and richness of life is filtered out. An actual event, triggering off a certain category of experience, activating a certain structure, is rapidly lost as the internal processes connected with that structure and its associated structures and prepotent needs take over the energy of the system… (“States of Consciousness,” Chapter 19 (“Ordinary Consciousness as a State of Illusion,” pp. 269-270),
“ if your cultural conditioning has not given you any categories as part of the Input-Processing subsystem to recognize certain events, you may simply not perceive them… so the wheel of your life rolls over these events hardly noticing them, perhaps with only a moment of puzzlement before your more ‘important’ internal needs and preoccupations cause you to dismiss the unusual…
“If you experience such an event, though, the cultural pressures, both from others and from the enculturated structures built up within you, will probably force you to forget it, to explain away its significance. If you experience something everybody knows cannot happen, you must be crazy; but if you do not tell anyone and forget about it yourself, you will be okay.”

Tart goes on to cite a Sufi story from Idries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes (pp. 21-20), “When the Waters Were Changed,” to illustrate this idea:

Once upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.
Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.
On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.
When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.
At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.

On a brighter note, Tart concludes, “Fortunately we do make contact with reality at times. There are forces for real change in culture so the conservative forces do not always succeed. I have great faith in science as a unique force for constantly questioning the limits of consensus reality (at least in the long run) for deliberately looking for cracks in the cosmic egg that open onto vast new vistas. But, far more than we would like to admit, our lives can be mainly or completely tightly bounded wheels, rolling mechanically along the track of consensus reality.”

One of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s enigmatic parables is remarkably similar to this Sufi story. (I have no idea which came first, nor if the connection is causal or merely serendipitous; tzorekh iyyun.) Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan translates it in his collection, “Rabbi Nachman’s Stories” (Breslov Research Institute, p. 481). Although the primary source isn’t given, I tracked it down to Ma’asiyos U-Meshalim (pp. 27-28), a group of stories discovered in the the notebook of Rabbi Naftali of Nemirov (and later, Uman), a member of Rabbi Nachman’s inner circle. These stories were later appended to Kokhvey Ohr, Breslov oral traditions compiled by Rabbi Avraham b’Reb Nachman [Chazan], and edited and published by Rabbi Shmuel Horowitz before the outbreak of World War II.

A king once told his prime minister, who was also his good friend, “I see in the stars that whoever eats any grain that grows this year will go mad. What is your advice?”
The prime minister replied, “We must put aside enough grain so that we will not have to eat from this year’s harvest.”
The king objected, “But then we will be the only ones who will be sane. Everyone else will be mad. Therefore, they will think that we are the mad ones. It is impossible for us to put aside enough grain for everyone. Therefore, we too must eat this year’s grain. But we will make a mark on our foreheads, so that at least we will know that we are mad. I will look at your forehead, and you will look at mine, and when we see this sign, we will know that we are both mad.”

In a footnote, Rabbi Kaplan observes that “there are fungi of the ergot family that attack grain and can cause hallucinations and other bizarre experiences when ingested. These fungi contain substances very similar to LSD.” However he doesn’t offer any key to unlock the secret of Rabbi Nachman’s story.

Perhaps Tart’s quasi-Buddhist explanation of the Sufi story may be applied to the Chasidic one. The “corrupted” consensually-conditioned consciousness of those who partake of the new grain corresponds to samsara, ordinary dualistic (i.e., relational) perception. However, the pristine consciousness of the king and his royal minister corresponds to the enlightened mind, which is the ability to see things in their simplicity and utter newness—which Rabbi Nachman calls “sanity.”

The bottom line of both stories is the necessity of forgoing enlightenment in order to participate in the world. But the difference between Rabbi Nachman’s parable and the Sufi one is that the king and his friend make a sign on each other’s forehead to remind them that they are mad.

Is this an allusion to Tefillin, “…they shall serve as a reminder between your eyes…” However, Chazal give us hope, too: “In the future world, the tzaddikim will sit and their crowns [i.e., nondual states of perception] will be in their heads (ve-atroseihem bi-rasheihem) [i.e., internalized]…” (Berakhos 17a; and cf. Likkutei Moharan I, 21:4)

What does this mean when our leadership is anything but non-dual states of perception? In the 1970’s once could think that leaving the Jewish middle class and entering the social imaginary of the frum world would be like the spiritual awakening in a Sufi tale, what do we do now when the community does not seem anything like a source of enlightenment? Forty years after the counter-culture’s critique of society have we learned anything that offers new insight to Eiver LaNahar’s tales? Has spirituality with its quest for wellness killed the crazy wisdom of awakening?

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