I was speaking to a colleague today about the fact that I will be on a panel next week with Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Emmanuel, the Metropolitan of Paris. Metropolitan is the Greek Orthodox word for Archbishop.
So Rabbi Jack Moline, the rabbi that presided over the recent bar-mitzah of Rahm Emmanuel’s son, leans over to us and says:
“He is the fourth Emmanuel brother–Rahm, Zeke, Ari and Metropolitan Emanuel.”
I will be traveling for the next few weeks, next week in the US- so there will be email access. But I will be overseas during the last two weeks of June. Are any of our famous published authors interested in posting?
AS? – Some philosophy?
Eiver Lanhar? – Some Hasidus?
Tomer? – do you want an English audience?
Anyone else?
If you are interested, then send an email to my gmail.
Posted in Uncategorized
There is a new anthology of articles on Leo Strauss reviewed on ndpr. The review points out that all the articles present Stauss as a modern secularist. None of them present his work as having tensions between the Neo-Platonic and the contemporary situation. Rather than the approaches to Strauss that emphasize the natural order, the classic text, or the role of the philosopher-king, here we have a flexible pragmatic thinker. We dont have the Strauss that flirted with Orthodoxy in the 1930’s, nor the Strauss that looked for word plays in the 1970s. And those who just read the theological work God Interrupted by Benjamin Lazier will not find continuity. We have a Strauss that believed in philosophy and showed how it survived the assaults of religion and politics. The tension of religion and revelation will never be solved so we have to learn about techniques like esotericism to survive.
Steven B. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, Cambridge UP, 2009, 307pp., $28.99 (pbk),
Reviewed by Samuel A. Chambers, Johns Hopkins University
Full version here.Philosophy is threatened on the one side by a politics that would destroy it (3, 33) and on the other by a set of religious principles that would replace its search for knowledge with the positive content of revelation (115, 174).
In one of the stronger pieces in the volume, perhaps especially for those who are not close readers of Strauss’s entire body of work, Leora Batnitzky demonstrates… that Strauss was a non-believing Jew, an atheist who early in life embraced a strictly political zionism (43). While Strauss obviously understood the role that religious principles played in supporting social order, there is simply little reason to take him as a religious believer.
Strauss never sought a wholesale return to the pre-modern. The general argument, that Strauss does not simply or literally wish to return to ancient Philosophy, is repeated by numerous authors (7, 41-42, 93, 117, 173), but Catherine Zuckert makes this case most forcefully in her subtle exploration of the way in which Strauss returns to premodern thought. She quotes Strauss’s most important statement on this issue: “only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today” (117).
As most contributors to this volume read Strauss, he saw the conflict between reason and revelation as irresolvable because the positions from which they argue are incommensurable. Revelation can be neither supported by nor blended with reason; this was the main problem Strauss identified in medieval philosophy, especially Thomism (58). Nor, however, can the former be refuted by the latter; this was potentially a problem for the earlier, perhaps more dogmatically atheistic Strauss who was tempted by this possibility, before later recognizing the complete incompatibility of the two. Indeed, it is Strauss’s later understanding of the fundamental importance of these two “roots of western civilization” (94), that reveals him fully — according to most of the contributors here — as a thoroughly non-dogmatic philosopher who believes in no universal moral standards, no singular truth. Smith emphasizes this perhaps unexpected or controversial point (one that certainly cuts against the grain of many criticisms of Strauss) when he insists that there is nothing absolutist about Strauss’s thought, and that his “return to nature” was a return to “flexible” standards (33).
Some readers may balk at the picture of a Strauss with flexible standards, as a skeptical thinker, as one who returned to a “nature” in premodern thought that was not fixed and eternal. But those readers are well-advised to engage closely with the readings in this volume, with the work of Strauss, and perhaps also with the writings of the classic political philosophers that Strauss and his followers have championed.
Strauss’s most explicit statement on interpretive method, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” also stands as his most famous piece of writing (27). While it is well known that Strauss claimed to have “rediscovered” the ancient art of “esoteric” writing, this volume clarifies an important related point: precisely this rediscovery led Strauss to his own personal revolution in thought.
One of the little jewels of this collection, especially for those not already well steeped in the secondary literature on Strauss, is the exegesis by Laurence Lampert (and the summary by Smith and others) of the letters Strauss wrote to Jacob Klein in 1938 and 1939. These letters, only recently published in German and still untranslated into English, show clearly that Strauss did not develop his hermeneutics independently of his own readings, but truly did “discover” it in the sense that he came upon a way to make sense of a text that, for Strauss, was previously mysterious or full of contradictions. In the first letter that Lampert quotes, Strauss tells Klein that “Maimonides is getting more and more exciting” (63) and from this point on Strauss’s excitement only builds, with each letter more full of thrill than the previous one. Strauss is thrilled because for him Maimonides makes sense when one sees that “Maimonides in his beliefs was absolutely no Jew” (64, emphasis in original) and therefore he cannot be read as a “Jewish philosopher” writing a guide for believers. He must be read, instead, as a non-believer, writing a “radical critique of the Torah” that sounds to believers as if it is merely a repetition of the Torah, yet which adds “‘little’ ‘additions'” to signal to a few select readers (philosophers) what the text is really all about (65). Strauss’s better-known and (as Smith notes) much maligned theory of esoteric writing is contained in this kernel of insight (3). Philosophers like Maimonides who write under conditions of persecution (conditions in which to state plainly the truth in the face of dominant opinion would be to court disaster) must therefore produce texts that contain within them two very much distinct and at times utterly contradictory meanings. This then sets up the requirements for how good readers, those that Strauss refers to with an ambiguity that some might find ominous as “the few,” will read.
One problem with esoteric writing as a general theory of interpretation is that it becomes very difficult to know when to take an author at his or her word. Thus, my telling you that I have not written this review esoterically may in fact be the secret signal I give to a certain few readers that I am in fact writing esoterically, and to indicate to them that they should make sure to read me as such. Indeed, on Lampert’s interpretation of him, this is precisely what Strauss does in his essay on Halevi.
Here are the steps of the various readings, starting with Halevi’s text and then moving to Strauss’s reading of Halevi and Lampert’s reading of Strauss.
1) Halevi omits a discussion of the conflict between believer and philosopher.
2A) Strauss says the omission is intentional, designed to show esoterically that this conflict is exactly what matters most. (78)
2B) But Strauss then goes on to say that we should not “lay too much emphasis on this line of approach” (79).
3) Lampert then argues that this last line is Strauss’s esoteric claim: “to not lay too much emphasis on this approach is to take this approach” (79).To sum up, Halevi omits what is, in fact, most important; Strauss downplays what is, in fact, most significant. But if we know that Halevi is writing esoterically (and can only interpret him properly because of this knowledge) and if we know Strauss is also writing esoterically in his interpretation (ditto), then we therefore know how to read Strauss on Halevi.
Moreover, Strauss felt certain that only a few were fit for the life of philosophy that he championed, and he therefore argued fairly directly that philosophy must be protected from the many who are simply unfit for it as a way of life. For this reason, much of Strauss’s political philosophy seems designed to make sure that philosophy can continue to exist, but precisely as a private and sheerly pedagogical affair (85, 150).
Person – I’m a deist, we don’t believe in the Christian concept of love.
Me- What do you mean you are a deist? [I was not sure he knew what the word meant.]
Person- We have a realistic view of God – one that get angry, takes revenge and is not nice. God needs to be appeased.
Me- Do you appease God?
Person- Yes, I do my duties and obligations every day.
Me- When you fail do you get punished?
Person- I do my duties.
Posted in Uncategorized
Paul Griffiths, the Catholic theologian who started his career in the study of Hindu meditation and left it for the Church, is ever the outside the box thinker.
Here he offers us his thoughts on death, which equally apply to Judaism.Griffith looking from the vantage of pietistic works of the pre-modern era asks:Which is more important a good death and journey to the world to come or late 20th century medical care? Seforim like R. Aharon Berachya’s Maavar Yabok from the Early Modern period speak about a good death and a good journey to the world to come.
Is death, human death, a good thing? Catholic teaching is ambivalent about this.
On the one hand, the answer is no: It is a horror and an offense. We make great efforts to postpone it, and we lament when it occurs.
On the other hand, the answer is yes: the body’s death marks a transition to a new condition which we hope will be immeasurably better than the agony of this life; and so it has been a commonplace of the Catholic tradition to welcome death exactly as the gateway to eternal life. The day on which a saint is remembered in the Catholic calendar is her death-day,One way in which this might be done is for the church to educate its wealthy—in American terms, that means anyone with medical insurance and a household income over $100,000 annually—that it might be good for them to die sooner than they do and with less care than they have come to think their right. There is no reason why the church ought to accept the guidelines of the American Medical Association about such things as the frequency with which routine physical examinations ought to be scheduled… Whether it is proper in a particular case will rest upon ancillary considerations, not upon questions about intrinsic propriety.
Another way in which this might be done is to encourage Catholics from an early age in the use of the symbols of death: the skull on the desk, imaginative meditation on the approach and arrival of one’s own death, prayer before the exposed bodies of the dead. These symbols bring the reality of death into life, where it belongs.
I shudder as I write these things because they are so profoundly un-American. These views can be made plausible only if American Catholics begin again to have a sense that there is an art to dying, and that good practice of it means learning when, and when not, to seek diagnosis and treatment. Death’s embrace will come: hastening it is one mistake; resisting it whenever resistance is possible is another.
According to Maariv, Ronen Lubitz, the Rabbi of Kibbutz Nir Etzion potentially could be the new Chief Rabbi of Haifa, to replace Rabbi Shaar Yashuv Cohen. Lubitz was part of the wave of the New Religious Zionists, that includes Rabbis Cherlow, Bigman, Gilad, Benny Lau, who wrote programmatic essays a decade ago in Deot, Amudim and Akdamot about the future of Religious Zionism and who formed Tzohar, as a more progressive rabbinical organization.
Lubitz, who is less well known in America than the others, has already stated to Maariv that he seeks for greater tolerance of gays in synagogue and that he accepts the compromise of accepting that entertainment remains open on Shabbat.
A decade ago he wrote a programmatic article on what is “modern religious orthodoxy” called in Hebrew AD”M (Orthodoxy ha-Dati haModerni. For my American readers I must point out that he is referring to an Israeli phenomena and not an American phenomena. With the rise of the aforementioned New Religious Zionists in the early 1990’s due to the breakdown of the older state-building and collective vision of the older religious Zionists, these younger rabbis turned to individualism and started calling themselves “modern.” (Note: Religious Zionism and Modern Orthodoxy are not co-extensive and have different origins and trajectories. Too big a topic for here). This group of Religious Zionists have no connection or sympathy with Haredim since they attend separate schools and form identity through army service. Rav Cherlow even advocates not learning Haredi seforim. The article seeks to distance AD”M from the Religious Nationalism of Merkaz Harav such as the followers of Rav Aviner.
Man Searches for Meaning (Again) in Deot 7 April 2000
Lubitz offers chapters toward a Orthodox Dati ha-Moderni AD”M
We need to seeks our way. We used to have a clear path but not anymore. AD”M is between the national religious camp and the religious liberals, the former-associated with Rav Aviner-are connected to Religious Zionism but lack modernity and the latter embrace modernity but are sociologically separate from Religious Zionism.How do we relate to modernity? Confrontation, combination, synthesis, or even intergrafted?
Now we have the new issues raised by Postmodernity where ideas are contingent. In the National Religious group many run away back to certainty and Haredi life. If modernity does not work the default is to reject it and seek certainty.Ronen Lubitz defined the struggles of the New Religious Zionists as consisting of five elements.
Five characteristic of modern Orthodoxy (he mean Israeli Datiim Hadashim or AD”M, don’t confuse with America)(1) One needs to choose life- nothing in the fullness of the secular world should be foreign to Judaism.
We need to identify with Western culture and still keep mizvot in their fullness. Correct action is required but we allow many opinions so we are more orthoprax than orthodox. (I am not sure if he means these terms in the American usage.-read the Hebrew) We embrace doubt pluralism, contingency, there is no one opinion or theology. Sometimes a moment of holiness in the secular and sometimes a moment of secular in the holiness- “there is nothing as whole as a broken awareness”(2) Doubt is serious; misgivings about observing mizvot, skepticism about belief, and questioning of Torah are all to be taken seriously.
(3) Observant Jews can lead a normal life, and not conform to an ideal life. It is OK to relax with normal entertainment or to enter any profession. Legitimacy for modernity to permeate your life the way Israeli nationalism used to permeate lives. Torah Study does not override tasting and being part of the world.
(4) There is a pluralism of truth, without a reconciliation of halakhah, mahshavah, and secular studies. AD”M does not see a contradiction of Torah and the pluralism of scattered and fragmented truth. In this we differ from the National Religious who treat western culture as fact and try to keep out its values. Every month they have a new worry, reaction, and restriction. We openly accept human rights, autonomy, freedom, equality. We recognize that Western culture contributed to the advancement of humanity, therefore we seek to ground these values in Torah. In time, we will succeed in integrating post-modernism as well.
(5) We need to live in a religious language but we need a new religious language since the old language does not serve us anymore.
Interesting other piece about Lubitz protesting for human rights in China from 2008
In a small town in northern Israel Rabbi Ronen Lubitz is very happy to welcome his congregation’s leavened bread. It’s a token of solidarity to remember the days when the Jews had to cross the desert without it after they were freed from Egypt.But this year Rabbi Lubitz is adding something more to this ancient tradition. He’s asking everyone in his congregation to sign a petition against human rights abuses in China. His hope… to have his community know about the persecution of Falun Gong in mainland China.
[Ronen Lubitz, Rabbi of Nir Ezion]:
“I decided this year to use this opportunity to let people know about what’s going on in China. The persecution and torturing of the Falun Gong, and the prohibition of very basic civil rights to the people of China. I think it’s very much connected to the basic ideas of Pesach (Passover). Because during Pesach we celebrate our freedom. Our freedom as people, as a nation. Our freedom as individuals.”“I go in the way of Rabbi Kook. He talked a lot about our duty to love all human beings and he spoke about our Passover, our Pesach as a sign of freedom to all humanity…I would like to wish the people in China and in other places in the world that this spring of our nation will be a sign for spring for them as well.”
Two items in the paper of importance to the Jewish-Muslim encounter.
Sufi sheikh who preached nonviolence laid to rest
By LAUREN GELFOND FELDINGER.In a small and ancient family plot attached to his ancestral home in Jerusalem’s Old City, regional Sufi leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari was laid to rest on Tuesday at age 61, after a long struggle with heart disease. He was head of the mystical Naqshabandi Holy Land Sufi Order.
A longtime proponent of nonviolence and interfaith unity, Bukhari found his inspiration in Islamic law and tradition, as well as in the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. “The stronger one is the one who can absorb the violence and anger from the other and change it to love and understanding. It is not easy; it is a lot of work. But this is the real jihad,” he once told the Globaloneness Project in an interview.
His teachings and practices put him in danger and under great stress that over the years harmed his health, said Sheikh Ghassan Manasra of Nazareth, whose father heads the regional Holy Land Qadari Sufi Order. “Sheikh Bukhari influenced lots of people, worked hard to bridge the religions and cultures; and his teaching is keeping part of the youth on the right path. We worked together for many years and succeeded many times and failed many times and decided to stay on the [path] of God to bring peace, tolerance, harmony and moderation,” he said.
“But on both sides, Jewish and Muslim, there are moderates but also extreme people, and our work was very dangerous, with a lot of pressure and stress until now, and I think this explains, in part, his heart problems.”
Bukhari later also got involved in the Interfaith Coordinating Council in Israel, the Interfaith Encounter Association, and the Sulha Peace Project, and in 2007 launched the “Jerusalem Hug” every June 21, where Israelis, Palestinians and foreigners of all faiths form a human chain of prayer around the Old City.
During Operation Cast Lead, Bukhari initiated a delegation of Arab youth and religious leaders to show solidarity with the students and teachers in Sderot and to share the pain of his own family’s experience in Gaza.
“He was really special,” Rabbi Tzion Cohen, a native of Sderot who is chief rabbi of the Shaar Hanegev region, said of their meeting.
“Despite his own great pain for his family, and despite the fact that some of the group got heated up during the discussion, he and his wife remained gentle and patient and so very kind. I was truly impressed by their pleasantness.”
Even as the political situation in the Middle East continues to heat up, more groups dedicated to Muslim-Jewish education, dialogue and joint social action are being formed, according to the report issued by the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement in Los Angeles, a partnership between Hebrew Union College, Omar Ibn Al Khattab Foundation and the University of Southern California. The data were collected from two surveys conducted in November 2009.
More than 70 percent of these groups have emerged since 9/11. Of those, half were created in the past 24 months. Half of the groups have no staff or budget, demonstrating a heavy reliance on volunteerism. Fifty percent of existing groups raise less than $250 a year, according to the report.
Many of the newest groups emerged from the Weekend of Twinning, a two-year-old project of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding that has brought together more than 200 mosques and synagogues for weekends of joint activity. Seventy percent of the mosques and synagogues that took part in the 2009 weekend say they have developed ongoing relationships.
Posted in interfaith, Uncategorized
Tagged Islam, islam and judaism, jewish muslim encounter, sufi
Here is an article By Elchanan Shilo, “A Continuous Judaism between halakhah and Hiloni” that appeared in the Shabbat Supplement of Mekor Rishon on May 7 2010 and it has been posted on Tzav Pius (One of the many inscrutable projects of the Avi Chai Foundation.)
It is an interesting article and brings together many ideas currently floating around. Yet, I am not sure if he is not just recreating 1920’s Conservative Judaism or a European Geminde system. Nor am I sure that all the parts of his argument work together. Shilo, who teaches Jewish thought, wants to undo the division between those who keep halakhah and those who pick and choose. He brings together those who are halakhic, with those who pick and choose, and he includes in his expanded approach both those who only occasionally find something that speaks to them in Judaism and those leaving halakhic oservance. Here is a freehand summary and paraphrase of selected lines and an even more freehand translation of key lines.
A Continuous Judaism Between Halakhah and Hiloni by Elchanan Shilo
“The time has come to stop building bridges between the religious and the secular and instead to create a new wider existence. The religious Zionist community, whose strength is enough for both sides, is capable of building this expanse in order to break the divisions of the past.”
Modernity brought (1)education (2)a bourgeois life (3) a halakhicification of Judaism.The first two are good. But the later creates a division between religious and secular. The division was originally encouraged for the pride of building an educated community who knew and kept halakhah. Now we need to erase the divide by mixed schools and individualized patterns of observance.
We already have many people who have individualized approaches. Some people find halakhah and the religious life stifling and not life enhancing , others find it fits perfectly and enhances their lives. Generally we are happy when people discover observance but we should understand that it does not fit everyone and we should accept that people regularly give up observance. People go back and forth. His solution is to prevent absolute secularization- and see the community as a very wide range of observances with people going both directions at all times. In this approach, the formerly frum (Datla”sh) who don’t fit into the secular world would remain comfortably part of religious world. (Datla”sh is at least 25 % of the religious Zionist community)
Shilo argues that his approach should not be confused with the liberalism of Reform and Conservative. The later movements judged Orthodoxy as primitive and that they are progressive. They created a new ideology with justifications for none observance. Shilo wants a broad tent without any judgment or ideology.
He accepts the older American model of having a men’s section, a women’s section, and mixed section. No judging and no definite answer. Some people follow the halakhah and some people follow their need not to have a mehitza. {He emailed me to tell me that he thought these mixed pulpits still existed in the US. His American father remembers them. He did not know that they dont exist anymore.}
Liberal religious Zionist weddings have mixed dancing after the officials leave combining both halkhah and actual practice. But he asks why not has both separate and mixed dancing right from the start? Halakhah without ideology or non-observance of Halakhah without ideology wont topple the edifice.
There are no hard definitions of God’s will only soft ones that vary with the individual. Shilo advocates that we should turn to the writings of Rabbi Mordechai Leiner of Izbitz, the Mei Hashiloah. People can have different callings from God, some in the halakhah and some not in the halkhah. How do we know that God wants everyone to keep halakhah, maybe sometimes there is intentional sin for the sake of heaven or different paths for different people.
We don’t want to delegitimize Jews or close options. He advocates a practical Judaism or an actual Judaism or a realistic Judaism. Many people want to keep Shabbat and even love Shabbat but are not interested in the details of squeezing, mixing, or smoothing on the Sabbath Many just want to keep up the tradition or the family values.
A different case is that people can like Shabbat but also have normal sexual needs . They do not want to be told that it is the evil inclination, rather they want to enjoy sexuality and the Sabbath. They don’t want a dichotomy of either being part of the frum world or the secular world.
Not keeping hair covering, going mixed swimming, and mixed dancing can be done without any ideology of either rejecting Orthodoxy or forcing people into a social ghetto.The beit midrash should be open to all. And the criteria for how to study and what to study is not determined by halakhah but by relevance, interest, meaning and poetics.
People don’t want a Reform Shabbat in the synagogue they want a traditional Shabbat that they can mold to their own meaning.
Halakhah has to stop fighting a radical secularism and secularist have got to stop fighting the halkahic world. A wide practical Jewish life can bring people together.
OK, so is this new or old? Feasible or not? Are all details worked out or are their dangling elements. Read the full Hebrew article and let me know if there is something that will catch on here or is it just a idea.
Update with a response by Rabbi David Bigman.
Posted in religious zionism, sociology, Uncategorized
Tagged avi chai, dati hiloni, elhanan shilo, makor rishon
Here is a found nugget from Tusar N. Mohapatra
I read Sri Aurobindo to find some light in our difficult days
Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman (1883-1975)
Prithwindra Mukherjee
In a recent conversation[1], I mentioned that in 1972, as a guest of the Hebrew University for lecturing on Savitri, I made the acquaintance of Yehuda Hanegby, editor of the monthly Ariel. During this visit, Madame Themanlys, commissioned to interview me for Kol Israel, the official radio, revealed her identity as the daughter-in-law of a personal friend that the Mother had in Paris, belonging to Max Théon’s group. I would like to speak of a third interesting personality whom I met in Jerusalem : Professor Schmuel Hugo Bergman, commonly known as Samuel Bergman.
On the eve of my talk, during a dinner, Dr Poznanski, the Rector of the University, informed me that Professor Bergman, Dean of the University, was hoping to listening to me but, owing to his health (running 89), he could not be present at my lecture; he would appreciate if I went to have breakfast with him on the next morning.
I was staying with my friend, Professor Joseph Sadan, and had my meals with his parents at the picturesque Hayim Nahman Bialik Street : Joseph’s father Dov Sadan was a well-known scholar in Ladino, and his mother treated me with refined traditional dishes from Central Europe. Yehuda came to pick me up for going to see Bergman. Yehuda knew him pretty well and informed that Bergman had been a school-mate of Franz Kafka in Prague, and a zealous friend and translator of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). In 1920, Bergman along with Martin Buber (1878-1965) had founded in Palestine a “dual national” area to house peacefully Jews and Arabs, before joining the Hebrew University.
On entering the impressive library where sat the venerable scholar, I discovered rows of books by Sri Aurobindo. Amused by my reaction, he asked me to take the seat in front of him and commented on showing me the set : “This was our food for thought; David and I read Sri Aurobindo to find some light in our difficult days.”
Yehuda whispered : “By David, he means Ben Gurion !”
[1] “Meeting Prithwindra Mukherjee”, Article and Interview by Sunayana Panda, The Golden Chain, August 2009, p.13
My reader Paul Shaviv showed up earlier this week and left the blogging equivalent of a baby in a basket in a comment on my About page. He posted a link to a pdf of one of the new Rav Kook works that have been recently transcribed. I had assumed that this was already discussed and linked elsewhere.
Rav Kook left behind scores of notebooks of his thoughts. Many of those notebooks were used by the Nazir to create Orot Hakodesh as an editor’s synthesis. Others were used by R Zvi Yehudah to produce a different voice for Rav Kook. Recently, some of these notebooks have been published as Shemonah Kevatzim. In the last few years, even more material has come forth from the archives creating a serious academic and Merkaz haRav world debate on why were they hidden until now? what was edited out? Does it change our view of Rav Kook?
For those of us in the field, none of this is new. It is the bread and butter of academic conferences. Back in summer 2009 at the World Congress for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem when others were heading home already, I attended session 352 held in the evening in the Senate room located away from the other sessions . The session was dedicated to the editorial changes and changes over time in rav Kook’s thought. The speakers were Neriah Gutel, Yehudah Mrsky, Udi Avramovitch and Bitty Yehudah. And the audience was the entire cabal of Rav Kook experts (minus a few for specific personal reasons.) Their papers and the discussion afterwards discussed all the debated issues of what do we learn from these new volumes? How was Rav Kook’s vision different at the beginning? And what was consciously changed and censored?
Everyone had already read Avinoam Rozenak’s Hidden Diaries and New Discoveries: The Life and Thought of Rabbi A. I. Kook Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies – Volume 25, Number 3, Spring 2007, pp. 111-147, which first appeared in Hebrew. Rozenak showed that some of these writing had a more antinomian element to them and that the editors were more conservative.
So here is the 250 page pdf of one new books, Harav Kook- leNevuchai Hazeman The work starts off following the Guide of the Perplexed for content but then veers off course. Very little of it is new, we have seen almost all of the paragraphs or at least the ideas before in his other works. What we gain is a turn a phrase here, a named interlocutor there, and an alternative organization illuminating Rav Kook’s thought pattern.
We also have two recent articles in Kipa [in Hebrew]. One used the aforementioned Udi Avramovitch as its expert source. Udi finds the volume more radical than the printed version and he finds a greater identity of God’s will and the will of the people. He also claims that in this work Rav Kook claims a value for other religions and that they worship the one true God. The second article quotes the army and settlement Rabbi Yosef Kellner that the book is essential to read but they are confining distribution, and here is a letter by Rav Kellner about the book.
Rav Kook started the volume while still in Europe and finished it in Jaffa. The book starts off discussing the image of God as volition- will. Human have a will to make manifest as creativity in the world. Yes, Schopenhauer’s definition of man as the guide for our generation. (Along the way Spinoza is deftly defeated by the volition of R. Moses Hayyim Luzatto)The second chapter tells me that Saadayah and Maimonides saw that books of sectarians (minim) multiplied so they were compelled to write philosophic works. That does not inspire me in its understanding of the medieval but tells me more about Rav Kook. In a later chapter, he tells me that “all revolutions are good for clearing away the small minded people and narrow visions” with a later in the paragraph phrase that “they all follow the pure knowledge of God” Holy Hegelian Marxist! What do I do with these grapplings with the sectarian writings of German Idealists for a Torah for the 21st century?
Can we use this as a guide for social revolution now? Well, let look at what he said about the problem of favoritism, corruption and cronyism in rabbinic courts. Rav Kook was against any change to the institutional fabric and rejected secular oversight or higher courts to oversee lower batai din, threatening to return to the R. Hayyim Sonnenfeld camp. What of women in modern world? He did not think women should vote or study Torah. What of secular studies? The new diaries show that he encouraged his inner circle to avoid the wisdom of the gentiles and stick to the prophetic Torah.
Furthermore, we tend to read Rav Kook as if he is the one pushing the envelope on the potential diffusion of God’s light in a new age. Rather than responding to forgotten correspondents who were more radical than he was like R Shmuel Alexandrov or R. Moshe Seidel. These newly released versions, at first reading, will make it easier to find the original dialogue partner. As you read through it, let me know if you find any especially unique passages or if you can detect changes from the beginning to the end of the writing process.
For the meaning of these writings, I await the series of new scholarly articles that will be written in the next few years. The one thing these writings do show is his concern with making a new passionate Jew beyond cognitive focus of the Eastern European beit midrash. A new Jew concerned with volition, inner voice, volkgeist, a new age, love, and seeking a new knowledge of God.
Immediate Update– both the article in Kipa and the file of Rav Kook have been take down, the link wont work. I can understand the removal of the unpublished book, but what benign or nefarious power took down a current news article. If anyone knows then please let me know. The article in Kipah is cached and one can still get to the Headline but not the article. Friends in Israel, what’s the story?
Next Update– I just posted the pdf from my saved copy and the articles reappeared with minor changes.
A few years ago, I was asked to teach the beginning of Rav Dessler’s Miktav MiEliyahu whee he discussing the purpose in life. They did not know what they were asking for, and they had never read it, but they knew it was an important book. As we were reading it, they all remarked how it cannot say the things it does- for it invalidates the suburban trajectory of their lives. By the end they did not want to continue, they preferred something more relevant to their lives. Rav Dessler was known to be anti-bourgeois and the sharpness of his thought has receded into memory. Recently, people have however been turning to R. Itamar Schwatz (belevavi mishkan evneh) who screams out for people to abandon their cell phones, suburban homes, and nice clothes and flee into devotion toward God. A shock treatment to remember what life in this world is all about-service of God. But not everyone is ready for such shock treatment.
How do you tell such people that they do not get the world-to-come simply by paying a mortgage in a religious neighborhood? How do tell them that it is not just where you once upon a time learned but also what you study now? Rav Nahman of Bratzlav mocks the material life in his story “The Master of Prayer” But what if one is not looking for reductio ad absurdum, rather insight?
American society has also been witnessing preachers who are questioning the religious value of suburban life. One of these is Skye Jethani The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity .
Americans live in a consumer-driven society. We are consumers. This is our world, and the ethos of the corporate and consumer dominated life has been with us and expanding for well over 100 years. Consumers R Us.
However, there is a difference between being a consumer and having a worldview of consumerism. Consumerism is “a set of presuppositions most of us have been formed to carry without question or critique” (12). It has become the subconscious framework through which we view everything, including God, the gospel, and the church. In Jethani’s view, “it is competing with the kingdom of heaven for the hearts and imaginations of God’s people” (12).
For Skye Jethani, the concept of imagination is key. “Learning to see the world as it truly is—saturated with the presence and love of God—should be the essence of Christian discipleship, or what many call spiritual formation” (13). However, the church is failing to provide an alternative vision that will captivate the hearts and minds of consumers and break the chains that bind their imaginations. Instead, churches are catering to consumers without challenging the worldly assumptions that leave them undernourished and anemic in their faith.
What are Skye Jethani’s complaints about consumerism? How does this worldview stunt our faith?
• It commodifies God. God is not the Holy One any longer, the Great Mystery, but one who nicely fits in with our desires and politics. We value him for what he can do for us.
• It moves us to construct our Christian identity from the brands we consume rather than from what God has done for us in Christ. Christians buy Christian, and thus are Christian. Image is everything.
• It leads us to seek transformation through external “experiences” we consume. This has led to a whole new kind of church and ministry: “And the role of the pastor, once imagined as a shepherd tending a flock, now conjures images of a circus ringmaster shouting, ‘Come one, come all, to the greatest show on earth.’ In Consumer Christianity, the shepherd becomes a showman” (75).
• It has turned the church from an “ocean-liner” designed to move people from point A to point B (connecting people with God), to a “cruise ship” that is, in itself, the destination. One need never disembark because it contains everything the Christian life has to offer.
• It leads to a faith that is insatiable, unable to delay gratification, and averse to suffering.
• It causes us to segregate ourselves from others who are not like us, and to gather in homogeneous communities, causing us to miss the gospel call to a unity that rises above human divisions.
• It moves us to choose lifestyles of guarded isolation and individualism and miss out on the gospel call to practice hospitality, especially toward those we would never naturally associate with.
Is he right that we have become a homogeneous pleasure cruise ship? Have we converted God into a kitchen deity serving human needs? Has outreach and spirituality turned into a form of entertainment? What is the alternative to a fixed commodified faith?
Posted in popular religion, sociology, Uncategorized
Tagged Looking for God in the Suburbs:, skye Jethani, suburban relgion
One of the interesting people I met in Oslo was Harold D. Roth, professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. As many of the experts of the Eastern Traditions, he was of Jewish background who turned to the east becuase “One of the problems I wrestled with as a young Jewish person growing up was how the Holocaust could be justifiable in light of the theology I’d been taught.”
Roth offers a meditation lab to compliment his lecture course.
TOM: The Religious Studies courses you teach at Brown are supplemented by lab courses where you invite students to engage in what you call “critical first-person investigation” of the material. Would you tell us more about this?
ROTH: There are two courses that I teach that involve first-person labs right now. These are advanced seminars for people who already have had some courses in Buddhism. In them we have our weekly three-hour seminar in which we discuss the texts we are reading, and then from 9am to 10am, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we try out meditation techniques that are derived from these texts. I encourage people to investigate things empirically, to try out different techniques, for example, following the breath, or counting breaths, or paying attention to different parts of one’s body, the diaphragm, the sensation of the breath coming in and out the nose. These are all practices that would be used in the “Insight Meditation” tradition that is at the heart of Theravada or “Southern” Buddhism. Very often I’m able to coordinate the actual reading with the techniques in the lab. For example, when we study Theravada Buddhism we get two sutras that are devoted to breathing meditations: “Sutra on Mindfulness of Breathing” (Anapanasati sutta) and “Sutra on The Foundations of Mindfulness” (Satipatthana sutta). And in the lab we use techniques from those particular texts. I call this approach critical because I never ask anyone to accept what they are reading as true. I just ask them to read the texts with an open mind, and to practice a particular technique with an open mind. And then we talk about how the text relates to the techniques and the experiences in the meditation lab.
Direct experiential questioning is important for a complete investigation of religious phenomena. However, … academics in Religious Studies are very uncomfortable with engaging in religious practices as part of their pedagogy and their research. It is odd, because there are a lot of other academic disciplines that encourage first-person practices, such as laboratory science, public speaking, and anthropology, to name a few.
This kind of direct experiential questioning is important for a complete investigation of religious phenomena. However, conventional academic study in the field of Religious Studies has completely banned it, for a variety of reasons.
It is odd, because there are a lot of other academic disciplines that encourage first-person practices, such as laboratory science, public speaking, and anthropology, to name a few. All these disciplines give you techniques to critically examine the data you get from first-person investigation
First, religions in which empirical experience is central de-emphasize the need to believe. This is the case in all the world’s great mystical traditions.
Second, the whole idea that any of us can be completely objective denies the important role that our own subjective experience plays in our intellectual investigation and reasoning. Instead of banning and attempting to deny our own experience as a valid investigative tool, why not develop methods that engage it in a critical, reasoned way? That is what is behind my courses that combine traditional third-person academic study and “critical first-person” investigation. So I, for one, would be happy to engage in first-person investigation in Christian prayer or meditation, or Islamic practices, or Hindu practices, even though I don’t consider myself a believer in any of those traditions. I think first-person investigation is part of a serious examination of religion. The field is cutting off its foundations in not finding that acceptable.
The very fact that anybody does any kind of sitting or moving meditation practice … already gives them a leg up in interpreting texts that might have involved meditative or mystical practices.
ROTH: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m alluding to. For example, there are Taoist texts and Buddhist texts produced by specific groups of practitioners. If you don’t understand what the practicing context is, and if you haven’t had any related experience, you’re just going to miss the allusions to the practice and can not appreciate when this technical language is being used. Very often, especially in the early Taoist tradition, things are described metaphorically. Or Chinese characters may be used that have a range of meanings. They may have particular meanings in a political context but in a meditation text they might mean something very specific and concrete. So that’s part of what one needs to be sensitized to.
To read more from a good interview- here.
Any thoughts on labs for Kabbalah or mahshevet yisrael courses?
Cordovero’s Safed was a city of 18 study halls and 22 synagogues where lay devotions and public acts of penance were the norm. Pining away for God mixed with the channeling of errant spirits. And Yosef Karo the author of the Shulkhan Arukh received an angelic visitor guiding him in ritual practice and bodily mortification. Solomon Schachter’s Safed was a romantic vision of kabbalists going out into the field to greet the Sabbath. (In actually, Cordovero sang Lekha Dodi indoors and Luria meditated on Ana BaKoah without lekha Dodi outdoors.) Now Safed has combined its romantic heritage with Israeli Hasidism and then transformed the aura into a world of art, new age spirituality, hippie ethos and holistic health. Even without the visits by the material girl, there is still a whole lot of materiel religion going on.
Alastair Macdonald of Reuters seeks to capture the new age spirit of the city in an article and a blog post.
In this hilltop town above the Sea of Galilee, black-clad Hassidic Jews throng stone alleys where sandal-shod New Agers offer biblical jewelry and organic hummus to tourists seeking enlightenment — or Madonna.
But in this mountain-top retreat for Jewish mystics, both of an Orthodox and of less conventional persuasion, the public outburst of peace, love and understanding seemed entirely natural. Depending on your national cultural references, it’s hard to capture the spirit of Safed precisely – it is part hippie-haven, part devotional centre for hordes of black-clad Hassidic Jews; part Taos, New Mexico, part Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Spirituality and tradition are everywhere on Safed’s storefronts — “Natural face cream products based on ancient recipes”; “Bible and Mystical Art Center”; “Art & Soul.” Craft and art shops abound, though the town has lost the reputation it enjoyed in the 1960s as a home for Israel’s serious art world.
“SPA FOR THE SOUL”
It might seem the last place to forget one’s cares. But that is just what Eyal Riess of kabbalahtour.com at the International Center for Tzfat Kabbalah recommends. Eighteen years after he traded in the secular life of metropolitan Tel Aviv, he believes even a short burst of Safed air and Kabbalah can work wonders.
Busy executives choppering in for a few hours of “Kabbalah Experience,” or the party of “Russian oligarchs” flying down specially from Moscow direct to Safed for three days are among 40,000 people who Rabbi Riess says visit his center every year. One of his tour offerings is branded “A Spa for the Soul.” “Kabbalah teaches the parallels of experience between the spiritual and physical,” Riess said, pointing from his rooftop terrace to the cemetery “where Madonna visited last year.” We find the code of the soul of a person, based on the letters of his name and the date of his birth.”
Next door, Algiers-born, Paris-raised Danielle Chouraqui, a self-taught painter, is painstakingly at work on her latest creation, designed to draw viewers into pondering the mystic links between the Hebrew alphabet and the secrets of the human body and soul — “22 letters, 22 chromosomes,” she says. Her goal is “to get people to talk to their soul.”
As a town housing both Arabs and Jews, Safed saw violence in the decades leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In that year, Safed had a substantial Muslim Arab majority, including the 13-year-old Mahmoud Abbas – now the Palestinian president. Most became refugees as Jewish forces swept through the Galilee. Aside from a mosque, turned into an art gallery, and some Israeli public monuments to the war, there are few reminders of their presence.
I regularly receive sincere phone calls and emails from people looking for the Lurianic source for Safed aromatheraphy, healing candles, and yogic kabbalah. This article captures something of the spirit.
Back in 1999, Beinart framed the rise of day schools as a rejection of the original acceptance of public school. The growth of Jewish Day Schools is an abandonment of the American public square.
Beinart pointed out that the rise of day school had other factors than the obvious religious commitment. Even though day schools were originally for ideologically driven Orthodox who have not totally integrated into America, Day Schools became a form of private school for those moving up the latter.
Now, it seems the drive for day schools is the ideological need to create an enclave, in many classes an upper middle class Orthodox enclave. In this type of school, what counts? the education or the creation of the enclave? Some families are clearly still interested in creating private schools better than the public schools while others no longer ask if the day school if better than the public school in social studies, English, arts, or college preparation. Beinart reminds us to account for the role of the school in social mobility,class and caste. At the end of the twentieth century, day schools were “in” but the word “day school” may have had three different meanings- a prep school for Jews, a community school for identity, and a day school to create an enclave. Studies done by Avi Chai do not differentiate types of schools or factor in class and caste. (One of the decent studies available on the web, which was done privately by Alex Pomson, shows that in Toronto day schools are not growing relative to population increase.)
Jews supported public school because it helped enforce the separation of Church and State. Jews did encourage Christian kids to go to pre-Vatican II Catholic and Protestant schools because it would not have helped their integration. In those days, thinking of America as a Christian country would have meant Jews are excluded. Now, Jews do not worry about the possibility if there are Christian schools that do not offer an American secular narrative Jews do not worry about being outsiders. Nor do American Orthodox Jews currently worry about the possibility of Afrocentric, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh private schools.
What do day school parents feel about the melting pot? I would suspect that many are oblivious or against. Or it is only useful for everyone else. Do some of the parents see that if you exclude yourself from the socialization of the rest of the country then you start to look sectarian? Or if you accept the melting pot for viewing sports and listening to Lady Gaga, but not for social science thinking and historical narrative then you create a hybridization that may not work in all contexts. (In the full article, Beinhart cheers for the creation of the New-Jew HS in Boston as outside the box.)
Read full version of Beinart on Jewish schools here.
Preparing children for “the general American environment” meant public education as both practice and ideology. “The public school,” says Alvin I. Schiff, the Irving I. Stone Distinguished Professor of Education at Yeshiva University, in New York, “was considered sacred, holy. It was the method and setting by which Jews could become Americans.”
All the talk about Jewish identity may also obscure a less high-minded reason for the Jewish-school boom: as Jews have moved up the economic ladder, their commitment to public education has waned.
“As the public schools have eroded,” Miller says, “we are no longer being compared so much to public schools as to other independents.” Jewish leaders argue that because Jews make up such a small proportion of the U.S. population, the growth of Jewish schools has no real impact on the overall health of American public education. But public schools rely more heavily on Jewish support than the numbers would suggest, in part because Jewish organizations, fearful of any breakdown of the wall between Church and State, have traditionally lobbied hard against school vouchers and other government aid to private schools. As awareness grows that voucher programs might benefit financially strapped Jewish schools, that opposition may diminish.
Yet such parents, by choosing Jewish schools, are preparing their children to lead more observant, less assimilated lives than they do. Some even describe the phenomenon as an inversion of a practice in nineteenth-century Europe whereby parents would remain Jewish but baptize their children.
Why a growing number of relatively secular Jewish parents are abandoning the education model of their youth is a topic of considerable debate within the organized Jewish worldTHERE is another, even more sensitive issue lurking behind the Jewish-school phenomenon. Earlier generations of Jews, according to Eduardo Rauch, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in New York, sent their children to public school not simply as a means of ascending into the middle class but as a show of national loyalty. Today, in contrast, parents are willing to consider Jewish schools in part because they no longer fear being viewed as outsiders. They take their integration into mainstream America as a given. But what if earlier generations were correct — that full equality in an overwhelmingly Christian country is, in fact, reliant on Jewish willingness to participate in a common system of education?
In fact, when discussing issues like Afrocentrism and bilingual education, American Jewish leaders sometimes bemoan the demise of the melting-pot ideal in this country. Yet separate religious schools both rely on that demise and exacerbate it. The Orthodox community, for its part, has rarely celebrated the melting pot, and generally worries less about total acceptance by the broader culture.
For our last discussion about day schools, see here- Catholic Schools and Jewish Day Schools.
By now everyone has read, reacted, or over reacted to the essay by Peter Beinart, The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment. For a summary and links to many reactions, see JTA or Alison Ramer and Menachem Mendel. I also assume everyone has read the interesting three part interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic.
My interest remains focused only on religion and how it plays itself out in people’s lives. I will leave to other people and other blogs to deal with the politics. However, in the second installment of the interview with Goldberg, I found the following snippet dealing with religion.
Jeffrey Goldberg: It’s interesting to me that you, an Orthodox Jew, don’t answer the question about Zionism in any sort of theological way whatsoever.
Peter Beinart: I didn’t call myself an Orthodox Jew; I said I attend an Orthodox synagogue. But anyway, it’s a reasonable question. I feel a spiritual connection through Jewish observance–when I’m in shul, on Shabbat, even through kashrut. And I feel a spiritual connection to Jewish people–a certain delight at certain Jewish idiosyncracies, at a sense of global peoplehood.
My immediate question is what does this say about those gen x’ers who floated into Orthodoxy during the great revival of the last decades. How do they combine the warm of Shabbat with their liberalism, theological openness, and not fitting into the rigid Orthodox categories. Would the post-orthodox vortex of those demanding rigid definitions of belief and practice throw him out of their sectarian imaginary? Does he fell uncomfortable around Orthodox political views? So I emailed Peter and received the following response.
Although there are a lot of Orthodox Jews in my family (my mother is Sephardi, which doesn’t always translate easily into American categories), I was raised in a Conservative synagogue. I began going to Orthodox synagogues in my 20s.
What appealed to me was the dedication to Jewish learning, which I have come to believe is the only path to Jewish continuity. I feel in many ways limited by the fact that I did not attend Jewish school, and want my children to learn more, far more, than I did at their age. In a way, I’m more concerned with their knowledge than their observance, though I suspect and hope that the latter will follow the former. (In any case, we’re less strictly observant than some). If they can feel confident in a Jewish religious context, it will always be available to them, even if they drift away for periods of their lives. I’m also attracted to Modern Orthodoxy’s vision of a life in which one can be faithful to halacha (though I myself could be more faithful) and also truly at ease in the world, recognizing the truth and beauty in non-Jewish things.
In addition, I have always felt a sense of community that I consider precious: the involvement that people have in each other’s lives, the long, lazy stretches of time during a shabbat meal or at the park on Saturday afternoon, a series of friendships that are not based on work (which I find is very common in Washington), the amount of time we spend in each other’s homes, the way we watch each other’s kids grow up.
I think I’ve also been lucky because my community is very tolerant both in terms of observance and political opinion, even on Israel. (I didn’t realize quote how tolerant until I wrote my essay).
That makes it much easier for me to deal with those parts of Orthodoxy that do trouble me: for instance, the participation of women. I might have grativated to some more egalitarian conservadox minyan, but the fact that there are so many successful, empowered, articulate women in my community makes me feel more comfortable on questions of gender. There is also a sense of irony and good humor about Orthodox Jewry’s foibles among our friends that I greatly value.So I suppose I compromise my liberalism to participate in an Orthodox community, but I’m willing to do so because I am so enriched by it in so many ways. (And perhaps because I fear that a more universalistic Jewish community would be less of a true Jewish community). So it’s a little like Zionism. I recognize that to be a Zionist I have to compromise my liberalism: I have to support a Jewish state, which by definition will never be able to provide absolute equality to its non-Jewish citizens. But I try to do so while still hoping for as much liberalism as possible. I’ve never felt my community is demeaning or disrespectful to women or gays or lesbians or non-Jews, even as I do remain bothered by the roles according to all those groups in mainstream Orthodox practice.
I’ve also been inspired by various people who are far more learned than me who are also highly critical of certain illiberal, even racist, tendencies that they see in the Orthodox community, and in Israel. They have modeled for me a life of Jewish commitment that is not morally complacent, and which is zealous about the rights and dignity of non-Jews, both in the US and the Middle East.
On the essay itself, I’ve been pleasantly surprised–even moved–by the reaction from the Jewish Week and from Nathan Diament, who runs the Washington office of the OU. I don’t expect that publication or organization to agree with my views on Israel, but if there is marginally more concern for the declining Zionism of non-Orthodox Jews, and for the kind of attitudes expressed at the 2002 Israel rally, where a largely Orthodox crowd booed a call to recognize Palestinian suffering, then I will be gratified.
We seem to have a functional religion adding value and community to life. His religion is not very theological. Regarding problematic ideas and values, we see an important role played by those who are ironic or critical toward towards their Orthodoxy as helping to make Orthodoxy more welcoming. It seems these friends help lower any religious tensions or cognitive dissidence. I was pleased to see the tolerance and acceptance of diversity within the community, or at least among his friends and acquaintances.
If you comment, limit it to religion. Post the politics on one of the other blogs.
