Category Archives: Uncategorized

New issue of Sh’ma – DIY Judaism

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Alan Brill | Leave a comment

Marshall Sklare’s classic work Conservative Judaism (1955) declared Orthodoxy dead because orthodoxy means Yiddish derahsas not English sermons, it means old world customs, it meant rabbis without a secular education, it meant no college and no professions. What about the rising modern orthodoxy of the 1950’s? They were few in number and most importantly when Jews who moved to suburbia in 1950 viewed their live options and their memories, it was the Orthodoxy of their childhoods. They forever visualized Orthodoxy in those terms, which justified their choices even into the 1980’s when their original vision of Orthodoxy was no longer reality.

We have a similar retention of an original childhood vision by modern orthodox who still refer to the Conservative congregations of their youth that were unlearned Orthodox synagogues without a mechitza, with a traditional rabbi paternally leading a semi-observant congregation. In those days, Conservative Jewish centers taught peoplehood and ethnicity.

The MO never ask: what is done today? What people do today is indie and DIY. When gen-y opts out of Orthodoxy for intellectual and cultural reasons -they are attracted to indie.

Well, the current issue of Sh’ma is an essential read to catch up on current affairs, especially for this snowy day. It describes the new world of Do It Yourself and indie Judaism. They want everything to be a co-op or a collective activity. They do not seek wisdom of the boomers or an organizational hierarchy, they are DIY.

[I cannot seem to create a direct link. It seems that you now have to sign up – It is still free but they get your email. Let me know if one can get in directly. Here are the links:
www.shma.com/shma-subscriptions
www.shmadigital.com/shma/201002/?u1=texterity

Steven M Cohen wrote a great article in the issue (It is on page 3) on “The New Jewish Organizing” outlining five points (1) indie and spiritual minyanim (2) culture- music, magazines, film, poetry (3)learning in LIMMUD format (4)social justice (5) new media- social networking. Cohen points out that the gen y calls themselves activists, not leaders. High quality davening is valued over building an institution. They don’t want to change the system like Boomers, rather they want to create opportunities for like minded people with similar sensibilities to gather. They don’t like the preoccupation with divisions and boundaries of the older generation. Cohen writes that they blur the boundaries of” education and entertainment., prayer and social justice, learning and spirituality.” They remain single into their 30’s and exist in a separate social realm than those settled. Religious experience is more important than numbers attending.

To develop Yosef’s comment, the younger gen y’s are moving out but not pulled by the Conservative movement circa 1975, which still lingers mainly in the imagination of the modern orthodox. It seems Yosef is affirming my original definition that the gen-y’s are in a new place. Yet all the gen-x and boomers can do is use the phrase post-orthodox and think of the issues of the 1980’since they have not visited the new minyanim. Some Boomers do not get that for the DIY movement, MO synagogues seem intellectually and cultural stagnant like a 1970’s Jewish Center. The gen y’s are pulled by the new indie vision. Yosef seems to be correct, the older generation may call them post-orthodox, but they are indie and DIY. The current issue of Shema is probably the best list itemizing what might be considered as post-orthodox to a Boomer and treated as natural to a gen y.

But just as I remember Conservative leaders were still telling people in the 1980’s that one cannot be Orthodox and go to college or be a professional. Even though no one who was mastering the halakhic world of Rav Soloveitchik students ever thought about Yiddish and the Lower East Side. I suspect that the older Orthodox will still think for years to come that the younger set is leaving to return to the liberalism circa 1978.

Post-Orthodoxy and loss of the 20th century definition of Orthodoxy.

Posted on February 7, 2010 by Alan Brill | 8 comments

Since it has reached my attention from people in real life -not online- that the term post-orthodoxy has gone from a meme to a buzz word, I will devote a few more posts to the term. Unlike my original post on the term among gen –y, I have been told that some people 35 years older are finding it a meaningful buzz word. I am not sure what we will have in the end of these posts, but here goes.

Let us now consider the term from the perspective of a thesis ‘POST ORTHODOXY’: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE THEOLOGICAL AND SOCIO-CULTURAL BOUNDARIES OF CONTEMPORARY ORTHODOX JUDAISM NEHEMIA STERN (unpublished MA, SUNY Binghamton, 2006.) Stern is studying for a PhD in anthropology and I assume that someday he will be a fine scholar. I thank him for providing me with a copy. However, the thesis was a journeyman’s work and he should not be judged on it. I will be reorganizing the material, providing a tighter framework than the original and a stronger conceptual scheme.

Stern claims that the clear sense of Orthodoxy as a fixed denomination as defined by the era of Rav Moshe Feinstein is over. Now we have a wide variety of practices and many lines to divide people formerly under a common banner of the term Orthodoxy. Meaning that the working definitions of the 1970’s and 1980’s are gone and people are now without a fixed order and have to work things out afresh.

Stern claims that lay people are now figuring out what it means to be Orthodox through their discussions on the internet, in turn this creates the formation of many micro cultural identities. The micro-cultures are the many echo chambers, group thinks, and blogging communities that have created new cultural boundaries.

Stern insightful point is that topics that once had a variety of accepted rabbinic opinions, in which one knew that there were liberal and strict opinions has now been reframed as whether one is a heretic, outside orthodoxy and whether one accepts rabbinic authority. Inside/outside has replaced strict/lenient. The topic that is mediated is no longer the halakhah as found in the Rabbinic books rather the topci debated is Rabbinic authority. Topics are no longer debates of two rabbinic authorities in which a practitioner accepts one position. Now, there is only one correct position and those who disagree are heretics.

Even very small decisions in the grand scheme of things, such as a decision whether to eat Hebrew National franks is not decided as a Kashrut question, but as a snowball discussion about gedolim, science, rabbinic authority, and obedience. Rather than a strict and lenient position questions open up a Pandora’s box of issues of boundary issues.

Finally, these changes are incomprehensible using older models so the baby-boomers are clueless. Stern claims that those whose model is still from an earlier decade have trouble with the new shifts and mixing of older categories. There are dozens of patterns of belief and practice, few of which continue the recognized older patterns.

In sum, Post- Orthodoxy is the sense that the older definition has faded, that everything is now pitched as question of boundary and heresy. In this new era, lay people create their own boundaries using blogs and newspapers and are thereby creating a post-Orthodox world of new identities.

In a post Orthodox world the choice of practices and rituals one performs or takes part in, tell more about a person then his/or her choice of denomination. Separations are made through practices and not so much through beliefs. This paradigm of praxis differs markedly from the ways in which Rabbi Moshe Feinstein attempted to shape Jewish Orthodoxy within the twentieth century. For Feinstein the boundary of that which is intolerable rested on ones denomination. For example, Feinstein could recognize one who desecrates the Sabbath as being within the
frame of Orthodoxy, so long as that desecration occurs out of a sense of teyavon (desire). Thus, if one is required to work on the Sabbath to feed ones family that is considered ‘desire’. If one watches television on the Sabbath out of a sense of loving television, that
too is desire. However, the instant that desecration turns into an ideology, an intolerable deviation suddenly occurs. Thus, Reform and Conservative Judaism’s acted as intolerable deviations (from the stand point of Orthodoxy) because they ignored or negated (from the Orthodox perspective) various practices and rituals out of a sense of ideology, and not desire.

In the post Orthodox era of the twenty-first century, individuals gather either on the internet, in groups, or via letters to the editor, and discuss this wave of ‘crime’. In the process of discussion, various sensibilities and ideologies are being negotiated. These negotiations pierce the philosophical heart of what it means to be ‘Orthodox’ in the twenty-first century. The definition of rabbinic authority, the role of rabbinic authority, the delineations between Science and Torah, between governmental control and communal practice, are under a constant process of negotiation and mediation. Some individuals may discuss these themes in an effort to forge definitive answers. Yet in many ways, these efforts are irrelevant. Answers have never been reached. These discussions however, serve a social function. They operate to demarcate and define social and religious boundaries between people. By discussing that which is intolerable, by questioning the very notion of the intolerable, an Orthodox group, “supplies the framework within which the people of the group develop an orderly sense of their own
cultural identity”

Whereas in the previous century the discourse rested on the interpretation of the opinions of the cultural broker (indeed there existed a plurality of mutually respected interpretations), in the 21st century the discourse has shifted slightly to the authority of the culture broker (Da’as Torah) and subsequently to the creation of theological boundaries and separations.

Thus over two packages of heretical franks…The conversation that ensued was ethnographically fascinating in that we could not discuss the legal topic of Kashruth without discussing the meta-thematic issues of Rabbinic authority.

Individuals who were primarily educated in the previous century may have difficulty comprehending religious conceptions that question classical boundaries… Where once two or three delineations were enough to categorize ones Orthodoxy, today a plethora of different delineations are being made.

Stern offers lists of the controversies of the last few years, all well known to those who are keeping up with the world of blogs. The controversies include Slifkin, metizah bepeh, organ donation, bugs in the water, shidduch crisis, Hindu temple hair, and Chabad messainism, Much of the MA is devoted to a collection of snippets about these topics.

Stern claims that these controversies eroded the fixed positions of religion and science, religious authority, and education. There are five new criteria that have destabilized the older definition: Jewish outreach, Gedolei Yisroel, the semiotics of holiness and purity, and invoking of acceptance of rabbinic authority They created unclear lines of who is on what side. And most importantly, they have served among lay people, who inhabit blogs, newspapers, and eat at pizza shops, as a means for them to argue, debate, and reach new understandings of Orthodoxy.

The new positions created in these popular venues are not intellectual or even ideological positions but cognitive frameworks for dealing with change. Reactions are in crisis mode and emotionally charged because of the need to regain a stable world order. For Stern, these new restructures, even when speaking about Rabbinic authority, are highly personal. An Orthodoxy “that is constructed of our own experiences, language, culture, and temperament”

A feeling of ‘dramatic crisis’ is created, as the boundaries and definitions of Orthodoxy are called into question…. Controversies and newly found religious stringencies are used to help reinterpret a definition of and a boundary for Orthodox Judaism.

For the purposes of this thesis, religious fundamentalism occurs when an individual (or a group of individuals) reflexively reinterpret their theological assumptions. In this paradigm, modernity acts as a backdrop to this reinterpretation. Fundamentalism then acts as more of a cognitive then an ideological framework. Martin Reisbrodt in his essay Fundamentalism and its Resurgence in Religion (2000)… For Reisbrodt religious fundamentalism refers to a“type of religious revival movement which reacts to social changes perceived as a dramatic crisis. In such movements people attempt restructure their life worlds cognitively, emotionally, and practically, reinvent their social identities and regain a sense of dignity, honor, and respect (2000. 271).

The physical sites of such controversies may be a pizza store, a kitchen, the internet, or the pages of a newspaper
The standard Orthodox meta narratives that deal with, denominationalism, rabbinic authority, and secular knowledge are no longer enshrined in stone when viewed in the light of a world “that is constructed of our own experiences, language, culture, and temperament”

Post-Orthodoxy is a term for those drawn into the vortex of ever new controversies, those who feel an urgency to deal with them, and those who use them to help create new lines.

To be continued in a Part Two with some of Stern’s examples of the new varieties and my own reaction to Stern attempt at providing historical causality. But do you think his analysis rings true?

8 Comments

Tagged orthodox heresy, orthodox Judaism, post-orthodox, post-orthodoxy, rabbinic authority

Habermas and Halakhah -Guest post from AS

Posted on February 4, 2010 by Alan Brill | 1 comment

[My intended posts for this week are still on an external hard-drive, but I was lucky enough to have a guest post from AS]

AS writes in a comment:

Right now I can only offer the following brief comment that overly compresses what could be at least a book chapter. Those not familiar with Habermas should note that he talks about communicative rationality as an aspect of modernity. Therefore this constitutes a consciously external and modern critique of halakhah – although one that perhaps reveals the paradoxes in modern apologetics.

Before starting we need to ask how to characterize halakhic claims. More specifically we must ask where the binding normative force of halakhic claims come from. Sociology could adequately describe a community in which a certain species of claims were taken to be binding, along with the varieties of social coercion that are employed to ensure compliance, but this would not but this would not account for internal rules of justification that are capable of shaping beliefs.

One obviously wrong answer is to assume that halakhic claims aspire to truth, and that the truth conditions are correspondence to the revealed will of God. The binding force of halakhah in both ritual and moral domains derives solely from the authority of a just God.

This is the wrong picture for a few reasons, mostly because halakhah is “not in heaven.” The correctness of a halakhah derives not from its correspondence with a revealed word, but at least in part because it comes to be regarded as the correct interpretation of a text by means of a rational, internally consistent, discourse. The metatheory of halakhah, were it ever to be carefully explained, would not need to make any reference to God whatsoever in describing how halakhah functions to determine its correctness. At best there is some God-granted authority to interpret at the very root, but within the discourse this authority is neither appealed to or contested (except rhetorically), so it is moot.

Halakhah can therefore be construed as a species of rational communicative discourse. Indeed, in its internal dialectics it seems to aspire to be a rational discourse in that it follows rules of interpretation, precedent, etc. that are universally recognizable by all participants. If this is the case then a Habermasian would likely say that halakhic claims, like moral claims, aspire not to truth (having conditions of rightness constituted independent of the halakhic community) but rather to validity.

In general Habermas thinks that normative validity claims implicitly contains not merely the intersubjective ought, but to the universal/deontological. The deontological nature and binding force of normative claims stems from the idea the very participation in a discursive practice presupposes the acceptance of certain normative principles. In other words, we could not exist as a community of language-users capable of achieving basic communicative rationality (like coordinating behavior) without background normative assumptions which everyone implicitly relies upon in any discursive practice.

Now clearly halakhic claims cannot be “redeemed” in the same way that Habermas thinks that regular normative claims can – nor would we expect as much. We would liken halakhic discourse in many ways to legal discourse. But Habermas claims (and here it is simply easier to quote) that:

“Discourse theory explains the legitimacy of law by means of procedures and communicative presuppositions that, once they are legally institutionalized, ground the supposition that the process of making and applying the law lead to rational outcomes.” This rationality is proved not by the outcomes themselves, but procedurally “by the fact that addressees are treated as free and equal members of an association of legal subjects.”

Because halakhah is an exclusionary discourse that does not even aspire to procedural equality, because addressees are not treated as equal, and because this inequality, instead of bearing a very high burden of rational justification is claimed to lie in a revealed metaphysical ontology, its claim to communicative rationality breaks down.

Halakhic discourse does not devolve into literal incoherence, and anyone familiar with legal discourse will not find it entirely foreign. But this is precisely because rabbis address each other, and sometimes learned laypersons, as equals (it by no means breaks from communicative rationality simply by appeal to various metaphysical processes or the like). On Habermasian grounds it breaks from communicative rationality when it treats its subjects unequally who themselves have no part in shaping the discourse.

At this point halakhah either makes a sharp premodern return to a mythical worldview, or remains modern but employs an instrumental rationality in its treatment of some of its subjects (I don’t think it’s quite strategic rationality because it lacks the pretense of equal participation). I think that both of these are in play. Sometimes in contemporary halakhah difference and exclusion are justified naturalistically (in a sense because some subjects do not transcend nature, they are regarded as a part of the natural world to be intervened upon) and sometimes by appeal to a premodern mythology. And sometimes it is a rather interesting hybrid. [end of AS guest post]

For those who are less familiar with Habermas, I [AB] add some links and definitions. Basic wiki biography , communicative action, and the public sphere, as well as the SEP on Habermas. Even from the links and the short definitions below, it may be enough to have some serious discussion. For those, who need a translation, a deontological claim, in this context, means something is assur or muttar.

From Wiki on rationality
Jürgen Habermas considers his major contribution to be the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of either the cosmos or the knowing subject.

From Wiki on the the public sphere
The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.” The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.

Habermas stipulates that, due to specific historical circumstances, a new civic society emerged in the eighteenth century. Driven by a need for open commercial arenas where news and matters of common concern could be freely exchanged and discussed – accompanied by growing rates of literacy, accessibility to literature, and a new kind of critical journalism – a separate domain from ruling authorities started to evolve across Europe. “In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people”.

In his historical analysis, Habermas points out three so-called “institutional criteria” as preconditions for the emergence of the new public sphere.

1. Disregard of status: Preservation of “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether. […] Not that this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses, salons, and the societies; but as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realized, it was at least consequential.” (loc.cit.)
2. Domain of common concern: “… discussion within such a public presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned. The domain of ‘common concern’ which was the object of public critical attention remained a preserve in which church and state authorities had the monopoly of interpretation. […] The private people for whom the cultural product became available as a commodity profaned it inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of rational communication with one another), verbalize it, and thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long could assert its authority.” (loc.cit.)
3. Inclusivity: However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who – insofar as they were propertied and educated – as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate. […] Wherever the public established itself institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its educator – the new form of bourgeois representation” (loc.cit.).

On Rationality and Communication:

Communicative action for Habermas is possible given human capacity for rationality. This rationality, however, is “no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory.”[1] Instead, Habermas situates rationality as a capacity inherent within language, especially in the form of argumentation. “We use the term argumentation for that type of speech in which participants thematize contested validity claims and attempt to vindicate or criticize them through argumentation.”[2] The structures of argumentative speech, which Habermas identifies as the absence of coercive force, the mutual search for understanding, and the compelling power of the better argument, form the key features from which intersubjective rationality can make communication possible. Action undertaken by participants to a process of such argumentative communication can be assessed as to their rationality to the extent which they fulfill those criteria.

And for those who in their ignorance call anything they have not read post-modern- Here is Habermas’ rejection of post-modernism in a nutshell.

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Posted in 30940391, halakhic theory, philosophy, Uncategorized

Tagged habermas, habermas and halakhah, halachic rationality, halakhic discourse, halakhic rationality, meta-halakhah

Temporary Slow Down- Blue Screen

Posted on February 3, 2010 by Alan Brill | 2 comments

My computer gave me a blue screen of death last night, Bad-Pool Caller, today the hard drive was reformatted and memory checked, and it still did not work. So I am on a good loaner (it will probably become my new computer).
My data is backed up but I have a lot of transferring to do. Ninite made the first phase much quicker. But many files to go before I sleep.

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Hasidism and George Harrison: Living in the Material World

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Alan Brill | 5 comments

Hasidism, which is currently 270 years old, has gone through many changes over that long period of time.

Modern types look to Hasidism for new age and then find something else completely different when they look the eighteenth century texts. For example, the main literary disciple of the Baal Shem Tov Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonoye wrote the classic volume of Hasidic Torah, the Toldot Yaakov Yosef.
He presents the story of Yitro as our fight against materiality, luxury, and excess. I do not tend to hear many homilies against the physical anymore, and barely any against excess. Torah is no longer a means to get beyond the material world. Now, we get Hasidic homilies about the need to embrace the physical world and the earthly part of our lives.

“Yitro heard,” then he came to meet the children of Israel at Mt. Sinai. “What was it that Yitro heard that caused him to come?” “He heard about two things: the splitting of the Red Sea and the war against Amalek” (Zevachim 116 cf. Mikhilta and Rashi).
First, why should he have been impressed by these two miracles in particular? Second, why should that have led him to come to the Jews? [Third, why do we care what happened “What was was” The Torah is not a story. This verse has a moral lesson for every individual at all times.—- I will deal with this below]

A human being is composed of materiality and form: the body and soul. Our soul is constantly aflame to cling to our Maker. But our physicality interrupts that clinging with its desires for physical things, such as sex and food…. The influence of our physicality creates an obstruction between ourselves and God. When we sin, an additional barrier is formed since the physical grows stronger than the form and seeks excesses of luxuries, more than a person needs in order to sanctify himself.
Yitro represents the state of withholding ourselves from the excess (Play on the word yitro for additional). To remove the obstruction of our physicality and the barrier of our sins, we need the splitting of the Red Sea and the war against Amalek.
[Rest of homily is from Alsheikh and Olalot Ephraim on splitting of Red Sea and defeat of Amelek as representing a splitting of materiality and a defeat of our evil inclination.]
When we hold ourselves back from unnecessary pleasures, represented by Yitro–we overcome the two obstacles that divide us from God. Our physicality, which is represented by the splitting of the Red Sea, and we overcome our sins, which is represented by the victory over Amalek.

In contrast, 180 years later the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Basi Legani spoke about using physicality to serve God, there should be dirah batahtonim. As an example of the new type of homily on Yitro, here is one by my friend Professor Tali Loewenthal.

The Midrash is intriguing. It says this first word Anokhi is Egyptian, because G-d wanted to speak with us in the language we had learnt while we were in Egypt. G-d does not want to relate to us only on the sacred, spiritual level of our lives, represented by Hebrew, the holy language. He wants to reach the earthly “Egyptian” dimension as well. We should not try to pretend that we do not have this lower aspect. Rather, we should try to control it, then elevate it and ultimately transform it into something holy.

I could have done this post equally well with Mitnagdut. We do not give the homilies of the Vilna Gaon and other eighteenth century Lithuanians who were puritanical or ascetic, other-worldly, fasting often, avoiding sleeping and eating, hiding from the sunlight and seeking inner angelic guides. Herman Wouk stated that we are clearly not the Vilna Gaon anymore. Currently we seen to have effaced this difference and portray a GRA of our own presentism.

What happened to our tradition of transcending the physical? Maybe serving God with the physical has reached its limits for our age and we need to return to the Jewish tradition of getting beyond our physicality?

George Harrison: Living in the material world

I’m living in the material world
Living in the material world
can’t say what I’m doing here
But I hope to see much clearer,
after living in the material world

I got born into the material world
Getting worn out in the material world
Use my body like a car,
[skipped the middle of the song]

While I’m living in the material world
Not much ‘giving’ in the material world
Got a lot of work to do
Try to get a message through
And get back out of this material world

My salvation from the material world

To return to what I skipped above in the homily by R. Yaakov Yosef:
Third, why do we care what happened “What was, was.” The Torah is not a story: “The Torah of Hashem is complete” This verse has a moral lesson for every individual at all times.

Rabbi Yaakov Yosef .does not value treating the Torah as an accounts of the past or as a story of earthy matters. What was, was! The past is past. To matter the Torah has to be eternal and not in the past. The Torah is eternal wisdom beyond its story. In this, he undercuts those who treat the Bible as literary narrative or as history. Rather than fit the Bible into a modern category, it is treated as eternal wisdom for the adept. I do not hear much of that anymore either. But I do find a serious rejection of history.

This past Sukkot, while sitting in a Sukkah with many people, I mentioned that I can date a hasidic story to within about ten years. Especially since most of them are 20th century inventions, reflecting the issues of that decade. In an instant, someone sitting at the other end of the Sukkah declared: “That is just like a Bible critic. You cannot date Hasidic texts because that is what Biblical critic do.”

5 Comments

Posted in Neo-Hasidism, popular religion, Uncategorized

Tagged George Harrison, hasdism, hasidic stories, Lubavitcher Rebbe, materialism, Tali Lowenthal, toldot yaakov yosef, Vilna Gaon, yitro

Happiness, Salinger, and Popular Religion.

Posted on January 31, 2010 by Alan Brill | 1 comment

Rav Soloveitchik in his famous footnote number four in Halakhic Man spends over two pages decrying the seeking of happiness and solace through religion. For him, true religion is about psychic upheavals, pangs, and torments from anxiety, anguish and tension. He claims that those who seek the stillness of peace and tranquility are non-Orthodox Jews and are “Typical of this attitudes the Christian Science movement.” Leaving aside the empiricism of this statement, he would not be sanguine about the current Orthodox emphasis on instant happiness through Torah, outreach by promising happiness, or the goal of producing studies to show the happiness quotient of Orthodoxy.

In today’s NYT, there is a review of recent literature that critiques happiness. The quotes speak for themselves on the happiness industry as silly. There are five basic principles of a benign happiness that would apply to the followers of any denomination or Church. And that true happiness is a fleeting emotion related to the peaks of the transient not to a warm bed, friends, and a job.

Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries — just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it. The fashion is to bemoan happiness studies and positive psychology as being the work not of the Devil (the Devil is kind of cool), but of morons. “

In “Bright-Sided,” Barbara Ehrenreich recently looked with dismay at what she views as the industry of happiness, a culture bludgeoned by insistent — even aggressive — good cheer.

We could canvass Gore, Rubin, Gilbert, the Dalai Lama and the many authors on the happier.com Web site and produce the Fundamentally Sound, Sure-Fire Top Five Components of Happiness: (1) Be in possession of the basics — food, shelter, good health, safety. (2) Get enough sleep. (3) Have relationships that matter to you. (4) Take compassionate care of others and of yourself. (5) Have work or an interest that engages you.

The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it’s happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience. It is deep but often brief (as Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Frank Kermode wrote, “It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.” To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies.

In honor of Salinger’s death, many tributes have been placed on the web. (I am still waiting for an Abrahm Sutzkever tribute with content.) Fifty years ago, a theologically oriented literary critic noted that the success of J. D. Salinger was to offer us the torments of hell that we can enjoy. Salinger’s characters rejected the cant of society including its petty views of happiness for a more exquisite torment of those who truly hope.

The literary critic Donald Barr wrote “Saints, Pilgrims and Artists” for Commonweal more than fifty years ago, in 1957, but its analysis remains sharp and insightful

Most of Salinger’s work, therefore, is about those who think they are in hell, a place where the soul suffers according to its qualities, and without escape.

Ordinarily, we all are interested in hell. Ten people have read and enjoyed the Inferno for every one who has read the Purgatorio or the Paradiso. It is fun; like looking at real estate, it gives us a sense of our own possibilities. But Salinger’s hell is different. It is hell for the good, who can feel pain, who really love or hope to love. On the gate of this hell we do not read the words, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.” Hope is not abandoned here—hope is the implement of torture, hope deferred. We identify ourselves both with the victims and the devils. And it is not strange real estate. It is home.

Salinger wrote in the 1950’s. Hudnut-Beumler in his Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics. 1945-1965 points out the role of solace and happiness in 1950’s religion and the importance of the jeremiads against it by the intellectuals.

In 1946 Rabbi Joshua Liebman, a leading Reform rabbi promised happiness through organized religion in his best seller Peace of Mind, which reached #1 on the NYT charts. In the 1950’s, many Churches took his advice. As did most modern Orthodox rabbis in the RCA who wrote definitive books on the Jewish Way in Love and Marriage or in Death and Mourning. Happiness and psychological well-being was promised as the immediate reward of the rituals.

We have just lived through a period similar to the 1950’s, with simple answers and projected resolutions of all problems through organized religion. Barbara Ehrenreich and Amy Bloom now and Salinger and Rav Soloveitchik in the 1950’s, remind us that there is more to religion than simplistic quotients of happiness.

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Tagged amy bloom, barbara ehrenreich, frank Kermode, happiness, Hudnut-Beumle, Joshua Liebman, Looking for God in the Suburbs:, Rabbi Soloveitchik, salinger

Vattimo and Theology

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Alan Brill | 12 comments

There is a new series by Continuum Book that engages contemporary philosophy from a theological perspective. Adorno and Theology, Wittgenstein and Theology, Habermas and Theology, Girard and Theology, Zizek and Theology. They are also offering new readings for the 21^st century of Kant and Theology, Hegel and Theology, Kierkegaard and Theology. Most of them look good and will surely engage discussion.

This past week, I went to a book signing for Vattimo and Theology– Thomas Guarino

There is little good material on Gianni Vattimo in English but here is a book review in English and here is Vattimo’s blog (in Italian- Columbia UP has a link to the blog embedded in a translation program).

Vattimo translated Gadaemer into Italian, and took hermeneutics to a Nietzsche influenced extreme. Everything is just interpretation, there is no truth in the text.

Now, how can a catholic priest teaching in a conservative seminary use an atheist, nihilist, gay, anti-clerical, anti-revelation thinker as a basis for a book? The approach not to take is to call this is heresy and forbidden and violates what we were taught. So what does that leave? One can show how other contemporary theologians have rejected his thought. (There is an article in Modern Theology- that does that) Or one can take Vattimo’s positive points and re-graft them onto tradition.

Instead the author of the new book attempted the following two approaches. One can use it as a self-corrective for how tradition is currently being presented. One can use it to understand what current intellectuals are thinking so that one can respond to the issues of our age

Some of the points in the book:

Cardinal Ratzinger – decried the dictatorship of Relativism, Vattimo argued against Ratzinger that dogmatic claims are the bigger problem and let’s have charitable tolerance.

Secularism, in the post-religious sense, should not be decried but treated as a chance to practice the weak virtues of charity-love without dogma and as a vibrant fruit of religion. Religion has been kept out of the public sphere, but now that it is weakened, it should be brought back into the public sphere.

Vattimo says “I believe that I believe” – meaning that I have faith in the human concept of belief not in an object of believe. So whereas the Enlightenment taught we cant know the truth of religion, Vattimo argues that “faith” is the acceptance that one is heir to a library of the textual tradition of faith and to a socio-cultural world of religion. Modern rationalist liberals want to treat religion as symbolism, or metaphor. In contrast, Vattimo has faith in faith so he takes religion at face values but know that there is nothing behind it. There is no one meaning, all is a fable, all is interpretation, there is no truth out side the cave.

“It is only thanks to God that I’m an atheist”
“I believe that I believe” (credere di credere)

Guardino argues that this is not theologically sound. We need for revelation, and belief but Vattimo gives us an insight into our age. Guardino best line: “Vattimo makes cultural liberals look like scholastic divines”

Vattimo recites the Latin prayers from the Roman Breviary three times a day, and he says it is not because he believes but as an acceptance of tradition. There was a wide range of opinions what to make of that behavior. Does that give him a weak faith? Does ritual without a traditional sense of faith count? What would Jews make of this ritual behavior?

Unfortunately, we have nothing similar from the Jewish community. We do not have a series like this. There is little Jewish theological engagement since the early 1960’s, except among a few academics. Why cant Jews put out a series like this?

We spend all our time discussing bad ideology about our denominations, maybe responses to actual philosophers might better clarify our beliefs? Maybe a Reform and Orthodox response to Vattimo might teach us more than a rehashing of denominational generalities.

What can Jews learn from Vattimo? Does it reflect our congregants state of faith? How would we respond to Vattimo? What corrective does it offer us?

How would an Orthodox author successful learn from a heretic?

As a side point: It is interesting to watch the major philosopher of our age Jurgern Habermas learning to use Twitter.

Update: Jürgen Habermas says he’s not on Twitter

Over the last several days there has been considerable hubbub around the fact that pioneering media theorist Jürgen Habermas might have signed up for Twitter as @JHabermas. This would be “important if true”, as Jay Rosen put it. Intrigued, I tracked him down through the University of Frankfurt. I succeeded in getting him on the phone at his home in Sternburg, and asked him if he was on Twitter. He said,

No, no, no. This is somebody else. This is a mis-use of my name.

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Posted in philosophy, theology, Uncategorized

Tagged gianni vattimo, thomas guarino, vattimo, weak faith

Chief Rabbi di Segni on the Jewish Catholic Encounter

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Alan Brill | 3 comments

Interviews with Chief Rabbi di Segni from January 12, and 14.

In an interview with Reuters ahead of this Sunday’s visit, Rabbi Riccardo di Segni also said he hoped the event would help combat hostility towards the Jewish world and intolerance of any religion.

INTERVIEW – Only God can judge Pius XII on Jews – chief rabbi
By Philip Pullella
ROME (Reuters) – Only God can judge whether wartime Pope Pius XII did enough to save Jews and whether he should have spoken out more forcefully against the Holocaust, the rabbi who will host Pope Benedict first visit to Rome’s synagogue said.

Di Segni was asked about a Vatican official who defended Pius — who became pope on the eve of World War Two — from accusations he turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.

“I think that it can be morally dangerous and, religiously speaking, dangerous to say that the will of God is to be silent and not to say a word in front of the suffering of the people,” Di Segni said, speaking in English.

“So let us be careful and let us not (look for) a way of absolving people. I think only God may understand if people have done His will righteously, not us,” he said.”Religion now has a tremendous responsibility in bringing either war or peace to the world. So a signal of peace and friendship starting here from Rome could be very important,” he said.

“As Jews we want to say very strongly that any kind of hatred against difference, and not only against the Jews, has to be banned, has to be condemned,” he said.

Another Interview in Catholic News Service

Rome rabbi says pope’s visit shows commitment to dialogue
Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi, told Catholic News Service there is “a solid basis” for positive relations, but “with a storm every now and then.”

“Times have changed,” the rabbi said. “Many things have been achieved; other things still need to be done. The path, the Jewish-Catholic encounter, is terribly complicated. It is not a smooth road leading onward, but it is one continually filled with stumbling blocks. The visit of a pope to the synagogue should demonstrate that beyond the stumbling blocks there is a substantial desire to communicate with each other and resolve problems.”
As is often the case, he said, “it’s hardest to establish good relations with the person closest to you.”

Side point on Bnei Akiva

Bnei Akiva’s local representatives said they decided to participate after hesitation and followed the advice of Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, who said that the visit was a sign that Pope Benedict wanted to “continue the dialogue.” He advised Bnei Akiva that the pope should be “respected as a king.”

Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni (1949-) the current chief rabbi of Rome offers a unique take on the dialogue. He assumes that both sides accept exclusivism, so to go forward we have to affirm pluralism. Ever the gadfly, di Segni writes that the Jewish tradition follows the exclusivist and anti-Christian counter-gospel narrative of Toldot Yeshu, on which he wrote his doctorate and then published as a book. For di Segni, Christians must recognize that the derogatory exclusivism Toldot Yeshu is the Jewish tradition, and this corresponds to the anti-Jewish narrative of traditional Christianity. He ponders that the Christian Trinity may actually be idolatry and violates the Noahite law that requires monotheism. If Christians violate this law, according to deSegni, they will not find salvation and are, furthermore, deserving of death in this world.

Noahite laws may be incumbent on gentiles as a form of general revelation but, Segni asks, if we took that seriously then wouldn’t we would have to be missionizing for these laws? So too, Christians if they should take their own faith seriously, should advocate missionizing. Rabbi de Segni proposes therefore that both sides call a moratorium on truth claims and missionizing. It is not that either side should actually give up their truth claims, or their exclusivism, or to stop hoping for the conversion of the other, but simply a practical moratorium, a practical pluralism.

The real problem is not so much the Church’s conviction of the necessity for the Jews to be saved by means of Jesus. The real issue is what is done with that conviction. If we were to apply the system of Noahide laws to the latter, we would have to do everything possible in order that the Noahides observe them—including the law dealing with the prohibition against worship of other gods. Each person would have to become a missionary of the pure faith…

On the Jewish side, this movement would have to be matched by an affirmation of the principle that faith in Jesus (understood: on the part of Christians, not Jews ) is not incompatible with the worship of the one and only God. This is a principle which has been accepted in authoritative traditions within Judaism, but which would have to become more prevalent and accepted by the majority. From this would have to follow, on the part of Jews, a greater understanding of Christian Spirituality.

Moses Maimonides, in the rules he gives for kings in his treatise (Chapter 11), after having denounced the invalidity of faith in Jesus, nevertheless formulated an interpretation of the providential significance of the spread of Christianity, “to prepare the road for the king-Messiah, and to help the whole world become accustomed to serving God together, as it is said, ‘At that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the LORD and serve him with one accord’” (Zeph. 3:9).

Perhaps the parallel suggests the solution, which cannot be immediate but eschatological. Each of us has the right to hope that the other will acknowledge that there is true faith in us, but we allow for that to unfold over a long period, which is beyond our control.

Read full version here

Rabbi De Segni argues that we keep our particular truth claims but suspend acting on them until the end time. Since we have no common ground for discussion if we put our truth claims first, let us avoid the question and deal with ethics and practical matters.He frames questions as an exclusivist and then answers as a pluralist. Unlike other thinkers, De Segni values diversity over dignity, he emphasizes religious exclusivism and prejudice and then calls for charity.

Rabbi de Segni does work toward theological charity by building on Rabbi Yaakov Emden’s acceptance of Jesus as a great teacher who did not want to harm Judaism, and therefore legitimate for the gentiles since

In the end what counts is human responsibility. In the human realm, both faiths are called by God to work in the world.

As he left the ark, Noah received the assurance that humanity would never again be entirely destroyed by God. Now, however this risk still exists—not destruction by a divine hand, but by a human hand with no guarantees other than our own responsibility, which we (especially as religious) cannot escape. Commitments and facts must come before forms and ceremonies. This is the authentic message of the prophets, which we recognize as a common source, and the comfort promised by the divine mercy will recall once more the waters of Noah, no longer as a sign of destruction, but as a sign of protections. As the prophet Isaiah says (54:9): “This is like the days of Noah to me: Just as I swore that the waters of Noah would never again go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you.”

di Segni sates that there is no need for Jews to change their current prayer because they have already been censored, but he claims that they were self-censored.

Jewish prayers have already been self-censored, centuries ago,” Di Segni informed the prelate in a communiqué. “What has been brought to our attention once more is a history of polemics which goes back thousands of years, concerning which some clarifications are in order. Anyone can hear for themselves the prayers which Jews recite today, and they can easily be verified, even in translation,” Di Segni emphasized. “The essential fact,” he added, “is that today no reference to Christians exists in our prayers, which, among other things, have been the object of repeated interventions of censoring and self-censoring. The Hebrew texts were changed centuries ago.
full version here

Di Segni thinks that dialogue is important but he does not think that Judaism can change through dialogue. “There has been notable theological progress in Christian theology’s view of Judaism” However, “reciprocity at the theological level does not exist,” the rabbi said. “Among politicians there can be discussions that lead to a solution, not so among theologians.” “Christianity is born from Judaism and, with notable efforts, can introduce elements of Jewish spirituality,” he said. “The contrary is not possible.”

Side Point: Rabbi David Rosen in Haaratz on the poor behavior of Jews toward the Vatican.

Israel’s behavior toward the Vatican over the past 15 years has been “outrageous,” one of the figures behind the 1994 establishment of diplomatic relations between Jerusalem and Vatican City told Haaretz last week. “Any [other] country would have threatened to withdraw its ambassador long ago over Israel’s failure to honor agreements,” Rabbi David Rosen said.

3 Comments

Posted in interfaith, Uncategorized

Tagged de segni, Jewish Christain relations, noahite laws, pius XII, Pope Benedict, Rabbi David Rosen, Rabbi segni, toldot Yeshu

Why Read The Zohar?

Posted on January 13, 2010 by Alan Brill | Leave a comment

From this week’s issue of The Forward
Why Read the Zohar? By Alan Brill

(The Forward made a few rearrangements at the 11th hr, this was the version as of 2 days ago. Read this one)

For an alternate view to that of Melila Heller-Eshed, see the view of Daniel Abrams discussed 2 months ago here..

Demystifying Kabbalah For English Readers
By Alan Brill Published January 13, 2010, issue of January 22, 2010

The Zohar 5: Pritzker Edition, Volume Five (With Translation and Commentary)
Translated by Daniel C. Matt, Stanford University Press (Pritzker edition), 656 pages

A River Flows From Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar
By Melila Hellner-Eshed Stanford University Press, 488 pages, $60.00.

The Pritzker translation of the Zohar into English by Daniel Matt — the fifth volume of which has just appeared — should be greeted as a major cultural event. Yet, the publication of each volume has typically produced tiresome book reviews on the ownership of the word Kabbalah, comparing the academic approach of Gershom Scholem to Madonna’s New Age approach. The reviews do not answer the basic question: Why read the Zohar? Nor do they explain why the Zohar speaks to our age more than the myriad other kabbalistic works.

Melila Hellner-Eshed, in her book, “A River Flows From Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar,” provides an indispensible work that, finally, explains why the Zohar is an important and alluring work for our time. Susan Sontag taught readers to ask not what the art means, but rather “how it is what it is.” Hellner-Eshed follows Sontag and seeks to offer an experiential aesthetic of the Zohar.

Hellner-Eshed’s book is comparatively easy to read, despite being a scholarly work that assumes the reader has already read the terse prose of Scholem. Her work offers the nonacademic a chance to see the current state of Kabbalah study at Hebrew University among the students of Yehuda Liebes and Moshe Idel.

Liebes, who was Hellner-Eshed’s dissertation supervisor, claims that the Zohar was produced by a group similar to the group of mystics described in it. Accepting this approach, she muses “Who is this Rabbi Shimon who emerges from the quill of the Zohar’s composers?” Is he fictitious, or a legendary embellishment of a real historical person? Or maybe he represents the authors’ ideal figure? To these questions, she concludes: “There are of course no easy answers to these questions and perhaps this is as it ought to be.”

Hellner-Eshed’s book seeks to capture the life of the group of companions around Shimon, the stories of their wanderings and journeys, their study of Torah as a mystical quest and, finally, a description of their mystical experience. The book needs to be read cover to cover and then reread to integrate the concluding descriptions of mysticism back into the stories. This is because stories, experience and wisdom are not separate commodities for the kabbalists.

In Hellner-Eshed’s presentation, the companions around Shimon spend their time revealing the secrets of the Torah to each other as a collective form of mysticism. Instead of the usual reductionist discussion of sefirot (emanations of God), we are shown how the Holy Spirit pulsates within the companions of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. We also meet wondrous characters — old man, young child, donkey driver — who reveal ancient secrets to the companions.

The Zohar’s name originates in the biblical verse: “The enlightened will shine like the brilliance (zohar) of the sky…” (Daniel 12:3). Hellner-Eshed shows how the image of light is used to indicate the presence of a God in the Bible and in rabbinic literature. The Zohar, in turn, expands the metaphor to include variegated colors and mixings of shades, and combines light metaphors with those of fragrance and fluidity. Her own book draws its title from another of the Zohar’s central images, the superabundant divine plenty portrayed as “a river [that] flows from Eden.” Hellner-Eshed does not treat this imagery as mere metaphor, rather as a description of the mystic life of the companions engaged in nocturnal entrance into the Garden of Eden. When there is an awakening by the mystics below, then there is a parallel awakening from above, shown as a river of divine plenty.

The Zohar portrays the experience of God as ecstatic delight through kissing, embracing and even intercourse. Hellner-Eshed’s original conclusion is that the mysticism of the Zohar describes the experience to be like a wave of water or A scent, where one enters into a period of heightened consciousness, sensuous pleasure, altered time frame and intuition of the secrets. According to Hellner-Eshed, there are three mystical states in the Zohar: when one drifts in and out; when one is “in the zone,” like a dancer or sprinter, and white light — a deep mythic level in which one enters into being itself. One can — using the terminology of less poetic scholars — call them shekhinah, tiferet and keter, but after Hellner-Eshed’s evocative exposition, that would show a tin ear for the drama.

Hellner-Eshed claims that the Zohar’s style is deliberately exaggerated and rhythmic to capture the experiential mood through trails of sensations and emotions. The rhythm of the Zohar offers many voices in which each sage continues and further develops the thought of the prior speaker. Hellner-Eshed compares the Zohar narrative to a jazz jam session, where a common melodic theme performed by the ensemble branches into solo improvisations that build to greater surprise, complexity and crescendo — the more virtuosity, the more wonderful and surprising the innovations.

One of her conclusions is, “The genius of the Zohar as a book lies precisely in its ability to capture the life of the experiences in Rabbi Shimon’s circle.” And thereby, according to Hellner-Eshed, it draws the reader into the mystical journey. She boldly claims that an academic attempt to understand the text should coincide properly with the attempt to induce a mystical experience.

What percentage of the Zohar fits Hellner-Eshed’s description? For that, we have to turn to the actual text of the Zohar. The Zohar corpus as published in the 16th century contains many reworked texts of ancient and medieval materials; there is certainly a large chunk of the Zohar that portrays the grand epic story of Shimon and his companions, but there are many segments that do not.

The fourth volume of the Pritzker edition of the Zohar (2007) was a diverse volume containing many texts that do not fit the model. It included a paraphrase of Philo of Alexandria’s ban on abortion, a Shiite style apocalypse of a messiah who is hidden in heaven, citations of 12th-century Ashkenazic theology, and selections from the rewritten biblical narrative of late antiquity.

The newly published fifth volume of the Pritzker Zohar exemplifies Hellner-Eshed’s thesis in the delightful story of the Old Man of Mishpatim, who teaches though riddles and paradox and then explains them with a chivalrous story of a damsel in the castle who reveals herself only to the worthy kabbalist. But is also contains the terse and bombastic Book of Concealment, which describes the primordial world before emanation. Hellner-Eshed does not explain how the latter gnomic work fits with her selections. In addition, Hellner-Eshed’s biggest lack is that her work does not discuss the huge number of Zohar passages about mitzvahs, Halacha, rituals or pietistic life, all of which are admirably represented in Matt’s new volume.

Armed with these books, one can now begin to appreciate a cultural and religious treasure of Judaism. No journalist or book reviewer should write about Kabbalah again without first reading Hellner-Eshed. Her work steers the English reader between the Scylla of Kabbalah as technical sefirot and the Charybdis of Kabbalah as the personalized New Age spirituality. Hellner-Eshed’s work treats the Zohar as a mystical fantasy in which the Knights of the Round Table are rabbis living in an eroticized Middle Earth and spurred to great deeds by their love of the damsel Shechinah. Then, the beautifully edited Pritzker translation allows the interested reader to travel on these mystical journeys, yet still return home safely.

What is the Civil Religion of the Orthodox? Models of Relgion and Society

Posted on January 12, 2010 by Alan Brill | 3 comments

Philip Gorski, Professor at Yale offers three attitudes at the immanent frame toward the relationship of religion and state in America.

Liberal secularists believe that the religious and political spheres should be radically separated; religious nationalists believe that they should be tightly integrated; and civil religionists believe that they should be overlapping but independent.
The governing metaphor of religious nationalism in the United States is blood: blood as in blood sacrifice on the battlefield, and blood as in the blood purity of the nation. The deep roots of this tradition are to be found in the bloody wars and priestly sacrifices portrayed in the Hebrew Bible.

The governing metaphor of liberal secularism is autonomy: autonomy as in individual choice and institutional separation. The deep roots of this tradition are to be found in the atomistic and anti-religious creed of the Epicureans. Faint echoes of it can be found in, say, the writings of Thomas Jefferson.. Its most complete—and virulent—expressions today are Randian libertarianism on the right and soft-Nietzschean post-modernism on the left.

The governing metaphor of civil religion, finally, is covenant: covenant as in collective commitment to a set of sacred principles and collective responsibility for their realization. The deep roots of this tradition are to be found in the Biblical covenants between the Ancient Israelites and their God. Its more immediate roots can be traced to the New England Puritans

For the religious nationalist, America is a “Christian nation” or, perhaps, a “Judeo-Christian nation.” In this vision, religious and political communities should be coterminous.

For the radical secularist, America is a liberal society comprised of autonomous individuals. In this vision, religious and political communities ought to be completely distinct.

For the civil religionist, finally, America is a moral community that seeks to balance solidarity and pluralism. In this vision, the religious and political communities inevitably overlap with one another.

Now how would this apply to the Orthodox community? They seem to use the religious nationalism model when dealing with Israeli society. But it seems that the majority of Centrist Orthodoxy follows liberal secularism in America. Why? They keep their religion and their Americanism bifurcated. Yet, there are selected groups and rabbis in the community that do accept civil religion. But which? On the other hand, some parts are beginning to identify with American religious nationalism and identify with Republican or Christian right values.

Can we conceptualize the community not as right and left but based on which of these three models they follow? Or to keep things closer to the way people think now- which model does Open Orthodoxy follow? (The latter may be a much harder question than it looks.) Which does the yeshivah world follow? How about a supporter of AIPAC? Which does Chabad follow? Which does Aish Hatorah follow taking into account their production of the movie “Obsession” on their view of terrorism? Or do the various blogs follow? And in these distinctions, one’s age and generation does matter and will change the results. Among orthodoxy, who is a libertarian, who a covnant thinker of values, and who a nationalist? Does it change the conception of orthodoxy?

The religion of the 1950’s was a Judeo-Christian covenant. At the end of the 1970’s Robert Bellah reoriented everyone and said civil religion was empty. “Writing amidst the collective funk of the mid-1970s, Bellah famously concluded that the American civil religion was an empty and broken shell” And it led many clergy to preach that one must turn to religion to reclaim society. Without religion one has the vacuous worship of the self. What does it mean when rabbis in 2009 are still saying that religion will save you from “Sheilaism”?

When Rav Soloveitchik writes in Confrontation that “it is quite legitimate to speak of a Judeo-Christian tradition…However, when we shift the focus from the dimension of culture to that of faith… the whole idea of a tradition of faiths and the continuum of revealed doctrines…is utterly absurd…” In the 1950’s he seems to follow the civil religion model? But does Lonley Man of Faith agree? Which of the three is he associated with now?
I was asked in the comments on an earlier post: How does all this evangelicalism relate to the thinking of thinkers like Taylor and Habermas. Gorski offer an answer:

.Now, there are plenty of people… who would disagree that civil religion is a necessary means to this end. First, there are non-theistic neo-Kantian rationalists—such as Rawls, Habermas, and Audi—who would be somewhat uneasy about the religious dimension of civil religion. Then, there are theistic neo-Aristotelian confessionalists—such as MacIntyre, Yoder, and Hauerwas—who would be somewhat uneasy about the civil dimension of civil religion. But each critique supplies an answer to the other.

Among Orthodox, are they more worried about the civil or the religion in American civil religion?

3 Comments

Posted in sociology, Uncategorized

Tagged civil relgion, immanent frame, Philip Gorski

Catholic Schools and Jewish Day Schools

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Alan Brill | 25 comments

In the 1960’s the Catholic Ghetto walls came down. In the 1950’s Catholics went to Catholic school, lived in Catholic enclaves, and had all their social needs met by the catholic community. One only left for graduate school or when certain professions required one to have non-Catholic co-workers. In the nineteen sixties, everything changed. Catholics wanted in live in new locations, new suburbs and exurbs, the idea that one should only live around Catholics declines and the cultural revolution of the 1960’s called into question the provincialism and parochialism of these enclaves. Some of these Catholic Ghettos dissolved entirely – from near total allegiance to the Church to minimal attendance, and even then only by the elderly.

Catholic teaching taught that building a parochial school is more important than a Church and that one would lose one’s faith in public school. Jews at this point were in favor of public schools, and many of the orthodox saw day schools as entirely unneeded for girls and a hot bed of Zionism.

The question is: Can the Orthodox Jewish community learn anything from the Catholic example? Are there things to learn about rapid declines of enclaves? Are there any reasons it wont happen to places like Teaneck? Will the young gen y- millennials share their parents Modern Orthodox provincialism? What about when they move to new cities, new professions or disdain living with the gen-x’ers? Dont just say we are committed to our religion in a way that Catholics are not. Catholics were more committed and had a much longer tradition of day schools.

Let’s turn to day schools. The Catholic system lost most of its attendees in the nineteen sixties. By the end of the decade they were down to 15%. N ow 40 years later they find themselves as an unsustainable system strapped for cash and may have to close. What can Orthodox Jews learn from it? I am not sure but we should ask ourselves what we can learn.

The quotes below are from a variety of papers. Some are based on a 2007 Notre Dame Study and some from the Bergen county schools. One factor they cite is that without nuns they have to pay real salaries for teachers. Is anyone here old enough to remember when Jewish day school teachers were seriously underpaid? We cannot go back to hiring Holocaust survivors who don’t live in our communities or to being months behind on salary payments.

Also many Jews and Catholics went to parochial school to avoid the public school in immigrant neighborhoods. We don’t live in immigrant neighborhoods anymore and many public schools are of the same class and caste as the parochial schools. The article also points out that we expect more. We are not first generation college bound anymore. There are currently high expectations for a school. When parents were lacking in either general or Jewish studies they expected less. Now what?

Many parents of children in Catholic schools attended these schools themselves and look back nostalgically at a day when Catholic schools, just a step past “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” were staffed by nuns, brothers and priests. Today, however, they account for a mere 4% of the staff, many of them in administration.

The glory days of the U.S. Catholic parochial school are gone, according to a new University of Notre Dame report, and the church must rethink its mission in order to recapture the school system’s lost luster.
The nuns and priests who educated generations of American Catholics are almost gone, retired or deceased.. Faculty salaries are too low while tuitions and costs are rising, the report says.

Catholic schools are in steep decline, their enrollment having “steadily dropped by more than half from its peak of five million 40 years ago.”Among the better-known reasons: 1) nuns and priests who once staffed teaching positions have retired and their ranks have not been renewed in the near-total absence of new American “vocations”; 2) as urban Catholics suburbanized over the past two generations, Church officials for various reasons did not choose to follow them out by establishing suburban schools in large numbers; 3) having fully entered the mainstream of American life, Catholics are less drawn than previously to separate institutions.

There was a time when parochial schools seemed almost omnipresent, when the daily migration of kids in plaid clothes seemed to fill every street. However, with enrollments plummeting and one school after another closing its doors, the torrent of Catholic school kids has become a trickle, and it looks like the days of Catholic education may well be numbered.

When it comes to Catholic education in America, the numbers are downright startling. In 1965, approximately half of all Catholic families sent their kids to parochial schools; today, roughly 15% do so. While there are numerous reasons for this, the big one seems to be that the cost of parochial school has vastly increased. Once upon a time, Catholic classes were largely taught by clerics. Today, however, fewer Catholics are choosing to enter the priesthood or the nunnery; in fact, one statistic states that there are presently more nuns over 90 than under 50 years old.

Another concern has been a reduction in religious definition. For many people, Catholicism has become less of an all-consuming lifestyle and more of a part-time identity. Where Catholic education was once a responsibility for Catholic parents, it is increasingly becoming an expensive luxury.

Furthermore, in areas where public education has improved, parochial education has suffered. For example, in Northern Virginia, where I grew up, Catholic schools once offered the best educational choices. However, as the area’s schools have improved, Catholic education has simply become a more expensive option.

You might have not seen the former paragraphs which were from NYT and other papers. But what about those who live in Bergen county? Did you not see the Bergen record two months ago? Has anyone called any of the Catholic parochial schools to see if anything can be brainstormed together? This article is on the remaining 15% of Catholics still going to parochial school having to leave because of the 2009 recession. They closed 40 out of 137 schools in the last few years. In addition, the local public schools which uses licensed teachers are currently seen as offering a superior education.

Bergen Record – Catholic schools enrollment drop blamed on economy
Friday, November 13, 2009 BY TONY GICAS

CLIFTON — The economic downturn has created frightening unemployment rates, forced many Americans to foreclose on their homes, brought sticker shock into the nation’s grocery stores and has even changed the way people plan their children’s education.

More specifically, many New Jerseyans have either decided to take their children out of parochial schools or send them to public schools because of the financial commitment required at most Catholic schools.

According to Brian Gray, a spokesman for the National Catholic Education Association, enrollment at America’s Catholic schools reached its peak in the 1960s with about 5.2 million students. By 1980 that number had dropped to approximately 3.1 million and last year the nationwide enrollment hit 2.19 million.

In September 2000, the Newark Archdiocese had 137 grade schools in Union, Essex, Hudson and Bergen counties. Now, it has just 97. The school population in neighboring Paterson jumped by 1,000 students this year, a 3.5 percent increase in the district that has about 28,000 students, the district reported.

“I think down the line if the economy continues this way the tuition at parochial schools will remain unaffordable to many and the numbers will continue to decline,” Tardalo said.

“Therefore they may desire a private education for their children, but if they have to they’ll opt to send their children to a public school.”

He said parochial schools offered “an equivalent educational experience” during his time as a Catholic school principal, however he did stipulate their teachers do not face the same licensing requirements as public school teachers.

I exclude from my discussion the wealthy Jewish prep schools like Ramaz becuase they are based on having a financial endowment and have a different constituency. The question remains- Will the average Jewish days schools decline the way the Catholic schools did? Why not? Why do we think we have a more sustainable system than the Catholic schools? Even if everyone struggles to keep their kids in their current day school, will those 10 years younger than you want to enter this rat race? Will your kids want to continue this struggle? Anyone have good data about those moving to the new Sun Belt suburbs? I have no solutions, only historical questions.

This post came from running into a neighbor HF in the grocery for whom this is a major concern. It is a write-up of a discussion that occurred by meat aisle. I do want to write this up as an op-ed at some point.

25 Comments

Tagged day school tuition, day schools, yeshiva tuition

Authorship and the Individual

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Alan Brill | 6 comments

Interesting book review on questions of authorship as applied to Dante. The critical theorists have already shown that medievals treated Aristotelian philosophy the way we treat the rules of physics, not something that needs an author. And they showed how some medieval texts were written with the reader in mind- either as images on the side of the page or only giving allusions and letting the reader apply them on his own. Medievals also wrote as a form of revelation, and treated cosmologies as revelatory and they considered the bearers of the scholarly tradition as possessing an immanent truth. Not everyone who wrote was considered an auctores.

This opens up the question of what rabbinic Jewish author were doing? The Geonim and Nahmanides were writing with the a Divine spirit, or at least legal decisions were guided by the Divine. Some Kabbalistic works are seen as transmitting ancient knowledge or ascribed to older figures. And the Guide for the Perplexed is just that, a guide for the reader. But what were the “authors” of Pirkei deRebbe Eliezer thinking?

To consider the modern issues: Judaism never bought into the idea of the individual author and still has trouble with intellectual property of an author. In many texts, Torah is seen as possessed by the collective or as eternally given. So when a posek writes a teshuvah: Is it his own authorship? Does he write as bearer of a mesorah, like a medieval kabbalist? Is there a revelation granted to the community? We tend to frame these questions using the anachronistic modern contrast of autonomy and authority. We need to ask: what is involved in an act of religious writing? Does one write ex cathedra, with immanent truth, with revelation, or for the reader?

But then it becomes more difficult- what happens when the written opinions of a rabbi are involved in petty squabbles or personal interests or manipulated by politics? Ascoli’s book on Dante asks that question directly – If Dante claimed to write with revelation then how can he till be involved in his petty squabbles? What happens when someone writes with immanent divine truth and also acts as an independent agent?

Albert Russell Ascoli. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2008. Reviewed by Jan G. Soffner (Zentrum Cr Literatur- und Kulturforschung) Published on H-Italy (December, 2009)

By Which Authority Did Dante Write?

If one happens to talk by chance about Dante’s fourteenth-century masterpiece _Divine Comedy_, one can observe a strange phenomenon.

Dante seems to misuse God for his political opinions, by letting the divine justice condemn his enemies, and for his personal
pride or arrogance, by having all the best dead poets honor him (see, for instance, Inferno IV, 100-102). Moreover, isn’t it already quite
presumptuous to “know” the divine verdict about everybody who has ever died? All this seems to be even stranger, since this work is
evidently a literary text, not an inspired prophecy like the Revelation. So how could Dante attribute this authority to himself?
And did he attribute this authority to himself after all, or did he “just” write fiction?

This suspicion arose as soon as the _poema sacro–_the “holy poem,” as Dante himself calls it (Paradiso XXV, 1)–was written. Nearly
seven hundred years of “Dantology” (to use Robert Harrison’s brilliantly provocative term)[1] have not convincingly resolved this
doubt. In the fourteenth century cosmological representations in the _Cosmographia_ of BernardusSilvestris (ca. 1084-1178), the _Anticlaudianus_ of Alanus ab Insulis (1120-1202) and the _Tesoretto_ of Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220-94). They read the text either as a spiritual revelation and a dream, despite its literary construction and despite the claim to report a physical journey, or they interpreted it in a “modern” way, that is, as a fictional construction, despite the explicit claims of the _Commedia_to be a revelatory work.

Ascoli also has an excellent knowledge notonly of the works of modern theoretical thinkers such as Hannah
Arendt, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Mary Carruthers about literary authorship and authority, but also of the discursive
figurations of _auctores_ available at Dante’s time. Ascoli starts with an extensive analysis of contemporary concepts of
authorship, and of the manner in which Dante seems to be relating to them as a whole. Ascoli argues that the image of an author stemmed
from the trustworthy _auctoritates_ of the ancient and/or philosophical and theological tradition granting for an immanent
truth to biblical scribes and the true author, who is God. These traditional concepts refer to _auctoritas_ as both an individual and
impersonal power and knowledge. The _auctor_ thereby was not so much a creative agent, but rather a mediating power of knowledge. He was
one worthy of faith and obedience.

Hence Dante, modeled as an individual traveler in the _Divine Comedy_, “comes, paradoxically, to embody the canons of
impersonal authority” (p. 20). On the one hand Dante is thereby traditionalist and conservative, on the other, he is also provided
with the “transgressive desire to appropriate that attribute for himself, for the vernacular, and for ‘modernity'” (p. 20f).

How can a fictional work gain a revelatory truth? Ascoli shows convincingly how Dante assumes the traditional role of an
authoritative author without thereby relating to the pre-existing models of knowledge implied by these kinds of authorship.
The unease of us moderns when confronted with Dante cannot just be about the relation to an ineffable divine Being. Representationalist
modern authors work with a more or less Aristotelian concept of fiction, that is, with a concept of a poetic truth relying on
modeling possibilities and an emotionality that can be addressed playfully and without consequences. However, Dante tells us a
different story

Here is a sample of chapter one of Albert Russell Ascoli. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author.
Can we move beyond the dichotomies of authority/autonomy or submission/freedom and explain the act of religious writing or studying Torah or acting as a rabbi in terms of how they define authorship or role of the self in the process?

6 Comments

Posted in jewish thought, kabbalah, literary studies, midrash, Uncategorized

Tagged authorship, cosmology, dante

Foodie Judaism, Solar Powered

Posted on January 3, 2010 by Alan Brill | 7 comments

I have a neighbor who is a physician who switched twenty five years ago from his Conservative upbringing to Orthodoxy because the latter offered a Yuppie lifestyle (bye bye Maneschewitz and chopped liver, hello Cheers Italian restaurant) and rational medical ethics (bye bye appeals to tradition).
So, what now?
Food has changed for many Americans, as Anthony Bourdain wrote in the NYT last week “Foodie Nation” (December 27, 2009)

Something important happened to my former profession in 2007. I’m still unsure what, exactly — but there was a shift, the world of food tilting on its axis. Dining rooms were busy with ever more food-obsessed, better-informed customers…Chefs were now trusted enough to persuade customers to try what they themselves loved to eat. Hence the hooves and snouts and oily little fishes that increasingly popped up on menus

Or Wikipedia states:

. . . foodies are amateurs who simply love food for consumption, study, preparation, and news . . . foodies want to learn everything about food, both the best and the ordinary, and about the science, industry, and personalities surrounding food.

So my question is: How will this play itself out in religious groupings? Not everything is theology or law, people like to live their lives with those of similar lifestyles. How will those who go to Fairway to prepare for Shabbat only when they cannot get to a farmers market play itself out? How will those who prefer cerviche to gefilte fish create demarcations? or artisan bread in place of sugary egg challah? (once upon a time – the move from Orthodoxy to Conservative included a switch from herring to lox.)
From the other direction- will those who crave the heimish cholent or the frat house buffalo wings create community distinctions? Parts of Orthodoxy have actually been going with this trend as the restaurant Solo has hired 2 of the Top Chefs as consultants and there will be a molecular gastronomy restaurant similar to the non-kosher WD-50 opening in Jerusalem.
These shifts are never single cause and involve broader lifestyle changes. If the person that I mentioned at the start found doctors becoming Orthodox (there was still unwritten quotas and restricted positions for Jews entering medicine before). Yesterday’s NYT said that some of the in new fields will be narrative medicine, high tech security, and sustainable energy-solar energy. Whichever group gets there first with the “torah of the imperative of solar energy” or “halakhot of security” wins them as congregants. This is not so far off since on linkedin – among the friends of my Israeli friends- the largest number work for NICE systems- which develops high tech security. Have you heard any shiur geared to that industry lately?
So which rabbi or community will the solar energy engineer who feels there is a vital need to make our homes and synagogues energy efficient and reduce our global footprint pick? What if the engineer is also a foodie?
Copyright © 2010 · All Rights Reserved

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Tagged foodie

Rick Warren’s new agenda:what we can learn from it?

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Alan Brill | 6 comments

Someone in the comments mentioned that my post was similar to a NYT op-ed and said it must be a meme going around. It is not a meme but that we all subscribe to the same list serves of religion information such as the Pew foundation that study and conduct surveys of religion in America. Orthodoxy, except for the truly sectarian, follows these trends as much as any other group does. So if you want to know the range of positions available at a given time they provide the guidelines. Orthodoxy will follow other similar conservative groups. Chief Rabbi Sacks is closer to Pope Benedict. NY Centrist Orthodoxy is closer to certain aspect of the Evangelicals and the Kiruv organizations are closest to other aspects of the Evangelicals.
At the end of last month, Pew held an interview with Rick Warren to let journalists know where things are going. Rick’s book, The Purpose Driven Life, is the best-selling nonfiction book in American history – over 30 million copies. That was the first quarter century of his career and corresponds to the religious turn in America. He has now turned to broader concerns. These are some of the directions and causes people will want from their Orthodoxy. Whoever gets there first will claim them

We do training of what we call the three legs of the stool: business leadership, church leadership and public leadership in government.
We have over 4,500 small groups. They meet in every city in Southern California.
The second signature issue of our church we started in 1993, 10 years later, and it is called Celebrate Recovery. Celebrate Recovery is a Bible-based recovery program. It’s similar to AA but it’s built on the actual words of Jesus.
The third signature issue we began in 2002, and that is our AIDS initiative for people infected and affected with AIDS.
The fourth signature issue we began in 2003. It’s called the P.E.A.C.E. Plan. It’s a global humanitarian effort to take on the five biggest problems on the planet: poverty, disease, illiteracy, corruption and conflict. P.E.A.C.E. stands for Promote reconciliation, Equip ethical leaders, “A” is assist the poor, “C” is care for the sick and “E” is educate the next generation.

Notice his working together with lay leadership and government agencies. He divides his Church into many focus groups “parents with a Downs child” “parents of an ADD child” “parents of twins.”
His work with AA was done in Judaism by Rabbi Abraham Twerski and several elements of the Engaged Yeshivish world, not YU. Centrist Orthodoxy does not relish the thought of working with addictions as part of the rabbinate. Aids treatment is not part of the community at all. Finally, the community does not make as its mission to fight poverty, disease, illiteracy, corruption, and conflict. This last one is where the future of American conservative religion lies.

WARREN: the future of the world is not secularism. The future of the world is religious pluralism, and we must learn to get along. It is not secularism. There was the myth in the 20th century that if we just educate people they won’t need God anymore.
I was the keynote speaker for ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, which is the largest convention of Muslims. It was here in D.C. on the Fourth of July. There were 25,000 Muslims here in town, and they invited a non-Muslim to be the keynote speaker.

This affirmation of religious pluralism from an exclusivist Evangelical Christian is where things are going. And unlike the 1980’s and 1990’s where Evangelicals said “woe is me- the secularists are after us;” Rick Warren is now boldly going out into the world and trying to put relgion in the public sphere (Don’t confuse his position with that of First Things and David Novak.) Many college students participate in interfaith events as part of the post 9//11 world, even Orthodox. We have had orthodox Jews and Muslims discussing difficulties in dietary laws and hair covering, Catholics and Orthodox Jews holding joint Friday night dinners, and groups of several faiths meeting to each talk about their experiences- not theology or doctrine but personal narratives.

I have many, many who are gay leaders across the nation who have worked with me on AIDS. Kay and I have personally given millions of dollars – millions of dollars personally – to help people with HIV and AIDS. We’ve worked with all kinds of gay groups on these issues. I wrote those guys apologies and said, you guys know I didn’t mean this. Oh, we knew. We knew it, Rick.
But all of the criticism came from people who didn’t know me – 100 percent. Not a single gay leader who knew me personally criticized me. Not one. All of it came from people who didn’t know me personally because I didn’t have the relationship. That goes back to this thing about if you don’t have the relationship, where do you know where that guy’s head is anyway? He said that. He didn’t correct it. Well, that’s not their fault; that’s my fault.

My message is to the individual, and that is, every individual matters. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, what you claim to be or – you matter to God and you are loved unconditionally. You can’t make God stop loving you. Here’s my philosophy of life: If God gives me a choice to reject him or love him – because it’s not love if I’m forced to love him – if God gives me a choice to reject him or love him, then I’ve got to give everybody else that choice too. And that’s why I believe in America. I’ve got to give everybody the choice.

This is his philosophy on GLBT issues as an evangelical. He does not support Gay marriage but would not support the anti-legislation either. The press and the blogs love to tear him apart from both sides. The web is filled with statements hinging on his every word to see what he accepts or rejects. In contrast, Rev. Richard Cizik who was Vice President for the National Association of Evangelicals and was leading evangelicals toward ecology and global stewardship (another role model for orthodoxy) expressed his support for same sex unions and that he was closer to supporting same sex marriage and was forced to resign from his leadership position.

Melinda Gates, who was a friend of mine said, Rick, I get it. The church could be the distribution center for health care. I said, not only health care, for everything else. You can use it for education, you can use it – all five things that we’re talking about in the P.E.A.C.E. program. I said, let me give you an example.Then we started teaching them more things like how to dress a wound, all the way up to how to administer ARVs. Today, right now, I have 1,400 trained community health care workers – it will be over 1,500 by the end of December – in an area that had one doctor a year-and-a-half ago.

Notice he is friends with confirmed agnostic Melinda and Bill Gates. And when he asks for money it is not to build churches or parochial institutions but to offer health care in Africa. Young Jews like AJWS and Hazon.

Third is I added up all that the church had paid me in 25 years and I gave it all back. I knew I was being put under the spotlight, and I never wanted anybody to think that I do what I do for money. I don’t. I do it because I love Jesus Christ. And I love people.
We’re not going to change our lifestyle one bit. I still live in the same house I’ve lived in for 17 years. I drive a 10-year-old Ford truck. I bought my watch at Wal-Mart. I don’t own a boat, I don’t own a plane, I don’t own a vacation home. I didn’t want to be a televangelist. The second thing is seven years ago I stopped taking a salary from Saddleback Church, so I effectively retired.

See any Orthodox leaders going this route?

We lowered the age of the leadership body in our church by 16 years in one week. We had a group of pastors who have been with me pretty much since the start that we call our elders. Most of us are in our 50s, mid-50s, and we have led the church all these years. All along we’ve been mentoring the next generation, which is what I’m doing. I’m spending the rest of my life mentoring the next generation. We had a group of young guys who were in their 30s and a couple reaching 40, and in one week we turned over the leadership.

This is important for the change in leadership style– see this quiz that I posted a while ago.Take the Quiz

6 Comments

Tagged pew forum, pew foundation, purpose driven life

Jewish Sufis in Iran

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Alan Brill | 3 comments

Siman Tov Melammed: (before 1793- 1823 or 1828, nom de plume Tuvyah) was an Iranian Jewish rabbi, poet and polemicist. He was the hakham, the spiritual leader of the community of Mashad and had to deal with a variety of religious tension of the era including forced disputations with Shii Imams. In 1839, the entire community was forced to convert to Islam. They lived as relatively secret Jews until the 20^th century. Raphael Patai wrote a book on them Jadid al-Islam.

We usually associate Jewish-Sufism with Bahye ibn Pakuda, Avraham ben haRambam, and other Egyptian descendents of Maimonides such as David Maimuni or Joshua Maimuni. (These have been published by Paul Fenton with French translation and have not attained a wide readership.) Melammed’s writings are the tip of a much larger world of Jewish Sufi thought in Persia and Central Asia. Melammed wrote, in Persian, a philosophic and mystical poetic commentary on Maimonides thirteen principles called Hayat al Ruh; a sufi commentary on the Guide for the Perplexed. Within the large treatise, he wrote a poem in praise of Sufis. Vera Moreen translated selections in 2000, (Queen Esther’s Garden, Yale UP , 2000) Below are 6 stanzas out of 30 (not to run a foul of fair usage laws.).

Melammed praises the Sufis for transcending their physical bodies and the habits of ordinary life to become servants of God. They are radiant and contented from their devotion to God and they lead other back through a straight path to God.

Description of the Pious Sufis Roused from the Sleep of Neglect

Godly and radiant like roses

The Sufis are, the Sufis,

Whose carnal soul is dead,

Doused their desires, the Sufis.

Firmly they grasp the straight path,

Leaders benevolent, guides

Of those who strayed are the Sufis.

Drunk with the cup and soul’s sweets,

With love of seeing the Unseen;

Without reins in both hands are the Sufis.

Dead to the world of the moment,

Alive to the hear after;

Full of merit and kindness are the Sufis.

God’s love is their beloved,

God’s affection their decoration,

And that which veils Him from the Sufis.

The most contented of beggars,

Avoiding rancor and dispute;

Freed from the Day of Punishment are the Sufis.

The issue must have been seriously debated because there is also a poem by an unknown Jacob against Jews becoming Sufis. The poem says to follow Moses, and his father Imran and to avoid the path of the famous Sufi Majnun. One should not relinquish one’s status as the chosen people for a universal faith.

Jacob: Against Sufis

O people of “Imran’s son”

Let not Satan deceive you,

Lest you forfeit religion and faiths;

My life for Moses’ life;

Whoever abandons his faith

Becomes a sage like Majnun,

Roaming about, confused;

My life for Moses’ life.

Bravely he is called a friend.”

But he turns common instead of chosen,

[Now] what religion can he call his own?

My life for Moses’ life.

3 Comments

Posted in interfaith, Islam, jewish thought, spirituality, Uncategorized

Tagged avraham ben Harambam, Islam, jewish sufis, Judeo-Islamic synthesis, mashad, siman tov melamed, vera Moreen

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Post-Orthodoxy and loss of the 20th century definition of Orthodoxy.

Habermas and Halakhah -Guest post from AS

Temporary Slow Down- Blue Screen

Hasidism and George Harrison: Living in the Material World

Happiness, Salinger, and Popular Religion.

Vattimo and Theology

Chief Rabbi di Segni on the Jewish Catholic Encounter

Why Read The Zohar?

What is the Civil Religion of the Orthodox? Models of Relgion and Society

Catholic Schools and Jewish Day Schools

Authorship and the Individual

Foodie Judaism, Solar Powered

Rick Warren’s new agenda:what we can learn from it?

Jewish Sufis in Iran

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