The Book of Doctrines and Opinions:

A half-year ago, I posted about suburban religion and its turning of the house of worship into a cruise ship. Well now the OU has officially designed a entertaining Orthodoxy with all social events on board.

It has turned the church from an “ocean-liner” designed to move people from point A to point B (connecting people with God), to a “cruise ship” that is, in itself, the destination. One need never disembark because it contains everything

It is a continuation of Disney-ization of Faith:magic moments, theme park, kitsch, and entertainment.

If you google “Synagogue Transformation” you see that it was the buzz word for the last decade in liberal congregations. The successful STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal) brought in a variety of parallel programs called The Synaplex Initiative. Similar efforts were done by Synagogue 3000 and the United Synagogue. But they claimed to be doing something new. Here we have the OU claiming that turning the Orthodox synagogue is not a new act or transformation “rather to inspire a shul to become what it always was supposed to be.”

The director states “If there’s a book out there that relates to synagogue growth in any way, I’ll read it,” This means, and the language of this announcement shows, that he read all the books by the liberal movements and the Mega Church Evangelicals.
Shavuot night moves from an evening of Torah study to a midnight BBQ, one creates a Menorah Building Contest, a Latke Cook-Off; and a great debate on the Maccabees.

Or one creates a Rock and Roll Shabbaton as the director of Wings does. (flier)
Who Roger Daltrey of THE WHO
Joshua Nelson Rock Gospel Chazan
David Fishof – Producer of VH1 Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camp
Elan Atias – Lead Singer of Bob Marley and The Wailers
Ellen Foley – “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” Co Singer
There will also be a Comedy Shabbaton in the upcoming weeks.

I guess this is what an Orthodox Synagogue was “Always supposed to be.” This will be the new model of Centrist synagogue, more like the entertainment mega-Church.

NEW OU WINGS PROGRAM INVITES SYNAGOGUES TO SOAR

Just as synagogues provide the spiritual means for their congregations to soar, the Orthodox Union, in one of its newest and most ambitious initiatives, has established the WINGS program to guide the synagogues themselves to rise to new heights. WINGS… is an acronym for “We Inspire New Growth Synagogues,” with “new growth” referring to shuls of any age or size, as long as they have the outlook and attitude to be inspired – and to soar.

“The title ‘we inspire’ is meant to reflect just that,” declared Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn, the rabbi of Manhattan’s West Side Institutional Synagogue, who is Project Director of Wings. “We’re not claiming we can transform a shul, but rather to inspire a shul to become what it always was supposed to be.”

In the five years since he arrived at the West Side Institutional Synagogue, Shabbat morning attendance has increased from 12 to over 300. “It’s been going amazing there,” Rabbi Einhorn says. He came with the background to build a congregation. “I’ve been watching rabbis and shuls since I was a kid, observing what shuls do wrong and what shuls do right,” he explained.

Rabbi Einhorn has supplemented his first-hand knowledge with intensive study. “If there’s a book out there that relates to synagogue growth in any way, I’ll read it,” he says, adding that he’s already read more than 1,000 books on the subject. “The content of what I give comes from taking a lot of time listening to a lot of shuls, hearing their struggles and their challenges, how they face them and how they respond to these challenges.”

For example, for each holiday WINGS compiles a listing of best practices. For Chanukah, suggestions included a Family Friday Night, a Carnival, a Creative Menorah Building Contest, a Latke Cook-Off; and a great debate on the Maccabees.

This is all connected to the book HOLY IGNORANCE By Olivier Roy, which was reviewed by Alan Wolfe in today’s NYT book review. (subscription required). Roy claims that today’s Evangelical and Orthodox religions are themselves secularized into the consumer market. No one is going back to the Bible rather into ever newer consumer cultural forms. Much of Centrist Orthodoxy is moving forward by ever greater identification with consumer religion. True frumkeit will be determined by whether one takes part in these cruise ship entertainments.

Every winter Fox News, seeking to stir up anger through the land, uncovers evidence of a war on Christmas. Secular humanists ignorant of religion and hostile to its traditions, someone in the studio will declare, want us to say “Happy Holiday” or give Kwanzaa equal standing. But Christmas, as its name suggests, is about Christ. These enemies of Christianity will stop at nothing to get their way. Not even Santa Claus is sacred to them.

Actually, as the brilliant French social scientist Olivier Roy points out in “Holy Ignorance,” it is those defending Christmas who are not being true to their traditions and teachings. There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts.

Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue.

Over the past few years, a number of theories have been offered about the rise of fundamentalism. Roy proposes the most original — and the most persuasive. Fundamentalism, in his view, is a symptom of, rather than a reaction against, the increasing secularization of society.

EJ the important blog commenter sent in the following guest post. I will offer a little intro on Rawls and then blog his comments. This is one of the pillar’s of EJ’s thought along with certain parts of Lacan. A yearning for a more Rawlsian halakhah.

The Harvard ethicist John Rawls was required reading in ethics, politics, law school for decades and was treated as open of the starting positions for political and juridical discourse. He offered a humanistic Kantianism based on equality, fairness, and justice. For many, it was a natural synthesis with Telshe, Brisk, or Maimonides. Rawl’s Theory of Justice (1971) was based on defining justice as treating others with fairness. Fairness was to be decided from what he called the “original position,” one makes decisions without knowing where in society one would fall. One created abstract principles of fairness not knowing where you would be in society. (For Kant, transcendence means beyond what our faculty of knowledge can legitimately know).

John Rawls’ Method

John Rawls’ principles of justice.
Rawls argues that self-interested rational persons behind the veil of ignorance would choose two general principles of justice to structure society in the real world:
1) Principle of Equal Liberty: Each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all. (Egalitarian.)
2) Difference Principle: Social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity.
Source here
For those who want more – here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Rawls.

EJ’s post

I find these five ideas useful in stating my moral complaints against certain types of Orthodoxy. I could probably organize a moralizing blog explaining why and how Jews are screwing up their future by everyone trying to get an edge on the other guy.
(1) endorsement of a morality defined by interpersonal relations rather than by pursuit of the highest good; (2) insistence on the importance of the separateness of persons, so that the moral community or community of faith is a relation among distinct individuals; (3) rejection of the concept of society as a contract or bargain among egoistic individuals; (4) condemnation of inequality based on exclusion and hierarchy; (5) rejection of the idea of merit.

Enclosed are 3 recent examples where I try to adapt Rawls in a comment.

1…R. Maryles…If you want to give up racism you have to give up the idea that others exist for the sake of frum Jews. Let’s not even talk about blacks…you don’t even see the 12 million Jews who are not Orthodox as ends in themselves. Their tachlis is to become frum through kiruv. As Rashi says, God created the world bishvil yisrael shenikra rashis, and yisrael in your theology equals Centrists..

Human beings don’t exist for the sake of confirming anyone’s beliefs. They are ends in themselves and are to be treated as such.
I can’t say this Kantian idea is the correct hashkafah, that’s for rabbis to decide. But if you reject this idea, if you believe the world is structured as a hierarchy, to the point where this hierarchy is an adequate reason for acting, then you have no systemic grounded way to confront racism.

2…R. Maryles…Hillel said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” Many here seem to agree they don’t want Lubavitch mucking about with their own kids or with other kids from their stripe, like the bocherim in YU. The solution is not to turn around and do something that Lubavitch will find unpleasant.

A group proselytizes when they think the children are a davar shel hefker, i.e. the parents do not have the exclusive right to raise their children in accordance with the parents ends and values. Orthodox hold it is a mitzvah to be mekarev non-orthodox kids; they and their parents are tinok shahnishbas and because of their ignorance of the truth, the parents have no legitimate say in how their children should live. Centrists also feel they have a right to be influence young charedim to become more centrist…go to work, join the army, get a secular education. Charedim, rosh yeshivas feel it is OK to turn MO students into Charedim. But when some group like Lubavitch feels they have the hegemonic rights of turning klal yisrael into Lubavitchers, and then come into Centrist or Charedi communities, many, maybe most, are up in arms. You don’t die from a contradiction, so maybe this is just the way it is.

This entire mess comes from treating people as means. Each and every person and certainly each and every Jew is an end in himself, and his freely chosen values ought to be respected. When two people meet, each viewed as an end in themselves, kiruv is not unidirectional. Like all human interactions both parties can change. ”

3…XGH… This is how I see your problem. You are caught between two poles, neither of which are acceptable. You feel Torah is not real in some common sense plus empiricist conception of the real. Take that as a starting point. You also feel Torah is not imaginary, it’s much more than a novel by Dickens. How to take hold of the middle, what Lacan calls the symbolic world, the world of society, law, tradition, language. These are social constructs. Even if not real-real, they are kind of important. Try not paying your taxes or lying to the bank. We live in this symbolic world. Death, physics dog shit (to use some of Lacan’s examples) are real, but who would want to embrace only this world.

So the task is how to make a symbolic world, like the world of Judaism, justified in some transcendental way, or noumenal way? This was in effect Kant’s problem about morality. All through the 19th century Jews remained neo-Kantians, the most famous being Hermann Cohen, the subject of RJBS’s dissertation. Today Rav Kook, pantheism, Rav Nahman, Art Green, and kabbalah are in, Kant is out of favor.

An article that I found moving, and is in a Kantian mode is this one about the young John Rawls and his religion. The Christian part is clearly marked and not essential. Even without knowing much about his ideas, I think it can be understood.

If you have never seen the movie Elmer Gantry, and live in the NYC area then get offline and watch the movie tonight (Saturday Dec 25th) on PBS at 9PM. It is the classic tale of the end of the third great revival and turn toward secularism of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

The story shows:
Uneducated outreach working making up the tenets of faith as they go along.
They are good at outreach but never studied in a seminary and do not have real ordinations.
The hypocrisy of financial, sexual, and criminal scandal among those preaching.
The emotional manipulation of the masses and peoples lives.
The egoism and narcissism of those involved.
It also show the complacency and acquiescence of the Established churches who should have know better.

For my Jewish viewers notice the shifts in preaching from New Thought to Methodist to pure emotionalism and ask yourself where a given Jewish kiruv organization fits in. New Thought is the secrets and powers of faith, Methodism is the regular public Bible reading and the emotional manipulation speaks for itself.
What one wont get from the movie and book is an sense of the grappling and loss felt by the ordinary believer. It is not about the struggles of living with the realization of chicanery, anti-intellectualism, and manipulation. The story is only about the self-aggrandized rise to power.

The original book was 460 pages and was scandalous when it came out in 1927, the movie used only 100 pages of the book and by the time it came out in 1960 was noted more for its acting than its social criticism. Go read the book- It is one of the classics of 20th century relgion.Elmer Gantry ranked as the number one fiction bestseller of 1927, according to “Publisher’s Weekly”.
For a complete copy of the book for those who read online- see here.

From wiki
Lewis did research for the novel by observing the work of various preachers in Kansas City in his so-called “Sunday School” meetings on Wednesdays. He first worked with William L. “Big Bill” Stidger (not Burris Jenkins), pastor of the Linwood Boulevard Methodist Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Missouri. Stidger introduced Lewis to many other clergymen, among them the Reverend L.M. Birkhead, a Unitarian and an agnostic. Lewis preferred the liberal Birkhead to the conservative Stidger, and on his second visit to Kansas City, Lewis chose Birkhead as his guide. Other KC ministers Lewis interviewed included Burris Jenkins, Earl Blackman, I. M. Hargett, and Bert Fiske.
The character of Sharon Falconer was based on elements in the career of Aimee Semple McPherson, an American evangelist who founded the Pentecostal Christian denomination known as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927.

On publication in 1927, Elmer Gantry created a public furor. The book was banned in Boston and other cities and denounced from pulpits across the USA. One cleric suggested that Lewis should be imprisoned for five years, and there were also threats of physical violence against the author. The famous evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis “Satan’s cohort”.

Baylor professor wrote a book a few months ago connecting Elmer Gantry to today.

Public fights over the role morality and churches should play in American life. Vocal evangelicals tripped by personal scandals. Heated debates over science versus religion, definitions of obscenity, a presidential candidate’s religious faith.
Welcome to — the Roaring Twenties?

As current as many of those topics seem today, they were equally vibrant in 1920s America, said Baylor University professor of history Barry Hankins in his new book, “Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars.” published this month by Palgrave McMillan.

“After a period of about a half century, from the 1930s to the 1980s, when religion was viewed more as a private, individual concern, I wanted to show how similar the place of religion was in the public arena in both the ’20s and now,” he said.

Try former baseball player Billy Sunday, whose dynamic preaching style and pop culture sensibilities packed his revival tents and tabernacles in the 1910s and 1920s. Or female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose dramatic stage presence and radio preaching drew thousands each week to her Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, including Hollywood actors and filmmakers seeking to learn from her style.

Today’s religious-flavored debates over abortion, science and intelligent design, homosexuality and morality in media had equally emotional counterparts in 1920s fights over Prohibition, the teaching of evolution, fundamentalism and book censorship.
Hankins said a popular misconception of the 1920s is that fundamentalism and conservative Christianity were defeated in the public arena in controversies over Prohibition and the1925Scopes Trial concerning the teaching of evolution. “(Fundamentalists) didn’t disappear. They were vigorously building Bible colleges and mission programs in the time between the 1930s and 1980s,” he said.

Likewise, viewing the Scopes trial as a fundamentalist-vs.-science battle overlooks the effort by liberal Protestants in that decade to discredit fundamentalism as preachers like Harry Emerson Fosdick argued faith and science could be reconciled.

Since everyone was more interested in חֲנֻכָּה‎, than Halakhah or Kabbalah, here is the chart. I started with all 13 possible spelling and kept the ones that moved off the bottom axis. Here we have two major contenders since the 1930’s. No major change from the EJ in the 1970’s. The question is what happened in 1930 to change the preferred spelling from Ch to H. And what happened to make Channukah with two n’s the preferred spelling of the 1940’s. Click on Chart to enlarge.

Here is a history of how to spell קבלה. Notice the changes of the spelling and recent vintage of our current spelling of kabbalah. Most spell checks still use cabala. It seems that the publication of the Encyclopedia Judaica in 1971-2 changed the spelling to kabbalah. What other words did the EJ change? Qabbalah has still not caught on and cabbala has declined. Also notice the interest in the esotericism of the cabbala as a subject between 1810-1840. Click on the chart to enlarge.

Thanks to Yosef Rosen and Satya of Berkeley for the above chart.

Update- Here is one for halacha, halakhah, halachah, and halocha. The scale is smaller, before 1925 there were basically no references.

One of the most important books of Jewish thought in 2008 was Benjamin Lazier. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton University Press, (I unfortunately have had it out from the library since early 2009 and they are finally recalling it. This core of this post was actually written ages ago). It deals with how three Jewish thinkers- Scholem, Jonas, Strauss- dealt with the loss of tradition. They wanted to avoid relativism and instead choose human value through pantheism, gnosticism, neo-platonism, and neo-aristotelianiism.

Why is this high brow book relevant? Why read this long blog post? The reason is the tension between physis and nomos and between relativism and ethical meaning. In 1975, Rav Aharon Lichtenstein wrote his classic “Is there an ethic outside of halakhah.” Many have not paid enough attention to the opening second paragraph where Lichtenstein reclaims the tradition by claiming that we care about nomos, not physis, law not the natural order. In turn, the Reform theologian Rabbi Eugene Borowitz complained about the counter-cultural centurions at the door and wrote that Reform needs its own ethical moment within nomos. Most of the recent discussions, therefore, in all three movements have been about nomos, for example medical ethics is done as a legal question.

Now, this year the hot book is Arthur Green’s Radical Judaism with its defense of pantheism. Most of the criticism of the book has been sociological or the invoking of nomos against Green’s physis. However, if there is going to be a serious response, then it must directly tackle the current quest for physis. The response must directly deal with the issues of those who feel that nomos is not the answer. One can either find a new defense of nomos for the next generation or find a more traditional form of physis. Saadyah, Bahye, Cordovero and Rav Kook among many others are all physis in that their Judaism is part of the natural order. Should one use one of those for a theology? Alternately, one of the followers of Hans Jonas is Jewish thinker Leon Kass, who rejects stem cell research as an affront to the natural order. Are people looking to become natural in that the law has turned out to not offer ethics? or should one respond to Green with Neo-Aristotelianism, or with Levinas? People want to look into their hearts, not to nomos, where the “deepest depths” are to be treated as the holiest.

I did not post Lazier to discuss the implications for Green, rather because it offers one of the best expositions and casuistry of the current issues about formulating theology today. My Catholic colleagues are all gaga about the work of the Notra Dame theologian Cyril O’ Regan, one of the leading theologians in the US today, who is writing a massive many volume exposition of modern gnosticism, heresy, and pantheism- in order to come out with a committed Catholic theology at the end. (I already have a draft of a future post on O’Regan.)Lazier’s book provides one of the basic interfaces between the Jewish heresies and the potential for a response.

The Paradoxes of Secular Heresy by Anna Yeatman
In this wonderful, erudite, and beautifully written book, Benjamin Lazier suggests that the legitimation problem of human artifice assumed a particular urgency and topography in the period between the world wars. His focus is especially on how three Jewish thinkers–Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Gershom Scholem–responded to what their contemporary Arendt recognized as the context for Walter Benjamin’s work, the irreparable loss of authority for tradition, None of these thinkers wanted to reinstate orthodox Judaism; they could not avoid the modern freedom for human artifice, but they rejected a nihilist-existentialist celebration of the will–in the absence of God, the human subject is free to will its own being. They rejected this conclusion because it affirms an utter contingency or arbitrariness. Such freedom is without any normative orientation or restraint. It is as though the human subject arrogates to itself a divine creative power without the infinity or universality that is the divine.

In his own way, each of these thinkers insisted that it is vital that the human freedom for artifice not be mistaken as a freedom for self-creation. To make this insistence, each had to engage and learn from the two heresies of Gnosticism and pantheism that attend the development of the idea of a freedom for human artifice. These heresies are not new, but in the modern context they acquire the force of being the only possible intellectually cogent narratives of the divine. In Gnosticism, as already indicated, the divine is invoked in its absence from the world that humans have made, a world of destruction and sin. In pantheism, the divine is invoked as it inheres within worldly being. The problem with both heresies is that they are antagonistic to the world–Gnosticism by indicating the world as derelict in relation to the divine, and pantheism by conflating the divine with the world, thus robbing the world of its own distinctive being. Jonas offered a philosophical biology, a neo-Aristotelian account of the world as a living organism, as purposive nature. In so doing, he deliberately presented an alternative to the will to power, a normative reference point in ecology. Strauss offered a different conception of nature as a normative reference point for human artifice–this is a neo-Platonic conception of natural right, a conception of justice that precedes human artifice. Of the three, Scholem was most attracted to a nihilist celebration of a Jewish Zarathustra, a worldly messianism that, like pantheism, conflates human and divine creation.

However, he argued that “Nietzsche’s famous cry ‘God is dead,’ should have gone up first in a Kabbalistic text warning against the making of a Golem and linking the death of God to the realization of the idea of the Golem” (p. 194). The myth of the Golem, of course, is a story of the human arrogation of the divine power to create turning into a force for destruction of human beings and their world. Scholem recognized in Zionist messianism a contemporary Golem, and he argued against it, the tragedy as is now so clear of modern Israel.

For Lazier, God cannot disappear, for the modern sensibility continues to dwell with and in God, albeit heretically.
read the full version here.

Here is another great review

The Heretical Imperative by James Chappel

“Church Going,” a 1955 poem by Philip Larkin, describes the mix of awkwardness and reverence many of us feel when faced with the monuments of our religious past. The narrator, having removed his cycle clips to visit an old church, asks himself why he continues these debased pilgrimages, which “always end at a loss like this, wondering what to look for.” Larkin’s tourist is unwilling to embrace the rigidities of strict atheism or strict orthodoxy, and lives somewhere in the murky space between the two.

Perhaps the problem is the one diagnosed by Hannah Arendt: the collapse of orthodox religion has not caused us to turn towards the world with the piety and love once accorded God. Benjamin Lazier, in his inspiring and beautifully-written God, Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination Between the World Wars (Princeton, 2009), suggests that there can be no simple path between these two forms of reverence. A detour through the long tradition of heresy might be required in order to overcome religion without losing our faith. Through a study of the surprising influence of heretical thought on Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Gershom Scholem—three of the most influential Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century—Lazier attempts to resuscitate the lost art of heresy, with all its possibilities and danger.

Although European societies were obsessed for centuries with the identification and persecution of heretics, Gnosticism and pantheism refused to die (however many actual heretics were forced to)…In the tumult of interwar Europe, many attempted to reclaim this absent God through heresy: both Gnosticism and pantheism, the twin rivals of a discredited orthodoxy, reappeared and flourished. Jonas, Strauss, and Scholem, all of whom came to maturity in this postwar period, were indelibly marked by this revival.

Both Jonas and Strauss argued that the horrors of modernity stemmed from God’s disappearance. Against the Gnostics and pantheists, whom they relentlessly attacked, the two German Jews held that the world left behind could be reinvested with the transcendent value that used to be God’s alone. Modernity, in other words, could only be redeemed by filling the God-shaped hole in our society with nature. In Aristotelian terms, they see physis as an antidote to nomos. We need, that is, to understand nature differently: not merely as “that which surrounds us,” but as a metaphysical and ethical order that sets limits to human activity—limits that we are manifestly incapable of setting for ourselves.

For Jonas, the modern worldview was tainted with Gnosticism: we treat the earth, and one another, with such consummate lack of care because, in the absence of God, living things appear to us as mere matter to be used and abused at our convenience. Once we stop seeing nature as a stage for God’s creation, and God’s order, everything is permitted (to quote another famous heretic). From this insight he developed a robust philosophical biology and environmental ethics, premised on the final overcoming of the Gnostic heresy.

When we encounter the world, Scholem suggests, we are not faced with the bare nothing of the Gnostics or the flaccid everything of the pantheists; instead, we are faced with a unique something that is autonomous from God yet shot through with traces of its divine origin. Only a gap between God and world allows us the space to develop autonomously as ethical subjects, but this gap is not absolute: from our all-too-human standpoint, we can still sense God, and we can still glimpse redemption.

it shows us an alternative to strict orthodoxy that does not take the form of shrugging ecumenism. Lazier, it should be clear, is not attempting to found a new orthodoxy. Instead he is unearthing a style of thought and reasoning… This mode of engagement with the religious past replaces confused half-belief with exacting analysis, shaping the shards of exploded traditions into something new instead of leaving them in a mess on the floor. If the God of orthodoxy has lost his plausibility for many of us—for two-thirds of us, apparently—heretical reasoning allows us a path to piety that does not circle back to a bankrupted past.

To adopt Lazier’s title, the modern predicament is one in which God’s call is “interrupted.” The orthodox solution to this dilemma is to act as though she can still hear the word of God with complete clarity, while the atheist’s solution is to clap her ears against the ever-quieter echoes of past revelation. The Jewish intellectuals discussed by Lazier present us with a third option: to open our ears to nature, and to one another. The skeptic would argue that a circuitous route through heresy is hardly necessary to arrive at such a banal conclusion; in response, Lazier’s modern heretics would wonder why such a simple resolution was ignored in the tragedies of the twentieth century. As Scholem put it in a devastating formulation, whose simplicity belies the heretical complexity required to truly defend it: “Develop peacefully, and don’t destroy the world.” Read the rest here.

After John Lennon was killed in 1980, there was a massive public mourning in Central Park. All Tuesday and Wednesday there was an immense gathering in the park of people crying, wailing and flailing over Lennon’s death.

That Wednesday night, Rav Soloveitchik gave a weekly parashah shiur in Furst 501. The topic was the deaths of Jacob and Joseph in Egypt.
Rav Soloveitchik set up the Biblical verses to discuss the topic of the mourning laws, in which he emphasized how the Egyptian mourning practices of embalming and the encrypting process was not permitted according to teachings of the halakhah.

He then said: “This [the Egyptian practice] is a case of going to extreme in mourning just like the people are now doing for John Lennon.” In the audience, this elicited an outburst of chuckles, murmuring, and moving chairs closer. When everything quieted down, he continued:

“How do I know from Lennon? You are surprised I know from Lennon. Well, I know Lenin- no one can forget Vladimir Lenin, he was a real troublemaker.[last two words slightly garbled from the murmuring crowd] So I know about Lennon.”

Rav Soloveitchik followed this by using Jackie Onassis [Kennedy] as the model of the opposite extreme of callousness when after Kennedy was shot she shopped for a hat to wear during mourning .

Chabad and Paul McCartney
Since we are speaking about Beatles: The surprise guest at last night’s fundraiser for Rutgers Chabad in New Brunswick was Sir Paul McCartney, who’s apparently dating the daughter of the one of the honorees. h/t JustASC and more details here.

This is from internetmonk.com by Chaplain Mike, my favorite watchers of all things post-evangelical. This offers further thoughts on the role of culture and relgion. How much of Centrism, year in Israel or kiruv – Is to provide magic moments? How much is heart-tugging sentimentality? How much is the state of Israel views as a theme park? And how did the super cognitive Rabbi Soloveitchik create a rabbinate of sentimental kitsch? Did the acculturation into Evangelical America override anything else? How much of the visions of Torah circulating have mawkish origins far from anything in the Talmud or classic Biblical commentaries, let alone the classic of Jewish thought? Why do we can this shallow frumkieit a form a Torah? At least, the Gra and his followers would reject the folk relgion of the prostaks. It seems we are not Litvaks anymore.

Disney does not fool me into thinking what they do is great art containing profound insights into life and the human experience. I accept and enjoy them for what they are, no more. Their artists and animators are first class and what they do, they do well… They take stories that are classic because of their universal themes and dumb them down so that the kids can enjoy them with mom and dad. They remove all the messiness, complexity, nuance, and grit from these tales and sanitize them for a G or PG-rated modern entertainment audience. They are enjoyable, but as subtle as a punch in the face; as deep as the puddle in my driveway after a light rain.

Those visions will come to life in true Disney-like fashion—with overwhelming kitsch, mawkish sentimentality, a thin veneer of credibility, and, most importantly, the absolute conviction of unwavering belief in spite of any contrary evidence or countering interpretations. This project is fundamentalism at its creative worst. Read the Full version here.

Here is one blog quoting another blog, which itself is quoting another blog. I did not differentiate by font the four different voices. The content is a collective musing on the role of authentic in religious products and the role of kitsch in modern relgion. What was the role of kitsch in the year in Israel or the creation of Centrist Orthodoxy. If we one made fun of Reform homes for their dancing hasids on the wall, what will we make fun of in Centrist homes? And how much do they really believe the religious objects are authentic? Is the myth of authenticity essential to creating Centrists? Anyone remember when Peshischa and Kotzk were emblems of authenticity?

There is a problem of the white middle/upper class pursuit of authenticity – namely, that this pursuit itself can never be “authentic.” In response to counter-critiques against critics of consumerism (particularly when such consumerism is used as a means of attaining “authenticity”), he uses the metaphor of a sinking ship to point out the necessity of prophetic doomsaying even in the absence of a solution:

The same applies to religious kitsch. There is a difference between a poor Catholic peasant embracing some kitsch religious form for intent devotion in an act which in no way is motivated by a desire to become or to prove an “authentic” Catholicism (the Catholic peasant has nothing to prove in that regard, but takes his or her Catholicism for granted) than there is in the adoption of religious kitsch by a white person from the middle class suburbs who wants tokens of authenticity about their home to help them feel like they are a real Catholic.

h/t or really taken entirely from Medieval Leftist and The Ochlophobist. I only found through my research on popular culture and relgion.

A couple of items that came my way via Facebook.- Judaism on trial, food again, and humanities degrees.

1] The London School for Jewish Studies -LSJS is having a series of holiday break lectures that will put Judaism on trail against its critics. .Despite the disclaimer, I expect apologetic lectures, except on the issue of evolution. It has been a long time since we have seen this sort of program- 50 years ago we had programs- Judaism versus Freud, Marx, Durkheim, Darwin, and Dewey. People want to put Judaism on trial again.

Judaism on Trial travels the razor’s edge of Jewish tradition and 21st century thinking on: evolution, attitudes to non-Jews, dialogue with other religions, biblical criticism, and much more. This is an open and intensive text based exploration of Judaism in the modern world, warts and all.
20, 21 and22 December Session
Evolution and Torah Dr. Raphael Zarum
Value Clashes in Rabbinic Judaism R. Simon Mandel
Anti-Semitism and the Talmud Richard Verber and LSJS faculty
Who Wrote the Bible? R. Natan Levy
‘The Goyim’: Attitudes to Non-Jews R. Michael Pollak
The Female Jew: No Apologetics Maureen Kendler & Chaplaincy Rebbetzens

2] Steven I Weiss made a good call on Facebook by noting how many of this year’s award winning cookbooks are were written by Jews. Almost all are not observant of the dietary laws but the cookbooks will enter the broader Jewish community and raise the level of being a foodie by yet another notch. Kosher by Design and Spice and Spirit will be considered grandparent or old people cooking. What do you mean they don’t have a recipe for beet Carpaccio with fresh mint or Crevice with mango? How will one make shabbos? This will be a divider in the new configurations like dry wine and sushi used to be. Let us see who puts out a Jewish new cuisine cookbook first?

3] I don’t remember who posted this but humanities have been going up even so slightly but the decline was in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. In 1968, the course with the largest enrollment was religion, in 1978 it was economics. In the nineteen eighties everyone majored in business or economics. People complain about the decline of high culture or humanities since the formation of Centrism, but the very ideology was formulated and works well in a time of no humanities.

in 2007, just 8 percent of bachelors degrees were given to disciplines in the humanities.” So things are getting worse? Really? No, not really,
Compared to 17.4 percent in1967, yow! We are totally in trouble! … except that the decline was entirely a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, when the percentage dropped to about 7 percent. And it’s been 8-9 percent for the past 20 years now.
But I just don’t know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It’s the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters have declined sharply since 1967,”** and trying to pass it off as tonight’s lead story. But for some reason, when it comes to the humanities, it works every time.
The real story should be this: amazingly, remarkably, counterintuitively and bizarrely, humanities majors in the United States, as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, have held steady since about 1990—since the onset of the culture wars,
However, because we continually tell ourselves that we have fallen– O how fall’n! how chang’d
Read the rest here at the blog crooked timber.