Joseph Weiler, traditional Jew, defends the freedom to affix a Crucifix

Posted on July 6, 2010 by | 3 comments

Joseph H. H. Weiler, expert in international law, who has more degrees -earned and honorary- than almost anyone else has written a piece defending the freedom the affix a crucifix. Some of my readers may know him because he is mainly situated at NYU and is a traditional Jew. I was once on a panel with him post 9/11. In the post-EU world, one part of the EU can hold another part to its standards. The placing of a crucifix was brought to court of European Court of Human Rights and banned in school use. Italy appealed the ban. Below is part of the defense of the Crucifix by Joseph Weiler.

13. Consider a photograph of the Queen of England hanging in the classroom. Like the Cross, that picture has a double meaning. It is a photo of the Head of State. It is, too, a photo of the Titular head of the Church of England. It is a bit like the Pope who is a Head of State and Head of a Church. Would it be acceptable for someone to demand that the picture of the Queen may not hang in the school since it is incompatible with their religious conviction or their right to education since – they are Catholics, or Jews, or Muslims? Or with their philosophical conviction – they are atheists? Could the Irish Constitution or the German Constitution not hang on a class room wall or be read in class since in their Preambles we find a reference to the Holy Trinity and the Divine Lord Jesus Christ in the former and to God in the latter? Of course the right of freedom from religion must ensure that a pupil who objects may not be required actually to engage in a religious act, perform a religious ritual, or have some religious affiliation as a condition for state entitlements. He or she should certainly have the right not to sing God Save the Queen if that clashes with their world view. But can that student demand that no one else sing it?

21. Today, the principal social cleavage in our States as regards religion is not among, say Catholics and Protestants, but among the religious and the ‘secular’. Secularity, Laïcité is not an empty category which signifies absence of faith. It is to many a rich world view which holds, inter alia, the political conviction that religion only has a legitimate place in the private sphere and that there may not be any entanglement of public authority and religion. For example, only secular schools will be funded. Religious schools must be private and not enjoy public support. It is a political position, respectable, but certainly not “neutral.” The non-laique, whilst fully respecting freedom of and from religion, embrace some form of public religion as I have already noted. Laïcité advocates a naked public square, a classroom wall bereft of any religious symbol. It is legally disingenuous to adopt a political position which splits our society, and to claim that somehow it is neutral.

23. If the social pallet of society were only composed of blue yellow and red groups, than black – the absence of color – would be a neutral colour. But once one of the social forces in society has appropriated black as its colour, than that choice is no longer neutral. Secularism does not favour a wall deprived of all State symbols. It is religious symbols which are anathema.

24. What are the educational consequences of this?
25. Consider the following parable of Marco and Leonardo, two friends just about to begin school. Leonardo visits Marco at his home. He enters and notices a crucifix. What is that?’, he asks. ‘A crucifix – why, you don’t have one? Every house should have one.’ Leonardo returns to his home agitated. His mother patiently explains: ‘They are believing Catholics. We are not. We follow our path. Now imagine a visit by Marco to Leonardo’s house. ‘Wow!’, he exclaims, ‘no crucifix? An empty wall?’ “ We do not believe in that nonsense” says his friend. Marco returns agitated to his house. ‘Well’, explains his mother, ‘We follow our path.” The next day both kids go to school. Imagine the school with a crucifix. Leonardo returns home agitated: ‘The school is like Marco’s house. Are you sure, Mamma, that it is okay not to have a crucifix?’ That is the essence of Ms. Lausti’s complaint. But imagine, too, that on the first day the walls are naked. Marco returns home agitated. ‘The school is like Leonardo’s house,’ he cries. ‘You see, I told you we don’t need it.’

27. Make no mistake: A State-mandated naked wall, as in France, may suggest to pupils that the State is taking an anti-religious attitude. We trust the curriculum of the French Republic, to teach their children tolerance and pluralism and dispel that notion. There is always an interaction between what is on the wall and how it is discussed and taught in class. Likewise, a crucifix on the wall, might be perceived as coercive. Again, it depends on the curriculum to contextualize and teach the children in the Italian class tolerance and pluralism. There may be other solutions such as having symbols of more than one religion or finding other educationally appropriate ways to convey the message of pluralism.

Read the whole thing here.

Notice his definitions of the open society, tolerance and pluralism. A lack of religion in the public sphere is itself a religious decision. Also note how far the defense of the crucifix has no connection to medieval polemics or even the polemics of the age of tolerance and the Enlightenment. One is not proving either side right or wrong, nor is one conflating liberal tolerance with pluralism. Many modern orthodox Jews still respond to questions in medieval terms or attempting to fit Enlightenment tolerance into the classic positions. Neither one is where current discussions of human rights start.

Any thoughts on his arguments? Would Judaism agree? Would Judaism seeking a place to defend its own religious liberty in the US agree?

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God is Back —-Part II—-Religious Conclusions and Orthodox implications

Posted on July 5, 2010 by | 3 comments

Here is the second part of the Guest Post by Benzion N Chinn. It continues from Part I – here. In this part he offers an evaluation of religion as lifestyle coach, and asks about the more intellectual elements. I am less certain about this approach since the book’s point is that 21st century religion is amoral and non-intellectual. Why be religious? It is a good lifestyle, offers meaning, and warm shabbosim.Chinn asks where are the orthodox bikers? In this I think he still bears the limits of the YU ideal.We do not have statistics but there are more bikers than you think- there is Orthodox 12 step for NA, chabad, outreach devoid of torah and mizvot, and as I saw yesterday heavily tattooed Jews worried about the hashgahah on chicken. Finally, the book deals with everything from meditation and spirituality to pentacostals- each part of which deserves its own discussion. Here is Chinn on his own blog has a post “Do some religions make you stupider” discussing one of the playful pages on the book.

Having reviewed God is Back, I would like to follow up with a consideration of some of the implications of its main thesis that an American model of religion, mixing a surface conservative theology with modern notions of community and self help.

On the surface this book is a strike against the New Atheism and their traditional Enlightenment narrative. But before we start cheering in the streets at the coming defeat of Dawkins and company, any serious religious thinker is going to have to sit down with this book and ask some hard questions; are we actually comfortable not just with religion triumphing in the battle for modernity, but the type of religion that is doing so. Is this a battle we can afford to win?

In many respects this book is an ode to Evangelical Christianity, the source for the American model and its most successful practitioners to date. In particular, the new generation of social activist pastors, like Rick Warren and Bishop T. D. Jakes, are given very positive portrayals

Jesus now is a lifestyle couch to teach you how to reach your worldly potential. It is somewhere among the glowing descriptions of Evangelical mega churches, with their comfy seating and sports complexes.

I must admit to having felt slightly queasy. While Evangelicals have certainly proved capable of harnessing modern technology for their own ends, one has a hard time seeing them as having the sort of intellectual sense to confront the modern world in a serious fashion and actually effecting the broader secular culture. These concerns were only confirmed when the authors brought up Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind only to dismiss it as a problem of the past that is quickly being solved. (For this reason I would strongly urge readers to read Noll in conjunction with this book as a necessary corrective.) God is Back is written from a sociology of religion perspective, content to simply describe what it sees, without ever attempting to pass judgment. (Perhaps this explains the willingness to pass on Noll’s concerns. Noll, as someone living within the Evangelical world, does not have the luxury of not concerning himself as to whether his religion is intellectually tenable.)

That being said, the attraction of the American model is precisely its willingness to mix such theological conservatism with tolerance for the individual and downplaying theology in favor of society building. In essence this is an attempt to have one’s conservative cake and eat one’s modernity too. Rick Warren is an excellent example of this with him being caught on both sides of the gay marriage debate. On the one hand, as an Evangelical Christian, he had no choice but to come out and support Proposition 8 yet he likes to brag about his personal friendships with homosexuals and his tolerance for them even to the point of distancing himself from Proposition 8 once it dropped off the map.

Warren along with every leading figure in liberal Evangelicalism have trapped and knotted themselves in finding a politically correct Evangelical response to the question of “is Jesus the sole path to salvation,” saying both yes and no. If Warren and company are going to be representing Evangelicalism then why bother being an Evangelical? Why not simply join mainstream Protestantism and openly consider mainstreaming homosexuality and acknowledging the existence of alternative paths to salvation? That is unless your religious conservatism is simply a pretense to claim some sort of high ground in terms of authenticity.

Looking at Orthodoxy through the lens of the American model puts an interesting twist on the issue of individuality within Orthodoxy. The Modern Orthodox world is woefully ill equipped, at an institutional level, to offer a place for anyone who does not fit into the doctor/lawyer/accountant living in suburbia model. Where are our Orthodox biker gangs or taxidermist societies? (Academia presents its own set of problems.) I am constantly amazed as to the extent that someone with long hair and shorts might just be a deeply religious Christian. Orthodoxy’s emphasis on a uniform, such as a kippah, closes off this possibility. Part of our problem is that we lack the numbers to serve niche markets. The American model of religion suggests that offering one size fits all systems may not just be bad simply as a matter of promoting conformity, but suicidal. I would also suggest that this might be one more reason why Israel is important. Israeli Orthodoxy has shown itself capable of offering niche Orthodoxies.

I can see two ways in which the American model plays to the strength of Modern Orthodoxy, more so than Evangelical Christianity, at the intellectual level and in terms of ritual practice. The Orthodox emphasis on study gives it an integral intellectual element absent from Evangelical Christianity. (This is not to say that all Orthodox Jews are learned or that Evangelical Christianity cannot produce learned individuals.) Even the authors, while they downplay the threat, take it as a given that the society building of the American model cannot hope to survive, in the long run, without an intellectual component. Now Orthodoxy’s intellectual culture can work against itself, in the short term, by hastening the moment of crisis when the intellectual pretenses of the movement crash against the distinctively anti-intellectualism of the American model.

On the flip side a deep rooted intellectual culture may be just the thing to balance out and cover for such anti-intellectualism. Orthodox practice gives an extra dimension to claim the authenticity high ground, unavailable to Evangelicalism, thus opening the possibility of taking politically liberal positions. An Orthodox rabbi could come out in favor of legalizing gay marriage and even pursue an active “don’t ask don’t tell policy” in terms of homosexual Orthodox Jews.

I certainly accept the author’s premise of the success of the American model and the reasons for it. I am less certain as to whether this is something long term. The inherent tensions, if not downright contradictions, in the American model beg this to be an exercise in the power of unforeseen consequences; the most obvious of them being the American model doing itself in after doing secularism the favor of first eliminating the sort of rigorous intellectual faith that might have been able to stand up to a secularist assault. The forces of faith may not have lost the battle for modernity, but that does not mean that religion have won.

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Gulen Movement – Part 2

Posted on July 4, 2010 by | 2 comments

Continued from part one here. Read part one before you read part II.

I am now asked to comment and tell people what I think of the Gulen movement. The people in the Gulen movement themselves ask me what I think about the movement. Before are some first thoughts – still not organized- still not fact checked- treat it as first impressions. Coming from my knowledge of the Jewish community, I can only evaluate them based on analogy to Jewish parallels.

My basic questions for evaluating the Islam of the Gulen movement is what will the next generation look like. Even knowing that next generations can turn out the opposite of the prior ones, the vantage point of projection allows evaluation. This is where I am stumped as to how to evaluate my experiences.

Vignette 1 –I am speaking to a 21 year old economic major who describes how the movement took Islam from the folkways and tradition in his small town and made it into a religion. Now the religion of Islam that he follows is by conscious choice and he sees that it can be treated as Turkish-Islamic culture. This would sound like a religion of self-conscious traditionalism. Their own newspaper quotes the anthropologist Ruth Benedict that “Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.” They are a transition that is still taking place in which the plausibility structure of the past has died and the Gulen movement offers the potential of a future plausibility structure that works.

Vignette 2- I am speaking to an 18 year old recent graduate of the Gulen boarding prep school in CT. He explains to me how Islam was not part of the curriculum but they have prayer and chaplains. He tells me that he is going to study Political Science and pre-law in a major Midwestern mega-university. I wonder how is he going to keep his Islam on a college campus? Will he change due to the influence of the Muslim-chaplain on campus? Will be forced to either assimilate or stake out a more public form of Islam to maintain his identity? What can I use to evaluate this kid as a success story of Gulen Islam?

Vignette 3- I am speaking to a 50 year old teacher of the movement. Someone shows him a keychain and asks: what is written on it? He says he thinks the first Sura of the Koran but that he cannot translate it and would need to look up its meaning. Since the first Sura is known to every school child who learns Koran-and even to any Jewish studies teacher who has ever taught the second Sura because of its Judiac sources- what do I make of his lack of knowledge of the Koran? it is not hard to remember
In the name of the merciful and compassionate God.
1 Praise belongs to God, the Lord of the worlds,
2 he the merciful, the compassionate,
3 he, the ruler of the day of judgment!
4 Thee we serve and Thee we ask for aid.
5 Guide us in the right path,
6 the path of those Thou art gracious to;
7 not of those Thou art wroth with; nor of those who err.

In general, they say to trust one’s own heart in religion. Don’t be a hypocrite and try to be sincere in your practice. They have created an Islam of knowledge of the basic rules and Mosque etiquette but no real learning of Islamic sources. They say to trust the heart for matters of interpretation. Imama, kadis, and scary sources of authority do not play a role in their thinking. How can I evaluate if the next generation will return to sources of authority and which ones they will choose?

They affirm the need for salat (worship) five times a day, yet they also say that God wants you to be engaged in medicine or business or community work so that if you miss some of the prayers it is OK. Once or twice a day is enough is one is busy with other service of God such as helping people. There is a form of osek be mitzvah patur min hamitzvah and rahmana leba bai.

When asked about restrictive fatwas, salafi interpretation or about Islamic reformers, they tend to shrug it off and say: Dont question others or engage in polemics- love all – don’t fight with the right or the left.

So how do I evaluate them? Where will they be in 20 years? 40 years? Are they like the Conservative movement of 1940’s – traditionalists following accepted practices of the people? Are they renewal and romantic for their setting as their base a universal reading of Sufism as tolerance, love, and intercultural understanding? Are they Modern Orthodox for their insistence on women covering their hair and everyone only eating OU kosher as their halal– both inside and outside the home? (There is money to be made by the OU giving them seminars in what to look for in ingredients and how to navigate American Kashrut.)
What happens when the kids open the books? Will they?

To offer a comparison: Teaneck has a new Muslim Mayor affiliated with the local Mosque and Muslim day school. In the Teaneck al-Ghazzali school they have half a day religious studies and half a day general studies. The Gulen schools all have only secular studies and one period a week of religion. To teach classes in al-Ghazzali, they sometimes have less than modernist teachers and the textbooks are produced in Pakistan. In the Gulen school, every teacher is bright-eyed and supportive of Gulen’s vision of love, tolerance, and purity of the heart. Here in Teaneck, the Muslim women do not all cover their hair but in the Gulen movement they do.

So how do I evaluate the movement? How are they similar or difference than the American Jewish entrance into modernity? Where will they be in 20 years?

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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CFP: Volume on Beyond Halakhah & a recent newspaper article with choice quotes

Posted on July 3, 2010 by | 3 comments

For those who enjoyed the discussions on post-orthodox, ironic -orthodox, Elchanan Shiloh, Yoav Sorek, and Peter Beinhart, here is a CFP that can help you gather your thoughts.

CFP by BGU for a volume on Judaism Beyond Halakhah- On Jewish culture without clear boundaries of religious-secular, modern-traditional, mystic-rational. What is the role of mesorati, new age, and secularism in the mix?

קול קורא להגשת מאמרים לאסופה חדש

מעבר להלכה: מיפוי מחדש של מסורת, דת ורוח בישראל

כרך הנושא החדש של כתב העת עיונים בתקומת ישראל עתיד לכלול מחקרים על החילוניות, המסורתיות, ה’עידן חדש’ (ניו-אייג’) והרוחניות בחברה הישראלית ובתרבותה. בכוונת עורכי הגיליון ליצור אכסניה מחקרית החורגת אל מעבר לשיח ה’קשוח’ בדבר ‘השסע הדתי-חילוני’ ואל מעבר לחלוקות דיכוטומיות רווחות המבחינות בחדות בין מודרני למסורתי, בין דתי לחילוני, בין רציונלי למיסטי וכיוצא באלו.

המאמרים בכרך זה לא יוגבלו לתחום דעת ושדה מחקר מסוימים. ייכללו בו מחקרים מתחומי דעת מגוונים (סוציולוגיה ואנתרופולוגיה, חקר הספרות, פילוסופיה, היסטוריה ועוד). הגיליון יהיה פתוח לגישות מחקריות מגוונות. יתקבלו מאמרים שלא פורסמו בעבר בעברית או בשפה אחרת.

חוקרים המעוניינים להשתתף בכרך זה מוזמנים לשלוח תקציר (בן כ400 מלים) המתאר את מחקרם המוצע עד לסוף חודש אוקטובר 2010 , לכתובת הדואר האלקטרוני של המערכת:

omiller@bgu.ac.il

As a side note- here are some paragraphs from a recent newspaper article used to describe the current climate. The article was ostensibly on politics but there was the soul of another article “On the Religion of the Thirtysomethings” buried in the article. This is not the religion of the Datiim Hadashim who are now in their 40’s and 50’s. It is the younger university crowd- South Jerusalem and the towns around Beer Sheva.

Most are young people in their twenties and thirties, and they represent an entire spectrum: religious, datlashim ‏(formerly religious, but usually people for whom religion and tradition are still important to some degree‏), datlafim ‏(sometimes religious‏), “transparent skullcaps” ‏(bareheaded people who describe themselves as religiously observant‏), secular, and those who do not want to specify their position along this continuum. In any event, nearly all consider Judaism and their religious education and background to be important elements in their political thinking and activism.

“I think this is a new phenomenon,” he says. “Something that crosses religions is emerging in Jerusalem today. [These are] young people who are not bound to their parents’ conventions and don’t care whether their partners in the struggle are religious or not, but all of them share the feeling that our future is in danger.”

Ben Sasson, son of the president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, historian Menahem Ben-Sasson, is currently writing his doctoral dissertation in Jewish studies. The subject: the explicit name of God. He describes the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations as “worship of Hashem [the Hebrew name for God]” and is very eager to engage his settler-adversaries in theological debate. It’s clear he has already rehearsed these arguments in his mind many times.
“In the Middle Ages disputations were held between learned Jews and Christians. Sometimes the Jews won, in which case they had to escape to avoid being killed. If you bring [the settlers] for a disputation now, I will win. All the Jewish sources are on my side. Their whole activity is twisted. What they are doing is desecration of God’s name, in the most explicit way.”
Sharon, now secular and a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Stanford University, attended a hesder yeshiva ‏(combining religious studies with army service‏), studying at Alon Shvut in the Etzion Bloc south of Bethlehem and Otniel Yeshiva, also in the West Bank.

“I am religious, but there was a period in which, even though I did not stop believing, I did not want to walk around with a skullcap,” says Netanel Warschawski, 27, who also works at Keter. “I was a bit ashamed that in the name of the beliefs of the settlers, and in the name of the skullcap, as it were − people say and do terrible things. I did not want to identify with that society, did not want them to think that I was like them, that we share the same views. Eight years ago I had an argument with friends, during which one said I was ‘shaming’ the skullcap on my head, and since then I decided that it is precisely an opposite symbol. I am proud to be religiously observant and I represent the religion better than they do. That is why I still wear the skullcap and go to demonstrations with it.”

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God is Back- John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Part I

Posted on July 2, 2010 by | 4 comments

Here is the first of several guest posts by diverse authors. This one is by Benzion N. Chinn, former student, who is an ABD in Jewish History at Ohio State. He generally blogs at his own blog Izgad. He reviews God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, which is one of the best introductory books on religion of the last few years. The book written by two journalists from the Economist who provide an easy to read overview of the current state of religion. They show how the secularization theory is dead, but without the technical details of Peter Berger, Jose Casanova, or Talal Asad. The book presents the role of religion everywhere in our lives. Unlike 25 years ago., religion now seems to be a factor in everything. Rather than the ritual, myth, symbol, and mysticism of older studies of religion, this book provides insight into topics of current interest such as religion and politics, religion and violence, religion and media. They view the current champion as the evangelical model that mixes free-enterprise, self-help, and family life. Benzion N. Chinn offers his review in two parts. The first part of Chinn’s review here is a general overview of the book and the second part is on its application for Modern Orthodoxy. So be patient for the second part.

In the course of studying the contemporary religious resurgence, we must step back and review the Enlightenment ideology its presumptive attractions and strengths as well as its defects and disadvantages. If Schleiermacher aimed to reconstruct theology in the wake of the Enlightenment, today we need to reconsider the Enlightenment in view of recent religious developments. They include liberal theology as well as a variety of neoorthodox and existential ideologies. The return to religion may to some extent be rooted in and related to the inadequacies or oversimplifications of earlier thought.
One corollary of this development would be that we should seek to engage not only people who are formally in the field of religious studies but religiously committed people who are reflective and articulate and who would be able to describe in general nonconfessional terms the nature of their commitment, the meaning and impact of their religious experience, the views they have of secularism or other antireligious ideologies. (Prof. Isadore Twersky, Random Thoughts)

The traditional narrative of the Enlightenment was that the Enlightenment came in and defeated the forces of “superstitious” religion. Such a narrative still retains a certain cultural currency (particularly in the hands of the like of Richard Dawkins), but fails to offer a convincing explanation as to the continued success of organized religion in the United States and, even more devastatingly, the role that religion is playing in the modernization of the developing world. I have no reason to assume that John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge were familiar with the work of the late Prof. Twersky, but their book, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, is certainly an admirable attempt to carry through precisely this charge. It offers a narrative that covers both the Enlightenment encounter with religion and how it continues to play itself out today. Furthermore, the book both challenges the traditional Enlightenment narrative of religion and seeks to understand religion by engaging in a dialogue with its modern practitioners.
The basic narrative of God is Back is one that should be familiar to students of American religious history. While in France (and eventually Western Europe as a whole) a radical version of the Enlightenment, which saw modernity as being in opposition to religion, triumphed, in the United States it was a moderate Enlightenment, which saw religion as the natural ally of progress, which proved dominant. Because of this, today Christianity remains an active force in American politics, while Western Europe has become a collection of post-Christian countries.
This does not mean that the United States was founded as a Christian country. The authors are careful to debunk that myth to show that, in the eighteenth century the young United State was not that different from Western Europe in terms of religiosity. It was plausible that the situations could have been reversed. As to why this did not happen, the authors argue that the lack of strong State supported churches created an opening for niche churches and the sort of religious innovation necessary to thrive in the open climate of modernity. A religious free market forced clergymen to actively seek congregants to fill their pews by catering to popular needs. As the authors openly admit, this thesis comes from Tocqueville; they are merely updating it for the twenty-first century.

While the authors spend the early part of the book giving an overview of the diverging histories of religion in the United States and Western Europe, the most worthwhile part of the book is when the authors move away from the United States to places like the Philippines, China, South Korea, and Nigeria as they struggle to embrace modernity. This path to modernity is increasingly not one of secularization, but on the contrary an embracement some pretty conservative brands of religion. I particularly recommend the anecdote in the introduction, describing a home bible study and worship session by a group of middle-class Christians in Shanghai.

If there is one central thesis at the heart of this wide ranging discussion of religion it is more than just that organized religion is here to stay as an essential part of the modern world, it is that there is a distinctively American brand of religion that is winning in the battle for the soul of modernity. This is no longer just in the United States; the American model is sweeping across the developing world and is even making inroads in the secular bastions of Western Europe. The basic features of this model are, despite a conservative exterior, a move away from top down hierarchal structures, emphasizing hard theology, toward social communities, with an emphasis on personal experience and growth. This is not just Christianity we are dealing with; the authors spend much of the later parts of the book charting how this model has moved into Hinduism and even Islam.  The authors, furthermore, consider the implications of this shift for the future of Islamic relations with the West. Could it be that American style religion, as opposed to American bombs and American style secularism, will be what brings down radical Islam?

The success of this American brand of religion, across confessional lines, is not contrary to the narrative of modernity or peripheral to it, but at the heart of modernity. Modernity has given us choice, but at the same time has disrupted traditional values and community. It should therefore be no surprise that there would be an attraction to a system that offers a surface reaffirmation of traditional values, the sort of community that modernity leaves wanting, all while allowing one to enjoy the freedom, independence and personal choice that are the fruits of modernity. In the struggle between religion and modernity, the American model allows one to eat one’s cake and have it to.
God is Back offers a general picture of the issue, which, while not particularly innovative, offers a readable and much needed statement as to where we are at today in terms of religion and modernity.

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The Gulen Society as Modern Orthodox- Part One

Posted on July 2, 2010 by | 14 comments

I am back from Turkey or as they keep telling me I am in the Anatolian peninsula and Turkey is the greater vision of the Ottoman-Turkish Empire. I had a Jewish-Christian conference here followed by a whirlwind tour provided by the Gulen Movement started by Fethelulah Gulen.

The Gulen organization steers its followers between a state mandated modernism without religion or an Islamic totalizing embrace of religion. In Turkey, a country where the public school and society does not teach Islam, the Gulen society advocates a completely secular curriculum under religious auspices and the keeping of the practices of one’s youth. In the US where it is permitted to teach religion in a private school, they only teach secular studies in their charter school in NJ and their private boarding school in CT. They only have a chaplain on campus and one period a week of religion (like the old Episcopal prep schools). With the Gulen Society’s help, they send first generation students to a good colleges and then medical school or other professions. It produces a modernized Islam that keeps the commandments but has little to do with the vast corpus of Islamic works since they do not study them. The only Islamic teaching that they study are the writings of Fethelulah Gulen, who defines Islam as love, tolerance, interfaith and cultural dialogue, science, and caring for others. Numbers of adherents are hard to come by and vary from 500k to 10milion. The Gulen movement is one of the many emergent faces of 21st century Islam and you will be hearing much about them in the future.

The Gulen society is trying to create a modern-orthodox Islam in Turkey. They don’t trust the airlines when they say it is halal and women refrain from shaking men’s hands. (But men will shake women’s hands in a business context.) Women are encouraged to cover their hair. They wear Western dress and push for secular university study and want to blend into American democracy. Their NJ charter day school emphasizes the study of science and that you will get into a good college.

Turkey is officially a secular country maintained by the military. It has a prime minister who is head of the ruling religious party (but a PM even if religious cannot enforce religion or else he will be ousted by the military). The Gulan society is trying to create a middle ground between secular and Islamist and is supported by the police and the businessmen. There is a whole class of newly minted doctors and factory owners who support the movement. Fethullah Gulen himself is in exile in PA since he was seen as promoting religion in Islam, which is illegal.

I am not talking politics, but religion. So limit your comments to his modern religion. Nevertheless I must point out that he was on Israel’s side against the current PA flotilla disaster. I repeat please deal with the politics elsewhere.

Reclusive Turkish Imam Criticizes Gaza Flotilla
SAYLORSBURG, Pa.—Imam Fethullah Gülen, a controversial and reclusive U.S. resident who is considered Turkey’s most influential religious leader, criticized a Turkish-led flotilla for trying to deliver aid without Israel’s consent. Mr. Gülen said organizers’ failure to seek accord with Israel before attempting to deliver aid “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters.”

Fethullah Gulen is a liberal hanafi imam when it comes to law, (think of Rav Uziel or Rav Nissim) and he is against the strictures that has emanated from the influence of Salafi (Wahabi) Islam or from the Brotherhood in Egypt. While denying to actually follow Sufism, Gulen is a neo-Sufi- following and modernizing their ideas (Think, neo-hasidism). Gülen was a student and follower of Sheikh Sa’id-i Kurdi (1878-1960), also known as Sa’id-i Nursi, the founder of the Islamist Nur (light) movement. In contrast, Salafi Muslims, for example the Saadis, consider all forms and ideas of Sufism to be Baadah- innovation, changing the tradition, not binding, heresy.

Now for some of the interesting points. Once again, like Centrist Orthodoxy or Evangelicals, the community is linked to success and making money.

The movement appears to be very rich, leading to questions about the source of its money (with the implication that if the money is “bad”, then the movement must be too). The answer seems to be: voluntary donations, largely from rich businessmen. The Gülen network’s organizations – mainly schools, based in over 100 countries – are publicly registered and subject to legal scrutiny. Their members are also highly motivated, as reflected in the fact that Fethullah Gülen was (in July 2008) voted the world’s most significant intellectual in the respected intellectually monthly journal Prospect.

At the event, we listened to the stories of men from humble backgrounds who had after years of work and investment recently become rich; they now supported the movement’s drive for an ethical capitalism. They seemed to personify the argument of the Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk (in his memoir Istanbul: Memories of a City) that the elite’s cosiness with the Turkish Kemalite military is based on the shared fear that people rooted in or close to the great unwashed mass of urban and rural (and Muslim) working people are on the verge of gaining power- more here

On woman’s issues they are in favor of woman’s equality and entering the modern world but they are against woman’s prayer quorums or female imams.

The Qur’anic verses which insist on women’s equal human status with men really do seem to operate in the movement. The women (choose to) obey the injunction to dress modestly; at the same time, the verse “(there) is no compulsion in religion” seems to operate as strongly on this question as it does in the movement’s relations with people of other faiths. But, as the Muslim feminist Kecia Ali points out, the Qur’an does not propose full social equality, however ‘complementary’ men’s and women’s roles are seen to be (see Sexual Ethics And Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, Oneworld, 2006).

On questions of globalization, interfaith, and modern vales they are of the same cloth as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks because of their emphasis on the Neo-Sufism to create a vision of love, brotherhood of man, and natural human piety. The Gulen Society’s motto is “All is based on Love.” Rumi for a modern age.

The movement builds on Sufism; they define their Islam with pithy paragraphs like this one.

On the basis of Sufism lies a struggle with the self, a purification of the heart, and a feeding of the soul. This is accomplished with prayers and remembrance, and with increasingly extra forms of worships. If the methodology of fıqh constitutes a fundamental part of Islamic civilization, social mind, worship, and transactions; Sufism should be viewed as the most important manifestation of Islamic spirituality. Sufism is not solely a lifestyle. It is at the same time a special perspective that determines how the Sufi should establish relations with his Lord, with himself, and with the whole universe and all its contents. But this perspective is a perfect worldview in wider and philosophical meaning. – more here.

The Gulen society is not into theological dialogue and they rarely discuss Islam or even mention that they are Muslims. They advocate friendship dinners where you have a evening where clergy of all faiths, along with politicians and government officials meet and deliver fellowship speeches. (They hold three a year in NJ). For example, you can find on the web a speech by Bill Clinton at one of these dinners. They also advocate joint visits to religious sites and religious ruins- let’s bring Jews, Muslims, and Christians to ruins in Ephesus or to see the synagogues of Istanbul. They have contacts with Jewish organizations and are playing an increasing roll in local and US politics.

IF you have any thoughts on their brand of modern Islam, their religion, or their means of interfaith then please leave a comment. If you are coming to preach politics of Islamophobia please go elsewhere.

This post was written before spending 12 days with them, it was modified slightly after seeing them in the field. I will have a follow-up post(s) on their religiosity, and some of the cultural elements brought up by Thomas Friedman’s recent op-eds.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Will return next week

Posted on June 26, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Unfortunately, I do not have enough bandwidth in the overseas cities that I am visiting.Therefore I cannot post the guest posts.
I will return by July 3rd and then I will post the guest posts.

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Hukkat, Noam Elimelech and Levinas

Posted on June 18, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Here is an interesting Dvar Torah by a classmate of mine from YU. In it, he juxtaposes Noam Elimelech and Levinas on distance bring one closer to God (and in the full version explians why it is different than Rabbi Soloveitchik who accepts distance as the normal state of things). This is clearly drush, in an oral style, in which I do not expect the details to sustain close scrutiny. But it would be nice to hear more derashot that attempt to bring in contemporary thought. Anyone has any good sermons to report? Can the community sustain such homiletic devices? My Christain readers- heard any good philosophic sermons lately?

Hukkat: The Red Heifer Ritual- Distance Bringing You Closer

The ceremony, in days when the Temple stood, involved the ashes of a red heifer, which were reconstituted by the priest with purified water and sprinkled upon the individual or object that needed purification.
This ceremony is uniquely bizarre and the Torah itself identifies it as such, in the opening verse of the section, labeling the ceremony as a Hukka, traditionally translated as a “law which is beyond any kind of sense or interpretation”

The early Hassidic master Noam Elimelech, R. Elimelech of Lizensk suggests that the word hukka does not mean a law that is inexplicable, as commonly translated, but in fact the term is derived from a different etymology entirely, from the homonymous verb, lahkok, which means to engrave; that is, performance of this ritual causes a message to be engraved upon ones heart. That message which must be engraved upon ones heart is not, however, specified in that particular teaching.

The NE notes that the phrase distance appears in other texts dealing with sublime spiritual moments, for example, in the episode of the binding of Isaac, we are told that at the third day, at the height of the spiritual challenge, Abraham sees the place from a distance. Thus there is implied a connection between distance and the spiritual.

The NE suggests that the red heifer text is really about teshuva, repentance, the coming closer to Gd. It is the nature of the dialectic of coming close, that nearness so often reveals distancing. When one makes the effort to come closer, to abrogate past spiritual failings (the contact with death signifying the ultimate cessation of the spiritual in this worldly affairs), then Gd draws the individual closer in a reciprocated move. However, once one attains such heights of spiritual insight one then realizes how far the individual is from Gd in every way. This distance does not imply a rebuff on the part of Gd, in fact, the opening of this divide is meant as an invitation to cross over to an even higher spiritual understanding, which by the nature of these things would lead to an even more humbling recognition of the chasm in between, which, one presumes, would continue infinitely, sort of like the differential in calculus.

I was startled by the similarity between the Hassidic paradox of distance and the summation of Levinas’ work Totality and Infinity. The “infinity” referred to in the title is the endless number of worlds, of possibilities one can achieve when one begins to perceive of the Other as entirely different from oneself. Levinas then defines:

This distance is then the route to which endless possibilities of human existence present themselves Distance with regard to being, by which the existent exists in truth, is produced as time and as consciousness, or again, as anticipation of the possible. The structure of consciousness or of temporality-of distance and truth-results from an elementary gesture of the being that refuses totalization. In fecundity (to Levinas, the ultimate Othering which is transformative of the self, when being open to all the possibilities one opens towards the future, is that of the relation of parent and child, which he labels fecundity) distance with regard to being is not only provided in the real; it consists in a distance with regard to the present itself. The discontinuous time of fecundity makes possible an absolute youth and recommencement. This recommencement of the instant, this triumph of the time of fecundity over the beginning of the mortal and aging being, is a pardon, the very work of time.

Note the introduction of the concept of pardon, which plays a role similar to that of teshuva in the Noam Elimelech. Pardon acts as a retroaction, an ability to redetermine the meaning of the past in such a way as to open whole new futures. In fact, contra Heidegger, death is not the finitude of being that constitutes the essence of time but rather is an unknown, which is, in a sense, transcended by fecundity-
…the fact and the justification of time consist in the recommencement it makes possible in the resurrection, across fecundity, of all the compossibles sacrificed in the present.
Thus we see a structural similarity, whereby the act of achieving pardon, helps transcends the gap of Otherness which in turn opens up a whole realm of new possibilities of being. It is the experience of the distances themselves which bring about this transformation. What appears to be a distance actually grounds the closest truth to ones own being, in Levinas labelled “fecundity”.
These are the hukkot, the inexplicable distances, reehuk, we experience, that leave their traces at the most intimate, the most close, or in the words of Chazel, that chakaku, engrave themselves upon our hearts.
Mark H. Kirschbaum, MD, Dept of Hematology and Stem Cell Transplantation, City of Hope National Cancer Center, Duarte, CA,
Read the whole version here.

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Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz on avoiding harm

Posted on June 18, 2010 by | 1 comment

I am teaching Jewish ethics next semester and am now on the lookout for all things pertaining to the topic. So be prepared for some of the recent books on the topic to show up here- Elliott Dorff, Jonathan Sacks, Jill Jacobs and adaptations of Levinas. I am finding little meta-ethical discussion that has been written since the early 1980s. Everything has been denominational biased professional topics like medical “ethics”. There was no response to Rawls and Sandel the way there was a response to Kant, Gustafson, and Hare in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. So expect me to discuss, time permitting, some Hilary Putnam, Appiah, and Zygmunt Bauman.
In the mean time, here is another op-ed by Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz. This time he has a nice use of WD Ross on pluralistic deontology (Wurzburger would be proud) and a nice understanding of rule deontology, which make a nice rubric for dealing with Rabbinic ethics. I wish the article had been titled Jewish ethics and not Jewish law because the supply side and libertarian readings of halakhah are not rule-deontology. The op-ed gets in a nice swipe at ascribing teleology to situations that call for responsibility and there is a virtue ethic yearning for articulation between the lines of the op-ed. Thoughts? more successful than last week? And interconnectedness of all beings is a different line of thought than deontology-are they able to be combined?

The BP Oil Spill, Personal Responsibility and Jewish Law
Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz

The Jewish concept relating to a case of mass public damage is “harkhakat nezikin” – the requirement that one not partake in any activities that might cause damage to other people or their property. A primary argument that emerges from the halakhic commentators (Shulkhan Arukh 155:33) is whether one is culpable when he or she indirectly causes a single accident (gerama) after following the correct safety procedures in the same way that one who continuously causes direct damage is liable.

Religion, at its worst, can be used to eliminate human agency and responsibility. Texas Governor Rick Perry invoked a morally deficient appeal to religious language last month when he called the Gulf oil spill “an act of G-d.” While we can debate G-d’s presence in the world, we need not debate the issue of human responsibility and culpability.

A primary charge of the Jewish social justice tradition is the demand that we learn both how to limit our damage and how to hold ourselves and others who cause damage accountable. Religious life, lived at its best, shapes a discourse of public responsibility and calls on us to pay close attention to public policy as well as our everyday spills.

Prior to our question of maximizing the good, we must be concerned with avoiding harm. “Sur mei’rah v’aseh tov” – the Jewish antidote is to turn from evil and then do good. This is what the philosopher W.D. Ross in his “pluralistic deontology” calls a “duty of beneficence” (to help others) and a “duty of non-maleficence” (to avoid harming others). These duties to prevent indirect damage are also present in everyday activities that we might not contextualize as being moral issues.

The Talmud (Shabbat 54b) teaches that anyone who can protest a wrong in one’s home, one’s city, or in the world and does not do so is held accountable for that wrong as well.

Full version Here.

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Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers

Posted on June 18, 2010 by | 3 comments

The books by the new atheists were widely read and eye opening for those raised in the prior decades of religious certainty but they garnered little praise from professional philosophers. Everyone has heard the arguments before in Bertram Russel’s “Why I am not a Christian” Tom Paine’s delightful Age of Reason, and the Joseph Lewis’ less delightful The Bible Unmasked. Most of the cultured responses were snarky or dismissive to the atheists as not knowing the history of ideas.

But now we have an interesting new volume that answers the new atheists as part of a book designed for an undergraduate introduction to philosophy course or introduction to religion, God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers by Eric Reitan. The book won an award as an outstanding academic work. It does not refute the atheists as much as use them to open the discussion about Anselm, Aquinas, and Schleiermacher. I am always on the lookout for good “teaching” books. This one looks like it would be appropriate for the right class, bothered by these problems. It would be a good introduction for those who only know the popular literature. It would also be useful for someone trying to explain Saadya and Maimonidean theism to a contemporary fideist.

Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers

Eric Reitan’s latest book, Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2009. Here he tells us how he was motivated to write the book partly in response to the misrepresentations of religious thought he discovered in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, but also by a very personal desire to reconcile his deep intuitions about ultimate reality with open intellectual inquiry.

Why did you decide to write Is God a Delusion?
Eric Reitan: One day a few years ago, a colleague of mine handed me a photocopied page from a book, without any identifying information, and asked me to evaluate it as I would a student paper. On that page the unknown author attempted to summarize and then critique the first three of Aquinas’ “Five Ways” for proving God’s existence. I say “attempted” because the author got the arguments wrong and then critiqued them at precisely the points of misunderstanding.

As it turns out, that page was taken from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. And so I became curious about the book and bought a copy. By the time I was finished I found myself thinking, “You know, I could write an entire introduction to the philosophy of religion just by noting what Dawkins has to say about classic questions in the field, pointing out his oversights and errors, and then introducing the reader to the more developed ideas of great thinkers.

What’s the central concern of the book, and why is it important?
ER: Is God a Delusion? addresses the range of new atheist challenges to religion, not for the purely negative aim of exposing their shortcomings, but for the more productive purpose of trying to identify the parameters within which religion can be both intellectually respectable and morally benign. I’m surprised at how often the book has been mistakenly dubbed an apologetic response to the new atheists…and then criticized as a poor example of apologetics because it fails to defend the kind of religion that the new atheists are attacking. But my aim in the book was never to defend what the new atheists attack, but rather to show that their objections to theistic religion are not as sweeping as the new atheists present them as being. That is, there is a way to believe in God, a way to live a life of religious faith, that does not fall prey to new atheist objections.

To a lesser extent, I also wanted to explore where and how religion goes wrong. Why is it that religion as we encounter it in the world so regularly strays outside the parameters of reasonableness and moral decency? Unlike the new atheists, I don’t think the answer lies in something essential to religion itself. Rather, I think it is the result of certain common human failings—such things as the need for certainty even where certainty can’t be had, and the propensity to find meaning and self-worth through membership in groups that define themselves against opposing groups.

And what is it that draws you to this topic?
This juxtaposition led me on a personal struggle of sorts—the struggle to find religion characterized not only by a sincere desire to live in connection with the transcendent but also by the values I couldn’t set aside: intellectual openness and honesty, compassion, and a respect for fellow humanity that reaches across the differences that so often separate us. My search for the former brought me first into a deep flirtation with modes of religion that challenged the latter—which isn’t surprising, since my most powerful religious influence during childhood had been my mother’s father, with whom I shared a special bond but who was a preacher in a tradition that tended towards exclusivism and suspicion of free thought.

In any event, that personal struggle has made me deeply interested in the issues I explore in the book. I’ve experienced first hand and struggled personally with the notion, so characteristic of much of the contemporary public discourse on religion, that we must choose between masters: religion or science, faith or reason, God or our fallible human conscience. In my personal life I traced out in intuitive terms a path between these false dichotomies. In Is God a Delusion?, my aim is to trace out that same path on a more intellectual level.
What sort of reaction do you hope it will get?

ER: At this point, it’s hard to separate my hopes from the actual reactions the book has already generated. I was deeply gratified, of course, that Is God a Delusion? was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2009, and I’ve been thrilled every time a philosopher or theologian in some other part of the world contacted me to express appreciation for the book. This kind of response from the academic world is in many ways more than I could have hoped for.

The response from atheist readers has been mixed, but in many ways pretty well tracks what I was hoping to do with the book in relation to that audience. Some atheist readers have found in the book a development of a species of religion they can respect even if they don’t agree with it—and then engaged me in stimulating discussions about key points of disagreement.

What sort of audience did you have in mind when you wrote it?
But I also hope that the book can be profitably used in undergraduate philosophy of religion courses. Although it’s no longer the introduction to the philosophy of religion I had originally intended to write, much of that original idea still shapes the book. I suspect that philosophy of religion teachers will notice very quickly that the topics I cover are some of the staple issues in the field, as are many of the thinkers I discuss. In fact, in my own philosophy of religion course I’ve been pairing my book with The God Delusion and a traditional philosophy of religion anthology, basically with the aim of doing what I’d originally thought to do in the book—and it has proved to be very successful in getting students to see the relevance of philosophical work to issues of contemporary significance. Also, it just makes the course more fun.
Is there another book you wish you could claim credit for?
I also find so much to admire in Charles Taylor’s short and accessible treatment of William James’ religious thought, Varieties of Religion Today, that I’d love to claim credit for it.

Read the whole interview here.

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50 Philosophy Blogs

Posted on June 18, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Here is a nice list of 50 philosophy blogs. It has all the best ones Some are single author professional academics like the Leiter Report, others are multi-author academic like PEA soup, and Continental Philosophy blog is an essential bulletin board. Warning:Some of the blog have little patience for non-philosophers and some of them will eat a religious apologist alive. On the other hand, the Evangelical blogs are devoted to warrant to believe and justifying their epistemology.

Update:
oops – the links to the 15 dont work- so you have to go to the original source. I dont have time to find the problem.

Enjoy
Here is the list of all 50 Philosophy Blogs.

Below are a sample of fifteen of them

1. Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog
Brian Leiter at the University of Chicago blogs frequently on subjects pertaining to philosophies – both the figures behind them and the people who enjoy spending time interpreting their meanings.
2. Experimental Philosophy
Read the ideologies and news stories behind experimental philosophy through the writings of a wonderful and diverse plethora of contributors.
3. Think Tonk
Clayton Littlejohn digs deeply into philosophy, politics, and how the 2 different subjects influence and come to be influenced by the other.
4. Continental Philosophy
Because “continental philosophy” covers ideologies from Europe (sans the British Isles), this blog and bulletin board provides diverse content from underneath that particular label.
5. Life in the Dream
Dr. Gregory Tucker blends Buddhism and other “Eastern” philosophies with traditional psychotherapy to present some very intriguing insights into the nature of reality, perception, and suffering.
7. Philosophy Talk
Philosophy Talk is a blog and a podcast for anyone who wants to try and make sense of how other people make sense of the world. They cover a wide spectrum of topics that illustrate philosophy’s role in human existence, including politics, business, social constructs, and more.
8. Philosophy’s Other: Theory on the Web
To borrow a phrase from Eugene Hütz, Philosophy’s Other could very well be considered the “super theory for supereverything.” It covers mankind’s perceptions of tops as diverse as architecture, psychology, and rhetoric in addition to discussing journal publications and conferences.
10. PEA Soup
Myriad diverse contributors gaze into how humanity processes the ins and outs of existence, ethics, and academia with the hopes of facilitating rewarding, intellectual discussions in its readers.
14. Thoughts Arguments and Rants
5 authors regularly weigh in on a variety of different philosophical topics, frequently looking into political and social issues along the way.
15. philosophy bites
David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton host a podcast and a blog emphasizing the ideas and movements supported by the biggest names in philosophy today..
21. Certain Doubts
Affiliated with Baylor University, the Certain Doubts blog concerns itself with any and all topics relating back to epistemology.
23. Epistemic Value
Anyone searching for knowledge regarding knowledge and meaning would do well to catch up with the writings (and events!) featured on this blog.
24. It’s Only A Theory
Science and philosophy aficionados must bookmark It’s Only A Theory to read up on all the latest news and views regarding how the two intertwine.
34. Larval Subjects
The concept behind this philosophy blog certainly piques a fair amount of interest. Rather than peering into and trying to make sense of the old, Larval Subjects seeks to explore and develop new philosophies from new, very small kernels of ideas..
41. The Prosblogion
All religious philosophies exist as some of the most controversial, subjective, and complex topics for debate, and The Prosblogion does not shy away from addressing any of the ones that ever have and ever will crop up.

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Smashing the Idols- Jonathan Schorsch

Posted on June 15, 2010 by | 3 comments

The Kotzker Rebbe who pierced the falsehood of society and taught a path of individualism was the hero of existential hippie ethos of late 20th century. The Kotzker Rebbe asked: “why do we say ‘our God and God of our fathers,’ shouldn’t it be reversed to show reverence for the past before our selves? The Kotzker answered that we first have to make God our own and then we can appreciate the God of our fathers.

I think of that piece as I read the essay by Jonathan Schorsch about his smashing the idols of the prior generation and now how he finds his own children treating him as a Terah, just as he used to view the prior generation. Schorsch adds the sociological insight that this generational change is especially acute in America where every era is flabbergasted by the prior era.

Also note the issue of Neo-Hasidism – “the serious yet easygoing, communal, neo-hasidic Judaism that my wife and I had nurtured as haven and inspiration fit neither into proper conventional Judaism nor rational secularism.” Ah, if only the Kotzker were mainstream, but then it would not be Kotzk. The Kotzker once said: “I cannot believe in a God that every common yankel can believe in or understand.” The new coda of this quote would be that the next generation of 1880 would find their father neither conventional nor secular rational. So the Kotzker’s son imitated the conventional Ukrainian style of being a Rebbe, while much of the rest of Polish Jewry chose secular rationalism.

Full version- here

I was young once. By my teenage years, as far as I was concerned, I knew everything, what was right and what was wrong. Mine was the only authentic perspective, my perception the only one that saw things as they truly were.

Some time into my older children’s adolescence, I noticed a pain I could no longer conceal. Someone had entered my workshop and was busily chipping away at much of what I had loved, cared for, and spent so much time and energy building. It was my own children! They seem to have mistaken the treasures that my wife and I had built ourselves for idols: Our environmentally friendly, quasi-hippy ways were deemed aberrant and embarrassing, ineffective and silly; our critique of contemporary capitalism and governmental failures and our search for alternatives were considered cynical; our lack of a television and opposition to much of popular culture were causing our children’s mental and social debilitation. Worse still was the fact that the serious yet easygoing, communal, neo-hasidic Judaism that my wife and I had nurtured as haven and inspiration fit neither into proper conventional Judaism nor rational secularism. We were aberrations — stupid, backward, and superstitious; religious tyrants imposing groundless beliefs on those less powerful. Terachs, indeed.

Our domestic intergenerational conflicts evolved into a routine of sorts. I realized that it was not my idols (ideals) that were being smashed. It was me. I had become the idol; I had become the towering statue of a false and tyrannical dictator. My orientation, values, and beliefs could not be separated from my essence; they were me.

Becoming a parent had broken through my narcissistic blindness to perspectives other than my own childish one. My failures had kindled the intelligence of withholding judgment regarding the failures of others.

With great sadness, I see that the smashing of idols has itself become an idol. American pop culture, modernity in general — in some sense even certain ways of being Jewish — seem fixated on destroying parental idols and ideals, unable or unwilling to sift through what is handed down by previous generations for wisdom, intent on wholly remaking the world anew. The idols may well have deserved reshaping, and the truth is that not all parents parent well, but the conflict has left us a world littered with the shards of countless broken hearts. How difficult it can be to consider the pain we have caused, that has been caused to us, that we continue to cause — and to move forward still.

One day, I hope they will recognize, as I have come to learn from the revolving mirror of life in which I periodically glimpse myself — that the clay that forms these new idols and ideals comes from the dust of the shattered old ones, that our unknown inner powers were likely, as not, sown by our parents.

Jonathan Schorsch is associate professor in the department of religion at Columbia University

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Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz replies

Posted on June 15, 2010 by | 3 comments

Shalom,

I’d like to share my appreciation with Professor Brill for posting this op-ed and to all the thoughtful commentators. I have a few replies here:

1. Gilgul’s implications for relationships between Jews & Non-Jews: This is exactly the kind of conversation I would like to further. I think that by embracing Sartre’s notion that “existence precedes essence” we can embrace a past soul’s existence (not essence) as a Hindu, for example, and we can do so without saying that our soul was essentially different. I’m suggesting that perhaps we can embrace gilgul and be post-essentialist. The soul has a universal nature which enters different cultural realties. What divides me between a Muslim or Buddhist is not our determinism but our freedom. Our choices and affiliations, not our essences, have more weight.

In Keriat Shema al Mita, we ask for forgiveness for our past gilgulim. We are, in fact, held accountable for those existences not because they have scarred the essences of our souls but because the free will (the real stuff of existence) has carried over into our next gilgul. Our decisions, in this life, have more weight and moral implication beyond this body.

2. I’m suggesting less of a metaphysical truth and more of a spiritual activity or a hermeneutic for human phenomenological encounter. I was surprised that someone was “put off” by my treating “this exercise as a thought experiment and temporary suspension of belief.” We live in an age of religious skepticism and I was merely stating the obvious here. Given the current epistemic foundations of Judaism (and religion), we can no longer state hard truths. What does this commentator propose as a different way of framing our theological discourse in a post-modern age (with certainty and perfect belief)?

3. “One could take the opposite tack and argue that a belief in gilgul allows people to work less hard in this life” – you’re right that someone could do that. But I think that our intentions when crafting our personal theologies are vital in religious life. I think we can embrace a more pragmatic consequentalist theology – one that works for us and that improves us. Is it wrong to embrace a theology that one believes to be true if it produces a racist or sexist culture? To have integrity in confirming one’s beliefs, one must embrace more comprehensive truths.” One who needs a personal G-d to feel connected religiously and spiritually engaged simply should not embrace Rambam’s theology even if they find it logically compelling. Maybe in the next gilgul they can embrace it, but this life demands more – it demands that their chosen hermeneutic actualizes them!

I look forward to replies.

B’Shalom, Shmuly Yanklowitz

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Decline in the Megachurches and Rise in Microchurches

Posted on June 14, 2010 by | 4 comments

Reports are coming in that the era of mega churches may be coming to an end. Just as synagogues have learned to create multi-purpose social environments that are driven by managerial rabbis, the trend has peaked in the Protestant world. Part of the reason is that people have had enough with entertainment and social services and want repentance and redemption. They wont disappear but their number will be reduced and new congregations will be formed. The megachurches of Rev Rick Warren and Rev Joel Hunter will continue to thrive, but others will not. So which successful synagogues will continue to operate as mega-churches and which may need to retool as offering Torah, redemption, and teshuvah? How long will it take Rabbinic training to once-again shift? Will CjF change? Which denominations will lead the return to repentance? (I am still unsure of how this relates to spirituality. Are people turning to repentance to replace spirituality or will it be a more traditionally grounded spirituality of repentance?)

On the other hand, this year has seen a rise of micro-churches, small groups that meet in a living room or small congregation that are run by lay leadership, or a clergy that has a full time job. No more driving to a distant church, gather a few like minded believers from the neighborhood and create an intimate setting. (Google “micro-church” for some of the variety). Be prepared for Reform Shtiblach. If these two trends keep up, then the Federation in two years could likely fund “Reform mussar stiblach.” The question is whether Centrist Orthodoxy can give up its characteristic and winning trait of gregariousness and turn toward repentance or will people start break-off microshuls, each brewed to a specific taste?

Decline in the Megachurches and Rise in Microchurches — Martin E. Marty

Schadenfreude, or rejoicing in others’ misfortunes, is abundantly evident in responses, blogged and otherwise, to the bad/sad news about the decline of the famed Crystal Cathedral, a megachurch founded in the mid-1950s in California. Publicity has been constant, for over a year, concerning the church’s 55-million-dollar debt, sellings-off of property, non-payment of bills, et cetera. Other megachurches have closed when the nearby malls on whose traffic they half-depended went broke.

First, why Schadenfreude? One has to see a turnabout-is-fair-play attitude in some of the uncharitable responses. The megachurch networks build constituencies in part by attacking denominations, even as these networks then become more-than-virtual, indeed, parallel and competitive “denominations” themselves. Worshippers who gather in town-and-country, inner-city, and left-behind neighborhoods, where neither congregations nor anything else can grow, chafe when the mega-success folk deride them, publishing books and releasing releases which suggest that smaller, declining, or holding-their-own churches and synagogues are simply doing wrong, or at least not doing right.

What is going on with the decline of the megachurches? I’ve read some sociological analyses, works in progress on which we’ll report after they are published, which have some big clues. Most come down to the fact that so many of these churches replace or eclipse classic concerns such as “repentance” and “redemption” and have converted, in their terms and substance and energies, to market models.

No, the megachurches are not going to disappear. But as they transition from the world of inevitable success to re-participation in a world of partial success, setbacks, disappointments, and frustrations, now is a good time to see what about them can be appropriate in the lives of so many other kinds of churches and synagogues, which have much to learn, and only sometimes are themselves eager to change.

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Metropolitans and Brothers

Posted on June 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

I was speaking to a colleague today about the fact that I will be on a panel next week with Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Emmanuel, the Metropolitan of Paris. Metropolitan is the Greek Orthodox word for Archbishop.

So Rabbi Jack Moline, the rabbi that presided over the recent bar-mitzah of Rahm Emmanuel’s son, leans over to us and says:
“He is the fourth Emmanuel brother–Rahm, Zeke, Ari and Metropolitan Emanuel.”

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