R. Moshe Cordovero on the Amidah.

Posted on April 26, 2010 by | 12 comments

R. Yosef Karo writes that he followed the kavvanot of the Ramak.

In contrast, to Provençal method where there is an ascent to tiferet or binah. In Cordovero’s method, as mentioned above, the shekhinah itself is raised and the entire system collapses up like the folding up of a telescope. One folds shekhinah up beyond nezah and hod which makes her the same as tiferet, not that there is only tiferet or that she merged into tiferet, but that she has been raised to the point of tiferet.  From tiferet, the shekhinah together with tiferet receive from an influx from binah. There is  loss of differentiation and integration within binah. This ascent during the silent prayer allows the entrance and then the merging of the soul into the supernal realms.

The passage contains the division of ADNY into AY, the Infinite oneness found within ten sefirot showing unity of keter, tiferet, and malkhut, and DN the forces of judgment and materiality showing the emanation process as privation from the Divine goodness.

Here we have words of the amidah especially the name A-donai (A-d-n-y) divided into Aleph for the top three sefirot, and daled-nun as judgment of the world, and yod as the ten sefirot. The infinite light (aleph) above descends to the earthy world of judgment (daled-nun) through the means of the ten sefirot (yod). The infinite light cascades down in emanation as the discrete units of the three Divine names, E-hyah, Y-H-V-H, and A-donai.

ADNY, this name is malkhut.

Meditate that She is now higher than nezah and hod, as She is silently rising between the two shepherds during the unification of the recitation of the Shema. The mystery of prayer is their literal union, that they completely unite. The individual is silent because the union is in silence. Voice (kol), tiferet, is not heard outside at all,. The mystery of this verse is to open the door of the palace for the worshiper to enter inside. Thus, he knocks on the opening of the palace gate, holy of holies, in order to enter inside, to unify and bind. As it is known, inside the palace is malkhut, bound with the three fathers whose mystery is love (ahavah).

One knocks and says, “my Lord” (ADNY), who is malkhut, as she is the aspect bound in the mystery of daled nun that she is the mystery of alef, which is the name eh-yeh in binah and the mystery of yud, which is Y-H-V-H in tiferet. This is why she is called Ado-nai, tied to three names, Eh-yeh, Y-H-V-H, Ado-nai on nezah and hod.

“My lips” are nezah and hod;

“open” (tiftah) from inside the palace. These are the openings of palace of the gates of righteousness so that I may enter them and praise Y-H (Psalms 118:19).

“and my mouth” (u’fi) for through the opening of the lips the mouth is formed, which is malkhut. Since She does not have a mouth without open lips, immediately you will see malkhut.

Immediately, “will express” (yaggid), from the side of hokhmah, which is the mystery of gimmel daled, seven sefirot GYD, a drop from the brains that are drawn down in the mystery of semen that shoots like an arrow.

First Blessing

The goal of the first blessing of the silent amidah is to draw down from binah into the lower sefirot of yesod and malkhut.

The following paragraph is a note written above the liturgy, so that the reader does not misunderstand the process and think that one is still just connecting the lower to the higher sefirot, The entire first berakhah is not only in binah, but in the depths of binah; while the other mentioned sefirot are all within binah. The imagery is of the infinite king, a cosmic deity, who is so great, that there are many aspects (bekhinot) , called inner limbs. This passage is not included in the first Rosh Hashanah commentary  and may be by another hand, but it does express the characteristics of the practice of the Cordovero intentions.

This entire blessing is in the depths of binah until “shield of Abraham” that She descends into hesed. Whenever it says that [the pray-er] goes down into malkhut and the avot, it is all hidden in binah. For the first blessing is the first principle of the king, and all the higher inner limbs are included in it. Thus, she will have many aspects.

Cordovero wrote notes above the words Bless and You explaining how the blessings within the amidah work.  He reiterates that his method is to go from top to bottom during blessings drawing down from the eyn sof to malkhut.

“Bless” During the amidah, one should direct “bless” down from the Ein Sof to yesod including all ten sefirot from the Source of everything. The power to bring down influence from on high until malkhut below depends on thought.

This is why the Zohar says that one should not start at the level of “Your face,” so that you do not admonished, God forbid. Should he start “bless” from bottom-up, standing in din, then the going bottom-up is din. Rather, start from the top and go before His face below; this is the mystery of “blessed” from top-down to repair it beforehand with influx and sweetening its judgments.

Energy is drawn down from the top three sefirot to the middle six, first as keter, hokhmah, and binah into tiferet, then in the middle blessings one draws daat the animating vitality of the world into the twelve-sided version of tiferet, and in the concluding blessings of the amidah one brings the spiritual energy into malkhut.

Yesod includes yesod malkhut (YM) from keter until yesod seals this world of yesod malkhut from the world of the male, spreading top-down.

Blessed (Barukh)

Malkhut is the world of the female. Alef (A) is keter; tav (T) is hesed, binah, gedulah, gevurah; hei (H) is tiferet until malkhut.

Are You (Atah; ATH)

Tiferet, which binds together male and female from the bottom up.

Lord (Y-H-V-H)

Ein Sof keter of keter:

yud hei vav hei (YUD HY VYV HY); [72]

alef hei yud hei (ALF HA YUD HA); [143]

yud hei vav hei (YUD HA VAV HA); [45]

alef dalet nun yud (ALF DLT NUN YUD). [#zzz]

Bind head to head YAHH-VYHH—hokhmah and binah.

Bind body to body YAHD-UNHY—tiferet and malkhut.

Binah

Our God (e-lo-heinu)

Hokhmah that lights up binah

And God of (vei-lo-hei)

In the mystery of her three roots, gedulah, gevurah and tiferet inside her.

Our fathers (avoteinu)

Hesed of hokhmah bound in hesed of binah.

God of (e-lo-hei) Abraham (avraham)

Gevurah of hokhmah bound in gevurah of binah.

God of (elo-hei) Isaac (yizhak)

Tiferet of hokhmah bound in tiferet of binah.

And God of (vei-lo-hei)  Jacob (ya’akov).

Mystery of three fathers revealed in the great binah of gedulah

The God  (ha-e-l) The great (ha-gadol)

Gevurah

The mighty (ha-gibbor)

Tiferet

And the awesome (ve-ha-nora)

To bring them influence and blessing from the source of the right of keter, called or zah, the mystery of yud in the name yud hei vav hei (YUD HY VYV HY) [72]

God on high (e-l elyon)

Who brings influence from hokhmah to binah

Benefactor of (gomeil)

Hasadim that are great and give light, that her aspect is from the right, hesed; and all the aspects from her side are kind

Great kindness (hasadim tovim)

From the source of binah of keter, which is the name alef hei yud hei (ALF HA YUD HA) [143]

And possesses all (vekoneih ha-kol)

The sprouting of three fathers, all hasadim from the highest white light.

And remembers the kindness of the fathers (vezokheir hasdei avot)

Mystery of the name yud hei vav hei (YUD HA VAV HA) [45] of keter, vav of the name of arikh anpin and keter revealed

And brings redemption (u’meivi go’eil)

Nezah and hod, children of the three fathers

To the sons (livnei) of their sons (veneihem)

Meditate on spreading the last letter hei in the name Y-H-V-H of keter

For the sake of His name (lema’an shemo)

From there, spreading out the exiled malkhut who will be bound between two arms.

In love (be’ahavah).

Now return to unify from bottom to top through hokhmah and binah as one. Malkhut bound with malkhut of keter.

King (melekh)

Tiferet bound to tiferet of keter yud hei vav hei (YUD HA VAV HA) [45]

Helper (ozeir)

Gevurah bound in the name Eh-yeh of keter

And savior (u-moshia)

Hesed bound in the mystery of the highest hesed of keter, yud hei vav hei (YUD HY VYV HY).[72]

And Shield (u-magein).

Yesod including all ten sefirot from the world of the male

Blessed (barukh)

Malkhut including all ten sefirot from the world of the female

Are You (atah)

Going up to unite in keter until Ein Sof

Lord (Y-H-V-H)

YAHD-UNHY; YAHA-VYHH;

alef dalet nun yud (ALF DLT NUN YUD); [#zz]

yud hei vav hei (YUD HA VAV HA);[45]

alef hei yud hei yud hei vav hei (ALF HA YUD HA YUD HY VYV HY).[#]

Bind three fathers of malkhut in hesed to bring everything out from binah and bring them to hesed.

Shield of Abraham (magein avraham).


Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Arthur Green- Radical Judaism #2 of 5 parts

Posted on April 26, 2010 by | 6 comments

The first chapter is on Green’s quest for God.

Continued from part 1- here.

Continue to part 3 – here. Continue to part 4 here.
part 5 here

Green writes that he is a Jewish seeker looking for a lone path. He discusses his atheist upbringing and that he is seeking a middle path between atheism and theism, which he finds in his poetic pantheistic reading of Hasidism.

Green wants to be both a seeker and the spiritual leader of our age. His calling himself a seeker is a bit much at this point when Green sets himself up  as an exemplar and leader of our age.  Someone who is seeking does not write an article called “On Being Arthur Green” implying that one should learn from his wisdom – it was published when he first got to Hebrew College. One can only write an article like that at a pinnacle to share your wisdom. In addition, Green has been in the public eye and noted in the newspapers his whole life.

As a spiritual autobiography of someone who was in all the important places, there was little on his teachers at JTS or Brandeis. Nor on his classmates David Novak, Reuven Kimmelman, and  Byron Sherwin. Nothing as doctoral adviser at Penn or his being President of RRC. Nor a mention of being invited as a young academic to Peter Berger’s “other side of God” retreats or being one of the youngest involved in the Classics of Spirituality and World Spirituality series. Nothing on founding Shefa quarterly with Jonathan Omar-Man and Adin Steinsatz. And most surprisingly nothing on the founding of the first havurah while in grad school Havurat Shalom in Somerville, where along with his buddies Danny Matt, Michael Fishbane, James Kugel and Michael Strassfeld they set out to create a new Judaism for a new age. As a seeker he can claim to “still haven’t found what I am looking for” and not need to survey the past. But if he is offering wisdom that he holds as truth then the disestablishmentarianism is a bit jarring.

Green himself attributes his title Radical Judaism to the radical “God is dead” theology of the 1960’s. He claims that the holocaust and historical criticism ruptured his faith. He found his way back through the non-personal pantheistic hiding God of Hasidism and Kabbalah. He attributes his salvation in the writings of  Hilell Zeitlin (H”YD) who went from freethinking journalist to fervent Hasid and was uniquely able to interpret Hasidism through the eyes of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Tolstoy. Zeitlin created an urbane Hasidism for his urban newspaper readers.

As a side point, Green’s Tormented Master followed the interpretive lines of Zeitlin and portrayed Rav Nahman as struggling with doubt and freethinking.  When Mendel Pierkaz gave a negative review of Green as “Hasidism for a new world” since it was based on Zeitlin, everyone was furious and even more furious when Piekarz reprinted his review.  The sacrilege was that Green was considered in America as the true university interpretation of Rav Nahman. Now Zvi Mark is the regnant academic work on Rav Nahman and has a different reading of Rav Nahman than Greens, and more people follow the interpretation of Rav Nahman by Rabbis Kenig, Schick, Arush and Schechter et al than academic works.

Green accepts his involvement in the psychedelic age and quaintly defines post-modernism as the rejection of modernity by the counter culture of the 1960’s  They sought to transcend the rational into the realm of myth, drugs, pantheism, and poetry. (Go read Art Green’s early psychedelic works under the pseudonym Itzhak Lodzer.)

Green accepts as another side to his thought that of religious humanism- Kafka, Buber, and Hebrew literature.

After almost 40 years, Green is not claiming identity of his thought with Heschel anymore. He does claim affinity to Tom Berry (d 2009) visionary advocate of evolutionary ecological development of human consciousness, human lifestyle, and our life on the planet. Berry is the near forgotten theologian of the Age of Aquarius and moon landing, who barely got obituaries last summer when he died. Green reminds people of Berry’s positions on our sitting on the edge of a new evolutionary moment where religion will no longer be literal. Like in 2001 Space Odyssey, the world is being thrust into the future and mankind needs to evolve with it.  Religion will now be a mystical pantheism of energy flow that God providentially directs. Yes, he believes this but just not literal the way fundamentalists or orthodox believe. This God is not the theistic God of the Protestant era but “God” – the force of the astro, geo, bio, psych, realms.

Many years ago, Green wrote an article in Shefa Quarterly on the need for a new Jewish theology deserves reprinting for its quest for remytholization over rationalism. Not shattered myths but learning to make the myths of Pesikta, Zohar, and Rav Nahman come live again. For a sense of what this new volume lacks in its discussion of myth compared to older Green writings, here are some excerpts from a NYT interview from 1989 about the new RRC prayer book. They give a sense of the kernel of the birth his rejection of rational for myth and learning to see religion as a progressive force.

While the notion of a ”chosen people” is still excluded from the new liturgy, the mention of miracles, like the splitting of the Red Sea, have been restored. Dr. Arthur Green, president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and one of the editors of the new volume, said the ”language of myth” speaks powerfully to many people, even if they do not believe in the literal details. ”As myth, the ancient tale of wonder underscores the sense of daily miracle in our lives,” he said.

Dr. Green, the president of the college, said the prayer book was molded by events that began unfolding in the 1960’s, and ”our view of religion and its place in society have drastically changed” since then. The nation, he said, went from debates over ”Is God Dead?” to seeing the power of religion in the civil rights movement and in the movement to end the Vietnam War. ”We learned from the 60’s that religion can be a progressive social force for change,” he added.

Continue to part 3 – here.
Continue to part Four here
Continue to part 5 here.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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After 7 and a half months.

Posted on April 24, 2010 by | 5 comments

Well, I have been blogging for longer than I expected.

I had a medical virus this week and was ill so I did not post but people still showed up. No one emailed to to ask if I stopped blogging the way people did during autumn breaks. So this is good.

Evaluation of posts after almost eight months.

1] I post random clipped items that I read because people ask me what I find interesting on the web  They are almost always from blogs of other faiths or ethics. Now, there are new tools like “read something” to share articles but this seems to work fine. I tend to select lists. This is my cork board.

2] I post interfaith clippings of Jews or Jewish texts. These get steady hits and serve as a repository. These rarely get a publishable comment. (I don’t post the islamophobia and xenophobia.)

3] I post pieces on Jewish meditation, Zohar, and kabbalistic ritual. These are intermittent but always generate the most comments and the most personal emails.

4] I post long reviews of the most important theological works of the year. This has been the most surprisingly successful for determining if I have a book review to pitch to a journal and to determine if I have 1k or 8k words.  These are the works that usually don’t get reviewed on blogs because the book was too complex for this format.

5] Finally, I post sociological observations on the Orthodox community in comparison to the other faiths as it appears on my feed. These generate the most links on other blogs and the massive influx of temporary readers but are not my major concern. However, when I feel I have come up with something, then I do theme and variations for a while.

6] Every 2 months I look at the wide range of Jewish academic journals and download the pdfs. I do this to professionally keep up with the field but have not had time to comment on more than a few articles.

Evaluation of the technical aspects of the blog

a] I could arrange this in magazine format as five topics, wordpress allows that but this is working OK.

b] If anyone has any suggestions for widgets or plug-ins, then let me know. I have not found a good widget for finding old posts yet. The cloud does not yield a sufficient index.

c] I have gotten used to receiving my best discussions and comments by email. I did not think it would. On the other hand, phone calls are a bit much and I do not then have a printed record of the comments.

d] I have not upgraded yet for a memory increase to allow mp3s and video. I am debating if I want to do file hosting here or at itunes u channel.

e] I get the most hits on snow days. I get the least before Hag.

f] Only a handful of readers ever click through to links.

g] When you are kind enough to send me typos, I correct them in the text. I do not bother posting the list of typos.

Any Suggestions?

On Book old and new

I will be speaking and having a book signing at NYU-Bronfman Center this Monday April 26th at 6:30.

I will be speaking at DAVAR in Teaneck on MAY 8th after musaf, shalos seudot, and then book signing after havdalah.  Order book in advance at $48 and you can pick it up before shabbos.

Finally, my first volume had an orange color on top; I will make the second volume light blue, magenta, or green. But should I change the text at the bottom of the cover? Rambam hilkhot AZ had 4 font sizes and was attractive on the page. None of the standard Talmud editions for AZ have the same eye appeal.  Do any Rishonim have an attractive first page of AZ? Neither Meiri, Yeraim, nor anything by Mosad Harav Kook has better typography. Does it pay to switch? Should I keep the Rambam and just change title and color?

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Tzvia Greenfield: Israel’s first female Haredi MK- Meretz Activist

Posted on April 17, 2010 by | 7 comments

From Haaretz- full version here

Tzvia Greenfield. Israel’s first Haredi female to be elected to the Knesset, she is a fierce critic of her own community’s attitudes to the peace process and modernity; describing the Haredi community as being “incapable of compromise.” Yet she still lives in it, a resident of the Jerusalem suburb of Har Nof.

Of course, her horizons are far broader than the narrow vista of ultra-Orthodoxy. The 62-year-old, who has a doctorate in political philosophy from the Hebrew University, was elected on behalf of Meretz last November. She advocates a two-State solution based closely on the pre-1967 War borders; a self-proclaimed egalitarian, she’s in favour of women rabbis and religious pluralism.

The mother-of-five, who sent her children to national religious high-schools and both her sons to the army, arrives as expected wearing a sheitel (one that looks like a sheitel) and a long dress.

She then speaks candidly about her prospects of influencing change: she is unsure that Israel’s left can be revived – she’s not sure they can awake secular Israel from its “slumber”- and feels compelled to channel change in her own back-yard, despite disillusionment about the trenchant positions of the Haredi world, which her Austrian “ultra-Orthodox Zionist parents” brought her into.

She describes the “haredization” of parts of Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh as “killing” those places: “Once they take over a community no one else can live in – like in some parts of Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh – that’s unacceptable. That is something people won’t tolerate because they want to live their lives. One neighbour cannot impinge on the other’s rights; it’s true the Haredi community doesn’t understand its task in a democracy. It believes when its population grows in a territory, the whole area should be governed by its rules.

She added: “An essential part of adjustment is in being a minority; the problem is when they become a majority. They are already driving people out of Jerusalem and not just the secular – but the modern Orthodox; because they cannot tolerate this. If the Haredi community gets large enough we won’t see nice developments.”

Her non-interventionist liberal instincts means she defends its right to promote a school curriculum that bares little resemblance to the national model: she believes a “balanced” approach is necessary in seeking to bring the Haredi world into the modern age, without assaulting its delicate nuances. “Interfering in questions of education is particularly sensitive and fragile,” she argues. “Thinking from all sides, I think society has to ensure Haredim aren’t poor. Despite Israeli society’s investment it’s a very poor community.”

Can Meretz deliver change? “I’m not sure. I think the left all over Europe and particularly Israel has severely failed on many assignments and I think the left should profoundly reconsider its goals and how it goes about them. To me after years of being a peace activist it’s a shameful situation and I think it’s unacceptable not to look at ourselves.

Q and A

Bearing in mind you say some religious people have difficulty with compromise how would you like to see change stemming from the religious world?

Religious people have difficulty grasping essential ideas like peace, compromise and accepting others. These are difficult issues and they’ve got to be worked out.

I’m writing a book on the subject. I decided I had to write down what I think and that would be the best way to explain how one could retain ones religiosity and faithfulness to ones position and yet encourage profound changes.

I have one answer to your question. I think a religion ought to be concerned with human beings and not objects. Too often traditional religions have a great interest in objects and not enough in human beings. That has to be shifted completely. The emphasis and the concern should be entirely different and there are ways to do it.

Do you think the demonstration of the human side of the Judaism has been lost?

I think there is not enough concern about human beings, and I mean human beings in general, including non-Jews. As a religious person I believe that all human beings were created in the image of God.

What we’ve seen in Israel in the last thirty or forty years ever since the ’67 War is a concern with land. That’s an object. It’s become the centre of attention for religious people and I think that’s a major mistake and I think that should be changed.

Where do you stand on issues of religious pluralism and the rights of all sects of Judaism to have equal funding with regards to conversion programs and education?

Of course I support pluralism. People have to make their choices and decide what’s for them. There’s no way the state should direct on what or how they should do things. Every citizen should be a free subject to make his or her decisions without any input by the state whatsoever.

How would you, as a progressive Haredi, advocate it modernises its approach to self- governance?

Education. Education is the answer to everything, The fact that it blocks general education to its community is part of the problem because they never really understand what is going on and make their own decision. I would try and allow these people to get education without breaking down the system altogether, without enforcing education on them in a way which cannot acceptable, not only for them, but even for me. I don?t believe in enforcing it brutally; it has to be done carefully.

The very fact it’s living in the modern world, is affecting it. We are talking about the younger generation that will make decisions about what they are doing. In both America and Israel.  They are re-evaluating the world that their parents have brought them into. We’re probably going to see changes in the next 20-30 years. After all, they do not want to be poor.

You hope that the secular and Haredi worlds can live side by side but at the moment even the modern Orthodox are getting annoyed with the Haredim as the recent riots in Beit Shemesh prove.

Once they take over a community no one else can live in – like in some parts of Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh – that’s unacceptable. That is something people won’t tolerate because they want to live their lives. One neighbor cannot impinge on the other’s rights; it’s true the Haredi community doesn’t understand its task in a democracy. It believes when its population grows in a territory the whole area should be governed by its rules.

The Haredization of Jerusalem is already here – how can this situation be clawed back?

The community is poor, uneducated and very militant – the combination is lethal. It will kill Jerusalem.

How can the Haredi leadership recognise the need to modernise?

There is one factor in favour of modernisation- poverty. Some of the leadership recognizes and is concerned by this. Although the politicians would recommend poverty should be paid for, the leaders have a deeper approach. Certain changes must occur. First women join professions. Later on some men join. Things will change. Young men will be encouraged to join colleges. Already now there are a couple of colleges where Haredi girls are accepted to law or commerce school.

What do you think about the status of women in the Haredi world?

The big issue here is a very delicate one. That is children. Large families thirty years ago was six children; now there’s 13 or 14 – from one wife. I believes the glorification of bringing as many children as possible is a definite way of ensuring women can’t bring their advantages into effect – subjugation.

It’s inconceivable for a woman to say to her husband, “I won’t have more than three children” – a cause for divorce. Inconceivable and non-existent.

Do you think there should be Orthodox female rabbis?

I’m all for it. I think if women want to serve as rabbis in religious function they should be given the right to do so. The issue of depriving women a religious position is part of deprivation of women from positions of power. Women don’t have equal rights in Judaism because they never had them in any field of life- a general result of subjugation.

Why is there a lack of state involvement in social issues?

The state has been run by conservatives who don’t want equal rights for women, Arabs, anyone; any progressive left issues. They want to sabotage these things.

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The 20 Most Brilliant Christian Professors

Posted on April 17, 2010 by | 6 comments

This list should give people a sense of what is considered academic religion today. I can quibble over some of the inclusions and I have my own favorites to add. While lists may be arbitrary or really a sense of misplaced concreteness in such a list but they are useful for keeping up on the field. the list includes both liberals and evangelicals and it has the leaders in questions of religion and science. While everyone should have read Peter Berger and know of Charles Taylor Robert George and Alvin Plantinga – the influence of many of the others cannot be underestimated. Knowing at least half of them is a good start for the pulse of popular academic theology.

The professors listed here are all “brilliant” in the original sense of the word—they shine brightly among their peers as towering figures in the academic world. In addition, they are all Christians who do not hide their Christianity and see it as significantly impacting their intellectual work.

We have limited this list to professors who teach in the English-speaking world. A few listed here have officially retired or moved on to other responsibilities, but in each case they keep close ties to the academic world.

Peter Berger (1929-)

Professor Emeritus of Religion, Sociology and Theology at Boston University, where he directs its Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. A Lutheran, he studies the secularization of the West, focusing especially on the rift between “ elite culture and the rest of the population.” He sees American Christianity as a force for resisting secularization: “In the U.S., unlike any Western European country, there is enormous popular resistance to this trend [of secularization], especially from evangelical Christians.” He has written numerous influential books that have been widely translated. The University of Munich and Notre Dame have awarded him honorary doctorates.

References:
Faculty Bio
An Interview with Peter Berger

Benjamin S. “Ben” Carson Sr. (1951-)

Professor of Neurosurgery, Oncology, Plastic Surgery, and Pediatrics along with Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University. Educated at Yale and the University of Michigan, Carson has written over 100 scholarly articles as well as three bestselling books on integrating work and faith, all three with the Christian publishing house Zondervan. In addition to 38 honorary doctorates, he has received dozens of national merit citations, including the Presidential Freedom Medal, awarded in 2008. In a debate with atheist Richard Dawkins, Carson raised questions about evolutionary theory’s ability to reconstruct the natural history of life.

Reference:
Benjamin S. Carson Sr. Profile

Simon Conway Morris (1951-)

Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology in the Earth Sciences Department at Cambridge University. Praised by the late Stephen Jay Gould for his fundamental insights into the Cambrian explosion, Conway Morris ardently defends evolutionary theory in his book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge). At the same time, he has no patience with atheists who use evolution to try to “prove” atheism. Active with the Templeton Foundation, Conway Morris has become a key critic of intelligent design. Conway Morris’s understanding of evolution is deeply tinged with Neoplatonism. His favorite author is the Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton.

Reference:
Simon Conway-Morris Bio

Louise S. Cowan (1916-)

University Professor of English at the University of Dallas. She, as a former dean, and her late physicist husband Donald, as president, fundamentally transformed the University of Dallas’s curriculum, advancing a generous Christian humanism. An author of books and numerous articles, she is best known for her teaching and impact on students. Now in her 90s, she continues to teach. As one recent student remarked, “Dr. Cowan is a legend and a master at her craft. She is uplifting, inspirational and brilliant. She is the reason that many teachers are still teaching literature and loving it.”

References:
Louise S. Cowan Faculty Bio
Student Reviews of Louise Cowan

William Lane Craig (1949-)

Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. With a doctorate in philosophy (under John Hick) and another doctorate in theology (under Wolfhart Pannenberg), Craig is the premier evangelical apologist of his generation. A consummate debater who regularly debates atheists before university and (mega-)church audiences, he is at the same time a top-flight and wide-ranging scholar with a voluminous output that includes many books and articles. He has made fundamental contributions in the study of God’s relation to time, traditional arguments for God’s existence (especially the Kalam cosmological argument), and divine and human freedom.

Reference:
Reasonable Faith

Robert P. George (1955-)

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of its James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, his research and writings focus on the intersection between ethics and law. A Roman Catholic, he embraces a natural law approach to ethics and is known as a critic of liberal political philosophy. An author of many books and articles, he has had presidential appointments to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and to the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is one of the framers, with Chuck Colson, of the Manhattan Declaration.

References:
Princeton Faculty Bio
Manhattan Declaration

Donald Knuth (1931-)

Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. Knuth is the 20th century’s greatest theorist of the algorithm. His influence within the computer science community is unparalleled. In addition to his fundamental work on algorithms, epitomized in his multivolume The Art of Computer Programming, he is the creator of TeX, mathematical typesetting software that has revolutionized publishing within the physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences. A Lutheran, Knuth has written a charming book on all the verses numbered 3:16 in the Bible, material he first presented to the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences. He has received numerous awards and prizes, including the National Medal of Science.

References:
Stanford Website
6th ACMS Conference Proceedings

Robert Jackson Marks II (1950-)

Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University. A founder of the field of computational intelligence (comprising fuzzy sets, neural networks, and evolutionary computing), Marks has published hundreds of articles on an very wide range of problems (everything from optimal detection of non-Gaussian noise to proper placement of radioactive inserts to treat prostate cancer). His work has enormous practical implications that are felt every day—all major North American utilities deliver energy using his work on neural networks. An Christian intent on understanding teleology in nature, Marks founded the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, which publishes peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting the controversial theory of intelligent design.

References:
Faculty Bio

Michael W. McConnell (1955-)

Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law at Stanford University, where he directs Stanford’s Constitutional Law Center. Formerly at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah (leaving Chicago for Utah to place family above career), McConnell was a federal judge from 2002 to 2009. While at Chicago, he obtained a fellowship for then recent Harvard Law graduate Barack Obama to bring him to the UofC Law School. McConnell is a top constitutional law scholar, focusing especially on separation of powers, federalism, and originalism. An unapologetic Christian, he embraces the sanctity of life and supports a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.

References:
Faculty Profile at Stanford

NY Times Article on McConnell’s Relationship to President Obama

Alister Edgar McGrath (1953-)

Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education, and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture at King’s College, London. Receiving his first doctorate in molecular biology, he earned a second doctorate in theology and has since become one of the English-speaking world’s premier theologians and apologists. With an unrivaled scholarly output (one loses track of the number of books he has published), he has been a strong voice against the “new atheism.” He has worked closely with the Templeton Foundation to advance the science-religion discussion. In 2009 he presented the Gifford Lectures on natural theology.

References:
Oxford Homepage
McGrath’s Facebook

R. Albert Mohler (1959-)

Joseph Emerson Brown Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he is also the seminary’s president. With an incredible ability to read and assimilate material (his personal library numbers well over 50,000 volumes), Mohler also hosts a national radio program and is a regular on talking-heads programs such as Larry King Live. A conservative Southern Baptist, he has been a controversial figure in his denomination, moving it well to the right of its previous moderate stance. Nonetheless, committed to cultural renewal, he works across denominational barriers, being an original signer of the Manhattan Declaration.

References:
Albert Mohler Homepage
Albert Mohler Biography

Martin Andreas Nowak (1965-)

Professor of Biology and of Mathematics at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. An Austrian citizen, Nowak received his doctorate in Vienna studying with Peter Schuster. He has published 300 scientific articles, over 30 in Nature and 10 in Science. In 2005 he was the first to quantify in vivo kinetics of human cancer. Nowak is a Roman Catholic who works with the Templeton Foundation on the connection between faith and science. According to him, “Science and religion are two essential components in the search for truth. Denying either is a barren approach.”

Reference:
Harvard Faculty Bio

Alvin Plantinga (1932-)

John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale, Plantinga taught at Calvin College. More than any other philosopher, Plantinga is credited with the revival of Christian theism as topic of serious inquiry within mainstream academic philosophy. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll cites this move in philosophy as the only truly significant contribution of evangelicalism to the wider intellectual culture. Plantinga has written several important books, including God and Other Minds (Cornell), The Nature of Necessity (Oxford), and his trilogy on proper function (Oxford).

Reference:
Notre Dame Faculty Profile

John Polkinghorne (1930-)

Former President of Queen’s College at Cambridge University, where he was also Professor of Mathematical Physics. Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, he resigned his professorship in 1979 to pursue the Anglican priesthood. As a priest, he became one of the leading voices and teachers in the dialogue between science and religion, culminating in his award in 2002 of the Templeton Prize. Polkinghorne “believes that the universe is an ‘open’ and ‘flexible’ system, where patterns can be seen to exist, but where ‘the providential aspect cannot be ruled out.’” “His own faith has little to do with physics. It stems, instead, from a more personal ‘encounter with Christ.’”

Links:

John Polkinghorne’s Homepage

Marilynne Robinson (1943-)

Pulitzer Prize winning author (for Gilead) and permanent faculty member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (University of Iowa). Her non-fiction The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought trenchantly critiques modern misconceptions that secular thinkers use to invalidate Christian faith. Her 2009 Terry Lectureship at Yale, titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, expands on this critique. In a 2006 interview with The Christian Century, she remarked, “I’d like to see mainline churches, collectively and individually, remember and claim their profound histories and cultures.”

References:
University of Iowa Bio
Terry Lectures Video

Henry “Fritz” Schaefer III (1944-)

Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia. The inventor of quantum computational chemistry, Schaefer has published over 1,000 journal articles and is one of the most widely cited chemists in the world. Receiving his doctorate from Stanford, he was on faculty at Cal Berkeley before taking his current position at Georgia. A constant contender for the Nobel Prize, he has been persistently passed over for membership in the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences because of his outspoken Christian views, skepticism of Darwinism, and support of intelligent design.

References:
Faculty page at UGA
Leadership U Faculty Office

Charles Margrave Taylor (1931-)

Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. A Roman Catholic, Taylor is one of the premier social and political thinkers of our time. His book Sources of Self, according to Robert Hoffman, provides “a historical account of the modernist protest against the disengaged and instrumental modes of thought and action that arose when theistically grounded morality crumbled.” It demonstrates Taylor’s thorough-going engagement with the contemporary intellectual world. Taylor is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prize (for arts and philosophy) and the Templeton Prize (for progress in religion).

References:
Templeton Prize Winning Page

John Suppe (1943-)

Blair Professor of Geosciences Emeritus at Princeton University. Known for his genius at “seeing through rocks,” Suppe has received numerous honors, including membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. A convert to Christianity later in life, Suppe has a passion for missions. As a member of the American Scientific Affiliation, a professional society of Christians focusing on the relation between faith and science, he sees “significant parallels between Christian and scientific knowing that lie at the very core of contingent epistemology. Specifically, observation and interaction are fundamental to both Christian and scientific knowledge.”

References:
Christianity in Light of Science
Princeton Faculty Page

James Tour (1959-)

The Chao Professor of Chemistry at Rice University. Tour also holds faculty appointments in computer science and materials science at Rice. Taking the mantle of his friend and mentor, the late Rice professor and Nobelist Rick Smalley, Tour has become one of the world’s leading nano-engineers and is himself now on a fast track for the Nobel Prize. A skeptic of Darwinian evolution for, as he stresses, scientific reasons, he has nonetheless been passed over membership in the National Academy of Sciences. An evangelical Christian, he rises at 3:30am every morning to study the Bible for two hours.

References:
The James M Tour Group

Nicholas Thomas “Tom” or “N.T.” Wright (1948-)

Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and formerly on faculty at McGill and Oxford Universities. Wright is one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars. His magisterial The Resurrection of the Son of God is widely regarded as the definitive defense of the traditional view that Jesus rose from the dead. Though clashing swords with more liberal biblical scholars (who reject Jesus’ bodily resurrection), everyone acknowledges that Wright’s work cannot be ignored. The author of many books and the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates, Wright is also an honorary fellow at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities.

Reference:
NT Wright Homepage

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May it be a Tikkun!

Posted on April 14, 2010 by | 6 comments

Overheard snippet:

Someone BT Yeshivish age 60 broke something valuable and they said:

“May it be a tikkun!”

My question is what happened to the traditional “May it be a Kapparah!”??
The traditional formula is about the need to pay for one’s sins, there has to be an expiation by transferring the punishment onto the inanimate object.
What does the new phrase mean? A tikkun is a positive act or something redemptive or restorative. Have we lost the sense of needing expiation for sins? Have we lost a sense that everyone has to pay dues or accept a certain amount of loss? Do we think everything we do has a positive force? Has the liberal language of tikkun olam finally become traditional? Thoughts?

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Walter Brueggemann (more Kugel and Criticism)

Posted on April 13, 2010 by | 2 comments

Walter Brueggemann is the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia
He has devoted his life to a passionate exploration of Old Testament theology, with an emphasis on the relation between the Old Testament and the Christian canonical works, and the dynamics of Jewish-Christian interactions. He has published more than 59 books.

Brueggermann criticizes Brevards Childs as being too Christian and not pluralistic enough (Jon Levenson in turn uses the same arguments on Brueggermann). Walter Brueggemann is the standard mainline Protestant approach. He is the Reverend Lovejoy not the Ned Flanders. He is the standard approach now in seminaries that locating meaning in Documentary History is so 19th century skepticism and positivism, on the other hand he rejects fundamentalism or apologetics as anti-intellectual and repressive. Does he have anything to teach about moving beyond the false dichotomy?
He thinks history removes the theological sense of the text. We lose God and Sinai with criticism. We also cannot create an ethical approach with historical criticism. He is also willing to question parts of historical criticism. But on the other hand, he questions the fundamentalist approach as more concerned with external dogma and affirming an external event rather than accepting the revelation of the text.

Passages from: Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1997. (pp.726-29) Old Testament Theology in Relation to Historical Criticism

No doubt Brevard Childs is correct in his contention that the relationship between Old Testament theology and historical criticism is of crucial importance to any advance in Old Testament theology. Thus I take it as a truism that Old Testament theological interpretation must be seriously engaged with criticism, and any serious student of Old Testament theology cannot retreat into a “safe” fideism because he or she fears the results of critical inquiry.

The conclusion to which I am drawn is that the enormous apparatus of high historical criticism that reached its zenith in the nineteenth century and continued its dominance well into the twentieth century is not, in the first instant, of primary relevance to theological exposition at the end of the twentieth century. By such a conclusion, I do not intend any appeal to an anti-intellectual fideism; I appeal rather to criticism that is congruent in the two ways suggested. In drawing this conclusion, I only reflect what in practice has turned out to be the case for a great number of responsible scholars at the present moment, namely, that scholars have moved well beyond the critical categories that have come to represent historical criticism.

In my judgment, historical criticism (by which I shall refer to the entire Enlightenment enterprise that came to be associated with Julius Wellhausen and that now seems to reappear as neo-Wellhausianism) was committed to a Cartesian program that was hostile (in effect if not in intention) to the main theological claims of the text.

Thus what is required in a new, antipositivistic intellectual climate is a criticism that is not thinly positivistic, but that is open to the density of social and rhetorical processes that generate social reality beyond our “realism.”
I suggest that in a new settlement still to be worked out between criticism and interpretation

Serious energy needs to be given to discern what of the older historical criticism is to be retained and how it is to be used. There is much in the history of the literature and perhaps in the history of religion that still needs to be valued, even though almost every old “consensus” opinion is now under heavy assault. The challenge in retaining learning from the older historical criticism is to do so without a hidden commitment to the theological skepticism that seemed endlessly to accompany that criticism, but was not a necessary part of a critical perspective. There may be a place for skepticism, but it should be explicit along with its grounds, and not surreptitiously taken along with critical judgment.

The real issue in the relationship between interpretation and criticism is to be aware that fideism and skepticism are twin temptations, and that criticism is an effort to be thoughtful in a way that does not permit fideism and that does not require skepticism. In much “scientific” study of the Old Testament, it is generally assumed that skepticism is much more intellectually respectable than is fideism. With the demise of positivism, that unstated but widespread assumption might well be reconsidered. Skepticism, often voiced as hostility to theological claim, is in fact not a given element in responsible intellectual inquiry. What passes for uncommitted objectivity in Old Testament study, moreover, is often a thinly veiled personal hostility to religious authority, which is displaced on the interpretive task as though such hostility is an intellectual virtue. No doubt an oppressive fideism and a hostile skepticism endlessly evoke and feed each other. We may now be at a moment when totalizing fideism is exposed as inadequate and when skeptical positivism is seen to be equally inadequate, when a genuinely thoughtful criticism can engage the density and depth of the text, which is available neither to fideism nor to skepticism.

Or a more technical plea to look at the text and not behind the text. The social world of a text does not explain the meaning of a text. For example, the social world of the Talmud does not explain the logic and meaning of the Gemara.

A mere excavating of the social world behind the text, as if the text, itself, did not enter into the social construction of reality and provide an alternative “social” world of negotiation and definition, is a species of positivist reductionism. As Clifford Geertz once argued, this short-circuits the autonomous process of symbolic formulation. Geertz claims that such symbolic reductionism usually stems from theories whose “psychology is too anemic and whose sociology is too muscular” (Geertz 1973: 202). How what is said is crucial to what is said.

The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has recently eloquently argued that rhetorical criticism is an indispensable complement in biblical studies to sociological analysis. Echoing Geertz’s strictures, he deplores forms of historical criticism (of which the sociology of the Bible is a sub-set) which explain away literary cunning such that “what is interesting and dense in the text has been often forfeited” (Brueggeman 1997: 103). As he puts it, historical criticism “runs the risk that the methods and assumptions to which it is committed may miss the primary intentionality of the text” (Brueggemann 1997: 104).

Brueggermann reviewed James Kugel’s 2003 The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible and thought that Kugel agreed with his seeking theological meaning as more important than history. But Kugel’s recent book sings a different song.

On the other hand, Kugel refers to “The Project” by which he seems to mean a theological investigation into the “realness of things” that lies deep beneath the appearances that are so taken for granted among us: “They [the texts] can indeed come back to life, and their world, their way of seeing, can let us in to take the measure of things that are strange” (p. 3). At the end, Kugel concludes: “It is important to glimpse how things once were otherwise; certainly we then may better understand where the present came from. And perhaps also for another reason, somewhat more sublime: to remember that that ‘otherwise’ is, for all that has intervened, not unrelated to what exists in the fullest reality of today” (p. 199).
Thus in the most restrained and almost whimsical way, Kugel’s ultimate concern is not historical but contemporary.

So what can be used from Brueggermann for an Orthodox approach? What cannot be used?
(Since my proportion of hits to the blog compared to click to links is so small, less than 1/100, I left the links out).

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Reb Yudel on Kugel or Kugel #2

Posted on April 13, 2010 by | 6 comments

Since nobody had any clarifying comments on the Kugel post and it just got 600 hits in a day, let’s try a different approach.
Here was one of the useful comments by Reb Yudel- any thoughts for an Orthodoxy?

1] How much history are you willing to give up to make a usable Torah both critical and as Talmud Torah?

I’m certainly willing to give up the scholarly agnosticism over things that are unknown and cannot be proven. Kugel ignores redactional history, presumably because it’s all hypothetical. I’m willing to assume a redactor, and throw R into the mix. I’m willing to assume that J played a redactorial role, collating and creating etiological folk tales. As a result, I can preach the moral growth of Judah, as cited by Sommers. Talmud Torah, unlike academia, does not require absolute proof.

> 2] How much are you willing to defend an ethical message in the Bible despite historical origins?

That’s really the wrong question. The real question is, when did Modern Orthodoxy decide that Torah was ethical (and then why did it more recently renounce that view)? I don’t want unethical texts taught to my children, regardless of whether they were composed in the Iron Age or the Ipod Age. If Kugel makes it easier to remove Joshua from the 4th grade curriculum, so much the better.

(There’s a related question: When did Modern Orthodoxy abandon Hazal in favor of literary pshat? Why does Rashi’s division of characters into Righteous and Evil (following Hazal, of course) seem less appealing than the grays of literary analysis peshat?)

3] What needs to be added to Sommers to make it useful for Orthodoxy?

I don’t think Orthodoxy — which we can now define as the portion of Judaism which rejects the ordination of women — is impacted by any epistemology of Torah other than that which attributes absolute Divine Revelation to its current leadership. (Sort of like Mormonism, except without the transparency). Grant Daas Torah, and then the whole thing works.

For Conservative Judaism, which took the claims of academic Rabbinic scholarship as a lesson in the plasticity of Rabbinic halacha, the Sommers approach works fine: Torah SheBaal Peh simply goes back to [the putative date of] Sinai, to the tales and ballads that accompanied the evolution of our people.

As you say, Kugel is not a theologian, and his final chapter is weak: It simply peters out. Had he simply said, “I believe that part of my service to God is by following the tradition of my ancestor, and looking to the sacred anthology of Iron Age documents for meaning, knowing that the process of that search will itself create meaning” — he could have opened a door for a certain liberal Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, Kugel evinces no awareness of Talmud Torah as practiced around the Shabbos table or in the classroom..

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Brevard Childs

Posted on April 13, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Apropos to the Kugel discussion- Here are some quotes from Brevard Childs who was at Yale from the 1960’s until the 1990’s. Childs treats the Bible as a Christian work through the eyes of the Church even as he uses Biblical criticism. His approach is called “canonical criticism” is “an examination of the final form of the text as a totality, as well as the process leading to it.” “Whereas previous criticism asked questions about the origins, structure and history of the text, canonical criticism addresses questions of meaning, both for the community (and communities – subsequent communities are regarded as being as important as the original community for which it was produced) which used it, and in the context of the wider canon of which it forms a part.”
Childs was criticized on both sides – by Biblical scholars who wanted the text to remain in its bronze age meaning or documentary meaning and by fundamentalists who rejected any criticism. I am not advocating Childs’ approach, I repeat I am not advocating Childs’ theories. I am posting this as a sense of what most non-Jewish Bible professors that I know had to read in graduate school and it served as a basis for any further thinking they did on the topic. It also serves as a basis for many of the readings in an undergraduate Bible course. Many introductory courses try to show continuity with the tradition.

Childs’ approach influenced Levenson, Fishbane, and other Jewish scholars who read the Bible with the Second temple and Rabbinic commentary, who look for intertextuality within the Bible itself, and treat the Bible as a Jewish work. The Jewish authors developed their own approaches but Childs is one of the many building blocks. Maybe I might post on some of the other building blocks. And as Benjamin Sommers pointed out – for many people Kugel’s book The Bible As It Was – his book on Midrash was taken as an extension of Brevard Childs.

Brevard S. Childs is author of Biblical Theology in Crisis, and The Book of Exodus and Isaiah
CHILDS: I have always objected to the term “canon(ical) criticism” as a suitable description of my approach. I do not envision my approach as involving a new critical methodology analogous to literary, form, or redactional criticism. Rather, the crucial issue turns on one’s initial evaluation of the nature of the biblical text being studied. By defining one’s task as an understanding of the Bible as the sacred Scriptures of the church, one establishes from the outset the context and point-of-standing of the reader within the received tradition of a community of faith and practice. Likewise, Scripture is also confessed to be the vehicle of God’s self-disclosure which continues to confront the church and the world in a living fashion. In sum, its content is not merely a literary deposit moored in the past, but a living and active text addressing each new generation of believer, both Jew and Christian.

Childs accepts a unified approach without separate documents and looks for intertextuality. He sees the text as having a revelatory message from God. Notice his description of the human and divine elements and his definition of revelation. Later parts of the Bible were already hearing fresh insights into God’s prior words. It is quite Christian but it was still influential on Jews. Notice the subtlety of his view of revelation. On needs to hear a powerful theological message from the Bible.

Of course, the Bible is also a human work written as a testimony to God’s coercion of a historical people, and extended and developed through generations of Israel’s wrestling with its God. The goals of interpretation can be defined in countless different ways, but for those confessing its role as sacred Scripture the goal is to penetrate deeply into its content, to be illuminated theologically by its Word, and to be shaped and transformed by its gracious disclosure which witness is continually made alive by its divine communicator.
The divine and human dimensions of Scripture can never be separated as if there were a kernel and a husk, but the heart of the Bible lies in the mystery of how a fully time-conditioned writing, written by fragile human authors, can continually become the means of hearing the very Word of God, fresh and powerful, to recipients open to faithful response.
First, I remain deeply concerned with the unity of the book which, I agree, cannot be formulated in terms of a single authorship.
Secondly, one of the most important recent insights has been the recognition of the role of intertextuality. The growth of the larger composition has often been shaped by the use of a conscious resonance with a previous core of oral and written texts. The great theological significance is that intertextuality reveals how the editors conceived of their task as forming a chorus of different voices and fresh interpretations, but all addressing in different ways, and in different ages a part of the selfsame, truthful witness to God’s salvific purpose for his people.

Taken from Brevard Childs’ Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context.

If one asks what was God’s purpose, that is, his motivation in revealing himself, the Old Testament is silent. However, if one asks what was God’s purpose, that is, his goal toward which his self-disclosure pointed, then the Old Testament is eloquent in its response. God revealed himself that all may see and know who God is:

Any thoughts? What would you take from this? Why?

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A cult…some odd group that is not interacting with the world

Posted on April 12, 2010 by | 1 comment

From our Evangelical friends at Christianity Today.

CT has been watching the online debate snowball over this week’s resignation of renowned OT scholar Bruce Waltke from Reformed Theological Seminary. At issue: the March 24 release of a BioLogos interview in 2009 where Waltke states:

“…if the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult…some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God’s Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness.”
Reformed Theological Seminary asked Waltke to have the video removed. Waltke’s resignation was announced April 6.

Waltke announced today that he will be going to Knox Theological Seminary. Now back to us– When do we say things that make us into a cult? What is the line of what is considered overwhelming evidence? Do we think God wants us to use our intelligence? Do we worry about Devarim 4:6 Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”? (see the commentators ad. loc.) [There is a quip by Yeshayahu Leibowitz – “When was this? Never have we been a wise nation” ] Why do the evangelical examples fit so well for orthodoxy?

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Key findings of the Avi Chai report on young Jewish leaders

Posted on April 12, 2010 by | 6 comments

Here is a sense of the ideology of the leaders of the new organizations and they will someday head the established ones.
Any trends? Is it what you expected? Notice the day school graduates did not remain Orthodox, so that Orthodox who have the Avi-Chai definition of leadership remains at the 10% mark. We expected already the lack of Antisemitism as a drive and a lack of us-them relationship with the world. So this means that those of you under 40 who do have the us-them divide may feel alienated from the community’s leaders.

Key findings of the Avi Chai report on young Jewish leaders
By Jacob Berkman · April 12, 2010

A team of six researchers studied Jews between the age of 22 and 40, who serve as Jewish leaders, which they defined as those who have spearheaded new Jewish initiatives, direct existing mainstream Jewish organizations or somehow are thought leaders or activists on Jewish endeavors.The researchers interviewed some 250 leaders across country, but claim to have identified more than 3,000 who might be considered young Jewish leaders.

Among the key findings

* They do not feel threatened by Antisemitism.
* They prefer to reject us-them relationships with non-Jews and want to be inclusive of non-Jews in their programing.
* They hold strong views on the organized Jewish community and need for new ways of organizing it and are critical of federations, traditional synagogues and agencies that engage in protective activities.
* While many believe that most young Jewish leaders totally buck the mainstream of Judaism, the report suggests that a large segment actually involve themselves in those organizations such as Jewish federations, Friends of the IDF and AIPAC. “It’s not true they want nothing to do with traditional causes, especially those who are economically secure and relate to the networking core of traditional Jewish organizations.”
* Around 40 percent of Jewish leaders attended day school, only 10-11 percent of those are Orthodox.
* Two thirds attended Jewish summer camps.
* Half have spent more than four months of study in Israel.
* They believe that Jewish peoplehood means the celebration of diaspora Jewish culture that is rich, diverse and inclusive.
* Most do not see Israel as central to Jewish identity and peoplehood, and there is a broad range of how much criticism about Israel they can tolerate.

On a similar note we have to congratulate Rabbi Ari Weiss of Uri L’Tzedek who won a Joshua Venture Grant. Uri L’Tzedek is defined as created to “engage, empower, and inspire the American Orthodox Jewish community to enact social change both within and beyond its own communal borders.” For the other 2010 winners- here. For past years- here.

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Menachem Ekstein Visions of a Compassionate World — A Post-Hasid?

Posted on April 11, 2010 by | 4 comments

I was recently recommended to read the volume Menachem Ekstein, Visions of a Compassionate World : Guided Imagery for Spiritual Growth and Social Transformation (Urim 2001) (Hebrew- Netzah 1960) based on the original Tennai Hanefesh leHasagat HaHasidut (Vienna, 1921).

I was told the book is an essential part of modern Hasidism along with the Piesetzna Rebbe. (In a recent PHD on the latter, there is a chapter on Ekstein.)

The book is a 1920’s volume of guided imagery – image the sun, the entire planet, the animal kingdom, see all the fish in the sea. Then see your place on earth. Open yourself up to growth and infinite potential, see the potential for change and overcoming one’s limits. Avoid negative thoughts and images that hold you back. The goal is to wake up the senses and this is defined as Hasidism. As I was reading it, I realized that I read these visualizations before. They are from Jean Huston’s The Possible Human: A Course in Extending Your Physical, Mental, and Creative Abilities (1982). Jean Huston is a 1980’s hero of New Thought incorporating many 1920’s classic visualizations in her work. There are similar elements in Alice Baily Shakti Gwain, and Warren Kenton. A quick google search of any of the visualizations yielded dozens of new age sites with the same visualizations. I do not know which works Menachem Eckstein actually read in 1920’s Germany, I could not find a list of German New Thought books online (I already tried Wiki in German.)

I have been told from other sources that the book is very popular in the neo-hasidic national- religious Habakuk crowd, especially the hilltop youth. There is even a CD to listen to the visualizations. This book offers a traditional Hasidic version of new age. It authenticates their individualistic spiritual quests.

It is hard to see it as a Hasidic work, even if the author is a son of a Galitzianer Hasid because the book is printed in Vienna using modern Hebrew and the last chapter is a vision of a restored state of Israel after the Balfour Declaration.

After WWI, many Hasidim entirely left the tradition to become Zionists, Bundists, secular educated or just left to enter the modern world.
But there were also those, especially in Poland’s cities like Warsaw that remained somewhat Hasidic as they entered modern life. There were Hasidic journalists and authors, or least aspiring authors, and there was even a Hasidic boxing columnist . Some continued the traditional garb but living modern lives and other changed their garb but remained loyal in their hearts. The modern city makes all this possible. We could use a good study of interwar Warsaw. Hasidic story writers infused new vitality into Hasidic stories by using Rumi, the Golden Legend, and 1001 Arabian nights. Others advocated Kibbutz Hadati Torah veAvodah as a Kotzker holy rebellion against the establishment. This era rejected the stolid Hasidism of their parents 1880-1920, but still were sociologically part of the Hasidic world. Menachem Ekstein seems part of this world. He took the Western European NEW THOUGHT and metaphysical visualizations and cast it as the way of Hasidism.

If anyone knows more about him, then please let me know. I have just been informed that there is a someone working on him for an MA.

But should we call this inter-bellum period the post-hasidic?

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Justice Stevens and the Jews

Posted on April 10, 2010 by | 1 comment

If you want a good topic to discuss this week, the legal decisions of retiring Justice Stevens would make for good conversation. He was narrow on free exercise when at the expense of something else and liberal on free speech. He has many angles that would make good Jewish conversation. I expect an op-ed from someone in Jewish paper in the next few weeks.

Stevens wrote against allowing a yarmulke in the Air Force, and was against the Kiryas Yoel redrawn religious district. He was against school vouchers and anything that would lead to religious indoctrination. Yet he allowed preaching and outreach in public place and full freedom for Santeria. He is against crèches in town squares and a few years ago Noah Feldman took him to task in the NYT’s for this.

Justice Stevens religion clause jurisprudence is reviewed in the following articles: Eduardo M. Penalever, Treating Religion as Speech: The Religion Clause Jurisprudence of Justice Stevens (SSRN, November 2005); Christopher L. Eisgruber, Justice Stevens, Religious Freedom, and the Value of Equal Membership, 74 Fordham L. Rev. 2177 (2006);

Ht/Religious Clause

But regardless of Stevens views, we should be appreciative living in a country with an establishment clause, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. More importantly, we should not abuse it. In the last few years, I have seen and heard arguments that run like this: Our preschool should not have to meet OSHA guidelines or health department rules because that would take away our ability to learn Torah. There is a sense that if we have religious freedom then that means we don’t have to follow other laws. I have also seen these arguments quoted in the papers to defend the various Jewish criminals of the last three years.

From our own perspective, have we created an appreciation for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or freedom of religious conscious in our Judaism? Are these valuable rights only to receive and not to give? Can Judaism formulate anything close to modern views on these topics? Rav Herzog somewhat tried to create such an approach in Israel based on the need to follow world opinion and the dictates of the UN. Recent poskim, however, have rescinded Rav Herzog’s attempts. Now what? What about here in America?

From another angle, Justice Stevens is being called the last of the non ideological justices. Now everything is ideological. In the late 1950’s, there was even an essay on the end of ideology.
Would Rav Moshe Feinstein be the last of the non ideological poskim? Are all sides now ideological? (Let’s acknowledge that the sanctimonious on all sides, would see their leaders as non-ideological. But that is not an argument. ) Are we at a point of change, unlike the 1950’s, where are all halakhic positions are ideological?

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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‘Sephardic’ Halakhah? The Attitude of Sephardic Decisors to Women’s Torah Study

Posted on April 10, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Here is a nice article summarizing the state of the field on the relationship of Sephardic Jewish Law and modernity. It is one of those article that one can read and then pretend to know what one is talking about. Fuchs summarizes those who see the Sefardi world as more lenient and the critics of the position. He presents the work of both Binyamin Brown and Zvi Zohar. Bibliographies are also given for the state of Rav Ovadiah Yosef studies and the attitude of sephardi poskim toward women. It has the liberal Rav Mesas and the the stricter Rab Batzri.

The article is from the legal perspective but we still lack a good article from the historical perspective. We successfully situate the challenges of German poskim in German history of the enlightenment, this topic needs a similar approach. From the 1880’s until the 1950’s the Islamic modernists were in the forefront creating many very liberal fatwa, especially in Egypt. Then there was a return to more conservative opinions and women started wearing the chador again. Egypt was a center of modernism, other countries less so. When Rav Ohana was alive and when Rav Ovadiah started it was the era of modernism. Yet, the latter disliked the laxity of the Jewish modernists in Egypt but was very liberal with the North African development town Jews in Israel. The article does not deal with Israeli sociology.


‘Sephardic’ Halakhah? The Attitude of Sephardic Decisors to Women’s Torah Study: A Test Case
Ilan Fuchs
Tulane University, Jewish Studies Program December 31, 2009
Bar Ilan Univ. Pub Law Working Paper No. 02-10

Abstract:
This paper examines Sephardic rabbinic attitudes to women’s religious studies, and more specifically, advanced Talmud study. I draw on Halakhic texts written in the second half of the 20th century by leading Sephardic rabbis that immigrated to Israel. I first examine the terms Mizraxi and Sephardic and explain on what grounds I find reason to compare the rabbis discussed. I argue that there is no monolithic Sephardic halakhic tradition and that the rabbis discussed hail from diverse communities that experienced and reacted to western and secular influences in unique ways. I then describe how these rabbis reacted to changes in women’s religious and secular education, changes they were forced to confront as their communities were exposed to changing values and social realities. Examining how Sephardic rabbis have responded to the challenge of women’s Torah study allows us to test the claim that the Sephardic halakhic tradition is more flexible and tolerant of change than the Ashkenazi orthodox halakhic tradition.

ht/Religious Clause

One could compare some of these tensions to the fatwa of Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, the recently deceased head of Al-Azhar University and grand Imam of the al-Azhar Mosque in Egypt. He was against female Imams and mixed events. Yet, he issued a fatwa allowing Muslim girls in France to take off their headscarves while attending school.
In October 2009, Tantawy launched a campaign against the Niqāb (the full-face veil which covers the entire body except for the eyes, increasingly worn by women in Egypt) by personally removing the Niqāb of a teenage girl (after she failed to remove it) at a secondary school affiliated to Al-Azhar University, He had asked the teenage girl to remove her veil saying: “The Niqāb is a tradition, it has no connection with law” He then instructed the girl never to wear the Niqāb again and promised to issue a fatwa against its use in schools. He then told the girl “So if you were even a little beautiful, what would you have done then?”

Copyright © 2010 Alan Brill • All Rights Reserved

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Arthur Green- Radical Judaism #1 of 5 posts

Posted on April 6, 2010 by | 4 comments

There is a new book from Arthur Green that is his mature vision for a Neo-Hasidic Renewal Judaism. I received a review copy as soon as it came out and have been grappling about whether this will be a short quickly review or a very long full study. In his introduction, Green quotes Arnold Eisen as telling Green that he should put out a definite scholarly version of his theology. The actual product is a version that is actually less scholarly and more personal than the prior versions and can serve as an eminently readable introduction to his thought.

In the interim as I continue to write up my own reflections, David Wolpe has put out a very concise and insightful review. Wolpe puts his finger on the pulse of the book as having a renegade provocative 1960’s tone. He also catches how a technical academic scholarly approach glides in Green’s hands into New Age mysticism. Green’s work rejects Biblical theism into a minimal theology of mystical metaphors. Wolpe calls it pantheist and animist but I think there is much more going on. Green’s God would feel comfortable on the shelf with Eliade as a myth and symbol, sacred cyclical time deity.

The view of God of Arthur Green, Michael Lerner, and others has been given a quite cogent philosophic and theological analysis by Michael Silver, A Plausible God: Secular Reflections on Liberal Jewish Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)

Those of us interested in Kabbalah and Hasidism have a much more complex relationship with Green’s work than does Wolpe because Green’s Tormented Master was one of the first works available in English. Green has had a presence in both the academic and theological use of Hasidism, and the field consists of his students. Nevertheless, many of the original readers of Tormented Master have either moved on to the works by the Breslov Research Institute and no longer turn to academic works or the readers turned to charismatic teachers by Aleph –Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

Those of us who teach Polish Hasidism, when dealing with Green’s works have to grapple with when Green is modernizing in a natural way, when he transforms it into his own renewal view, and when he just truncates away an essential element such as Torah study or halakhah.
Continue to post 2 of 5 posts on Arthur Green – here.

March 30, 2010 Rethinking Judaism By Rabbi David Wolpe

Arthur Green, author of “Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition” (Yale University Press, $26), has been working to reimagine Judaism since his early days as a renegade scholar and theologian. The book under review is filled with interesting observations and sources. They are knit together in a neo-Chasidic, kabbalistically infused ’60s activist Judaism that claims Green as one of its pioneers and preeminent spokesmen. To rework a Divine self-description, this book will be persuasive for those to whom it is persuasive. Some will find it a bracing tonic; for others it will be Jewish learning sprinkled with heresy. Can “radical Judaism” speak to people outside the envisioned circle?
Most of Green’s book (a capstone to the trilogy, “Seek My Face, Speak My Name” and “Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow”), is deliberately provocative. “Radical Judaism” should not be the title of a book that soothes. It is accessibly written, although occasionally with a kind of academic-cum-New Age mistiness that some will cherish and others will not: “Just as Y-H-W-H is not a ‘thing’ but refers to the transcendent wholeness of Being that both surpasses and embraces all beings, so is the soul to be seen as the transcendent wholeness of the person, a mysterious essence that is more than the sum of all the characteristics of that person we could ever name.”
Green’s approach is panentheist. God is not a separate Being who created and superintends the world. Rather God is in all things, shot through the fabric of life, but because the system as a whole is greater than its parts, God is also more than the sum of life. If this smacks of a kind of “Avatar”-ish paganism, that charge is one kabbalists have always had to combat. Green insists it is not pagan, as his predecessors always did. He is right; it is not worship of nature; it is rather a deification of the totality of all that is. For moderns, such a theology may be the only possible piety. To a classical taste, while this may not be paganism, it is at least in the animist suburbs.
Green wrests from this premise some very beautiful and inspiring imagery. Speaking of faith, he wisely says, “We can only testify, never prove. Our strength lies in grandeur of vision, in an ability to transport the conversation about existence and origins to a deeper plane of thinking.” This he seeks to do by insisting that we have to reconceive of God and the world. Everything is interdependent, connected and organismic — and together this vast, pulsing reality is what we can augment or diminish by our actions. In the modern world we have learned to look at systems, and his is a sort of systems theology.
For Green, our great task is awareness. The book is divided into classical categories — God, Torah, Israel. Within each, he struggles with the particularity and universality of the tradition. He struggles as well with the need, given a modern audience, to explain traditional concepts before he can offer a revisioning of them.
As one would expect of a leading light of the chavurah and renewal movements, Green’s book is also a call for Jews to be politically activist. Environmentalism, anti-war activities and other traditional causes of the left are seen not as political choices, but as spiritual imperatives. To criticize the book for this is foolish: One can agree or disagree with convictions and still esteem the courage to have them. For Green, a religious position that does not embrace his politics contradicts the heart of his theology of interdependence: As we are all bound together, universalism, environmentalism, radical activism in many areas is a concomitant of theological understanding.
Green writes several times that he hopes non-Jews will take up this book as well. Certainly much of his theology is not “specifically” Jewish: There is no chosenness, for there is no Chooser. Jews have special responsibilities arising from their history; yet other groups do as well. Green reads his beliefs from the sources of Judaism, and does so with deep knowledge and skill, but they are surely not the predominant reading. Other religious traditions can be read to endorse the same conclusions, as he readily acknowledges. Indeed, Green repeatedly encourages Jews to turn to other traditions, East and West, for insights absent or unacknowledged in our own.
In a pluralistic age, readers will have different feelings about such ecumenicism. Some will see it as a great strength; others as a disqualifying weakness. As one whose belief in God is more traditional than Green’s, I remain enlightened and provoked, but ultimately unpersuaded.

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